‘Do you ever get any time off, Babu-ji?’ he asked.
‘Oh, sir, this is not work! This is fascination! I like to keep everything shipshape and Bristol fashion. I like to make sure that it all adds up and here I am adding.’
Feeling that something more than a polite interest was called for, Joe said, ‘What’s your system, Suman?’
‘Oh, sir, it works like this, you see: the officers sign chits daily. Oh, what bloody awful handwriting! They come to me and I enter them in a book and send out the mess bills promptly on the first of every month. My predecessor was – dear me! – a very muddled citizen. It took me the deuce of a long time to sort out the mess he had left behind but now I can tell you exactly who had what, when and how many. See – here is yourself: Sandilands J. (H). H stands for honorary member of the mess and here you see Smythe Sahib was absent. I put (Abs.) next to his name. Oh, no, this is a good system.’
Joe admired the fluent copperplate handwriting and said sincerely, ‘Suman, do you ever wish you could use your talents more widely? You should be in government – you are a monument of neatness and clearly a genius with figures.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Suman with a big smile and a wide gesture, ‘change my job for a lackh of rupees! I am after all a member of a proud regiment and indeed I am hoping to write a regimental history. Besides, who would keep everything in apple pie order if I retired? I hear everybody from greatest to least say – oh, ten times a day – “Ask Chatterjee, he’s sure to know.” And, mostly, I do!’
‘How far back do the records go?’ asked Joe with no particular interest.
‘To 1898,’ said Suman immediately, ‘when Staverdale Sahib commanded the regiment. But in my care, for fifteen years.’
‘So, if you wanted to tell who’d had two glasses of port after dinner on November the 18th 1899 you could tell me?’
‘Not as good as that but since I have been running things, certainly!’
‘Let me,’ said Joe, ‘pick a date at random. What about this day, March the 17th, let’s say in 1910?’
‘Oh, that is no problem. That was in my time.’
He rose to his feet and, lifting portly arms with difficulty above his head, he fetched down from a high shelf a tall account book on the spine of which there was a strip of sticking plaster with ‘1908- 1910’ written on it. He placed it on the table in front of Joe and began to leaf through the pages. To Joe’s fanciful imagination it seemed that from the dry pages an aura of wine-soaked corks, brandy and Trichinopoly cigars arose.
‘Here you are, you see,’ said Suman proudly. ‘Here we are… March… and the seventeenth. It was a Saturday. Ah. Oh. That night… You have not chosen a good night. There was hardly anybody in the mess that night. The others had all gone to some jollification. In March there are many jollifications – it is the end of the season when many memsahibs go away to the hills. And here they are, sir. Five diners that night.’
He pushed the book over to Joe’s elbow.
‘Not very many but drinking quite a considerable amount, you see, sir. Oh, you could say the port was flowing that night!’
Joe did not respond. He was looking at the mess record for the night twelve years ago when Dolly Prentice had been burned to death, predictably Prentice’s name was not there. He had been in Calcutta. But five other men had been present.
Their names drew his astonished gaze and fixed it on the page. He read again and muttered the list under his breath. Major Harold Carmichael, Dr Philip Forbes, Captain John Simms-Warburton, Subaltern William Somersham and, lastly, a name he did not recognise, a Subaltern Richard Templar.
‘Is all well, sir? May I assist you further?’ asked Suman, concerned at Joe’s long silence.
‘Yes. Oh, please. Help me to understand the shorthand, will you? This says “ Carmichael 5-p”?’
‘That would be five glasses of port, sir. And here we have Forbes Doctor Sahib three glasses of port and 1-b that is one glass of brandy. Somersham Sahib, 4-p, that is four glasses of port and Simms-Warburton Sahib three glasses of port and one of c.b. – cherry brandy.’
‘It must have been quite a jolly evening,’ said Joe.
‘Oh yes, sir, very boozy, to be sure!’
‘And here, what does (A) stand for?’
‘Ah, yes, that would be the young sahib Templar, sir. It stands for “attached”. I remember him well. He was spending some time on attachment here before being gazetted and going off to join his regiment on the frontier. Very nice young gentleman, sir, and, as you see, not at all boozy – just two glasses of port.’
‘Very abstemious, not rich enough perhaps to keep up with Bateman’s Horse?’
‘Very likely, sir.’
A trickle of excitement was running along Joe’s spine. He ran his eye down the list again. What he was looking at was a list, a list of soon-to-be-widowers. The first four men on the list had all lost their wives roughly on the anniversary of this night. The fifth was an unknown quantity. If the wild theory Joe was beginning to form was to be proven, this fifth man, this Richard Templar, might hold the key to the mystery. And Somersham? Surely he would be able to throw some light on this fateful grouping? Joe was struck by a shattering thought. This grisly party was held well before the war – Somersham was not married then, had in all likelihood not even met his future wife – Peggy must have been all of ten years old at the time.
His mind scurried over the information he had read and listened to over the last few days. On this particular day in 1910 Carmichael and Forbes only were married. Their wives had been the first on this list to die. Simms-Warburton had not married until the summer of 1912 and his wife had been drowned in the following March. And then came the gap. Not, as he – as everybody – had naturally supposed, because of the war but because there were no more wives left to this group! And then after a period of eight years, Somersham was promoted to Captain. Kitty’s awful little adage came to mind -
‘Captains may marry’. This one had taken up the privilege and, the following March, he too was a widower.
He had searched; Nancy had searched. The Naurungs, father and son, were searching their minds and searching physically to find a link – anything, anything in the world that would bind these victims together and to the bloody series of crimes. And could this be the link? A link which was not through the women at all but through their husbands? Could the fact that they had dined together on the night of the first tragedy seriously be held to be their common cause? Was their meeting casual? Was there some deeper, more sinister meaning behind their drunken dinner?
Joe recited the names to himself again, Suman looking on in puzzlement, acknowledging by his silence that he understood the entertaining enquiry had taken on a new and serious dimension.
‘ Carmichael, Forbes, Simms-Warburton, Somersham and young Templar,’ he muttered. Nothing obviously in common; completely different in character and ages. Not at all an outwardly congenial grouping.
A devastating thought came to mind. Suppose all these men had been Dolly’s lovers and Prentice was following some hideous Pathan custom by killing off their wives? No sooner had the idea formed than he dismissed it. Why would they all be dining together and on the very night Dolly died? And even his vivid imagination could not couple Dolly with the deeply unattractive Carmichael or the ‘nice young gentleman’ Templar.
And then there was the question of Prentice. The first to be bereaved, the rogue of the group, the one unaccounted for. Where did he fit in with these other fellows? If at all? He too was a March widower. Of the listed men, Somersham was on the station somewhere. He would interview him again in the morning. But, meanwhile, there was another witness, immediately available.