Patrick Mercer - Dust and Steel

There was very little blood, for Forgett had been executed with a butcher’s axe. The policeman lay sprawled on the floor. One blow had fallen obliquely across his neck, severing, Morgan guessed, the spinal column and causing almost instant death, and then the horrid little iron spike that backed the axe’s blade had been buried deep in Forgett’s sternum. Lying on his back with his legs folded under him, the chief of police could almost have been laid out ceremonially, and the impression was only underlined by the pink, curly gristle that emerged from his mouth.

‘Aye, that’s what it is.’ Between finger and thumb Morgan delicately pulled the distasteful bit of pork from Forgett’s lolling lips. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, at a guess, it’s an allusion to the biting of pig-fat-greased cartridges,’ McGowan volunteered. ‘I told you that Forgett had enemies.’

‘Yes, and we need to get after them.’ Carmichael led the others back to the hall and gestured towards the open kitchen door and the yawning back door beyond, which showed as a black oblong of night air. ‘Look at the trail – that’s the way they’ve gone.’ He indicated some smears of blood on the floor, drew his revolver and led the others back to the hall and towards the open kitchen door.

‘Wait. What on earth’s this…oh!’ McGowan exclaimed, noticing a rolled bundle of curtain cloth close to the woman’s cadaver.

The mainly buff, floral-patterned cotton curtain had been pulled from the pole above the window, that much was obvious, and something wrapped within it had bled into the material, staining it a rusty red.

McGowan pulled the tight-wrapped fabric to one side, revealing a crushed baby’s head, blue and deep purple with bruises and contusions. ‘It’s baby Gwen. They’ve beaten the poor little mite to death.’

Morgan had seen plenty of starvation-dead babies back in Ireland, and one of the servants’ still-born children at Glassdrumman, but nothing like this. The toddler had been deliberately wrapped in the curtain to drown any noise, then, from the look of things, heels had stamped hard on the delicate bones of her head, thumping the skull almost flat, making the grey matter of the infant’s brain ooze from her nostrils and ears.

‘Dear Lord.’ Carmichael was genuinely appalled. ‘Come on, there’s not a second to lose.’

‘Yes, but they’re almost cold.’ McGowan was too squeamish to touch Gwen, but reached down to Kathy Forgett. ‘They’ve been dead for at least a couple of hours.’

But Carmichael wasn’t having any of it and went charging through the house, out of the back door and into the night, towards the sallyport of the fort.

‘Right, I’ve got you, you murderin’ Pandy, you.’ The officer commanding Number One Company had run two hundred yards down the cinder path that led from the married officers’ quarters to the back gate of the fort, and there seized a sentry from the 10th, thrusting his pistol against the forehead of a terrified sepoy.

One minute Sepoy Puran Gee had been quietly standing at ease, belching curried goat, guarding the least used gate of the fort and expecting an agreeably undemanding couple of hours, and the next an angry sahib had come running at him, thrown his rifle to the ground and pushed a steely-cold revolver hard against his head whilst yelling a stream of incomprehensible Angrezi at him. It was bad enough having the Feringees blow his friend Mungal Guddrea to dog meat, without this sort of indignity.

‘For heaven’s sake, Carmichael,’ McGowan exclaimed, running across after him. ‘He’s not your man!’

Carmichael had forced the sepoy to his knees, one hand twisting the soldier’s collar, the other ramming the barrel of the revolver into his temple, a series of jerks causing the man’s cap to fall off and his face to twist in a combination of fright and pain, whilst his hands shot out sideways to steady himself against the officer’s assault.

‘Forgett and his family must have been dead for hours.’ McGowan grabbed Carmichael’s wrist and pistol. ‘Puran came on guard, what…about an hour ago?’ He looked to the soldier for confirmation, but the man was too scared to follow the question in English. ‘Besides, that wasn’t the work of soldiers – not from the Tenth, anyway.’

Carmichael allowed McGowan to push the pistol away from the sentry’s head, and released the hold on Puran’s collar. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘It stands to reason: the Forgetts have been dead since this afternoon, when the whole battalion was being trained by you lot, every man jack accounted for. All ranks are under curfew, either here in the fort or down in the cantonment, and believe me, all the officers and NCOs are on a hair trigger. And anyway, those executions have put the fear of the Almighty into the lads; the mood’s not right for this sort of thing now. I’ve never seen the troops so obedient and keen to please,’ McGowan answered. ‘No, this has been done by bazaar wallahs or perhaps soldiers from another battalion, though I doubt that.’

‘Oh, I see, you’re probably right.’ Now the aggression had gone out of Carmichael, who lowered the pistol and even stooped to pick up Puran’s cap.

‘May I suggest an apology to the man, Carmichael?’ Morgan asked. He could see how this story would spread like plague back to the ranks of the 10th, the very men whose trust they were trying to restore.

‘Apologise to some damned…’ Carmichael blurted, whilst the Indian brushed the grit off his rifle and rubbed his bruised forehead with offended gusto.

‘Yes, Carmichael, apologise to a man you’ve wronged, even if he is a private soldier and a mere native .’ Morgan thought the apology just as important for McGowan to hear as for Puran.

Carmichael looked hard into Morgan’s steel-blue eyes, opened his mouth to object, but then changed his mind. ‘Er…I’m very sorry, my man.’ He was still holding Puran’s cap; now Carmichael brushed the dust off it before handing it back. ‘Hasty of me and needlessly rough.’ He thrust his hand out to the soldier whilst McGowan translated.

Puran looked perplexed at the big, pink mitt. McGowan uttered something more before the sepoy awkwardly put his rifle between his knees and made namasti , cocking his head to one side and grinning so widely that his teeth flashed below his moustache.

Carmichael was equally confused. Not to be outdone, he grasped both of Puran’s hands that were now pressed, palms together, in front of his face and gave them a vigorous waggle. ‘No hard feelings then, old boy,’ he said, just as he might have done after accidentally tripping a fellow team player at Harrow.

‘Right, thank you, Carmichael. I’m sure that’s soothed the poor fellow,’ McGowan said with a note of sarcasm. ‘I doubt that these troops have been involved in this outrage, but they may well have turned a blind eye to those who did. After all, whilst we accepted Forgett, he was a policeman; the executions were pretty well all his own work. The colonel will want this investigated.’

Women and babies getting torn to bits; what sort of a war is this? It’s going to be a nasty bloody bitter fight that’s not really any of our business. We should have left it to the John Company boys to sort out. After all, they got themselves into it…thought Morgan as the little group of officers trudged back to the mess, skirting the horror of the bungalow.

All eight hundred men of the 10th Bengal Native Infantry stood in two ranks arranged in three sides of a square whilst Commandant Brewill, the British officers and McGowan, the adjutant, stood in the middle of the fort’s parade ground in the early morning cool. The sun had hardly risen, the dust lay still, whilst the monkeys blinked sleepily from the branches of the trees that peeped from just beyond the high stone walls.