‘What do you suppose came of her?’
Sermon did not answer my question, but he held a gun in his hand. At a nod from Sermon, the mali flung open the door of the tonga. We had rolled to a stop, and we were at the zoo. The giant birdcage was beyond the swinging door of the tonga, and so were two police constables. I did not know how the constables had come to be there, but the sight of them checked the flight of Gopal the mali. Sermon turned to me with gun pointed. He said, ‘I will thank you not to say “she” when speaking of a lady,’ and Deo Rana shot him in the head. There came a mighty screech from the giant birdcage and the giant bird inside it began circling madly at its uppermost level. The tonga had now set off again but it, like the bird, was not going anywhere, only circling. I climbed down. One of the two horses that had pulled the tonga had been killed by the continuation of the bullet that had killed Charles Sermon, and the surviving horse was endeavouring to drag the whole equipage around in a circle, which was evidently a more fascinating form of animal entertainment than offered elsewhere in the zoo, for in spite of the teeming rain, we were surrounded by quite a crowd.
Chapter Fourteen
I
It was Wednesday 16 May, and I was walking with Lydia on the Calcutta maidan. She and Bernadette had returned from Darjeeling that morning. It had been business as usual for King Sol throughout the day, and he was now winding up his operations. It was five o’clock, and we had just had tea on the terrace of Willard’s Hotel. Lydia was glad to be back, beyond the range of the visiting card tyranny, and she was looking forward to giving her talk to a branch of the Women’s India Association. We were fairly confident that Bernadette was at that very moment practising piano in the basement music room of the hotel.
As we walked, I said, ‘What is the condition of her love life?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lydia, ‘and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’
In fact, I believed that she did know, but I did not want to cause her undue anxiety by pressing for an answer. I had forgotten – it was becoming ever more embarrassingly evident – almost every detail of the wife’s first two confinements. (I could remember little beyond the persistent smell of something called Scrubb’s Cloudy Ammonia.) But I assumed that undue anxiety was the sort of thing a pregnant woman should be avoiding. Also, I myself was now less anxious about Bernadette, the wife’s unexpected pregnancy having suddenly promoted her in my mind to the status of adult.
But for most of our walk, and for most of our tea, we had been discussing the shooting of John Young, and the bad business that had occurred at Tolly’s Nullah two days previously. As to the first, I had explained in full Khan’s actions, and I said I still didn’t know to what extent he had acted alone. Lydia had not believed that Khan could have acted alone. He must have had the authority of his superiors. I put this down to her willingness to think anything bad of the British ruling classes, but her point was a bit more subtle. She saw the beginnings of an alliance between the imperial power and the Moslems. The British, she thought, would attempt a policy of divide and rule, buying off the Moslems with political concessions so as to get their support against the Hindus who were the mainstays of the nationalist movement. But I didn’t believe Khan was anybody’s stooge, and when I put that to the wife, she had nodded rather wistfully in agreement. I believed that in spite of all he’d done she rather admired Khan, found him romantic and dashing.
As for Tolly’s Nullah and the bloody denouement at the zoo, I had told the wife the tale, but in a rather fragmentary way, since I had been coming and going all day between Willard’s Hotel, Fairlie Place and the Alipore Jail, where Gopal, the mali of the Railway Institute was being held as yet without charge, and where Deo Rana was also being held, on a charge of murdering Charles Sermon.
Lydia said, ‘When exactly did this Noreen Ford die?’
‘That’s not quite clear. But late March of this year, in the Railway Hospital at Burdwan.’
‘And it was a cancer?’
‘Yes. Sermon would have heard of it by early April one way or another, and then he started leaving the snakes on the trains.’
‘In co-operation with this other fellow, the gardener at the Institute?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was in it for him? The gardener, I mean.’
‘Money. It made sense for Sermon to have an accomplice: they could divide the duties, alternating the jobs of collecting the snakes and putting them into the carriages.’
We walked on.
It ‘made sense’ only insofar as any of it made sense. Charles Sermon was a nut. But then again, it appeared that he had courted Noreen Ford in a civilised and loving way, and it had been a genuine alliance even if a strange one. It might even have lead to marriage in spite of the age difference, but the girl had been rejected by Sermon’s fellow railway officers; rejected, that is, by first class-travelling society. Or so he thought.