‘Of course not. But sometimes ideas percolate without there appearing to be any definite agency. The need for progress, for instance. And, in a sense, being against Britain united India. It created the concept of patriotism, of a nation. Indians started to talk of Mother India. That was new, and look where it’s led.’
Mike shook his head. ‘I never thought I’d hear you justify a colonial regime.’
‘I’m not justifying it. Merely playing devil’s advocate.’
‘Be careful you don’t turn into the devil while you’re doing it,’ Mike said sourly.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care.’ Grayson got up from the table and pulled back Daisy’s chair for her. ‘You’re very quiet this evening, Miss Driscoll. Have we overwhelmed you by the brilliance of our arguments?’
‘I really don’t know enough to say anything sensible,’ she excused herself. ‘Overall, though, I think I’d be with Mike on this.’
Mike smiled at her with genuine warmth and she realised how much that had been missing during their trip.
‘I’ve clearly lost out,’ Grayson said, ‘and before you two gang up on me any more, I’m off to bed. There’s a lot to do tomorrow and I can’t imagine it will be any cooler to do it in.’
It was the signal for a general breaking up of the party and Daisy was able to slip away to her room with a murmured goodnight. The slightly bad-tempered conversation had ensured that she’d escaped interrogation, not just about how she’d spent today, but how she intended to spend tomorrow. There had been a price to pay for it though. An unaccustomed divide had opened up between the two friends and she hadn’t enjoyed seeing them disagree so starkly.
Once Mike and Grayson had left the house the following morning—together, she noted, and that felt a good deal better—she set off for Megaur. It took an hour’s driving along a road which wound northwards and across a landscape crackling with heat. In this first searing blast of India’s hot season, there was no sign that when the rains came, bushes and trees, fields and ditches would burst into new, green life. For now she looked out on a land shrivelled into crisp parchment. Beneath the sun’s white glare, the bright trees on either side sent sparks flying heavenwards. Clouds of dust mushroomed over the tonga as they drove, covering horse and driver and passenger with a fine red sheen. Yesterday she’d been foolish enough to venture out bareheaded and Grayson had taken her to task. Today she’d been careful to unhook the last remaining topi from the corner stand, but it proved only a flimsy defence. Even beneath the tonga’s fringed canopy, she had continually to adjust the helmet to cover as much of her neck as possible, and it wasn’t long before she was feeling hot and gritty.
In just under the hour, they were driving through Megaur. It was a sizeable village, with several narrow streets of whitewashed houses, a variety of shops and stalls and a large and ornate temple set back from the road. It was cleaner and tidier than most of the smaller villages they’d passed through and she wondered if Anish’s uncle was the main landlord of the district. If so, Megaur did him proud. Mrs Forester had called him a rude man, but Daisy hoped she’d been mistaken. Edith’s relationship with Indians was mediated through long experience of living under the Raj and she was likely to interpret any show of pride as discourtesy.
The tonga drew to a halt outside a pair of elaborately decorated iron gates and the driver said something to her in Hindi. This must be Amrita. She went to alight and then realised with a sinking feeling that the colonel’s wife had not mentioned the name of the man who lived here, and she had no idea how to address him. Not that it mattered, it seemed. She had barely rung the bell, when a white-coated servant emerged from the house and waved at her. It took her a while before she realised that he was waving her away.
She peered through the gate and tried to explain her arrival. But the man wasn’t interested in listening. Either he spoke no English or he’d been sent to frighten her away. The latter it appeared, for he picked up a large wooden stave from the side of the drive and walked purposefully towards her. At the sign of this aggression, the tonga driver took fright and began to back his horse up the lane they had just travelled.
Daisy didn’t blame him but neither did she intend to be intimidated. ‘Tell your master that my name is Driscoll and I have travelled some miles to see him. Be sure to say that I won’t intrude for long but I would be grateful to speak with him for a short while.’
A loudspeaker attached to one of the gateposts crackled into life. She hadn’t noticed it before but evidently it relayed speech back into the house. The voice that emerged from its depths was smooth and urbane.
‘Good morning, Miss Driscoll. Please, do come in.’
And the gates swung open.
Grayson had spent another frustrating morning. For nearly two days he’d questioned members of the administration team, telephoned old contacts and walked the town’s streets, but only the haziest of whispers had been of any interest. It was a most unusual situation and it took him some time to realise that it was a reluctance to speak, rather than ignorance, that was keeping people silent. When yesterday he’d made an abortive visit to the bazaar, he’d thought the stallholders in those narrow, ancient streets might be holding out for more money than he’d so far offered. He knew them to be a canny bunch. But when today he’d cast his net wider, visiting every business, every professional office in the town, and received the same response, he became certain his potential informants were scared. Everywhere he met with the same reception—a warm greeting, a chair pulled out, chai brought, but when the conversation turned to the troubles in the north of Rajasthan, there was a deafening silence followed by an apologetic smile and more chai. It must be precisely what Javinder had faced, and yet the young man had discovered enough to send him hotfoot to—to where? The region was huge and Grayson could be travelling for days and still find himself nowhere near his young colleague. He needed to have some sense of where he should be heading, particularly as it seemed his journey was likely to be every bit as dangerous as he’d feared.
After hours of useless talking, he walked into the office he shared with Mike to find his companion looking equally disheartened. The room was sticky with heat, a ceiling fan stirring the sluggish air to little effect. Mike looked up as he came through the door, a slow trickle of perspiration running down the centre of his forehead and stopping short at the bridge of his nose.
‘Did you have any luck?’ he asked.
Their last evening’s clash seemed to have been forgotten and Grayson could see his colleague was trying hard to look cheerful. That made him feel a little better. He hadn’t enjoyed being at odds with Mike, who was a good friend, an old friend. And he needed the man’s help if his quest was to have any chance of success.
‘Not a scrap. How about you?’
‘Much the same. I’ve been trying since early this morning to get these files into some kind of order.’ He waved a damp hand towards the tottering piles of paper which all but covered the surface of both desks. ‘I’m sure Javinder Joshi was an excellent worker. I can see he kept his paperwork more or less up to date, but he’s been gone several months, and since then the filing has turned into a paper Everest. I reckon every person in the building has slung something in here over that time. Probably anything they didn’t know what to do with.’
Grayson slumped down in his chair, putting his feet up on the desk and dislodging several files. He surveyed the mass of paper glumly. ‘It certainly looks that way. But you shouldn’t have the bother of going through every document in detail. For now, just stack the stuff as tidily as you can and someone else can decide later where it all belongs.’
Mike shook his head, then fished around on the floor for an errant pair of reading glasses that had somehow jumped from the desk. ‘I’ve been reading