A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (50 page)

‘The violence makes more sense if you do accept what you call the other thing. Was Merrick kind to him at any point?’

Rowan stared at me. ‘Kind to him?’

‘Afterwards.’

‘He gave him water. But he made him thank him for it.’

‘It’s the sort of thing I mean. Tell me about it.’

‘I can only tell you what Hari said. It doesn’t mean it happened.’

‘Well tell me what Hari said.’

‘He said he was taken into another room and manacled to a charpoy. Merrick was alone with him. He gave him a drink of water and made him say thank you. He bathed the cuts. He told him there’d be no more questions until morning. He said the whole evening had been an enactment of the real situation between them and that now they both knew how matters stood and what that situation was.’ Rowan paused. ‘It was a master and man situation, a simplified way of putting it, but near enough. At one point Merrick said, What price Chillingborough now? At another point he told Hari that there were only two basic human emotions, contempt and envy, and that a man’s personality existed at his point of equilibrium between the two. But when I met Merrick the other day I simply couldn’t imagine him behaving and talking like that.’

‘I’m sure he did.’

‘Yes, I thought you’d believe it. It’s one of the reasons I’m telling you.’ Again he hesitated. ‘Hari said that it was to punish himself for thanking Merrick for the water that he decided to answer no more questions. He said the situation between himself and Merrick wouldn’t exist if he dissociated himself from it and refused to say anything more to Merrick or to anyone else. Does that make sense to you?’

‘It makes very good sense. It’s what I’ve been trying to do. Dissociate myself from the situation that arises out of being chosen.’

Rowan was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Has he chosen Sarah Layton’s sister?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Just the Laytons as a family?’

That suddenly didn’t fit entirely either. But I saw what did. I said: ‘In the way I mean by choose I should say he’s chosen the child.’

*

‘The child,’ Lady Manners had said (meaning that other child fathered by a person unknown). ‘The child. But even now I can’t be sure, only surer. She was so sure.’ The other thing she said was, ‘He spoke the truth’, but qualified it later as they drove through Kandipat, blinds down. She said, ‘One has to make do with approximations’ and that this was what one meant when one said he spoke the truth. When Rowan left Room O he too was sure he had heard the truth. He told Lady Manners that Kumar would be released but regretted this later when various impediments to such a release had all contributed to a partial revival of disbelief, to a renewed conviction that Kumar
had
somehow been involved in the assault. Lady Manners had asked to be taken back to her hotel and not to Government House. As they parted she thanked him for having undertaken such a distasteful task and asked him to give Malcolm a message: a very short one. ‘I know my niece did not lie, that he never harmed her and is very wrongfully imprisoned.’

When he gave the message to the Governor, Malcolm said they would discuss it when the record of the examination was typed up and he’d had the chance to read it. He was going to Calcutta for a few days and preoccupied with other matters. He told Rowan to give the confiscated shorthand book to Cynthia, Her Excellency’s private secretary. He thought it unwise to have it transcribed by the shorthand writer at the Secretariat. ‘Don’t worry,’ Malcolm said. ‘Cynthia’s pretty broad-minded.’ All the same, Rowan tore out the page which the shorthand writer had drawn a line through before handing it to her.

She must have worked late. The following morning she sent him a sealed envelope containing the notebook and a top and two carbons of an impeccable typescript. When he rang through to thank her she merely said, ‘Oh, well. Press on you
know. Only way to get round the course.’ When he read the typescript through he was astonished at her apparent equanimity. It sounded even worse in print. He kept notebook and typescripts in a locked drawer until Malcolm returned, and hourly expected Gopal to ring him and ask when the shorthand writer could complete his job by typing the record. But Gopal didn’t ring.

When Malcolm had read the typescript he told Rowan it was a pity he hadn’t been able to stick to the political evidence. The transcript showed that he had tried and also why he hadn’t succeeded. But it was a pity. He explained that although senior police officers had always stood by Merrick, and that included the Inspector-General, the Inspector-General’s private opinion was that Merrick had botched the evidence by being over-anxious and emotionally involved because he had been fond of the girl himself. If the
IG
saw this transcript he would be so shocked by Kumar’s accusations that he would write them off as pure fantasy and point out that the only result of the examination had been to revive suspicion of Kumar’s guilt, and that this would be sufficient reason to keep the fellow locked up until the end of the war. The
IG
would say that to release Kumar now would be as good as recording a reprimand on Merrick’s personal file and that this could count against him, very unfairly, when he returned to the police after his army service.

‘Then the best thing,’ Rowan had said, ‘will be to file the transcript away and forget all about it.’

But Malcolm said he didn’t think he could allow that. In Kumar’s case Rule 26 had fairly clearly been abused. The abuse was less obvious in the case of the other boys. If they had had a political leader at all it would have been Vidyasagar who wasn’t among those arrested for rape but who was arrested a couple of days later for printing seditious literature on the press in the
Mayapore Hindu
office. In comparison with Vidyasagar even the others might be thought of as lambs led to the slaughter. Kumar, Malcolm was sure, hadn’t even been a member of the flock. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘why did you confiscate the book and end the examination so abruptly?’

Rowan told him.

‘It isn’t in the transcript.’

‘I removed the offending page.’

‘And deprived Cynthia of the dénouement? What happened after you sent the shorthand writer out?’

Again Rowan told him.

‘And Lady Manners heard
all
this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she make any other comment in the car coming home apart from giving you that message?’

‘I gathered she was now surer Kumar was the father of the Manners child, but not as sure as her niece had been.’

‘What did you infer from that?’

‘That Miss Manners told her aunt she and Kumar had been lovers.’

‘Her niece told her nothing. She left a written statement absolving Kumar completely. The old lady found it after her death, but she wouldn’t show it even to me.’

*

Rowan felt like exploding with irritation.

‘If we’d had Miss Manners’s statement we might have had a more successful examination,’ he told the Governor. But the Governor pointed out that the examination had been of a man detained for political reasons. Miss Manners’s statement, presumably, dealt entirely with her emotional involvement with Kumar. The only value a statement like that would ever have would be in the event, now highly unlikely, of a charge being brought against Kumar for rape, when defending counsel might construct his case from it. In Malcolm’s view, Lady Manners was perfectly justified in otherwise keeping it to herself. Neither she – nor her niece – had ever had any answer to the political charges, which lay outside their competence, however deep the conviction was that political detention had been imposed out of sheer frustration; the frustration felt by the civil authority which had wanted to nail Kumar much more effectively. And in
that
regard, in the matter of the charge of rape, Malcolm suggested, Miss Manners’s silence, Kumar’s refusal to answer questions, during the period when a charge of rape might so easily have been brought, had not only been effective then but was
eloquent now. Just how eloquent, Malcolm wasn’t sure. Except that he believed it suggested that they had loved one another and that, loving him, she had been afraid for him.

Just as eloquent, he thought, was the fact that Lady Manners had let a certain amount of time elapse before trying to hoist the civil authority with its own petard: Kumar’s ‘political’ crimes. Clearly non-existent. He could order Kumar’s immediate release simply on the basis of the transcript of the examination but was reluctant to do so without the approval of both the member for Home and Law and the Inspector-General. That approval, he thought, wouldn’t automatically flow from the transcript of the examination.

‘He left it to me,’ Rowan said, ‘to find a
modus operandi.
’

The first thing Rowan did was to edit a copy of the transcript to isolate the political content. When he’d done this he persuaded Cynthia to type copies of the revised version. ‘Very neat’, she said, when she handed the revised version to him. He thought so himself. It was now the kind of transcript that could be shown – for instance to the Inspector-General – without much fear of blood-pressures rising or of waking departmental sensitivities.

However, there was one man who might upset the applecart. Both Rowan and Gopal would have to initial the transcript before it went on file. Gopal could wreck everything by refusing to put his initials to a document that was obviously rigged. The question was, in what was Gopal most interested? In the release of an unjustly imprisoned Indian detenu or in the eventual exposure of a British police officer? Rowan rang Gopal at the Secretariat. He asked if they could meet somewhere, unofficially. Gopal didn’t bite. Rowan had no option but to go to the Secretariat. He took with him a carbon of the full typescript and a carbon of the edited version. He asked Gopal to read both documents and then get in touch with him so that they could discuss the problem.

The following day Gopal rang. He asked Rowan to have dinner with him at his home that evening and gave instructions how to get there. It was the beginning of an association that ripened into friendship and affection. Gopal had seen the
point of the edited typescript at once. He was on Kumar’s side. He said he would be prepared to initial the edited typescript at once, with one proviso, that the title of the document should include the word Abstract and that the general heading should make it clear that the examination was in regard to a warrant issued under the Defence of India Rules. He produced a draft of the kind of heading he had in mind. Rowan accepted it at once.

‘Are we doing the right thing, though?’ Gopal asked as they parted. ‘In prison at least he has an identity.’

*

But even with the edited typescript in front of him, the Inspector-General threatened to prove stubborn. An unexpected nigger in the woodpile was Pandit Baba. Since 1942 this man had become much more actively involved in affairs which attracted the em’s attention. Kumar’s disclosure that he had been taught Hindi by Baba interested the
IG
considerably. Kumar had refused to answer questions about the Pandit at the time of his arrest. His admission now surely showed how well-informed Merrick had been, how right to suspect a connection, how right to ask questions about a connection. Until now it hadn’t been clear why he did. At the time the Pandit’s activities had been too unimportant for one’s attention to have been attracted to his name on the file. But he was nowadays believed to be a subtle and potentially dangerous leader of Hindu youth, anti-Congress, anti-Gandhi, anti-British, with affiliations with the Hindu Mahasabha and its activist group, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh. And what was the connection between the pandit and the detenu’s aunt – who had bombarded Government with pleas for her nephew’s release and was now in Ranpur without visible means of support? The examination showed that the aunt had paid for the Hindi lessons, and that it was she who had chosen Baba as Kumar’s teacher. Did her persistence, her constant pleas, suggest prompting by Baba Sahib? Was she being used by this man? He had always been much too clever to get into trouble himself. Currently he had disappeared from the scene. But if one released Kumar mightn’t he be the
very type of young man the Pandit would find it useful to have as a disciple?

Rowan suggested to Malcolm that if the main obstacie to Kumar’s release was the suspicion that he would fall at once into the Pandit’s net of eager young disciples perhaps the thing to suggest to the
IG
was that if the
CID
wanted to nab the Pandit a free Kumar might be more helpful than an imprisoned Kumar.

But Malcolm said, ‘Either we believe Kumar and his aunt have no political commitments or we don’t. If we don’t believe it we’re not justified in releasing him. Frankly I do believe it. The Pandit’s just a red herring the
IG’S
suddenly noticed. So, let it lie. Have you ever understood Einstein?’

Rowan said he hadn’t. Malcolm said he hadn’t either, but that sometimes when faced with this apparently insoluble and intricate problem of reaching a solution through the thickets of departmental vanities he applied his own theory of relativity, which was that although people seldom argued a point but argued round it, they sometimes found the solution to the problem they were evading by going round in ever
increasing
circles and disappearing into the centre of
those
, which, relatively speaking, coincided with the centre of the circle from whose periphery they had evasively spiralled outwards.

So Rowan let it lie. His belief in Kumar’s innocence or guilt was like a pendulum. He wished he could get that to lie too, wished he could stop it at the vertical point which represented non-commitment. It was a relief when a couple of weeks later Malcolm gave him another confidential assignment – one which called for him to officiate on the Governor’s behalf at the transfer of another detenu – Mohammed Ali Kasim – from imprisonment in the fort at Premanager to the protection of his kinsman, the Nawab of Mirat; a form of parole, an ostensibly compassionate act but not without its element of political shrewdness.