‘Good morning to you, Captain Stringer,’ he said, touching his sola topee.
‘Morning there,’ I said, because I never knew whether to risk calling him William.
From behind him, Dougie Poole nodded at me and flashed a rather pained grin. Then, as Askwith began to speak, Poole embarked on a huge yawn.
‘According to Eleanor,’ Askwith said, ‘the girls had a lovely, if rather strenuous, time at the Wednesday Club.’
‘Bernadette did seem tired,’ I said. ‘I’m not quite sure why.’
‘They were learning some silly, but evidently rather involved, new dance. Had a thoroughly ridiculous name, something to do with—’
‘The banana glide,’ Dougie Poole put in. ‘It’s considered “hot socks” at the Wednesday.’
‘I gather you encountered a spot of banditry on the Night Mail?’ said Askwith, ignoring Poole.
‘A fellow was killed, I said. ‘A Company man: Anglo-Indian.’
‘Yes,’ said Askwith, ‘a very poor show.’
I wondered how he knew of it. So I asked him.
‘We had special orders about the return of the carriage,’ he said. ‘It was to be kept sealed. I saw a copy of the wire last night.’
A reasonable answer, even if this seemed a minor bit of business to be crossing his desk, given that he was head of traffic. Presumably he had known nothing of the trouble when calling Lydia to explain the arrangements for collecting the girls. We spoke for a while about the attack and the death of John Young. ‘What a country that can produce such horrors,’ said Askwith, in his blank way.
I asked him how things were in his department.
‘The traffic’s expanding all the time, so we must work hard to keep up with the operational and maintenance requirements. But as with your police work, Captain Stringer, our main attention focuses on the coming change, and the rationalisation. It’s certainly keeping us all on our toes, isn’t it Douglas?’
But Dougie Poole could not give an immediate answer, having embarked on another yawn. It was becoming increasingly hard to talk in that fast-moving sea of black and white clerks, and now Askwith and Poole gave themselves up to the flow and, with a tipping of hats on all sides, allowed themselves to be swirled away from me, and into the courtyard.
I lingered on the pavement, being occasionally buffeted, and watching the motor taxi that Askwith had climbed down from, and which had still not managed to leave Fairlie Place. I had heard that he would never on any account use trams or tongas in town, but only taxis, and according to Lydia this was because he’d had a brush with the Gandhi-ites . . .
In the year after the war, the Mahatma had organised a protest campaign against the security measures of the Rowlatt Act. The Act was meant to keep the revolutionists in check, but had only succeeded in creating an army of them, the protests against it having resulted in the killings at Amritsar. There’d been bother on the streets of Calcutta. Indians had stopped the trams, and made Europeans get off and walk. Evidently, William Askwith had been on one of the stopped trams, and the protestors had not only made him walk, they’d also confiscated his sola topee, exposing his head, which was bald, to the strongly raying sun. Evidently, Askwith himself did not like to recall the event.
Five minutes later, I had gained the office I shared with Fisher and Jogendra. Fisher’s enormous and sweat-stained sola topee was on the top of a filing cabinet, and Jogendra’s umbrella was propped in the corner, but there was no sign of either man. After checking the drawer to see whether the stolen file had been returned (it had not), I began looking over the Schedule B files concerning graft among junior employees. I was after one particular letter that touched on a certain interesting store room at Sheoraphuli station, which was one of the early stops on the Grand Chord, only about fifteen miles out from Howrah. I fished out the letter and folded it into my pocket book. A visit to Sheoraphuli was on the cards, but I doubted I would get round to it today, for I would be spending most of my time on the railway lands in company with my Gurkha colleague, Deo Rana.
I spent a further hour on the files, until the rising sun discovered the one window in the office, and began raying in ferociously. I called a passing bearer, and he brought me a cup of sweet and milky tea.
I resumed my reading of The Statesman. A ‘communal riot’ had occurred in the district of Faridpur, wherever that was. These were a regular occurrence in Bengal. The phrase meant fighting over religion, generally – in fact always – between Moslems and Hindus, and here was the British Imperialist argument on a plate: if we left, civil war would break out. But I did not think it such a good argument. If we’d gone into India to stop a civil war in the first place, then it might have been. I had moved across the page to an arsenic poisoning case, when Superintendent Christopher Bennett walked in.
‘Would you come through to my office, Jim?’
I followed in the wake of his pipe smoke. He sat down at his desk, and I sat down opposite. There was still nothing on his desk save the tin of St Julien tobacco, and I was beginning to think there should be something on it. For example, a dossier about the dangerous snakes of Bengal. I admit there was some devilment in my question: ‘Have you seen the paper, sir?’
‘Yes,’ Bennett said. ‘Middlesex beat Surrey by three wickets.’
He removed his pipe from his mouth and he smiled, but it was a rather crooked smile. I said, ‘Have you been on to the zoo?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think they’ve got their hands full giving elephant rides and chimpanzee tea parties.’
Not in the reptile house they didn’t.
The snake trouble was testing his amiability to the limit, but he wouldn’t let on. He was the type who would mop his brow with a folded handkerchief however fast the sweat rolled down. I told him I was about to go off to the railway lands with Deo Rana. ‘He tells me there are snake men there, stealing from the Company.’
‘Snake charmers, you mean?’
‘Not exactly sure.’
‘From what I can see,’ said Bennett, ‘these incidents have done the charmers no end of good . . . the snakes seem more exciting.’ He spoke in a drawling way that I thought rather forced. He sat back, clasping his hands behind his head.
‘Haven’t you and Fisher got rather a lot on without troubling about the snakes? I really do think you can leave those to the regular chaps.’
By which he meant himself. I had know from the ‘off’ that the investigation of the Night Mail shooting would not fall to me, and I was now being warned off the snakes as well. But the snakes interested me, and it seemed to me they did fall within Schedule A of my brief as officially defined.
I heard a rumble of heavy boots on floorboards, and a raised voice from the end of the corridor; it sounded like Fisher.
Superintendent Bennett said, ‘Jim, I’m afraid a certain Detective Inspector Khudayar Khan of the C.I.D. would like to see you about the Jamalpur business.’
He was glad to be able to give me some bad news, I thought, in the light of my forward remarks about snakes.
‘When?’
Bennett removed a chit from his desk drawer. He read it over, replaced it.
‘Seven o’clock today if that’s all right.’
It had clearly better be.
‘Is he seeing Fisher as well?’
Bennett nodded. ‘At six o’clock. Khan’s in the Writers’ Building, you know.’
The Writers’ Building was a long palace that took up the north side of Dalhousie Square, a mixture of government offices and swanky private apartments. The main tram stops were all in front of it.
‘Where’s Fisher now?’
A trace of a smile returned to Bennett’s face. I turned to see Jogendra Babu standing in the doorway. He said, ‘Fisher Sahib away outside. He is having a jolly good cooling off.’
Judging by the yellow blaze of sun at the window of Bennett’s office, I doubted that.
Bennett said, ‘Major Fisher has invited Jogendra Babu to make a formal complaint.’
‘About what?’
‘Himself, sahib,’ said Jogendra Babu. ‘And this I will most certainly be doing.’
He salaamed and continued along the corridor.
Bennett said, ‘Fisher was rather put out because everything to do with the shooting was sent to Jamalpur. He wanted to get his teeth into it, just like you.’
‘But that wasn’t Jogendra Babu’s decision.’
‘It was mine – not that there was any decision to be made. The jurisdiction is with Hughes at Jamalpur.’
‘But now the C.I.D.’s coming in.’
‘Not necessarily, Jim. They might just want to hear your side of the story. By the way, Major Fisher asked me something about you. Requested some data. Thought I’d better tell you.’
He smiled: he was enjoying this as well.
‘He wanted to know if you were going up to Darjeeling. I said I assumed Lydia would be – and your daughter. But I didn’t know about you. He said he wondered whether you would like some company, if you were travelling alone.’
‘With all due respect sir, I don’t believe you.’
‘He didn’t quite couch it like that, no.’
Bennett was looking at his pipe.
‘I think he proposes to accompany you, anyhow.’
‘Are you going up?’ I asked Bennett.
‘Mary will go. I had meant to go with her, but business might keep me here.’
He meant snake business.
I quit Bennett’s office, and returned to my own, where Jogendra Babu was hunting up a file.
I said, ‘Did you manage to get hold of the reservation chart from the Night Mail, Babu-ji?’
He gave a half nod, began fiddling with his wire glasses.
‘Is it available?’
He thought about this for a while. Then he nodded, and said: ‘Is indicated.’
‘What is indicated, Babu-ji? When will it be available?’
‘In the fullness of time, sahib.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it is a murder investigation.’
‘But one you are not undertaking, sahib?’
‘Not officially, no.’
I tried a grin on him; it didn’t really work.
Jogendra Babu said, ‘I am official, Stringer sahib.’
Perhaps by this, he meant that the chart had been sent to Hughes at Jamalpur Junction.
‘But you will see what you can do, Babu-ji?’
‘I am seeing, I am seeing.’
Evidently I had been laying it on a bit thick with the addition of the affectionate ‘ji’.
II
The main part of the Armenian Ghat took the form of wide steps going down into the river. Be-robed Hindus stood on the steps, immersed to varying degrees, watching the wide, brown river and sometimes pouring it over themselves. Fisher stood on the very top step, his boots well clear of the water. He stood with his hands on his hips, and a Trichinopoly cigar in his mouth. I was watching him from behind – from Strand Road – but I could tell about the cigar from the smoke flowing about his enormous and globe-like head. I imagined the smoke as coming from inside his head, for I supposed he was fuming as usual. But I did not believe he was really put out by being blocked from investigating the shooting. I remained watching for a while, and he remained staring fixedly ahead. Not once did he reach up and touch the cigar; he smoked it only by sucking and blowing with his mouth. A sacred cow – or at any rate a cow with ribbons on its horns – was descending the steps to take a drink, and for a while it stood right next to Fisher, looking at the water, and obviously thinking hard, just as Fisher was. But he never gave it a glance.
Presently he spat out the cigar stub, and turned so that I saw him side-on as he walked past the small quays, mooring posts, and riverside godowns. He came up on to the pavement where he passed by one of the thin sadhus or holy men, a fellow sitting on a green square of cloth, who seemed to have bathed in ash before daubing himself with some streaks of orange paint. The fellow was not begging – he occupied some other world altogether – but in passing him, Fisher trickled some coins into his lap.
Deo Rana came up beside me. He gave a small bow.
‘Good morning, Deo. Where exactly are we going?’
‘Backside of station, sahib.’
We decided to walk, but we had to wait to cross the Howrah bridge because the centre of it was being floated away to let a ship go through. In the blazing heat of the day, I wondered that the sailors could be bothered to sail the ship, and that the bridge men could be bothered to accommodate them. Once on the Howrah side, we skirted the front of the station and the stampede for tongas and taxis, and we went past the first clock tower, which said eleven fifteen, and the second clock tower of the station, which said not quite the same thing.
We traversed the waterfront, and the barges being unloaded by derricks that spat out black smoke and made a machine-gun rattle as they strained to lift the swinging white bales of cotton, jute and tobacco. The crane operators and dockers kept up a constant shouted commentary on the transportation of the bales, rising to a peak of agitation as the loads dangled between barge and bank . . . or perhaps they were speaking about something else entirely. On the right side stood the railway lines, leaving the road at right angles, with low, red one-storey buildings in between, some with the benefit of a platform to raise them above the black ash, and all with wide green doors open to receive or discharge goods. On the lines were wagons – ‘mixed goods’ they’d be called in Britain, but all goods in India were mixed. The contents were sometimes branded on the sides. I read ‘Kerosene’, ‘Sugar machinery’, ‘Tea’, ‘Copper wire’.
We were walking alongside a train. The bales loaded on to it put a spicy haze into the air that made you want to sneeze. Still with the train to our right, we climbed up on to one of the platforms, and walked past the open doors of one of the low red houses. Men sat around a rough table drinking tea from a big brown pot. There was a stone sink with a tap, empty gunny sacks folded on the bare wooden floor, and framed photographs around the walls showing cricketing scenes; also a sign reading ‘ALWAYS TAKE CARE’. The men looked out at us with moderate curiosity, but not enough to check their talk. A white-suited sahib and a railway policemen – they probably thought I was someone making a complaint about theft of goods. We descended from the platform, and carried on, still shadowing the long train. It had been made up, yes, but there didn’t seem any question of it going anywhere, and when we got to the end of it, I was not in the least surprised to see there was no engine.
Beyond the train, and beyond the other waiting trains, the tracks curved away right towards Howrah, but Deo Rana was leading me left, where the goods yard began to fade. There might be tracks in this territory but they went nowhere in particular, and there might be engines, but they were likely to be crocks. I had my eye on a little saddle tank with no cab, just a pressure gauge on top of the boiler like an eye on a stalk. There were two men on the back of this queer-looking bug, and I thought they must have been in the process of dismantling it, but then it coughed into life, ejecting one foul ball of smoke like a man spitting phlegm, and it clanked away towards the Howrah main line, becoming bent as it disappeared into the heat haze.
Deo Rana was leading me towards one of the long red loading bays. It had a platform, but not any tracks. Over the wide door, a sign said ‘Trainlighting Office’, but it hadn’t been that for a while. Some mill or factory over to the left was making an orange cloud, and beyond that was the native city of Howrah, the Black Town, a maze of shacks and litter, with hundreds of crows circling above. Indicating the loading bay, Deo said, ‘Snake men.’ There were two, sitting on the platform. Another two came out of the trainlighting office as we approached. The snake men looked like men in a Bible story. One – the governor, I supposed – came down from the platform and salaamed to Deo, who turned to me and said, ‘Baksheesh, sahib.’
I took out my pocket book and gave the fifteen rupees to Deo who gave it to the snake man. By filling out thr
ee forms, I had got the money from the petty cash guarded by one of Jogendra Babu’s men, but the sum was not so petty. The head snake man reminded me of the Arabs I had seen in Mespot, resembling a sort of scarred hawk. Having safely stowed the money – he had a cloth purse rolled into his dhoti – he spoke again in Hindustani (I assumed that was the lingo) to Deo Rana, who turned to me and translated: ‘You will take one tea?’
I had been eyeing the dark interior of the trainlighting office, hoping to go in there and escape the sun. But we all walked over to a smouldering fire at some thirty yards’ distance – a fire made of railway sleepers bleached and worn down to something like driftwood. Tea was made and the snake men rolled cigarettes. I declined the offer, but lit a Gold Flake. Deo Rana did smoke but never on duty. Indicating the trainlighting office, I asked the head snake man, ‘Do you live there?’ and I looked to Deo to translate. The answer that came back via Deo – ‘We don’t live anywhere’ – couldn’t have been quite right.
I said, ‘Are you gentlemen snake charmers?’ and the question, when put by Deo, caused amusement. The answer came back: ‘Sometimes, sahib.’
I was about to ask where all the bloody snakes had got to, when a small Indian boy came running over the ash from the edge of the Black Town. He wore a European shirt and shorts, and he was fairly clean, but he knew the snake men all right. He was laughing, and calling out to the head snake man, indicating a certain spot in the ground. All the snake men got up, and went towards the kid, and Deo Rana turned to me, saying, ‘Hamadryad.’
Night Train to Jamalpur Page 8