The Hamilton Case (32 page)

He might be proposing a toast at a Bar Association dinner, or negotiating a flight of stairs while pain streamed to his knees from his spine, his mind fixed on the task at hand, when he would be nudged by an un-ease he found difficult to classify. Then the ill-defined impression that he had missed something—
a vital clue
was the formulation that came unbidden to him—would keep him company for days, a smudge at the edge of his vision. If he jerked his head around quickly enough he might spot it.

This tic, very pronounced at times, was remarked upon by everyone who knew him. In the market, Ranil sat on a sack of lentils and gave it as his opinion that the
hamuduruwo
was beset by ghosts. The remark was a testimony to his insight.

On a rain-shrouded night in 1963, Jaya’s car had skidded on a bend near Kadugannawa Pass. He died with a steering wheel embedded in his chest. Sam recalled the black border around his newspaper; the photograph of the crumpled hood. At the time, he had exulted at the supreme justice of it: Jaya crashing into a rocky embankment, like the country he had guided into disaster with such reckless disregard for the rules. The telephone was ringing before he had reached the end of the first column: a chap he knew from Neddy’s, inviting him to a discreet celebration in Cinnamon Gardens that evening. By the time he returned to the table, his toast had grown cold. He rattled the handbell. Ranil came in, after a delay. Sam was about to tick the blighter off; then he saw that the boy was crying.

Now, during the sleepless hours he spent hunched in a chair, cross-examining the past like an unreliable witness, he was haunted by the possibility that he had chosen unwisely. By daylight he knew this to be absurd. But at night the sound of the sea reached him more distinctly. Its repetitions, which were never wholly identical, hinted at infinite subtleties of interpretation. He was unable to articulate why he should find this disturbing. There was only the unbearable thought that everything might have been different.

B
eneath the baleful murmur of ceiling fans, the British Council library offered the
Times
, the
Spectator, Punch
. In this way entire afternoons were rendered tolerable. Each day was a campaign conducted in hostile territory where meticulous discipline was required to keep moving forward, outflanking tedium. He still played tennis every Wednesday and Saturday; and turned up, vervain scented, at AGMs, where he could be counted on to dispute obscure points of order. Other men, his contemporaries, succeeded in overcoming boredom only to be assaulted by despair. Then there were only two courses open to them, death or emigration. He outmaneuvered loneliness by failing to recognize it, a devastating strategy.

One day, as he was leaving the library, his attention snagged on the rosewood stand of Recent Acquisitions. The book was called
Serendipity
; but it was the name below that had drawn his eye. His first thought: When was inadequacy ever a bar to ambition? Nevertheless, as he picked up the volume there was a needle of jealousy in his heart— Shivanathan, the author of a collection of stories!

At the Loans desk, he tapped the crudely tinted illustration on the cover. “I know this fellow.”

The librarian, rifling through his box of index cards, nodded without raising his eyes.

“Oh yes—we were at Neddy’s together. One of those plodders. Worked his way up, worked his way up. But they passed him over for the Supreme Court.”

Even the silly asses at the Ministry got it right from time to time. Like everyone in the legal fraternity, Sam knew that Shivanathan had come under an official cloud. Details were sketchy, but Billy Mohideen had insisted the blighter was suspected of taking bribes. Nothing could be proved, said Mohideen, but the Supreme Court was out of the question. It so happened, however, that the vacancy arose shortly after the riots in ’58, when everything was reflected in the distorting mirror of race. The cry went up that Shiva had been overlooked because he was a Tamil.

While the controversy billowed about him, Shivanathan had accepted a post abroad; somewhere that didn’t count, like Canada. At this recollection, Sam’s resentment began to ease. He flipped through the book, a cheap local edition, noticing the coarse paper, misspellings and smudged, uneven type. A biographical note informed him that the author was
Emeritus Professor of Low
at a university in Vancouver. The little rush of glee carried Sam along Galle Road, so that he bore the exhausted afternoon with equanimity. The sloganed, filthy walls, the blue petrol stink and glaring windshields, the house-high advertisements for Bata Shoes: he smiled with gentle forbearance on them all.

At sunset bats rose from the tree at the top of the lane to stencil the sky. Sam opened Shivanathan’s book, savored the pretentious subtitle—
Island Epiphanies
—and prepared to be entertained. “There will be breasts that resemble mangoes,” he announced to the decanter at his elbow. “Hair lustrous with coconut oil will alternately ripple and cascade. And I very much fear there’ll be a barefoot old woman in spotless white who eats curries with her fingers and performs simple devotions to her gods.”

Two hours of contented skimming proved him right in every particular. He put down the book, awarded himself a third whiskey and went in to dinner.

For years now he had taken his meals at a gate-legged table in his office room. At eight Ranil came in with a fish cutlet, boiled French beans, tinned beetroot, white bread and butter. Afterward there was orange jelly. Everything was indifferently cooked, the beans falling apart, the jelly resilient as rubber; but to care overmuch about food is a sign of weak character. Between courses he opened Shiva’s book at random and read, with deep pleasure, a sentence involving
a maiden
and
delicately cupped hands.

Over the jelly, his amusement turned rancid. Shiva had taken the cuneiform in which the world manifested itself and reduced it to a script suitable for the nursery:
H is for Hut. L is for Lotus.
His version of reality resembled the simple drawings in flat, bright colors that adorn kindergarten walls: a typical lotus, a typical hut. And those terrible little pictures, drained of all complexity, were hailed by his publishers as
authentic glimpses of an island paradise
. Here I am, thought Sam, with my orange jelly and my
Collected Works of Shakespeare
, I’m part of it all too, like it or not, I’m as authentic as any bally mango.

The last story in the book was by far the longest. He saved it until he had swallowed the last spoonful, intending to relish it like a sweet.

He read quickly at first, then slowly, and a pale moth drugged on light drowned in the coffee grown cold in his cup.

When he was halfway down the last page, the night mail dragged past at the bottom of the lane. Minutes later it reached the bend in the track and cried out, a beast that could endure no longer.

He flipped pages until he found the beginning of the story, and read it through once more.

“Death of a Planter” was set in an outstation in the 1930s. It centered on a bored Englishwoman named Cynthia Wilmot, who was married to the superintendent of a rubber plantation. Mrs. Wilmot had been amusing herself with a man called Cameron, her husband’s oldest friend, who managed the adjoining estate. The story opened at the point where she had thrown him over for Vernon Danby, the local magistrate. Consumed by jealous hatred, Cameron threatened to lay the tale of her infidelities before her husband; whereupon the lovers colluded to murder him.

Cameron’s body was found beside an isolated estate road very early one morning. The police looked for the killer among his workers, as Cameron was a notoriously harsh employer. A coolie was arrested and interrogated. But nothing could be proved against the man, despite the best efforts of the police, and eventually he was released. (Here, the flow of the story was interrupted by a page of predictable sentiments about the plight of the estate worker, plucked from his native India to labor on the plantations of the profiteering British. The sole merit of the passage was to stamp Shiva’s blatant pastiche of Maugham with a clumsiness that was wholly original.)

It was then, a few weeks after the crime, that the murderers revealed their genius and the true viciousness of their scheme. Danby befriended an English reporter who was visiting the district and contrived to direct suspicion at Mrs. Wilmot’s husband. The reporter,
a Londoner with the high opinion of himself that brands a fool
, leapt at the opportunity to play sleuth. Within days, following the trail of insinuation and false evidence artfully laid by Danby, he had “discovered” the identity of the murderer. True to the principles of detective fiction, his investigations “proved” that the crime had been committed by the least likely suspect: Wilmot, the dead man’s best friend.

Wilmot protested his innocence, but was arrested and tried for murder. He stood to gain financially from Cameron’s death, having come into a sizable legacy from his friend. Yet at trial the case for the prosecution was shown to be flimsy, with little direct evidence linking the accused to the crime.

At this crucial juncture Cynthia Wilmot took the witness stand. There, playing her role with consummate artistry, she “broke down” under cross-examination and confessed to her affair with Cameron. She told the court of her fears that Wilmot had discovered what was going on. She also retracted the alibi she had originally provided, now admitting that she had slept so soundly throughout the night of the murder that she could not swear to her husband’s presence at her side. Everyone understood what she did not actually say: that this unnaturally deep sleep had been brought on by the cup of Horlicks served to her at bedtime by the accused and doctored with a draught for his own murderous ends.

The jury returned a Guilty verdict, which was upheld on appeal, and Wilmot went to his death in a prison yard one morning.

His widow, tearful and upright to the last, sailed for New Zealand, where Danby joined her after a judicious interval.

The reporter, whose genius was feted on three continents, turned his account of the murder into a bestselling book, accepted an outrageously high fee from a London broadsheet to write the occasional column celebrating his own brilliance, and lived a long, contented and useless life.

Much later, while a corner of his brain noted with puzzlement that the decanter was almost empty, Sam thought of Shivanathan cultivating his spite over the years until it erupted at last into this grotesque flower. It demonstrated what he had always known: that no one is too untalented to excel at envy.

Yvette Taylor had been capable of anything. Hadn’t he always suspected her of setting that weak fool Taylor on his murderous course? Beyond that, Shiva’s theory was preposterous. To imply that Nagel was guilty of cold-blooded collusion in the deaths of two men was fanciful enough. But to suggest that Sam himself had been instrumental in fulfilling the murderers’ design proved only that a diseased mind is a great maker of fictions.

The high opinion of himself that brands a fool.
There would be smiles in Hulftsdorf when that one did the rounds.

From the row of royal-blue bindings, he selected the volume he wanted straight away. The bookcase had a glass door locked with a key, protecting its contents from the monsoon’s rot; but silverfish have in common with thoughts the capacity to ravage as they please. He shook the book gently, dislodging a papery shower of wings from the binding on the spine, noticing that the silver crest and motto on the cover were still bright:
Semper Vincit.
Inside, entire sections displayed the insects’ tattoos, but the cutting he had placed there forty years earlier remained intact. He carried it over to the lamp and examined the photograph with the tender amazement we reserve for our younger selves.
Our Sherlock Holmes:
as an embrocation, it was extraordinarily soothing.

With supreme disregard for the British Council’s injunctions he went through Shivanathan’s book with his pen in his hand, circling literals, underlining errors of fact, annotating legal points, calling attention to the grosser stylistic blunders with an exclamation mark in the margin. All the while an old trouble flickered just below the surface of his mind. Something he had noticed but not heeded at the time. It came again, a faint tug traveling up the taut stretch of years. Any moment he would wind it in. But then it darted away, vanishing into opacity where he couldn’t follow.

When he looked up he saw what he had long ceased hoping for, a fold of yellow skirt in the mess of shadows beyond the bookcase. At once he was released, the core of him unclenching. There would be time yet to set everything right. He rose from his chair in a single painless movement, supple as a boy. She was gone on the instant. But when he opened his eyes the memory of happiness remained, a streak of brightness like the first thread of day unspooling along the horizon.

It was a Saturday. There were no young men waiting on the verandah. Half-past ten found him at his usual post, by the gate. A dull discomfort was coursing the length of the arm that had been cramped under his body when he woke. He stretched and flexed the limb but was unable to dislodge the ache. There was a scuttling among the white-haired mango stones and blackened plantain skins in the ditch; a rat perhaps, or a chameleon. Watson cocked his head, but declined to investigate.

The stand on the postman’s bicycle was broken. He propped it against a telephone pole and fed envelope after envelope into the slits in the gateposts of the pastel houses across the way. Then he looked across at Sam and shook his head. He could just as well have signaled this information as he freewheeled down the lane, but had chosen to keep his victim in suspense. This despite relieving him of five chips at Christmas. Fury knocked at Sam’s breastbone. But he remained planted where he was, gazing up the lane as if absorbed in the red tilt of the earth, the vacant blue sky. He was very well aware that this charade lacked conviction, but was unable to prevent himself from acting it out.