know where he is.”
“And, perhaps, to know if he actually is still ‘yours’?”
Nesbit stood abruptly, taking three quick steps to bend over a fairly unexceptional flower. When he spoke, his voice was even but taut. “I refuse to believe that O’Hara has turned coat. I worked with the man. He is the King’s man to his bones.”
I waited for Holmes to agree, but he said nothing. Clearly, he had been rethinking the question since his vehement declaration in Mycroft’s rooms three weeks before. It sounded to me as if he was no longer quite so certain of Mr O’Hara’s bone-deep loyalties.
Holmes allowed the silence to hold for a while. Nesbit prowled up and down, gravel crunching under his soft shoes, until Holmes spoke.
“How many other agents have you lost in recent years?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘lost.’?”
“Any of the word’s definitions will do,” Holmes said irritably.
“Sorry,” Nesbit said, coming back to his bench. “I don’t mean to evade your question. It is merely that the answer is difficult to give. In the sense that we’ve ‘lost’ O’Hara, there have been four others in the past thirty months. In England, or if they were Army, that number would be alarming. But here, it’s commonplace to go months, even years without hearing from one of our ‘pundits,’ as the native agents are called—it’s often just not possible for a man to report in. And frankly, I expect that one or two of those missing simply decided that their period of service was over and slipped quietly back to their families. I am aware of three other such who informed us openly of their retirement from The Game. All of whom, I have confirmed, are healthy and home, thank you very much. It is more than possible that the four missing agents have done the same, merely neglecting to tell us— which would be a typically Indian way to do things, by the way. Indians hate to disappoint a person to his face, and often say yes to something they know they can’t provide. I shouldn’t have expected the attitude from O’Hara, but it’s not beyond the imagination. We’ve made enquiries for him in all the obvious places, including his old lama’s home monastery. He’s either not there, or won’t respond.”
“And what about the other sense of ‘lost’?” Holmes pressed.
Nesbit’s green eyes wandered across to the playing fountain. “Three. All in the last nine months. John Forbes, Mohammed Talibi, and a new man—just a boy—Rupert Bartholomew. All good men. All dead.”
“How?”
“One shot, one knifed, one strangled.” He paused, and then gave us the worst. “All tortured first, beaten and burnt.”
It was suddenly all too clear why Mycroft had sent us.
“You have a traitor in the ranks,” Holmes said.
The handsome face grew still, as if movement might bring a return of pain. After a moment, he nodded, once.
“I no longer know whom I can trust. Even Hari, who has been with me for twelve years, even him . . .” Nesbit broke off, to dig a silver case from a pocket and light a cigarette, pinching the match between his fingers and tucking it back into the case. “I begin to understand how the officers must have felt during the Mutiny. Their own men, men they’d fought beside, marched with, trusted with their lives—with the lives of their wives and children, for God’s sake—turning on them, slaughtering them. And five years ago, I saw Jallianwala Bagh, the morning after. I saw the results of Dyer’s order to fire on the demonstrators. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds and nearly every one of them hit civilian flesh—men, women, and little children heaped against the walls where they’d tried to get away from the machine-gun fire. I’ll never outlive the nightmares, never. Hundreds dead, thousands bleeding, and every white man in India wondering when the country would rise up and kill us in our beds, rid themselves of us once and for all.
“And who could blame them? We collect their taxes and we give them nothing but the bottom of our boot. You heard of Dyer’s ‘crawling order’? Where he set guards to make certain no native could walk past the spot where an Englishwoman had been attacked, but had to crawl—even the natives who’d rescued her? God help us, with such officers. There are days when, if I heard that someone in a position to undermine the Survey from within had chosen to do so, I couldn’t altogether bring myself to condemn him.”
“Yet you don’t believe O’Hara capable?”
“No. Not him.”
“Even though since he was a child his white blood has warred against his love and loyalty to the country that nurtured him?”
“Even so. He would not deceive his friends in that way.”
“O’Hara is quite capable of practising deceit, when it comes to playing The Game.”
“No.”
Holmes looked at the younger man and gave a small shake of his head, but said merely, “I’ll need all the details on the three men found dead, and on those missing.”
“I’ve included a precis in the O’Hara file I have for you. I prepared it myself; no one has seen it.”
“That’s as well.”
Nesbit crushed his cigarette out under his heel, then said abruptly, “I am having doubts as to the wisdom of this venture.”
“That is understandable, but we shall take the file nonetheless.”
“I should not have allowed you to come here, openly to my home. What if you were seen, and followed?”
“Who knows we are here?” Holmes asked.
“You and Miss Russell? By name? No more than four men within the Survey, all of them high ranks. But still . . .”
Holmes smiled happily and reached over to clap the man on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t worry. By tomorrow, your two English visitors will have ceased to exist.”
The smaller man looked taken aback, then forced a grin. “And I’m supposed to find that reassuring?”
With that, the more clandestine portion of our interview was at an end. Nesbit led us inside to his study, where he opened the safe and took out a flat oilskin envelope and a japanned-tin box, laying both on his desk. The tin contained a crumpled and torn paper wrapping with an address in the government offices. Holmes laid the paper out on the desk and set to with the magnifying lens he carried always, but in the end, it told him little more than it had Nesbit: that some tidy person—a man, to judge by the printing—had parcelled up O’Hara’s amulet and sent it to Captain Nesbit, but as the address was entirely in capital letters, it had little personality.
“I couldn’t say if that was . . . our man’s writing,” Nesbit told us, his voice low and avoiding names, “but I’d lay money that it was a St Xavier’s boy who wrote it—the way he’s made the numerals is fairly distinctive. I went to the school myself for two years,” he explained. “Not at the same time, of course, but these numbers look like what I might do, were I attempting to conceal my hand.”
Holmes bent again over the paper, and when he stiffened at some characteristic invisible to me, standing at his shoulder, Nesbit said, “The sand, yes. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to set it apart—it might have come from anywhere in the country.”
“In London,” Holmes muttered, “I could say for a surety that a mite of soil had come from one spot or another, but in this vast land, there are ten thousand places where such grains might have come from.”
“Such as from another parcel,” I pointed out, unnecessarily. Holmes laid the paper back in the tin and took up the twine, turning his lens on its knots. But as they were not tied in a manner known only to Bolivian merchant sailors or a small tribe of gipsies from northern Persia, and since the fibres bore no traces of raw opium, gold dust, or a face-powder sold only in one exclusive shop in Paris, the string told him no more than the paper it had covered. Nesbit seemed mildly disappointed, but unsurprised. He put the box back into his safe, pulling out a lumpy envelope in return. Bringing it to the desk, he fished from it a pair of small silver lockets strung on copper-wire chains and handed us each one.
Holmes smiled, as if he’d seen an old friend, and thumbed the surface of his with familiarity. I held mine up to the light. It was a rude piece of jewellery, with touches of black enamel in the silver and an almost invisible latch on one side, which opened to reveal a small twist of soft rice paper around a hard centre. I unfurled this cautiously, set
