It was McColl’s turn to consider.
Cunningham put the thoughts into words for him. “Yes, even Lloyd George. So there’s no last court of appeal, no one you can go to. Look,” he said, easing some fake sympathy into his voice, “I can understand how you feel, but it was just bad luck that you ended up in the firing line. You know how it is. Just disappear; that’s my advice. Start again somewhere. If there’s one thing you learn in this job, it’s how to be someone you’re not, and you must know a dozen places in India where you can pick up a set of false papers.” He grunted. “And you won’t have any problems with the lingo, will you?”
McColl sighed. Not too dramatically, he hoped. “You may be right. But whose idea was it to use Brady, for God’s sake?”
“Brady’s, of course. He suggested it to us.”
“What makes anyone think he can be trusted?”
“No one does, old man.”
“Then why?”
“Let’s just say there were no other viable candidates. The theory was—is—that they’ll do it for their own ends and because they think they can fix it on us. We let them do it, then fix it on them. And we’ll have the easier job. This is our country—so to speak—and there are more of us. They’re under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”
“I still don’t like it,” McColl said, realizing how easy it was to slip back into this kind of detached risk appraisal.
“Look,” Cunningham said, with a gesture that suggested his last glass of whiskey was taking effect. “Aidan Brady may be a bastard of the first order, but he’s brought us a bona fide Bolshevik to kill Gandhi with. What more could we ask?”
So they were in Delhi, McColl thought. “I can’t believe the political situation is that bad,” he said.
“Isn’t. But it soon will be if we let the old scarecrow keep at us in the way he’s been doing. The stakes are just too high. Can you imagine where we’d be without the empire? Just a small island on the edge of Europe. Another Ireland, for Chrissake!”
McColl sighed again, more genuinely this time. “Maybe,” he said, standing and gesturing with the gun. “Come over here, will you?”
Cunningham emptied his glass and obeyed. “Turn around,” McColl said when they were both invisible from outside.
“At least I won’t feel…” Cunningham was saying as the gun butt came down on his head. He crumpled onto the carpet, and McColl left him there, faceup.
“God save the King,” he murmured, as he blew out the paraffin lamp.
Outside, the moon was high in the sky. He was walking down the road, still wondering where it would be best to change his clothes, when an empty tonga materialized out of a side road.
“Where to, sahib?” the driver asked. “The club?”
“The railway station,” McColl said, climbing aboard. If the IPI traced the driver, it would look like he’d followed Cunningham’s advice and taken off for points unknown.
The tonga rattled along the mostly empty roads of the British quarter. A dead city, McColl thought, an alien city. He hadn’t enjoyed his time here in 1916, and then he’d felt a lot less alienated from his fellow countrymen.
Komarov had been right, at least in that. There was no going back. And, despite what Cunningham had said, no running away either. One way or another, McColl was going to see this through.
They entered the Indian city by the Mori Gate, and McColl paid off the tonga driver at the northern entrance to the station. Relying on five-year-old memories, McColl bought tea in an empty room of a first-class restaurant, retired to the toilet to change back into the Pathan clothes, and walked brazenly out through the kitchen. He left the station via the southern entrance and walked through the Queen’s Gardens to the still-throbbing Chandni Chowk.
The contrast to the Civil Lines was hard to ignore. Nasal songs blared out of doorways; children scampered and shouted. In the distance a clashing cymbal or a reverberating gong occasionally split the night. Lights flickered like fireflies in each twisting alley; the glow thrown by oil lamps filled most open doorways. Fathers and children ate from brass trays on the doorsteps, the mothers often standing behind them and scanning the street, as if taking the chance to get out.
Another alien world, but somehow more inviting.
At Sinha’s house the servant let him in and told him the master had retired. McColl was glad—he didn’t want a barrage of questions from his friend.
Caitlin was waiting anxiously in their room, and he wasted no time in telling her what he’d found out. “Right to the top. Right to the bloody top.”
“As we expected,” she said quietly, putting her arms around his neck. “But what about you?”
“I’m a potentially dangerous loose end. If I don’t disappear myself, they’ll do it for me.”
“Oh, Jack, maybe you should.”
“We’ve been through that. If I didn’t owe it to others, I’d owe it to myself. And I know you feel the same.”
She sighed and let him go. “I do,” she agreed, walking across to the window and leaning back against the sill. “So how are we going to find them?”
He smiled for the first time that night. “I saw a sign outside a shop this afternoon.”
Soon after nine on the following morning, McColl paused in the shadow of another doorway, this one on Ballimaran Road, a few hundred yards from its junction with Chandni Chowk. The day’s heat was still building, and the light seemed preternaturally bright, turning each passing tonga’s dust into a whirl of flashing specks.
Across the street, a professional letter writer was seated at his folding desk, taking dictation from the client who sat cross-legged in front of him. Ten yards to his left, a group of young boys, the oldest no more than twelve, were sparring good-naturedly in the mouth of an alley. Between these two centers of activity, a doorway opened onto a flight of stairs, and above it hung the sign that McColl had noticed the previous day: ahmed mirza—consulting detective. The same words appeared on the larger board that fronted the balcony above, and there was movement in the windows behind.
Glancing up and down the busy street, McColl saw no sign of fellow Europeans or Indian policemen. He waited for a gap in the procession of tongas, then sauntered across the sunlit road at a suitably Asian pace and started up the stairs.
A woman kneading dough on a wooden board was sitting on the top step, and after squeezing past her, McColl found himself facing a door bearing another notification of Ahmed Mirza’s profession. He knocked, and a voice called, “Enter,” in Urdu.
The room was spacious and surprisingly cool. Like most Indian rooms, it seemed half-empty to a European, but the detective’s desk almost made up for the lack of other furniture—it was at least six feet long and more than half that wide.
There were two men present. The one behind the desk presumably greeted most of his clients Indian-style; shaking hands across it, as he and McColl discovered, was a serious test of balance. “I am Ahmed Mirza,” the man said in English. He was in his forties, McColl guessed, but looked physically fitter than most Indians of that age. His hair was cropped quite short, unlike his mustache, which seemed in serious danger of running riot. As if in recognition of this fact, the detective began stroking it back into submission the moment he had reseated himself. His clothes were European; a lightweight white suit, white shirt, and red bow tie.
“And this is my friend and colleague Dr. Din,” Mirza added, gesturing toward the other man. The doctor was older than Mirza and dressed in traditional Indian clothes. He brought his palms together and flashed a smile full of golden teeth at McColl. “You may say before this gentleman anything you say to me,” Mirza added. “He is completely deaf.”