The India Spy Page 14

  None of this would have mattered if Jamie’s involvement could have been ruled out, but it couldn’t, and that worried me. Macaulay the historian with access to a few dusty archives was one thing, but if he was working with Jamie, a senior station head at MI6, IPI, one of the least-known, most shadowy arms of Britain’s intelligence services, might conceivably still be wielding some posthumous influence over fifty years after its supposed demise.

  I needed to talk to Frank.

  15

  Frank seemed genuinely alarmed when I told him about the IPI files, but excited, too. It was as if he were finally confronting something in his past that he knew he had been avoiding for years.

  “If you say these files are declassified, a copy should be with the Oriental and India Office Collections by now,” Frank was saying on a better line than last time. “I’ll ring the British Library, see if I can have a read of them myself.”

  At last he was beginning to sound like the old, reassuring Frank again. He used to spend a good deal of time as a student at the British Library, partly researching Indian miniatures, mainly because of the surprisingly large number of women he managed to seduce there. (“It’s the pheromones,” he had once joked. “Libraries are awash with them.”) That was what most upset me about the night I had found him and his family on my drive. Frank had been visibly distraught and he wasn’t meant to be like that. But it had reminded me that everyone had their limits and I knew that what I was about to ask Frank might test them again.

  “Frank, you remember when you first told me about IPI, the message you intercepted,” I began.

  “Yes,” he said, the first hint of suspicion creeping into his voice.

  “You said then that you had a sympathiser, someone on the inside. Do you think they might still be sympathetic?”

  “Raj, it was a long time ago – almost twenty years.”

  “I know, but he still might be able to help. We need to establish a link between Macaulay and IPI.”

  “We?”

  “Macaulay, IPI and Jamie,” I added. Frank had never met Macaulay, but I knew the mention of Jamie would stir something, although I wasn’t quite sure what. It seemed that Jamie had been an irritant in Frank’s life for longer than he cared to remember.

  “It’s a long shot – I don’t even know if he’s still alive,” Frank was protesting, but I knew already that he would look up his old contact.

  I rang Priyanka next, at her office. It was a risk, but I had already considered my approach and began by telling her that I had some potentially sensational news about Macaulay. She was writing her article, wrestling with an angle, she said, and I could hear the mixture of relief and excitement in her voice when I told her that Macaulay might be a spy after all.

  We agreed to meet at an icecream parlour across the road from her office in Panampilly Nagar, where I waited for her to appear, reading the files again and inhaling the sweet smell of honeybee, blackcurrant and “hold me tight” icecreams.

  It was hard to concentrate, the tone of her voice on the phone lingering, teasing. After an initial, formal exchange of words, an unmistakable quickening had crept into both our voices. In my case it was the knowledge that we had a legitimate reason for seeing each other again, an alibi that would exempt her from family reproach. Of course, it didn’t make any difference – we were still committing the crime of seeing each other on our own – but I felt much better, as if our imminent encounter was entirely due to outside professional elements beyond our control rather than because of our own feelings. Did she feel the same? Or was it just the journalist who had agreed so promptly to another meeting? Her manner last night as I had left the nursing home, accompanied by her father, had been hard to read: if there had been any emotion on her face it was fear.

  There was only openness when she walked into the parlour, her face melting into a gratifying smile when she spotted me in the corner. She gave me a small wave, her smile lasting all the way to the table. Something about her had changed.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, sitting down opposite me. She gave my forearm a small squeeze.

  “No problem,” I said, thinking that I would have waited for forty days if I had known she would breeze in with such radiance. I assumed it must be her mother. “Any news from the hospital? I was going to ring them.”

  “I just had a call from my father,” she said, looking briefly at the plastic menu. “She’s much better today.”

  “Excellent. Must be the herbs.”

  She glanced up at me again, a look of childish anticipation in her eyes, as if she were about to impart a secret.

  “He also said something else,” she said. “Our thalakuris are not compatible.”

  “Our what?”

  “The match is off.”

  I looked at her for a moment and then realised she was referring to her future husband. I tried to find something in her face to corroborate what she was saying, a small crease of sadness, a welling up of despair, but all I could see was happiness.

  “The broker’s been with him all morning. They’ve got an astrologer there as well. My horoscope is very problematic. I have chowa dosham – Mars, the ruiner of many girls. With great difficulty they found a boy who also had chowa dosham, but now it seems something else has cropped up in the thalakuri. My father’s very upset. Pur a niranju nilkunna pennu – ‘the girl who is so grown she fills the house’.”

  “You must be devastated, too,” I said, risking a smile to match her own.

  “He was too fat,” she said, laughing.

  “Too fat?” I said, subconsciously breathing in. “I thought you said you liked him.”

  “I did. I do. He’s very sweet, but…”

  “But?” I said, teasing.

  She looked around the room and then leant forward. “His breath smelt of veluthulli.”

  It sounded pretty horrible, whatever it was. “Veluthulli?” I asked out of the side of my mouth, in case my own breath smelt of the two Nilgiri coffees I had drunk while waiting for her.

  “Garlic. We never use it in our family. Never.”

  “No, of course not.” Annoyingly, I felt a touch of sympathy for the man as I made a mental note never to order garlic bread again. “What did he do, anyway? You never said.”

  “He was very rich,” she sighed. “That’s my only regret. He ran a dotcom company.”

  He did?” I asked, tickled by my own prescience. “In Bangalore?”

  “No, here, in Ernakulam.”

  “These cyber CEOs, you can’t trust them. Really, they’re fly-by-nights. One click and they’re gone. Here today, crashed tomorrow. E-money, no substance. What you want is the son of an industrialist, a solid fortune like steel or marble, something that hurts when you drop it on your foot, not this ephemeral net nonsense.”

  She looked slightly taken aback by my outburst. “I didn’t realise you felt so strongly,” she said.

  “I don’t. I’m just jealous.”

  My words hung between us in the cool, scented air.

  “There’s no need to be,” she said quietly. “Not any more.”

  “I’m going back to Delhi this afternoon,” I said, unable to draw my eyes away from hers.

  “So soon?”

  “I got a message yesterday. Will you be staying in Cochin?”

  “I’ve told my father I want to leave it for a while. The broker’s desperate for me to stay. I’ll be here for a few more days, until Mummy’s settled back at home.”

  “Then Delhi?”

  She nodded, her eyes fixed on mine, limpid, full of promise.

  Then I remembered Macaulay, his words about my father, IPI, Jamie, each recollection chipping away at a moment that I wanted to last. I had to discuss these things with Priyanka before I returned to Delhi, share them with someone, to have them validated by a third party, in the hope that they might become more real. At the moment I couldn’t process the potential implications.

  “I’ve come across some new information about Macaula
y,” I begun.

  “I need something.” She gestured to one of the waiters for a coffee. “When we talked he seemed such good copy but then I played it back and I realised he’d actually said nothing.”

  “He’s clever like that. Gets people to reveal far more of themselves than he ever discloses of himself.”

  “So what have you got?”

  “Did I ever tell you about a person called Dutchie? He was English, a backpacker.” She shook her head. “He turned up half dead in the clinic one day. Anyway, it turns out he stayed here in Cochin, with Macaulay.”

  “On the island?”

  “One of the select few. You saw that guy walking around half naked the other day? According to Paul, the boy with polio, Dutchie came across a whole load of files at Macaulay’s house. It seems he shouldn’t have seen them. A few days later he was found unconscious on a platform at Ernakulam Junction.”

  “What sort of files were they?”

  “You didn’t see any, then?”

  “No. And being a good journalist, I had a snoop around when I went to the bathroom.”

  “According to Paul, the files contained information on Indians who had settled in Britain.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “He didn’t elaborate. But you heard what Macaulay had to say about my father.” I held up the sheaf of papers. “This morning Paul gave me these. Somebody sent them to Dutchie at the café but he never received the package.”

  “And? What are they?”

  “Recently declassified files. Certain sections were marked. This bit, for example,” I said, handing her a page. As she read, I told her a bit more about IPI, its secret remit to follow anyone suspected of being a revolutionary, its supposed closure after Independence. For a moment I thought that she was not interested, but she read carefully, moving to other pages that I had marked. I watched her gently bite her lower lip as she concentrated, drawing her teeth slowly across the soft inside.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said, five minutes later. “How’s Macaulay involved?”

  “Remember what he said about my father, his supposed role in the Quit India movement? It’s just the sort of information IPI would have compiled.”

  “You think Macaulay might have once worked for IPI?”

  “Yes,” I said, showing her the first paragraph. “Have a look at this bit again. It was said by Vickery, the man who ran IPI for thirty years: ‘Strong arguments can be adduced in favour of the retention of IPI as a self-contained unit for some time to come.’”

  She looked at me for a moment, holding my stare. “It was closed down,” she said flatly, putting the pages on the table.

  “Possibly.” I picked the papers up and found her the section about the meeting off Parliament Square, the page that had been heavily edited. “Did Frank ever tell you about his life in England?”

  “Frank?” she said, clearly surprised by the introduction of his name. “Not really, why?”

  “He didn’t ever tell you about his days with CND or with the Communist Party of Great Britain?”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “But then nothing about Frank surprises me.”

  “He was having a bad time of it when I left Delhi,” I said, thinking back to the pitiful sight of his family on my driveway. It was a relief to be sharing it. “The British authorities were getting suspicious, didn’t like him applying for Indian citizenship.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s okay.” I paused, weighing up whether I could continue without revealing anything of my other role in Delhi, wondering whether I cared any more. I carried on, before the resentment built, knowing I would soon tell her, in the same way that I had known I would tell Frank. “Frank told me something about a man who works at the High Commission. Jamie Grade. He’s meant to be head of spooks.”

  “Spooks?”

  “Spies. MI6. Frank crossed swords with him in the late 1980s, when he was working for CND. He says they intercepted a communication to Jamie. It had the initials ‘IPI’ at the end of the message.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It was about a British Asian, originally from Gujarat, who had recently become involved with CND.”

  “My God,” she said quietly.

  She paused for a moment and then looked at me, her face suddenly colder. “Why are you interested in all this? I thought you were just a doctor.”

  “I am,” I said, turning away, hating the deception. Then I faced her again. “But I’m also British and I feel uncomfortable when I read about organisations such as IPI. Offended.”

  Despite my falseness of tone, she temporarily bought the story, which upset me more than having to keep the truth from her.

  “But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why sign something ‘IPI’ fifty years after it was officially disbanded?”

  “I don’t know. I’m more worried about Macaulay. He claimed to know a lot about my father.”

  “But you don’t think it’s true.”

  “Your father said he remembered him.”

  “My father? When?”

  “Last night, when I was leaving. He said he remembered a Ramachandran Nair, thought he had been involved with politics.”

  “Did you talk to him for long?”

  “For a while. Why?”

  “He didn’t mention it.” She looked at her watch. “I must get back to the office. I’ll tell them to hold it over.”

  Our eyes searched each other’s faces. There was so much to come that the inevitability of it was almost overwhelming, like an approaching storm over Delhi, humid, unstoppable, just a matter of when.

  “If I find out some more about Macaulay, shall I email it to you?” I asked.

  “Please. The biggest problem is going to be proving any of this. We need to see those files.”

  “He’s got a website, too. Ostensibly for his café.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  “You must be careful about Macaulay. Dutchie was a jibbering wreck when I saw him. Muttering something about Kali.”

  “That would follow. Who was that boy, then, in the lunghi?”

  “Just another traveller. Handpicked by Macaulay from the hundreds who pass through the café. He has a weakness for young men.”

  “He was rather gorgeous.”

  “Was he?” I was about to tell her what I had seen in the kitchen, but she wrong-footed me.

  “In a sort of Hrithik Roshan sort of way,” she continued. “Muscly. Just like you.”

  She leant forward and squeezed what passed for my biceps. Her hand lingered for a moment and I took it in my own. Instinctively she looked around the parlour but there was no one watching. I held her hand tight. “He split the boy’s lip,” I said.

  “Who did?” she asked, looking at me for an explanation.

  “Macaulay. When I went back to say goodbye, I found him in the kitchen, smacking the boy. It was hard, not just a slap. And when his mouth started to bleed, Macaulay kissed him.”

  “You saw this?” she asked, appalled, withdrawing her hand. I suddenly felt guilty for sharing it, for puncturing her happy mood.

  “They didn’t see me,” I said, looking out of the window.

  “That’s awful,” she said after a pause. “Awful.”

  “Can’t you come away, just for a while?” I asked, turning to her again, trying to lighten the mood with a smile.

  “Raj, please, you mustn’t,” she said, getting ready to go.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s unfair. You know it is. This is my home town, where my parents live. Where I grew up. It’s not like in Britain, or Delhi. I’m accountable.”

  She wasn’t angry, just a little strident. We were both pleased to have moved away from Macaulay.

  “Delhi, then?” I asked, fiddling with my empty coffee cup, our bill tucked underneath the saucer. She didn’t answer. I looked up after a few moments and saw her eyes were moistening.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, touching her f
orearm. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, interrupting me, regaining her composure. “I should be thanking you.”

  “Thanking me? For what? Being pushy and insensitive to your family?”

  “You know perfectly well what for.”

  “I don’t,” I protested, relieved at the change in direction.

  “For your timing.”

  Everyone should be allowed one chance in life to get out of the water.

  “That was the easy part. It was all in the stars.”

  I stood up and gave the bill to a waiter, together with a hundred-rupee note. Outside on the street the hot air blew into our faces like a hair-dryer. We crossed the busy Manorama Junction, heading back towards her office. To the left was one of Panampilly Nagar’s wide, leafy avenues, straight ahead was a bridge leading back towards the congested M. G. Road.

  “There’s my editor,” Priyanka said, nodding at a group of men who were drinking coffee and smoking at a stall across from the office, in the shade of some trees. They hadn’t seen us yet. Priyanka stopped, pulling me back out of sight. I suddenly wanted to tell her about Sir Ian, why I was really here, but it was too late.

  “Ring me when you get to Delhi,” she said, our faces close.

  I leant forward to kiss her mouth but she moved her head discreetly away.

  “Not here,” she said. “We’re very provincial in Cochin, remember?”

  *

  Back at the hotel I asked for my bill to be prepared and then took a lift to the second floor, where I walked along what looked like a ship’s corridor, sloping gently upwards towards the bow and my room at the end. It was still being cleaned and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the two young women as they made my bed, folded back the top sheet, changed the towels. They were both college students, bright with brilliant smiles and fluent in English. I was relieved when they finally went, their presence had been too unsettling.

  My flight to Delhi left in two hours and once my case had been packed I sank into one of those unproductive hotel dazes, alternating between TV, minibar, and bathroom. I ordered a club sandwich from room service and then took a long shower, which only ended when a metal bell rattled on the tiles above the taps. I stepped out of the spray, wrapping a towel around my waist. For a moment I considered not putting anything else on, in case it was one of the women back to turn another sheet, but I checked myself and slipped on a T-shirt.