INCARNATION (2 page)

The old man’s name was Dennison. No first name, no title, no tactless entry in Who’s Who. He had the air of tired menace that walks with men and women of a certain age and class. Not even the city’s heat could penetrate the invisible wall that stood between him and his surroundings. He sat upright in the pirogue, as aloof as any Rajput prince on a palanquin. His eyes fell on the dun walls and shuttered windows of the jumble of houses clinging frantically to the narrow banks, but he gazed at them with the practised indifference of a demigod.

A drop of sweat beaded the tip of his nose and fell at last to his knee. Another formed, but he did not lift a finger or furrow his brow. He’d been sent here on a wild-goose chase, and he knew it. The business had a smell about it, a smell not much unlike the stench that rose from the muddy river through which he was being rowed. The boy would turn out to be a fake and an illusion, the whole thing a clever trick to wheedle money out of Dennison’s bosses in London.

The boatman flexed his arms, twisting the heart-shaped oar through water and sunlight, propelling them deeper into the ancient city. The scent of fear was everywhere. Buildings carried the marks of bullet-holes, the traces of fires, the scars of bombings. It might have been Beirut a decade earlier. Eyes peered through broken lattices, watching, surmising. Two Europeans passing in an open boat: sitting targets for a band of kidnappers. And the Indian, calm and collected as a petty god moving among his worshippers. He looked up the narrow course of the river, humming a bhajan to himself.

A faint sound of hammering came to them from beyond a bend.

‘Habba Kadal,’ said the Indian, without turning his head. ‘Here is where they make copper goods. Advised to stop up ears.’

They passed beneath the old bridge with its weathered beams of deodar. The din of the copper workshops took possession of them for a while. The young man let his hand fall into the water, letting it trail for a moment before pulling it out again as though stung. He shook water from it like a dog. The water was unpleasantly warm to the touch.

‘You aren’t going to like it,’ he said to the older man. ‘It isn’t what you think.’

‘I don’t think. I watch and wait. They didn’t send me here to like or not to like.’

‘You won’t understand. He isn’t what you want him to be.’

‘And what, pray, is that?’

‘An impostor.’

He’d found the boy during his last tour of duty up here. It had taken him until now to make them send someone out. He hated to think how much time had been wasted.

‘We’ll see.’

The young man’s name was Ross, Douglas Ross. Born in Edinburgh, into the service. His father had died in a cold room somewhere in East Berlin. The Wall was gone now, but the room remained. In memory. In his mother’s heart. She’d told him once her heart was nothing but a single memory.

He let his hand fall limply to the water again.

‘He’ll frighten you,’ he said. Something made him want to goad Dennison.

Dennison shook his head. He was beyond fear.

‘He told me things he couldn’t have known,’ said Ross. ‘Not if he was a fake.’

The shikara glided under another bridge and continued to the next.

‘Zaina Kadal,’ said the Indian. ‘We are getting out here, please.’

The boatman brought the craft up against the bank. No one was waiting for them. People glanced at them with curiosity. Tourists seldom came this way. It was too dangerous. There had been too many kidnappings, and a killing only last week.

The Indian told the boatman to wait, then led them into the tangle of alleyways that made up the quarter in which the boy lived. Stalls festooned with skeins of silk and wool lined the street, narrowing it until there was almost no room in which to pass. Always the Indian went ahead, making space for them. Twice they were stopped by military patrols, but each time the Indian showed a pass and brought them through without further questioning.

They passed into a lane that became a cul-de-sac. It was hotter here than in all the rest of the city, Ross thought. He fingered the pistol in his pocket. If they got caught here, they’d never make it out again. He’d have brought the boy to Delhi, but he’d refused to go, and there’d been no making him.

A wooden door barely wide enough to pass through stood at the end of the alley. The Indian stopped and turned. He took off his sunglasses and looked directly at them for the first time.

‘You must understand, Mr Dennison,’ he said, ‘you are

not in your own world any longer. Whatever happens here, it will not happen according to your rules. Do you understand that?’

Dennison nodded. He only had to sniff the scented air to understand the truth of the man’s words.

‘Let’s go in’ he said. ‘I haven’t come all this way to stand gaping at a bloody door.’

Part I

From transcription of a tape-recording made at 10 Pampore Alley, Zaina Kadal, Srinagar, 

14:30 hours 1ST, 20. June 1999

Operator
: D. Ross, Field Agent MI6 Delhi Recording Time: 2:17:35

Tape logged
: 20:15 hours GMT, 23/6/99, Vauxhall 

Access
: Nil access below Chief M16/Chairman Joint Intelligence Committee

Transcript logged
: 14:07 hours GMT, 24/6/99, Vauxhall annexe 

Access
: Nil below Chief MI6/CJIC/Controller East Asia

Ross
: Testing, testing. [Puff, puff, puff.] Hello, one, two, three, testing … I think it’s working. Right, this is Douglas Ross. I’m about to interview the boy called Yongden whom I last met here on the eighth of June. Also present are Captain Sunil Dubey of the Indian Intelligence Service, and the man you sent out to act as an observer, Dennison.

I’d like to set the scene for you, if I may. Dennison is sitting on my left, Dubey to my right. We’re in a small room, maybe twelve by ten, with a low ceiling. It’s hot in here, very hot. We’re all uncomfortable, except for the boy. I can feel sweat coiling down my neck, my back is soaking, my socks are wringing wet. Yet the boy is as cool as a cucumber, he looksas if he’s sitting on ice. He isn’t even bothered by the flies.

He’s about twelve years old, I think, good-looking, with jet-black hair and a winning smile. He’s simply dressed in white, in the Indian fashion. It’s impossible not to like him. And just as impossible not to be frightened of him.

The humming sound you can hear is the big fan up above that goes churning round and round. All it does is cut the hot air into slices and then send dollops of it down on top of us, making us hotter than ever. I find it distracting. I think we all do. Dennison looks up at it from time to time. The kid doesn’t seem to notice it. Nothing distracts him. He could be on another planet. Maybe he is. 

Dubey, Indian Intelligence
: My name is Captain Dubey. I am here to see all is correct. These gentlemen have come from England to speak with you. Mr Ross you have met already. 

Boy
: Hello, Mr Ross. How are you keeping?

Ross
: Very well. How about you? 

Boy
: I thought you’d forgotten me. 

Ross
: Now, how would I do a thing like that? 

Dubey
: Mr Dennison you have not met. He is an old friend of mine. You can trust him. 

Boy
: I’m not so sure of that. Peter the Ponce was always a sly fox. Weren’t you Pete? 

Dennison
: How the hell do you know that nickname?

Boy
: I gave it to you, old boy. Back in seventy-five. We’d been to the Gay Hussar for lunch, we were on our way back to Century House, the cabbie passed a remark about the flower in your buttonhole. You were Peter the Ponce from then on.

Dennison
: Turn off that bloody machine. I want to know what’s going on here. I want to know what bloody fool trick you’re trying to play.

Ross
: I’m sorry, Mr Dennison, I have instructions. Everything has to be recorded.

Dennison
: Even that nonsense?

Ross
: Especially that.

I
t was just a room. Douglas Ross had been there twice before. The room never changed, the boy never changed. The room and the boy were timeless, unchanged, perhaps even unchangeable.

He was sitting just like he’d sat before, on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. Nothing seemed to affect him, least of all the heat. His parents stood to one side, watching, understanding nothing. They never spoke, not a syllable. The boy did everything for them. He was their messenger, their angel, their interpreter. He said they’d come down from Ladakh, from Leh, along the long road that reaches Kashmir through the pass of Zoji La. That was in the spring. Ross had met them first in the first week of May.

A window had been left open in the vain hope of bringing a little fresh air into the room. Flies went in and out, heavy black flies that came up from the river in droves. They settled on everything. On a little trestle table, the reels turned slowly on the recorder Ross had brought from Delhi.

Dennison’s bluster had gone. The boy’s use of his nickname had taken the breath from him, left him gasping. Ross took over, questioning the boy gently. Dubey sat on a chair facing them, mentally recording all that passed. Ross knew that Dubey was going to become a problem, that they should never have got Delhi involved.

‘Tell me, Yongden, you say your real name is Matthew Hyde, that you are his reincarnation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Dennison finds this hard to believe. He does not believe in reincarnations. His superiors in London will find it even harder to believe.’

‘They have not seen me.’

Ross looked at the boy, as though seeing him again for the first time. He no longer wore the tattered Ladakhi goncha he’d worn in May. The Indian clothes made him look like a miniature guru. His face and stature suggested a child of ten. He said he was twelve. His eyes were the most penetrating eyes Ross had ever seen. Blue, as blue as the water in Dal Lake. Yongden might have come from almost anywhere east or north of Kashmir. His English was near perfect.

‘You have to persuade Mr Dennison of the truth of your claims. Otherwise his bosses will not want to see you.’

‘They will want to see me.’

‘Tell us about Matthew Hyde. How does Matthew Hyde come to be in the body of a twelve-year-old boy from Ladakh?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? After all, what do you really know about these things. I found a suitable vessel in a boy called Yongden, and I pushed him aside. After that, it was a doddle. I am no longer Yongden. I am Matthew Hyde.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two years ago. When Yongden was ten.’

‘We have no evidence that Matthew Hyde is dead.’

‘I died in the prison-camp at Huancheng. I was shot there.’

‘We have had no news of that.’

‘Now you know where to ask, you will find what you’re looking for.’

A fly circled the boy’s head, but it would not land. Yongden’s mother went to the next room to prepare tea.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Durham, of course. Nearby, anyway. My mother went over to Hardwick Hall in Sedgefield. It’s a hotel now.’

‘When was that?’

‘Fifteenth of September nineteen fifty-seven.’

Ross looked across at Dennison.

‘Does that check out, sir?’

Dennison nodded.

‘Go on,’ he said. A voice drifted through the open window, a rough man’s voice complaining about something.

‘School?’

‘Ushaw College.’

‘And after that?’

'The usual. Cambridge. My father’s college, King’s. I read Chinese.’

‘The Keynes’ building was there then, was it?’

‘Naturally.’

‘It’s next to the chapel, isn’t it?’

‘Of course not. It’s on the other side of college, facing on to King’s Parade.’

Dennison grunted. He was a John’s man, but he knew the Keynes’ building.

‘After college?’

‘My tutor, Harry Forbes, gave me an address in London. Baker Street. I had a chat with a man there, and the next day I was up for an interview in Carlton Gardens. You know the drill, you’ve been through it yourself.’

Dennison cleared his throat.

‘Who interviewed you?’ he asked.

‘Peter Doddswell. Michael Patch. De Coverley - it must have been a couple of months before his retirement. Hugh Creasey looked in.’

Dennison looked away. Ross reached down for a plastic file he’d left on the floor. Opening it, he extracted a handful of photographs. He took one and passed it to Yongden.

‘Can you tell me who this is?’ he asked.

Yongden glanced at the photograph and handed it back.