While these instructions may sound as if they were pulled from a John Le Carre novel, they were in fact a guide to find one of Mumbai’s greatest hidden secrets in the heart of the old city. What I was looking for was a shed, made of corrugated steel, within which lay the objective I had spent a morning searching for. As I clambered up the boilers, I found a hole in the steel roof and looked down. I had found them.

What stared back at me was a face. In particular a royal face belonging to His Imperial Majesty King George V, by the Grace of God, Emperor of India. The mustache had not faded despite the fact he had died almost 80 years prior, and resplendent on his chest were his various orders and decorations. Nearby was his errant son and brief successor, Edward VIII, dressed in a pith helmet and a khaki uniform.

The two former rulers of a quarter of the world had found their home in a shed near an abandoned car with cobwebs dangling from their gold braid. Over them was a thin sheet of muslin, doing little to shield them from view. Hopping down from my precarious perch, I left the monarchs to their dark loneliness in the Bombay utility shed and returned to the traffic filled Mahatma Gandhi road, possibly the largestthreat to the men I had just visited.

After Gandhi’s success in gaining independence for India, the newborn republic was keen to throw off its imperial heritage. Streets and buildings were renamed, new coins minted, and statues replaced. Even the name, Bombay, was changed in the 1990s to Mumbai in a new fit of anti-colonial feeling, Calcutta (now Kolkata), among others, soon followed.

The statues from the shed are not the only ones to be banished, the sculpture of Queen Victoria that once adorned Victoria Terminus (Mumbai’s main railway station) has also disappeared, possibly sold at Sotheby’s. Other statues have been relocated to the city zoo, while others met their fate at the end of sledgehammers. It is unclear why George V and Edward VIII were assigned such an odd sentence, but they still remain one of Mumbai’s most treasured legends to this day.

Despite the clear desire to wipe any remainder of British influence on the streets of Indian cities, it does not take long to find it when looking a bit closer. The games of cricket that throng Mumbai’s Oval Maiden park is one of the more soft examples. However walking down towards the sea front there is a reminder of one of the men from the shed in the form of the Gateway of India, where George V came with Queen Mary in the early 20th Century. While the image of the King has been hidden away, a much greater memory of his colonial grip remains.

Every morning when I was at school, we would read the papers. Ordered for us by our Housemaster so we could keep up to date on current affairs, we would all sit on a sofa outside our matron’s surgery and read before lessons. One day I read a story about a man who was lost forever on an evening in 1977, his remains never to be found. Captain Robert Nairac was murdered by the Irish Republican Army in a field somewhere on the border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. I found the story fascinating and read a little on the internet and found out he had gone to Ampleforth, the same Catholic boarding school as my father. I let the story fade for a few weeks until one day at home with him, I asked him if he knew about Nairac.

“He kept a falcon,” he said.

Apparently this was the same falcon that was used in the classic British film Kes. My father didn't remember much else, except that he was incredibly popular and that his charisma exuded from him like a beacon of light. Occasionally I would bring it up again, when Nairac featured in the news, but for the rest of the time at school I forgot about the British captain who died at the hands of the IRA. This was until recently, when triggered by the spate of Northern Irish news, I began once again to dig into the history about Nairac’s final hours, a time period we truly know nothing about.

His time in the Province is incredibly murky, made up of legend, some fact, and pure nonsense, there are countless events in history I discovered that are somehow linked to this shadowy officer. Originally sent to Northern Ireland in 1973, Nairac stayed long after his regiment left, becoming instead a liaison officer for the regiments that followed. However he soon became entangled with an infamous part of the history of the Troubles, the 14th Intelligence Company. The “Int & Squint” as it was known amongst servicemen was a unit that conducted undercover operations against republican paramilitary groups. Captain Nairac served as the liaison between the 14th and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the controversial civilian police force in Northern Ireland. What he did in this role is unclear, some pin him to incidents like the Miami Showband Massacre where loyalist paramilitaries murdered members of one of Ireland’s most popular bar room bands along with other supposed collusions with loyalist paramilitaries. However there is little evidence that can prove this, most relying on vague statements such as an accent someone heard while blindfolded. Yet despite the lack of veracity in these links, they still linger today in his public image, especially in Ireland, what little of it there is. It is what Captain Nairac did away from his official unit and regiment though that draws the most attention, and ultimately led to his murder.

At this point Nairac was unrecognisable from the elegant Grenadier Guards officer seen in the photograph above, he had instead, in an attempt to fit in amongst local civilians, adopted long hair down to his shoulders and an odd goatee beard as seen below. I had an urge to dig deeper, which is where the most fascinating stories about Nairac began to appear. With the bravado only he could show, he would be driven to pubs in the most difficult parts of Northern Ireland and simply walk in and sing Irish Republican songs and as a result pick up incredibly valuable tidbits of intelligence. He became so well known for his rendition of Danny Boy that the locals began to even call him Danny Boy. But on one evening in May 1977, Nairac didn’t sing Danny Boy. Having gone to a pub deep in South Armagh, charmingly known as Bandit Country, the Captain introduced himself as a Danny McErlaine. He then sang the famous republican folk song, the Broad Black Brimmer.

The song tells the story of a young boy fascinated by the uniform of his now dead father, a member of the IRA during the original rebellion, and how this young boy puts it on and feels the spirit of the movement course through his veins.

Soon after Nairac sang it, suspicions were aroused (apparently due to the jacket he was wearing) with Republican sympathisers in the pub, and after refusing to take a lift with the pub band home, Nairac was taken out of the Three Steps Inn by a group of local IRA members and beaten up. Nairac who was a boxer at Oxford put up the fight of his life. Trying desperately to gain control of a pistol he had, he was overpowered and abducted, but not after felling some of his attackers in true Nairac fashion. Taken across the border into the Republic of Ireland, the Captain was violently attacked while he sat defenceless. During this they tried to drunkenly interrogate him convinced he was some sort of loyalist spy from the North, Nairac however insisted he was just a Catholic from Ardoyne, a story he maintained till the end. Tiring, one of the men who had taken him pretended to be a priest and that he would hear Nairac’s confession, hoping to finally find out the real story. Blindfolded, Nairac simply replied “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.” Giving up, the men hit his head with a wooden post, and after two misfires, shot him. Most of them left, but three remained to dispose of the body, but to this day the IRA refuse to tell the authorities where ‘the British captain’ is buried. The men who killed him had no idea who he truly was, until the news the next day informed them of the disappearance of a Captain Robert Nairac of the Grenadier Guards. Over the years, the mystery of his burial place has remained. Some say he was reburied several times, others that he was fed through a meat grinder.

Nairac was awarded the George Cross, the highest decoration for gallantry outside of combat, and is regarded as a British hero. Today he is the only soldier to make up part of the Disappeared, a group who were murdered by the IRA and whose bodies have still not been found. Nairac’s case lies open, and his family still yearn to find closure. He paid the ultimate sacrifice to protect others, a testimony from the man convicted of his murder, Liam Townson, looms out, dwarfing all of his other accomplishments.

“He was the bravest man I ever met. He told us nothing. He was a good soldier.”