‘Meer Chopra, my approver in this vile crime, says he could have killed him, for the girl was their sentence of death were she to denounce them. He appealed to Khan to follow their rule – to kill the girl – but the Khan laughed in his face and dragged her off. Meer Chopra says that she would fain have fled, and attempted to do so, but the Khan pursued and caught her, for her tender feet were cut by the rough ground. Ghufoor Khan told him in the morning, with a hellish laugh, that she’d tried to possess herself of his dagger to plunge into her own heart. “I spared her the trouble,” said the Khan.’

The disapproval was marked in the extreme. The faces of the front rank showed it, and the exclamations of those in the rear rank put words to it.

Sleeman was pleased. It wasn’t often he was able to address King’s officers, especially ones who were about to assist him in his work. ‘But not, I fear, before he’d defiled her in ways that no Christian ought to hear.’

‘Monstrous,’ said Worsley; ‘bestial.’

Sleeman closed his order book and said nothing more for the moment, allowing the outrage among his audience to do his work.

He’d calculated well: a tale or two of highway robbery, even accompanied by violence – by murder indeed – might be shrugged off in this land, especially the murder of money merchants and the like who took their chance, without precaution; but the murder of women and girls – even of low estate – and especially their defilement, must for any Englishman demand justice. Demand revenge, indeed; and above all for officers of His Majesty’s cavalry …

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, finally, ‘this Ghufoor Khan, who masquerades as a nujeeb, a militiaman, is abroad again, even on the road from Guntoor to Chintal. But to date he has eluded all our endeavours, for these depositions were made two years ago. With your help, however, I am confident that we shall apprehend him, and with his arrest, such will be the dismay, the fear, among the other bands – for the Khan is looked to as their leader – that there will come a check in their activities, so that there will then be an increase in approvers, and we might then take the chiefs and jemadars of all the bands one by one.’

At this, there was much appreciation, with calls to ‘take ’em to the gibbet’. But Sleeman had one more card to play. ‘Gentlemen, I am conscious that this is not a job for cavalry, for I am myself a cavalryman, albeit a native one, but I am persuaded – as is, more importantly, your colonel – that only cavalry can do it.’

And thus, said Hervey to himself, Sleeman elegantly enlisted every man assembled, whatever his first thoughts. For here addressing them was not a zealot, but a measured officer of infinite native experience. He himself had first thought the suppression of thuggee to be an impossibility (as well bid the incoming tide to stop, Canute-like), and yet he’d been persuaded these past few days that it might be reduced to a status that could not long stand, and that time and the ordinary sanction of law would see it dwindle to nothing, an occasional and minor irritant.