The Midnight Palace (Niebla 2)

‘You mentioned this had something to do with some crimes?’ he said with studied indifference.

‘Murders, sir,’ Seth confirmed. ‘Quite a few.’

De Rozio checked his watch and, after a few moments’ reflection, he shrugged.

‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But let this be the last time. What’s the name of the man you want to investigate?’

‘Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee, sir,’ Seth replied quickly.

‘The engineer? Didn’t he die in the Jheeter’s Gate fire?’

‘Yes, sir, but there was someone with him who didn’t die. Someone who is very dangerous and who started the fire. That person is still out there, ready to commit new crimes.’

De Rozio smiled. ‘Sounds vaguely interesting,’ he murmured.

Suddenly a shadow crossed the librarian’s face. De Rozio leaned his considerable bulk towards the boys and pointed at them sternly.

‘This isn’t some invention of that friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Ben doesn’t know anything about this, Mr de Rozio,’ Seth reassured him. ‘We haven’t seen him for months.’

‘Just as well,’ de Rozio declared. ‘Follow me.’

WITH TREPIDATION ISOBEL STEPPED inside the station, allowing her eyes to adapt to the darkness. Tens of metres above her was the main dome, with its great arches of steel and glass. Most of the panes had melted in the flames or had simply burst, shattering into red-hot fragments that had rained down over the entire station. Dusky light filtered through cracks in the darkened metal. The platforms faded into the shadows, forming a gentle curve beneath the huge vaulted ceiling, their surface covered with the remains of burnt benches and collapsed beams.

The large station clock, which once had presided over the central platform, was now just a sombre mute sentry standing by. As she walked under its dial, Isobel noticed that the hands had dropped down towards the ground like tongues of melted wax.

Nothing seemed to have changed in that place, were it not for the traces left by years of dirt and the impact of the rainwater torrential monsoons had swept through ventilation shafts and gaps in the roof.

Isobel stopped in the centre of the grand station and gazed around her.

A fresh gust of hot humid air blew through the building, ruffling her hair and scattering specks of dust over the platforms. Isobel shivered as she scanned the black mouths of the tunnels that went underground at the far end of each platform. She wished the other members of the Chowbar Society were with her, now that the situation was beginning to look far too similar to the stories Ben liked to invent for his evenings at the Midnight Palace. Isobel felt in her pocket and pulled out the drawing Michael had made of the Chowbar Society members standing by a pond in which their faces were reflected. She smiled when she saw the picture Michael had drawn of her and wondered if this was really how he saw her. She missed her friends.

Then she heard it for the first time, far away and muffled by the murmur of the breezes that blew through those tunnels. It was the sound of distant voices, rather like the rumble of the crowds she remembered hearing years ago after she dived into the Hooghly River, the day Ben taught her how to swim underwater, only this time Isobel was sure that these were not the voices of pilgrims approaching from the depths of the tunnels. What she heard were the voices of children, hundreds of them. And they were howling in terror.

DE ROZIO METICULOUSLY STROKED the three rolls of his regal chin and once again examined the pile of documents, cuttings and papers he had collected during various expeditions to the digestive tract of the Indian Museum’s labyrinthine library. Seth and Michael watched him with a mixture of impatience and hope.

‘Well,’ the librarian began. ‘This matter is rather more complicated than it seems. There’s quite a bit of information about this Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee. Most of the documentation I’ve seen is not that significant, but I’d need at least a week to get the papers on this person into some sort of order.’

‘What have you found, sir?’ asked Seth.

‘A bit of everything, really,’ de Rozio explained. ‘Mr Chandra was a brilliant engineer, ahead of his time, an idealist obsessed with the idea of leaving this country with a legacy that would somehow compensate the poor for the suffering he attributed to British rule. Not very original, frankly. In short, he had all the requirements for becoming a miserable wretch. Even so, it seems he was able to navigate a sea of jealousy, conspiracy and subterfuge and even managed to convince the government to finance his golden dream: the building of a railway network that would link the main cities of the nation with the rest of the continent.

‘Chandra believed that this would mark the end of the commercial and political monopoly that had begun in the days of Lord Clive and the Company, when trade was limited to using river and maritime transport. It would allow the people of India slowly to regain control over their country’s wealth. But you didn’t have to be an engineer to realise that things would never turn out that way.’

‘Is there anything about a character called Jawahal?’ asked Seth. ‘He was a childhood friend of the engineer. He went on trial a few times. I think the cases were quite notorious.’

‘There must be something somewhere, but there’s a mountain of documents to sort through. Why don’t you come back in a couple of weeks? By then I’ll have had a chance to put this mess into some kind of order.’

‘We can’t wait two weeks, sir,’ said Michael.

De Rozio stared at them severely.

‘Wasn’t your friend supposed to be a mute?’

Michael stepped forward, his expression dead serious and worth at least a thousand words.

‘This is a matter of life and death, sir,’ said Michael. ‘The lives of two people are in danger.’