The Ninth Buddha

The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

By the same author

The Last Assassin

The Seventh Sanctuary

THE NINTH BUDDHA

Copyright © Daniel Easterman 1988 All rights reserved.

PART ONE

Advent

‘.. . twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.. ..”

W. B Yeats, The Second Coming’

Hexham

Hexham, England, December 1920 Snow had fallen in the night, a stark white emblem of another world, purity lost and stranded in the depths of our humanity.

Above Causey Hill, a white, bloated fog hung like a freezing shroud. The long, low lights of Advent huddled in the cold and gloom, extinguishing their flames in preparation for the mystery that was to come. In halls and cottages, the fires of Christmas were emblazoned with frost and rimmed with soot. In village squares, in the ancient gathering darkness, ice formed on newly erected monuments to ten million dead.

Night and the expectation of night to come, the great untrammelled dark barking and whispering beneath the eaves all winter long, the dull onslaught of mystery in the hard, silent heart of an unredeemed and unforgiving world. God and the expectation of God to come. The Lord of light and darkness would return as he had always done, born into the freezing flesh of the dying year.

The Prince of Peace would come into a world freshly awakened from a nightmare of slaughter in which whole armies of innocents had died, a world at whose bloodletting even Herod might have blanched. It was harder now than it had ever been.

In the soft, candled interior of St. Mary’s, evening mass was reaching its climax. In view of the bad weather, it had been decided to hold a second mass that day, for those who had not been able to attend in the morning. The ancient liturgy unfolded its mysteries among the shadows. At the altar, the violet-coloured vestments of the priest enhanced the darkness as his voice enhanced the silence.

Holding the chalice in his left hand, the priest made the sign of the cross with his right.

Benedixit, deditque discipuhs suis, dicens: Accipite, et bibite ex co omnes.

He raised the chalice, blood mixed with water, wine

Hie est emm Cahx Sangmms met .. . for this is the chalice of my blood...

Christopher Wylam sat in the last row of worshippers, rising with them and sitting again, intoning the responses, telling his beads, inhaling the wafted incense. His son William sat beside him, tiny fingers echoing his father’s, speaking what he knew of the responses. William was ten, but he carried himself like an older child, as though he already knew a little of what life held in store for him.

His father was something of an enigma to the boy. Until fourteen months ago, Christopher had been little more than a name to the boy. William still remembered the photographs in his mother’s room at Carfax, the house just outside Hexham where they lived with Aunt Harriet and his three cousins, Roger, Charles and Annabel. He had never been able to relate the man in those faded prints to the shadowy figure he had last seen at the age of three, waving sadly to him and his mother as their crowded train pulled slowly out of Delhi Station.

But he remembered almost nothing of Delhi now, only little things, like snatches of dreams: an old ayah bending over him and singing softly into the throbbing night, a toy elephant on wheels that he had pulled along behind him on a length of string, great white mosquito nets suspended in the hot air above his cot.

Christopher had returned to William’s world only to shatter it, a stranger in strange garb, claiming him for his own. The boy remembered his mother’s feverish excitement as the hour of Christopher’s return drew closer the dangerously flushed cheeks, the sunken eyes bright with thoughts of his homecoming. He himself had hoped for a soldier coming home from the war at last, wearing a uniform and bright medals that would catch the sun.

“Bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting,” his mother had sung in the nights to him when he was small, exorcizing the fatherless dark.

“Gone to fetch a rabbit-skin to wrap a Baby Bunting in.” But he had been met at the gate by a quiet man in civilian dress, a man who had no tales of heroism to tell and no medals for his son to polish.

William’s disappointment had been keen. His cousins had not helped:

their father, William’s Uncle Adam, had been killed at the

Somme three years before. His photographs, draped in black crepe, took pride of place on the high mantelpieces at Carfax; his medals lay on velvet in a glass case in the hall; and a tablet to his memory stood just left of the altar at St. Mary’s.

Roger and Charles made William’s life a misery. They mocked his father, who, they said, had never been a soldier at all; or, if he had, must have sat at a desk in India throughout the war a sort of conchie, really. Once, they had left a white feather on William’s bed, bearing a little hand-made label: “For your father’.

All this might have been hard enough for a boy of nine to bear.

But his father’s return coincided with the beginning of his mother’s last struggle against the illness that had been consuming her for the past eighteen months.

“The decline’, people said when they thought William was not listening, and he could tell from the way they averted their eyes that they expected the worst. She had kept going for the past six months in anticipation of Christopher’s return. He had seen it in her eyes each time he visited her in her cold bedroom: a violent craving that exalted and exhausted her.

Two months after Christopher’s arrival, just before Christmas, when everyone seemed to be preparing for festivity, for new birth in an old world, his mother died in her sleep.

Though he knew it to be unjust, William blamed his father for her death. And Christopher himself earned a measure of guilt about with him that only served to reinforce his son’s unspoken accusation. The truth was that he felt awkward with the boy and unable to come to terms with his wife’s death. Explanations were beyond him. In the hard winter that followed, he would walk for hours across cold, infertile fields, seeking to resolve his guilt or at least pacify it for a while. He kept a painful distance between himself and the boy.

Spring had thawed the fields and laid the first flowers on Elizabeth’s grave, but it had done nothing to bring father and son closer. It was decided that William should go to Winchester that autumn. And then, abruptly, all that had changed. One day, while Christopher was in Hexham with his sister Harriet, William went unobserved to his father’s room and opened his desk. What was he looking for? He himself could not have answered that. In a sense, he was looking for his father. And in a sense he found him.

Inside a drawer in the top right-hand corner, he found a small

red box among a pile of papers. On the lid was the royal crest, and inside lay a medal in the shape of a cross. William recognized it at once: the Victoria Cross. He had seen a reproduction of it in a magazine during the war. In an envelope next to the box was a letter from Buckingham Palace, in which Major Christopher Wylam was commended in the highest terms for ‘exceptional bravery in service to his King and Country’.

For days William was torn between excitement at his discovery and guilt about the means by which he had come by it. On the Sunday, after church, he confessed to his father: by now he needed an explanation more than he feared any possible punishment. And that afternoon, for the first time, they talked in Christopher’s study until the fire died down and turned to ashes.

Christopher told the boy that there was more to war than pitched battles or tanks or aeroplanes; that the war he had fought in India had been lonely and diseased and treacherous; and that what he now told William must remain an inviolate secret between them.

From that day, they had begun to draw close, each sharing the other’s grief at last, as far as possible. It was agreed that William ought to stay at least another year at Carfax, after which they would decide whether he should go away to school at all. When summer came, there were roses on Elizabeth’s grave.

They had reached the Paternoster. The priest recited the familiar prayer aloud, his lips moving with rich and practised smoothness.

He must already have spoken those same words countless thousands of times in his lifetime. He was a young man, in his early thirties: he had served as a chaplain during the war. Christopher wondered what he thought of while he prayed, of Christ stretched out on the wooden frame of his consecrated life, nailed to him, hand to hand, foot to foot? Of the solemnity of these, his daily actions? Of his priestly role, ordained to bind and loose, to curse and bless? Or did he think of his dinner, of turnip and meat pie and roasted potatoes swimming in thick gravy?

To an astute observer, it would have been obvious at a glance that

Christopher Wylam was an Englishman who had spent little time in

England. He seemed ill-at-ease in his winter clothes, and his skin

still retained much of the colouring that can only be

obtained in warmer climates. His fair hair had been bleached by the sun and was swept back from a high, mournful forehead. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, finely etched lines radiating towards the temples like filaments spun from a spider’s web. The eyes themselves were dark and heavy-lidded, yet touched by a depth and clarity that caught others unawares. One sensed perhaps it was only a trick of the candlelight that his eyes were closed to what was happening in the church and opened on to other, more alien vistas.

He looked round the small church. Not many had ventured out this evening. Men and women and restive children filled the front pews, some genuinely pious, others there from force of habit or a sense of duty. He himself came for William’s sake and perhaps as a penance for his betrayal of Elizabeth.

The priest had broken the Host and taken the Body of Christ.

He lifted the chalice and drank the consecrated wine, the blood of God, the blood of Christ, the blood of the world, red with redemption.

Christopher imagined how the wine must taste, imagined it transformed into blood, and he felt a sour bile rising in his throat.

Father Middleton had preached of Christ’s coming and prayed that the peace of Christmas might remain throughout the coming year; but Christopher had no welcome for the pale god-child of Christmas. There was no celebration in his heart tonight, only a dull anger that REGAINED against God and His season of specious joy There was silence as the priest raised a fragment of the Host and held it high before the congregation.

“Ecce Agnus Dci, behold the Lamb of God,” he said, ‘ecce qui tollit peccata mundi, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.”

One by one, the congregation rose and made for the altar, weighed down with sins, all but the children. Christopher stood up and followed William to join the line of waiting sinners. An old man knelt and opened his mouth, tongue partly extended to receive God’s body.

Corpus Domini nostn .. .

So many sins, thought Christopher, as he watched the silver paten flash in the candlelight. The Host touched the old man’s tongue. Mortal sins, venial sins, the seven deadly sins. Sins of commission and omission, the sins of pride and lust and gluttony, sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the spirit. Sins of the eye, sins of the hearing, sins of the heart.

Jesu Christi .. .

He knelt and opened his mouth. He felt the wafer touch his lips, dry, tasteless, forlorn. . custodial ammam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen.

When Elizabeth had died, something in him had followed her.

He and William had visited her grave earlier that day, a little, snow-covered mound among so many behind the church. She belonged to the earth now. He remembered the funeral the frost, the ground hard like iron, the spades futile, out of season, the black horses, their breath hanging naked and abandoned in the thin winter air.

He remembered her as she had been in those last two months:

pale and feverish by turns, remote, her face turned to the wall, intensely conscious of death’s approach. There was nothing sculpted or romantic about her passage from the world, nothing fine or ethereal: just a young woman racked with pain, just blood and sputum, and in the end decay. After her death, men had come and burned her clothes and the furniture in her bedroom and scraped the walls as though they harboured some deadly miasmatic force. She had been thirty-one.

For two months, he had sat by her bedside holding her hand;

and for two months he had been conscious that they had become strangers to one another. She had died in his arms, but a nurse would have done as well. More than a war lay between them: in their world, love was as hard to come by as forgiveness. They had met in Delhi eleven years earlier, at the first dance of the winter season. She had come out with the “Fishing Fleet’ the annual contingent of eligible young ladies in search of husbands and had stayed behind as Mrs. Wylam. He had not loved her Fishing Fleet girls did not expect love but he had learnt to care for her.

He sat down in his pew again. At the altar, the priest purified the chalice and began to recite the Antiphon: “Ecce Virgo conapiet et panel filium. Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”

In another month, Christopher would be forty, but he felt older.

His generation what there was left of it was already old: young

old men to rule a decaying Empire and heal the breaches left by war. He shuddered. There would be another war in Europe. A year ago, the thought would have left him cold. But now he had a son to fear for.

Unlike so many who had fought in the trenches in France and Belgium, Christopher’s mind and body were intact. But his own war, that dark, secret and dirty war whose details he was not even permitted to speak of, had changed him. He had returned with his body whole and his spirit in tatters: cold, cold and lonely, and the dusts of India choking him, filling his throat and chest and nostrils with dry and bitter odours.

Elizabeth’s death so soon after his return had made of that change a permanent and frozen thing, hard, calcified in the blood, ineradicable. It consisted in part of the obvious things that came through war and death: bitterness, a loss of joy, a certain coldness of the affections, grief written large, a deep sense of futility. But there were other feelings too, feelings that surprised him: a profound sense of human worth under all the tawdriness, compassion both for the men he had killed and for himself in his former ruthlessness, patience to accept what he had come to believe was inevitable. At times he dreamed of tall white mountains and cool, wave less lakes. And he spent a lot of time with William.

The priest read the last Gospel, final prayers were said, vespers were sung, and the service came to its appointed end. Christopher took William’s hand and led him out of the glittering church into the darkness. It was the Sunday before Christmas, but he found it hard to believe that God would ever return to earth.

They did not notice the car waiting in the shadows further down the street.

“Christopher.”

He turned to see a figure approaching from the side door of the church.

Father Middleton, still in his cassock, was making towards them.

“Good evening, Father. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk with you, Christopher, if I may. Could I walk with you a little? Would you mind?”

The priest was shivering slightly from the cold. His thin cassock was more a spiritual than a physical garment. But he was a strong man who made a point of defying the elements when he could.

Christopher liked him: he made no show of piety and had helped after Elizabeth’s death by steering well clear of all talk of the blessed souls in paradise.

“Perhaps we could talk in the church,” suggested Christopher.

“It’s cold for you out here.”

Father Middleton shook his head firmly.

“Nonsense, Christopher. I won’t die. You’ve both got some way to go. And I only want a few words anyway: just along Hencotes past the Sele, then I’ll leave you and get back to my little fire.”

Christopher nodded and they set off. He felt his son’s small hand in his, warm and fragile, the frosted snow giving beneath his feet, the fog gathering force beyond the limits of the flickering gas lamps The presence of the priest made him self-conscious. Somewhere behind them, a car door opened and closed in the darkness.

“I’ve been thinking,” said the priest, ‘that it may be time to put up a permanent memorial to our war dead. I thought perhaps a small chapel in their honour, dedicated to the Virgin. Nothing ostentatious. Just a quiet place near the front. Somewhere a widow can light her candle and be left in peace.”

Out of the darkness, muffled footsteps crossed the street and came in

their direction. In another place, at another time, Christopher might

have taken alarm. But it was Sunday and this was

England. Long months of inactivity had lulled his instinct for , danger. The darkness thickened round him, like something solid moving against his flesh.

“How can I be of help, Father? You’ll want a

donation, of course.

I’ll be glad to contribute.”

“Indeed. I’ll be grateful for anything you’re willing to give. But

I wondered if I could ask more of you. You’re a military man yourself.

I’ve heard .. .” he hesitated ‘.. . that you were decorated.”

They were nearing the end of Hencotes. A single light struggled against the dark, laying a yellow film across the firmly packed snow. Christopher stared ahead into the darkness. Who had told the priest?

Not William, he was sure of that. His secret was safe with the boy.

Perhaps Harriet.. .

“Yes,” he said. His breath mingled with that of the priest, white and listless in the clear air, like milk moving in water.

“I’d like to set up a fund,” Father Middleton continued.

“You’re the man at Carfax now, ever since Major Ridley died. There’s your sister, of course. But I’d like a man, a soldier, to head the appeal.”

“I was never a soldier.”

“No. But highly decorated. For valour. I ask no questions. You have military rank.”

“Father, I’m not sure .. .”

The footsteps were upon them now. Two men emerged from the shadows, their faces pallid in the thin light. They were dressed in heavy coats and wore shallow fur hats pulled down well on their heads. The first man had a narrow, sour face and eyes that looked as though he had not slept for nights. His companion was heavier and coarser-featured, with dark stubble on his chin.

, What happened next took only a few seconds, but it was to ; remain etched on Christopher’s memory for the rest of his life. The I thin man nodded at his companion. Both men began to run at once. There was no time to skip or dodge. Christopher felt himself bowled over, then the thin man was on top of him, pressing him into the snow, crushing his chest, making it impossible for him to breathe.

There was a stifled cry. Twisting his head, Christopher saw the heavy

man grab William from behind and begin to pull him, struggling, across the snow. The boy kicked out, trying to escape, but the man was too powerful for him.

Christopher pressed up, freeing his right arm in an attempt to grab for his assailant’s throat and dislodge him. But the man twisted away from him, thrust a hand into the wide pocket of his coat, and brought out a large pistol. Christopher froze as the man raised it and held it against his head.

“I am ordered not to harm you,” the thin man said. His voice was soft, the accent foreign yet hard to place.

“But I do not always obey orders, and I have killed a great many men in my time. I intend to leave here without interference. Do you understand? So please lie still and let us do what we have come here to do. The boy will not be harmed: I promise you.”

William cried out, still struggling with his captor.

“Father! Help me! Help me!”

The thin man cocked the pistol and held it very hard against Christopher’s temple. Beneath him, he felt the snow cold and precise against him, and a stone that stabbed mercilessly into the small of his back.

He had forgotten Father Middleton. The priest, stunned by the suddenness and violence of the attack, had remained standing in the middle of the road, a single arm raised, whether to ward off further attack or to bless his attackers it was not clear. But at the boy’s cry, like a sleeper awakened, he stirred and began to stumble through the dragging snow.

Encumbered by the struggling child, the heavy man was finding it hard to make progress. He almost slipped as William twisted in an effort to throw him off balance. One arm was round the boy’s throat, while the other desperately tried to pin William’s flailing arms to his side.

The priest ran up, arms reaching for the boy’s assailant. He cried out inarticulately, the same voice that had spoken Mass only minutes before, troubled now with fear and a grim rage. His finger’s tore at the man’s arm, dragging him from the boy. The two men slipped and slithered on the wet ground, their feet struggling for some sort of purchase. Suddenly, the heavy man lost his balance and fell, pulling the priest with him.

“Run, William!” Father Middleton shouted.

“Run like hell!”

William hesitated, then turned and ran back in the direction of

the town, in search of help. On the ground, the priest rolled in the snow, fumbling for a grip that would allow him to overpower the kidnapper. He was a rugby player, but the man beneath him was stronger than him and was starting to recover from his fall. The priest got his arm across the big man’s windpipe, hoping to crush the air from his lungs, but as he did so the other man succeeded in bringing up his knee hard into his groin.

Father Middleton grunted and bent with pain. The heavy man squirmed, pushing him away from him, wriggling out from beneath his body. But as he started to get to his feet, the priest recovered his breath and lunged at him in a low tackle, bringing him down heavily into a patch of virgin snow.

Suddenly, something glinted in the lamplight. As the priest threw himself across to pin him down again, the man lifted a knife and brought it up in a smooth arc. The knife-blade shimmered in the light, then disappeared as it entered the priest’s chest. Father Middleton’s body jerked backwards, trying to escape the pain of the blade, but the momentum of his leap kept him moving down on to the hilt. He fell on to the man, tearing the knife from his grasp, throwing blood across his face.

“Jesus!” he cried, writhing with pain He reached for the knife handle but his hand had lost all its strength. It slipped on blood and fell against his chest. With his last strength, he traced a clumsy cross over his heart. His hand shook and fell away, his legs jerked, then he became still.

Christopher pressed up against the muzzle of the gun, but a hand pushed hard against his shoulder and forced him down again.

“You bastards!” he shouted.

“You murdering bastards!” But the man with the gun did not relax his grip or move the barrel. A light went on in a window across the street. There was the sound of a sash being raised.

“What’s going on out there?” someone shouted.

“Get the police!” shouted Christopher. But the thin man struck him hard across the cheek and pressed a hand down heavily against his mouth.

He saw the heavy man wipe the blade of his knife on the priest’s cassock and stand up. His face showed no sign of emotion, no hint of regret. He had killed the priest as he might have killed a sheep or a pig, and thought as little of it. Christopher wanted to kill him just as wantonly. At least William had got away. Whatever happened to him now, the boy was safe.

There was a sound of footsteps. Someone was coming up the street.

People had heard their cries: someone was coming to help.

A man stepped out of the shadows, a tall man dressed in a coat and hat like those of the first two men, but of better cut and quality. In front of him, his hands pinned and a cloth tied tightly round his mouth, was William. The man was supporting the boy, forcing him to walk in front of him.

There was a rapid exchange of words in a language Christopher did not recognize. He guessed it might have been Russian, but the men said so little he could not be sure. He opened his mouth to call to William, to reassure the boy somehow that, come what may, someone would track him down and rescue him. But before the words could reach his lips, the thin man raised the gun and struck him across the temple. The world leapt at him then shrank away again as quickly as it had come.

He did not lose consciousness completely. There was a taste of snow in his mouth and he realized he had rolled over on to his face. As he struggled to move, he heard the sound of car doors slamming and a motor being started. Somewhere in the darkness, voices were calling. He saw lights weaving through the shadows and red blood on the snow and the dark shapes of men and women standing and staring at him. There was a roaring sound, then the headlights of a large car stabbed through the darkness at him. A second later, they were gone and he was in the darkness, sobbing into the bitter snow.

The clock on the Abbey tower chimed six times. It was Tuesday evening, and the market-place, recently filled with people buying geese and turkeys for the coming Festival, was deserted. Snow had begun to fall, gentle and bright against the uncertain halo of a street lamp.

Christopher was growing cold. Winterpole should have been here by now. On the telephone he had said he was taking the midmorning train from King’s Cross to Newcastle, then driving the rest of the way to Hexham. Even allowing for a quick lunch, he should have been here two hours ago.

It was two days now since the attack and William’s kidnap, and still the police had nothing to report. A superintendent had grilled Christopher for hours, asking questions both men knew could not be answered. Scotland Yard had been notified, and an alert put out to watch every port; but nothing had been seen of three foreigners and a boy in a large car. The kidnappers themselves had remained silent: no message, no telephone call, no ransom note. It was as if they had vanished into thin air.

Christopher walked up and down in an effort to keep warm.

Behind him, the coloured windows of the Abbey hung suspended in the blackness, dimly lit patterns from another age. A faint sound of singing could be heard: Evensong was almost over.

Out of the darkness, borne on the cold night air, all the smells of England came to him, whether real or imagined he neither knew nor cared. He smelled dead leaves beneath the snow on the Sele, and below that the fragrance of countless summer days, the odours of leather and resin and polished willow, grass trodden beneath the feet of running batsmen, the green turf cut away at the crease, the naked soil giving up its worms. And flowers in spring, and bonfires in autumn, and the dead rotting in ancient churchyards all winter long.

There was the sound of an engine coming down Priestpopple on to Battle Hill. He heard it turn right into Beaumont Street, heading for the Abbey, and moments later its lights appeared. The car stopped on the corner opposite him and the driver extinguished the lights and the engine. Winterpole had come at last. Winterpole and all he stood for. Christopher shivered and walked across the street. The car door was already open, waiting for him.

There was just enough light from the nearest gas-lamp to confirm what Christopher had already guessed: Winterpole had not changed visibly since they last met. A little greyer on the temples, perhaps, a little tighter around the lips, but otherwise unchanged and unchangeable. As always, he reminded Christopher of nothing so vividly as an undertaker. He dressed in black whatever the season or the time of day, as though in perpetual mourning, though what or whom he mourned for no-one had ever been able to guess.

Briefly, as he entered the car and closed the door, Christopher caught a glimpse of Winterpole’s eyes. Who was it had said, all those years ago, that they were like a doll’s eyes? Perfect, blue, and shining, yet with no more life in them than pieces of cobalt glass.

Splinters in the skin, grown hard over the years. It was rumoured that the only time he had ever been known to smile was when his mother died after a long illness. He had turned up late for a rugger match somewhere.

“Sorry I’m late,” he was reputed to have said, “I’ve just been burying my mother.” And he had smiled.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting in the cold,” he said as soon as Christopher had settled in the soft passenger seat.

“I came as quickly as I could. The trains are running to time, but the road to Hexham is bad. I was lucky to get through.”

Christopher wiped a half-moon in the condensation on the window by his side and looked out. The lights were going out in the Abbey and the last worshippers were making their way home in silence. After Sunday, people were staying together.

“Yes,” Christopher murmured.

“You were lucky.”

Major Simon Winterpole was the head of British Military Intelligence’s Russian and Far Eastern Section. Since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, his had become one of the most powerful voices in the country, discreetly but firmly guiding British foreign policy with respect to out-of-the-way places most Ministers had never even heard of. Even before the war, he and Christopher had met regularly to discuss Russian intelligence activities on the northern borders of India.

“How long has it been now, Christopher?” Winterpole asked.

“How long?”

“Since we last met. Since we last spoke.”

Christopher did not have to think. He remembered their last meeting well.

“Five years,” he said.

“At the end of nineteen-fifteen. You came to Delhi after the Benares Conspiracy Trial.”

“So I did. I remember now. A lot has happened since then.”

Christopher did not reply. He hated meeting in the dark like this, like men who had something to hide. Like clandestine lovers.

But Winterpole had insisted. Unlike Christopher, he loved the secretiveness of his trade, the little rituals that set him and his colleagues apart from other men.

“And how long is it now since you left the service?” Winterpole went on.

“A year,” answered Christopher.

“A little more. I thought you might come then. You or someone like you. But no-one came. Just a letter, signed by someone called Philpott. All about the Official Secrets Act. And my pension.”

“We thought you needed time,” said Winterpole.

“Time? Time for what?”

“To mull things over. To get away from things.”

“What was there to mull over? I had made my mind up.”

“Dehra Dun. The war in general. Your wife’s death. Whatever mattered to you. Whatever still matters to you now.”

Several of Christopher’s best agents had died in Dehra Dun because of an administrative blunder by the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, to which he had been attached. He still felt a sense of responsibility for the deaths, though he had been in no way to blame for them.

“I was surprised,” Christopher said at last.

“Surprised?”

“That you let me go so easily. Just that letter. That letter from Philpott; whoever Philpott is.”

Winterpole took a silver cigarette-case from his pocket and snapped it open. He offered a cigarette to Christopher, but he declined. Delicately, Winterpole extracted a single cigarette for himself, closed the case, and put the cigarette between his lips. He paused briefly to light it. Christopher remembered the smell from the old days. The match flared briefly and died.

“How can I help you, Christopher?” Winterpole asked.

“You say your boy was kidnapped. I’m sorry to hear that. And I understand someone was killed; a priest. Have the police discovered anything?”

Christopher shook his head.

“You know they haven’t.”

“Have you no idea at all who was responsible?”

“I was hoping you might tell me that.”

There was a nervous silence. Winterpole drew on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, through the corners of his mouth. The car filled slowly with a perfumed smoke.

“Me? Why should I know anything about this?”

“You didn’t travel all the way from London to tell me you know nothing.

A telegram would have done. A telephone call. A messenger-boy.”

Winterpole said nothing. He was watching the snow fall against the windscreen.

“Let me tell you exactly what happened,” Christopher went on.

Carefully, he described the events of Sunday night. When he had finished, he turned to Winterpole.

“I am not a rich man,” he said.

“In any case, there has been no ransom note. The men who took my son and killed Father Middleton were Russians I’d stake my life on that. If they were, there must be a link with you: whether they are Whites or Reds or some other colour, they could not be in this country without your knowledge. And if you are involved, that establishes a sufficient link with me.”

“I assure you, Christopher, I am not involved.”

“I’m sorry,” Christopher said.

“Perhaps “involved” is not the correct word.

“Connected” is that what I should have said? Or “informed” would that express it better?”

Winterpole was silent. So much depended on how he phrased himself. In this business, the right choice of words was often more important than the right choice of weapon. A man’s life could hang in the balance.

Several lives. Winterpole thought of himself as a general, though his

troops were few and easily wasted. He disposed them like tiny chessmen

on a vast and tilted board, little glass

pawns clinging precariously to the surface: an army of glass, brittle, betrayed, and dreaming.

“I think,” he said slowly, ‘that I may be able to help you. And you, in your turn, may be able to help me.”

“You mean that’s the price I have to pay if I want to see William alive again?”

Winterpole said nothing. He pulled deeply on his cigarette, wound down the window, and tossed it half-smoked into the darkness. Slowly, he wound the window up again. It was suddenly cold in the car.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Have you ever heard of a man called Zamyatin? Nikolai Zamyatin?”

“Zamyatin,” Winterpole began, ‘is probably the most dangerous Bolshevik agent currently operating in the Far East. He’s a leading light in Comintern, the Communist International set up by the party in March last year to co-ordinate the work of worldwide revolution. In Moscow, he is Trotsky’s eminence gnse. In the East, he is almost independent. Without Zamyatin, it’s safe to say there would be no Bolshevik policy in the region. To be honest, if it weren’t for Nikolai Zamyatin, I would sleep a lot more easily in my bed at night.”

And if it weren’t for Simon Winterpole, thought Christopher, a lot of other people would sleep better.

“Exactly what has any of this to do with me or my son’s disappearance?” he asked.

“I don’t know this Nikolai Zamyatin, I’ve never heard of him, and I assume he has never heard of me.”

Winterpole glanced at Christopher.

“Don’t be so sure about that,” he said.

There was something in Winterpole’s tone that unsettled Christopher. Like a swimmer who senses the first pull of the undertow plucking him down, he could feel the past tugging at him. He wanted to cry out, to struggle against drowning in waves that might be of his own devising; but his limbs felt tense and his throat was raw with the cold night air.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“Zamyatin is half Russian, half Burial Mongol. His father was Count Peotr Zamyatin, a wealthy landowner from Cheremkhovo to the north of Lake Baikal. His mother was a Buriat woman, one of the peasants on his father’s estate. They’re both dead now.

Nikolai was born about 1886, which makes him roughly thirty four

“He had a little money as a child, enough to get what passed for an

education in Irkutsk, but he learned soon enough that he had no hope of

inheriting a penny from his father. By the age of sixteen,

he was an active member of the Communist Party in the region, and before he turned twenty he had been sent to Moscow. He was about thirty when the Revolution started Sovnarkom, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, sent him out to help organize the new order in Transbaikalia. From that point on he led a charmed life.

In Moscow, the Russians accepted him: he was the rebel son of an aristo claiming his own on behalf of the people. And in Transbaikalia he was a local boy made good. What had been a disadvantage his mixed parentage now became his passport to power “He was Moscow’s chief man in Transbaikalia throughout the Civil War. Now he talks with Lenin and Trotsky and Zmoviev about an empire beyond Siberia, a people’s republic stretching to the Pacific. China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet. They can all see that Europe’s hopeless now, that it may be hopeless for another fifty, another hundred years. But they need to dream, you see, and so they dream about the East. And all the time Zamyatin stands there whispering in their ears like a mesmerist, telling them that he can make their dreams reality.”

Winterpole paused for a moment, staring into the darkness beyond the windscreen, as though he could see a second darkness gathering there, discrete, intact, waiting. He shivered. It was cold:

cold and empty.

“About a year ago,” he went on, “Zamyatin dropped out of sight.

One minute, my people were sending me almost daily reports about him, the next he was gone. There were sightings at first, but they all proved negative. The internal pogroms had already started, of course, so my first thought was that he had fallen victim to his erstwhile friends in the Kremlin. Stalin is the coming man in Russia, and he wants socialism in one country. Zamyatin could have been a sacrifice, a reassurance that the others are not dreaming too hard.

“But time passed and Zamyatin’s name wasn’t mentioned, and I knew he must still be alive. They have to denounce their victims, you see it’s no good just doing away with them some dark night.

Their deaths are a sort of atonement, you understand, and their sins must be expiated in public. Pour encourager les autres.

“Then, about four months ago, I had a firm sighting. One I could rely on, from one of my best men.” He hesitated.

“He was seen in Tibet, in the west, near Mount Kailas, near a monastery called Phensung Gompa. He was alone, and he seemed to have been travelling for a long time. In Tibet, Christopher. Nikolai Zamyatin. I didn’t believe it at first. But my man managed to take some photographs. There’s no doubt about it. He was there. Am I making sense to you?”

Christopher nodded. Winterpole was making a sort of sense.

Tibet was Christopher’s territory, one of his special sectors. The agent who had sent the photograph had probably been one of his own men, recruited and trained by him. He followed the other man’s gaze into the darkness beyond the windscreen. More strongly than before, he felt that he was being sucked down beneath heavy waves. Thin hands above the water; the taste of salt on his lips; and a cold wind coming from the shore, driving him out to sea.

“You were in the Kailas region back in 1912, weren’t you, Christopher?”

Winterpole asked.

“Yes,” said Christopher dully.

“What were you doing there?”

“I was looking for agents. Russian agents. We had received a report, a reliable report. I was sent to investigate.”

“And what did you find?”

Christopher shrugged.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I spent a month up there, on the slopes of Mount Kailas itself and round Lake Mansarowar. It’s a sacred region. I made excursions to several of the monasteries. I spoke with pilgrims. If there were Russians, they must have been invisible.”

He saw Winterpole shake his head.

“Not invisible,” he said.

“Dead.”

Christopher realized that, with one hand, he was holding tightly to the door-handle beside him. Drowning men never let go: that is an axiom. He tightened his fingers on the cold metal.

“There were two of them,” Winterpole went on.

“Maisky and Skrypnik. Maisky was a Jew, the son of a watchmaker from the stetl. I met him once in Petersburg. A small man with bad teeth.

“There was a third man with them, a Mongol guide. He made his way back to Russia after they died and managed to make a report. Badmayeffwas their expert on Tibet then. He interviewed the man and wrote the report himself.

“Now, Maisky and Skrypnik had gone to Tibet officially as explorers, so heavily edited versions of the report were deposited in all the proper places the Institute of Oriental Languages at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Oriental Section of the Imperial Archaeological Society, and the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

One or two articles were even published in journals. I read some of them myself.”

He paused and fingered the steering-wheel again. No-one passed in the street. It was Tuesday night, and it was cold, and children were in bed at home, dreaming of fat Father Christmases and dining off brandied pudding in their sleep.

“The real report, the unedited version, was locked away in a file in the Secret Service archives and promptly forgotten. The Mongol disappeared almost certainly killed because of what he knew.”

“What did he know?”

“Be patient, Christopher. I’ll come to that. I think Badmayeff planned to act on the report, but first of all he needed funds and the backing of the right people. However, it was already 1913 and circumstances were far from propitious for an undertaking in Tibet. The file stayed where it was, gathering dust. I had no idea of its existence, of course. No-one had any idea.

“I only discovered what I have just told you this year, after I received the report about Zamyatin being sighted near Mount Kailas. My information was reliable. There were photographs, as I said. So I believed Zamyatin had really been there. And I asked myself what could possibly bring a man like Nikolai Zamyatin to such a God-forsaken place. A man on his way up. A man with access to the corridors of power.

“It was then I remembered that you had been there in 1912.

Looking for Russian agents. Perhaps, I reasoned to myself, you had been mistaken. Perhaps there had indeed been agents, or at least one agent. If so, I argued to myself, there must have been a report, there must still be a report somewhere .. . and Nikolai Zamyatin must have found it and read it.”

Abruptly, Winterpole reached out a hand and cleared a space where fresh condensation had fogged the windscreen. Outside, the snow still fell, its faint flakes drifting down past the street-lamp, remote and colourless, like shadows falling from another planet.

“I instructed my best agent in Moscow to look for the report. It took him a week to find it. Or, to be precise, to find the file it had been in. The report itself was missing Zamyatin had either kept it or destroyed it, there was no way of knowing which. There was, however, a second file in Badmayeff’s hand. It contained a synopsis.

of the full report, intended for the eyes of the Tsar himself. The synopsis is less than a foolscap page in length and it tells us very little. But it does make one thing clear: Maisky and Skrypnik were sent to Tibet expressly to search for something. And whatever it was, they found it.

“What is also clear is that their discovery did not go back to Russia with their Mongol guide. It was left in Tibet. Badmayeff’s synopsis ends with a request for further finance in order to kit out an expedition to bring it back. But war broke out in Europe and everybody started waving flags, so no expedition was ever sent.

Until this year. Until Nikolai Zamyatin appointed himself to the task.”

Somewhere, footsteps sounded on hard ground and faded again.

Someone was reclaiming the streets from Sunday’s violence. A light went on in a room opposite and was extinguished a few seconds later. A dog barked once and was silent. The night continued.

“What has any of this to do with me or my son?” Christopher asked again.

Winterpole leaned his forehead against the cold rim of the

steering-wheel and breathed out slowly.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I wish to God I knew, but I don’t. I swear that’s the truth.”

“Then why .. .”

“Go through all this? Because, Christopher, although I cannot begin to explain it to you, I know that there is a connection. So far, all I know is that you were in the Kailas region eight years ago. And Nikolai Zamyatin was there four months ago.”

“You mean that’s what brought you all the way up here? My son is kidnapped and you come here talking about coincidences. You tell me stories about a man I’ve never seen or heard of.”

Winterpole did not answer at once. Outside, the snowflakes danced as he came closer to the heart of the thing. They were all dancing: himself and Christopher Wylam, and somewhere far away, Christopher’s son and a man called Zamyatin, all caught in a Dance of Death, turning round and round in the still darkness like figures on an old clock.

“There’s something else,” he said at last, his voice flat and

emotionless.

“Go on.”

“Last month,” he said, ‘a Tibetan monk arrived in Kalimpong in northern India. He was dying: he’d come over the high passes during some very bad weather. Somehow we’re not sure exactly how he managed to get a message to a man called Mishig.

Mishig is a Mongol trader with his base in Kalimpong. He’s also an agent for the Russians. Until the Revolution, he worked quite happily for the Tsarist regime. Now he’s a messenger-boy for the Bolsheviks .. . and just as happy. He keeps them informed about traffic to and from Tibet. Low-grade information mostly, but from time to time it throws up pearls. So they’ve given him a small radio transmitter that he uses to communicate with a controller in Calcutta, whose identity is still unknown to us.

“We know that Mishig’s control is able to get messages through to Moscow and Europe, but we haven’t yet worked out his system.

In the meantime, we go on monitoring all the signals that pass between Mishig and Calcutta.”

There was a pause. Winterpole took a deep breath.

“On the tenth of November, we intercepted a message to Calcutta from Mishig. It was marked “urgent” and had been encoded quite differently to any of his previous signals. And it was signed with the code-name “Zima”. That’s Russian for “Winter”.

It’s the official code-name for Nikolai Zamyatin.”

Winterpole paused again. Christopher sensed that he was reluctant to get to the point.

“Exactly what did this message say?” he asked.

“You understand, Christopher,” Winterpole said in a quiet voice, ‘that there can be no going back. Once I have told you, you won’t be able to leave it alone. I can still spare you, I can still keep silent.

It’s your decision.”

“Tell me. I have to know.” He felt the tension in his stomach tighten into a knotted cord. Outside, the snowflakes danced and fell.

“He asked for information,” Winterpole said.

“Information about an Englishman called Christopher John Wylam, who had worked for British intelligence in India. And about his son. A boy called William.”

The undertow had him firmly in its grip at last, and he could feel himself going under. Thin hands flailing, tearing the sunlight out of the sky. He said nothing.

“Three weeks after that,” the other man went on, inexorable now he had begun, ‘we got hold of a signal from Calcutta to Mishig. It said they had tracked you down in a place called Hexham in England. There was a request for further instructions.”

He paused.

“I’m afraid that’s where things went a bit wrong,” he said.

“We thought Mishig would send another message to Calcutta later the same day. He was due to despatch one of his routine signals. But he never made the broadcast. He took the next train from Siliguri to Calcutta. We’re certain he carried the instructions to his control in person either orally or in writing, it doesn’t matter. That was six days ago.”

Christopher looked at Winterpole.

“You knew about this and you didn’t notify me. You knew something might happen, but you kept quiet.”

“Try to understand, Christopher. We needed to know what Zamyatin is up to. We had to let them show their hand. I was afraid you might do something to prevent them if you knew. I’m sorry.”

“They might have killed him. For all I know, he’s dead now.

And they did kill Father Middleton. For what?”

“We still need to know, Christopher. What Zamyatin is doing in Tibet. What he wants with your son. I’d like you to go to India, to Kalimpong. And if it’s necessary, to Tibet. I think that’s where they’re taking your son.”

“I know,” Christopher replied. He looked away from Winterpole.

Outside, the shadows of night were descending on grey and mottled wings that troubled the snow-filled air.

“I know,” he said. And the snow stopped falling and there was only darkness.

Nedong Pass, southern Tibet, January 1921 He was cold. There had been more snow that morning, white, blinding snow that had whipped at his face and hands. It had blotted out everything: the road, the rocks, the footprints they left behind. It was impossible to tell whether they were still in the pass or not; he thought they might have lost their way. Tobchen was frightened, he could tell. Once, the pony had almost slipped on a ledge over a steep precipice. Since then, Tobchen had made him walk, holding the animal’s bridle, stiff with frost. The old man went in front, repeating mantras endlessly, spinning his prayer wheel like a madman.

Since early afternoon, the snow had given way to a fierce wind, a wind so sharp it threatened to tear the skin from a man’s bones.

It rose to gale force like this every afternoon. The day before, they had passed a group of travellers wearing masks, dark masks of leather painted with the features of demons. He had been frightened and had called out.

“Tobchen, Tobchen who are those men? Why are they dressed like that?”

The old man had looked up and shouted back. The wind snatched his words away and he waited until the boy came alongside him.

“Don’t worry, my lord. They are only travellers. They wear the masks to protect their faces from the wind. And they paint them to frighten the demons.”

The men had gone past without a word, silent and incurious, harried by the wind, dark figures driven remorselessly into the void. He and Tobchen had been left alone again to battle on against the elements.

They stopped just after sunset. The old man found dried yak dung

somewhere and lit a fire. There was tea and tsampa as always, but

Samdup did not complain. And if he had, Tobchen would not have

listened to him. He was a trulku, but he was still a child, and

Tobchen treated him with a mixture of awe and sternness that allowed for no lapses in discipline. He was worried that the old man was growing tired. He wondered how much longer the journey would last.

“How much farther to Gharoling?” he asked.

The old monk looked up, his tea cup clasped in frost-bitten fingers.

“Soon, my lord, soon.”

“But how soon, Tobchen? Tomorrow?”

The lama shook his head.

“No, not tomorrow,” he said.

“But with the help of your prayers and the grace of Lord Chenrezi, it will not be long.”

“Will it be the day after tomorrow, Tobchen?” the boy insisted.

“Drink your tea, khushog, and don’t ask so many questions. When you have finished, I will light a lamp and we will study the Kangyur together. Your education must not be neglected just because you are travelling.”

The boy fell silent and sipped his tea, lifting out from time to time the balls of tsampa that provided the only real nourishment in his meal. The wind was still high, but they sat in the shelter of an outcrop of rocks, listening to it pass. The heavens were invisible behind acres of heavy cloud.

“Why are we going to Gharoling, Tobchen?” Samdup asked.

“I have told you before. To visit Geshe Khyongla Rinpoche. The Rinpoche is a great teacher, greater than I. It is time for you to study the Sutras. Then you will be ready to undertake the study of the Tantras. You must know both to fulfill your destiny.”

“But there are teachers at Dorje-la Gompa.”

“Yes, there are good teachers there. But none as great as Khyongla Rinpoche. Do you remember when we studied the Lama Nachupa together, how it described the duty of a disciple towards his guru?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Now it is time for you to put all its counsels into practice. You have not come among us to learn. You have come to remember all you knew before. The Rinpoche will instruct you how to do that.”

There was a pause. Snow had begun to fall again. It would be a cold night. The boy’s voice sounded faint in the darkness.

“Was there danger at Dorje-la Gompa?”

Unseen, the old monk stiffened.

“Why do you think there was danger, my lord?”

“I sensed it. When the stranger came. I sense it now. Am I right?”

There was silence for a moment, then the old man answered.

“You are not mistaken, khushog. There is danger.” He paused.

“Great danger.”

To me?”

“Yes. To you.”

“Is that why we are fleeing to Gharoling? Is that why we left at night?”

The old man sighed.

“Yes We will be safe there. Khyongla Rinpoche understands. If if anything should happen to me, lord, make your way to Gharoling. They will expect you there. Do not attempt to return to Dorje-la. Do not go anywhere but Gharoling. Do not trust anyone but Khyongla Rinpoche and those he advises you to trust.”

Silence fell again as the boy digested what he had been told The world was proving to be a harder place than he had once thought it. Then his voice broke into the old man’s thoughts again.

“Is it my other body” he asked.

“Is he responsible for this?”

Tobchen shook his head.

“No, my lord. I am sure he knows nothing of you. At least I think not. When it is time, he will be told.”

“Would he try to kill me if he knew?”

The lama did not answer immediately. So many incarnations, he thought. They began as children and grew old and died. And were born again. An endless cycle.

“Yes,” he said.

“I think so. I think he would have you killed ‘

Kalimpong

Kalimpong, northern India, January 1921 Kalimpong dozed in the thin January sunshine. It dreamed of wool and cotton and bright Kashmiri shawls, of Chinese silks, deer antlers and musk, of Indian sugar, glass, and penny candles, of long, jangling caravans coming down from the Chumbi valley out of Tibet, of traders bringing their wares in gunny sacks from the plains of India. But on the high passes to the north, snow fell in easy splendour, thick and white, falling in a trance like the substance of dreams on rocks as cold as sepulchres. For two weeks now, no-one had dared to venture over the Nathu pass. Trade had been brisk with the arrival of the last caravan from Gyantse, but now it had fallen off again, and the tiny market town waited for word that the large consignment due from Lhasa was at last on its way.

Christopher Wylam let the clear air fill his lungs. He felt better in Kalimpong. The town itself was little more than a trading-post on the outskirts of an empire, an entrepot for traders coming down from Tibet with wool and yak-tails to exchange for cheap manufactured goods and more expensive fabrics. But it stood on the edge of mystery. In the air, Christopher could already taste the snow and ice of the Himalayas. They lay on his tongue like a flavour remembered from childhood, at once familiar and exotic, conjuring up memories of silent journeys in the dim, falling snow.

He had only to lift his eyes to see the mountains themselves standing silently in the distance beyond green foothills. They rose up like ramparts barring access to the great Tibetan plateau beyond, a forbidden kingdom jealously guarded by its protector deities. And, more prosaically, by armed Tibetan border guards.

As he stepped down from his pony, the spices and perfumes of the bazaar brought back to him vivid memories of his father. He remembered walking here with him, followed by their chaprasst, Jit Bahadur. And behind would come his mother dressed in white, carried in an open dandy on the shoulders of four impeccably dressed servants. That had been in the days when his father was stationed nearby as British Resident at the native court of Mahfuz Sultan.

Arthur Wylam had been an important man, appointed to his post by the Viceroy himself. The Wylams had been Anglo-Indians for three generations: Christopher’s grandfather William had come out with the Company just before the Mutiny and had stayed on afterwards as an ICS District Magistrate in Secunderabad. Young Christopher had been brought up on stories of the great Raj families the Rivett-Carnacs, the Maynes and the Ogilvies and had been told repeatedly that it was his duty, as it would one day be that of his own son, to add the name of Wylam to that illustrious roll.

Kalimpong had scarcely changed. The main street, a rambling affair of little shops, rang to the sound of hawkers and muleteers as it had always done. Here, Bengali merchants rubbed shoulders with little Nepali Sherpas and fierce-looking nomads from Tibet’s eastern province of Kham; pretty Bhutanese women with their distinctive short-cropped hair collected glances from young trap as making their first pilgrimage to Buddh Gaya; cheerful Chinese traders argued with sharp Marwari merchants and made a profit out of it. On a flat stone in the middle of the bazaar, a blind man sat begging, his eyes running sores, his fingers bent into an attitude of perpetual entreaty. Christopher tossed a coin into the upturned hand and the old man smiled a toothless smile.

Christopher’s father had always preferred the bustle and anarchy of Kalimpong to the stiff formality of Darjeeling, the British administrative centre some fifteen miles to the west. How many times had he told Christopher that, if he was to live in India, he must learn to be an Indian? Arthur Wylam had in many ways despised his own caste the Brahmins, the heaven-born of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Political Service for their insularity and prejudice.

The Civil List, with its tedious enumerations of precedence, the clubs

with their ridiculous rules of etiquette and protocol, the effective

apartheid that made even high-born and educated Indians outsiders in

their own country all had at one time or another drawn his wrath. His

love for the Indian people, for their languages, their customs, their

religions, their foolishness and their

wisdom, had made him an effective and eloquent intermediary ‘ between the Government of India and the various native rulers to whose courts he had been assigned. But his scorn for convention in a society riddled by it the way a chest of drawers is riddled by worms had earned him enemies.

1 Christopher left his pony at a stable and took his bags to a small t rest-house run by an old Bhutanese woman near McBride’s Wool Depot. The rest-house was noisy and smelly, and it teemed with energetic little Kalimpong fleas whose great-great-grandparents I had come to town in a particularly noxious sheepskin from Y Shigatse; but it was the sort of place where no-one would ask too many questions about who a person was or what he was doing in town.

i He could have stayed in the Government guest-house, a small dak-bungalow just outside town, complete with potted plants and f ice and servants. But that would have involved getting chitties in Calcutta and travelling as a Government official the last thing either Christopher or Winterpole wanted. As far as the Governt ment of India was concerned, Christopher Wylam was a private , citizen visiting the hill country merely to relive some pleasant childhood memories and recover from his wife’s death. If there was trouble and questions were asked, Mr. Wylam would not officially exist.

When Christopher came downstairs, the rest-house was in turmoil. A

party of Nepalese had arrived after a journey of almost three weeks

from Kathmandu. They had come to find work in

India, in the tea-plantations round Darjeeling. There were about a dozen of them, poor men in ragged clothes, farmers whose barley had failed that year, leaving them without enough food for the winter. They had come to the rest-house on the recommendation of a Nepalese trader whom they had met on their way, but now the bossy little landlady was telling them there was no room for so many.

There was little likelihood of the scene turning genuinely ugly such outbursts seldom went beyond words or, at the most, some harmless pushing and shoving. But Christopher felt sorry for the men. He had lived with peasants just like them in the past, and had travelled widely in Nepal: he could understand what it was that had forced them to leave their homes and families at this time of year to make such a hazardous and uncomfortable journey, carrying their provisions on their own backs.

What a contrast there was with his own journey to India.

Winterpole had arranged for Christopher to fly there in a Handley Page biplane by way of Egypt, Iraq and Persia. While these men had been trudging through snow and ice, buffeted by high winds and in constant danger, he had flown like a bird across the world, his worst discomforts cramp and a little cold.

He felt an impulse to intervene, but checked himself just as he was about to step forward. Instinct gave way before training: the rules of his trade said ‘do not draw attention to yourself, merge into the background and stay there, do nothing curious or out of character’. He had come to Kalimpong in the guise of a poor English box-wallah from Calcutta a trader down on his luck and desperate for a new venture away from the scenes of his failure.

No-one would give such a man a second glance: he was a common enough sight in the doss-houses of the big cities and the flop-downs of the frontier bazaars.

Christopher turned away from the shouting peasants and went into the rest-house’s common room. This was the centre of the house’s activities, where guests cooked their own food during the day and where those without bedrooms slept by night.

The room was dark and grimy and smelt of sweat and old food.

In the corners, bales of wool and gunny sacks filled with rice or barley were stacked up high. By one wall, an old man and woman were cooking something over a small iron tripod. Near them, under a greasy-looking blanket, someone else was trying to sleep. A fly buzzed monotonously as it toured the room, out of season, dying, finding nothing of interest. A girl’s voice singing came through the half-shuttered window. She sang in a dreamy, faraway voice, a Bengali song about Krishna, simple but possessed:

Bondhur bdngshl bdje bujhi bipine Shamer bdngshi bdje bujhi bipine.

I hear my lover’s flute playing in the forest;

I hear the dark lord’s flute playing in the forest Christopher imagined the girl: pretty, dark-eyed, with tiny breasts and hair pulled tight in long plaits, like the images of Radha that hung on the walls of so many homes. For a moment, he wondered what she was really like, singing in the alley outside as if her heart would break. Then he called out, breaking the spell of her voice, and a boy came.

“Yes, sahib. What do you want?”

“Tea. I’d like some tea.”

“Ystrang?

“No, not bloody ystrang! Weak tea, Indian-style. And get me a chotapeg to go with it.”

“No whiskey here, sahib. Sorry.”

“Then bloody get some, Abdul. Here,

take this.” He tossed a grimy rupee to the boy.

“Step lively! Juldi,juldi.”

The boy dashed out and Christopher leaned back against the wall. He hated the role he had chosen to play, but he played it because it made him inconspicuous. That sickened him more than anything that it was possible to be inconspicuous by being rude and that politeness to a native would have made him stand out like a sore thumb.

The fly buzzed and the girl’s voice continued outside, rising and ,

falling as she went about her chores. Not since his arrival in “

Calcutta had Christopher had time to sit and think. The journey had

been all rush and bustle: the hurried preparations for departure, the

clumsy, rushed farewells, the staggered flight from staging post to

staging post across the world, the hot, sleepless railway journey from

Calcutta to Siliguri, and finally the trek by pony to

Kalimpong. No time to reflect on what he was doing. No time to reconsider. Just the world rushing past beneath him, water and sand and silent green valleys where time stood still. And yet always a growing realization of what it was he had embarked on, a tight knot of fear in his chest that grew tighter and larger with every stage he travelled.

He had thought about William constantly, trying to understand how the

kidnapping could possibly fit into Zamyatin’s plans, whatever they

might be. Apart from his own expedition to Kailas in search of Russian

agents, he could see no link between himself and this man. Was William

no more than bait, intended to bring

Christopher to the Russian, for reasons he could not begin to guess? That seemed unnecessarily elaborate and clumsy. Not for the first time, he reflected that Winterpole might not be telling him the whole story, or even that what he had told him was largely fabrication.

The boy returned carrying a tray on which stood a cheap, battered teapot, a cracked cup, and a small glass of whiskey coloured liquid that Christopher took to be anything but whiskey.

There was a low wooden table nearby; the boy set the tray down and poured tea into the germ-laden cup. It was strong, the way all Indians imagined Europeans liked to drink it. Christopher shrugged: he would soon be drinking Tibetan tea made with salt and butter why turn up his nose at Darjeeling’s finest?

“It’s quiet outside,” he said.

“Have the Nepahs gone?”

“Yes, sahib. Not nice people. Very poor. No room here for them.”

“Where will they go?”

The boy shrugged. What did it matter where they went? He had already consigned them to the nothingness his mind reserved for everyone of no immediate use to him. He turned to go.

“Just a moment,” said Christopher.

“Can you tell me how to find the Knox Homes the orphanage” A shadow seemed to pass briefly across the boy’s face, then it was gone and he was smiling again. Yet not really smiling.

“The orphanage, sahib? What would you want with the orphanage? There is nothing there, sahib, nothing but children.”

“Listen, Abdul, I asked for directions, not advice. How do I find the place.”

Again that curious expression in the boy’s eyes, then he shrugged.

“It’s very easy, sahib. Have you seen the tower of the church?”

Christopher nodded. It was the most prominent landmark in Kalimpong.

“The orphanage is a red building beside the church. A big building.

With many windows. You will see it, sahib, once you are at the church.

Will that be all, sahib?”

Christopher nodded absently, and the boy turned again to go.

Then, in the doorway, half of his body caught in a pale shaft of sunlight, half in shadow, he turned back.

“Are you a Christian, sahib?”

Christopher hardly understood the question Just as all Indians were Hindus or Muslims to the uninitiated European, so all white people were Christians to all but a few Indians.

“I’m not sure,” Christopher replied, wondering if it was the right answer to give.

“Should I be?”

“I don’t know, sahib. You don’t look like a missionary.”

Christopher frowned, then understood.

“You mean the orphanage?”

“Yes, sahib.”

Christopher shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a missionary.”

“But you are going to the Knox Homes.”

“Yes. Do only missionaries go there?”

The boy shook his head.

“I don’t think so, sahib. All sorts of people go there. It’s a very ‘ important place. Important people go there.” Again that odd look.

“And you don’t think I look important enough or Christian enough to go there is that it?”

The boy shrugged. He felt he had spoken out of turn. It was never good to cross a European.

“I don’t know, sahib. It’s none of my business. Sorry, sahib.”

He turned and slipped into the waiting shadows.

“Boy,” called Christopher. The boy returned.

“What’s your name, boy?”

, “Abdul,” the boy replied, mumbling the word as though it had a bad taste.

i “No, it isn’t. You’re not a Muslim. And even if you were, Abdul’s not a proper name. Even I know that. So what’s your name?”

“Lhaten, sahib.”

“Laten, eh?” Christopher mispronounced the name deliberately.

“Very good, Laten. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Thank you, sahib.”

Lhaten glanced curiously at Christopher once more, then left.

Christopher sipped his tea. It tasted vile. He put the cup down and quaffed the cholapeg in a single swallow. It wasn’t much better.

Outside, the girl had stopped singing. The sound of men and animals from the bazaar had grown duller. An afternoon silence had fallen over Kalimpong. Christopher sighed as he put down the chipped whiskey glass. He was back.

Mishig, the Mongol trade agent who had sent the messages to Calcutta, had disappeared. According to George Frazer, the British Agent, he had returned to Kalimpong briefly, then left without warning about ten days earlier. Frazer told Christopher what he could about the monk who had brought the original message out of Tibet.

He was called Tsewong. It seemed that he had battled his way over the Nathu-la pass, down through Sikkim, and almost to the outskirts of Kalimpong before collapsing from exhaustion. According to the report received by Frazer, he was found on the roadside by a passing farmer on the fourteenth of December feverish, delirious, and near to death.

The farmer had brought him on his cart to the orphanage, where the Reverend John Carpenter and his wife had cared for him until the Mission doctor returned from a visit to a nearby village. The doctor had advised against Tsewong’s removal to the Presbyterian Hospital and had remained at the orphanage all that night. The monk had died the next morning, apparently without saying anything intelligible.

Before handing the body over to the Tibetan agent, who was to arrange for his cremation, the doctor had searched the man’s pockets or, to be precise, the pouch formed by the fold of his robes, in which Tibetan men carry their personal possessions.

In the pouch, apart from the normal accompaniments of a lama - a wooden teacup (also used as a bowl from which to eat tsampa), the traditional metal water-bottle, normally hung from the sash, a yellow wooden rosary of one hundred and eight beads, a small gau or talisman-box and some medicinal herbs the doctor found a letter written in excellent and idiomatic English, asking ‘whomsoever it may concern’ to provide the bearer, Tsewong Gyaltsen, with every facility, since he travelled as the personal emissary of a Tibetan religious dignitary identified only as the “Dorje Lama’.

A second paper had been folded into the same packet as the letter: it contained only five lines of writing, but was in Tibetan and could not be deciphered by the doctor. He had thought it best not to give either the letter or the paper to the Tibetan Agent along with the monk’s other possessions. Instead, he showed them to Frazer, who had the paper translated by his munshi. It turned out to be very simple: instructions on how to find the Mongol Trade Agent Mishig.

One thing nagged at Christopher’s thoughts while he made his way to the

orphanage in accordance with Lhaten’s directions: if the monk Tsewong

had been dying when he got to Kalimpong, and if he had in fact died the

morning after his arrival at the Knox

Homes, how on earth had he managed to convey Zamyatin’s message to Mishig? Had someone else taken the message on his behalf? If so, who?

The orphanage, like the church beside which it was built, looked as if it had been transported bodily, like the palace in “Aladdin’, from the Scottish lowlands to the place where it now stood. Here in Kalimpong, not only did the Christian god reveal himself in open defiance of the myriad tutelary deities dwelling in the mountains above, but Scottish Presbyterianism ranged itself against the questionable mores of the unredeemed masses of India below.

Although the rest of Kalimpong luxuriated in a cold winter sunlight that seemed to have been bounced off the gleaming white slopes to the north, the Knox Homes and the pathway that led up to them were sunk in gloom, as though the very stones of the building rejected all but the grey est and most melancholy of lights.

The path was lined with thick, dark green cypresses that seemed to have stepped straight out of a painting by Bocklin. Everything was steeped in shadow not merely touched or etched by it, but steeped in it, tormented by it. The Reverend Carpenter had brought more to Kalimpong than Presbyterianism and God.

The pathway led directly to a short flight of steps that in its turn led to a heavy wooden door. There was nowhere else to go. Feeling Catholic and English and travel-stained, Christopher lifted the heavy brass knocker and announced himself loudly to the hosts of Christendom within.

The door was opened by an Indian girl of about fifteen, dressed in what he took to be the uniform of the Knox Homes: a dark grey dress fastened at the waist by a black leather belt. There was nothing welcoming about her face or her manner. The slight trace of a Scottish accent alerted Christopher to the possibility that she might now carry in her soul more than just a trace of Calvinist iron.

“Would you please tell the Reverend Carpenter that Mr. Wylam, about whom Mr. Frazer spoke to him recently, has arrived in Kalimpong and would like to see him at his earliest convenience.”

The girl looked him up and down, clearly disapproving of what she saw. In the Homes, the girls were taught of cleanliness, godliness, and chastity, and the half-shaven man on the doorstep looked very much as though he were deficient in all three. But he spoke like an English gentleman and carried himself like one.

“Yes, sahib. May I have your card, sahib?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, ‘but I’ve just come out from England. I haven’t had time to have my cards printed yet. Would you please just give the Reverend Carpenter my name and message?”

“The Reverend Carpenter is very busy today, sahib. Perhaps it is better you come back tomorrow. With your card.”

“I’ve just told you. I don’t have a card, young lady. Now, please do as I ask and give my message .. .”

At that moment, the young lady was precipitately displaced in the doorway by a thin, Presbyterian-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties.

“I am Moira Carpenter,” she said in a polite Edinburgh accent that would have crushed glass.

“Do I know you?”

“I regret not, madam,” Christopher said.

“My name is Wylam, Christopher Wylam. I understand that Mr. Frazer, the Trade Agent, spoke with your husband concerning me last week. Or so I was given to understand before I left Calcutta.”

“Ah, yes. Mr. Wylam. How good of you to call. I was expecting . ah, someone different.”

When Moira Carpenter said ‘different’, she meant exactly that.

She fitted her surroundings as though, by an act of simultaneous decree in the mind of John Knox’s dour and unsociable God, they had been brought into existence in one and the same cosmic instant: dark things set down in the Indian sunlight, as though to hamper it. Like someone in perpetual mourning, she wore black a long dress without the vice of trimmings or ornament, more a cage for the body than a fabric for the soul.

A mother if that is not an unsuitable use of the word to dozens of destitute Indians, she had herself given up trying to have children at the age of twenty-eight. Her womb, she had been candidly informed by doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was just not up to it, and the four deformed foetuses she had theretofore delivered into immediate oblivion had borne the doctors out. At the heart of her, something was broken, something that neither doctors nor prayers could fix.

As a Christian woman whose duty in life lay in the replenishment of that pool out of which the good Lord would one day choose His elect, she spoke bitterly of her loss. She sought reason for her failure in a sense of her own sinful unworthiness. But privately, she rejoiced in her barrenness, for she had never had much liking for children and none at all for the turgid conjugal act that necessarily preceded their procreation. She had never understood why the Lord had not thought of a quicker, less embarrassing, and more sanitary method.

Now, she devoted herself, inter aha, to the welfare of the orphans of Kalimpong, whom she had helped make world famous through the pages of a thousand parish magazines, and to the furthering of the Mission’s plans to bring the Christian witness to the benighted heathens of northern Sikkim and Tibet. She was forty-four, flat chested nervous of temperament, and given to kidney troubles.

She was going to die two years later in an accident involving two

Tibetan ponies, an over-laden mule, and a two-hundred-foot drop near Kampa-Dzong. In the meantime, however, she was on one side of the doorway and Christopher on the other.

“I’m sorry if I don’t match your expectations, Mrs. Carpenter,” said Christopher as politely as he could.

“If it’s inconvenient, I’ll call again. But I am in Kalimpong on urgent business, and I would like to start my investigations as soon as possible.”

“Investigations? What have you come to investigate, Mr. Wylam?

I assure you, there is nothing here to investigate.”

“I think I will be the judge of that, Mrs. Carpenter. If you would kindly let your husband know that I am here.”

The formidable presence turned and barked into the gloomy interior of the entrance hall.

“Girl! Tell the Reverend Carpenter that a person is here demanding to see him. An English person. He says his name is Wylam.”

The girl departed, but Mrs. Carpenter remained, as though afraid Christopher might have designs on her brass knocker. She had brought the knocker all the way from a shop in Princes Street herself, and had no wish to see it fall into the hands of a man without a visiting card.

In less than a minute, the girl returned and, still invisible, muttered something to her mistress. The presence shifted and gestured wordlessly to Christopher to enter. As he stepped through the door, childhood tales of Protestant irregularities chattered in the back of his mind. The girl led him along a narrow, carpeted passage dimly lit by weak electric bulbs to a dark-panelled door.

He knocked and a thin voice bade him enter.

‘ll John Carpenter’s study, like his wife, his faith, and his own person, had been carried wholesale from Scotland and set down, virgo intacta, in the heart of heathendom. Nothing Indian, nothing dark skinned, nothing indelicately foreign had been permitted to obtrude itself into this small, un incensed sanctuary of Christian virility. On the walls, the heads and antlers of Highland stags braved the moths and biting insects of the north-east frontier, while men in kilts and bristling beards glared their defiance of the heathen and his gods.

Had Jesus Christ himself walked in dark skinned, Jewish, and mundane the good Reverend Carpenter would have made haste to convert him there and then and to have him baptized Angus or Duncan. The Aramaic-speaking Jewish teacher from Nazareth was nothing or worse to John and Moira Carpenter. Their Jesus was a pale Galilean, blond, blue eyed and beardless, walking miraculously above the wild flowers and heather of a Scottish hillside.

John Carpenter was standing, hands clasped behind his back, peering at Christopher through a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles. He was a man in his early fifties, spare, slightly bent, balding, with teeth that would have made a dentist turn to drink and wild women. He looked, on the whole, as though he had seen better days. Christopher thought he seemed nervous.

“Mr. Wylam?” he said, in an accent to match his wife’s.

“Do take a seat. We’ve not had the pleasure of meeting before. Is this your first visit to Kalimpong?”

That was a subject Christopher preferred to stay clear of.

“I’ve been here before,” he said.

“Once or twice. Just short visits.

No time to socialize.”

Carpenter glanced at him sharply, as though to suggest that socializing was hardly an activity men like Christopher engaged in.

“Or go to church?” The little eyes twinkled behind thick lenses.

“Ah, no. I’m afraid .. . that is, I’m not a Presbyterian, Dr.

Carpenter ‘ “Oh, too bad, too bad. Church of England, naturally.”

This was getting off to a bad start.

“Well, no, not exactly. More Roman Catholic really.”

Christopher was sure the men in kilts stiffened and drew in ghostly breaths.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wylam,” Carpenter persisted, ‘but I don’t quite understand. Surely you cannot be “more” or “less” Roman. The Church of Rome is not a church of compromise. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is that not so?”

“Yes, I expect it is.”

“You were brought up in your faith, I expect?”

“Yes. Ah, Dr. Carpenter, I .. .”

“Of course. That is usually the way. There are few converts to the cult of saints. The Anglicans sometimes turn in that direction, to be sure. But they are half-way there already, more’s the pity.”

“I’m sure. Now, if you don’t mind, I .. .”

“Do you know,” Carpenter continued, utterly disregarding Christopher, “I have often thought that your faith meaning no disrespect has much in common with the faiths one encounters in this dark wilderness. I think of the Hindus with their extravagant gods, their priests, and their offerings. Or the Buddhists of Tibet, with their hierarchies of saints and their candles always burning on altars of gold and silver. Of course, I have never set foot in their savage temples, but I .. .”

“Dr. Carpenter,” Christopher interrupted.

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t come here to discuss theology. Another time, perhaps. For the moment, I have other matters that require my attention.”

Rebuffed, the long-suffering martyr of Kalimpong smiled a gap toothed smile and nodded.

“Yes, of course. Mr. Frazer did mention to me that you were coming and that you might want to ask me some questions. He did not tell me what these might concern, but said they were of a confidential nature.

I’m sure I will do my best to answer them, though I cannot imagine how

your affairs could possibly concern me, Mr. Wylam. I know nothing of

trade or commerce. My one and only aim here is the purchase of souls

from damnation, though

the penny I pay is not a copper one. Nor silver nor gold, for that matter. I deal in .. .”

“I’m sorry if Mr. Frazer was mysterious with you. I am here in Kalimpong on an important matter, but one that need not concern you. Nevertheless, you may be able to assist me. I require some information, information you may have. I understand you were responsible for looking after a Tibetan monk who died here some weeks ago. A man called Tsewong. Anything you know of him would be of use to me.”

The missionary gave Christopher a curious look, as though that had not been the question he had expected It seemed to have thrown him slightly off balance. The smile left his face and was replaced by a keen, probing expression. He rubbed the tip of one finger along the edge of his nose, lifting his spectacles a fraction.

He was clearly weighing his answer. When it came at last, it was cautious.

“I cannot see of what concern the monk could be to you or to Mr. Frazer. He was not a trader. Just an unfortunate devil-worshipper with scarcely a penny to his name. May I ask the reason for your interest?”

Christopher shook his head.

“It’s a private matter. I assure you it has nothing whatever to do with trade. I merely wished to know whether he said anything of importance while in your care, whether you recall anything that seemed significant at the time.”

The missionary looked sharply at Christopher.

“What would you deem significant? How am I to judge? I have already given an account to Mr. Frazer and to Norbhu Dzasa, the Tibetan Agent here.”

“But perhaps there was something that seemed trivial to you and was not put in your report, and yet would be of interest to me. I’m trying to find out how he came to Kalimpong, where he came from, whom he had come to see. You may have some clue that would help me.”

Carpenter reached up, removed his spectacles, and folded them up

carefully, one leg at a time, like a praying mantis folding an even

tinier victim in delicately articulated forelegs. For a moment, the

mild-mannered missionary had gone, to be replaced by another man

entirely. But the substitution lasted only a second before

Carpenter regained control of himself and straightened the mask he had allowed to slip. As carefully as before, with the same insect like deliberation, he unfolded his spectacles and replaced them exactly as they had been.

“The man was dying when he was brought to us,” he said.

“He died the next day. All that is in the report. Would that I could say he had gone straight to the arms of a merciful Saviour, but I cannot. He spoke deliriously of things I did not understand. I speak a little Tibetan, but only what suffices for conversations with the dzong-pongs and the shapes when they come to visit me.”

Christopher interrupted.

“Did anyone like that visit you while the monk was here? The Tibetan Agent, perhaps. I forget what you said his name was.”

“Norbhu Dzasa. No, Mr. Wylam, there were no visitors, unless you count Doctor Cormac. This man Tsewong died among strangers, I regret to say.”

“You say he spoke deliriously, that he muttered things you did not understand. Did he say anything at all about a message? Did he mention the name Zamyatin? Or my name, Wylam?”

Christopher was sure the little Scot reacted to the questions. He seemed to grow pale and then flush. Just for a second, the mask slipped again, then Carpenter was back in control.

“Absolutely not. I should have noticed something of that kind, I am sure. No, it was all gibberish about the gods and demons he had left behind him in the mountains. You know the sort of thing I mean.”

Christopher nodded. He did not believe a word of it.

“I see,” he said.

“Are any of your staff Tibetan? Or perhaps some of your orphans?”

Carpenter stood up and pushed his desk back.

“Mr. Wylam,” he expostulated, “I really would like to know just where you are driving with these questions. You are verging on the impertinent. I am willing to answer anything within reason, but questions about my staffer the children in my care pass the bounds of what I regard as proper or allowable. You are not, I take it, a policeman. Nor a government official, presumably. In which case, I would like to know what right you think you have to come here prying into my affairs and the affairs of this institution. In fact, I think it would be best all round if you were to leave at once.”

Christopher remained seated. He had succeeded in rattling the man.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to seem impertinent. I think it will be best if I explain. My son William was kidnapped two weeks ago. As yet, the motive for the kidnapping is not known. But I have reason to believe he was abducted on instructions contained in a message carried out of Tibet by this man Tsewong. I’m not at liberty to tell you why I think that to be the case. But I assure you my reasons are very serious.”

Carpenter sat down again slowly, as though something very sharp had punctured him. He looked more rattled than ever.

“Where exactly was your son when he was .. . ah, abducted?”

“At home, in England.”

“And you say this happened two weeks ago.”

“On the Sunday before Christmas. We had just left Mass.”

A look of sectarian distaste flickered over the missionary’s

face.

“You expect me to believe this?” he said. Christopher noticed that he had started playing nervously with a small ivory paperknife on the desk.

“It is not humanly possible for anyone to have been in England two weeks ago and to be in this room talking to me today. You know that as well as I do, unless you are completely insane. Goodbye, Mr. Wylam. You have wasted enough of my time.”

“Sit down. Please sit down and listen. I was in England until nine days ago, if you want me to be precise. There’s no mystery about how I got here. Certain friends in England arranged for me to be flown here in a biplane. The world is changing, Mr. Carpenter. Before long, everyone will fly to India.”

“And your son. The one you say was kidnapped. Where is he? Is he in India as well?”

Christopher shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“But, yes, I think he may be in

India. Or, more possibly, already on his way to Tibet.”

“Mr. Wylam, you may be telling the truth about how you got here. Modern science is truly miraculous: the good Lord has given us the means to spread His Gospel in the remotest regions of the globe. But the rest of your story makes no sense to me. I am truly sorry to hear about the kidnapping of your son. My wife and I shall pray for his return to you. But I do not see how I can be of any further help to you. The man who died here brought no messages. He said nothing coherent. He had no visitors. And now, forgive me, but there are urgent matters awaiting my attention.”

Carpenter stood up again and reached a hand across the desk.

Christopher followed suit. The missionary’s fingers felt dry and brittle.

“I’ll ask Jennie to show you out.” He reached for a small brass bell and rang it vigorously. An uneasy silence followed. Christopher could see that Carpenter was eager to be rid of him. What was he hiding? And who was he frightened of? Abruptly, the missionary broke into his thoughts.

“Mr. Wylam,” he said.

“You must excuse me. I have been very short with you. I am under a great deal of pressure at the moment.

The Lord’s work makes demands on us. And no doubt you yourself are feeling great anxiety on behalf of your son. You must be very concerned for him.

“Would it help to make amends if I were to invite you to dine with us this evening? Just my wife and myself. A simple meal, I fear: this is a house of charity, not the palace of Dives. But we have ample for a guest. And perhaps a little sympathetic company will help to ease your troubled heart.”

Ordinarily, Christopher would have declined. The thought of sitting through a meal of charitable frugality with the black gowned Mrs. Carpenter and her desiccated spouse did not fill him with eager thoughts. But the very fact of the invitation both unnecessary and, thought Christopher, out of character- added to his conviction that Carpenter was uneasy about something.

“I’d be pleased to accept. Thank you.”

“Good. I’m glad. We dine at seven. There are no formalities.

Come a little earlier and I will show you something of our work before you eat.”

There was a knock, then the Indian girl who had opened the front door to Christopher entered.

“Jennie,” Carpenter said.

“Mr. Wylam is leaving now. He will be dining with us this evening. When you have shown him to the door, will you please ask Mrs. Carpenter to join me in my study?”

The girl curtsied but said nothing. Christopher shook hands with Carpenter again, then followed the girl out of the study.

John Carpenter remained standing at his desk, his hands resting on its top as though for support. He heard the front door open and close and the sound of Jennie’s footsteps going towards his wife’s sitting room. The wing of the orphanage in which he and Mrs. Carpenter lived was soft and silent, filled with carpets and velvet hangings, dark, papered walls and heavy chintz furniture. Sounds were muffled, light was turned to shadow, the air was thick and unnatural.

Behind him, on a low shelf, a clock ticked and ticked, forlorn and remorseless. He closed his eyes, as though to pray, but his lips remained tightly shut.

Kalimpong fell away from him like a dream. All the spired and domed and pillared cities of India fell away, leaving nothing but a thin ochre dust hanging in the air. He was alone, walking along a dirt road that led to the residence of the tsong-chi, the Tibetan Trade Agent. Above him, to the north, white mountains hung in the sky like castles of snow and ice. In the air above them, thick clouds like dragons’ breaths swirled in a tattered swarm.

As he looked at the mountains he felt descend upon him a sense of unease he had first experienced eleven years earlier, not long after his marriage. He had brought Elizabeth north to Simla for the summer season, and at one point they had gone up to the Himalaya foothills. On the second day, an icy wind had come down from the north, stirring the trees in their garden. They had stood on the terrace together, drinking cold whiskey in heavy glasses and watching the clouds shift and scatter above the mountains.

“Can you feel it?” Elizabeth had asked, and Christopher had known instinctively what she meant. All the crude power, all the vast material strength of their civilization was massing about the quiet places of the earth. Christopher could feel it now as he had felt it all those years before, but redoubled in its potency. Like an octopus, its tentacles were reaching into every corner of the world, stroking at first, then squeezing, and finally draining the very life from all it touched. Ancient places, sanctuaries, the dark and the untouched realms all were being turned into an endless battlefield where tanks roamed like black beetles and new men in new uniforms danced in a dim ballet.

He found the tsong-cki’s residence in a small valley about a mile from town. It was a small house built in Tibetan style, with touches of Chinese ornamentation on the roof. At the door, a tall prayer wheel stood like a sort of guardian, reminding the visitor that religion, not trade, lay at the heart of every Tibetan.

The tsong-chi, Norbhu Dzasa, was at home. Christopher had originally planned on getting an introduction from Frazer, but in its absence he had produced one for himself. It wasn’t much to look at, but he didn’t want it to be. Here in Kalimpong, he had to act the part he had imposed on himself.

He handed the letter of introduction to the tsong-chi’s grave little Nepalese servant and asked him to transmit it to his master. The little man looked at Christopher as if to suggest that his very existence was an impertinence and his calling without an appointment not far from a capital offence. He took the letter, harrumphed loudly, and disappeared down a dark passage.

Christopher thought he could hear a voice murmuring in the distance:

somewhere in the house, a man was praying. The sound of his voice was melancholy and remote, a single mantra endlessly repeated. Suddenly, he heard footsteps and a moment later the little servant reappeared out of the shadows. Without a word, he ushered Christopher inside and closed the heavy wooden door.

The room into which Christopher was shown was, in its way, as much a transplant as John Carpenter’s study, even if it had travelled rather fewer miles to get to Kalimpong It was another world entirely, a world within a world, wrapped, enfolded, miraculously set down: its colours were different colours, its shadows different shadows, its fragrances different fragrances. He stood on the threshold gingerly, for all the world like someone about to abandon one element for another, as a swimmer stands naked on the water’s edge or a moth turns about the flame that will in another instant devour it without trace.

He had stumbled somehow upon a hidden and finely constructed paradise of birds’ wings and dragons’ eyes, meshed in a manner at once mysterious and simple with the earth in which it inhered.

Like a bee drowning in honey after a season rich in blossoms, he felt himself grow heavy with sweetness.

Painted columns rose out of a bed of multi-coloured carpets to a ceiling intricate in ornamentation. Around the walls, thick curtains embroidered with red and yellow silk formed a sort of sofa. Low lacquered tables of Chinese manufacture sat among richly carved and gilded cabinets festooned with angry dragons and soft-petalled peonies. On the walls, naked gods made love, encircled by tongues of fire. At one end stood an altar of gold, studded with precious stones, on which were grouped the images of Tibetan gods and saints. Incense burned in little golden stands, filling the room with dark, intoxicating fumes. In front of the altar, silver butter-lamps gave ofFa yellow, ethereal light.

And then, as though he had just that moment materialized in the room, Christopher caught sight of Norbhu Dzasa himself- a man masquerading as a god, a human image fashioned from silk and coral and precious stones. His dyed jet-black hair was set in tightly coiled bunches above his head, and from his left ear dangled a single long ear-ring of turquoise and gold. His upper robe was of finely woven yellow silk, delicately patterned with dragons and held at the waist by a crimson sash. He was standing motionless in a corner of the room near the altar, his hands crossed in front of him, concealed by the long sleeves of his robe.

On his way, Christopher had found a stall in the bazaar that sold kfiatags, the thin white silk scarves used throughout the region as tokens of respect at formal introductions. He held out the scarf, loosely woven from strands of the finest silk, like gossamer, and approached the tsong-chi. Norbhu Dzasa extended his arms and took the scarf with a slight bow, placed it on a low table, and, with his hands free of the sleeves, lifted a second scarf, which he passed to Christopher. He looked bored. The two men exchanged stiff greetings, and the little Tibetan invited Christopher to join him on cushions near the window.

A moment later, the servant who had shown Christopher in opened the door and bowed low.

“Cha kqy-sho,” ordered Norbhu Dzasa.

“Bring us tea.”

The servant bowed, sucked in his breath, and simultaneously muttered ‘la-les’.

Abruptly, Norbhu Dzasa turned to Christopher, speaking in English.

“I’m sorry. Not ask. Take Indian tea or Tibetan tea?”

Christopher asked for Tibetan, and the tsong-chi spoke again to his servant.

To cha kay-sho - ‘bring some Tibetan tea.”

“So,” Norbhu Dzasa said when the servant had gone.

“Drink Tibetan tea. Been in Tibet?” He had learnt what English he knew here in Kalimpong, out of necessity.

Christopher was unsure how to answer. So many of his visits

there had been made illegally. With rare exceptions, Tibet was barred to foreigners and Christopher knew from personal experience that the ban was no mere formality.

“I was in Lhasa in 1904,” he said.

“With Younghusband.”

In 1903, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, had been disturbed by reports of growing Russian influence in the Tibetan capital.

Determined to force the reclusive Tibetans to discuss the issue of commercial and diplomatic relations with Britain, he despatched a small force to Kampa Dzong under the command of Colonel Francis Younghusband. Ignored by the Tibetans, Younghusband obtained reinforcements 1,000 soldiers, 1,450 coolies, 70,000 mules, 3,451 yaks, and six unhappy camels and moved up the Chumbi valley in force.

Christopher still remembered the journey: the freezing cold, the misery of the foot-soldiers unaccustomed to the winds and the altitude, skin sticking to gun-metal in the frost, men tearing skin from their lips with frozen spoons, the sudden deaths, men and baggage plunging from narrow ledges into the abyss. Above all, he remembered the insanity of Christmas Day, when the men had been served plum pudding and turkey, and the officers had tried to drink frozen champagne.

But the real madness had begun outside Gyantse. Tibetan troops carrying muzzle-loading guns and broadswords, and wearing charms to turn aside British bullets, had advanced against men armed with modern rifles and machine guns. Christopher would never forget the massacre that followed. In four minutes, seven hundred Tibetans lay dead on the battlefield, dozens more were screaming in pain. The expedition took Gyantse and moved on unopposed to Lhasa, where it arrived in August 1904. The Dalai Lama had fled in the meantime to Urga in Mongolia to take refuge with the Living Buddha there, and the Regent was forced in his absence to sign a peace treaty with Britain on very unfavorable terms.

“Don’t remember you,” Norbhu Dzasa said.

“I was much younger then,” answered Christopher, ‘and of no importance.

We would not have been introduced.”

Norbhu Dzasa sighed.

“Younger then, too,” he said. Their eyes met for a moment, but the tsong-chi gave nothing away. That, as he interpreted it, was his job: to give nothing away. He was very good at it.

Tea arrived quickly. It was served in ornamental cups of jade decorated with silver. Norbhu’s man had brewed it in the kitchen from semi-fermented tea bricks imported from Yunnan, mixing it in a wooden churn with boiling water, salt, wood-ash soda, and dri-butter. It was more a soup than tea, but Tibetans drank it in vast quantities forty Or fifty cups a day was not at all unusual.

Christopher could tell at once from the way he quaffed his first cupful that Norbhu Dzasa was a record-breaker even in Tibetan terms.

Norbhu had been tsong-chi at Kalimpong for seven years now and was doing very nicely out of it. He could afford to drink tea in urnfuls if he wanted to. His greatest fear was to be recalled to Lhasa prematurely, that is, before he had stashed away enough rupees to ensure a comfortable future for himself and, above all, his children. He was over sixty now, though he could not be sure exactly how old he was. His mother thought he had been born in the year of the Fire Serpent in the Fourteenth Cycle, which would have made him sixty-three. But his father had been equally sure he had been born in the Wood Hare year, which would make him all of sixty-five.

“What I do for you, Wylam-la?” asked the little tsong-chi as he poured himself a second cup of the thick, pinkish beverage.

Christopher hesitated. He felt he had got off to a bad start with Norbhu Dzasa by referring to the Younghusband expedition. In the end, the British had gained the respect of the Tibetans they had looted no temples, raped no women, and withdrawn their forces at the earliest possible opportunity but the memory of the more than seven hundred dead and the profound sense of vulnerability that the expedition had created in their minds lingered even now.

The problem about the present business was that Christopher could not mention the real reason for his visit. There was ample evidence that the Mongol Agent, Mishig, had been contacted by Tsewong. But it was always possible that the Tibetan tsong-chi might also be involved. For all they knew, he might have been the person responsible for transmitting Zamyatin’s message to the Mongol. The tsong-chi’s residence lay between the mountains and the spot where Tsewong was supposed to have been found. The monk could very easily have paid a visit to Norbhu Dzasa before continuing his ill-fated journey.

“It’s very little, really,” Christopher said.

“Perhaps you will find it sentimental of me. You’ll have seen from my letter that I am a businessman. I’m here in Kalimpong to do business with Mr.

Frazer. I knew him years ago, back in Patna. He knows about an incident that happened back then something that happened to my son, William. We were in Bodh Gaya, William and I, just passing through, on our way to Aurangabad. We lived in Patna then, when .. . my wife was still alive.” The combination of fact and fiction would, Christopher hoped, serve to convey a feeling of conviction to the tsong-chi.

“William fell ill,” he went on.

“There was no British doctor in

Bodh Gaya, none anywhere near. I was desperate. The child was very sick, I thought he would die. And then one of the pilgrims visiting the sacred tree ... It is a tree they have there, isn’t it, Mr.

Dzasa?”

Norbhu nodded. It was a tree; he had seen it. Lord Buddha had gained enlightenment while sitting under it.

“Right,” said Christopher, warming to his tale.

“Well, one of the pilgrims heard William was ill, you see. He came to visit us and told me there was a Tibetan monk who was a sort of doctor.

Anyway, I found this monk, and he came at once and looked at

William and said he could treat him. He went off- it was late at ‘ night by then. I can remember it, sitting in the dark with William in a terrible fever.”

There had been a fever once, and William had almost died but there had been no monk, no sacred tree, only an old doctor sent round by the DBI.

“I thought he would die, I really did, he was that bad. Anyway, he went off as I said the monk, I mean and then came back in about an hour with some herbs he’d got from God knows where.

He made them up into a drink for the boy and got it into him somehow or other. It saved his life. He came out of the fever that night and was on his feet again two days later. I tried to find the monk afterwards, to thank him, give him something. But he’d gone.”

“Frazer knew about it. When he came here, he asked questions, but he never heard of any monk. Until a couple of weeks ago.”

Norbhu Dzasa glanced up from his steaming cup. His little eyes glistened.

“He said a Tibetan monk died here. A man with the same name as my monk. About the same age. Frazer said he carried herbs. He thought I should know: he wrote to me about it. I was coming anyway, I have business here. So I thought I’d make some enquiries at the same time. About the monk.”

“Why? You could not meet. Not thank. He is dead.”

“Yes, but he might have a family, relatives. His parents, brothers, sisters. Perhaps they need help, now he is dead.”

“What his name, this medical monk?”

“Tsewong,” Christopher answered.

“Is that a common name?”

Norbhu shrugged.

“Not common. Not not common.”

“But it was the name of the man they found here? The man who died?”

The tsong-chi looked at Christopher.

“Yes,” he said.

“Same name. But perhaps not same man.”

“How was he dressed?” asked Christopher.

“Perhaps it would help to identify him.”

Norbhu Dzasa saw that Wylam wanted him to lead with information rather than confirm something he already knew. It reminded him of the theological debates he had seen the monks at Ganden engage in verbal fencing matches in which the slightest slip meant failure. What would failure mean in this case, he wondered.

“He wear dress of monk of Sak-ya-pa sect. Was monk you met Sak-ya-pa?”

“I don’t know,” said Christopher.

“What would one of them look like?” But in his own mind he had already begun the process of narrowing things down. The majority of Tibetan monks belonged to the politically dominant Ge-lug-pa sect. There were far fewer Sak-ya-pas and fewer Sak-ya-pa monasteries.

Norbhu Dzasa described for Christopher the dress of a Sak-yapa lama:

the low, conical hat with ear-flaps, the red robes, the broad-sleeved over-mantle for travelling, the distinctive girdle.

“Yes,” said Christopher, ‘he was dressed very like that.” But he wanted to move on, to narrow the field even more.

“Did you find anything,” he continued, ‘that might have told you where he came from? The name of his monastery, perhaps?”

Norbhu could see what the Englishman was trying to do. Why was he playing such games with him? Did he take him for a fool?

“Where your friend come from?” he asked.

Christopher hesitated.

“He didn’t say. Do you know where the dead man came from?”

The tsong-chi smiled.

“Not every mountain has a god,” he said.

“Not every monastery has a name.” If the Englishman expected him to play the part of the wily and enigmatic Oriental in this masquerade, he would at least put on a virtuoso performance.

Christopher recognized the shift in mood. He would have to change tack.

“Did you see this man Tsewong before he died? This house is on the road he must have taken to reach Kalimpong. Perhaps he called here. Perhaps you saw him. You or one of your staff?”

Norbhu Dzasa shook his head.

“Not see. No-one see.” There was a pause. The tsong-chi looked at Christopher intently.

“What you really look for, Wylam-la? What thing you look for? What person?”

Christopher hesitated again before answering. Did the little Tibetan know? Was he teasing him with this questioning?

“My son,” he said.

“I’m looking for my son.”

The tsong-chi sipped tea from his cup and set it down elegantly.

“Not find him here. Understanding, perhaps. Wisdom, perhaps.

Or things you not wish to find. But no son. Please, Wylam-la, I advise you. Go home. Back to own country. The mountains here very treacherous. Very high. Very cold.”

The two men eyed each other closely, like fencers with raised foils. In the silence, the mantra sounded clearer than before.

“Tell me,” Norbhu Dzasa said abruptly.

“Is Wylam a common name?”

Christopher shook his head. Not common. Not not common, he wanted to say. But he didn’t.

“No. There aren’t many Wylams. Lots of Christophers but not many Wylams.”

Norbhu Dzasa smiled again. There was something about his smile that unsettled Christopher. A lamp on the altar spluttered briefly and went out.

“I knew man called Wylam,” the tsong-chi said.

“Many years ago.

In India. Look very much like you. Father perhaps?”

Had Norbhu Dzasa suspected all along? Christopher wondered.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“My father was a political agent. He died many years ago.”

Norbhu Dzasa looked hard at Christopher.

“Your tea getting cold,” he said.

Christopher lifted his cup and drank quickly. The thick, lukewarm liquid clung to his palate and his throat.

“I’ve taken enough of your time, Mr. Dzasa,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have wasted it on a wild-goose chase.”

“No matter,” answered the little man.

“There are other geese.”

He rose and clapped his hands twice. The sound of the hand-claps rang out dully in the shimmering room.

The door opened and the servant came to show Christopher out.

“Goodbye, Wylam-la,” Norbhu Dzasa said.

“I am sorry not more help.”

“I’m sorry too,” said Christopher. The heavy tea was making him feel slightly nauseous. He wanted to get out of the stuffy room.

Norbhu Dzasa bowed and Christopher left, escorted by the servant. The tsong-chi sighed audibly. He missed his wife and children. They had gone to Lhasa for the New Year celebrations at the end of January and the three-week Monlam Festival that would follow. It might be months before they returned. His new wife was young and pretty, and he felt almost youthful when he was with her. But here, without her, he felt age lie upon him like a covering of hard snow that will not lift. On the walls around him, gods and demons danced and copulated in solemn gradations of ecstasy and pain. So little ecstasy, he thought; and so much pain.

Curtains parted in the wall to his left. A man dressed in the robes of a monk stepped into the room. His thin, sallow face was covered with the scars of smallpox.

“Well?” asked Norbhu Dzasa.

“Did you hear?”

The monk nodded.

“Wylam,” Norbhu Dzasa went on.

“Looking for his son.”

“Yes,” said the monk.

“I heard.” He ran a thin hand over his shaven scalp. Light from the lamps flickered on his mottled skin, making small shadows, like ants crawling.

“The gods are coming out to play,” he said.

“We must be ready when the game begins.”

As Christopher returned to the outskirts of Kalimpong, the sun sank steeply in the west. The light was snatched away with fierce rapidity. Night invaded the world, precipitately and without resistance, save for a few pockets of illumination in the bazaar and one light burning faintly in St. Andrew’s church, just visible from where he stood.

He walked back through the bazaar, filled with flaring lights and the deep, intoxicating scents of herbs and spices. At one stall, an old man sold thick dhal in rough pots; at another, a woman in a tattered said offered a selection of peppers, chillies, and wild pomegranate seeds. On small brass scales, in pinches and handfuls, the whole of India was being parcelled out and weighed. The old kaleidoscope had started to turn again for Christopher. But now, for the first time, he sensed behind its dazzling patterns an air of cold menace.

He found the Mission Hospital at the other side of town from the orphanage. The British cemetery lay symbolically between.

Martin Cormac, the doctor who had tended the dying monk at the Knox Homes, was not available.

The nursing sister who saw Christopher was unhelpful. She said that Cormac had gone to make an urgent call at Peshok, a village between Kalimpong and Darjeeling. More than that, she said she knew nothing.

Christopher left a slip of paper bearing his name and the address of the rest-house where he had put up. The nurse took the paper between finger and thumb as if it bore embedded in its fibres all the diseases of the sub-continent and most of the plagues of Egypt.

She deposited it in a small, neglected pigeon-hole half-way down the hospital’s austere entrance hall and returned to the ward with a look that promised much wiping of fevered brows.

He returned to the rest-house, took a cat-nap, and fortified himself with another chota peg before shaving and donning some thing suitable for dinner with the Carpenters. The rest-house was quiet when he left. No-one saw him go.

He was met at the door of the Knox Homes by Carpenter himself, now dressed more formally than before, but not in evening attire. The missionary conducted him straight away to the orphanage proper, or rather, to what constituted the girls’ division.

There were more girls than boys in the Knox Homes: boys were economically viable offspring who might grow up to look after their aged parents: girls were burdens who would end up being married into someone else’s family. Girl babies were dumped quickly on someone else’s doorstep if they were lucky.

The girls’ orphanage was a scrubbed and spartan place, more a way-station than a home; its walls and floors and furniture were pervaded with the smells of carbolic, coal tar soap, and iodine, and its musty air seemed laden with the ghosts of other, less immediately recognizable smells the thin vomit of children, boiled cabbage, and that faint but unmistakable smell that is common to all institutions where adolescent girls are gathered in one place. A r sour, menstrual smell that lingers on all it touches.

In a dark-panelled hall hung with the portraits of patrons and pious mottoes edged in funereal black, Christopher was introduced to the children. Rows of silent, impassive faces stared up at him as he stood, embarrassed and awkward, on a low platform at the end of the hall. The girls were of all ages, but all wore the same drab uniform and the same dull look of incomprehension and sullen endurance on their faces. Most appeared to be Indian, but there were Nepalese, Tibetans, and Lepchas among them. Christopher noticed a few of mixed parentage, Anglo-Indians, and two girls who seemed to be of European origin. There were rather over one hundred in all.

To Christopher, the most dreadful thing about the place was the temperature: it was neither uncomfortably cold nor was it comfortably warm. Old pipes brought a certain warmth up from an ancient boiler hidden in the bowels of the place, but not so much that one could feel relaxed nor so little that one could wrap up sensibly against the chill. And the children themselves, he noticed, looked neither well fed nor thin. He guessed that they did not go hungry but probably never felt that they had eaten quite enough.

It was a world of limbo, where these orphans, neither wholly abandoned nor yet wholly loved, lived an in-between existence that would forever determine the tenor and the inner structure of their lives.

“Mr. Wylam has come to us recently from the distant shores of England,” Carpenter began to intone in a pulpit voice.

“He came among us to seek tidings of his son, a child of tender years taken from him by dreadful circumstance. Which of us here has not prayed in the dark watches of the night for a loving father who might come searching after us, to carry us home? Which of us has not yearned for such a love as this man’s, that he comes willingly and alone across the globe for the sake of his only child, to return him to the loving bosom of his family?

“How well this brings to mind the words of our Lord, in that sweet parable of the father and his sons: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” Perhaps in Mr. Wylam’s journey there may be a parable for us here. For there is a father searching for us, longing for us to return to him, contrite and full of repentance. And he will travel the lengths of the earth to reach us.”

Carpenter paused for breath. It sounded as though he was just getting into his stride. The girls looked resigned. They did not cough or fidget or shuffle their feet as English children would have done. Clearly, they had long ago decided that being preached to was as normal a part of life as eating or sleeping. Christopher had to struggle to stop himself yawning.

“Mr. Wylam, our hearts go out to you in this, your hour of need, as yours, I doubt not, has in the past gone out to the widows and orphans of this godless and wasted land. These are the children of idolatry, Mr. Wylam, the children of sin. Their mothers and fathers were but heathen cannibals, but through the grace of our Lord, they have been brought out of the darkness and into the light. I ask you, then, to join with us in prayer, that our spirits may be united in the presence of our all-merciful and loving Saviour. Let us pray.”

Like mechanical dolls, the uncomplaining rows closed their eyes and bowed their heads. Their necks and eyelids seemed fashioned to the task.

“Merciful Father, Who know est our sins and our transgressions,

miserable sinners that we are, look down this night, we beseech

Thee, upon Thy servant Christopher .

And so the evening began.

The meal was a cabbagy affair with some sort of gristle-laden meat I . that had long ago given up its struggle to maintain any sense either of identity or taste. Moira Carpenter was less a hostess presiding , over her table than an undertaker directing the obsequies for whatever poor beast lay sliced and gravied on their plates. She kept up her end of a stilted conversation with miserable politeness. “My husband told me of your grief, Mr. Wylam,” she said, ladling boiled cabbage on to his plate.

“I have spent most of today in prayer, asking for your son to be restored to you. And his poor mother at home: she must be stricken.”

“My wife is dead, Mrs. Carpenter. She died a little over a year ago.”

“I am so sorry. So very sorry.” She dropped a slab of something off-white beside the cabbage.

“Was she carried away by illness?”

“Consumption, Mrs. Carpenter. She died of consumption. She was thirty-one.”

For the first time, Moira Carpenter’s eyes seemed to light up.

Sickness enlivened her much as idolatry enlivened her spouse.

“It is a scourge, Mr. Wylam, a dreadful scourge. We are blessed to live here where the mountain air drives it away. But, of course, we have our own afflictions to bear. You can have no conception how these poor people are ravaged. They pay the price of a depraved system. Syphilis, Mr. Wylam, is endemic .. . please, do eat your dinner .. . and gonorrhoea takes a terrible toll.”

It was not long before Christopher realized that his hostess was the worst possible dinner companion anyone could have: a hypochondriac who finds interest in nothing else but illness. As she picked at her food, she regaled Christopher with tales of her own illnesses, her husband’s illnesses, the illnesses that daily afflicted the unfortunate orphans of Kalimpong, the illnesses of the entire sub-continent.

It was all Christopher could do to force down his sweet a vile yellow custard with indecipherable pieces embedded loosely in it while she expatiated on a recent case of cancer of the nose she had visited in the hospital.

“This is all very well, my dear,” her husband interrupted at last.

“But we should not allow our guest to think that our care is chiefly for the physical ailments of these unfortunates. We leave that to those whose inclinations lie in that direction. But I assure you, Christopher I may call you Christopher, may I not? that, however terrible the ills that ravage the flesh of India, they are nothing to the spiritual sicknesses that torment its spirit. The Dark One is at work in this land, dragging this wretched people down to hell, generation after generation. We do what little we can, but it is an uphill struggle.”

And so he went on, detailing what were for him the principal horrors of India and its idolatrous faith. The Hindus were condemned for worshipping a multiplicity of gods, the Muslims for praying to the wrong one. Yogis were charlatans and Sufis fakes, for by definition no sort of spirituality could be found without the presence of God and God to John Carpenter was white-skinned and Presbyterian. Christopher decided there was no point in arguing. He was little enough of a believer himself to go defending other men’s faiths.

It was only towards the end of the evening that Christopher began to see that the man was playing an elaborate game with him. He was not a fool with antiquated and bizarre beliefs about religious practices on his doorstep, nor yet a simple-minded bigot rabbi ting on about his personal obsessions, but a clever man playing a role.

Christopher remembered the moment earlier that day when Carpenter had removed his glasses and shown himself to him briefly. Now, as the missionary or his wife rambled on about disease or moral corruption, he caught from time to time a sneaking look on Carpenter’s face whether ironic, derisory, or merely mischievous he could not tell.

“Tell me, Christopher,” he said while they drank weak tea after the meal, ‘how often have you been in Kalimpong before?”

“I came here frequently as a child. My father worked near here.”

“He was a businessman like you, was he?”

“Yes, he ... was a tea trader.”

The missionary looked across his teacup at Christopher.

“And you? What do you trade in?”

“Most things. I’ve dealt in most things in my time.”

“But you seem to me like an educated man. More like the sort of man who might make a career in the Civil Service or the Political Service. Not a small trader, really. Please don’t take any offence.”

“That’s all right. I chose to go into business. But perhaps another career would have suited me better. Things haven’t gone too well lately.”

“And you live in England now, is that correct?”

Carpenter was interrogating him, discreetly but carefully.

“Yes. My wife and son went there when war broke out. I returned last year to rejoin them, but Elizabeth died soon afterwards. I decided to stay on with William.”

“I see. What did you do during the war? You stayed in India, take it.”

“I was a supplier to the army. Grain, fodder, rice: all the staples.

I made a little money for once. But not enough.”

“And who hates you enough to steal your child? Whom do you suspect?

Why did you come to India to look for him? To

Kalimpong?”

Christopher sensed more than mere curiosity in Carpenter’s questioning.

The missionary was worried about something. He did not believe

Christopher’s cover-story. But there was more than that: he knew

something and he wanted to know just what

Christopher knew.

“I’ve been advised not to talk about that,” Christopher said.

“Who advised you? The police?”

“Yes. The police.”

“Did they fly you here? Forgive me for seeming inquisitive. But it puzzles me that a man like yourself should have enough influence to be flown to India. Just to look for a child, however precious he may be to you. The authorities are not normally so obliging.”

Christopher decided it was time to go.

“Dr. Carpenter, I’m grateful to you and your wife for such a delightful evening. I’ve enjoyed your food and conversation immensely.” He turned to Carpenter’s wife.

“Mrs. Carpenter, please accept my thanks. You have been a most considerate hostess. But now, I fear, I must take my leave. I am still tired after my journey, and I fear I may become boring company if I stay any longer. And you must have your duties to go to.”

“Of course, of course. How thoughtless of us to keep you talking.”

Moira Carpenter got to her feet. Her husband followed suit.

“If it would not tire you too much, Mr. Wylam,” said the missionary, “I would very much like to show you our boys’ wing.

The children are asleep now, but it would please me very much if you would step in to see them before you leave.”

The boys’ section was not far away. A green baize door led to a short corridor, off which lay a long dormitory bathed in moonlight.

In orderly rows, like patients in a hospital ward, the children slept in a silence that was broken only by the sound of their heavy breathing. Carpenter walked between the beds with a dark lantern, showing the sleeping boys to Christopher like a curator in a waxwork museum taking a visitor on a tour of his exhibits. On narrow beds, the boys huddled beneath thin blankets, dreaming desperately.

Christopher wondered why Carpenter had brought him here, why he had asked him to dinner at all. Had it been to reassure him, to counter that afternoon’s impression of nervousness? As he watched the sleeping boys, he began to ask himself whether William had been here. Was that it? Was that what lay behind Carpenter’s nervousness, behind his probing? But no sooner had the idea intruded itself than he dismissed it as ridiculous.

The Carpenters showed him to the door, still heaping sympathy on him like confetti. The rest of the orphanage was silent.

Christopher imagined the girls in sleep, their dreams haunted by visions of dark gods and goddesses, black Kali dancing on the bodies of her bloody victims, Shiva with gory hands, destroying the universe. Or did they dream of cannibals in the mountains, eating the flesh of English children? And if so, what was that to them?

It was after ten when he got back to the rest-house. The common room was in semi-darkness, filled with small restless mounds:

people were sleeping, planning an early start at one or two a.m.

Word had come that the weather to the north was improving, and there was every likelihood the passes into the Chumbi valley would be open in a day or two.

He climbed the rickety wooden stairs to the first floor, carrying the

reeking oil-lamp he had left downstairs for that purpose. The thin

wooden panelling of the house kept out nothing of the freezing cold. It

was stained with damp from the rains and cracked with frost. In a room

along the corridor, someone was moaning in pain, but no-one came. Outside, dogs were prowling in the streets, old dogs, thin and diseased, afraid to show their faces in daylight. He could hear them howling, lonely and desperate in the night.

He did not see the man who hit him as he opened the door, nor did he feel the blow that dropped him, unconscious, to the grimy floor of his room. For a moment, he saw a bright light and faces moving in it, or a single face, blurred and shifting. Then the ground lurched and fell out from under him, and the world shimmered and reddened and was swallowed up, leaving him spinning and howling and alone in the darkness.

He was at sea in an open boat, tossing deliriously on blue salt waves. Then the boat vanished and the water opened up beneath him and he was sinking into the blackness again. Somehow the blackness passed and he was rising once more towards the light.

There must be a storm on the surface: he was tossed again and again, a piece of flotsam on the back of giant waves. Then, as if by a miracle, the waves were stilled and he was drifting on gentle, inland waters, rocking in a soft, rhythmical motion.

There was a face, then a pair of hands pulling at him roughly, then he was no longer afloat on still waters but lying on a hard bed. The face was European and unshaven, and it kept slipping in and out of focus.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Wylam? Can you hear my voice?”

The face was speaking to him in English, but with a heavy accent. His first thought was that this must be the Russian, Zamyatin; but something else told him that was ridiculous.

“Can you sit up?” the voice insisted. Christopher felt hands pushing against his armpits, raising him to a sitting position.

Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be moved. Upright, his head began to spin again, and for a moment he feared the blackness would return. He felt nauseous: the mysterious meat and its lugubrious accompaniments had chosen their moment to break free: they had swollen out of all proportion in his stomach. Rapidly, they were acquiring a life of their own.

“Do you want to be sick?” the voice asked.

He managed to nod, sending flashes of green light in every direction through his reeling brain.

“There’s a basin beside you. Here on your right. Just let it out.

I’ll hold you.”

He felt a hand guiding his head, then something exploded in his guts and travelled upwards with the violence of an express train on its home journey. Hot liquid rushed into a metal bowl.

Spitting sour vomit, he fell back exhausted against the back of the

bed. Someone had taken his head off and replaced it with a spinning

top. And a mad child stood over him, cracking a whip and sending the

top round and round without stopping,

“Better?” the voice sounded stronger this time. He’d heard the accent before, but still could not place it. Scottish? Irish?

“If you want to be sick again, there’s another wee basin here. And if you fill that, I can get another. Can you open your eyes?”

His mouth felt foul. Someone had gone for a walk in it, wearing large, muddy boots.

“Taste .. . horrible,” he managed to croak.

“Here, rinse your mouth with this. It’s safe I boiled it myself.”

The stranger held a cup to his lips. It contained water. He sipped some, rolled it in his mouth, and spat it out into the basin by his side. With an effort, he opened his eyes again.

(, He was in his room at the rest-house. He recognized the table and broken chair by the window. Someone had brought up a charcoal stove that was giving off a reddish-yellow glow in the middle of the room. A stinking oil-lamp was burning on the table.

The man who had helped him was sitting on a second chair by the side of the bed.

“You’re all right,” said the man, catching Christopher’s eyes on ‘ him.

“A wee bit bruised, but you’ll be none the worse for wear in a day or two. There’s nothing broken. You’ll have a headache for a while, and a very tender lump on your head for a few weeks, but I don’t think you’ll die.”

“Thanks,” said Christopher, wincing as he realized that his head did ache.

“You’re probably wondering who I am,” the stranger suggested.

Christopher closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said. His voice sounded like a cross between a camel and a hyena. It made peculiar echoes in his eardrums. His stomach had settled a little, but it gave occasional twinges as if to remind him it had not forgotten him; he guessed that some of the meat if it had been meat was still lying there, thinking what to do next.

“My name’s Cormac, Martin Cormac. You left a wee note for me up in the Black Hole of Kalimpong. The hospital, or so they say.”

Christopher squinted to see the man properly. He didn’t look like a doctor, he thought. At a guess, he would be in his mid-forties and ageing fast grey-haired, grey-eyed, and grey-skinned. On his face was that look certain men of his age wear, of someone who has shut his eyes for a moment twenty years ago and opened them again to find himself in his present predicament. Somewhere along the way, he had lost a pound and found sixpence. At the moment, he looked dusty, as though he had been travelling. On reflection, Christopher realized he must just have arrived back from Peshok.

“You’re probably wondering what the hell I’m doing here,” the doctor continued.

“That had crossed my mind as well,” answered Christopher.

“I’m sure. Well, to answer your first question I’m not the one who hit you over the head. Not guilty. I don’t know who that was, to tell you the truth. He ran off as soon as I came on the scene I’d been waiting outside for you to come back from Cold Comfort Hall. I saw you go in here and I came behind, maybe a minute later. He was rifling your pockets, but I don’t think he took anything. Your room had been given a good going over before you arrived. You can take a look later, see if any thing’s missing.”

Cormac paused and looked solicitously at Christopher.

“How’s the head?”

Christopher stoically tried to smile, but the effort was more than his skull could bear. The smile turned into a grimace.

“Bad, eh? Well, I’ll give you a wee something for it. I never come out without some of these.”

From his pocket, Cormac drew out a small brown bottle of pills.

He knocked two out on to his palm, gave them to Christopher and handed him a glass of water. Christopher swallowed the pills one at a time: it felt like swallowing splinters of glass.

“A pity you’ve had those,” said Cormac as soon as they had been downed.

“From the way Sister Campbell talked about you, I guessed you might be in need of some refreshment after your visit to the wee darlings up the hill. So I brought along a bottle of the real stuff for us to drown our sorrows in. Assuming you had any, that was. Only, now your sorrows are such that I’ll have to share the bottle with me self Do you want me to leave, or shall I hang on.”

Christopher, who was beginning to feel nauseous again, shook his head.

“It’s all right. I’d like you to stay. What’s the “real stuff”?”

“Ah!” said Cormac, drawing a half-pint flask from his other pocket.

“Poteen. Irish whiskey, made from spuds. I’ve a friend in Newry sends

me a wee bottle every now and again. I don’t suppose there’s another

drop of this stuff anywhere between here and the

Belfast ferry.”

Northern Irish that was the accent. Probably Belfast, but

Christopher couldn’t be sure. He’d never heard of Newry. There were a lot of them in India: the ruled ruling the ruled. Perhaps that was what the Empire was all about, after a fashion.

“It’s a funny thing,” Cormac continued, ‘but, to tell you the truth, Kalimpong’s not normally a place you’d expect to be set upon. There’s plenty of thievery, of course, but they’ll not knock a man out as a rule. In all my years here, I’ve never come across a case of it. A knockout in an argument, sure. But never in a robbery.

When I saw him bending over you, I felt sure I’d come across a

Thug about to make a sacrifice of you. Cheers! Sldintef

Cormac raised the flask and put its mouth to his lips. He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, and shivered.

“God, I needed that,” he gasped.

“Just what the doctor ordered.

Mind you,” he went on, replacing the stopper, ‘it’s a bit rough. It’d ; burn your gob off, as my dear departed Da used to say. Can’t be doing me any good.”

“There are no Thugs in India any longer,” muttered Christopher.

“There haven’t been any for nearly a century. That’s almost a hundred years.”

“Ay, I know well enough. But don’t go telling that to your wee friend up on the hill. He’s a firm believer in them.

“The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone” that’s his ‘ favourite song, and he sings it morning, noon, and night. As, no doubt, you know by now.”

“How did you know I was at the orphanage tonight?”

“Ah,” replied Cormac, unscrewing his stopper again.

“There’s ‘ not much that passes unobserved in Kalimpong. Sister Campbell made it her business to find out who you were and what you were I up to. I think she was put out to discover you’d been with the t Carpenters. It’s not often she gets invited there herself. Mind you, it’s even less often I get invited. Unless one of the wee’uns is taken poorly. And what qualifies as “poorly” up there would be next to fatal anywhere else.”

“And just what made you come here tonight to see me?”

Christopher asked. As his faculties were returning, so were his instincts for suspicion.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure,” said Cormac.

“Maybe if you’d lived up in the Black Hole as long as I have you’d understand. I got back from Peshok earlier this evening. The first thing that confronted me here was Sister Campbell with a face like cold whey telling me about this disreputable-looking character who’d been asking after me. Then I heard a wee rumour that Lady Carpenter hadn’t been all that impressed by your appearance either, but that you’d been extended the supreme honour by her good man. So, to tell you the truth, I was curious. I thought I’d come and have a look at you. Good thing I did. Sldinte.r “You don’t suppose I could have a drop of your “real stuff”, do you?” Christopher asked.

Cormac tried to look medical and severe, but he had lost the knack.

“Ah, well, you’re not supposed to have any strong drink along with those wee pills you’ve taken. But, then, I don’t imagine a wee smidgeon will do you much harm. To tell you the truth, it’ll probably do you more good than the pills. Have you a glass or anything?”

Christopher pointed mutely to one of his bags on the floor. He could see it had been disturbed and subsequently rearranged.

Cormac rummaged in the bag for a bit and finally surfaced brandishing a battered tin mug.

“This it?” he asked triumphantly.

Christopher nodded.

“Not exactly Waterford Crystal, I’m afraid,” he said.

“No,” replied Cormac as he began to pour a small libation into the cup.

“More like Rathgormuck Brass. But then you wouldn’t know Rathgormuck, would you?”

Christopher smiled.

“Is there such a place?”

Cormac nodded sagely.

“Ay, of course there is. It’s a wee village a few miles from

Waterford. Nothing much goes on there: they’re born, they get married, they have lots of kids, they die, and the kids bury them.

That’s all there is to it. Much like anywhere else, I suppose.” He paused.

“I was in London once. It wasn’t any different.”

He paused again and sipped a measure of poteen before continuing.

“So, what brings you to this wee excuse for a boil on the backside of the Himalayas?”

“Business, Dr. Cormac, just business.”

The doctor raised one grey-flecked eyebrow.

“Oh aye? Is that with a capital “B” or a small “B”? I’m just asking. Look, mister, I’ve lived in this place long enough to fart in Bengali, and I knew what you were the minute I wiped your fevered brow and smelt your vomit. You’re no more a box-wallah than I’m a yogi.”

Christopher sighed. First Carpenter and now this man.

“What do you think I am, then?” he asked.

Cormac shrugged.

“Couldn’t say exactly. ICS, IPS .. . Heaven-born, anyway.

You’ve got the look. You’ve got the manner. And you’ve got the voice, even if it is a wee bit on the shaky side at the moment. Do I get a prize?”

Christopher shook his head. It hurt.

“No prizes. Anyway,” he went on, trying to change the subject, “you’re no more a missionary doctor than I’m the Kaiser’s mother.”

The doctor unplugged his fire-water and raised it to his lips. He made a face.

“Inpoteeno veritas, my son. You might be right.. . and then again, you might be wrong. To tell you the truth, sometimes I’m not too sure me self I am a doctor, mind you the real McKay. The Queen’s University, Belfast, then a wee stint in Edinburgh with Daniel Cunningham, the Anatomy Professor. After that I got a post as a Junior House Surgeon in the Royal Infirmary. That’s where I went wrong.” He paused and took more poteen.

“You see, there was a group of Christians in the Infirmary. You know the type: spotty faces, glandular trouble, masturbation, and daily prayer. Medics for Jesus, they called themselves. I won’t tell }’ you what other people called them.

“I’m still not sure if it was Jesus that formed the main attraction or a pretty wee nurse called May Lorimer. He had the power to raise the dead, but she wasn’t short of a few miracles of the same kind herself. Anyway, I put my name down, stopped drinking, started masturbating, and prayed nightly for the love of Jesus Christ and May Lorimer both.

“I was doing all right for a man with religious mania until there was a big convention out at Inverkeithing. Three days of sermons, prayers, and how’s-your-father. On the last day, there was a call for medical missionaries. If we couldn’t save the black man’s soul, we’d save his body for resurrection and eternal torment.

“Anyway, the sublime Miss Lorimer was on the platform calling us to the Lord. I was on the floor and the flesh was calling me to Miss Lorimer. The next thing I knew, I was on the platform. And before I had time to think about what I was doing, I was on a big ship with a copy of the Bible in one hand and a bag of secondhand surgical instruments in the other. Next stop Kalimpong.” He paused.

“That was twenty years ago.”

He unscrewed the top of his flask more slowly than before and swallowed more deliberately.

“What about the divine Miss Lorimer?” asked Christopher, uncertain whether or not to make light of Cormac’s morose tale.

“May Lorimer? I asked her to go with me. I offered her the possibility of serving Jesus together as man and wife. I asked her to marry me. She was very kind about it. She said she thought of me as a brother in the Lord, but not as a husband. I had Jesus, she said, what did I want with her as well? I had no answer for that then though if the chance came my way again, I know exactly what I’d tell her now.

“A year later, I heard she’d run off with a big guardsman from Edinburgh Castle. Black Watch, I believe. Known for their sexual prowess. So I stayed on in Kalimpong without May Lorimer, without Jesus, and without much reason to go back. I took up drinking again, gave up masturbation, and became a sort of scandal. What’s your story?”

For the first time, Christopher put the mug of poteen to his lips and

drank. It took his breath away and made him splutter, but the fire

that filled him afterwards made him feel better. He looked at the pale

liquid in the tin and thought of the priest raising the chalice at

mass. Hie est enim Calix Sanguinis mei. Wine and whiskey,

blood and fire, faith and despair. He raised the mug again and drank.

This time he did not cough.

“I was born near here,” he replied to Cormac’s question. He thought he could afford to be honest with him.

“My father worked for the Political Service. He brought me up to love the country. I don’t think he loved anything or anyone himself but India. Not my mother, not really. She died when I was twelve, and I was sent to school in England. Then, when I was fifteen, my father disappeared.”

The doctor looked at him curiously.

“What? Vanished into thin air, d’you mean? Like a fakir” He pronounced the word as if it was ‘faker’.

Christopher gave a wry smile.

“Just like a fakir,” he agreed.

“Only without a rope. No rope, no music just himself. He was making a visit to Major Todd, our Trade Agent in Yatung back in those days. There was nobody in Gyantse then. My father left Kalimpong one day in October with a party of guides and bearers. The weather was turning bad, but they had no difficulty in making it over the Nathu-la They were already well into Tibet when he disappeared.

“The party woke up one morning to find him gone. No note, no sign, no trail they could follow. He’d left all his belongings in the camp. They searched for him, of course all that day and the next, but he was nowhere to be found. Then the snow got really heavy and they had to call off the search and push on to Yatung.

“He never reappeared. But nobody found a body. They sent a letter to my school; I was handed it one day in the middle of Latin class. It was very formal no compassion in it, just the formalities.

They sent me his things eventually decorations, citations, letters , patent, all the trumpery. I still keep them in a trunk at home in England. I never look at them, but they’re there.”

“So you stayed in England?” Cormac interjected.

Christopher shook his head.

“Not until recently. I left as soon as I finished school and came straight out to India to join the ICS. That was in 1898. I’m not quite sure why I came back. Sometimes I think it was to look for my father, but I know that can’t be right. Perhaps I just felt f something had been left unfinished here, and I wanted to finish it.”

“And did you?”

Christopher stared at the wall, at a patch of damp high up, near the ceiling. There was a gecko beside it, pale and ghostly, clinging tightly to the wall.

“No,” he said, but quietly, as though speaking to himself.

“Bloody awful, isn’t it?” said Cormac.

Christopher looked at him, uncomprehending.

“Life,” the doctor said.

“Bloody awful business. That,” he went on, ‘is the only advantage of growing old. There’s not much more of it to face.”

Christopher nodded and sipped from his mug. He felt a shiver go through him, as if it were a premonition of something. It was getting late.

“We have to talk,” he said.

“Fire away,” said Cormac, leaning back in his chair.

“Something’s going on here,” Christopher said.

“Tonight I was attacked. Perhaps it was a thief, as you say; perhaps it was a dacoit who’d grown tired of ambushing people on the highways and byways; and perhaps it was someone who didn’t want me in Kalimpong asking questions. I’m beginning to think that last possibility is the one with most going for it.”

“What sort of questions have you been asking, Mr. Wylam?”

Christopher told him. Cormac was silent for a while, collecting his thoughts. The light of the penny candle hurt his eyes; he turned his face away from it gently.

“I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask you exactly why you’ve been enquiring after this monk. Or why someone would want to snatch your son in the first place, much less bring him here to Kalimpong or up to Tibet.”

“All I can say is that I used to work for the Government and that someone in a position to know thinks my son’s kidnapping is related to the work I did. We know the monk brought a message out of Tibet and that the message was conveyed to a man called Mishig, the Mongol Trade Agent here.”

“Aye, I know Mishig well enough. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he was involved in something shifty. Go on.”

“The problem is finding out just how a man who was dying, who seems to have had no visitors, and who is said to have been delirious, managed to get a message to anyone. I’m beginning to think I’m wasting my time here.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” said Cormac in a quiet voice.

Christopher said nothing, but he sensed that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Whether it was as a result of the poteen or the lateness of the hour or the relating of reminiscences, Cormac’s mood had altered from jesting cynicism to measured seriousness.

He was a man on the verge of divulging closely guarded matters.

“I think,” said the doctor, choosing his words carefully, ‘the man you want is the Reverend Doctor Carpenter. He knows Mishig well enough. And, if I’m not mistaken, he knew the monk even better. But, to tell you the truth, it’s just as likely that Tsewong took the message to Mishig himself. It was one or the other of them, believe me.”

A deep and seamless silence followed Cormac’s words. Christopher felt himself hold his breath then release it slowly.

“Carpenter? But why’ What possible motive could a man like that have to take messages round town on behalf of a man he must have considered the next best thing to a devil-worshipper?”

“A motive? With wee Johnny Carpenter? Good God man, we’d be up all night if we started talking about motives.”

“Such as?”

Cormac did not reply at once. Maybe it was his turn to feel suspicious. Christopher guessed he had set in motion a process he was beginning to regret.

“Let’s begin with something else,” he said.

“Officially, this man Tsewong died of exposure. I wrote the death

certificate me self

You’ll find a copy with the Registrar for Births and Deaths, Kalimpong District. Man called Hughes’ a Welshman from Neath.

We’re all Celts round here. Anyway, that isn’t what Tsewong died of at all. Do you understand me?”

“How did he die?” asked Christopher. He noticed that Cormac had begun to take more of the poteen.

“He took his own life.”

The way the doctor pronounced the word, it sounded like ‘tuck’:

‘he tuck his own life’. Christopher imagined the monk in bed, dying.

“Tuck yourself up now,” came the voice of Christopher’s mother from his childhood. Tsewong had come through the cold passes into India and tucked himself up for good.

“But that’s impossible.”

“Is it?” Cormac’s voice was gentle, almost pathetic. He had seen the dead man, touched his face, his skin.

“You think a Buddhist monk can’t kill himself? For some of them, their whole life is a slow death. There are men in Tibet who shut themselves into a wee hole in the rock and have themselves bricked up with nothing but a gap to let food in and shit out. Did you know that? That’s a living death. They last for years and years sometimes. They go in young men and end up old corpses.

“Apart from that, it’s a hard life anyway. There are frustrations, temptations, dark moments. A yellow robe is no guarantee against humanity.”

Neither man spoke. Wax dripped from the candle in silence.

The flame flickered and straightened itself.

“How did he do it?” Christopher asked.

“Hanged himself. Carpenter says he found him in his room, just hanging there. He used the girdle, the rope from around his waist.

There was a hook in the ceiling. It was an attic room, a wee room they use for storing old boxes. He hanged himself from the hook.”

Christopher shivered.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I can’t understand how someone is able to do it. To take his own life. I can understand murder, but not suicide.”

Cormac looked at Christopher. There was a sadness in his eyes that not even the whiskey could conceal.

“Lucky man,” he said. Just that, then he fell silent. In the street, the dogs were busy. Or was it a single beast padding in the stillness?

Christopher broke the silence with another question.

“Why did he kill himself? Do you know?”

Cormac shook his head.

“I couldn’t tell you. I think John Carpenter knows, but you can be sure he won’t tell you. I have one or two notions, though.”

“Notions?”

“I think Tsewong had problems. Maybe they were serious, maybe they just seemed that way to Tsewong: I can’t tell you. But problems he undoubtedly had.” The doctor paused briefly, then proceeded.

“For one thing, I don’t think he was a Buddhist. Not any longer, that is. I’d lay money on it that he was a Christian convert.”

Christopher looked at the Irishman in astonishment.

“I don’t understand. He was a Tibetan. There are no Tibetan Christians. He was wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk. And he was dead. How could you tell he was a Christian?”

Cormac fortified himself with the rough whiskey before continuing.

“A couple of things. I had the body taken up to the hospital for examination. When I undressed him, I wanted to be sure I had all the wee bits and pieces, because I knew they’d have to be handed over to old Norbhu, along with the body. That was when I found the letter and the note, in his pouch with the prayer-book, the amulet and all the rest. But guess what he was wearing round his neck, well tucked away inside his clothes. A cross, Mr. Wylam. A wee, silver cross. I’ve still got it hidden away in my desk at home.

I’ll show it to you if you like.”

“Weren’t there questions about the suicide?”

“Who would ask? You don’t think I’d let on to Norbhu Dzasa that one of his lamas did himself in, do you? I told you I wrote the death certificate me self Plenty of people die of exposure at this time of year. Quite a few of them are Tibetan monks. There were no questions.”

“What about Carpenter? You said you thought he might know why the man killed himself.”

Cormac did not answer right away. When he did, a note of caution had entered his voice.

“Did I now? Yes, I think he must know something, though I can’t prove it. The thing is, the dead man was staying with Carpenter before all this happened. There was some story about a farmer finding Tsewong on the road and bringing him to the Homes the day before he died. That’s probably what you heard yourself. It’s what Carpenter told me, and it’s what I told Frazer.

But it’s a load of baloney. I happen to know that Tsewong was living with Carpenter for at least a week before he killed himself.

Tsewong wasn’t some unfortunate wretch passing through Kalimpong who’d been taken in by the charitable Doctor Carpenter and who just happened to take his own life while on the premises. No, whatever else he came here to do, Tsewong came to Kalimpong to see Carpenter. I’d swear to it.”

“Why should he want to see Carpenter?”

“That’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer to it. I’ve an idea Carpenter had a hand in Tsewong’s conversion. For all we know, the man wasn’t called Tsewong at all, but Gordon or Angus.”

Christopher smiled bleakly.

“Are you sure the man was a convert? Isn’t it possible Carpenter just gave him the cross while he was with him? Perhaps Tsewong didn’t realize the significance of it.”

Cormac looked at Christopher.

“I can see you weren’t brought up in Belfast. I don’t know whether or not Tsewong understood its significance exactly, but I’d be very surprised if John Carpenter gave it to him. Presbyterians aren’t given to wearing crosses, let alone crosses with wee figures of Jesus Christ on them.”

“A crucifix, you mean?”

“The very thing. I fancy Tsewong got hold of the crucifix from another source. But I still think he and Carpenter were involved in some fashion.”

“I don’t see what connection there could be.”

‘ Cormac stood abruptly and stepped across to the window.

Outside, moonlight and clouds had turned the sky to broken lace.

He stood there for a while, watching the patterns of the sky break and

re-form. Sometimes, he thought it would go on forever, and he felt

diminished and afraid.

“What do you think you saw tonight?” he asked, his voice low yet carrying.

“A man of God, maybe? A man at any rate. But John

Carpenter isn’t a man. He’s a mask a series of masks, one inside the other, deeper and deeper until you think you’ll go crazy trying to get to the face underneath. And if you ever did get to the face, you’d be sorry you’d done so. Take my word for it I know.

“For one thing, he’s ambitious. Not like an ordinary man he’s sick with it. He’s turned fifty, and what’s he got to show for himself? Here in Kalimpong, he’s a big man, but that’s like saying he’s made a name for himself collecting stamps or that he’s the Lord Mayor of Limavady. One thing’s for sure he doesn’t want to live out his days in this hole with all these wee heathen shites.

No more does Mrs. Carpenter who is, by the way, made of cast iron and twice as frigid.

“Carpenter knows there’s more, and he knows where he can get it. It’s eating him up inside. It’s been eating him up for twenty, five years and more. If he wants to become the Indian Livingstone, he’ll have to pull off something big, something that’ll get him [ noticed. And round here that means just one thing.”

I He paused and lifted the flask to his lips. The whiskey was { working, dreaming in his veins.

i 91

“What’s that?” asked Christopher.

“Tibet,” answered Cormac.

“Open up Tibet. A mission there would crown anyone’s career. It would even help the Pope make a name for himself. It’s never been done, at least not since some Jesuits tried in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A Presbyterian church in the Forbidden City, overlooking the Potala maybe. Convert the Dalai Lama, tear down the idols, proclaim the land for Christ. Jesus, he could go home in triumph. There’d be a statue to him on the Mound in front of New College. They’d tear down the Scott Monument and put the Carpenter Memorial in its place. Ladies in tweed skirts and sensible underwear would queue up to write the story of his life. A few of them would doubtless lift their skirts and let him tell his own story ‘ “Could it be done?”

“I don’t see why not, if you could find your way through the underwear.”

“I didn’t mean that. Could Carpenter actually open a mission?”

Cormac grunted.

“Are you mad? But that won’t stop the wee bastard trying. He has his contacts, or so he lets on. Before long, there’ll be a British Ambassador in Lhasa. Don’t look so surprised I know a bit about what goes on round here. And the Ambassador will need a chaplain. That would be a start. He’s got it all worked out, believe me.”

“And you think Tsewong was part of this plan?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

Christopher nodded. It sounded plausible. Plausible but harmless. And he was convinced that whatever was going on here was far from harmless.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

“But it sounds innocuous enough to me. Where do I come into this? And my son. He wasn’t kidnapped because of some ecclesiastical plot to open a mission in Lhasa.”

Cormac shrugged.

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not in that business me self Something tells me that would be more in your line. But you can be sure of one thing: if Carpenter’s laying the foundations for a Tibetan mission, it’s costing him plenty. There’s people to buy, influence to attract, men in high places to win over. That sort of thing doesn’t come cheap. And there are other prices too. Concessions.

Quid pro quos. Favours. As you know, Bibles and trade often go hand in hand. And not too far behind trade come the guns. Johnny Carpenter’s in deep, whatever he’s mixed up in.”

The penny I pay is not a copper one. Nor silver nor gold, for that matter.. .

“Where does he find the money? If you’re right, he must need a lot of money. I’ve been at the Homes there’s no wealth there.”

Cormac gave Christopher a look so intense it made him flinch.

It was like hatred.

“Isn’t there?” he snapped. Then, abruptly as he had spoken, he took hold of himself.

“I’ve had too much to drink,” he said.

“You’ll have to excuse me.

We’re on dangerous ground, mister. We’d better not go any further until I’m sober and you’ve had a rest. Perhaps we’d best go no further at all.” He took a deep breath before continuing.

“But maybe you’ve a right to know more. Come and see me in the morning. I’m not on duty until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be in my bungalow they’ll tell you how to find it at the hospital. I’ve some things in my desk I’d like you to see.”

The doctor fell silent and glanced out through the window again.

Someone had lit a fire on the hills. He could just make it out, a tiny, lonely speck in the darkness.

“Jesus,” he said, his voice low, as though he were speaking to himself.

“Sometimes I wonder why we ever came here, why we stay. It’s no place for the likes of you and me: it swallows us up alive and spits us out again. Have you never felt that? As though you were being eaten. As though a tiger had your flesh between his teeth and was chewing you. A carnivore that had developed a taste for human meat.”

He shuddered at his own imagery. He had treated men attacked by tigers. What was left of them.

“What about the letter?” Christopher asked.

“The English letter that was found on Tsewong. Could Carpenter have written it?”

The doctor shook his head.

“He could have, but he didn’t. It wasn’t in his handwriting. It wasn’t in any handwriting I recognized. But I know one thing:

whoever wrote it had been brought up speaking English. Speaking it and writing it.”

“The letter said Tsewong was an emissary.”

“That’s right.”

“For someone called the Dorje Lama. I’ve never heard of such a person.

Have you?”

Cormac did not answer straight away. He watched the fire on the hillside. Someone was out there in the snow, feeding the flames, watching.

“Yes,” he answered, in a voice so quiet Christopher was not sure he had spoken.

“They don’t talk about him often. And never to foreigners. But one of my patients told me a little oh, it was years ago. He’s a sort of legend. There’s a monastery up there somewhere, a secret place. People are frightened of it. And the Dorje Lama is the abbot. There’s been a Dorje Lama for hundreds of years, so they say.”

The doctor turned and faced Christopher. The effects of the whiskey had vanished, to be replaced by a haunted look.

“And Tsewong was his emissary?” Christopher said.

“So the letter said.”

“Do you believe it?”

Cormac hesitated.

“I think,” he said, ‘you’d better see what I have to show you.

Come in the morning. We’ll talk about it then. I’ll tell you

everything I know.”

Christopher woke the next morning with the worst headache he had ever known. He took more of the tablets Cormac had left, but they did little good. Outside the rest-home, the girl had resumed her singing. She sang the same song, as though she knew no other;

but this morning her voice tore like a rusty blade through

Christopher’s head, and he cursed her as he dressed.

He shaved, cutting himself twice, and combed his hair, but he still felt untidy: there was a section of his head he could not bear to touch with the comb. Downstairs, he paused just long enough to drink a cup of black tea and eat some buttered chap atis The boy, Lhaten, looked at him oddly, but said nothing. The house was almost empty the caravaneers had gone off that morning early as planned, but Christopher had fallen into a disturbed sleep by then and had not heard them leave. The place seemed dull without them.

As Christopher was leaving, Lhaten approached him nervously.

“Are you all right, sahib? The doctor-sahib said you had an accident last night. He said you fell on the stairs.”

Christopher nodded.

“Yes,” he said, ‘that’s right. I fell on the stairs. I’ll be more careful tonight.”

A look of concern passed across Lhaten’s face.

“Yes, sahib. You must be careful. Call me when you come tonight. I’ll be awake.”

Christopher sensed that the boy either guessed or knew more than he said.

“Thank you, Lhaten, I’ll remember that.”

Lhaten flashed a smile and vanished towards the kitchen.

Christopher heard the shrill voice of the Lepcha woman.

Outside, the sun was shining and the air smelt fresh and clear.

Perhaps the world was clean after all, Christopher thought;

perhaps he carried the dirt around inside himself.

To his left, he heard the voice of the mysterious girl singing her bhajan. He turned and saw her, sitting on the ground with her back towards him. Long black hair fell gracefully down her back. Her head moved gently from side to side in time with her singing. He could just see that she was working with something on the ground in front of her.

An ekdm shamero at bangs hi bejechilo kanone.

One day that flute of the dark lord’s Played again in the forest.

Something pulled him towards her. He wanted to see her face, to watch her mouth as she sang, to watch her fingers move at her work. Softly, so as not to frighten her, he walked past her, then, several paces away, turned.

She did not see him looking at her. All her attention was focused on the object in front of her. She went on singing, like an angel whom nothing can distract from song. But her face was appalling in its ugliness, and misshapen legs stretched out in front of her like bent sticks. One eye was stitched tightly closed, and long scars disfigured her left cheek. Her skin was sore and blistered on face and arms and legs equally. But none of this horrified Christopher quite so much as the sight of what she was doing with her hands.

He thought it had been a dog, but he could not be sure. The knife she was using was blunt and rusted, and the work of butchery was painfully slow. The passers-by averted their gaze, shunning the girl and the meat she was preparing; but Christopher stood as though transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away from her. She sang gently as she worked, and Christopher realized that she was crooning to the dead animal in her lap. Her fingers were covered in blood, and the cuffs of her long sleeves were smeared with it.

Turning away, Christopher set off down the narrow, crowded street. Behind him, the mad girl’s voice rose and fell in an unending supplication of the beast. He remembered the dogs he had heard in the night, remembered their voices tearing the darkness.

He walked to the hospital through streets crowded with men and animals. The blind beggar was there on his spot in the bazaar again, muttering prayers beneath his breath. Christopher hurried it past, ignoring his cries. Out of an opening on his right, a small group of singing men came into the main street. They were Bauls, members of a wandering cult that sought God outside the rituals and ceremonies of organized religion. They carried simple musical instruments in their hands and played and sang as they walked.

As they approached him, Christopher recognized suddenly the song they were singing it was the same song the girl had been singing a few minutes earlier.

Bondhur bangs hi baje bujhi bipine Shamer bangs hi baje bujhi bipine He felt hemmed in, like someone in a nightmare, and ran on, the voices of the men ringing in his ears, and beneath them the girl’s voice, unforgettable and cold.

The hospital stood next door to the Government Dispensary, to which it was connected. It was a small place with only twenty eight beds, but it was smart and well kept. The small, white painted entrance hall was empty when Christopher stepped inside.

On the wall, a varnished wooden plaque commemorated the opening of the hospital and dedicated it to the glory of the Christian God. Beside it stood a two-tier dressing trolley holding several kidney dishes, a saline irrigator, and a pair of Cheatle’s forceps in a glass jar. In a white enamel basin, a blood-stained bandage intruded on the surrounding sterility. Above the trolley, a blonde haired Jesus, smug as a new pin, smiled down, surrounded by hordes of bright-faced, laughing children, none of whom looked remotely Indian.

“Kot hat,” Christopher called, his voice echoing in the stillness. A smell of ether drifted towards him. Somewhere, someone called for assistance and fell silent again. Someone else began to cough with a dry, racking sound that ended in vomiting. Metal banged against metal.

A peon appeared from nowhere. He was dressed in a starched white uniform with a tightly wound pugaree that bore the badge of the hospital.

“Did you call, sahib?”

“Yes,” said Christopher.

“I’d like to see Dr. Cormac; he’s expecting me. He said I would find him in his bungalow. Can you show me the way?”

“When you go out the main entrance, sahib, turn left. You will come to a row of deodars. There is a gate. Follow the path to the third bungalow. I would be happy to take you, sahib.”

What he meant, of course, was that he would be happy to keep an eye on Christopher.

“No, thanks. I’ll find the way myself.”

Without waiting to see if the man would follow him, Christopher went back into the sunlight. A dome was sweeping the gravel path in front of the building; back and forwards, back and forwards the long brush swept as he moved down the path, as though he had been walking there all his life. He looked up as Christopher came out, then away again, averting his gaze in case the sahib might find it unclean.

There was a stretch of neatly trimmed doob-grass beside the hospital, then the deodars, their broad branches sweeping low towards the lawn. The gate bore a small sign, painted in stark black letters on a white board: “Out of bounds to Native Staff.”

Christopher raised the latch and passed through.

There were six bungalows in all, nestling together beneath another row of deodars. The path up to Cormac’s was flanked on both sides by rows of potted chrysanthemums, mainly red and pink. There were still traces of water at the bases of the pots: the hospital was probably nearby Christopher doubted that Cormac would have his own men to do the work of gardening.

He knocked on the door three times and waited. There was no reply.

Perhaps the whiskey had been a bit much for Cormac after all. Christopher knocked again, more loudly this time. No-one came. That was odd. He had formed the impression that Cormac was not the sort of man to keep much of a household, but surely he would need one or two servants.

The door was unlocked. Christopher stepped inside and closed it behind him. He found himself in a small cream-painted entrance vestibule. From floor to ceiling, the walls were hung with glass cases containing hundreds upon hundreds of brightly coloured butterflies. Nearby Sikkim was famous for them, a paradise heavy with their drugged and painted wings. Here, in the little hall of Cormac’s house, they lay silent and still, as though fresh from the miracle of chloroform. Bright scarlet trails traversed their wings like wounds on purple flesh.

He called Cormac’s name, but his voice echoed flatly in the empty hallway and was swallowed up by the silence.

He opened a second door. Beyond it lay the main room of the bungalow. Pale light filled it, dappled and watery on the sparse furniture. A few cane chairs and a small table, a battered desk rented furniture from a go-down in Darjeeling, worth a few rupees a year. A faded linen table-cloth from Belfast, photographs of school and university groups on the walls, an oar bearing the names of some forgotten eight, a black and gold tasselled rugby cap gathering dust, some medical textbooks on clumsily built shelves.

Like the butterflies in the entrance hall, the fragments of Martin Cormac’s past hung on his walls as though they too had just been lifted by thin and ragged wings from the killing-bottle. Or perhaps this was the killing-bottle: this room, this bungalow, the hospital, Kalimpong. A transparent bottle of concentric rings through which a dying man could look out and watch the stars.

He was not sure when the buzzing first became audible. It had been there from the moment he entered the room, of course, but so low his ears had not at first picked it up. He stood for a moment, listening. It was a deep, angry sound, like the wings of huge insects hovering in the heat of summer, like the buzzing of large flies above a slaughterhouse, drawn by the smell of blood in the last days. But it was winter: there should not be flies.

The noise came from behind a door at the far end of the room.

The door was partly open, but from where he stood, Christopher could not see into the room beyond it. He called out again, almost frightened by the sound of his own voice.

“Cormac, are you there? Is anyone there?”

But there was only the buzzing. The buzzing and a smell that seemed familiar, but so faint it was impossible to place.

He approached the door cautiously. Narrow shafts of light fell through a slatted blind. In the thin golden strips, specks of finely scattered dust spun freely. Christopher’s heart tightened within his chest. He felt blood leap in his veins, felt it pound in his already aching head. The room was full of flies. Hot, buzzing flies in a dense swarm that shook and shimmered in the shifting golden light. Wave upon wave of them, black, violent, moving in dark battalions, circling, droning, their wings alight. He felt nausea rise in him, he recognized the smell. He wanted to run, but his feet moved towards the door instead. It was winter: there should not be flies.

He entered the room, shielding his face with his hands, half blinded by the moving forms that circled through the light and the darkness. In one corner, white curtains hung, huge and diaphanous, across the edge of the blinds, lifting and falling in a fine breeze, speckled with the coarse black bodies of blowflies. Above his head, the insects had gathered like a thick carpet on the punk ah hanging from the ceiling. On the floor, his feet crushed the bodies of dead flies, staining the floorboards with purple.

The bed was a seething mass of flies, as though something living was moving there, straining to take on form in the half-light.

Keeping himself away from the bed, Christopher moved to the window and pulled the cords that operated the blinds. He raised them a little, not too far, but far enough to allow more light into the room. He had to force himself to turn and look at the bed.

It was Cormac all right. The flies had congregated mainly on the body, where the blood was. He could make out enough of the face to recognize the man. His throat had been sliced through from side to side as he slept. On the pillow, Christopher saw the scalpel that the killer had used, bright and shining and stained with blood.

The body had not moved much in its last agony. One arm had twisted back, the hand reaching for the torn throat, the fingers pale and bent, drained of blood. Cormac had died early that morning, possibly within an hour or two of falling asleep. The blood had congealed and dried, the limbs had begun to stiffen.

Christopher turned away from the bed and the seething carapace of flies and blood that moved on it. He opened the window and breathed in lungfuls of fresh, clean air. Behind him, the droning of the flies echoed in the small, fetid room. He wanted to be sick, to rid himself of the clinging, sweet smell.

Abruptly, he turned and left the room, without another glance at the thing on the bed. As he came into the main room, he saw something that had escaped him on his way in: Cormac’s desk had been tampered with. He went up to it. Drawers had been pulled out and small cupboards opened. Papers were heaped on the writing surface in total confusion: letters, bills, reports, all thrown together at random. Some lay on the floor, crumpled where someone had stepped on them. He picked up a large blue file and set it on the desk. It bore a title in large black letters:

“Kalimpong Houseflies: A Statistical Survey of Breeding Rates in Captivity’.

That explained the flies: Cormac had been running an experiment, and his killer must have broken his breeding cases and let the insects loose. The sound of their buzzing still hammered out mindlessly from the bedroom. They were dying, cold and blind and gorged with blood.

He glanced through the papers carefully, but found nothing of interest. Whoever had killed Cormac had taken what he had come for. The silver cross that the doctor had said he found on Tsewong was not there either. Had the killer taken that as well? Then Christopher remembered what Cormac had said: “I’ve still got it hidden away in my desk.” Was there a hidden drawer somewhere?

It did not take Christopher long to find it. A simple lever at the back of one of the recesses operated a spring mechanism that released a drawer near the top of the desk. He reached in and drew out a packet of thick brown paper. Inside were several photographs, perhaps about two dozen in all. For the most part, they were in pairs, held together with plain pins. Most of them were pictures of girls from the orphanage first, a photograph of each girl in the grey Knox Homes uniform that Christopher remembered from the evening before, then a second showing the same girl, usually in a said, wearing jewellery and make-up. All of the first photographs seemed to have been taken by the same camera and against the same background, but in each case the second photograph differed in size, in quality, and in setting.

There were also a few unpaired photographs of boys in what appeared to be the male equivalent of the girls’ uniform. At the bottom was another set of photographs, again of a girl. The top photograph showed her, like the others, in the grey uniform of orphan hood But when his eyes fell on the second photograph, Christopher felt himself gasp for breath and grow dizzy. The buzzing of the flies as they feasted blurred and mingled with the roar of blood rushing in his head. He put out a hand to steady himself.

The second photograph was of the girl in the street, the girl whose bloody fingers Christopher had watched at work less than an hour before. She was looking straight at the camera like someone staring at something a long way away. It was the same girl as the one in the first of the two photographs. The same girl and not the same girl. In the first photograph, she seemed perfectly normal, even pretty. She had not been disfigured when she lived at the Knox Homes.

On the back of each second photograph, someone, probably Cormac, had pencilled a few words: a personal name, a place name, and, in several cases, a date.

“Jill, Jaipurhat, 10.2.15’;

“Hilary, Sahibganj, 9.5.13’. But on the back of all the photographs of boys, the place name never varied and was always followed by a question-mark: “Simon, Dorje-la?” 1916’; “Matthew, Dorje-la?, 1918’;

“Gordon, Dorje-la?” 1919’. Dorje-la: was that the name of the monastery presided over by Tsewong’s mysterious Dorje Lama?

Christopher wrapped up the photographs in the paper and stuffed them into a pocket of his jacket. His heart was still beating.

It was like a nightmare in which he was haunted first by the voice and now by the face of the mad girl from the street. Had these photographs something to do with whatever it was Cormac had been talking about the night before? Had it been them that the doctor had intended to show him? One thing seemed clear:

whoever had killed the doctor had not even guessed there might be something in the desk.

He put his hand into the drawer again, to the very back. His fingers came in contact with something cold and hard. There was a fine chain attached to something. It was the silver cross.

Christopher lifted it out carefully. The flies were buzzing more loudly, and he was growing afraid.

It was a plain cross bearing the nailed figure of Christ. Both wood and flesh had been transformed to silver. Something about the cross made the hair on the back of Christopher’s neck rise. It was so improbable that he did not see it at first. He recognized the cross. It was not strange that he did: he had seen it many times before. As a child, he had held it in his hands often. He turned it over and saw on the back, cut into the silver beside the hallmark, the letters “R. V. W.” his father’s initials. Robert Vincent Wylam.

It was his father’s cross, the one heirloom that had not been sent to England with the medals and the cuff-links. From the feet and hands of the tiny Christ-figure, the heads of minute nails protruded. When he was little, Christopher had touched them in wonder. Now, his hand clenched tightly about the cross until its sharp edges began to cut into his flesh; a thin, red trickle of blood ran out between his fingers.

He heard the voices of the flies, mumbling feverishly in the darkened room, and the voices of the dogs prowling along dark, stinking lanes in search of offal, and the voice of the girl singing to him out of the gloom. His bleeding fingers clutched the cross and he stood in the centre of the room, crying bitterly, adrift, abandoned, not knowing where he was or why.

Christopher lost all sense of time passing. He remained in the room, clutching the crucifix, oblivious of his surroundings. He had entered the presence of Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies, there in that tiny room, amid the clamour of wings. His head was filled with images of his father dying in a blizzard, of the disfigured girl singing outside his window, of men he had killed or watched die.

And yet a part of his brain was icily calm and thinking hard about what had happened. Someone had overheard his conversation with Cormac the night before of that he was convinced. And that had led to a hurried and bungled attempt to suppress the doctor’s knowledge and its imminent revelation. Carpenter or someone close to Carpenter was responsible for the killing. Christopher no longer doubted that the missionary was mixed up deeply in whatever was going on. And that meant he was somehow involved with William’s kidnapping. Beyond that, he hardly dared think; but in a corner of his mind his father’s voice was whispering from the past, whispering words Christopher could not quite hear.

He stood up at last and put the crucifix carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket. He spent a little while going through the contents of Cormac’s desk, but could find nothing else connected to Carpenter, Tibet, or the photographs.

It was time to go. He knew exactly where he was headed. This time John Carpenter would tell him all he knew, even if Christopher had to drag every word out of him by brute force. He got up from the desk.

There was a heavy knock at the front door. Christopher froze.

Suddenly, footsteps sounded in the entrance hall.

“Doctor Cormac! Are you all right?” It was the orderly who had given him directions at the hospital.

A second later, the door of the living room burst open and three men stepped inside: a British police captain and two Indian constables. The orderly hung back in the corridor outside.

Without speaking, the captain motioned to one of his constables to search the other rooms. The man made straight for the bedroom.

Christopher could still hear the sound of flies buzzing loudly.

Moments later, the constable returned looking distinctly sick. He stepped up to the captain, muttered a few words to him, and then went with him to the bedroom.

When the captain came out of the room, he had turned pale. He was young, probably just out of police academy, and this might have been his first murder. What rotten luck, thought Christopher.

“What is your name?” the captain demanded.

“Wylam. Major Christopher Wylam.”

The word “Major’ threw the policeman a little. But he quickly pulled himself up to his full height and addressed Christopher in the prescribed manner, as laid down in regulations.

“Major Christopher Wylam, it is my duty to place you under arrest for the murder of Doctor Martin Cormac. I have to advise you that you will now be taken into my custody, to be delivered in due course to the Chief Magistrate of Kalimpong District for examination with a view to being referred to trial. I must also caution you that anything you now say may be recorded and used later in evidence against you.”

He nodded at the constable who had found the body. The man unhooked a set of handcuffs from his belt and stepped towards Christopher. Now that routine had taken over, the policeman seemed more at ease.

“Please hold your hands in front of you,” he said.

Christopher did as instructed. The man came closer and made to clip the first cuff over Christopher’s right wrist. As he did so, Christopher swung round, grabbed the policeman’s arm, and spun him in a circle, grabbing him across the neck with his free hand. It took only a moment to find and retrieve the man’s gun. Christopher raised it and held it tight against the policeman’s head.

“You!” he shouted at the orderly, cringing in the passage.

“Get in here! Juldi!”

A European would have made for the door and raised the alarm.

But Indian hospital orderlies suffered a double dose of authoritarianism: a medical hierarchy headed by representatives of the master race. The peon stepped into the living-room.

“Put your guns on the floor, then place your hands on your heads,” Christopher instructed the two remaining policemen.

“Slowly, now!”

They did as he told them. He spoke to the orderly again.

“Go to the bedroom. Find something to tie these men up:

neckties, strips of bedding, anything. But hurry up!”

The orderly nodded and did as instructed. Christopher heard him retching when he got inside the room. A minute later he reemerged with a sheet.

“Tear it into strips,” Christopher ordered.

“Then tie them up.”

The orderly’s hands were shaking and he looked as though he might be on the verge of fainting. But he managed somehow to make his fumbling fingers do what was demanded of them. The policemen were told to sit in straight-backed chairs while they were trussed up. All the time, the English captain fixed his eyes on Christopher, as though committing his face to memory.