One fellow remained standing on the water tank of the tender, and as I walked around the rear of it, I saw Ferry standing naked. He looked if anything neater without clothes than he did with, and when the bucket of fairly cold and fairly clean water was pitched down on him, he looked neater still, for all the black hairs on his long brown body were immediately aligned by it. He’d got hold of a cake of soap, and he was lathering his bald brown head. I registered the gold signet ring on his left little finger, and I saw, nestling amid his chest hairs, another item of jewellery: a small gold crucifix on a thin gold chain.
The Royal Engineer called down to Ferry: ‘Ready for your second?’
Ferry glanced upwards, and in doing so, he saw me: ‘I . . . am,’ he said.
The water came down, and all the hairs were straight again. Ferry had closed his eyes to take the deluge. He opened them again to see me still staring at him. He must think me a queer, but I didn’t care. What had Captain Boyd’s Arab servant, the amiable but half-witted Farhan, said? That the British soldier who’d visited Boyd on the day before his last day had had ‘religion in his heart’ – the Christian religion. Farhan had also disclosed that Boyd had made frequent visits to ‘the home of the British’ – surely the British Residency. Surely, also, he had gone there to send telegrams.
Ferry stepped forward to where his uniform was neatly folded on top of his kit bag together with Colt revolver, belt and holster.
I had seen the carbon copy, albeit too faint to read, of one of Boyd’s messages, or one of his attempted messages. A line had been put through it. Was it that Ferry had refused to send it? Was it that the message constituted what Ferry had called ‘tittle-tattle’? Or did he have some deeper reason for disapproving? Ferry was religious. He had the crucifix, and was therefore most likely Catholic. If you were Church of England, you didn’t go in for jewellery. Not if you were a man, anyhow. He had been first to arrive at both the club meetings I’d attended, and the Church of the Saviour’s Mother was just around the corner from the clubhouse. Catholics – keen ones – would go to a service held on a Saturday evening as well as the Sunday ones. They went on a Saturday evening because it was nearly Sunday.
Ferry put on his shorts first, and no wonder, the way I was looking at him. He said, ‘Are you . . . ?’
He buckled up his gun next, and I could see the logic of that, too, given that I still stared.
‘Am I what?’ I said.
Ferry put on his shirt. As he sat down ready to put on his socks, puttees and boots, he leant forwards and I could easily see the crucifix between the buttons of his shirt. It would be in plain sight every time he leant over. It was a wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. The point was that he wouldn’t have had to strip off for Ahmad to notice it.
‘The peculiar . . . code you employ,’ he said, and the rest came with horrific fluency: ‘Are you working for Manners at the War Office?’
He was lacing the first of his boots. It seemed to me he’d set himself the task of doing it in not more than half a dozen precise movements. It made me feel sick to watch him, for I knew I was not up to that sort of effort.
Ferry said, ‘Are you . . .’
Sock, boot, puttee. Ferry had completed his left leg; he now turned his attention to the right one. He was horribly in control of himself. He began by making an inspection of his long left foot, pulling apart the toes. Beyond the smoke box of The Elephant, the sun was going down, but not without protest, not without having started a great many other fires in the sky around it. I wanted to say to Ferry, ‘You had a run-in with Boyd. What happened?’ But I was too hot to speak, so Ferry did instead:
‘Are you . . . on a secret job?’
It was the cool cheek of the question that I found distressing. Ferry was not turning out how I expected. But this was my fault, for I had seen the steeliness in him.
Fifty yards off, Wallace King and Wilson were filming the sunset. King was a little way in advance of Wilson, perhaps taking a closer look at the sunset. ‘It’s not up to much!’ I could hear him calling. ‘We’ve got plenty of sunsets anyway! What we need is a good sunrise!’
It made no difference of course, the going down of the sun, and I thought of the one day of my childhood when I’d been overwhelmed by the heat. Baytown, the place of my birth, stood on the Yorkshire coast, not too far from Jarvis’s Scarborough. It wasn’t easy to be overwhelmed by heat on the Yorkshire coast. Knocked over by the east wind, yes. I was six years old or so; the sun was raying down on the beach, and I was screaming. My father held my hand. Being only a man – a widower – he did not quite understand young children, and I believe my distress had been increased by the woman who had come up and shouted at him, ordering him to take me indoors. He had immediately removed me into the lifeboat house, which was always dark, and smelt of paint, for they were always painting the lifeboat. There was a bench you could sit on to watch them do it. I had been placed on the bench and given a penny lick . . .
Ferry was asking another question: ‘Are you quite . . .’
An expression came to me all the way from Yorkshire, and I believed that I said out loud, ‘I feel like I don’t know what.’
And then I keeled over, and I continued to watch the sunset from sideways on.
*
They – I didn’t know exactly who – put me back on the sofa in the carriage. I was given bottled water, more quinine; I dropped asleep.
I awoke to see Findlay descending from the carriage. I had been somehow aware of him not sleeping, fretting with The Times – thrashing at it. He would now, I supposed, be making for the camp around the fire in the palms. As he opened the door, I made out the red glow rising above the single-fly tents. Shepherd was over there. It was no cooler in the open but uncomfortable in a different way, preferable to some. I took it for granted that the military arrangements had been made to guard us – that a couple of men were on sentry go, that someone was keeping the steam up in The Elephant. I could not see Ferry in the carriage, but an hour later, when I next awoke, he was there, and he was there perhaps six more times as I came out of fitful dozes, always with his pipe in his mouth and his eyes upon me. Evidently, he lived without sleep. Maybe that was the way of it with the brainier sorts of fellows. He was an Oxford man. He taught there, as did Harriet Bailey’s husband. He was Professor Bailey. Perhaps Prof. Bailey and Ferry were more than colleagues. Perhaps they were fast friends, in which case Ferry would have another reason – on top of his own strict morality – to warn Boyd off The Lady. I thought of the message I’d seen in the telegraphic office at the Residency: ‘Religion has a great influence over the Arab.’ Well, it had a great influence over some white men, too.
I had many dreams – dozens of them, but the principal one concerned a nest of mosquitoes in the corner of the carriage. In the dream, one of the Engineers explained that mosquitoes did not as a general rule go in for nest-building, but this particular lot had decided to club together. Later, in what may or may not have been a dream, I saw through the carriage window facing opposite to the camp a lavender-coloured sky containing three stars and a crescent moon. The cigarette packet of Shepherd was assembling itself, but no man in a fez and no woman in a red dress came wandering into view to complete it. I looked away, looked back again, and this time it seemed reasonably certain that I was awake. Beyond the window, an exchange had now occurred. The crescent moon remained, but there were a million stars instead of four, and in place of the imaginary vision of the walking couple there was a single walking man in khaki, and‚ as if to prove that he had somehow evolved from a cigarette packet he himself was smoking. He was about a quarter of a mile off. I ought not to have been able to make him out at that distance, and the reason I could was because of the dawn.
I rose from the couch, stepped down from the carriage. Even after I’d walked twenty-five yards, I still wasn’t sure I was on the ground, but I was making towards the smoking figure. This dawn, I realised, came with complications, namely a constant swirling of hot
sand. I had to keep my hand over my eyes, and I would periodically tip it, in order to see – so the world came in flashes. The smoking figure did better than me, for even though he too staggered somewhat, he had a cloth about his neck that he now put over his head: a keffiyah. It was Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd that I was following: a thin and small, bow-legged figure. He had the ready-for-anything look of a jockey. He wore his gun of course, and his haversack, but that evidently contained little if anything.
He was making towards a long, low object that seemed to lie near the source of the swirling. This was the branching railway line, and Shepherd was approaching the three wagons sitting upon it, as I had somehow known he would be without quite being able to say why – and it was this knowledge that had made me rise from the couch. I turned about with my hand over my eye. I lifted my hand. Another man approached – another staggerer. He wore a sun helmet, and walked leaning forwards with his hand upon it. Findlay.
The wind whined as it swirled the sand. It sounded like a cold wind just as the waters of the Tigris looked cold but it, and they, were not. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd had now arrived at the wagons. He gave a half glance back, and I dived for the protection of a gravel ridge – the kind of thing that I might once, before coming to the desert, have named as a dune. I did not believe I had been seen. I looked over my shoulder, and Findlay had also gone to ground, doubtless for the same reason. I peered forward again. Shepherd had gone between the bogies, beneath the rearmost wagon. In there was darkness; I couldn’t see what he was about. Presently, he re-emerged and stood upright. He began walking towards where I lay. He looked no different. But wait a minute. His haversack was not the same. It had hung more or less limp before. It now contained some new article.
Shepherd now stood ten feet away from me. I had my gun pointed at him. I could not help noticing that the train behind him seemed to have tilted to about thirty degrees. It held on to the track very well, considering.
I said, ‘Throw down your gun, sir.’ He took the Colt from its holster – pitched it away. ‘What are you thinking of, Jim?’ he said, as if really curious.
‘You know, sir,’ I said.
He said, ‘Shall I show you what’s in the bag?’
Whether I blacked out or not I can’t say, but a minute later he had jewellery in his hands: a tangle of gold, emeralds, rubies. I heard a footfall.
‘Here comes a murderer, Jim,’ said Shepherd.
I whisked around, Findlay was removing his revolver. He was now aiming it at me‚ but I let fly with a bullet and his piece went spinning out of his hand – not quite what I’d intended (I did not quite know what I had intended), but it had come out all right. Beyond Findlay, I saw a particular illumination: a gap in the whirling, and it held numerous Arabs on horses. They then disappeared. I motioned Findlay towards Shepherd. The major and the lieutenant colonel were now opposite to me.
‘I will face you down!’ I called over the storm to both of them. I was judge and jury, albeit with malaria.
Shepherd said, ‘May I put these down?’, meaning the jewels. I eyed him. ‘Of course, I will be delivering them to the Corps HQ,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ said Findlay.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you everything, Jim,’ Shepherd said, setting down the jewels. ‘I’ve been let in on an extraordinary adventure, and I wanted to follow it through in my own way.’
‘The Turkish officer,’ I said. ‘The bimbashi. He did offer you treasure.’
‘Not at the station,’ said Shepherd. ‘He said there would be gems to be found. They would be attached to the underside of the rearmost wagons of the abandoned trains in this territory.’
The wind rose and he had to shout louder, but there was now a lesser quantity of sand in the skies. Or rather the colour of the storm had changed: it was becoming golden.
‘A system of exchange would be set up,’ said Shepherd. ‘Jewels for military information. At the last train, a week ago, I found some rubies. In return, I left a document about the disposition of our forces and future plans. Naturally, it was one long lie from beginning to end. I saw the chance to make a great score. Well, to throw the Turks off. I about doubled the size of our force in the city for one thing . . . It was all lies, as I say.’
‘And so is this,’ said Findlay. ‘You will be on a charge yourself, by the way, Stringer, if you don’t put that damned gun down.’
It seemed to me that, in extremis and removed from the presence of Miss Bailey, Findlay was reverting to type: an upper-class man, irritated at the situation in which he found himself.
‘I gave the first haul into the safe keeping of Brigadier General Barnes,’ said Shepherd.
‘Hogwash,’ said Findlay.
‘Of course,’ said Shepherd, ‘they weren’t real. They were paste, and I’m pretty sure these are too.’ He indicated the jewels at his feet.
I turned towards Findlay, and my gun wavered that way too.
I said, ‘You took the photograph.’
‘There was a connection,’ he began, ‘I have no idea of the details of it – an association – between Mrs Bailey and Captain Boyd. It was Mrs Bailey’s business alone. I felt that she was entitled to her privacy. I need hardly mention that Mrs Bailey did not kill Captain Boyd.’
‘No,’ said Shepherd with a half smile, ‘she did not. But you did.’
The sun was rising fast on us, and I could hear a new sound: a distant singing.
‘Oh, do come off it,’ said Findlay.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked Findlay.
‘To keep cases on him.’
‘Why?’ I said again.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘He killed Boyd. Boyd had seen him take a Turkish bribe. He’s just taken another one.’
Shepherd said, ‘You adore Mrs Harriet Bailey. You are in love with her. Unfortunately for you so was Boyd, and probably she with him. He had met her in Basrah, as you knew quite well. When he came up to Baghdad, he telegraphed to her repeatedly – Jarvis told me. He had a run-in with Ferry of the telegraph office about sending wires of a personal nature. Boyd wouldn’t leave her alone. You arranged to meet him at the station. I don’t know what happened, but it ended by you killing him. You knew he had this idea about me – that he considered me a traitor. He misinterpreted what he saw at the station on the night the town fell. I suppose I can’t blame him for that. As a result, you thought I’d be blamed for his murder.’
‘All nonsense,’ said Findlay. ‘I only learnt of his theory about you – well, it’s more than a theory isn’t it? I only learnt that late on Saturday night when Jarvis told me.’
‘You took the photograph off Jarvis,’ Shepherd said. ‘You knew that it might ultimately help make a case against you. I don’t know what you told the fellow when you forced him to give it over – what sort of pressure you put him under. He was overstrained in any case.’
Findlay was about to reply, but in that instant, it seemed to me that I had at long last cottoned on.
‘No,’ I said to Shepherd, ‘Jarvis gave him the photograph.’
‘Of course he damn well gave me it,’ said Findlay.
‘I don’t know exactly why,’ I said to Shepherd. ‘But he felt guilty about something to do with Boyd. I believe he had helped you, and that’s why he shot himself.’
The desert revolved once again, bringing the Arabs into clear view – all these natives coming up with the sun. Unfortunately, Shepherd now had a second gun in his hand. He was like a magician. Where the hell did they keep coming from? It was another Colt, but this one a much handsomer piece. It must have been Captain Boyd’s of course, and it had been in Shepherd’s haversack. So it was the Webley against the Colt: one pull on the trigger of the Webley and I would do for him, whereas he would have to cock the hammer of the Colt.
With a half smile, this he now smoothly did, so that we became evenly matched.
‘My dear Jim,’ he said, blushing.
The shot came. I reeled away and in the instant of falling I saw
that one rider from the crowd of Arabs was approaching fast, evidently bringing important news from the rising sun. But whatever news was too late for me, for I was spinning, spinning away into blackness and the end of Mesopotamia.
Part Three
York Again
Chapter Eighteen
In the railway police office at York station, I opened my eyes. The thin fire in the grate was much the same as when I’d last looked at it. Therefore I hadn’t been out for more than a few minutes. As for the letter before me, that was exactly the same. To the man recovering from malaria, the mystery is not so much his own drowsiness as how anyone at all can keep awake for an entire day – not to mention the question of why they would want to. I read over the letter again.
It must have been sent to the War Office by the diplomatic bag, which is to say via the man Lennon – at a price no doubt, but evidently one affordable to Jarvis. (I supposed that Lennon’s rates were variable according to the customer’s rank.) It had then been forwarded to me at the police office by the ordinary mail, courtesy of Lennon’s brother and partner in crime if crime it was. The envelope was date-stamped May 30th, which was the day he and I had had our conversation about Kut. We’d gone soon afterwards to see Boyd’s Arab servant, Farhan, and it must have been after that encounter that Jarvis had written and posted.
Dear Capt. Stringer,
You told me you worked before the war in the police office at York station so that is where I am writing to you.
I am writing to you to point out that Lt. Col. Shepherd killed Captain Boyd at about six o’clock on the evening of Wednesday May 23rd 1917. I was there so I know. Capt. Boyd had asked me kindly if I would drive him to the station, not saying why he wanted to go there. Lt. Col. Shepherd, who I knew a little from the HQ, was already there walking up and down the platform. I did not think I was supposed to see him but he didn’t seem to mind very much about it. They went together into the station buffet as was, and I walked some distance away but still heard a little of their talk. Shepherd challenged Capt. Boyd. He said Capt. Boyd had been giving him dirty looks when they had passed by each other at the Hotel. Capt. Boyd said well don’t pretend you don’t know why. Capt. Boyd then called Shepherd a Turkish spy paid for in gold. He had seen and heard an arrangement made with a Turkish officer at the station where he and Shepherd had been on the day of our entry into the city. They started an argument, and then Capt. Boyd fell silent. As to how Shepherd did it, I believe it was by stabbing, for there was no gun shot. I had glimpsed a quantity of knives on the floor of the place on first arriving. Shepherd came hurrying out, saying would I mind very much giving him a lift back to town, for he is very polite as you know as well as a killer. I said what about Captain Boyd, and he said he would be remaining behind at the station. I said why – not taking much trouble by now to be respectful, and he smiled, saying Oh he’s rather brooding you know. I still stared at him, and he went red saying I think he means to walk over to the range shortly. He admitted they’d had a bit of a row, and I was amazed at how he didn’t try to cover up. But then this is a man who likes to put his whole life in hazard from time to time. Not to mention the lives of others.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 22