Ragtime in Simla Read online

  He shot a questioning look sideways at Carter. The policeman was struggling to suppress a smile. He had realized that the raised left eyebrow which had been fixing him with a chilling expression of query and disdain was, in fact, permanently fixed at this disconcertingly quizzical angle by clumsy surgery.

  ‘I’ve heard – and tell me if any of this is wrong – a lowly police superintendent is often at the end of the gossip chain, you know – that you are a highly decorated soldier – Scots Fusiliers, was it? – latterly of the Intelligence Corps and now recruited into the CID. An injection of brains and breeding to shake up the postwar force is what they say.’

  Sandilands gave him the benefit of his left profile again but Carter pressed on, matter-of-fact and friendly, ‘And that you’ve had a success in Bengal bringing the force there up to scratch on intelligence-gathering, interrogation techniques – that sort of thing.’

  ‘True,’ said Joe. ‘But, look here, Carter, I’ll say again – I’ve finished my tour and I’m on leave. I’ve not come here to lecture you or get in your way. The last thing in the world I want is to get drawn into this.’ But even as he spoke, instinctive reluctance gave way to a rush of anger. Anger for Feodor Korsovsky, so genial, so excited and friendly and so alive. And Joe had heard the last note of that wonderful voice turn to an obscene scream of pain. Yes, it was his business.

  Perhaps reading his thoughts, Carter eyed him with friendship. ‘I’ll tell you something, Sandilands. You are drawn into it so you might as well settle down and enjoy yourself. I expect baritones get shot two or three times a week in London but – I’ll tell you — it’s something of a novelty in Simla. Makes a nice change from rounding up blasted monkeys which it seems is how I spend my time nowadays.’

  With the posse closed up behind them they threaded their way through the lower town and out on to the open road, breaking first into a trot and then into a canter. Carter ranged up beside Joe as they rode. ‘Tell me something about this Russian,’ he said. ‘You had plenty of time to get acquainted travelling up from Kalka. Apart from this appearance at the Gaiety, had he any business in Simla? Any friends? Any contacts? Was anyone meeting him? I’m trying to understand why anybody would want to shoot the poor chap.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything useful,’ said Joe. ‘He mentioned that he was in contact with the Simla Amateur Dramatic Society who’d booked his appearance. They’d made all his arrangements, hotel and so on. But I got the impression that it was all purely professional. He didn’t even mention a name. He’d taken the engagement entirely, I think, because he’d always wanted to see Simla. He’d turned down a good offer in New York to do it.’

  Carter cast a sharp glance at Joe. ‘Feller was a tourist, are you saying?’ He barked out an order and four of the following sowars came forward and stationed themselves in front and on either side of Joe, all scanning the slopes ahead and on each side with increased alertness.

  ‘Ah! You think I was the target? And the marksman hit the wrong man?’ said Joe.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Carter. ‘Well, it’s certainly a possibility. What about you, Sandilands? Any contacts in Simla? Embarrassing connection with a disreputable past? Senior policemen pick up quite a few enemies on their way up. Especially those whose rise has been… would the word be – meteoric? So what about that? Something of that sort would be a great help to me, you know.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Joe, noting the man’s shrewdness with approval, ‘can’t supply. The only contact I have is the Lieutenant-Governor and contacts don’t come much more respectable than that! No, I know nobody in Simla. And the only man who might take the trouble to line me up on a lonely mountain pass is – I’m glad to say – serving twenty years in the Scrubs.’

  ‘But someone was lying in wait for the Governor’s car. You were the expected passenger, weren’t you? Was it by chance that you offered Korsovsky a lift?’

  Joe nodded.

  ‘Then, don’t you agree that it’s far more likely that the sniper was lying in wait for you?’ Carter persisted. ‘You were the man he was expecting to find in the back of the Governor’s car.’

  Something – a remark made by the Russian – was nagging at Joe’s mind. He thought for a moment and then said, ‘When we met and we were discussing ways of getting up to Simla he said to me… something like – “I’ve been instructed to take a tonga.” Yes – instructed. I thought at the time it was an odd word to use. Listen, Carter, someone had told him, and firmly we must assume, to come up by tonga. So your sniper is lying in wait – quite possibly for hours – looking out for a tonga bearing a large Russian singer. He picked a good place. Plenty of cover and a direct shot at the very spot where I expect everyone stops on their first visit to Simla. Tara Devi. You round the corner and there it is, your first sight. And there’s even a place where you can pull over and stop to get a better view.’

  Carter was listening earnestly and nodding his agreement.

  ‘So, you may be watching out for a tonga but if a car pulls over and a large man rises to his feet and serenades the hills with what is probably the most magnificent operatic baritone in the world, and that man is wearing a white suit and is outlined against a black rock, you’ve got your man.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ said Carter but Joe noticed he kept his protective escort in place.

  The posse swept on, attracting much attention from the few people now on the road, and rounded the bend before the ill-fated Devil’s Elbow.

  ‘We’ll stop here and dismount,’ said Carter. ‘I’ll tell off horse-holders – two should be enough – and the rest of us will do a short sweep through the rocks.’ He looked up at the sky, judging the amount of light left to them. ‘Better get a move on. Where did you reckon the shot came from?’

  Joe pointed.

  ‘Right then,’ said Carter. ’Off we go! This is what’s called a gasht. Pushtu word. Suppose if this were the British Army it would be called “an armed reconnaissance”, perhaps even “a fighting patrol”. Call it what you will. Equally it could be called “sticking your neck out”.’

  The policemen formed a line and with rifles at the port set off to sweep into the hills, Carter in the centre, a police jemadar marking the right flank and Joe reluctantly marking the left.

  ‘I don’t know what on earth I think I’m doing,’ he thought. ‘I’m supposed to be on leave, for God’s sake! And has it occurred to Carter that of all this mob, I’m completely unarmed? Perhaps I should have said something? Ah, well, too late now.’ But a further thought came to him: Feodor had been a nice man – interesting, interested, talented, looking forward to the coming weeks, harmless – yes, surely harmless, and yet someone had shot him. And, so far as he was anything to Joe, he could say that he was his friend for however brief a time. Joe could turn his back on it but – he realized – he had no intention of doing so.

  The gasht moved up the hill at surprising speed and it wasn’t more than a hundred yards before Joe began to blow. Tirelessly, Carter led them forward. Resentfully, Joe floundered in his wake, glad to be out on a wing, deeming this to be, if there was such a thing, the position of minimum danger. And perhaps that was why Carter had put him there.

  After a sweating quarter of an hour, Carter held up a hand to call a halt and redress ranks and at once there was a call from the man to Joe’s right. He shouted something Joe did not understand and Carter replied. They closed in together to meet beside the discovery of whatever it might be.

  ‘Perhaps we have a clue,’ said Carter. ‘Hardly dared to hope for such a thing. Let’s see what we’ve got!’

  What they had got was the brass cases of two spent rounds. The man who’d found them was standing still and pointing at them, not, Joe was relieved to see, dashing in to scoop them up in his hand.

  ‘We don’t have the facilities to test these,’ said Carter, once again reading Joe’s mind, ‘but we can send them away to Calcutta if it’s relevant. In the meantime I’ll handle them with care.’ And he produced a f
old of paper evidence bags from his pack. ‘.303,’ he said. ’You were right. From a British service rifle perhaps.

  ‘And look,’ he added, ’here’s something else. A cigarette end.’

  ‘Two cigarette ends,’ said Joe, pointing further up the hill.

  ‘Black Cat,’ said Carter. ‘Fat lot of help! Probably the most common English cigarette in India after the Woodbine. That won’t tell us much. Now if only it had been a Russian cigarette or an Afghani or a Balkan Sobranie, it might have told us something.’

  They peered together at the remains of the cigarettes held on Carter’s outstretched palm.

  ‘Nervous type?’ said Joe.

  ‘See what you mean,’ said Carter. ‘They’re only half smoked. A few puffs and they’ve been extinguished. Still, at least we know where the shot was fired from. Line yourself up with the black rock down there. My lady’s maid couldn’t have missed!’

  Carter moved in closer to take a sighting between the rocks. Joe noticed that he was careful, before he did so, to look closely at the ground for footprints or other disturbance. Joe looked too, trying to make out any slight indentations where elbow or knee might have rested.

  ‘Well, that’s plain enough,’ said Carter. ‘See there.’ He pointed to two deep scrapes in the moss about two feet apart. ‘That’s where the toes of his boots rested and over here… yes… there and there… you can just make them out – those depressions are where he placed his elbows. And here’s where his knee went. Clear as day.’

  ‘Tall man, would you say?’ said Joe. ‘Hard to make out, looking at the signs from above like this.’

  ‘I’d say average to tall,’ said Carter. ‘Taller than me, shorter than you.’ He looked along the group of interested sowars who were following developments and selected one. ‘Gupta?’ He did not need to explain further. The Indian came forward, dropped to his knees and adopted the classic sniper’s attitude, lying slightly oblique to the line of shot. His boots fitted the scrapes perfectly and his elbows and knees the depressions.

  ‘Arrest this man!’ snapped Charlie.

  A shattered silence was followed by loud guffaws as Gupta leapt to his feet in surprise and then joined in the joke. ‘Thank you, Gupta,’ said Charlie, writing down ‘Five feet ten inches’ in his notebook.

  ‘Who in Simla would be capable of firing these shots?’ Joe began and instantly regretted the naivety of his question.

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Carter. ‘That’s our problem. Place is full of Dead Eye Dicks! Army, retired army, tiger hunters – even the women are crack shots! You should see the Ladies Rifle Club at it on the range in Annandale! Still, we’ll go through the motions. Get the cases and the cigarette ends fingerprinted in Calcutta then if we should ever have anything so useful as a suspect we can get them tested and do a comparison.’

  ‘At least the cigarette ends tend to uphold the theory that Korsovsky was the intended target,’ said Joe.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Carter.

  ‘Only two of them. How long does it take to smoke two cigarettes? A matter of minutes. I would guess that our killer turned up here thinking he had all the time in the world to prepare himself for the arrival of his target in a slow-moving tonga. Snipers do nothing in a hurry; they like to take up position well before the intended killing time. The time of the train’s arrival in Kalka was known, easy then to calculate the arrival to this point of a tonga, but to his surprise and having had no time for more than two cigarettes, up draws a car carrying his target. He’s done his job and back home for tea earlier than expected.’

  The daffadur listening intently to Joe and nodding excitedly chipped in. ‘Yes, sahib, sir, that is very correct. And last year, I remember, the same thing. Here at the Devil’s Elbow. The young gentleman who was shot – he arrived by tonga and there was a pile of cigarette ends… twelve at least!’

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  « ^ »

  That was a damned odd remark,’ said Joe as they scrambled breathlessly down the hill towards their waiting horses. ‘Are you going to tell me what it was all about?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carter. ‘You’ll have to know what it was all about. The plain fact is that that’s the second time that somebody’s been shot on more or less that spot.’

  ‘And the victim on that occasion?’ said Joe. ‘Don’t tell me – a Brazilian counter-tenor?’

  Carter laughed. ‘Nothing so exotic as that, but a strange enough story all the same and a very sad one.’

  They mounted and set off together towards Simla, their escort clattering and chattering behind them. Carter took up his story. ‘An Englishman coming out to Simla to visit his sister. His name was Lionel Conyers. His sister Alice is a prominent local citizen, a director, and indeed a majority shareholder, I believe, in ICTC. The Imperial and Colonial Trading Company. Very rich merchant family and high up the social scale too. This young Lord Conyers had a very remarkable experience. He was a regular soldier attached to an American unit and he was caught in the retreat on the Meuse Argonne a few weeks before the war ended. Blown up and buried alive. He was only discovered two days later and by the advancing Germans. Poor chap! He’d lost his memory completely. No idea who he was or where he was and can you wonder after all he’d been through? He got hauled away by the Germans, who filed him away somewhere in a POW hospital. They didn’t even know his nationality and it was some months before he surfaced again. At last they found out he was British and then by degrees who he was and sent him back to Blighty.’

  ‘That’s a terrible story but, sadly, not uncommon,’ said Joe. ’I expect his sister was overwhelmed to get him back – almost literally – from the dead?’

  Carter hesitated for a moment. ‘Not that simple. In fact his reappearance caused an almighty muddle. You see, while he was mouldering in a German hospital he was posted “missing presumed dead”. His family at that stage consisted of his grandfather and his only sister – parents both died of the flu just after the war and he didn’t even know that. By the time he bobbed to the surface again his grandfather had died and left the considerable family fortune and the business to be shared between his sister Alice and her second cousin. I think she has a fifty-one per cent share in the company, he has forty-nine.’

  ‘I see,’ said Joe. ’And what was the reaction of the two directors? What, in law, was their position?’

  ‘See what you’re driving at,’ said Carter. ’First thing I thought of too. Bad situation. Legal nightmare! Young Conyers seems to have been a decent sort of chap. He wrote to Alice announcing he was still alive and had taken up the family title. He also said he was coming out to see her and would make arrangements for the equitable share-out of the company. He didn’t want to snatch it all straight from under her nose but he was damned if he could see why a remote second cousin should be involved. He was proposing to cut him out completely, take fifty-one per cent for himself and reduce Alice to forty-nine.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Alice herself told me. She showed me the letter he’d sent her announcing his arrival in Simla.’

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘Well, after a period of disbelief (only to be expected, of course), apparently with joy. Her friends say she was thrilled to be getting her brother back from the dead. And then I saw her after the shooting and I can say my own impression is that she was devastated. Lost her only close relation twice, so to speak. She was, I’d say, stunned and incredulous.’

  ‘And where was Alice and for that matter her fellow director when the shooting occurred?’

  ‘They were together. They had by this time married, by the way. And, funnily enough, at the precise moment Alice was out shooting. She’s a very good rifle shot but the only target she was hitting at the time was a bull’s-eye on the range at Annandale in view of about a hundred onlookers. She rushed off from the competition to prepare to receive her brother who was expected to come up the cart road in about an hour’s time. And
her second cousin was one of the onlookers.’

  ‘So what do you make of the two killings? Are they connected, do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ said Carter slowly, ‘at the moment I’m thinking that the two targets are completely unrelated. I’m guessing that we’re dealing with a madman. Someone killing for fun. Trying out a new rifle, if you like. What possible connection could there be between a forgotten soldier and the flamboyant Monsieur Korsovsky?’

  ‘Beyond the fact that they were both shot in the same place. By the same sort of bullet?’

  ‘Yes. .303, probably a service rifle in both cases. Calcutta will tell us more. They inspected the first lot of cases as well.’

  ‘And the killer smoked the same sort of cigarette?’

  ‘Yes. Black Cat. Same scenario exactly. Evidence of a tall – five foot ten or thereabouts – sniper though obviously with more time on his hands on the first occasion – all twelve cigarette butts were smoked right down to the end. Well, before I do anything else I ought to report to my chief. I know what he’ll say – “Carry on, Carter!” He never says anything else.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Joe with considerable feeling. ‘I wish I could say the same about my superior back in London Town. He’d let me blow my nose occasionally without consulting him but never much more than that. And while you’re reporting to your Chief Superintendent I wonder if I ought to go and make myself known to the Lieutenant-Governor, my host, Sir George Jardine?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you should. He’ll want to know. He took a very considerable interest, you might say a surprisingly considerable interest in the death of Lionel Conyers.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Joe. ‘Did he indeed! Do you know him? I mean, do you know him well? Just a nodding acquaintance?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Carter, ‘whether a humble police superintendent can have a “nodding acquaintance” with the mighty Sir George! I wouldn’t dare to nod! I’d be standing at attention and though I like him I have to say I hardly know him.’