“No, thanks. I’ll find the way myself.”
Without waiting to see if the man would follow him, Christopher went back into the sunlight. A dome was sweeping the gravel path in front of the building; back and forwards, back and forwards the long brush swept as he moved down the path, as though he had been walking there all his life. He looked up as Christopher came out, then away again, averting his gaze in case the sahib might find it unclean.
There was a stretch of neatly trimmed doob-grass beside the hospital, then the deodars, their broad branches sweeping low towards the lawn. The gate bore a small sign, painted in stark black letters on a white board: “Out of bounds to Native Staff.”
Christopher raised the latch and passed through.
There were six bungalows in all, nestling together beneath another row of deodars. The path up to Cormac’s was flanked on both sides by rows of potted chrysanthemums, mainly red and pink. There were still traces of water at the bases of the pots: the hospital was probably nearby Christopher doubted that Cormac would have his own men to do the work of gardening.
He knocked on the door three times and waited. There was no reply.
Perhaps the whiskey had been a bit much for Cormac after all. Christopher knocked again, more loudly this time. No-one came. That was odd. He had formed the impression that Cormac was not the sort of man to keep much of a household, but surely he would need one or two servants.
The door was unlocked. Christopher stepped inside and closed it behind him. He found himself in a small cream-painted entrance vestibule. From floor to ceiling, the walls were hung with glass cases containing hundreds upon hundreds of brightly coloured butterflies. Nearby Sikkim was famous for them, a paradise heavy with their drugged and painted wings. Here, in the little hall of Cormac’s house, they lay silent and still, as though fresh from the miracle of chloroform. Bright scarlet trails traversed their wings like wounds on purple flesh.
He called Cormac’s name, but his voice echoed flatly in the empty hallway and was swallowed up by the silence.
He opened a second door. Beyond it lay the main room of the bungalow. Pale light filled it, dappled and watery on the sparse furniture. A few cane chairs and a small table, a battered desk rented furniture from a go-down in Darjeeling, worth a few rupees a year. A faded linen table-cloth from Belfast, photographs of school and university groups on the walls, an oar bearing the names of some forgotten eight, a black and gold tasselled rugby cap gathering dust, some medical textbooks on clumsily built shelves.
Like the butterflies in the entrance hall, the fragments of Martin Cormac’s past hung on his walls as though they too had just been lifted by thin and ragged wings from the killing-bottle. Or perhaps this was the killing-bottle: this room, this bungalow, the hospital, Kalimpong. A transparent bottle of concentric rings through which a dying man could look out and watch the stars.
He was not sure when the buzzing first became audible. It had been there from the moment he entered the room, of course, but so low his ears had not at first picked it up. He stood for a moment, listening. It was a deep, angry sound, like the wings of huge insects hovering in the heat of summer, like the buzzing of large flies above a slaughterhouse, drawn by the smell of blood in the last days. But it was winter: there should not be flies.
The noise came from behind a door at the far end of the room.
The door was partly open, but from where he stood, Christopher could not see into the room beyond it. He called out again, almost frightened by the sound of his own voice.
“Cormac, are you there? Is anyone there?”
But there was only the buzzing. The buzzing and a smell that seemed familiar, but so faint it was impossible to place.
He approached the door cautiously. Narrow shafts of light fell through a slatted blind. In the thin golden strips, specks of finely scattered dust spun freely. Christopher’s heart tightened within his chest. He felt blood leap in his veins, felt it pound in his already aching head. The room was full of flies. Hot, buzzing flies in a dense swarm that shook and shimmered in the shifting golden light. Wave upon wave of them, black, violent, moving in dark battalions, circling, droning, their wings alight. He felt nausea rise in him, he recognized the smell. He wanted to run, but his feet moved towards the door instead. It was winter: there should not be flies.
He entered the room, shielding his face with his hands, half blinded by the moving forms that circled through the light and the darkness. In one corner, white curtains hung, huge and diaphanous, across the edge of the blinds, lifting and falling in a fine breeze, speckled with the coarse black bodies of blowflies. Above his head, the insects had gathered like a thick carpet on the punk ah hanging from the ceiling. On the floor, his feet crushed the bodies of dead flies, staining the floorboards with purple.
The bed was a seething mass of flies, as though something living was moving there, straining to take on form in the half-light.
Keeping himself away from the bed, Christopher moved to the window and pulled the cords that operated the blinds. He raised them a little, not too far, but far enough to allow more light into the room. He had to force himself to turn and look at the bed.
It was Cormac all right. The flies had congregated mainly on the body, where the blood was. He could make out enough of the face to recognize the man. His throat had been sliced through from side to side as he slept. On the pillow, Christopher saw the scalpel that the killer had used, bright and shining and stained with blood.
The body had not moved much in its last agony. One arm had twisted back, the hand reaching for the torn throat, the fingers pale and bent, drained of blood. Cormac had died early that morning, possibly within an hour or two of falling asleep. The blood had congealed and dried, the limbs had begun to stiffen.
Christopher turned away from the bed and the seething carapace of flies and blood that moved on it. He opened the window and breathed in lungfuls of fresh, clean air. Behind him, the droning of the flies echoed in the small, fetid room. He wanted to be sick, to rid himself of the clinging, sweet smell.
Abruptly, he turned and left the room, without another glance at the thing on the bed. As he came into the main room, he saw something that had escaped him on his way in: Cormac’s desk had been tampered with. He went up to it. Drawers had been pulled out and small cupboards opened. Papers were heaped on the writing surface in total confusion: letters, bills, reports, all thrown together at random. Some lay on the floor, crumpled where someone had stepped on them. He picked up a large blue file and set it on the desk. It bore a title in large black letters:
“Kalimpong Houseflies: A Statistical Survey of Breeding Rates in Captivity’.
That explained the flies: Cormac had been running an experiment, and his killer must have broken his breeding cases and let the insects loose. The sound of their buzzing still hammered out mindlessly from the bedroom. They were dying, cold and blind and gorged with blood.
He glanced through the papers carefully, but found nothing of interest. Whoever had killed Cormac had taken what he had come for. The silver cross that the doctor had said he found on Tsewong was not there either. Had the killer taken that as well? Then Christopher remembered what Cormac had said: “I’ve still got it hidden away in my desk.” Was there a hidden drawer somewhere?
It did not take Christopher long to find it. A simple lever at the back of one of the recesses operated a spring mechanism that released a drawer near the top of the desk. He reached in and drew out a packet of thick brown paper. Inside were several photographs, perhaps about two dozen in all. For the most part, they were in pairs, held together with plain pins. Most of them were pictures of girls from the orphanage first, a photograph of each girl in the grey Knox Homes uniform that Christopher remembered from the evening before, then a second showing the same girl, usually in a said, wearing jewellery and make-up. All of the first photographs seemed to have been taken by the same camera and against the same background, but in each case the second photograph differed in size, in quality, and in setting.