I looked down at the square: still the Arab paced.
At the table, Findlay inspected another photograph. And he suddenly froze. The look he then gave Harriet Bailey, and the look on the face of Jarvis – who stood behind Findlay while pouring champagne, and who could plainly see the photograph – made me move rapidly to where Jarvis stood. But Findlay placed the photograph face down, like a man folding his hand at poker. He glanced left and right, to see if anyone else had seen it. Jarvis, standing behind him, was left out of account: I believed that Findlay had not noticed him. All of the following happened in a moment. The steady ticking of the projection machine started up again. This was not the showing of the second reel but only preparatory to it, for the black cloth was not over the window. King was in conference with his assistant as the words ‘WALLACE KING BRINGS THE WORLD TO YOU’ appeared once again on the picture sheet, but this time paler, seeming more inconsequential, the room being light. More of the Babylonian ruins – also paler – appeared on the picture sheet. I made out the great statue of a lion as Major Findlay picked up the photograph that had caused such a reaction in both him and Jarvis, and began raising it towards his top tunic pocket.
The photograph did not get there however, for the stained-glass window burst; there was a splash of red on that tunic pocket of Findlay’s; the lion tilted and disappeared. The machine was over, hit by a bullet. Everybody was over. The projection machine was aflame in a confusion of shouts and sharp zinging sounds as further bullets flew into the room. Shepherd was at the window, shooting his revolver into the square. Every other man was down, although I didn’t believe anyone had taken a bullet. I had an image of Harriet Bailey, sitting on the floor, anxiously touching her beautiful curls. Findlay was moving towards her – explaining that the splash of red on his tunic was only red wine. The table was over, and the photograph had spilled to the floor . . .
A Royal Engineer had flung the door wide, and the room emptied in a moment. There was almost laughter from some – what with all the excitement – as we clattered down the shaking iron staircase. Major Findlay seemed to run with his right arm around the shoulder of Miss Bailey. Well, she tolerated it, all right. I thought: She is the one white woman in Baghdad; she must be protected. But of course there was more to it than that.
Major Findlay had not brought away the photograph that had concerned both him and Jarvis. Immediately before quitting the room I had looked at it on the floor‚ and I had seen . . . not Miss Bailey and friends amid the ruins of Babylon, but Miss Bailey in Basrah (I recognised the waterway, the type of the square house with battered veranda behind), and not alone there either. My first thought had been that I was looking at a picture of myself kissing the lady, but I had never done any such thing, not even in my dream. It had been Captain Boyd that I saw. I recognised him from the floor of the Salon de Thé even though his face in the picture had been in profile. It had been not more than two inches away from Miss Bailey’s, who had looked very glad to have it so close.
As our party descended into the dark lobby of the building, with the double doors closed in front of us, it was evident that nobody knew what the next move ought to be, and since there were still gunshots from the square, our lives might depend upon it. But I was still thinking of the photograph, and cursing myself for having left it in the room.
Chapter Fifteen
When we all judged that the Arabs in the square had left off firing, or perhaps somewhat in advance of that moment, Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd opened one of the double doors. The light had begun to fall; one yellow pi-dog wandered through the square. The bells of the Church of the Saviour’s Mother set up a furious clattering – this by way of a belated alarm. The sound only served to point up the emptiness and quietness of Quiet Square.
We bolted into it in chaotic fashion nonetheless. Everybody took off down the different alleyways. I had my own eye on Harriet Bailey and Major Findlay, who both went together towards the narrowest alleyway, heads kept low.
Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd hesitated in the square, a few yards from me. Seconds before, Jarvis had been there with him. I glanced up at the veranda of the room we’d just quit: black smoke tumbled upwards from the shattered windows. Major Findlay whisked Miss Bailey off along the narrow alley, and I saw Shepherd, revolver still in hand, going the same way a moment later. How did things stand between those three? In the meetings of the club, Miss Bailey had seemed keener on Shepherd than Findlay, but that might only have meant that Findlay was really the favoured one, for that sort of game was always a deep one, with many a double bluff involved.
I meant to give chase, but the three had disappeared from the alley by the time I reached the entrance. They might have taken any one of a dozen passageways leading off, and the light was now fading fast. I returned to the middle of the square, where in my uncertainty I made one complete revolution before haring off along the alleyway opposite to the one just mentioned. The direction I’d decided on would take me back to Rose Court. I must put my hands on my own revolver; and I would find Jarvis and quiz him about the meaning of the photograph.
But Jarvis was not at Rose Court, neither was Ahmad, and neither was the Webley. I made a quick search of all rooms. I turned Jarvis’s pack upside down, and found nothing out of the way. There was a picture postcard in there, addressed to Jarvis. The view was of the harbour at Scarborough, and the writer had been mad on exclamation marks. ‘Stan! Billy is back from France! He has bought The Ship Inn with his Blighty Money! He says the loss of three fingers is nothing! He says The Ship will soon be back on an even keel! He says Arras will be the breakthrough on the Western Front! He says you will be wearing your nightshirt all day when you come back, like the Arabs! (But what does Billy know? And we would all now like to hear your own tales, since he is beginning to repeat his. You’ve knocked over the blooming Turks. What’s keeping you?)’
I doubled back rapidly into the labyrinth.
I was looking for Jarvis, Findlay, Shepherd, Miss Bailey – and I wanted to know what had become of the club building. As I ran, I came into a gaslit part of the labyrinth, and it seemed I was seeing things illuminated for a reason – to show me that time itself had gone wrong: a camel reversing down an alleyway, an Arab glimpsed in a doorway, sitting cross-legged on the floor writing with an ink pot balanced on his knee. He seemed to be recording slowly events that were happening fast. The sight of the man distracted me, and I took a wrong turn. I stood in a blank, black alleyway, listening hard, and sure enough I heard a shot. I didn’t know which way to move in order to go away from it or towards. I froze for a moment, then bolted towards an archway that framed a leaning palm. The palm, I saw when I came through the arch, stood alone in a gravelled square made up of three blank walls, and the front – the front only – of a dead-looking red-brick fortification behind which lay a mass of smashed bricks. A man lay along the bottom of this façade, so close up against it that I had not at first noticed him. It was Jarvis, and he was on his back, his face tilted towards the base of the wall, as though inspecting it. But he couldn’t have been inspecting anything, because there was a hole in the back of his head. In his right hand, which lay over his chest, he held the Webley. There was a discolouration on the upper part of his uniform that I turned away from, something thicker, whiter, worse than blood. I heard a footfall on the gravel, turned and Shepherd came pell-mell into the square, gun in hand.
But he could not have killed Jarvis. I had entered the square only seconds after hearing the gunshot, and Shepherd hadn’t been there then‚ as far as I had seen. As he spoke to me – which he did while kneeling next to Jarvis – I looked all around the square. There were three alleyways leading off. For Shepherd to have shot Jarvis from some way along any one of these . . . his bullet would have had to go around a corner.
Shepherd was saying, ‘I believe it’s your piece.’
He took it gently from Jarvis, and handed me back the revolver. He seemed to think nothing of doing so.
‘He’d be
en cleaning it,’ I said.
Shepherd was carefully moving Jarvis’s right arm.
‘I’m going to look in his pockets,’ he said. He was cool as usual.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘He went back into the club to fetch something.’
‘A photograph?’ I said.
Shepherd eyed me, and for the first time in our acquaintance, it was a sharp look that he gave me.
‘You saw it?’ he said.
I said, ‘It showed Boyd with Harriet Bailey.’
Shepherd resumed his inspection of Jarvis’s shirt pockets.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, ‘the place was on fire.’
Having searched through the first of Jarvis’s pockets, Shepherd had now started on the second. He was shaking his head: ‘Just a lot of smoke,’ he said.
‘Did you see the photograph, sir?’
He hadn’t had sight of it in the clubhouse, as far as I could recall.
He said, ‘No, but I knew there was something queer about it from the way Findlay reacted to it. I quizzed Jarvis after we came out of the building, and we agreed it could have a bearing on the murder of Boyd. I kept them talking while he went back. They would have gone straight in themselves after it otherwise.’
By ‘them’, he meant Major Findlay and Harriet Bailey.
‘It’s not there,’ he said, and he sat back on the gravel, holding Jarvis’s paybook and pocket book. He sat with ankles crossed, knees upraised, arms around knees – like a boy. He had reholstered his Colt revolver. He said, ‘I know Jarvis told you all about Captain Boyd. He was found stabbed to death at the station. We believed it might not have been Arabs that killed him.’
‘You think Findlay killed Boyd over Miss Bailey?’
He nodded.
‘Jarvis believed there was an attachment between the lady and Captain Boyd. He had reason to believe Boyd had been wiring her from here when she was in Basrah – before she came up.’
Was Jarvis also acquainted with the amenable Private Lennon at the Residency? Had he had sight of the same telegram forms as me?
‘In the photograph’, I said, ‘they’re practically kissing.’
Shepherd nodded. ‘Which is why Findlay would have wanted to get hold of it as well.’
‘Did he also do for Jarvis?’ I said, turning again to the body. ‘Surely Jarvis made away with himself ?’
‘I’d say it’s a certainty,’ said Shepherd. And he could see that I wanted to know why that was the case. ‘There’s no sign of a struggle, and he wasn’t shot from a distance.’ With a tilt of the head, he indicated Jarvis, and I looked the same way. ‘He shot himself through the mouth – powder marks all round the lips.’
I knew he was right.
‘Why would he shoot himself?’
‘I got to know him a little bit,’ said Shepherd. ‘It was obvious enough he didn’t care for this place.’
He looked all around the empty square: what was horrible about it was that it didn’t look as though it belonged to Baghdad. It was just an all-purpose nightmare setting. ‘He was what I believe is called depressive,’ said Shepherd.
‘He told me Boyd was that.’
‘Boyd was a machine-gunner,’ said Shepherd, a trace of the sharpness returning. ‘They’re not usually very reflective types. Jarvis was describing himself.’
‘Then do you mean Findlay has come by, discovered the body, and taken the photograph?’ I answered my own question. ‘No, because I got here pretty sharpish after hearing the shot. I mean, there was no time, was there?’
Shepherd gave a half shrug‚ saying, ‘I believe Findlay would have gone after the picture himself. Returned to the club, I mean – after he got clear of me. He’d have discovered Jarvis had beaten him to it, in which case he’d have been looking for Jarvis.’
‘How would he know Jarvis had been in?’
‘He might have seen him coming out . . . Or from Layth. He does have some English, and he never left the building.’
Shepherd rose to his feet.
I said, ‘When did Jarvis go in after the photograph?’
‘About three-quarters of an hour ago. I’ve been charging about looking for him.’
‘How did you disentangle yourself from Major Findlay and Harriet Bailey, sir?’
‘They disentangled themselves from me,’ he said, with a ghost of the old smile. ‘Findlay made it perfectly clear he wanted rid of me.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Some alleyway between here and the club premises.’
Silence in the square.
Shepherd was holding his Turkish cigarettes out to me. I reached out, but he dropped the packet, and put his hand to his revolver. We heard a footfall, echoing in the square. I raised my own revolver. A patrol entered the square: a British sergeant and three sepoys. Shepherd went to them, giving over Jarvis’s paybook and papers, which he had taken from his pockets while searching for the photograph. He explained that the dead man had been my batman. Of the circumstances of Jarvis’s death, he told the sergeant nothing more than that we’d found the man shot – that it was very likely suicide. The man had been in a rather low state of health recently; he was oppressed by the heat, and the three of us had been under attacks from insurgents earlier in the evening; we’d all had a very narrow shave, and Jarvis had been badly knocked by the experience.
The sergeant asked: ‘Killed himself? With what, sir?’ His voice echoed in the dead square.
I came forward and showed him the Webley. ‘It’s my piece,’ I said; ‘Private Jarvis took it for cleaning.’ The matter could have been awkward for me, but the sweat and the agitation on the sergeant’s face was all down to the great humidity of the evening, and not at all to do with perplexity over the death of Jarvis. He was taking a note of our explanation, but made no attempt to claim the Webley as evidence. It was very obvious to all of us that it was easier to kill yourself with an officer’s revolver than with the rifle of the private – it was just another privilege of rank. As the sergeant made his note, I looked over to Jarvis, lying with his face turned away, as though in distaste for us all.
*
‘But might not Harriet Bailey have killed Boyd?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ said Shepherd, ‘she’s too small.’
‘She’s tough though, practically lives in the desert from what I can gather.’
We were on Park Street, closing fast on the cavalry barracks. We’d come this way via Quiet Square, where Shepherd had discovered from Layth that Jarvis had indeed returned and gone up alone to the empty club room. After he’d left, Findlay had turned up with Harriet Bailey. They too had gone up to the room – and it appeared that Layth had told Findlay that Jarvis had been there first. It had taken the best part of a quarter of an hour to get this out of the Arab, who spoke of Jarvis as ‘Mr Stanley’, Findlay as ‘Effendi Fine Lay’, and Harriet Bailey as ‘El Khatun’, meaning ‘The Lady’.
At eleven o’clock at night, nothing less than a gymkhana had seemed to be in progress on the dusty gaslit field in front of the cavalry buildings. Late night and early morning were I believed the busiest times for exercising the horses – away from the heat of the day. Cavalry officers on their mounts criss-crossed the field; orderlies on fodder fatigue carted straw bales about the place; in the stable courts, men swabbed horses from buckets of water. Shepherd and I saw it all from the main gate, where Shepherd addressed a sentry: ‘Captain Stringer and Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd to see Major Findlay of the Ninth Hussars.’
Major Findlay, the sentry was telling Shepherd, had signed back in half an hour ago.
‘Where will we find him?’ said Shepherd.
‘In Dunn’s.’ (Or it might have been ‘Dun’s’ or ‘duns’.)
‘What’s that?’ said Shepherd. He was running out of charm, fast.
‘That side of the house,’ said the sentry, indicating the right-hand side of the main barracks building, which was another
of the Baghdad music halls: all domes and turrets, like something dreamt rather than built.
As we made towards it, the sentry called out, ‘He might be in the bath if he’s any sense.’
Shepherd called back, ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s bath time.’
For all its fantastical front, the inside of the building smelt of dubbin, and was Spartan in the extreme. The bathhouse, we discovered, was in the basement: a white-painted room with ranks of partitions created by red velvet curtains. The officers were in tin baths behind the curtains. It was a peaceful scene. The gas burnt low; smoke rose up from behind a couple of the curtains but no steam. These were cold baths. Most of the men in them were silent, save for the occasional grunt and splash, but two of the bathers, in adjacent enclosures, were conversing, their voices echoing.
One said, ‘Apparently, the Kaiser has become a Moslem so as to impress the Arabs.’
‘Utter rot,’ said the other.
Shepherd and I patrolled the gangway between the booths. I knew what he was looking for. Perfectly ordinary dining-room chairs stood in this gangway, set at various angles, each one bedecked with the uniform of a bathing cavalry officer. Shepherd had stopped by one of the chairs. He indicated the tunic to me: a red wine stain. He too had seen the accident that had befallen Findlay when the bullets had started flying.
From behind the adjacent curtain there came no sound. Shepherd reached for the inside pocket of the tunic. He brought out an identity card and a photograph, displaying them to me silently like a conjurer doing a trick. One of the two conversing bathers spoke up again.
‘Do you know what I saw the other day? A fellow sleeping on a walking camel.’
The identity card held by Shepherd was Major Findlay’s; the photograph was of Harriet Bailey and the late Captain Boyd nearly kissing. From beyond the curtain there came the sound of a great waterfall. Findlay had risen to his feet in the bath. Shepherd eyed me, the beginnings of a smile on his face. Did he mean to confront Findlay? There came another waterfall: Findlay stepping from the bath. Shepherd slid the papers and the picture back into the pocket of the tunic. We walked fast from the bathhouse and barracks.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 19