City of Bells (22 page)

             
“Felix,” Rayley said gently.  “Your uncle told you Roland Everlee was the best white man.  What did he tell you about Anthony Weaver?”

             
“He say Sahib Weaver take care of our family,” Felix said.  “For all days.  And this he do.  Yes?  This he do?”

Chapter Thirteen

A Carriage in the British District

2:20 PM

              The meeting concluded at two and then the group dispersed, each one moving to his or her assigned task.  Tom returned to the club to investigate the wiring which had delivered the shock to Amy Morrow and Jonathan Benson the previous evening.  Seal and Morass bustled off to, in the words of Morass, “scare up” the female servants of the Weaver household and Trevor suspected that for once this was not a mere figure of speech.  After sending a note to Miss Hoffman to alert her that they would indeed be returning in the midday sun, Emma, Davy, and Gerry borrowed Mrs. Tucker’s carriage and set off in the direction of the temple. 

             
And Rayley and Trevor hired a cab to take them in the opposite direction, to the gentleman’s rooming house where Jonathan Benson had been staying before he was killed.  Apparently Gerry’s airy claim that there were no hotels in Bombay was not entirely accurate.  More likely what she meant was that there were few which accepted both male and female travelers and fewer yet which approached the levels of comfort to which she had spent a lifetime becoming accustomed. 

             
But there were boarding houses aplenty for the men of the Raj, the majority of them probably just like the one now before Rayley and Trevor – a large but humbly appointed dwelling with any number of small rooms for lease. 
This house is a charmless affair,
Trevor thought, as the landlord, with a glance at their paperwork, readily escorted them down the hall to Benson’s room. 
And not so very different from my own bachelor’s quarters back in London.
Buildings without women always seemed to him strangely abandoned, no matter how many men might climb their stairs or walk their halls.

             
“The poor chap is paid up full for the week,” the landlord said, before leaving them at the door, a remark Trevor initially found irrelevant.  But upon reflection he supposed the fellow was suggesting that Benson – or more likely Michael Everlee – had rented the room for a set number of days and thus that Benson’s things would remain there unmoved and unmolested throughout that period of time.  Which was fortunate indeed, for otherwise the man’s personal effects might have been packed up in careless haste and stored somewhere, thus diminishing Trevor and Rayley’s chance to get an impression of his personality.

             
“Just as one might expect to find it,” Rayley said, breaking into his thoughts.

“
              Umm…” Trevor said noncommittally.  What he assumed his friend meant was that Benson’s room was absolutely neat, without any clothing scattered about or any remains of food or drink.  The small desk in the corner was well ordered and Rayley moved to it at once, leaving Trevor to reflect that Rayley must keep his own room with the same sort of militaristic precision as this one.  Trevor’s own personal quarters looked more as if a handbomb had been recently deployed.

             
“See here,” said Rayley, handing Trevor a small framed daguerreotype.  “It must be from the fifties, before the mutiny, and thus is a bit unusual for its era, is it not?”

             
“Indeed,” said Trevor, accepting the photograph and sitting down on Benson’s unmussed bed.  Photography had not become in vogue for your average middle class family until the last few years, but here in his hands was an early example of the art, showing two officers in uniform standing side by side and staring straight ahead, as if into some uncertain future.

             
“Weaver and Everlee, I presume,” Rayley said.  “Back in their salad days.”

             
“It would seem so,” Trevor said.  “The one on the left is definitely Anthony Weaver and the other is…well, note the braiding on his shoulders and the insignia.  I do not pretend to fathom the many levels of the Raj but he is without question the more highly decorated of the two.  I wonder how and why Benson came to possess this picture.”

             
“The how is almost certainly through Michael Everlee,” said Rayley, sitting down beside Trevor on the bed, but with hesitation, as if he found the act somewhat disrespectful to Benson.  “He must have carried the picture with him through the years.”

             
“Or else he recently took it from the Weaver home,” Trevor said, squinting down at the faces of the two men.  “I cannot fully shake the impression that he beat us to the crime scene, no matter what Seal claims.”

             
“The photograph doesn’t seem to yield evidence in and of itself,” said Rayley.  “Unusually good work for its time, yes, but beyond that, just the image of Secretary-General and his lieutenant.  Do you make anything more of it?”

             
“Have you heard of this chap they call Freud?” Trevor asked abruptly.

             
“Sigmund Freud?  I’ve read a bit of him. Why?”

             
“You know he says that biology is destiny.”

             
“Yes…” Rayley said cautiously.  “But I believe that remark was made in reference to the differences between how men and women think.”

             
“Ah,” said Trevor. “Well, if the fellow can explain that great mystery to the world, we should bring him to England and have him knighted on the spot.  But this picture reminded me of Everlee’s remarks at the dinner table last evening.  It was after you left, of course, but someone asked him if he had come to see his father’s memorial plaque and he said quite pointedly that he had traveled to India because of his other father.  Meaning his stepfather, of course.  Anthony Weaver.”

             
“And?”

             
Trevor glanced up from the photograph.  “I do not entirely know what I am saying.  Just that it must be strange for a boy to grow up with two fathers – one by way of genetics and the other by way of training.  Under those circumstances, which would you imagine would have the greater influence – the biology of his father or the ideology of his stepfather?”

             
“If I could answer that, I should demand to be knighted along with Freud,” Rayley said with a soft laugh.  “It is a question for the sages, is it not?”

             
“They look rather alike in the picture.”

             
“All men in uniform look rather alike.”

             
“I suppose,” said Trevor, “but it strikes me once again how entwined the fates of Roland Everlee and Anthony Weaver truly are. They served in the same unit, were caught in the same battle, lived in the same house, even married the same woman.  One of them raised the other’s child as his own.”

             
“And yet one lived and one died,” Rayley said, pushing up from the bed and moving back toward the desk.  “In the most crucial and ultimate sense, their destinies diverged.”

             
“Do you think Felix’s story about the children taken from that farmhouse is correct?” Trevor asked.

             
“Almost certainly.”

             
“And the baby boy died and the girl was sent from India?”

             
“So claimed the report,” Rayley said, leafing through a notebook.  “Last night I briefly indulged the fantasy we might find the girl, who would now be close to forty and presumably still in England.  But it is bad luck that she is female and thus her adult name is probably no longer Sloane.”

             
“Even if we found her,” Trevor said, “the odds are that she would not remember anything that would help us.”

             
Rayley glanced up.  “You think not?  I’m torn on the issue.  I remember a few things from the time I was five, with certain impressions which I believe may have originated even earlier.  And something as traumatic as what that poor little girl must have witnessed - Ah, Welles, look, see here.”

             
He handed Trevor the notebook, which was turned to a page where Benson had drawn a small chart, some business with numbers and percentages that Trevor found impossible to understand.  But at the bottom of the page two notes jumped out immediately.

TOO MUCH FOR EIGHT STONE.  FOURTEEN?

              And, a bit further down…

LAUDANUM?

***

The Byculla Club

2:49 PM

              Tom had been crouched on the floor of the Byculla Club dining room for the better part of an hour, painstakingly working his way through the tangle of wires which connected the lamps which had been set beneath the table the evening before.

             
The trouble, he thought, rocking so far back on his heels that he actually rolled back with a plop to his bum, wasn’t that he couldn’t find a fray in the cords.  The problem was that he had found a dozen.  Either the electrocution of Jonathan Benson and Amy Morrow had been accidental – prompted by nothing more than their unfortunate placement at the table – or the plan to kill them had been so fiendishly intricate that he didn’t have a notion of where to start.  Emma had told him about the order of precedence and Trevor had commented on it too…apparently the Byculla Club set a great store around the sequence in which certain members entered and left a room.  Which in theory suggested that someone might have known where Amy and Benson had been sitting…

             
But no.  It seemed unlikely.  Had anyone even known either of them would be there, that Michael Everlee would drag along an attaché or that Mrs. Morrow’s granddaughter would be visiting from the districts?

             
Besides, Tom’s mind kept drifting back to the difference between poison and electrocution as a murder method and they seemed to be the fruits of very different sorts of minds.  Poisoning someone seemed to be so…well, there was no other way to say it.  Poisoning was so primal, and thus so native, while electrocution was so very modern, and thus so British.  India was full of toxins, and if local legend was to be believed, the locals used them with regularity to dispatch both themselves and their enemies.  But it would have to be a rare Englishman, one with significant experience of the flora and fauna of the subcontinent, to understand the particulars of this ‘suicide tree’ and how its fruit should be administered. 

             
And the electricity….even fewer people would be able to calculate the workings of that.  Someone last night, during that endless cocktail hour before dinner, had laughed and said that the servants at the Club would have nothing to do with the electrical lights and refused to turn them on and off, leaving that solemn task to a high ranking member of the Club.  The man telling the story had chortled with amusement over the Indian mistrust of electricity, but as it turns out the servants were quite right to demur, for the tangle of frayed wires before Tom now on the floor only confirmed what he had thought the evening before.

             
The real surprise was not that an electrocution happened, but that it had not happened long before now.

             
Which is not to say that a clever British man, wishing to avoid detection, would not go with the more primitive means of poison or that a clever Indian might just as easily divert attention from his crime by choosing to use the white man’s weapon against him. The members of the Thursday Night Murder Games Club had discussed this all many times.  It was a mistake for a detective to assume a killer was brilliant.  But it could be an even larger mistake to assume that he was not. 

***

The Gardens of the Khajuraho Temple

3:20 PM

             
Trevor often referred to Emma as the group’s “linguist,” a rather fancy tern which always made her uncomfortable.  It seemed to imply years of training and a thorough knowledge of dozens of languages rather than the three she could manage reasonably well. 

             
But still… at the heart of it, perhaps being a linguist really did come down to little more than the ability to recognize patterns, specifically patterns of sound, and Emma had not been on the portico for more than a few minutes when she had realized that both the Weaver maid and cook were saying the same phrase over and over.

             
It would appear that the women were being most cooperative.  They had entered the girls’ school in much the manner Trevor had predicted, with more curiosity than trepidation.  Both of them readily answered the questions which Davy asked and Miss Hoffman translated, the cook customarily going first, affirming that her status in the household was higher than that of the maid. 

             
So far they had revealed few facts of interest.  The morning of the murders had seemed no different than all others.  Sahib Weaver had risen first and gone to his Club, just as his custom.  Neither woman had seen him, but the maid had heard the front door close when he and Felix left, and had used that as the signal to tidy the man’s room.  He did not breakfast.  Never did.  Shortly after her husband’s departure, Mrs. Weaver had risen and rang for her tray, which was brought to the sitting room.  The tray held her beloved biscuits and jam, as well as a pot of morning tea which the lady preferred weak and watery, and her medication.  Pulkit Sang ate in the kitchen as he always did and made up his own breakfast from the remains of the previous evening’s curry.