I was being not only dull, but also – as the wife would say – common.
‘. . . But that’s not for tonight,’ I said. I looked down at my hand; it was shaking. ‘Tonight I mean to talk to you about my work as a detective – plain-clothes – on the railway force at York. Now the police office is on platform four at York station, which is the main “up” and anyone heading London-way on a Tuesday morning about eleven o’clock sort of time would have seen the full police strength parading outside. That was before the war, I mean . . .’
I lifted my glass of champagne, drank it all off, and everyone around the table watched me do it. ‘However . . .’ I heard myself saying, and I didn’t know why. Brigadier General Barnes was eyeing me carefully. Major Findlay – redder than the previous week – was looking at the ceiling. Miss Bailey kept adjusting the position of her glass of champagne, and I reckoned I had about five seconds before she dismissed me out of hand as a dullard and a blockhead. I was making a worse fist of this than Stevens had in his early stages, and he’d eventually become interesting. How had he done it? By yarning – by telling a tale.
‘However,’ I was apparently saying again, ‘I’m in rather a tight corner here because . . .’
‘Give us one of your cases, Jim,’ said Shepherd. ‘What’s the queerest thing that ever happened on a train near York?’
Almost without thinking, I answered, ‘It was the affair of the already clipped tickets.’
‘Sounds worthy of Conan Doyle himself,’ said Shepherd.
‘Not quite‚ sir, but it was a bit of a facer at the time.’
‘And what time was it?’
‘Late on in ’thirteen, sir. December. The matter first came up on a bright but cold day as I recall, with just a riming of snow on the streets of old York . . .’
Somebody said, ‘Ah, the thought of it,’ and all of a sudden the whole shining, sweating company was leaning forward. Shepherd nodded to Jarvis, who set down another glass of champagne for me, but I didn’t need it now. I was away.
‘It was Friday morning, and I’d been in the middle of town questioning a suspect . . .’
(I had in fact been buying cigars for the Chief but I left that out.)
‘. . . As I stepped under the station portico I saw that two fellows from the maintenance department were putting up the Christmas tree . . . and they had these coloured lights on a cable. They were untangling them, and Harold Spencer – who was a ticket inspector “A” grade, which meant he worked the main line – came haring round the corner from the ticket gate, tripped over the cable and went flying. This was a turn-up because Spencer was knocking on – probably sixty or so – and had never been known to run before. Well, he was a lay preacher and a Chief Ticket Inspector – not the sort of man who needs a sudden turn of speed. When he got up, he had a nasty graze on his cheek, but he paid it no mind at all, which was also a shock because he was normally very careful of his appearance. He just said, “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve got the rummest tale to tell you.”
‘Evidently he’d just come in off a London train that was heading for Newcastle and had stopped twice before York – at Peterborough and Doncaster. He’d got on at Doncaster and started checking the tickets, only to find that every one given up to him had already been checked and clipped with the regulation North Eastern Railway hole punch, which cuts a crescent-moon shape out of the tickets – other companies have diamonds or squares or what have you. He’d gone through four carriages and it was the same story in every one – some other fellow had beaten him to it. Now Spencer seemed completely floored by this, said he thought he was going nuts, but I said, “It’s not so much of a mystery is it?” He said, “How do you make that out?” I said, “It’s obviously the work of another ticket inspector.” He said, “It can’t be. If an inspector boards a train, he tells the guard on doing so, and a note is made in the guard’s log. No such note had been made.” I said, “How about this: he got on the train without telling the guard?”’
. . . At which Shepherd spoke up again, observing to the meeting at large: ‘You see the calibre of men we have in our railway office.’
A good deal of laughter at that, and I fancied I heard in amongst it some shouting from beyond the window, apparently a repetition of the disruption overheard at the previous meeting. I suddenly had cause to think about the Webley. It wasn’t in the haversack; I’d left it at Rose Court. I’d given it to Jarvis for cleaning; he’d handed it back to me, and I’d put it on the bed. The trouble was that I’d been carrying it sometimes in the holster and at times in my haversack – that was how I’d come to forget. The noises had faded anyhow.
Where had I got to?
‘. . . When I put my theory to Spencer,’ I continued, ‘he said, “You’re saying he wasn’t a real ticket inspector. Why? Why would anyone pretend to be a ticket collector?” I said, “To charge excess fares and pocket the money,” and at this Spencer became thoughtful. He had asked the passengers if they’d been charged excess, and one woman had said she had been. She’d not been able to find a seat in third, so she’d been sitting in second with a Third Class ticket. It was only a matter of a bob or so. But a second woman, found by Spencer at Doncaster to only have a ticket as far as Peterborough, said that the previous fellow hadn’t charged her, but just said, “Don’t trouble about it, only think on next time.” Very nice about it he was, the woman had said. As to his appearance, he was described as a middle-aged man of middling height with darkish hair – and he did have the long black coat with gold-braided collar of the ticket inspector.
‘Over the next week, other inspectors on the staff found a similar thing happening to them. The tickets would be properly clipped, some excesses asked for, some not. I reckoned that if this chap wasn’t taking all the excesses, then he wasn’t in it for the money – and the reason he took some cash now and again was to keep up the front, keep up his credibility. In other words it was more important for him to check tickets than it was to make money out of it, and that put me on the track of thinking he might be a man who’d once been turned down for the job of ticket inspector . . .’
‘A ticket inspector manqué,’ said Harriet Bailey – and I had one of her smiles all to myself, even if I didn’t quite take her meaning.
‘Ticket inspectors are employed by the traffic department,’ I said. ‘So I went there and looked over all the records of men shortlisted for ticket-collecting positions but not taken on, or stood down from them. There were plenty. More of the first than the second of course, but dozens all told. The men who’d resigned or been sacked had to hand over their ticket clippers, and the records showed that they always did. There was not a single pair of clippers unaccounted for, and there never had been. But I was curious about the resignations, of which there were quite a few. It was a steady sort of job, and decently paid. Why would a man chuck it up? I was told the main reason was that they didn’t care for the rostering patterns. Every man had to start early or finish late because that’s when most of the fare-dodgers operate – first thing or last thing in the day. It broke in on me then that our phantom ticket-checker did all his work in the morning, so might he not be using the clippers of a man who worked afternoons and evenings?’
Thoughtful nods from around the table. I seemed to have Bob Ferry quite mesmerised. Not Major Findlay, however. It would take more than a tale of petty crime on the line to distract him from Miss Bailey. I could hear no noise from the square just then.
‘I asked for the names and addresses of all ticket inspectors of the York district who worked late. I then picked out the ones who lived with other men – those who lived in digs in other words. There were three that fitted the bill, and I struck lucky with the first: a fellow called Hughes. He lived in a big lodging house in the middle of York – a place not too particular about its tenants. Every night Hughes knocked off late from work, downed a few more pints of ale than were good for him and in the small hours of the morning he put his coat in the hallway, leaving the clipp
ers in the pocket. He put the coat on again when he set off for work at one o’clock the next afternoon.
‘Now there were some ruffians in that house, but it was a quiet chap who caught my eye when I went round the landings knocking on the doors. He was medium build with dark hair, and I could see he was a railway nut because he had The Railway Magazine and The Railway Gazette on his table top.’
This caused quite a stir. Shepherd – a Railway Magazine man himself, of course – was laughing, and one of the R.E. chaps was quite indignant: ‘I’ll have you know that I subscribe to both. Does that make me a railway nut?’
‘Technically, it does,’ said Harriet Bailey, and she gave me another of her lovely smiles, thus increasing the anxiety written on the face of Findlay.
‘The quiet fellow’s name was Randall – Bartholomew Randall. We had him in for questioning, and he came clean. We asked him what he’d done with the money he’d taken for excess fares, and he took us to the collection box for the Railway Mission that stands on platform five of York station. It was all in there. He’d been putting cash in there for weeks in fact, and only a few days earlier, I’d been talking to Father Cunningham who runs the Railway Mission, and he’d said he’d detected what he called “a real access of the Christmas spirit in the city of York” – this on account of the donations in the box. In November, the donations had amounted to four shillings and thruppence or so, along with the usual admixture of foreign coins and amusement-machine tokens. Up to the third week of December fifty-seven pounds ten had been found in the box. But even though he hadn’t kept the money, Randall was charged with theft as well as personating a company officer and travelling on a train without a ticket, since he himself had not had a ticket. Of course, the peculiar feature of the whole case was the motive: he’d gone about inspecting tickets just for the love of doing it.’
‘A crime of passion,’ said Harriet Bailey.
‘What became of the fellow?’ someone else asked, which I’d hoped they would not, since Bartholomew Randall had hanged himself in the lodging house the day before he was due to appear in the police court, confirming too late the doubts I’d had about proceeding against him, and never put strongly enough to the prosecuting solicitor.
But the question of Randall was lost amid the applause for my talk, and the noisy arrival of Wallace King and his assistant. As this fellow struggled with a mass of equipment, King cut off the applause for my speech with a raised hand. ‘I am Wallace King,’ he said. (Somebody said, ‘We know.’) ‘I will tonight exhibit a film of the famous archaeologist Miss Bailey . . .’
She nodded her head graciously.
‘. . . on a visit to Babylon. Rest assured, there is footage of the railway. My assistant also took some still photographs of the visit, and these will be passed around.’
The assistant – he and Jarvis were wrestling with the tripod stand of the projection machine – was never named, I noticed.
‘My assistant and I’, King continued, ‘will attempt to set up our equipment with the minimum of fuss and inconvenience to yourselves, so please do carry on with the next business of the meeting. However, I must warn you all that both the film stock and the gas used by the projection machine are highly flammable, and there is a real danger of an explosion. Once the projection machine is started, I must insist that all cigarettes be extinguished – and all pipes,’ he added, with a glance at Captain Ferry.
The next business of the meeting was a talk by one of the Royal Engineers on the subject of Euston station in its early days. He was mainly concerned with the sidings of Euston station, and almost all of his talk went by the board anyhow, what with King, the assistant, Jarvis and Layth clattering about with the projection machine, testing the flow of gas from canisters in haversacks to the light box attached behind the projector, and the hanging of the picture sheet – an ordinary white bed sheet as far as I could see – on to the wall opposite.
The end of the talk on Euston coincided with the dramatic climax of the preparations, namely the hanging of black cloth over the stained-glass window (which left the hot air coloured a murky blue and gold), and the lighting of the lime in the light box. Miss Bailey put out her Woodbine. There was now a white light on the picture sheet, black scratches flying through that light, which suddenly gave way to words, ‘WALLACE KING BRINGS THE WORLD TO YOU’.
‘Just a bit of header left over from my theatrical presentations,’ said King. ‘In the picture houses back home, by the way, it would cost you one and six to see this film.’
He wasn’t joking either. The desert now appeared on the screen. Well, two palm trees against a pile of stones, perhaps with the river flowing behind – it would have been the Euphrates rather than the Tigris. The next minute we were looking at the sky, and many black scratches were flying through it too – but there was also a great black flying crow in the picture. It was immediately obvious to me that the projection machine was redoubling the already stifling heat of the room. I moved my fingertips across my forehead, and sweat ran freely down the back of my hand.
‘It was very hard to get this shot,’ Wallace King was saying, and I thought: Who’s giving this talk? You or Harriet Bailey? We were now looking at the bird from a different angle. ‘It’s just a bit of scene-setting,’ said Wallace King, ‘bit of atmosphere.’
Harriet Bailey smiled and rolled her eyes in the direction of Shepherd, who gave a boyish grin back.
‘This was a month ago,’ said King, ‘when Miss Bailey went to Babylon to look at the, er . . . antiquities. It was not Miss Bailey’s first visit, by the way. I believe she went there many times before the war. That right, Miss Bailey?’
Miss Bailey nodded.
‘She went to see what sort of mess the Germans have made of the place . . .’ said King.
‘It was ruined before, Mr King,’ said Harriet Bailey. ‘In fact, the German team there did some excellent work of preservation.’
‘Tommyrot,’ said one of the Royal Engineers.
Now the view had changed: there was a small tank engine on two-foot-gauge track, steam flowing away rapidly from it.
‘Ah,’ said Miss Bailey. ‘This is what you’ve all come to see – a train.’
‘It’s a locomotive actually,’ said Shepherd, grinning and colouring up.
In the film, Miss Bailey walked up to the engine, and faced the camera. She was smoking. Three Royal Engineers took up position beside her. After a while, all their smiles ran out, and with an effort they all renewed them. ‘It’s not exactly the Orient Express, is it?’ said Miss Bailey. ‘Perhaps Colonel Shepherd will put us in the picture.’
‘. . . A pannier tank of German manufacture . . . Note the low-set boiler and short chimney for maximum stability on the narrow, rough-laid track. The line is of two-foot gauge. It was put in by the Germans five years or so ago, and runs from the ruins at Babylon just a little way south to a spot called Hillah on the Euphrates. It was connected to Baghdad but the Turks blew that stretch up a couple of miles outside the town. We mean to restore the connection.’
On the screen, Miss Bailey now stood alongside a wooden hut. She was holding on to her straw hat in what appeared to be a sandstorm.
‘This shows the station,’ she said. ‘It’s gone now, I believe?’ she added.
‘A patrol reported it missing a fortnight ago,’ said Shepherd.
At this, Findlay spoke up rather timidly. ‘Missing? You can’t very well lose a railway station can you?’
‘It was stolen,’ said Shepherd. Findlay looked perplexed, and Shepherd blushed as he added, ‘We assume it was dismantled and taken by natives – for firewood.’
We now saw the station from side on, minus Harriet Bailey.
Brigadier General Barnes said to Shepherd, ‘You mean to replace it, I hope?’
‘A new one will be built . . . of bricks,’ said Shepherd.
‘Reminds me of the three pigs,’ said Harriet Bailey. ‘What are you going to call it? Babylon Junction? I’m not sure I approve.’
Somebody called out, ‘Change here for the Tower!’ It was Findlay, and there was some laughter.
There now appeared on the picture sheet a worn-down city amid grey sand.
‘Ah,’ said Miss Bailey, ‘the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar.’
We’d seen the last of the railway, it appeared, and Harriet Bailey began explaining the ruins. It went over my head, and I had a pretty good notion it was going over the head of Wallace King as well, who sat by the projector, occasionally whispering to his assistant. I could tell he was itching to interrupt Harriet Bailey though, and as she said, ‘This is the east side of the palace,’ he stood and pointed to Captain Ferry. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘is your pipe out?’
‘It . . .’
The assistant continued to turn the projector handle; he seemed to be counting in his head.
‘. . . will be soon,’ Ferry concluded, and something about the long pause, and the steadiness of the stare he gave back intimidated King, who sat down without a further word. It was his assistant who then said, ‘End of the first reel of Babylon.’ Somebody pulled aside the black window cloth, and the hot light poured in. A window was opened, and I walked over to get a breath of what passed for air in Baghdad. Down in Quiet Square, an Arab paced. He was being quiet all right, but there was something funny about him.
At the table, King’s assistant was handing around the still photographs he’d taken.
The man in the square was treading the shadow of the telegraph wire, like a tightrope-walker. I had thought for a moment that he held a cane as he walked, for the Arabs often did. It wasn’t a cane‚ however, it was a rifle. At the table, somebody was making a joke, ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept.’ The photographs evidently showed Miss Bailey and her party at the ruins.
The Arab bothered me; I meant to say something to the party at the table, where I saw Wallace King’s assistant giving a handful of photographs to Major Findlay. Findlay, evidently, was meant to look at the photographs and then to circulate them. He looked at the first of the pictures, gave a half smile and passed it to the Royal Engineer sitting next to him.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 18