— We did something terrible yesterday, didn’t we?

He put his hands to his ears, began to hum ‘Makin’ Whoopie’, and she shivered, wondering what could bring this man — always so assured, so solid — to this teetering place.

— The lorries, she said. The humming stopped, almost mid-note.

— Who told you?

Viv tasted blood in her mouth. It wasn’t her imagination. There was blood, real blood, she was swallowing it. And an ache in her tongue where her tooth had driven into it.

— Someone in a position to know, she said, and her voice was measured, without judgement.

— What was done had to be done, he said.

She closed her hand around the solidity of the lighter. There was a lesson she’d learned many years ago, though she hadn’t understood it at the time: how to coax information out of someone, how to make them believe you would never use it against them.

— If there’d been funerals this morning, all those bodies paraded around the street!

In her voice there was just the right mix of horror at what would have ensued and sympathy for the decision that had to be made to prevent it. There was a tiny exhalation — she understood it to be relief — from Remmick, before he responded:

— Mayhem. Absolute mayhem. The bastards, beg your pardon, would have whipped the entire Walled City into a frenzy.

— But we’ve lost the City all the same?

— Bolton — he’s cracking up. Somehow they’ve got him convinced that there’s a dam about to burst unless he withdraws the troops. It’s madness. We’ve contained it. We’ve done what had to be done.

— How many were there in the lorries?

She placed a hand on his shoulder as she asked the question; a woman appreciative of men who did what had to be done.

— I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

— Where were they taken?

— Six feet under. Beyond that, I don’t imagine anyone other than Caroe knows.

— Caroe?

— Man in charge of it. He’ll go far.

A lone cricket chirped in the vicinity of the oleander tree.

— Shall I tell you something I never understood, she said. My mother had a friend who lost a son in the Great War; he was buried in France. This was a woman who couldn’t venture more than ten feet from her house without treating it as if she was going on the Grand Tour. But on Armistice Day she heard the news on the radio, walked out of her door and didn’t stop until she was at her son’s grave. He’d been dead three years. Why should standing at a grave matter? But it mattered more than anything else in all the world.

Remmick sat up, then stood, entirely steady on his feet.

— You will keep your own best interests at heart, won’t you, Miss Spencer?

— It’s a vexed matter, to decide what those might be.

— Oh, not really. For instance: it wouldn’t be in your best interests to give anyone reason to go over the unfortunate matter of your wartime record.

Viv stood too, and slipped her shoes onto her bare feet, which gave her the advantage of several inches over him.

— Unfortunate. So speaks the man who was sipping tea at Dean’s while his countrymen were in the trenches at the Somme. And while I was nursing those men.

— You see, the question of your loyalties. I don’t like bringing it up. But I kept my eye on you, after you left here. I know about the letters you sent to the War Office, accusing a man who worked there of lying to you, and of murdering — what was your phrase — a man with more nobility in his little finger than the entire War Office has in all its bloated carapace?

— I barely remember those letters. I was. . upset.

— Yes, that was clear. And it was clear why. But if this proclivity for the King’s enemies should prove to be habitual –

— Proclivity?

— You used to speak to me about him, though never before you’d had a drink or two. Men aren’t such fools in matters of the heart as women like to think. So, that was the Turk. And now you’re here to see the boy to whom you had that unnatural attachment. People used to talk about it — I always defended you. He was just a child. But he’s a grown man now, with a Red Shirt brother.

The emptiness, the terrible emptiness of it, would it never leave her? For what had she betrayed that dear man, that mentor, that friend, that love? For men like Remmick. For the crumbs of their approval. Not just the whip-thin man from the War Office, but Papa, too, who even now was a shadow in her mind, telling her women didn’t understand the weighty decisions that men must make on their behalf.

The verandah doors opened and a small group of people came out, headed by one of the men who had been sitting in the deckchairs, Remmick’s wife walking beside him. Remmick turned his head at the sound of her voice, and called out, Darling, look who I found sitting out here. It’s Miss Spencer.

— She’s not still Miss Spencer, I’m sure, said his wife, walking rapidly across the garden. She looked at Viv’s hand for a wedding ring, her glance travelling to take in her unstockinged legs and Remmick’s wet clothes.

— He saved my lighter from death by drowning, Viv found herself saying, holding up the silver rectangle as though it were the guardian and proof of her chastity, and her voice was steady as the world hurtled into the cold darkness and she allowed herself to be pulled along with it towards the lights of the club building, Remmick by her side.

24 April 1930

Najeeb wasn’t at home; he wasn’t in either of his sisters’ houses; he wasn’t in Khan Sahib’s clinic where planks of wood had been nailed to the wall to make extra beds for the wounded; he wasn’t on the very short list of those who had been taken to the English-run hospitals in the Cantonment; he wasn’t in the back room of Avtar Singh, the antique dealer’s, shop, so lost in artefacts that he was unaware his brother and nephews and brothers-in-law and the cobbler Hari Das were striding around the Walled City with his photograph in hand, knocking on doors, saying, Have you seen this man? He wasn’t with this friend or that friend or the boy he walked back from school with ten years earlier. He wasn’t at the mosque to which he never went except for Eid prayers; he wasn’t at the neighbourhood tea shop which was closed; he wasn’t at any of the places to which he might go in search of Qayyum if he were the one trying to find his brother. He wasn’t, no, that wasn’t him in the corner of Qayyum’s eye; he wasn’t the man who threw that shadow against the wall; he wasn’t the force which knocked over the mosque-reflecting mirror leaning against a tree so that it held the sky, placed clouds within reach. He was everywhere until Qayyum looked closer, and then he was nowhere.

Troops patrolled the perimeter wall, looking towards the hills where word of the massacre would have reached the tribes; six men from the Congress Party stood on the stairs of the Municipal Library, their skin red, sun-flayed — they had been made to stand there since the morning when they tried to picket a liquor shop; round the corner came the sound of a lathi striking a man’s flesh.

Qayyum kept his eyes to the ground, instructed his nephews to do the same, and moved from house to house, knocking on doors. Have you seen this man? He was wearing a frock-coat yesterday. In one of the houses a very old woman touched the photograph and said, You’re lucky to have this; my son is missing and all his father can do to try and find him is take our daughter to unveil herself in front of strangers and say imagine if she were a boy. But otherwise every house was the same: No, I’m sorry, I haven’t. Go to the Congress offices, go the Khilafat offices, that’s where they took the bodies — but Qaayum shook his head and moved on.

It was evening already by the time Qayyum crossed the square dominated by the domed structure of Hastings Memorial. Troops stood guard around it, protecting the memory of an Englishman who had died decades earlier; a group of boys, a few feet away, spat pulpy sugar cane in the direction of the soldiers. Their aim fell short, but they didn’t move closer, and the soldiers ignored them.