The Hamilton Case (12 page)

“None of that counts for anything with me,” broke in Nagel. “If those men are innocent they have nothing to fear. It’s not as if —” He braked abruptly. But we all knew what he had been going to say:
It’s not as if I’m a Sinhalese
. Burghers are always trumpeting their immunity from Sinhalese–Tamil tensions; I suppose it’s true, in the sense that they consider their European blood renders them superior to both races.

Shiva sipped, then placed his cup on the arm of his chair. Behind his spectacles, his eyes looked slept in. “No one doubts your impartiality, superintendent. But you saw Rajendran. He’s a creature of the alleys. And people like that are afraid of the police. It was brave of him to go to you. Afterward he needed a little reassurance, from one of his own people, that he had done the right thing.”

He paused, and I was about to ask a question, when he rolled on. “You see, I have a notion that the ordinary man tries to make sense of our legal system by filtering it through his understanding of religion. He knows that deities at the upper end of the scale dispense justice and punish humans only with good cause. They correspond to magistrates and judges. Perhaps also to DSPs.” This last with one of his thin smiles. “But demons and minor gods and the lower denizens of the spirit world have no such scruples. They must be influenced through sorcery and ritual if they are to do good rather than evil in the world of men. Hence the bribes paid to witnesses and officials to manipulate evidence in such a way as to produce a favorable result, and the widespread perjury in our courts. The common man recognizes that telling the truth is desirable, but when it comes into conflict with a more important value — justice, say — he is quite prepared to lie.”

With admirable self-control, I refrained from letting him know what I thought of this little lecture. That is another consequence of out-station life: the mind, starved of real stimulation, nourishes itself on absurdities. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that Shivanathan belonged to one of those earnest groups that meet once a month in a mildewed public hall to discuss theosophy or ectoplasm.

It was plain that Nagel shared my opinion. “Are you suggesting,” he asked, with a touch of acid, “that your pawnbroker made a false statement?”

“Not at all.” Shiva inclined his head. “Merely pointing out that our legal system is literally foreign to our people. And so they strive to make sense of it as best they can. Sorcery provides an effective precedent. Rajendran came to me because as a Tamil proctor I represent a friendly exorcist or a kindly spirit. Whereas the police are minor gods, who might or might not be well disposed to him.”

He looked set to take flight again, so I intervened hastily. “The Hamilton case—I say, Nagel, are you in charge of that show?”

The DSP set down his empty cup and turned to me with a troubled look in his eyes. “I am,” he said, “and I don’t mind saying it’s a hell of a business. Dashed grateful for your views and all.”

“I’d be delighted,” I said at once, moved by the man’s gruff appeal. “Tell me about it.”

We rang for more coffee, and a bottle of brandy. Then, with the fire-light chasing shadows around the walls, they told me about it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

These manuscript pages were found among Sam Obeysekere’s papers after his death
.

II

Reality can only be partially attacked by logic.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

H
amilton had gone out as a downy-cheeked boy of seventeen, first to Assam, later to Ooty. He worked hard and wasted no time on suppositions, thereby commending himself to the company’s management in London. Nor was he devoid of ability. He understood tea: which is to say weather, soil, pruning. He drank only coffee himself.

Seven years previously they had transferred him to Ceylon and White Falls Estate, in the Nuwara Eliya district. White Falls was performing poorly when Hamilton took over, but he turned all that around. Success is a matter of applying oneself with diligence to one problem after another and he had the knack of that. The result was a respectable yield of high-grade teas, well-maintained roads, an orderly and efficient workforce. The other planters in the district agreed he was a
thoroughly good chap
. He drank in moderation and played a decent game of billiards. Something of a loner—if they hadn’t married by a certain age, they usually were—but he turned up to the socials at the club now and then, and you could count on a welcome if you dropped in on him without warning. His assistants found him fair-minded and capable. No one sought the opinion of the pluckers or the factory workers. In any case, their relations with the
dorai
were purely ritual: they flung themselves into the nearest ditch as soon as they heard the clip of his horse’s hooves on the gravel.

About a year before he died, Hamilton had announced that he was expecting the arrival of an old friend who had fallen on hard times. Gordon Taylor turned out to be one of those fellows you found as reliably as mileposts across the breadth of the Empire: amiable, aimless, never sticking at anything. Empires exist to provide such men with occupation and background coloring.

Hamilton had run across Taylor in India when they were both young creepers, apprentice planters in the same company. Inevitably Taylor lost interest in tea; he moved to Burma, where he managed a ruby mine for a few years. Later he drifted to Malaya and got into rubber. Somewhere in the Straits he married a girl whose eyebrows were so fair as to be invisible. Opinion at the club had her down as
a nice little thing
. As for Taylor, he was
pleasant enough
; but you felt he would
never amount to much
. Hamilton was sentimental about him, in the way practical men choose one thing to be foolish about and sink their teeth in. Perhaps Taylor reminded him of something he could not articulate, a sentiment—only nothing as definite as that, a suggestion, a hint—dating from India that life could encompass the unexpected. At any rate he now took the Taylors in, borrowing a motor to go down to Colombo and fetch them himself. Their luggage—a tin trunk, two large carpet-bags and a springer spaniel—came up later by cart.

Even before the Taylors’ ship had docked, Hamilton was going around trying to stir things up on his friend’s behalf. He wrote letters; looked up acquaintances on the flimsiest pretext. Later he would go up to chaps at the club and harangue them with recommendations, while Taylor hung about, grinning and sheepish, nursing a long one. Somehow nothing came of it. After a while, Hamilton gave up. The newcomers fitted into life at White Falls, became part of the pattern. Adaptability was their great skill; in that respect they exemplified the species. Taylor lent a hand with the accounts. The two men went shooting pigeon together. Visitors discerned Yvette Taylor’s influence in cretonne cushion-covers and two kinds of cake at tea. The spaniel lay wherever you were certain to trip over it, and snored.

One night Hamilton didn’t come home.

He had left early for the township, where he had gone to the bank and drawn out the wages for the entire estate as he always did on the first Wednesday of the month. He had called in at the post office and Cargills. He had taken lunch at the Hill Club. There, his dentist’s wife, an optimist saddled with a pudding-faced daughter, extracted him from the bar and allowed him to win at bridge. Later, as the evening mists came up, two nuns spotted him on an estate road, approaching the turnoff to a track that ran through a patch of jungle. Hamilton always traveled that way; the jungle path, cutting diagonally across two estates, trimmed an hour off his journey.

Taylor said he saw no reason to be alarmed when the planter failed to return that evening. If Hamilton was held up in town, as occasionally happened, he would put up overnight at the club. But some hours later, after the Taylors had retired for the night, they were roused by the apu; the
dorai
’s horse had returned, riderless. Taylor sent for the tea maker and Hamilton’s two assistants. Taking lanterns, the four men set out to search for the planter. A thin drizzle was falling. They found Hamilton near a bend in the jungle track. He had been shot in the chest and lay where he had fallen.

Murder, a moonless night, the jungle crowding close. The men who stood around Hamilton’s body were not given to introspection. Yet in the conjunction of those elements each recognized a certain kind of recurring nightmare and was visited by the conviction, momentary but forceful, of something cold and mad at the core of their endeavor.

S
uspicion fell on the coolies. That would have happened anyway. And Taylor, stammering in his haste to make his statement to the police, pointed out that Hamilton’s watch and chain were missing. Nor was there any trace of the two canvas bags containing the estate wages. That clinched it: Hamilton had been murdered for the money. Taylor, his hands dangling between his knees, choked on his own conclusion. For a dreadful moment it looked as if he might break down. “The best of fellows,” he stuttered. “The best . . .”

Nagel had expected it to be over quickly. He was of the opinion, he said to Sam and Shivanathan, that murderers were dull-witted. That was why they were obliged to fall back on murder to achieve their ends. The laborers at White Falls were questioned, then questioned again. The coolie lines were searched. Nothing was found. No one was missing. The police investigation was extended to the neighboring estates, then to the whole district. The usual suspects were hauled in for questioning. Informers were leaned on. Everyone could account for his whereabouts on the evening Hamilton died. No one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. Finally—and this was the most baffling aspect of the case—there was no sign of the money. The bank had recorded the numbers of the notes, and the list was circulated throughout the island. From one minute to the next Nagel expected a telegram, a trunk call. Days clotted into weeks. He swore at his sergeants. Behind his desk, at midnight, he stared at photographs of victorious Englishmen. Those trophies. The way their socks bulged over their calves.

Sam studied the superintendent, as Nagel refilled their glasses. He saw: a father in the railways, a brace of siblings, a fourth-rate school. A bright boy, athletic. Immense pride when he first paraded the uniform: aunties, cousins, tumbling babies, everyone jammed into a cramped room; tots of cheap whiskey and backslapping uncles. Examinations: the household on tiptoe, his mother lighting candles in a side chapel, children slapped for speaking above a whisper. Inspector. Chief Inspector. And then, astonishingly, the last unreachable bauble falling into his hand.

At that moment Sam understood why he warmed to the superintendent. Who isn’t drawn to what he pities? In the planters’ clubs and the estate bungalows, they would be saying that Nagel had bungled it. An Englishman would have had Hamilton’s murderer swinging before the body was cold. It was all the fault of the blasted Civil Service, kowtowing to some damnfool scheme hatched by Westminster. Look what happened when you gave them responsibility! No one safe in their beds! In Nagel’s eyes the bewilderment of a child who never meant to climb so high jostled the understanding of a man who has measured the drop below.

Yet two days earlier, the superintendent’s luck had turned. A scrawny Tamil presented himself at the police station. Rajendran ran a thriving bicycle-repair business in a filthy alley that was known to all the tea pluckers in the district: he would lend two rupees against their anklets, five cents above the going rate.

For his encounter with authority the pawnbroker wore a tweed jacket above his
verty
, and cracked, exquisitely polished oxblood brogues on his bare feet. Brought before Nagel, he reached into his inside pocket and produced a handsome half-hunter. The superintendent examined the watch in silence:
A. G. H
. His heart flipped like a coin.

Two coolies, a father and son, had brought it in, the pawnbroker said. He thought the younger man was called Velu. They worked on Rowanside, one of the estates Hamilton had traversed on his shortcut. Velu had said that he and his father were taking the same path home when he stepped into the undergrowth to relieve himself. There his toe encountered something smooth and cold. He stooped; retrieved a watch stuck over with black leaves.

Nagel himself went to Rowanside, put his boot through the door of the ten-foot-square room in the coolie lines. They found the father within. The son, spotted running away from the latrine block, was brought to the ground with a flying tackle by an ambitious constable.

At the police station the pawnbroker identified the suspects and was allowed to go. He went straight to Shivanathan, who telephoned Nagel and expressed his willingness to represent the men if charges were laid against them.

Nagel had interpreted this, correctly, as a warning: Shivanathan was letting him know there was nothing to be gained from forcing a statement that wouldn’t stand up in court. As if the superintendent was a brute-fisted sergeant extracting confessions on which judges could hone their weary sarcasms. It was the implicit insult to his intelligence— rather than the slur on police methods—that rankled.

The DSP cracked his knuckles and glared at Shivanathan, snug as a walnut on the other side of the fireplace. “They’re guilty of theft, at least,” he snapped.

“But not of murder?” asked Sam.

Nagel turned to him. He had the policeman’s instinctive mistrust of lawyers. Nevertheless he heard himself saying, “I don’t think so.”

A moment later, relief at having blurted it out collided with the fear of what he had set in train. He excused himself. In the lavatory the cramps came in waves, crinkling his guts. He hung his head between his knees. He wiped the clamminess from his forehead with a handful of Bromo paper.

When the DSP rejoined the other two, Sam asked if he could meet Taylor.

T
he man had stiff little ruffles of brown hair parted low on the side to show a line of cicatrix-pink scalp. They found him in the White Falls factory, running his fingers through a sample of Broken Pekoe, his pale eyes alight. His tea maker stood by, radiating disapproval.