The Empress of India (14 page)

“This is an extraordinary case,” the viceroy explained. “I received a telegram from the governor of the Bank of England, a chap named Bergarot, claiming that an attempt might be made to steal the gold. When or where, he doesn’t know, except that it will be sometime before the gold is put into the bank’s vault.”

St. Yves pursed his lips. “Insufficient information,” he said. “I’m not altogether
sure that I want to be responsible for four million pounds’ worth of gold, not with five officers and thirty men. Not, for that matter, with ten times five officers and thirty men. Four million pounds is enough to . . . well, it’s enough to b-buy a small country and make yourself a king.”

“A good point,” the viceroy said. “And let me reassure you. Technically you won’t be responsible for the gold. Although we both know that it won’t do your career any good if someone should make off with it during your watch. The bally gold is my responsibility until it’s loaded aboard the ship. And then the ship’s captain signs for it. He is, by maritime law and usage, responsible for anything and anyone on his ship, from the smallest belaying pin, whatever that may be, to the most valuable cargo. His responsibility doesn’t end until the cargo is off-loaded at Queens Dock in London.”

“So we’ll merely be helping the captain guard the gold,” St. Yves mused.

“Just so,” the viceroy said. “And let me say that I don’t really expect any trouble. Bergarot is being overly cautious. Not that I blame him; his job, after all, is to see the gold safely into his vaults. No, I believe you’ll have an uneventful voyage home. My daughter Priscilla will be on the ship with you. Her mother wants her in London for the season, and I certainly wouldn’t let her go if I thought there was even the slightest danger. Although I will admit that the knowledge that there’ll be thirty of your Highland Lancers on board will make me sleep even easier during her voyage.”

Sir George swiveled around as the door burst open suddenly and Djuna flung himself into the room. “In the name of Krishna, sahib, you come, come quickly, come!”

“Krishna?” the viceroy asked.

“Any god you like, sahib, but please come, come now!” And Djuna flung himself back out of the room.

“I suppose we’d better follow the little beggar,” Sir George muttered, coming to his feet. “Probably nothing; these people are so excitable.” But the speed with which he hurried to the door belied his words.

Djuna trotted down the corridor head up, arms at his sides; the gait
of someone who is in a great hurry but doesn’t want to be seen running. The others managed to stay close behind without quite breaking into a run. The group turned the corner and there, ahead of them at the end of the corridor, were the great bronze doors of the viceroy’s office. As they approached they could see that the polished dark-wood door to the right of the bronze doors stood open, and one of the ubiquitous footmen stood next to the door in a stiff approximation of attention, but his exaggerated posture and the hint of panic in his eyes strongly suggested that he would rather be somewhere else.

Djuna stopped his quick walk at the open door, and the others narrowly avoided piling into him. “In there, sahib,” he said, pointing.

The viceroy took two steps into the room and stopped. “God—bless me,” he said.

Margaret peered around the doorway. This was the anteroom to the viceroy’s office. It was about ten or twelve feet wide, and half again as long, and lit by two gas fixtures in the wall which were turned low, leaving the corners in palpable darkness. The walls were covered with a wallpaper the color of desert sand. There were two small desks to the right, and a row of file cabinets behind them. Several glass-front display cases to the left were fairly crammed with artifacts from the various peoples and places on the Indian subcontinent that the British had roamed over in the two-hundred-plus years they had been there.

There was a man in the room, presumably the native who had been waiting to speak to the viceroy. In his yellow cotton kurta jacket, baggy trousers, and brown turban and sandals he looked to be some sort of merchant. Not a street vender, but perhaps someone with a stall in the bazaar. He lay on the floor inside the doorway, with his head at an unnatural angle and a long white scarf twisted around his neck and knotted. His eyes bulged from his head, giving him a look of great astonishment. Even from where Margaret stood she could see that the whites of the eyes were filled with jagged red marks, like frozen lightning bolts, circling the sightless pupils.

Margaret took several deep breaths, closed her eyes, and attempted to swallow. It didn’t work. She could hear the beating of her heart. She took several more deep breaths and stepped back until her shoulders were against the wall on the far side of the corridor.

St. Yves knelt by the body. He cut the scarf off with a small silver pocketknife and put two fingers on the man’s neck to feel for a pulse. “He’s dead,” he said. “Not that there was much doubt, but I thought, you know, just in case . . .”

“Yes,” the viceroy said, “quite.” He looked down at the body for a long moment and cleared his throat. “Djuna, go to the card room and get Chief Constable Parker. He should be there by now. Bring him here. Tell him what happened—but only him. Don’t mention it to anyone else. Keep your mouth closed—hear me?”

“Yes, Viceroy sahib,” Djuna said. “I go now.” And he raced off down the hall.

“Strangled,” St. Yves said, coming to his feet. “Right here in your office, while the building is full of military officers and civil service officials. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Looks like a Pathan tribesman, but the clothes—”

“Perhaps he dressed up for his visit to the city—or perhaps he didn’t want to be recognized,” the viceroy suggested.

“Could well be, something of the sort,” St. Yves agreed. “Some sort of local dispute, I would imagine, or a robbery. Perhaps the chap was carrying something of value and the other chap knew it. But the b-bally nerve of the killer, coming right into Government House to do his deed.”

“Not robbery, surely,” said the viceroy. “There are several articles of considerable value about the room”—he indicated the display cases with a wave of his hand—“and none of it’s been touched. Besides, the chap still has his purse tied to his belt.”

“Not robbery, then,” St. Yves agreed.

“I don’t think it’s any sort of local dispute, Father,” Margaret said, slowly crossing the corridor toward the doorway.

“Eh? What’s that? Margaret, I’m not sure you should be looking at this, m’dear.”

“Well,” she said practically, “it’s too late to worry about that now, isn’t it? I think I’ll be all right.”

“What did you mean, you don’t think it was a dispute?” Sir George asked.

“That scarf with the knot in it,” she said, pointing. “I’ve seen pictures of it.”

“What’s that? Pictures of this scarf?”

“Well, I mean ones like it. It’s the sort used by the Phansigar. I read a book about them.”

“The Phansigar?” St. Yves asked. “Peg, m’dear, what sort of books have you been reading?”

The viceroy stepped back. “The Phansigar—of course. The Thuggees!” he said. “By Jove, I think she’s right, about that scarf at any rate.” He picked up the scarf and examined it. “She is right,” he said. “There’s a small knot at each end of this thing—here where the ends are tied together and each of the knots has a coin tied into it.” He pulled one of the small knots loose. “A silver coin. It’s the ritual killing-scarf of the Phansigar.”

“
Rumal,
I think it’s called,” Margaret said. “That’s the scarf they wore around their waist and used to dispatch their victims.”

“That sounds right,” the viceroy agreed. “We have a small museum of Thuggee artifacts downstairs, and there are a few scarves like this in it.”

“I’ve heard of the Thuggees,” St. Yves said. “But I thought they were all killed off forty or fifty years ago.”

“Perhaps not,” said a voice from the doorway.

Margaret looked up and saw a British army officer standing in the doorway, peering into the room. He was a tall young man with a face rather too rabbity to be truly good-looking, immaculately turned out in the dress uniform of a lieutenant in some regiment with which she was unfamiliar: blue regimentals with two thin red stripes running down
the trousers, and a double-breasted jacket with wide, red-trimmed lapels and oversized gold buttons. He appeared to be taking a considerable interest in the proceedings. His words, “Perhaps not,” had been uttered in a flat tone intended to impart information rather than shock or alarm, but Margaret found them all the more alarming for their matter-of-fact delivery.

“Perhaps not?” Margaret asked.

“There may be one or two Phansigar still roaming about, don’t you know,” he explained. “There are signs—”

Margaret’s father, who had been staring at the young officer for a long moment, interrupted. “Just who are you, Lieutenant, and what are you doing there?” he barked.

“Oh, sorry, sir.” The man in the doorway brought his heels together, stiffened to attention, and saluted. “Lieutenant Peter Pettigrew, carrier pigeon officer of the Seventh Foot, reporting, sir!”

St. Yves returned the salute briskly. “Carrier pigeon officer?”

“Well,” the young man said thoughtfully, looking from St. Yves to Margaret to the viceroy, “not exactly.”

“How’s that?”

The man considered carefully, and then replied, “I’m not really a lieutenant, and my name isn’t really Pettigrew. I don’t know whether or not there really is a Seventh Foot, or just what it might be if it did exist, and I don’t know the least about carrier pigeons. Aside from that, everything I told you is the absolute truth.”

Margaret’s eyes widened and she bit her lip to fight off an impulse to giggle. This was neither the time nor the place for even the slightest giggle.

The viceroy turned to face the young nonlieutenant. “Of all the effrontery,” he said, some powerful emotion evident in the timbre of his voice. His face had turned just the slightest shade of red. “Please identify yourself, sir, and explain what you’re doing here and why you are wearing a uniform to which you have just admitted you are not entitled.”

“Sorry, your lordship.” The young man shifted from his rigid position
of attention to a close approximation of parade rest. “This is my Lieutenant Pettigrew, ah, persona, as it were. Actually my name is Collins. Peter Collins. The ‘Peter,’ at least, was honest, you see. I happened to be with Chief Constable Parker when your boy ran him down. He immediately sent your boy off for Dr. McWarren, and then went off to see to it that all the exterior doors to Governor’s House were locked and guarded, except the front door, of course, and he sent me along to see if I could be of any help. I’m with the Special Department of the Constabulary, you see. The doctor should be along presently, I imagine.”

“I don’t think McWarren can do much good,” the viceroy commented. “The chap is dead, you know.”

“What ‘special department’?” St. Yves demanded. “I never heard of a special department.”

“Parker seems to feel that nobody is dead until Dr. McWarren says he is dead,” Collins told the viceroy. And then he shifted his attention to General St. Yves. “Our official name is the Department of Special Intelligence. We are not widely known, which is a good thing, for the most part.”

“The DSI, eh?” the viceroy said. “You chaps keep popping up in the oddest places.” He indicated the corpse with a nod. “Then was this chap one of yours?”

“You think he might have been a Scout?” Collins asked. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d better have a look.” He went over and knelt by the corpse.

“According to my boy Djuna, the chap had a message for me,” the viceroy told Collins as the young man examined the body. “The chap told Djuna to say, ‘To be or not to be.’ ”

“Ah!” said Peter Collins. “He did, did he?” Collins peered closely at the body and said, “Hmmm.” And then he said, “Damn!” And then he said, “Excuse me, miss. Didn’t mean to curse in front of a lady.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Margaret, who was trying to remain as unobtrusive
as possible so that her father wouldn’t notice her and send her away.

Collins took a small ivory-cased pocketknife from his trouser pocket and carefully slit open the seam in the ornate collar of the corpse’s garment. “This man was, indeed, one of ours,” he said, removing a tightly rolled tube of white silk, no longer than a cigarette and no thicker than a toothpick, from where it had been concealed inside the collar. He unrolled it and showed it to the viceroy.

“A rose,” the viceroy said.

Margaret leaned over to look. A stylized image of a red rose, its petals tightly closed as though concealing some roseate secret, was stamped on the fabric.

“It’s our, ah, sigil, so to speak,” Collins said. He flipped over the left lapel of his uniform jacket, revealing a small silver pin of an identical rose, with petals of red enamel.

“So he worked for you people, did he?” the viceroy asked.

General St. Yves pulled his ear thoughtfully. “As he was coming here to pass some information on to you, using the password and all,” he told the viceroy, “I would think that makes the idea of it being a robbery less likely. It is probable that he was killed to prevent him from speaking with you.” St. Yves turned to Collins. “What do you say, young man?”

“It’s extremely probable,” Collins agreed. “And it must have been something both important and extremely urgent for him not to go through the usual channels.” He peered closely at the ornate collar and allowed a puzzled frown to cross his face, and then pushed himself to his feet.