Authors: Kim Wright
Chapter Nine
The Byculla Club Bar
6:40 PM
“Was she Indian?”
“No, Sir, she didn’t look it,” Davy said, nervously swirling his cocktail. To travel posh was one thing, but the Byculla Club was quite beyond him. “She wore that wrappy sort of robe the local women wear, but her coloring indicated she was English.”
“They call it a sari,” Trevor said, swirling his own cocktail as well and making peripheral note that the ice shards within must have come at great effort. “A British woman in Indian clothes. Most strange. And she wouldn’t answer your question for why she was there?”
“It was more a shout than a question, Sir,” Davy admitted, moving aside on the divan to accommodate the arrival of Rayley. “She startled me and I apparently startled her. I asked ‘Who are you?’ but that’s when she ran.”
“Show Rayley what she dropped.”
Davy pulled one of the crime kit envelopes from the interior pocket of his ill-fitting linen coat. His outfit for the evening was a contribution from a closet of Mrs. Tucker’s which had evidently once belonged to her late and only somewhat lamented husband. And then he carefully extracted an eyedropper, using care to touch only the tube and not the plunger.
“So our mystery woman dropped a dropper,” Rayley drawled, settling back on the settee. “That is certainly convenient.”
“A little too convenient,” Trevor said. “Apparently she was there to plant evidence.”
“Or take the real evidence away,” Rayley said as Davy reverently replaced the dropper into its envelope and then his pocket. “Those gadgets retract fluid as well as release it, do they not?”
“I dusted this for fingerprints,” Davy said. “But that’s as far as I got.” He recounted his observations about the Weaver house to Rayley and Trevor as the three men sat in their little corner of the great room, each of them periodically making his own unspoken observations of the scene before them as they conversed.
“Save the dropper for Tom,” Trevor said when Davy’s story drew to its close. “As well as the clippings from that strange plant you noted. And you can return to the house and finish your work on the morrow.”
“It seems a waste of time to even be here,” Davy said fretfully. “With the house standing unguarded and the lab work unfinished.”
“Oh, not a waste of time,” Trevor said, gazing out at the people mingling around the room. They were elaborately dressed considering that the Byculla Club was a place they visited daily and that they would be dining among people they had known for years. But even his untrained eye could see that the women’s appearance was too fussy, with their clothes somehow out of date. Emma, whose gown was without a bustle but rather featured a severe sort of drape to the side, seemed to be attracting a good deal of envious attention from the other ladies.
They try to stay current with fashion from London, Trevor thought, but they have every disadvantage, do they not? Everything must be brought in by ship at great expense and if they try to reproduce British designs using the local materials and craftspeople, it always falls flat. Looks fake and out of place, neither convincingly British nor truly Indian either.
“Not a waste of time at all,” he repeated. “For I have no doubt that all our suspects with all their separate motives have most obligingly gathered themselves before us tonight. We must take advantage of our seating at dinner to overhear the local gossip, to interview while making it appear conversational. And do not trouble yourself, lad,” he added, with a glance toward Davy. “Whatever business drove the English woman in Indian dress to the Weaver house, she clearly didn’t finish it. My guess is that you shall see her again, very soon.”
***
“In this heat, a sari seems a quite sensible mode of clothing,” Emma said.
“Oh don’t let anyone overhear you,” giggled her companion, a giddy but quite friendly young woman named Amy Morrow who had attached herself to Emma at the moment of their introduction. Apparently any new visitor to the Byculla Club was a novelty and thus an automatic source of entertainment. “People will think you’ve gone native and that will never do. Shall we have another peg?”
“Peg?”
“It’s what we call the drinks,” Amy said with another giggle that shook her blonde curls. “Because they’re so strong that the old people claim each one is a peg in your coffin.”
“Thank you for saying they are strong,” Emma said, laughing back despite herself. “For I am quite dizzy and I feared it was the heat.”
“No it’s the gin, I assure you,” Amy said. “And let us do have another. One has to make one’s own fun here in Bombay, you see.”
“And even dull things are more fun if you’re tipsy.”
“Just the point.” Amy shifted on her cushion and looked around the room with a charmingly wrinkled nose. “From the outside, our social life perhaps appears to be acceptable. We have our theatricals and parties and balls and each dinner, even the mundane ones, have eight courses. You shall see what I mean when we are called in to dine. There will be this great gong and we shall enter to find, each of us, a servant standing directly behind our chair. A man whose sole purpose is to assure that our water glass is refilled after each sip and that each course of food is simply upon us, poof, like some sort of Biblical miracle. And it disappears just the same. No, not like the Bible. That’s quite the wrong comparison. More like a magician with his tricks.”
Emma laughed again. For all her curls and fripperies, Amy had a witty mind and seemed more than willing to share her observations, which might be pertinent. Trevor had said many times that when it came to crime solving, gossips were of far greater use than policemen.
“A servant behind every chair,” Emma mused. “Can you imagine what the cost would be in London?”
“Labor is cheap here,” Amy said. “And so we dress up the natives in all manner of livery and have them march about in any number of mindless tasks. It consoles us. Makes us think we are important, or, better yet, home. And so our events are very grand, but somehow they are never very gay.”
“You do sports?” Emma asked. “I understand they are popular among the women of the Raj.”
“Oh, of course,” Amy said. “Archery, badminton, tennis when I’m here with Granny in the city. In the provinces the women even try their hand at hunting and fishing. Otherwise we get so bored. The men go to work and we…don’t go anywhere. So we shoot birds, or we paint them. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. “
“And any social life revolves around the clubs, I take it? These little enclaves of England?”
“Oh we’re much more English here than anyone is in England,” Amy said with a wicked little chirp of mirth. “You shall get a proper dose of it at dinner, just you wait. Each party slogs along at a comfortably familiar pace. The same conversations. Even the same arguments, circling around us year after year. The etiquette is so rigid and so…pointless. There is an order of precedence for everything. Who goes into the table first. Who speaks first, bows first. Granny claims it all has something to do with the military, the fact that all English life in India began on army posts, but I can’t make heads nor tails of it. I just always assume that as the youngest daughter of a junior officer, I count last in all matters and so far no one has bothered to correct that impression.”
“I do hope we sit together at dinner, Amy,” Emma said, with a rush of affection. It was so rare to meet a lively girl her own age, or perhaps it was just the gin.
“I would love that as well, but we shan’t,” Amy said. “We’re too valuable and so we must be situated around the table at measured intervals, like diamonds in a crown. Oh, I assure you it’s quite the truth,” she added, when Emma looked surprised. “Do you have any idea how rare single girls are in Bombay? Especially those with all their body parts arranged in the proper order? At the last dance I attended there were at least four times as many men as women and I waltzed until my feet bled. That is not an exaggeration, I assure you. I felt the squish between my toes with every step.”
“All in service to the empire,” Emma said drily.
“But of course. I flatter myself that I have raised the morale of any number of men in the district, all on my own.” Amy paused and laughed, clearly aware of the bawdy implications of her statement, and then leaned forward to say her next lines with special emphasis. “But no matter where we are seated tonight, we shall meet again soon, Emma Kelly, I shall see to that. In fact, why don’t I make a few inquiries and ensure that you are invited to lawn tennis at Mrs. Keener’s tomorrow? How does that sound?”
“Lawn tennis?” Emma said skeptically.
“Indeed. We shall partner, you and I, but I must tell you that it’s considered good form to lose the first set to your hostess. That beastly order of precedence, you know.”
“That should not prove difficult,” said Emma. “For I have never picked up a tennis racket in my life.”
***
“And how did you find the soul of Anthony Weaver?” Rayley asked. “Sufficiently pensive?”
“Strangely variable,” Trevor said. They had been drinking now for the better part of an hour with no sign that dinner was imminent. He was unaccustomed to this ritual called the cocktail hour, normally taking only wine with his dinner at Geraldine’s or beer if he found himself acting the bachelor at a London pub. It was a bit hard to monitor consumption under these circumstances, with fresh trays of drinks appearing from behind the bar every few minutes. “The man showed abrupt swings of mood I couldn’t account for by the questioning. One moment he is twisting in his seat, wiping his brow, and behaving as if he is ready to jump from his skin. The next moment he is utterly certainly sure of himself, trying to maneuver the questioning away from me as if he were still the ranking officer and I was some sort of underling. All in all, not the sort of man I would have imagined could ever have won the heart of Geraldine Bainbridge.”
“Interesting,” said Rayley. “Well, I’m sure thirty-two years ago they were both very different people.”
“He doesn’t know she is here,” Trevor said. “He leapt to an assumption that she had sent us, not accompanied us, and I decided to let him remain in that fallacy. I was afraid he’d ask to see her.”
Rayley tilted his head. “What if she asks to see him? She surely will, as soon as she gets her feet back under her from the sailing.”
“True enough,” Trevor said. “But I would like to forestall that meeting as long as possible, at least until we hold a few more cards in our hands. He said he wanted her forgiveness, which is likely true enough, but who knows what manner of falsehoods he is prepared to utter in his quest for that benediction? Until we have a better grasp on the particulars, we’ll have no way of separating confessed facts from confessed fantasy.” Trevor sat back in his chair and scanned the room. “By the way, do you think I was too rough on Seal and Morass today?”
“I wouldn’t lose sleep over the matter. But I suppose that Morass is more accustomed to military matters, which exists as a different world from civilian crime, and that Seal fondly imagined he had come to India to shuffle paperwork around for a year or two and then move on to greener fields. You can hardly hold them to the professional standards of Scotland Yard.”
Trevor shifted a bit uncomfortably in his seat, for he knew he had done precisely that. “Seal has possibilities,” he finally ventured.
“You think so? Of the two, I would put my money on Morass.”
Just then Geraldine swept up, with a pair of young men in her wake. One was short, ruddy, and moved with the confident manner of a man intent on a plan. The other – frail and bookish with a heavy mustache – held back a bit, hovering on the periphery of the social circle.
“Darlings,” said Geraldine. “You must allow me to introduce Michael Everlee and Jonathan Benson. Recently come from London, just as we have. And this is Trevor Welles, Rayley Abrams, and David Mabrey. All of Scotland Yard.”
“Abrams?” Everlee said.