The Death of Mr Love, page 47
‘Hamba!’ she cried, and the cows looked up. ‘Haalya!’
Our walk seemed to last hours, but we had probably covered no more than five miles. The end of our quest came suddenly and was quite unlike I had expected it to be. It was late afternoon, the same day we had crawled out of the pipe. We passed through a thicket of karvanda bushes on top of a low hill and there, below us, was the road again. Set back from it was a gateway, a drive leading through a well-tended garden – banana plants, a guava tree, a fountain with goldfish – to a large bungalow surrounded by a verandah in which, sitting reading, was a very old man.
Phoebe led us through the gates and up the drive. The man looked up from his book and saw us. He took off his reading glasses and stared.
‘Good afternoon,’ Phoebe said. ‘I think you know who we are.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ he replied politely. ‘Are you lost?’
‘No, we’ve come all the way from Bombay to meet you.’
‘Really? On foot?’
‘Our car is nearby,’ said Phoebe. ‘With other friends waiting for us to return safely to it.’
‘Safely? Are you in some danger? Did you say you were looking for me?’
‘You were in the Bombay police, weren’t you?’
‘I was,’ he agreed. ‘But I have been retired for twenty years.’
‘A man was blackmailed,’ said Phoebe. ‘It was a long time ago, in the 1950s, while you were still in the force. The man was a boot-legger. He supplied drink to society people.’
‘I see. Is this a case I should know about?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘because the bootlegger had a customer you must surely remember. A man called Prem Ahuja.’
I was searching his face, but caught no flicker.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Nanavati case. Well, what you’ve said about the bootlegger does not surprise me. That sort of criminal is always in some kind of trouble. But I don’t understand why you have come to tell me this.’
We were still standing under his verandah, looking up to where he was sitting. I said, ‘Sir, are you aware that one of the women involved with Ahuja was also blackmailed? By the same man?’
‘The Nanavati affair was a long time ago. It’s hard to remember things accurately. I believe I was out of station when it happened.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jula, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s my understanding that you were involved with the case.’
‘So I was,’ he said. ‘With the investigation. One of dozens. Unfortunately that does not change the fact that memories fade.’
‘I doubt if memories of that case could ever fade,’ I said.
‘You speak remarkably good English,’ said our host, taking in my village apparel. ‘Don’t stand in the hot sun, please. Come in. Sit down. May I know your names?’
So we went up onto his verandah and sat on wicker chairs, in a semi-circle, facing him. Phoebe said, ‘My name is Phoebe Killigrew. Perhaps my surname will ring some bells with you?’
‘I am afraid not, dear lady,’ he said with a smile. ‘But please do enlighten me.’
So Phoebe began to tell the story I knew so well. Sybil’s ill-fated love affair with the man she called Mister Love, her abortion, the murder, the trial of Nanavati, the blackmail. As she talked she never took her eyes off his. This was the moment for which she had waited so long. ‘I wonder if the blackmailer ever realised,’ she said, ‘how cruel, how evil, his action was? For the sake of a few thousand rupees, he destroyed my mother’s life.’ She described in detail Sybil’s suffering, and her death. ‘This man, if he is still alive, needs to know that what he did was unforgivable, and that he will never be forgiven.’
‘I am shocked,’ the old man said. ‘I offer you my sympathy. But I don’t believe anyone I knew could have done such a thing . . . How can you be sure this blackmailer was a police officer? Isn’t it much more likely to have been a journalist? Or some corrupt official of the court?’
‘I never said he was a policeman,’ said Phoebe. ‘You have said it. But court officials don’t generally kidnap children from school and frighten them with murders they’ve investigated.’
‘Nor,’ I added, ‘do journalists interrogate people who are being held in police cells.’ I was trying desperately to remember the features of the policeman who had threatened me. I could not see them in this old face.
‘Nor,’ said Jula, ‘do journalists or court officials have the power to put people in such fear that they leave the country which needs them far more than it needs bahinchod gangsters and corrupt cops.’
The old man endured all this with a polite smile. ‘It seems you are convinced that your culprit was a policeman,’ he said. ‘But why come to me with this story? What do you expect me to do?’
‘Tell us the truth about what you know,’ said Phoebe, with an earnestness that wrenched my heart.
The old man picked up his reading glasses and polished them for a long time on the corner of his shirt. ‘Are you suggesting – I hope you are not – that I am the man you’ve been describing?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But you might be. We’re not yet sure who he is.’
‘Not yet? Then what is the good of making accusations?’
Phoebe said, ‘The man who blackmailed my mother thinks that he is safe. He thinks a crime committed so long ago can never be traced to him. He believes that any evidence we have against him is hearsay and that no court would admit it. But that man also has a reputation, and a family. He is near the end of his life. The last thing he would want now is for his old crimes to be dug up and gossiped about in the scandal sheets.’
‘This man,’ he said. ‘Without proof, what can you do?’
Pheobe gave a giggle and then began to laugh. I felt suddenly fearful. There was something so inappropriate, fiendish almost, in the sounds she was making. Pray God, I thought, let her not somehow have got hold of a gun. Let her not shoot him. We have no proof that it was him. Then it occured to me, if this really is the blackmailer, he knows that there was a notebook that could sink him. He thinks we haven’t got it.
I said, ‘There is a notebook. It was written in shorthand. It contains everything we need. Dates, times, places, amounts. His threats written down verbatim and witnessed. Even a description of his office.’
Once again from Phoebe came that unnerving laughter. ‘Our man,’ she said, ‘was so desperate to find the notebook that he actually bought the house where he thought it was hidden.’ To my amazement, she winked.
Our host had lost his smile. ‘This is all nonsense,’ he said. ‘Without this supposed notebook you can do nothing. Even with it you could do little.’
‘The notebook,’ said Phoebe, flying now on the wings of invention, ‘never left my mother’s possession. It is in the safe of my solicitor in England, who has instructions to make its contents public if anything unpleasant happens to me or any of my friends . . . Soon we will have that information, and then we will decide what to do with it.’ She paused. ‘The man named in the notebook – whoever he is,’ she said, looking him in the eye, ‘would like to spend his last years in peace. But my message for him is that he is going to have no peace from this day onwards. Soon the evidence of his crimes will be decoded. Since it involves a famous case, it will be of interest to the press. I may release it to journalists. I may not. This man will live from day to day never knowing when his name might appear in a headline. He will face the constant dread of being uncovered. He will feel sick with dread when he wakes up each morning. In fact, he will hardly dare open a newspaper. He will suffer exactly the same fate he inflicted on my mother . . .’
The old man clapped his hands and a servant immediately appeared from inside the house. I thought, This is where we get thrown out. Or worse.
Instead he said, ‘You have come a long way in the heat to tell me this interesting story. Won’t you have some tea?’
AT THE STONE
‘It’s him. I know it is!’
The five of us were in the house on the slope of Bicchauda, where my family once had lived. We had wandered round rooms now beginning to be invaded by trees, and were sitting around the edge of the crumbling fountain, once full of goldfish, now dry and packed with leaves. Outside, the car waited. Murad had parked it in exactly the same spot where Babu used to station the Humber.
‘I wish I was so sure,’ I said. ‘The old man didn’t behave like a guilty or a worried person. He gave us tea, and offered to help. Can you really see him as a sinister controller of thugs in a city a hundred miles away?’
‘I know it was him,’ she repeated. ‘It was him. The same man who stole me from school!’
‘If it was the man,’ said Jula, ‘his rectum must be turned inside-out by now. You have done what you came for. It’s over. Now go home and forget. This is finished.’
‘For once the bugger is talking sense,’ said Dost, to whom Mitra repeated his remark in Hindi. ‘Let the past officially be declared dead.’
‘Oh but it isn’t,’ she said, when I translated this for her. ‘He was the same cool bastard he’s always been. I want him so terrified he can’t breathe.’
‘Fever,’ I said. ‘Jula is right. If this is the blackmailer, he now believes we have the evidence to damn him. Let’s go home and leave him to ferment.’
‘But we don’t have the evidence,’ she said. ‘It was a lie.’
‘In this case,’ I told her, ‘lie or truth, makes no difference.’
‘It’s not enough!’ she cried. ‘You don’t understand! None of you! I haven’t been through all those years of misery just to let him off the hook. He was smiling when he said goodbye!’
‘Well, dear,’ I said, ‘the truth is we haven’t got the notebook. And we’ve failed to find it, so there’s nothing more that can be done.’
‘Nothing more!’ she mocked. ‘If I’d left things to you, Bhalu, nothing at all would have happened.’
The venom in her voice astonished me. Could this be the same person who had clung to me all through last night? Who had told me that I was the only person in the world she had ever really loved? She went on, apparently unaware that she had upset me, ‘You know what I think. The notebook is here. In this house.’
I was too shocked to reply. It was left to Jula, who missed nothing, to ask why she should imagine such a thing.
‘Because Mummy came to Ambona,’ she said. ‘At first I thought it was because the notebook was in the cemetery, but now I think perhaps it’s been here all along.’
‘Why would Maya have left it behind?’ I asked, as calmly as I could.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Phoebe. ‘But why else did that man buy the house then allow it to go to rack and ruin? Why did he make sure nobody else ever lived here?’
‘This is all just speculation.’
‘Did you see his face? He looked really rattled. I know he is the man, and I feel sure the notebook is here somewhere. It’s here right now, probably within a few feet of us.’
‘Fever is right in this much,’ said Jula. ‘The house was bought by a police bigwig, who did allow it to fall apart. It’s also a fact that no one has lived here after your family.’
‘It seems obvious to me,’ said Phoebe, ‘that the notebook must have had something really damning in it. Something even worse than blackmail. If we could find it, we would know why he was so desperate to get his hands on it.’
‘We do know,’ I said. ‘It named him and recorded every detail of how the blackmail worked. It even described his office.’
‘What is a worse crime than blackmail?’ she asked. ‘Think!’
‘Rosie!’ said Jula.
‘Yes, poor Rosie. Remember the blackmailer threatened them over the phone. Not just Mummy, but your mother too, Bhalu. Suppose Mummy recorded those threats, with Maya as a witness? A few days later, Rosie died.’
‘It was an accident, Phoebe. You and I both know that. It was our fault that it happened.’
‘It wasn’t our fault,’ she said angrily. ‘We were made to feel guilty about it, but Mummy believed she was murdered.’
‘Isn’t this just a little too far-fetched?’ said Jula.
‘No, Jula, it isn’t. Maybe you don’t remember that day, but I do. How quickly the police were here. They searched the whole house. What for? Didn’t you see the fear in that man’s eyes when you told him we had the notebook?’
‘Probably just afraid we were loonies,’ I said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she screamed. ‘Why are you trying to let him off the hook?’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said. ‘Tonight we return to Bombay and tomorrow I’m booking my flight home.’
Instantly, her mood changed. ‘Bhalu, please don’t let me down. Won’t you help me look for it? It’s hidden here somewhere. We can surely find it.’
‘I’ll go with her,’ Jula said. So they went together round the house, exploring the rooms, just as Nina and I had done on our first day, while I sat on the fountain with Dost and Murad, whose lack of English had kept them out of the controversy, but who had been unable to miss the tone of our debate.
‘It seems,’ said Dost with his usual perception, ‘that our Phoebe has got you all churned up again.’
I did not know what to reply. I was thinking that I had been mad ever to listen to Phoebe. Crazy to come to India in the first place. Why had I done it? Perhaps because I wanted to prove that I was not just the dull, middle-aged man I appeared to be. That the adventurous child I had once been was still alive in me. Perhaps because my marriage had grown too humdrum, and it appeared that I could captivate a beautiful woman. How baffling now seemed last night’s passion. Had I just been ridiculously gullible? Viewed in a certain unhappy hindlight, the events of the last few weeks carried the hallmark of all my actions, the bhola-ness for which I had always been celebrated. Bhalu the Bhola. Bhalu the Simpleton. Bhalu the Fool. Bhalu the Innocent-No-Longer.
‘Bhalu, look at this! I found it in a cupboard in our old room!’
Phoebe was back, restored to bouncing optimism. I recognised at once what she was holding out to me. It was a torn-off cover, now heavily mildewed, of a book bound in what had once been red cloth. The front endpaper and flyleaf were still attached. Puck of Pook’s Hill. An engraved frontispiece showed children playing on a Sussex hillside.
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘That was a first edition.’
‘Is that your only reaction?’
‘Well, how do you want me to react?’
‘I wanted you to realise,’ she said, ‘that if a piece of this book could survive here, and still be legible after all these years, so could the notebook.’
She resumed her search.
It would be dark in an hour or so. Jula said to me, ‘Bhalu, let’s all walk to Karvanda. We ought to visit the school and look up Rameshbhai.’
But Phoebe refused to come with us. She said, ‘The notebook is here somewhere. I don’t want to leave till I’ve found it.’
Dost did not want to go to Karvanda either. ‘Persuade Phoebeji to pack it in,’ he said to me. ‘I’m hungry. Think of the kebabs we’re missing at the Jam-i-Jam.’
I remembered that a couple of miles away, on the Tiger’s Leap clifftop, there were hawkers selling roasted corncobs. Dost said that he and Murad would drive down there and fetch some.
Watching the car disappear down the track, Phoebe looked thoroughly miserable. I asked, ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right here on your own?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she snapped. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
It was as if our intimacy of last night had never been.
As we were walking along the twisting track, down Bicchauda and up onto Dagala mountain, Jula said cryptically, ‘I’m afraid Fever is not in the best of health.’
‘What do you mean?’ We were speaking in Hindi.
‘There’s something about her. Can’t put my finger on it, but it’s disturbing.’
‘She gets excited,’ I said. ‘She also suffers from depressions.’ As he made no reply, I said, ‘She was hurt badly when she was young. You and I never even knew.’
‘She uses people, Bhalu. She uses you.’
No. I did not want to believe it. ‘She’s had a bad time,’ I said, ‘but she has courage. Lots of guts. She’s loyal.’
‘I’ve seen you together. When she knows you’re looking at her she’s all games and girliness. But the moment you look away, she goes blank. Just seems to lose interest. As if you’d ceased to exist.’
And what you don’t know, I thought, my reservations about bhola-ness already forgotten, was that last night she proved to me that she loved me. Over and over. With a passion that shook my heart. But this I could not say to him.
At Karvanda we found half the village gathered to watch a game show on TV. One of those instant-rags-to-riches fantasies, hosted by an ex-film star. But it was switched off when Jula arrived. He was soon deep in conversation, surrounded by old friends.
‘People here are proud of him,’ Rameshbhai told me. ‘Because he started with nothing and has achieved so much. So much good he does. He is always working, working, on other people’s behalf.’
A politician, I thought, who gives the lie to India in 1983.
Dusk was already blueing the sky when we came back down the mountain. Ahead of us at the house, we saw the car. Its headlights were on, pointing into the ruins. Why would Murad do that?
‘Something is wrong,’ Jula said, and began to run.
As we got nearer we could hear Dost and Murad. They were calling out, ‘Phoebe! . . . Phoebe!’
‘What has happened?’ shouted Jula. ‘Where is she?’
Dost came to meet us. On his face was an expression of such misery that it cannot be described. ‘She is gone,’ he said.
‘Gone?’ shouted Jula. ‘Where could she go?’
‘I don’t know. We came back and she was not here. There was no sign of her at all. We have searched everywhere, in the house. Around about. Nothing.’
