The Hamilton Case (11 page)
At first I demurred. The Fernando saga was something of a laughing stock among the legal fraternity and I feared my involvement would appear infra dig, at best. On the other hand, the case I should have been prosecuting had come to an early conclusion when the chief witness for the defense came over to the Crown, and it so happened that I had nothing else to do.
Marcus, sensing my hesitation, mentioned an outrageously high fee. I said I couldn’t possibly consider less than twice that sum. He agreed at once. His wife was a cinnamon heiress and the old boy was rolling in it. I told him to put his solicitors in touch with me and set about clearing my desk.
M
arch nights in the hill station of Nuwara Eliya were bracing. In my room at the Windsor, a fire crackled in the grate, and on my morning constitutional around the golf course I sported the tweed overcoat I had last worn in London.
With its rose bushes and frosts and half-timbered cottages, the township offered a very passable simulacrum of an English village. My eyes stung with woodsmoke as I strolled its streets on my first evening, and there came into my mind the memory of young men in long scarves crowding around a bonfire while I looked on from the shadows. I left the European quarter and went down into the bazaar, where a fellow with his head swathed in a gunnysack against the cold was doing a roaring trade in piping hot
mas paans
. But neither the spiced fragrance issuing from his stall nor the fiery beef curry on my tongue could dispel the images conjured by the smoke: shaggy chrysanthemum faces peering out of a foggy college garden, crisp fortunes that gardeners raked up with casual disdain.
As a boy I had loved the hill country. Every April, when society fled the worst of the pre-monsoon heat, Claudia and I joined our parents for a holiday at our place in Nuwara Eliya. The annual exodus broke the tedium of our routine at Lokugama and was the occasion of much excited anticipation. Our ayah hunted out warm vests and woolens in camphored trunks, while I reminded Claudia of treats in store: toasted marshmallows around the fire, rugging up for morning rides beside the lake on our ponies. Best of all, a week on our tea estate, some thirty miles out of Nuwara Eliya, where our bungalow looked out on near green hills and far blue ones, and we went for walks and picked wild-flowers like children in a storybook.
In those days, when the motor car was a rarity, we traveled upcountry by train. Like all children, I inhabited a world of potent symbols. The iron span of the bridge over the Kelani River was one of them. As soon as we had steamed across its girdered expanse I would insist on donning my jersey. No matter that our engine had not even begun its assault on the improbable gradients that lay ahead and that it would be hours before the sweetness of cool hill air penetrated our compartment. I sweltered happily in wool, waiting for Claudia, the crybaby, to burst into tears when the first stretch of tunnel cutting into the mountains engulfed us in darkness. Everything happened this way, always. It was very satisfying.
The itch of wool against my skin, the moist green ferns that sprang from rocky crevices as the track wound skyward, Claudia vomiting on the hairpin bends while I leaned out and waved to the third-class passengers in their bulging compartments at the front of the train: each discrete element contributed its part to my happiness. But I believe the deeper source of my pleasure was the certainty that on these holidays we would all be together, as a family. The up-country season, with its endless rounds of parties and dances, drew Mater as Lokugama never could. Her scented presence flashes like iridescence through my memories of those holidays. Here, she places a vase of sweet peas on a white-painted windowsill. There, she wears a striped ribbon in her hair and whacks a ball clean through three hoops on a velvet lawn.
Our house in Nuwara Eliya was always full of people. But Pater had a rule that our week at Cumberland tea estate was for the four of us alone. Every morning there before breakfast, while shadows were still thickening into mountains and a late rooster crowed from the coolie lines like a faulty alarm, Pater and I would follow dazzling gravel roads between fields where the small hands of Tamil pluckers darted along the surface of the tea. Each woman carried a rod with which she checked that the top of every bush had been plucked level: not easy to determine on the steep hillsides, and a point of pride with the pluckers.
MacKenzie, our manager, had wonderful eyes, blue stones in a blunt red face. He always greeted me with a handshake and answered my questions with proper seriousness. From him I learned that plucking is called fine when a bud at the tip of a shoot and the two young leaves just below it are taken. Fine plucking produces pekoes, while older leaves yield souchongs and congous. Pekoes consisting only of the buds or tips are known as flowery; those containing also the first young leaf are orange pekoes. I tried out the strange words, rolling them like sweets on my tongue.
In the evening, when we settled around the fire, I would parade my erudition before my parents, and my father would applaud while Mater blew me a kiss and a smoke ring. Yet as the week wore on she would grow restless, and remind Pater of the parties they were missing in Nuwara Eliya. After dinner the furniture in the drawing room would be pushed back against the walls and the rug rolled up. My father would pick out a tune on the ukulele he played with talentless verve, while Mater tried out this or that new dance step, breaking off in irritation when Pater wandered further off key than usual.
We spent our last holiday at Cumberland when I was twelve years old. The usual reason saw the tea estate sold a few months later, along with our house in Nuwara Eliya. That last April, almighty rows erupted between my parents. At those elevations, verandahs are glassed in against the evening cold. One morning Claudia and I woke to find every pane smashed and our apu painting flour-and-water paste onto strips of paper with which he taped cardboard over the frames.
That day, our last on the estate, Mater was sleepy and tender, no trace of the flaring temper that had had us children tiptoeing around her all week. Claudia gathered up the crimson seedpods that had fallen from the
madhitchi
tree on the edge of the lawn and I threaded them onto cotton. Mater bent her head and Claudia fastened the necklace around her throat. There it glowed for the rest of the afternoon, its splendor far above rubies.
F
earing lengthy sessions over the whiskey decanter at night, I had turned down Marcus’s offer to put me up. I explained that the quiet privacy of my hotel room was essential in order to weigh up each day’s proceedings and plan my strategy for the next. In fact, the case was running itself and I had little to do. Being by nature a sociable chap, I therefore gladly accepted an invitation to dine at the Danville Club. This venerable institution on Danville Road was the Ceylonese response to the Hill Club, which admitted no non-European members. Unfortunately, the Danville had not existed five minutes before some wag whose application for membership had been blackballed dubbed it the Downhill Club—a sobriquet it never managed to shake. Nevertheless, between six and eight of an evening it was a jolly little place: billiards, bridge, pretty Burgher girls sipping long drinks on the verandah, the soothing hum of talk.
My host was a chap called John Shivanathan, a proctor with his own practice in Nuwara Eliya. Shiva and I had been friends at school, where we had shared a study for a term or two. He was a couple of years behind me, and when he became a day boy we drifted apart. In fact, if not for the artificial intimacy enforced by the small boardinghouse at Neddy’s, we would have found little to say to each other. We were very different types, you see. He was a duffer at games: the kind of boy who cowers behind the crease instead of stepping out to meet the ball. And like most Tamils he was rather a swot, nose always in a book. I suppose it had paid off, since he seemed to know his way about the law. But he was a nondescript fellow, Shiva: definitely less to him than met the eye. Still, we bagged ourselves a couple of chairs in a corner of the verandah and chatted away over whiskey and sodas, reminiscing about old times, bringing each other up to date on the doings of mutual acquaintances. He enquired after Claudia, and I remembered that our sisters had been friends at school. I could dimly recall Anne Shivanathan, a lumpish girl with a polio limp, who had dropped by at the house shortly before Claudia married. She herself was about to go abroad, she said. The two of them ended up at the piano where they thumped out “The Blue Danube” for old times’ sake: Claudia providing the melody, the Shivanathan girl supplying the da-dums.
As the hour for dinner drew near and the crowd at the Downhill started to thin, a tall, fair man came up the clubhouse steps. Pausing in the doorway, he glanced in our direction. Shiva raised his hand, and the stranger came over to greet us, walking with an easy, long-limbed stride.
I warmed at once to Conrad Nagel. I imagine most people did. He had one of those regular, chiseled faces that draws men, while his dark eyes held a hint of that recklessness guaranteed to enthrall women. You pictured him with his chin uplifted, leading men in a doomed cause. It didn’t surprise me to learn that he was the superintendent of police for the district, despite his double handicap of race and youth.
Nagel’s manners were impeccable: deferential, quietly sincere. As soon as we had been introduced, he told me what an honor it was to make my acquaintance. Turning to Shiva, he recounted my shrewd demolition of the defense in a murder case that had attracted attention the previous year.
“Come, come,” I said at last, modesty insisting I put an end to his eulogy. “DSP at your age? That’s no mean achievement either.”
Nagel laughed. “Oh, I’m just acting the part. And only thanks to a damnfool accident, at that.”
He explained that the district superintendent, an Englishman, was on home leave, the first he had taken in fourteen years. He would be gone for months. His assistant, another Englishman, was to have acted for him in his absence. On his fifth day on the job, the new man called for a bacon sandwich at lunch. Sitting at his desk under framed photographs of rugby-playing policemen, he bit into the bread, choked on a piece of gristle and died. After considerable dithering on the part of his superiors, Nagel was promoted from chief inspector to fill in until his DSP returned.
“Hell of a piece of luck for me,” said Nagel. “And it wouldn’t have happened six months ago. But London’s been applying a little heat: more senior posts to go to Ceylonese, whisk the rug out from under the Bolshie buggers who claim we’re always being passed over for promotion.”
“All the same, you wouldn’t have been promoted if the chaps upstairs weren’t sure of your abilities,” I said, for I could see that Nagel was the sort of unassuming fellow who would always underrate himself. “And now’s your chance to prove them right.
Carpe diem
, man! Who knows? You could end up captaining the ship for good.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t like that,” said Nagel.
“Why not?”
He hesitated. Like many Burghers, the DSP had kept the fair complexion of his Dutch East India Company ancestors. Shiva and I watched the blood rise in his cheeks, spread to the roots of his tight brown curls.
“Horses,” he managed to say at last. “One day I’m going to breed horses. The Cape. Or Australia. Wonderful animals. Never let you down.”
Pink-cheeked, he looked off into the distance. For the blink of an eye that snug verandah with its framed watercolors and coils of tobacco smoke was as insubstantial as a mirage. A stallion thundered over a scorched plain. On a bald hilltop a knock-kneed colt lifted its head and whickered at the moon.
I
suggested to Nagel that he join us for dinner. Shiva was obliged to second the invitation, but I had the impression he did so without any great enthusiasm. He had grown quieter since the superintendent joined us, and his subdued mood continued over the meal. It occurred to me that Nagel’s frank admiration of my legal prowess might have put Shiva’s nose out of joint. Envy is the soul’s rust; and the corrosion is nowhere more evident than in small towns, where men clamp on their petty ambitions like armor.
Bearing this in mind, I tactfully steered the conversation away from professional matters. We spoke of tennis—Nagel was a keen player— and I entertained my companions with the latest scandals doing the rounds in Colombo. Over the beef olives I ventured a risqué story or two. The superintendent laughed until his broad shoulders shook. Shiva managed a watery smile.
Nagel told us that he had surprised his twelve-year-old brother poring over a copy of
The Well of Loneliness
in a brown-paper cover. Banned books were circulated among schoolboys at a cost of five cents for two days, the page numbers of juicy passages noted on an accompanying sheet of paper.
“I gave the little bugger two tight slaps and confiscated it on the spot,” said Nagel. The book was currently doing the rounds at his station; ten cents per night and constables bicycling in from all over the district to put their names down on the list.
Shiva laughed this time, but still looked uncomfortable. One of those chaps who’s incapable of letting himself go. I know that reek of virtue and
pro bono
cases. Perhaps after all it wasn’t the difference in our professional status that Shiva found galling, but the contrast between his own arid manner and Nagel’s easy style.
We took coffee in a cozy little den that we had to ourselves. As soon as the boy had banked up the fire and retreated, Shiva turned to the DSP. “Any progress on the Hamilton case?”
Nagel shrugged. “Your coolies still swear they found the watch near the path where Hamilton was murdered. But they would, of course.” He tugged at his silky mustache, frowning a little. “I must say I was damn wild, that pawnbroker bugger going straight to you.”
Shiva helped himself to three lumps of sugar, stirred, tapped his spoon against the rim of his cup. “Well, you know how it is,” he said, gazing at his coffee. “He’s a Tamil, the suspects are Tamils, I’m a Tamil...”
