A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (41 page)

Pinky had never seen the Indian procurer before but he must have seen Pinky. Was he in Merrick’s pay or a fellow-victim of Merrick’s cleaning-up operation? And what had happened to Tommy, the Indian lad? Had he been working with the procurer or had he been pounced on afterwards and made to hand the watch over? And then what happened? Had Merrick pounced on the procurer? Pinky became dizzy trying to work out the permutations. So he closed his mind to his case and lay on the sun-verandah all day trying hard to think of other things like home and times when he had been happy.

But throughout the day one question kept nagging at him.
Why me?

*

After two days in sick-bay he reported for duty at Richardson’s office. He had already packed a military criminal’s kit – his small pack. When he arrived he found another
NCO
at his desk. The new lance-corporal said it would be helpful if Pinky could show him the ropes. He asked Pinky where he was going. All Richardson had told him was that he was to take over Pinky’s job. Pinky said he didn’t know yet but thought he’d better not interfere unless Richardson gave him official permission to hand over. He waited outside. Richardson arrived. Pinky saluted smartly. Richardson told him that
since he was up and about he might as well show the new
NCO
some of the routine. A spark of hope was kindled. Logic said he should have been in a guard-room long ago. It was very odd. He spent the morning and afternoon helping his successor. Richardson came and went. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly. About five o’clock he came back and as he went into his office he told Pinky to come in.

When Pinky was inside with the door shut Richardson handed him a piece of paper. Pinky read it. He read it twice. It was a posting order to a Field Ambulance in a division that was preparing for something called Operation Zipper. When Pinky finally understood what this meant he sat down without asking permission and cried.

He cried from relief and out of gratitude. The only explanation he could find for his escape was that somehow Richardson had managed to suppress the terrible charge. How, he could not begin to imagine. For a moment he did not care.

Richardson let him cry the cry out. It didn’t last long and wasn’t noisy. The lance-corporal in the other room could not have heard it. Richardson poured him a glass of water and then went and stood in a characteristic position, with his back to the room, looking out of the window, his hands in his trouser pockets.

When Pinky had quietened down he stood up, ready to leave. He said that before he went he wanted to apologize for having abused Captain Richardson’s confidence in the matter of the files. He knew it had been very wrong and he was very sorry. He didn’t know what else to say because he couldn’t bring himself to mention the thing that Richardson had only referred to obliquely – so obliquely that it was almost as if he hadn’t referred to it at all.

Richardson said, ‘Yes, I suppose it was an abuse. Between us we might have overlooked it, but in all the circumstances I decided you would have to go. If it’s any comfort to you, Pinker, although I suppose I ought not to say this, I think you were extremely unfortunate to have come up against that particular officer. However, there it is. You did. And no experience, however disagreeable, is ever wasted.’

Richardson left the window, smiling, as if nothing much
had happened. ‘Also, if it’s any comfort to you, from observation I’d say that you’ll actually be much happier in the field than in a place like this. Your conduct sheet is clean, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t stay like that, is there?’

Richardson offered his hand. Dumbly, Pinky took it.

‘Tell me,’ Richardson added, putting his hand back in his trouser pocket. ‘How long was Major Merrick trying to get me on the telephone the other evening?’

‘Get you on the telephone, sir?’

‘He said he tried to ring me so that I could come over and deal with – this problem. He said he tried there and then, from this office.’

‘He sent me outside, sir.’

‘Yes. I see. How long were you outside?’

‘I honestly don’t know, sir.’

‘Quite. Well, never mind, but actually I was in my quarters the whole evening. You didn’t by any chance palm him off with a dud number?’

‘He didn’t ask for a number, sir. Just whether the phone was on hospital or civil exchange.’

‘Well I only wondered, because my phone never rang. But it’s of no importance. The operators probably ballsed the call up. That wouldn’t be new, would it, Pinker? But perhaps it was as well they did. These things are much better discussed in the cold light of the day after. Wouldn’t you say? Goodbye, Pinker. Good luck.’

Pinker said goodbye and thanked him. He tried to say more but couldn’t. He had the impression that Richardson was really asking him to say more. But he shirked it. Just before he reached the door Richardson said:

‘Oh, Pinker, I nearly forgot. This is yours, isn’t it?’

He was holding out Pinky’s watch.

‘I think it must need a new strap otherwise you’ll lose it again.’

Slowly, disbelievingly, Pinky took the watch. His face was burning. He mumbled something like thank you sir and goodbye sir, and then, remembering, came to attention. He was still at attention when Richardson said:

‘If it’s any interest to you, I found it among the Ms. I suppose
it slipped off your wrist when you helped yourself to Captain Moberley’s file.’

That evening, in the midst of his packing, Pinky stopped, sat down and looked at the watch: the gift of his parents when he joined up. Then he threw it on the floor and stamped on it with the heel of his boot until it was in pieces. This was what he had done with his life so far. He resumed packing, pausing every so often to wipe his eyes and cheeks. He kept telling himself to be a man. But that didn’t help. Thus, Sophie found him.

*

There were only two explanations for the returned wristwatch. The first was that Merrick had given it to Richardson and told him how it had come into his possession and that Richardson had persuaded him not to take the matter further but leave him to deal with it. This was the explanation Pinky believed was the correct one – the only one that made sense to him and which bore out his opinion of Richardson’s stout character. It didn’t make sense to anyone who knew Merrick as I knew him. It didn’t make sense to Sophie and Potter but neither had an alternative explanation.

From their point of view here was an officer who had gone to a great deal of trouble to nail Pinky on a charge of gross immorality. Without compunction he had used another man (obviously, according to Pinky’s description, his own servant) to act as agent provocateur and perhaps even a third man, the Indian lad, in order to get incontrovertible evidence. Sophie said he was familiar enough with British police methods in dealing with homosexuals not to find anything in the least remarkable about an officer of the Indian police using similar methods to shop a soldier. If Pinky had ever been charged and tried, Sophie said, we’d have been amazed at the transformation from fact to fiction in the statement made about how the evidence was obtained.

But then, after all this trouble, Merrick had done nothing more. Why? Had Richardson given Merrick a bad time? Had he seen through whatever story Merrick told him and warned Merrick that he would kick up a stink about the deliberate
provocation he could see had been used? Had Merrick been scared off, been persuaded to hand over the prime bit of evidence – the wrist-watch – even been glad to get rid of it and slink off none the richer but wiser?

Pinky accepted this as the explanation because he wanted to. Sophie and Potter didn’t accept it but couldn’t conscientiously refute it. At one time after Pinky had gone Sophie was prepared to see Richardson and ask, but Potter dissuaded him. So, failing a revelation, they had both settled for the fact that Merrick had set Pinky up, sadistically using powers which were his but which finally he hadn’t exercised to the full extent open to him – just possibly because after talking to Richardson (but why had he waited to do that and not called the
MPS
then and there?) he dared not take that risk.

Not dare take the risk? They didn’t know Merrick. He certainly set Pinky up and having set him up used him. If there had been any further advantage to be had out of persecuting Pinky he would have taken it. He was the kind of man who worked for preference within a very narrow margin of safety where his own reputation was concerned. He courted disaster. Deep down, I think, he had a death wish. It came out in this way, pushing his credibility to the limit, sometimes beyond it.

But once he had got what he wanted – in the Pinky affair as in any other – he was no longer interested except to the extent that it pleased him to see his victim suffer. What he wanted in this case was not, I think in one sense, very important to him, but he had made up his mind to have it and had seen how he might get it. He had a talent, one that amounted to genius, for seeing the key or combination of keys that would open a situation up so that he could twist it to suit his purpose.

Originally Merrick went to see Richardson to discuss someone who had been one of Richardson’s patients. This may have taken Richardson by surprise and like any psychiatrist he would have been reluctant to discuss the case in any detail. He would not have told Merrick much, only as much as an ordinary man would have realized he had to be satisfied with. But during that interview Merrick realized that there were files – a green one in particular – which would tell him far more, tell him as much as Richardson knew
himself and which he was absolutely determined to have a look at. Sheer luck, coming upon Pinky at the filing cabinet the night before, acute observation and shrewd deductive powers, had already shown him the way in which to get that look.

So what Merrick wanted,
all
that Merrick wanted, was a look at the green file, the private file about the patient he went to discuss. It was as simple, as absurd as this. Even while Potter was telling me the sordid little story I was – because I knew Merrick – casting about for the unconsidered trifle, but the significance of the file did not really emerge until later when I talked to Rowan.

While Pinky was outside on the verandah counting the grains of sand in the fire bucket or whatever he subconsciously did when in the grip of that sense of unreality, Merrick telephoned nobody. He opened the cabinet with the key he had guessed Pinky had and which he had terrified him into handing over and at his leisure looked through the file. The Red Shadow was there to continue terrorizing Pinky but also on sentry-go to warn Merrick if someone not in the little
mise en scène
approached. When Merrick finished, he placed Pinky’s watch in the cabinet – not in the Bs where the file he had been reading belonged but with the Ms which was the section to which he knew the file on Pinky’s desk belonged, because he had looked at and memorized the name on the cover. He had then locked the cabinet and come away leaving Pinky sitting outside. He must have enjoyed that, leaving his victim in that sort of sickening suspense. He kept his appointment the following day, gave Richardson the key and shopped Pinky – not for sodomy but for abusing Richardson’s trust. Precisely what Merrick said nobody knew, except Richardson.

In telling the story of Pinky, in trying to give an impression of my idea of what happened, I have filled the story out with some imaginative detail and also placed events in the order in which they occurred – not in the order in which they emerged during my talk with Potter. For instance, when Potter referred early on to Merrick’s first visit to Richardson I said at once, ‘What did he go to see Richardson about?’ Potter said Pinky assumed he went to see him about the patient whose file
Richardson asked for. I said, ‘What patient?’ Potter said, ‘Pinky said it was a woman, he’d had the file out at one time but put it back when he found out it was not about a man.’ I said, ‘Do you know what woman?’ Potter said the answer was a woman called Bingham, but neither Pinky, Potter nor Sophie had ever heard of her.

I then asked him to continue with the story, but from there on I was on the alert because there was unlikely to be more than one Bingham in Pankot and surely Bingham was the name of the officer Merrick had tried to rescue from the blazing jeep, the officer Sarah Layton’s sister married, who hadn’t been well enough to go to Bombay to meet her father and whom Sarah had described as having had a bad time: obviously, in view of Richardson’s file on her, not just a bad time physically but psychologically. And there was Merrick visiting Richardson to talk about her and becoming determined to have a look at her private file. Why?

It was rather late when I got to the Summer Residence guest house. This was a two-storeyed brick and timber building; appearing from the outside a cross between a shooting-lodge and the kind of villa you see half-hidden by fir trees and rhododendrons in the hills around Caterham. Inside, it was straightforward Anglo-Indian hill station stuff and smelt of damp and of aromatic wood. Rowan sat me down on a verandah whose floorboards sounded hollow underfoot so that it was rather like moving around in a sports pavilion or boat-house, except that the view was across an acre or so of rising ground to the Summer Residence (a dark hulk which in daylight proved to have been the inspiration for the guest house, architecturally speaking). On this verandah there were a lot of palms in brass pots and a set of white lacquered cane lounging chairs well upholstered by heavy cushions covered in durable royal blue cloth; and there was a smell of incense which presently I tracked down to a couple of joss-sticks smouldering away on a carved side-table. It struck me that if he went on like this and didn’t get married soon Rowan might end up wearing Indian pyjamas indoors and eating pan prepared by himself from ingredients kept in little silver boxes, and discussing the Bhagavad Gita with a gentle down-at-heel professor from some nearby Hindu college; but only
during his leisure hours. And even then, in pyjamas, preparing pan and discussing the significance, say, of Krishna’s remark to Arjuna that ‘Learned men do not grieve for the living’ no one would ever mistake him for anything other than an Englishman – one, moreover, of the kind it took a long time to get to know sufficiently well to be sure whether the amiable expression on his face was there for the benefit of the present company or for his own in dealing, as he constantly had to, with so many pressing and troublesome affairs.