“Er, no. That one’s there to remind me to be humble.” He threw us a boyish grin. “Big job, that. No, the broken one’s from the ’22 Cup. The first day, I’d flushed a big ’un, run it across the fields a mile or more, right at its heels when it jinked back in a flash and came for my horse. Which very sensibly shied, dumping me top over teakettle. Somehow I landed on my own spear and took a great hunk out of my arm. Nearly the end of my career.”
“So, what, did you shoot the creature? Or did it run off?”
“Good Lord, no,” Nesbit said, affronted. “One doesn’t carry a gun when pig sticking. And once a pig’s decided to fight, it generally doesn’t quit until one or the other of you stops moving. No, one of the other fellows took the beast. And the Cup as well. Native chap—maharaja in fact, though nothing like what you think of at the title. That’s him in the photo. He nearly had the Cup from me last year, he’s that good. ’Course he should be good, he has enough practice going after any kind of game you can mention. African lion, giraffe—you name it.”
Sports; maharaja; exotic animals: The unlikely conjunction rang some bells in my mind, but Holmes got the question out first.
“What is the name of this maharaja?”
“They call him Jimmy. Rum chap, a bit, but a great sportsman. He’s the ruler of a border state named —”
“Khanpur.”
Nesbit’s eyes locked onto Holmes over the top of his cup. Then, calmly, he took the last swallow, placed the cup and saucer on the tray, and stood. “Shall we go and look at the garden?”
“Looking at the garden” seemed to be a common ritual in the Nesbit establishment. At any rate, the ground was clear for a circle of thirty yards around the two benches he led us to, benches located in the shade of a tree which had recently been thinned so its inner structure could hide no person, benches facing in opposite directions to cover all approaches. A low fountain played nearby, obscuring our voices.
“You seem to have an interest in the maharaja of Khanpur,” he said as soon as we were seated.
“Not directly, but the name has come to our attention.”
It took a while, the story. Thomas Goodheart and the bison-collecting maharaja who had been at a Moscow gathering attended by Lenin. The defiant words of the drunken Goodheart, and his odd choice of fancy dress, preceded the odder decision to enter Aden with a debilitating hang-over on the day a balcony fell. To say nothing of the interesting coincidence that Khanpur was one of the kingdoms along the northern borders insulating British India from her long-time Russian threat. Holmes even mentioned my missing trunk, although by this time neither of us thought that was due to anything more sinister than inefficiency, or at the most a garden-variety thievery.
Nesbit listened without comment, but with such intensity that I thought he might well be able to recite Holmes’ words verbatim afterwards. At the end, he sat forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes not seeing the playing fountain while his mind explored the information. Eventually, he sat upright.
“If Goodheart is a known Communist, we probably needn’t worry, although I’ll pass his name on to the political johnnies. As for Khanpur, the state has always been staunchly loyal to the Crown. During the Mutiny, a handful of sepoys fleeing north attempted to pass through the kingdom, carrying with them two English captives, a mother and her young daughter. The then raja, Jimmy’s grandfather, allowed them entrance, but then set up an ambush on the road that passes through two halves of his hill fort. Dumped a thousand gallons of lamp-oil down the hill and set it alight. Killed them all, including the woman, unfortunately, but the child lived and was returned home. By way of recognition of their service, all the Khanpur tribute is remitted annually. And the raja’s rank was raised to maharaja. Khanpur has a seventeen-gun salute, which is big for its size—the girl’s family was important.”
“The Mutiny was a long time ago.”
“The Mutiny was yesterday, as far as every white man in the country is concerned. But it is true, that was the grandfather, and much can change in sixty-seven years. I shall bring this to the attention of my superiors.”
His eyes came back into focus. “Now, as to the reason why you are here. Kimball O’Hara. Mr Holmes, you knew O’Hara, did you not.” It was not a question.
“When he was a boy.”
“By all accounts, the man he became was there from the beginning.”
“The lad was remarkably well suited to The Game,” Holmes agreed.
“Which makes it all the more troubling that he has vanished.”
“How long has it been since he was last heard from?”
“Just short of three years.”
“It’s only in the past months that we’ve become aware of it. But once we cast back to look for his tracks, the last sure sighting we could come up with was in August of ’21.”
“Where was that?”
“In the hills above Simla. He stopped the night with an old acquaintance, and told her that he was going back to Tibet for a time, although he intended a detour to Lahore first to visit a friend.”
“But the friend in Lahore never saw him?”
“We could uncover no one in Lahore who had seen him. In fact, we couldn’t even find anyone there who would admit to being O’Hara’s friend.”
“And the amulet?”
“Ah. That arrived ten weeks ago. By post.” The dry answer forestalled any exclamations, for clearly the surprise of such an unadorned delivery had sent waves through the department, leaving a thousand questions in its wake. Holmes ventured one of those.
“Posted where?”
“In Delhi. Handed in at an hotel by a French tourist, a lady here to paint botanical watercolours. She was given it by a middle-aged Parsi who guided her through the gardens in Bombay, requesting that favour in return.”
“Extraordinary. I don’t suppose you still have the paper it came wrapped in?”
“Of course. It’s in my safe, if you’d like to see it.”
“Very much.”
I broke in with a question. “Pardon me if I ask things I either should not, or which I ought to know already, but was Mr O’Hara still on what you might call ‘active duty’?”
“Not really. After the War, with the Bolsheviks apparently having their hands full in Russia, we had all begun to think we might relax our guard and turn to other concerns. Since O’Hara’s expertise is that of the borders and Tibet, he sat at a desk for a year, possibly a bit more, then in late 1920 asked for a holiday. He was forty-five and had not taken one since returning from Tibet when he was nineteen, so one could scarcely object. But when we needed him this past autumn and went looking, we couldn’t find him.”
“You say you needed him. The Russians are back?” Holmes asked.
“If not yet, then soon. You know that Labour will grant the Bolsheviks formal recognition?”
“It is to be expected.”
“A mistake. MacDonald has his head in the clouds if he imagines The Bear will turn cuddly simply because they share a theoretical conviction. Belief was, The Game was finished with the Anglo-Russian convention seventeen years ago. But then the Reds came in and tore up all the treaties and back we went. Lenin—or whoever’s in charge while he’s ill—is buying time to sniff out our weak places, and will very soon be nudging through the passes like the Tsar before him. Our enemy may have changed his hat, but the Bolsheviks want a Communist East as much as the Tsar did, you can count on it. They won’t settle for the Congress Party—as far as they’re concerned, Gandhi’s worse than we are, a religious reactionary. And since the Bolsheviks will assuredly look to Tibet as a potential point of entry just as the Tsar before them did, we need O’Hara back on the force. True, Tibet has been receiving our own overtures of late—our giving the Dalai Lama shelter in 1910 saw to that—but whether the Russians or the Chinese get to Lhasa first, we’re going to need Tibet, and they us. We’re sending a political officer out this summer, but that’s all bells and whistles. We need someone who can see outside the diplomatic circle, and O’Hara knows the ground as a tongue knows its teeth.” He paused, to watch a pair of small black-headed birds dive at the fountain, and gave an almost imperceptible sigh.
“Still, that is not the main consideration here. What it boils down to is, O’Hara’s one of ours, and we want to
