The Baghdad Railway Club

by Andrew Martin

  ‘Another stabbing, sir.’

  ‘Native job, was it?’

  ‘They all are,’ he said.

  The sepoy gave me a sheepish smile. It was rough luck on those boys. Because we’d taken over their country some time ago, they had to help us take over someone else’s – this latest acquisition being the one place on earth more infernally hot than their own land.

  Just then the door behind the man opened; it gave on to a room that was also part of the red caps’ set-up in the hotel. A military police sergeant came out of it, together with a rather seedy-looking fellow that I recognised. It was the pock-marked man I’d seen coming out of the post room in the Residency when I’d telegrammed to Manners. Evidently, he was being taken in charge for some misdemeanour. No, wait. He was being let go – didn’t look too pleased about it though, and he gave a glare at the red caps before making towards the main doors of the lobby. He’d been let off with a warning, I decided.

  I followed the man out into the glare. He turned sharp left‚ then left again; he was into a short street leading down to the quays, and here he was pushing at the door of the place known as The Oasis. Officially this was Wet Canteen Number Two, but somebody had painted an oasis on walls with three beautiful women lying about in it wearing white summer dresses. I followed him in. The place had electricity; perhaps not enough of it though, for the central ceiling fan turned too slowly, and the bright lights flickered. The place (being close to the river) smelt of sewage, and was horribly hot. There was a makeshift bar at the far end with a tea urn on it, some very British-looking cakes under glass, and beer bottles, still in their crates. The pock-marked man was after beer, and the orderly was turning him down flat.

  ‘Not while five o’clock,’ he was saying – a bloody-minded Yorkshireman, by the sound of him. The pock-marked man was unexpectedly Irish, and with a high, fluttery voice. He said, ‘What a depressing outlook this is: I’ve a choice of mouldy rock cake and a cup of stewed tea or nothing.’ He ought not to have been talking to me, since I was an officer and I hadn’t talked to him, but he was doing.

  I said, ‘Are you going to salute?’ and he did after a fashion, saying, ‘Sorry about that, sir, I’m not right in myself. I’m a sickbay case, I think.’

  I said, ‘You’ve been in with the monkeys,’ and that pulled him up sharp, as it did the orderly standing behind him. An officer shouldn’t speak of His Majesty’s Military Mounted Police in that fashion. I had a pocketful of rupees and I put some on the counter, saying, ‘I want to have a talk with this man on Corps business, and we’d both like a bottle of beer.’

  The bottles were given over, and I sat the Irishman down at the furthest table from the orderly, who continued to eye us from his post during the following.

  The Irishman was Private Lennon. He’d been born in Ireland but lived in London. At least he did when there wasn’t a war on. After I’d got this out of him, he said, ‘What’s this about, sir?’

  ‘A confidential matter,’ I said.

  He was eyeing my white tabs.

  I meant to ask him something about methods of communication from the Residency. I didn’t know quite what, but I kept thinking of the bunch of keys he’d been jangling.

  I said, ‘They were putting the screws to you. Do you want to tell me why?’

  ‘Are you Intelligence, sir?’

  ‘Correct,’ I said immediately. Well, I could always deny it. Anything claimed by a man like Lennon could be denied.

  ‘Do you really not know?’ he said.

  I gave that one the go-by, since he evidently believed I did know what he had been questioned about, or that I would be able to find out with no trouble.

  ‘See, sir,’ he said, ‘I work in the Residency, second floor—’

  ‘As what?’

  He shrugged: ‘General knockabout – mainly in the post room. We’re all trusted men in the post room – have to be. But those coppers don’t trust me, sir.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said, ‘why ever not?’

  He took a belt on his beer, weighing me up; I took a belt on mine.

  ‘They think I’m sending ordinary mails by the bag.’

  ‘The bag?’

  ‘The diplomatic bag.’

  ‘Ordinary mails,’ I said, ‘you mean ordinary blokes’ mails?’

  ‘That’s correct sir. That’s what they think.’

  It would be a way for your average Tommy Atkins to avoid having his letter read over by an officer. But I didn’t see quite how it would work. I said, ‘The diplomatic mail only goes to government offices, or the offices of our allies.’

  ‘Well there you are‚ sir. That’s just what I told the gent with the red cap on.’

  ‘You couldn’t use the diplomatic bag to send a letter to Mrs Jones of Sycamore Avenue.’

  ‘Exactly right, sir. I rest my case.’

  He drained his glass.

  I took from my pocket . . . not rupees this time, but a one-pound note. I set it on the table before us. A pound note went a long way in Baghdad.

  ‘I notice that you haven’t exactly denied the charge. Only told me why there’d be no point doing it.’

  ‘No point at all, sir.’

  I picked up the note, and made to replace it in my pocket book.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lennon, ‘it might be different if your brother worked in the bag room of the War Office in London.’

  I set the note back on the table, and pushed it a little way towards Lennon.

  ‘Now if I pick that up,’ he said, ‘you’ll arrest me on a charge of taking bribes.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the only officer who’s ever bought me a drink, sir.’

  ‘Just so,’ I said.

  He swiftly pocketed the note, and I said, ‘I will now arrest you on a charge of taking a bribe unless you help me out with my special duty.’

  ‘You’re very bad for my nerves, sir, do you know that?’

  ‘Do you want another glass of beer?’

  He nodded and I got two more. When I returned to the table, he said, ‘I’ve decided it’s official business you’re on sir, although of a secret sort. And the money I take to be fair wages.’

  We both nodded for a while. I was thinking of the letter sent by Boyd to Manners at the War Office. That had gone via the diplomatic bag. Had its contents been somehow leaked? What exactly were its contents? I had not had sight of it, but I knew that in it Boyd had told what he’d seen at the station, and set out the case against Shepherd. I asked Lennon, ‘Are you aware of anybody trying to find out the content of letters sent in the diplomatic bag?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But that does not mean you haven’t put other letters into it – ordinary letters.’

  ‘It doesn’t in itself mean that sir, no.’

  ‘If for instance a fellow wanted to send a mucky letter to my wife.’

  ‘Now that doesn’t sound like secret service business,’ he said.

  It seemed to me – weighing the fellow up – that Lennon had added letters to the diplomatic bag, but had probably not taken from it, since that would be too big a proposition . . . In which case I was thrown back on the question of the telegrams. According to Manners, the ones sent by Boyd (both before and after the sending of his letter) had not disclosed any names, either of people or places. But it would be worth trying to make sure of that; and to find out about any other wires sent by Boyd. Since a copy was kept of all messages, it would be possible to do this given access to the records. Sitting back in my seat, so as to appear relaxed, I said to Lennon, ‘Do you have the keys to the telegraphic office at the Residency?’

  ‘Now there’d be no point having those keys,’ he said. ‘A sentry is posted outside at all times, and in any case the place never closes.’

  ‘I need to find out what was sent by a certain man and where to.’

  ‘When?’

  I thought back. When would Boyd have been sending? He had first wired to the War Office the d
ay after the fall of the city, which meant March 13th. The wires arranging the rendezvous at Baghdad station, or the ‘safe place’ (which turned out to be no such thing), were sent the third week of April. That was the end of his communication with the War Office. But Boyd might then have sent any number of other telegrams to other people up to the day I found his body: May 24th, Thursday last.

  I said, ‘Between the fall of the city and last Thursday?’

  ‘Then you don’t need the telegraphic office.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You need the strongboxes in the room around the corner. That’s the archive. Everything sent up to the end of last week will be in there.’

  ‘Can you get me in there and can you get those boxes open?’

  ‘For a pound?’ he said.

  ‘For your freedom from arrest.’

  ‘And another quid when the job’s done, sir?’

  The man was incorrigible.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said.

  *

  At ten that night, I presented my identity card to the sentry at the Residency, and passed into the quadrangle. The horse smell, the heat, the falling darkness, the puttering of a generator, one or two whispered conversations proceeding on the overhanging verandas . . . The man Lennon waited by the fountain. It still did not work. He had been trailing his hand in the green water, but he stood up snappily enough when I approached, and he very nearly saluted.

  We ascended the main staircase under flickering electric light; ordinary bulbs and black cable were tangled amid the candle chandeliers. Our boots made no sound on the thick and dusty carpet. On the first landing, I heard the sound of a closing door – an official in civilian clothes locking up for the night. Approaching the second floor, Lennon took out his own bunch of keys. We walked fast down the long corridor, passing an open door, through which I glimpsed another civilian: a man with well-oiled hair calmly reading a newspaper – one of the few fat men I’d clapped eyes on in Baghdad. He was perhaps the consul himself: The Resident.

  We now approached the telegraphic office – with its sentry outside the door. I had been worried about the position of the telegram archive in relation to this sentry but we continued a fair way past him, and made a left turn with the corridor. As we stood before the unmarked door of the archive we were out of the sentry’s eye line. Private Lennon opened the door of what turned out to be no more than a glorified cupboard.

  ‘One minute, mind,’ he said, and I was in.

  He called after me: ‘Anyone comes along, I shut the door on you‚ sir, all right?’

  Given that this cubbyhole was part of Captain Ferry’s empire, I’d thought it would be neater. The room held three sizes of box. The smallest ones accorded to the size of the sending form I’d filled in when communicating with the War Office, so I started on the stack of those. Each box had a paper label pasted on, and some had more than one – and on the label was just a mix-up of letters and numbers. Lennon stood guard some way beyond the half-open door. He commanded the right angle of the corridor, so he would have early sight of an approach from either direction.

  I pulled the lid off the first box that came to hand. It held the carbon copies of the forms all right. The first I saw was sent by a Second Lieutenant Foster of ‘Div. 4 Mobile Vet. Section’ to a man called Knight in Basrah, but many were not so clear. Where the handwriting had been decent, the carbon was invariably poor, or vice versa. I flicked through and came to a Captain Windust of what might have been the 26th Punjabis. He’d sent on March 25th; I couldn’t make out the message. The next fellow was somebody Battacharjee. He’d sent on March 25th also, and the message was readable, and had been sent clear: ‘Operation completed satisfactorily.’ Then came messages of March 26th . . . But the papers would take an eternity to rifle through.

  In hopes of I-don’t-know-what, I reached for the next box, and took off the lid. But I froze when, from beyond the half-open door, I heard a tread on the corridor carpet. Somebody was addressing Lennon, a whispered enquiry. Lennon said, ‘Fuck off‚ Sinclair,’ and the footsteps retreated. Evidently another Tommy, some pal of Lennon’s, had come up. The bloke no doubt worked a few dodges of his own.

  Now Lennon stepped into the storeroom.

  ‘You’ll have to get cracking, sir. We’ll both be in lumber if the wrong bloke finds us in here.’

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ I said. ‘I give it up.’

  ‘Another half minute,’ he said, and he stepped back.

  He was earning his extra quid. I began leafing through the second box, picked up a form and read the date: March 17th. So this box was earlier. I glanced at another form: Jackson of the . . . couldn’t read the rest. I glanced down at the message, and it was just four clusters of numbers: some military code. Lennon was closer to the door, becoming agitated. I tried to think of the offence we were committing – offences, more like. Trespass . . . Conspiracy . . . Injuries to the Telegraph. No, that was pulling down telegraph poles. Interfering with the mails – that was more like it. But it went beyond that: a charge of espionage might be preferred, and with only Laughing Jack himself – Manners of the War Office – between me and the firing squad.

  I plucked out another form, and . . .

  ‘Ferry!’ called Lennon.

  I stuffed the paper in my hand back into the box, replaced the lid and turned out of the room with fast-beating heart. Lennon had the door locked and we were walking fast away the moment Ferry turned the corner. Had he seen us? Impossible to tell; and uppermost in my thoughts was the image of the last paper I’d held. The name Boyd had been at the top, alongside a number I assumed must have been 185, denoting his machine-gun company. I had not had time to make out the date, the message, or the name of the person to whom it had been sent, all of which had been faint, but there had been something odd about the slip: a diagonal line had been drawn clear through it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Come Saturday, I went again to the Baghdad Railway Club.

  As before, Bob Ferry was already present in the club room, smoking alone under the dark colours made by the stained glass when I arrived with Jarvis. He was beautifully turned out in recently pressed khaki. I said, ‘I do believe this weather suits you.’

  Ferry smiled. ‘It’s a case of mind . . . over matter.’

  There was no sign of his having seen me raiding his archive.

  Jarvis was getting acquainted with our Arab waiter whose name, evidently, was Layth or something of the kind.

  ‘Your name means lion,’ Jarvis said.

  Layth, who had a few words of English, asked, ‘Stanley . . . what mean?’ and I could see the question had knocked Jarvis. What did Stanley mean?

  As other club members began to arrive and take their places around the table, I asked Ferry how things were going on at the telegraphic office of the Residency.

  ‘. . . Overwhelmed,’ he said at length.

  I heard from the other end of the table, ‘Ah, a glass of fizzle.’

  It was the cavalryman, Major Findlay; Jarvis poured champagne for him. We had not run to that at the previous meeting, and I wondered who was paying for it. No doubt Shepherd himself. His parents owned half of . . . what was it? Worcestershire? Why would a wealthy man like that risk his life taking Turkish backhanders?

  Miss Bailey arrived, and I stood together with all the other men. She wore a sort of Chinese coat. Now that I studied her again, I could see that her skin had been a little roughened by the desert sun; and she was perhaps a few years older than I’d thought. Findlay looked on very sadly as she took her place, for she was seated at the opposite end of the table to him.

  The meeting began, and in spite of the champagne, it did so sombrely, with a speech from Shepherd about the passing of Stevens – evidently a marvellous pugilist, and a bluff fellow who took some knowing but whose behaviour would occasionally (very occasionally, it seemed to me) disclose a heart of gold. Shepherd mentioned the forthcoming return to Samarrah, and the brigadier muttered, ‘Tomfoolery.
You’re sure to get into another scrape,’ but he did so affectionately. ‘If anyone would care to come, let me know,’ said Shepherd. I thought this might be a joke, but evidently not. ‘It’s a fascinating stretch of line,’ he was saying. ‘I can offer you a fine 2-8-0 engine, albeit of German make, a carriage that was formerly the personal saloon of General von der Goltz . . . the golden dome of the mosque at Samarrah . . .’

  He was making a general invitation of it: come and be fired on by Arabs or Turks. It did not seem an attractive prospect, but I observed Captain Ferry take out a gold pen and make a careful note in his pocket book. Miss Bailey said, ‘Might make a diverting day or two,’ at which Findlay immediately said, ‘I’ll come. It’s the Seventh Cavalry up there – I do know they’re short of saddles. I’ll take a load up for them. And I suppose one ought to see the Mosque of the Golden Dome.’

  ‘It’s called the Al-Askari Mosque,’ said Miss Bailey, rather coldly.

  He looked put-out, but rallied quickly.

  ‘Sounds good anyway,’ he said, ‘and I’m all for seeing it.’

  Shepherd now gave me the floor, and – very much doubting that the cavalrymen of Samarrah were short of saddles – I rose to my feet. I’d had in mind a quick rundown of the police set-up at York station, the extent of our jurisdiction, the tremendous size of the railway lands around York, but as I faced my audience, I realised I had not given enough thought to the matter.

  ‘I’m Captain Stringer,’ I said, and the brigadier looked at me sharply, as if he’d only just realised my identity. (I’d thought by now that everyone in the club would know my name.) ‘Before coming out here,’ I continued, ‘I was with the Seventeenth Northumberlands on the light railways in France – the railway pals, as they’re known, and a first-rate group of lads . . .’