With a rush of anger, Joe acknowledged that he had been duped. Used. And the anger was swiftly followed by shame and embarrassment. He had assumed that Nancy had found him irresistible and, in the context of her easy-going relationship with her elderly husband, had felt herself free to enjoy an affair with an attractive and vigorous man passing through her life.

On an impulse he kicked himself out of his mosquito net and, equipping himself with a cigarette to ward off marauding night-time mosquitoes, he made his way to his small office and with difficulty lit the kerosene lamp, reaching as he did so for his cipher book. The telegram he had in mind could not be sent from the station en clair.

After a sweaty half-hour he had encoded and despatched the following to a colleague at the Yard.

9291a john stop need to know extent of wartime injury sustained by captain a j drummond 23rd rajputana rifles 1918 stop sandilands

It would be three o’clock in the afternoon at New Scotland Yard and Joe imagined John Moore in the middle of his day, cursing, ringing the War Office, ringing them again and wearily proceeding to encode his reply. Joe realised he probably couldn’t expect to receive this for two or three days at the best and, feverishly, he returned to bed.

To his astonishment he awoke to find that, overnight, he had received a reply in cipher sent round to him by the Panikhat telegraph office at about five o’clock in the morning. Joe decoded it and read the short contents again and again.

9291b wartime injuries extensive stop quote intestinal chaos unquote stop right leg multiple fractures stop moore

What did ‘intestinal chaos’ mean? Very severe abdominal injuries amounting perhaps to mutilation? Unseeing, the buff telegram form in his hand, Joe stared out of the window. ‘So that’s it. There was an agenda. A design that didn’t include me! Though, in truth, I suppose, I was central to the plot, though not a party to it. God, I’ve been naive! And what do I say now? Do I challenge them? Do I say, “ Nancy, you’re a scheming hussy! Jardine, you are a crafty old bastard! Andrew, you are a scandalous conniver!”? What do I do?’

The answer came easily to his mind. ‘Nothing. You go with it. If this is what Nancy wants, this is what Nancy can have in so far as it’s up to me. Perhaps I even ought to be flattered. Of course I ought to be flattered. And when the other emotions have rolled away flattered is what I’ll feel. But for the moment, my self-esteem – my ego, as Freud would have it! – has taken a bruising… And maybe that’s no bad thing!’

Chapter Eighteen

Having half an hour to kill before Nancy ’s dinner party, Joe made his way over to the mess to fill his cigarette case from one of the many boxes always charged with the fat oval cigarettes bearing the regimental badge and supplied by Fribourg and Treyer of London. He found the table laid for four only; evidently all others were dining at the Manoli dinner or, like himself, with Nancy, and the dining-room was in darkness. He was greeted from the gloom by a friendly voice.

‘Oh, Sandilands Sahib, sir. Good evening. May I help you in any particular?’

It was the voice of Suman Chatterjee, a Bengali babu and the regimental clerk. Also, it seemed, the mess steward, since he was seated at a table in a small office surrounded by mess chits in neat piles. Joe had met him once or twice in the mess. He liked his unswerving affability, he admired his monumental physique but, above all, he appreciated his pedantic, idiomatic and heavily accented English.

‘Do you ever get any time off, Babu-ji?’ he asked.

‘Oh, sir, this is not work! This is fascination! I like to keep everything shipshape and Bristol fashion. I like to make sure that it all adds up and here I am adding.’

Feeling that something more than a polite interest was called for, Joe said, ‘What’s your system, Suman?’

‘Oh, sir, it works like this, you see: the officers sign chits daily. Oh, what bloody awful handwriting! They come to me and I enter them in a book and send out the mess bills promptly on the first of every month. My predecessor was – dear me! – a very muddled citizen. It took me the deuce of a long time to sort out the mess he had left behind but now I can tell you exactly who had what, when and how many. See – here is yourself: Sandilands J. (H). H stands for honorary member of the mess and here you see Smythe Sahib was absent. I put (Abs.) next to his name. Oh, no, this is a good system.’

Joe admired the fluent copperplate handwriting and said sincerely, ‘Suman, do you ever wish you could use your talents more widely? You should be in government – you are a monument of neatness and clearly a genius with figures.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Suman with a big smile and a wide gesture, ‘change my job for a lackh of rupees! I am after all a member of a proud regiment and indeed I am hoping to write a regimental history. Besides, who would keep everything in apple pie order if I retired? I hear everybody from greatest to least say – oh, ten times a day – “Ask Chatterjee, he’s sure to know.” And, mostly, I do!’

‘How far back do the records go?’ asked Joe with no particular interest.

‘To 1898,’ said Suman immediately, ‘when Staverdale Sahib commanded the regiment. But in my care, for fifteen years.’

‘So, if you wanted to tell who’d had two glasses of port after dinner on November the 18th 1899 you could tell me?’

‘Not as good as that but since I have been running things, certainly!’

‘Let me,’ said Joe, ‘pick a date at random. What about this day, March the 17th, let’s say in 1910?’

‘Oh, that is no problem. That was in my time.’

He rose to his feet and, lifting portly arms with difficulty above his head, he fetched down from a high shelf a tall account book on the spine of which there was a strip of sticking plaster with ‘1908- 1910’ written on it. He placed it on the table in front of Joe and began to leaf through the pages. To Joe’s fanciful imagination it seemed that from the dry pages an aura of wine-soaked corks, brandy and Trichinopoly cigars arose.

‘Here you are, you see,’ said Suman proudly. ‘Here we are… March… and the seventeenth. It was a Saturday. Ah. Oh. That night… You have not chosen a good night. There was hardly anybody in the mess that night. The others had all gone to some jollification. In March there are many jollifications – it is the end of the season when many memsahibs go away to the hills. And here they are, sir. Five diners that night.’

He pushed the book over to Joe’s elbow.

‘Not very many but drinking quite a considerable amount, you see, sir. Oh, you could say the port was flowing that night!’

Joe did not respond. He was looking at the mess record for the night twelve years ago when Dolly Prentice had been burned to death, predictably Prentice’s name was not there. He had been in Calcutta. But five other men had been present.

Their names drew his astonished gaze and fixed it on the page. He read again and muttered the list under his breath. Major Harold Carmichael, Dr Philip Forbes, Captain John Simms-Warburton, Subaltern William Somersham and, lastly, a name he did not recognise, a Subaltern Richard Templar.

‘Is all well, sir? May I assist you further?’ asked Suman, concerned at Joe’s long silence.

‘Yes. Oh, please. Help me to understand the shorthand, will you? This says “ Carmichael 5-p”?’

‘That would be five glasses of port, sir. And here we have Forbes Doctor Sahib three glasses of port and 1-b that is one glass of brandy. Somersham Sahib, 4-p, that is four glasses of port and Simms-Warburton Sahib three glasses of port and one of c.b. – cherry brandy.’

‘It must have been quite a jolly evening,’ said Joe.

‘Oh yes, sir, very boozy, to be sure!’

‘And here, what does (A) stand for?’