He picked a stone off the ground. 'Let me show you something,' he said. He tossed the stone in the direction of the outhouse. It landed in the debris, and moments later, a flock of pigeons took to the air with clucks of alarm and a frantic beating of wings. Murugan stood back and watched the birds circling above.

'I wouldn't be at all surprised,' he said, 'if there were a couple of descendants of Lutchman' s flock up there.'

Chapter 30

STANDING ON tiptoe Urmila peeped over the boundary wall at the office-going traffic, streaming down Lower Circular Road, past the hospital. She was surprised by how sheltered and self-contained the bungalow was, how far removed from both the bustle of the hospital and the noise of the nearby traffic.

'How quiet it seems here,' she said, glancing from the outhouse to the Ross memorial. 'It's hard to believe that I go past this place twice every day, at rush hour.'

'Exactly what Ronnie Ross thought,' said Murugan. 'Thought he'd found the lab of his dreams when he first got here.'

Urmila stepped back from the wall. 'So how was it that Ross came to be here?' she said. She ran her eyes over the smoothed-out sheets of paper in her hands. 'Was it this man D. D. Cunningham who invited him here?'

'No,' said Murugan. 'Exactly the opposite. Cunningham did everything he could to make sure that Ross wouldn't get here. Ronnie wrote him begging letters every couple of months, and Cunningham's answers were always the same, short and simple: no dice.'

'But still,' said Urmila, 'Ronald Ross did come here, didn't he?'

'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham stonewalled Ross for more than a year. And then one day, in January 1898, right out of the blue, Cunningham caved. In fact he handed in his resignation and left for England in such a hurry he forgot to pack his boxer shorts. On January 30 the Government of India finally approved Ronnie Ross's transfer to Calcutta.

'The official story is that all this was just coincidence: old Cunningham was aching for the honeysuckled cottages of Ye Olde England. Well, where he ended up was in a boarding house in Surrey with a view of the municipal gasworks. You're going to tell me he left his cosy little setup out here for that just because he was homesick for English muffins? Well, let me tell you: I don't buy it.'

'So what are you saying then?' said Urmila. 'Why do you think he left?'

'I don't have the answer to that,' said Murugan. 'But it's clear that something happened round the middle of January 1898 that made Cunningham change his mind. And it was no accident either: somebody worked pretty hard to set it up.'

Urmila examined her papers again. 'Here, look at this,' she said, pointing at a line. 'It says here that D. D. Cunningham was granted six days' leave in the middle of January – from the 10th to the 15th of February. That's when it must have happened.'

'Right,' said Murugan. 'And look at the date on that railway reservation chart: on the 10th of January 1898 somebody called C. C. Dunn took a train to Madras.'

'And who was that?'

'No one,' said Murugan. 'That's just it. I think someone is trying to get the message across that D. D. Cunningham travelled to Madras under a false name on that day.'

' Madras?' said Urmila scowling at the papers. 'Why Madras? What could have happened there? I suppose there's no way of finding out since it happened so long ago?'

'So you'd think,' said Murugan, 'I mean it's not like you can look up something that happened in Madras in 1898 in the back issues of Time, right? But the fact is that I do happen to know about a guy called C. C. Dunn who was in Madras about that time. Only I'd never connected him with D. D. Cunningham. Not until this morning, when I took those papers out of your hands. They were the missing link, you see; they tie it all together.'

'And how did you learn about this C. C… whoever he was?'

'Because someone wanted me to,' said Murugan. 'It's a long story. Are you sure you're up for it?'

Urmila nodded emphatically.

'A few years ago,' Murugan began, 'I was trying to update the malaria archive at the outfit where I work. I was three months into the North Africa and Middle East files when I came upon a weird report of a small, extremely localized epidemic in northern Egypt, about thirty miles south of Alexandria. The population of a tiny hamlet was wiped out in a period of a few days. There were no recurrences, no further outbreaks. This hamlet was settled by a family of migrants from the south – Coptic Christians. They didn't have much to do with their neighbours and they were a long way from the nearest village. When their bodies were discovered they were already in an advanced state of decomposition.'

'What sort of epidemic was it?' said Urmila.

'No one's sure,' said Murugan. 'There were no autopsies. In fact the only reason we know about it at all is because a British health officer wrote a short report on it. This was in 1950, soon after the war, and the British were basically still running the place. This health officer was a competent, nononsense guy, from the sound of it: he'd spent his whole career in Egypt. By the time he visited the hamlet the bodies had been disposed of. But he reported two kinds of anecdotal evidence about the symptoms of the deceased: swollen neck glands and large numbers of tiny skin perforations, like insect bites. He thought it might be an exceptionally virulent strain of malaria but he had no way of confirming his hunch. People from the surrounding villages said that there might be a survivor: the body count left one fourteen-year-old boy unaccounted for. He was reported to have been seen at the railway station in a nearby town at about the time of the outbreak. The health officer thought he might be a carrier, and he tried to find him. He thought an examination of the boy might yield a clue to what had happened. But he was never found.'

'So they had no idea what happened?'

'Basically, no. The health officer admitted he didn't know what the fuck had happened. He added that the only time he'd heard of similar symptoms was some twenty or more years before, down south, in Luxor. Someone had told him that the archaeology buff Lord Carnarvon had died of a mosquito bite that had led to a fever and swollen neck glands. He even quoted from a letter written by his lordship's daughter, just before he bit the dust. "You know the mosquito bite on his [Papa's] cheek that was worrying him at Luxor, well yesterday quite suddenly all the glands in his neck started swelling and last night he had a high temperature and still has today.'"

'I don't follow,' said Urmila. 'We were talking about something that is supposed to have happened in Madras in 1898. How did we end up in Egypt fifty years later?'

'That's exactly what I'm trying to explain,' said Murugan. 'That's what comes next. What happened was this: after I found the health officer's report, I began asking around to see if anyone had any leads on this. I even posted some queries on a couple of chat groups on the Web. One day I logged on and there was this long message waiting for me: pages and pages long. There was no address or anything on it: it had been sent anonymously. I soon discovered that whoever sent it went to a lot of trouble to make sure that I wouldn't find out who they were: it had been routed and re-routed so many different ways I couldn't even begin to trace it.'

'And what did the message say?' Urmila asked.

'It was an excerpt from a book written by a Czech psycho-linguist. The excerpt was about a Hungarian highsociety type, who became a distinguished amateur archaeologist and professional eccentric – one Countess Pongracz. Towards the end of her life she moved to Egypt. The last time she was seen was in 1950: she was on her way to do a dig somewhere near this hamlet where the outbreak happened. No one knows what happened to her.'