‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hakeswill?’ Harper asked.
‘Who knows? We can find out if any of the bastards will tell the truth.’ Someone had been busy. The band of deserters at the Gateway of God had not been over brotherly. There had been punishment here, too, and the punishment was worse than any the army ever handed out. It stank in the cellar. Men had been mutilated here and Sharpe, looking into the grisly shadows, saw that women had been brought to this place of punishment as well. The bodies looked as though a madman had attacked them with an axe, then left them as rat food, and only one body, naked and stiff, was whole. It appeared to be untouched and Sharpe, curious, walked so he could see the man’s head. ‘Hakeswill did this.’
‘How do you know?’
Sharpe tapped a fingernail against the skull. It sounded metallic. ‘He’s been killed with a flat headed nail.’
‘What? Hammered in?’
‘Not exactly. I saw him do it before. In India.’ Sharpe told Harper the story and the Fusiliers listened. He told of being captured by the troops of the Sultan Tippoo and how he had been taken to the prison cells in Seringapatam and had watched, through the half-moon windows that looked out at ground level, the torture of British prisoners. Perhaps torture was too strong a word, for the men had died swiftly enough. The Tippoo Sultan, for his own pleasure and the pleasure of his women, employed Jetties, professional strong-men, and Sharpe had watched as men from the 33rd had been dragged over the sand to where the muscled men waited. The heels of the prisoners had left scuff marks, he remembered. They killed in two ways that day. The first was to clamp their massive forearms either side of the victim’s head and, on a signal from the Tippoo, they would take a breath then jerk the head through half a circle. Another Jettie would hold the body still and, whatever the resistance of the prisoners, their necks would be wrung swift as a chicken.
The other method was to place a flat-headed nail on the victim’s skull and then, with one massive blow of the palm, drive the nail six inches into the skull. That killed quickly too, if the job was not botched, and Sharpe remembered telling Sergeant Hakeswill what he had seen, the Sergeant listening with the other men about the bivouac fire. Hakeswill had tried it on Indian prisoners, practising until he had got it right. Damn Hakeswill. Sharpe had damned the Sultan Tippoo too, and he had killed him later when the British troops were assaulting the citadel of Seringapatam. Sharpe could still remember the look on the fat little man’s face when one of his prisoners had come from the wrong end of the Water Tunnel where the Sultan was firing his bejewelled fowling pieces at the British. That was a good memory, spoilt only by the ruby that Sharpe had cut from one of the pudgy, dead fingers. He had given that ruby to a woman in Dover, a woman he thought he loved more than life itself, and then she had run off with a bespectacled schoolteacher. He supposed she had been sensible. Who needs a soldier for a husband?
A burst of cheering startled him from the top of the dungeon steps, cheers and jeers, laughter and catcalls, and he left the bodies in their crusted horror and went up the steps to see what was causing the commotion.
Fusiliers and Riflemen had formed a rough corridor down which they propelled a prisoner with their musket and rifle butts. The prisoner made small, futile, placatory gestures with plump hands and he smiled left and right, bowed, then yelped as another musket butt prodded him in his ample buttocks. Pot-au-Feu. He was still dressed in his ludicrous Marshal’s uniform, missing only the enamelled gold cross that had hung about his neck. He saw Sharpe and dropped to his knees, pleading in his deep voice while the enemy laughed about him. A Fusilier behind him raised a musket and aimed at the neck beneath the white-plumed hat. ‘Put that down! Did you find him?’