City of Bells (14 page)

             
It is their nightly song, Trevor thought.  They should call in the violinist and set it to music.  As the voices swirled around him, Trevor leaned out in his seat to determine the identity of the last speaker, the man who had spoken so eloquently about interim history. 

             
To his vast surprise, he found it was Jonathan Benson.

***

              “Will you be visiting the Taj Mahal during your visit?” Amy Morrow asked Tom, for she was thoroughly tired of hearing talk of an event which, while admittedly ghastly, had taken place years before she was born. 

             
“I would love to,” Tom said.  “But Agra lies three days travel to the north, or so I’m told, and we are here on business.  I doubt we shall have the time.”

             
“But you must see some of India,” Amy persisted.  “That true and lovely India that exists just beyond the cities.  We go strawberry picking in the spring in the hills, you know, and no more than an hour past the walls of Bombay, it is like another world.  A paradise of green and pink.”

             
“I suppose it is too late for strawberries.”

             
“Far too late.  But we can have a proper picnic.”

             
“I’d much prefer an improper one.”

             
“Oh dear,” said the girl, drawing back in mock alarm.  “Are you one of those smooth city men that Granny is always warning me about?  It would be so lovely if you were.”  She sighed and stretched her arms above her head as if she had been traveling a great distance, then nodded in the direction of the man on her other side, the bloodless young fellow Everlee had introduced as his attaché.

             
“What do you make of this one?” Amy said in a lower voice.  “He has scarcely said a word all night beyond hello and that last strange outburst about the American War.  I have tried twice to engage him in flirtatious banter and he has ignored me most completely.”

             
“Then he must be blind as well as mute,” Tom said.  “But why are you sinking so in your seat?  Have I bored you with my own attempts at conversation?”

             
“It’s the ice,” she said with a giggle.  “As it melts, my feet lower in turn and I must slide ever forward in my chair to keep contact with the last shards.  It is delightfully cool, is it not?”

             
“Cool and almost gone, for I can feel none within my feet at all,” Tom said, but as he moved to lift the tablecloth and look, the girl grabbed his wrist with faux alarm.

             
“A gentleman would never look beneath the table,” she said.  “Especially if he knew that a certain lady had slipped her shoes off and buried her bare feet in what’s left of the ice.  It is like immersing one’s toes into a lovely alpine lake at just the point in the evening when intoxication is at its highest point and wit is at its lowest.  It is generally the highlight of my dreary dinners at this club, if you must know, but a gentleman would never take advantage of such knowledge.  Especially if he also knew that lamps placed beneath the table would afford him far too clear a look at those bare feet.”

             
“True,” said Tom.  “All true.  But as luck would have it, I’m no gentleman.”

             
Amy laughed and tossed her head.  “This is enough,” she said.  “It stops here.  Our conversation tonight has been most scandalous.  I have enjoyed it and I’ll wager you have too, even though your orders undoubtedly were to search among the crowd for suspects, not to listen to simple minded girls prattle on about strawberries and bare feet. We must admit that our chattering has stretched the bounds which society allows and now converse of more general matters, must we not?”

             
“Only if you say so,” Tom said, settling back in his seat with a smile.

             
“Take note of the trophy on that shelf there,” Amy said, with another toss of the head.  It was a gesture she had evidently cultivated to show her curly hair off to its best advantage and the stratagem was effective.  “It is a prize taken in sport.  Shooting, you see, and do you know what makes it special among all the others in the room?”  She looked at him impishly over the rim of her large silver wine goblet.  “I shall give you one hint.  It involves the ladies of the club.”

             
“I dare not guess,” Tom said, looking about at other shelves placed about the room at intervals, with similar bowls and platters of every size and shape decorating the walls in lieu of the more conventional landscape paintings.  “For it suddenly occurs to me that this room is quite full of trophies.  Won against other clubs in other districts, I take it?  The Byculla Club must take its sporting honor quite seriously if they-“

             
But here he broke off, for Amy had suddenly taken on a strange look.  A far away stare, and her mouth fell open.  Not in a scream or a shout, but rather in a low queer sort of noise such as that a wounded animal might make.  Just as he was about to ask her what was wrong, the girl convulsed, her body rising up from the chair all in a single arched unit, like that of a diver.  Stiff, with her head thrown back and her eyes wide with terror and rolled up in their sockets.  The goblet in her hand fell to the floor.

             
“Amy?” Tom cried, pushing to his own feet.  “What has…”

             
But the spasm that had gripped her passed, just as quickly as it had come, and as she sank back into her chair Tom noticed that beside her the attaché, that nameless and soundless fellow, seemed gripped in the same sort of mania.  He flopped to his side, thrashing, causing the woman beside him to scream and the confusion and shouting ran up the table person by person, like a line of falling dominoes.

***

`              Within minutes, the dining room had been cleared of people, leaving only Trevor and Tom with Amy and Jonathan Benson, both of whom were stretched out on a carpet in the corner of the room.  The girl was moving, the man was not.

             
“What is it?” Trevor asked tersely, stooping to join Tom on the floor. 

             
“Electrical shock,” said Tom.  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of the danger.  The silver trays holding cold water, a cluster of lamps beside them, with their wires being pushed this way and that by people’s feet and legs in the course of the dinner.  She told me she was putting her bare feet in the water just before she convulsed.”

             
“So it was an accident?”

             
“Most certainly.”

             
“She is…”

             
“In shock,” Tom said, pulling the girl’s makeshift tablecloth blanket around her more tightly.  “In the most literal possible sense of the term.  Her heart absorbed the jolt but she is young and strong and the rhythm resumed of its own accord.  Or perhaps she was just lucky.  But as for the attaché...”

             
Trevor rocked back on his heels with a sigh.  Benson’s face was covered with another table cloth and only the man’s shoes peeked out from his makeshift shroud.  Boxy and black, Trevor noted.  A working man’s shoes, an Englishman’s shoes, standard issue at the Yard.

             
“His name was Benson.  There’s no chance his heart will –“

             
“Restart on its own?”  Tom regretfully shook his head.  “Not after this much time.  I did chest massage, but the die is cast within seconds of the shock, I fear.  The spirit either reclaims the body or it does not.”

             
“It’s all so odd,” Trevor said, pulling his gaze away from the sad sight of the trousered legs covered by the wine-stained sheet.   “They say nothing ever happens at the Byculla Club.  One would conclude it was the dullest spot in all of India.  And now three deaths in two weeks, very nearly four.  With a younger, frailer person it would have been four.  You’re quite sure this couldn’t have been rigged?”

             
“Take a look for yourself,” Tom said.  “Although it seems electrocution would be an extremely imprecise means of murder.  We all sat at the same table, our feet on the same blocks of ice.  And we had been there for better than an hour before one of these two – most likely Benson, based on the severity of his shock – happened to strike an exposed bit of wire with his foot.  I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened before.  When you look at the room more carefully it’s all terribly showy but not so terribly well-maintained.  They are quite proud of their electricity and their plumbing – more than one person has bragged to me tonight about how modern the Bycylla Club is - and yet who can say what manner of man installed this wiring or how well he knew his craft?  So you have frayed wires, silver on the table, silver under the table, pools of water, thirty or forty feet moving about through the course of the night –“

             
While Tom was talking Trevor had moved to look under the table but it was all just as Tom had described it – a great jumble of metal, wires, and water.

             
“You couldn’t put a fray in a wire at a certain point?” he said.

             
“Perhaps,” said Tom.  “If you knew a certain person would be sitting at a certain place and would touch the wire at a certain time.  We shall ask to inspect the whole room tomorrow, of course, although our list of places to inspect is growing by the moment and I feel this whole line of inquiry is pointless.  Why should anyone want to kill an attaché, the most unassuming man in the room, much less a young girl?  Amy told me she was the daughter of a junior officer stationed out from Bombay, staying in the city for the summer with her grandmother.  What sort of enemies could a creature like that have?”

             
“Was Rose Everlee a threat?  And yet she now lies dead.”

             
“Indeed, indeed, you’re right.  We shall check every inch of wire tomorrow.  But Trevor, don’t let your imagination run away with you.”

             
There was a gentle tap at the door and Trevor crossed the room and pulled it open to reveal Emma.

             
“An ambulance has been summoned,” she said.  “And they swear it shall be here within minutes.  May I report back to the crowd in the card room on the condition of the injured?  They are most agitated, as you can imagine, especially Mrs. Morrow who is beside herself with concern for her granddaughter.   Mr. Everlee is behaving more as if his property has been damaged.”

             
“Tell Mrs. Morrow Amy will likely be fine,” Tom said quickly.  “She is sleeping, which is common after a shock, but earlier she was alert enough to tell me her name.”

             
Emma blinked.  “And the man?  Everlee said his name is Jonathan Benson.”

             
Trevor frowned.  It was a familiar name, he had noted as much when Geraldine had made her first introductions, but he couldn’t recall where he might have heard it.  Of course it was a common name as well, so perhaps it was pointless to even try and remember.

             
“I’m afraid his heart was stopped with the jolt and never restarted,” Tom said gently.

             
“So he is –“ Emma stood still, her hand to her mouth.  “Everlee said something else too.  That the man wasn’t truly his attaché, but his bodyguard.”

             
“Everlee felt he needed a bodyguard?” Trevor asked skeptically. 

             
“As did his mother,” Tom said.  “But the bodyguards of this family don’t seem be faring too well, do they?”

             
“Hush, Tom,” Emma said automatically.  “There is no place for jokes when a man lies dead before us even now.  Besides, I find the revelation of Benson’s true role makes the matter even more confusing.  A bodyguard and the daughter of a junior officer….Who would want these two people out of the way?”

             
“My question exactly,” Trevor said. “Tom thinks it was the work of sheer chance.”

             
“I was supposed…I was supposed to visit her tomorrow,” said Emma, looking at the sleeping form of Amy.  “She was to teach me lawn tennis.”

             
“Well, I doubt she will be up to lawn tennis, but you can certainly visit her in the hospital,” Tom said.  “I shall go with you, in the afternoon.  In the meantime, report the news to those waiting in the dining room and try not to look so distressed.   Amy will recover.”

             
“Tomorrow,” Trevor said grimly, “will be a very busy day.”

             
“I told Geraldine I would take her to the temple in the morning,” Emma said.  “A place called Khajuraho which is supposed to be so scandalous that no virtuous woman can even drive by it in a carriage.  But that can wait.  Would I be more help collecting evidence at this scene or going with Davy to the Weaver house?”

             
“I don’t agree that the temple can wait,” Trevor said.  “For Anthony Weaver mentioned that same place to me in our initial interview.  He said he drove by the temple on the morning that Rose and Sang died and that this was why he did not pass their carriage.  I thought it most strange.  I shall go with you.”