Ragtime in Simla

As he stood uncertainly weighing his thoughts, a baby carriage as splendid as a Rolls Royce went by pushed by an ayah. The baby at that moment woke up and started to yell. The ayah hurried to pick up the red-faced scrap and talk to it tenderly. It gathered its strength and released another ear-splitting scream, Joe flinched.

‘My God!’ he exclaimed to himself. ‘Of course! The baby! Little Henri!’

He summoned a rickshaw and directed the ru

Sir George had not yet returned, to Joe’s relief, so he was able to go straight back to the guest house without having to give an account of himself. As he hurried across the garden he was struck by the thought that the trunks might have been dealt with in the efficient Indian way in his absence. He’d forgotten to leave instructions to say that they should not be touched. Entering his room he found that all had been cleaned and tidied but the trunks were still as he’d left them in the middle of the room, the piles of clothes a reprimand in the centre of such orderliness.

Ignoring the clothes, Joe picked up the French newspaper which had lain at the bottom of one of the trunks. The date was 5th April, three years ago. A fortnight after the Beaune railway disaster. By the time this edition of the paper came out, he calculated that Alice would have been at sea for a day on the next leg of her voyage to India in the care of Mademoiselle Pitiot. She would not have seen it.

The headline which had been nagging at the back of his mind since his conversation with Alice now screamed at him and he remembered similar headlines carried in the English press. ‘Miracle baby, little orphan Henri safe in his grandmother’s arms.’ He had even seen little orphan Henri looking with unfocused eyes at the camera on a Pathé News report in the cinema in Leicester Square. Yes, the article referred to the same baby. A second class passenger in the Beaune railway disaster, Henri had survived cradled tightly in his dead mother’s arms and had been cared for by nurses in Beaune until he could be identified and returned to his grieving grandparents.

This article was not a fresh news item and, cynically, Joe saw it as an effort to keep the story alive but also an attempt to sum up and to bring a ray of hope however faint from the whole bleak disaster. The official list of the dead and the three survivors was given on page two. Three survivors? He turned hurriedly to page two. The passengers were listed by class – first, second and third – and classified again by nationality, the main lists by far being French and English with a sprinkling of other Europeans. Joe ran his finger down the page. No third class passenger had survived the crash and only one second class passenger – baby Henri. In the first class two names were listed: Alice Conyers and Captain Colin Simpson.

Alice Conyers! Joe looked again at the message scrawled by Korsovsky’s agent across the top of the paper. ‘As requested.’ So Korsovsky had asked him to supply a copy of this paper. Why? He had assumed it was co

‘I need someone to talk to!’ Joe thought. He tucked the paper away in his pocket and strode off to the front of the Governor’s house where he knew a rickshaw would be waiting. He climbed aboard. ‘Police headquarters,’ he said.

It was five o’clock and the sun was begi

‘You want to know who is the biggest criminal in Simla? He is!’ he said tapping the file. ‘Big Red! Two or three thefts a week reported and now he’s branching out into physical attacks on children. Very nasty incident yesterday up at the temple on Jakko Hill. Little Lettice Murray, daughter of Colonel Murray, is said to be in a hysterical state after her awful encounter. Brave girl though! Stuck her lollipop in his eye and escaped.’

Joe looked at him in puzzlement.

‘Bloody monkey! Gang leader of that pack of vermin who infest the monkey temple. Sacred to Hanuman the monkey god and I can’t touch them! Mind you,’ he added confidentially, ‘that’s not to say some of them don’t disappear at dead of night sometimes! Especially when my Sikh chaps are on duty!’

‘You don’t…?’

‘Of course not! No, we round them up and take them for a little excursion into the country. There’s a sort of monkey paradise about ten miles from here. When they’ve gone whooping and hollering up the trees we sneak off and leave them there.’ He laughed. ‘First time we tried this we made the mistake of hanging about to make sure they were all right, having a happy time, enough food to eat and so on, and as they seemed to like the place we got on to the cart and started off back for town. Well! We’d only gone a few yards when the warning was sounded. They all came piling down from the trees and climbed back on the cart ready to go home! Just like a bunch of kids at the end of a Sunday School outing! Ah, but now – we’re as clever as they are!

‘But Joe, come out on to the verandah at the back and I’ll order us a cup of tea. Tell me where you’ve got to. Save my sanity – you see, I risk being obsessed by the simians of Simla.’

Joe gave him his impressions of Alice Sharpe and an account of his conversation with her, adding, ‘And remember, Alice does give Reggie good reason to resent her – hate her even. I don’t know if that signifies, but it should be borne in mind, don’t you think? And tell me, Carter, what do you know of her secretary, this Rheza Khan?’

Carter looked at him shrewdly. ‘Clever chap. Very able. Not a Simla man so I can’t tell you much about his background. I know he is from a well-to-do Indian family – father’s a rajah, I believe, up in the hills towards Gilgit – and he was sent away to school in England. Perfect English of course, and perfect ma

‘So you’d say he has strong reasons for preserving the status quo? He wouldn’t have welcomed the arrival of Lionel Conyers in Simla, I’m thinking. Does he have an alibi? Though I’m assured by none other than Alice herself that the more prominently positioned you are in the eyes of Simla at the moment of the crime, the greater the likelihood that you’re involved.’

Carter grunted. ‘Well, by those rules, he’s most probably i