Authors: Kim Wright
“A little after eight and yes, of course he did.”
“Felix appears to be a remarkable young man,” Trevor said, crossing his legs in an effort to imply a nonchalance he did not feel. Anthony Weaver had gotten under his skin a bit, although he wasn’t sure why. “Apparently capable of serving any number of functions within your household. But even so, I do not see how he could fetch you from the club at 10:15 and deliver your wife there at 10:29.”
“No, no you misunderstand entirely,” Weaver said, in exasperation. He clearly liked asking questions far more than he liked answering them. “Felix deposited me at the club just after eight and then I sent him back to the house so that Rose would have use of the carriage at her leisure. We only keep one carriage since I’ve been pensioned, if you must know, Inspector, and she feels the need of it more frequently than I do. I left the Club by way of a hired coach. At 10:15, just as I said.”
“Is there any point in asking if you or anyone at the Club might know the driver’s name?”
An impatient shake of the head.
“Not even the butler?” Trevor persisted. “Perhaps the Club uses the same carriage service repeatedly?”
“And if they do, why should I know? Ask them.”
“I shall. But another thing troubles me. Even in a hired coach, you should have passed the carriage carrying your wife and Sang.”
“I told you, man. I went another way.”
“So you did say. But why? As we have discussed, my knowledge of Bombay is limited, but my more widely-traveled friends have assured me that the English living here tend to hold to certain districts, using certain roads. Both your home and the Byculla Club lie well within these favored districts with a single road – I believe my notes said Bellham Street? – connecting them. So why should you, as you say, go another way? Were you specifically hoping to avoid your wife’s carriage?”
Perspiration was again dotting Weaver’s upper lip, as well as his high bare forehead. He dabbed at both, looking at Trevor sourly.
“I am not your typical member of the Raj, Inspector,” he finally said. “And certainly not some nervous tourist fresh off his boat. Do not forget that I commanded this territory. All of it, both the high and the low. So I shall drive any road that I damn well please.”
“Even those which take you on highly indirect routes. What path home did you elect?”
“We went by the bay. Coolidge Runs, they call it.”
“Ah,” said Trevor. “Against all odds, I know it, for it originates at the dock, I believe. Yes, a most indirect route. What should draw your attention there?”
A hesitation. “Sometimes I choose to drive by the Khajuraho temple.”
For the first time since this rather bizarre conversation had begun, Trevor felt genuine surprise. “Why would you go by the temple?”
“I like it. And since my retirement I have an unmanly amount of leisure, so why should I not indulge these little whims?”
“Did you go in?”
“I did not. “ Weaver’s eyes, still disconcertingly blue and bearing evidence that must have been at some point a handsome man, pierced into Trevor’s. “Look, man, my most fervent hope was to speak with Geraldine Bainbridge. That is why I wrote her, seeking not only her help, which I suppose you may be able to provide, but her forgiveness, which only Geraldine can grant.” He coughed. “There are a limited number of souls on earth in whom I feel any desire to confide, and yours is not among them. No, certainly not you or anyone in your fine contingent from Scotland Yard. So, help me if you choose. Or condemn me if you must. But either way, this interview has come to an end.”
“Not quite. I still must fingerprint you.”
The old man looked at him in dismay. “What the devil does that mean?”
Chapter Eight
The Weaver House
3
:15 PM
There is a secret to detection, and it’s a very simple one. Trevor had taught Davy the basic concept the previous November, when he had first taken the young bobby under his mentorship. But in the nine subsequent months, Davy liked to think he had improved upon and refined Trevor’s method.
He kept this belief to himself, of course.
All you must do is get to know the focus of your investigation – be they the victim or the suspect – well enough to understand how they spent their days. The time they customarily rose from their beds, what they ate for breakfast, the route they took to work. For we humans are ritualized creatures. We tend to live in certain ways, day after day and year after year, and once a detective begins to understand each individual’s chosen modes of behavior, he can also see where the pattern deviated. Why did the suspect awaken at six and not at seven? Skip his breakfast tea or forget his morning paper? What made the carriage turn toward the hills and not the harbor? Why was the locked door suddenly open or the barking dog silent?
For it is in the deviation of the pattern that the answer always lies. Trevor had decreed one question to be at the heart of all good police work: What made this one particular day different from all the others?
And thus Davy Mabrey arrived at the Weaver home with a determination to better understand a typical morning in the household. He would need to collect fingerprints, true, but they would most certainly be the fingerprints of the Weavers and their small staff and thus of little help. Of little help, that was, unless he could discern the underlying pattern of the household and thus the variation. Of little help, that was, unless he could find the one hand which touched something that it should not have touched.
Seal had described the home as “secured” by which he evidently meant that the front door was closed, but not locked, and that a sign had been posted warning the public away. Davy doubted such signs were any more effective in Bombay than they were in London – likely less so, since the wording was in English, a language the vast majority of the populace could not read. He walked up the steps, through the door and down the large central hall, noting that the interior of the house was more impressive than the exterior. The construction of homes in the tropics, he was beginning to see, had more to do with counteracting the heat than with following any principles of architecture. The outside of the Weaver house was composed of mortar block, a bit squat and certainly unimposing. But inside the rooms continued to open into more rooms - at times even full sections, as if the house was unfolding around him the longer he walked.
At least at first glance, nothing seemed amiss. Davy did a quick walk through to get the lay of the land, as Trevor always called it, and then decided to start with Rose Weaver’s room.
It did not take much effort to ascertain which was hers. The majority of the bedrooms had a neat but dispirited air, with the ornamentation generic and no details to reveal the personality of the occupants. Evidently the Weavers were well prepared for guests who rarely came. The chambers in the back, down a hall behind the kitchens, were smaller and evidently designated for the household staff. Only three bedrooms distinguished themselves, and only one furthermore clearly belonged to a lady. The pillows tossed about had a floral design, not unlike those Davy had observed in Geraldine Bainbridge’s parlor, and the curtains had a rather defiant frilliness. As if Mrs. Weaver was saying that she could not help what lay beyond the window, but she could control what was in this room, and she was keeping it English right up to the screen. For when the frilly curtains were pulled back, Davy found roughly woven strips of bamboo, jammed with bugs, their bodies so gummed together that it was difficult to see the garden beyond.
Glancing about self-consciously, even though there was no one near to observe his methodologies, Davy stretched out on Rose Weaver’s bed. Looked up at her ceiling with its great fan, and was struck with the irony that while the woman had gone to such pains to fool herself into thinking this room was somewhere in England, the first sight that greeted her eyes each morning stood as irrefutable proof it was not. For this fan, gigantic and utilitarian, with the pulley and gears fully evident, could only exist in India.
Davy sat up and viewed the room from the vantage of the bed. There was no table nearby, so evidently Rose Weaver was not in the habit of reading in bed nor was it likely she took her breakfast there. Once she was vertical, the first thing her gaze would fall on would be a portrait of young man whom Davy assumed to be her son, Michael. It hung ponderously above the mantle, and on closer inspection Davy saw that it actually was a photograph, but one that had been painted over in a technique that was popular in some circles in London. He had never understood the logic of it himself, for the overlay of paint always seemed to obliterate the individuality of the subject, turning all British faces, no matter what their gender, age, or general disposition, into uniformly rosy-cheeked, shiny-eyed children.
He would dust the mantle for prints, Davy decided, and the windowsill, the bedposts, and the nearest table. But first he would look at the other bedrooms which clearly had been occupied.
The Secretary-General’s room was across the hall and down two doors. This was a little odd, was it not? Davy knew that not all husbands and wives chose to occupy the same beds, especially those of the Weavers’ age and income level. No, the fact that Anthony and Rose no longer slept together was not much of a clue at all, but his understanding was that married couples did normally select adjoining rooms… and yet Mrs. Weaver was located a notable distance from Mr. Weaver. There would be little chance of a nocturnal visit with this configuration. The retired Secretary-General’s room was much as one would predict – leather armchair, bookshelf full of military volumes, wire-rimmed spectacles still resting on a nearby table – but what struck Davy as most significant was that the manservant, Pulkit Sang, evidently occupied the third bedroom. The one that lay between Rose and Anthony.
Odd among odd it was, but irrefutable, for the third bedroom was as Indian as the other two were Engish. A pallet rather than a bed. A bright carpet, great swaths of cloth tied across the window, a bureau full of woven robes. And a bird cage, the small yellow creature within hopping about excitedly until Davy obliged him with a handful of seeds from a nearby bowl and then covered the cage to allow the creature to compose himself. The chirping almost immediately stopped.
He supposed it was possible Rose Weaver might opt to keep her bodyguard even closer than her husband, but such a decision implied a heightened state of anxiety. Yet Anthony Weaver had apparently insisted there had been no recent threats.
Even stranger, the room which had evidently been occupied by Sang was as large as that of Rose and Anthony, implying he was treated more like a member of the family than a servant. Aside from the bureau, the room was quite devoid of furniture, but Davy suspected that was more at the request of its occupant than anything else. For it was by far the most practically designed and comfortable space he had seen in the house so far.
In fact, Sang’s room, unlike that of Rose and Anthony, had not merely a window but a door granting access to the garden. Davy pushed it open and walked out.
After better than a week without watering, the garden was a sad affair. The plants drooped. More of them were recognizable than Davy would have guessed – in fact, it reminded him of a smaller and less productive version of the same plot of land his mother worked back in England. Surprising too, that the garden would have more vegetables than flowers, but he supposed it represented Rose Weaver’s attempt to produce at least an occasional basketful of English food. Perhaps mix a few freshly picked peas in with the tinned ones to make it seem as if the whole lot of them bore the true taste of home. Whether the attempt was valiant or pathetic, Davy could not say, but either way the struggle was a doomed one.
The sight of the wilted peas, in fact, especially distressed him, for they were his favorites and somewhat of a specialty of his beloved mum. She would never have allowed him to pass a garden in such state without lifting a hand, and now, almost by instinct, he put down his tool kit and looked about for a well. He found one in the courtyard’s only shaded corner, or at least a small recess filled with cool water. There didn’t appear to be a bucket – odd that, too – but he stooped with the dipper and began to systematically carry water from the well to the plants, splashing a bit here and there.
Hard to say why he felt compelled to keep on with the task, not with the afternoon fading and half his work still undone. Not to mention the fact the mistress of this garden would never be returning to tend it. Chances were that no one would be returning to this house at all, which raised the question of what to do with the bird. Davy sat back on his haunches surveying the scene. The plants were not numerous, but it would take him quite some time to water the whole batch with a single dipper. And then his eye fell on a bush in the corner of the plot, the only plant among them that he could not readily call by name.
Noteworthy perhaps. He would pull the leaves and flowers, take a few of the pods back to Tom.
And it was just then, just as he pushed from his gardener’s squat to his feet, that he saw the second surprising thing in the garden: a woman.