When the body was turned up, Shepherd got me involved in trying to investigate the crime even though he’d done it, and so began a lot of play-acting. Shepherd said he had a suspicion of the culprit (as if it wasn’t himself) and wanted to pursue the matter secretly it being sensitive. It was painful to me to go along with this because you know what Capt. Boyd meant to me because I have told you. Shepherd would have me believe Capt. Boyd was a man likely to get into hot water over the ladies, but he himself I believe to be a QUEER.
I am hoping you will be in a safe place when you get this news. I pray God Capt. Stringer that you will be able to read this in your home town of York which I consider on a par with my home town of Scarborough. (This is meant complimentary.)
But I will NOT.
Capt. Stringer they say nothing lasts for ever but I don’t think so. I have been out here for two years straight no leave. I find it to be far too hot. My back which I have never showed you is covered with black fly bites and I can not sleep at all without taking more than is good for me in strong drink. On top of this, I let down my friend by not going to his aid, and by not speaking out until now. So I will in time do what I know must be done, and the writing of this letter will clear the way for me.
What exactly are we doing here? Building a nation it is said and who for? Not us. We already have one. But for the Arabs I ask you. Well it won’t happen overnight.
So we sit here waiting for the Turk to come back. Let him build the nation I say.
Why am I writing to you of all people?
It is because you asked about my experiences near the town of Kut-al-Amara which nobody has ever done.
In closing Capt. Stringer please find enclosed two tokens of my estimation. You will know which one Shepherd gave me after he came back from your run north saying here’s a trinket for you but I knew it was in order to keep silence about the events at the station.
Yours ever, Stanley Jarvis (Private)
The letter had come two days before in a package together with The City of the Khalifs (somewhat battered) and a sizeable brooch or pendant tightly wrapped about with newspaper, and consisting of three large green stones, each about the diameter of a shilling, surrounded by a larger quantity of smaller red ones, each about the diameter of a farthing. A glittering tassel hung down from it. I had immediately telephoned Manners at the War Office, and read over the letter. With his say-so, I had taken the brooch or pendant (rewrapped in its paper) into the best York jeweller, Pearson and Sons, in St Helen’s Square. Rather to my disappointment – because I’d been hoping to cause an immediate stir by handing over the thing – old Mr Pearson had said he was too busy to look at the brooch just then. I was to call back later in the week.
I knew the letter practically off by heart now. It was not quite clear on whether Shepherd had invited Boyd to the station or the other way around, or whose choice the station might have been. Shepherd might have chosen it, meaning to show Boyd the remaining Berlin–Baghdad railway medallions, and to fob him off with that tale. Then again Boyd might have chosen it, since he regarded it as a safe meeting place, as proved by the fact that he’d been planning to meet me there.
Boyd, it was becoming clear to me, must have influenced the allocation of Jarvis to me as batman. It would have been a way of opening up a channel of communication between us without our having to meet directly after that proposed first rendezvous.
Repocketing the letter, my thoughts turned to Jarvis himself. He had gone through the charade of playing detective when he knew the culprit all along. That might have brought him near to doing the deed promised in his letter – and he would have felt obliged to do it once having written and despatched the letter. The last straw had been the business over the photograph; the attempt to incriminate an innocent man. In the aftermath of the attack on the Railway Club – when giving over the photograph – Jarvis had told Findlay what Shepherd had done, and it was evidently to keep tabs on Shepherd – to catch him in the act of going under the Turkish trains to leave the data and collect the treasure – that Findlay had gone on the trip to Samarrah.
Beyond the window an express had pulled in.
I had the police office to myself, and I was cold, hence the fire I had lit, even though it was July. Baghdad had got into my blood, in more than one sense. Yet I had been away for no more than twelve weeks, and ten of those had been spent travelling, and five in the packed army hospital behind the cavalry barracks. I had never smoked the narghile, never been to the bazaar. On the other hand I had also never been shot. Much to my shame it had been a faint that had keeled me over when Shepherd had pointed the Colt single-action at me. I blamed my malarial condition.
The stationary express was somehow making the sound of a rainstorm.
I began to think of my five days in Baghdad military hospital. Existing on a diet of quinine and bad dreams, I had slept in a sort of dark cave, for my cot had been surrounded by a thicket of mosquito nets – three of them. It had been a case, as I had confusedly told the gentlemen of the Royal Army Medical Corps (apparently many times), of ‘bolting the stable door after the horse had locked’. Yet I had kept parting the curtains, in hopes of letting in a draught. How I had longed for coolness, yet now I was contemplating walking out to the driver of that northbound express and asking him for a few lumps of good anthracite to get a blaze started in the police-office grate which held only screwed-up six-month-old pages from the Yorkshire Evening Press.
Towards the end of my stay in the hospital, Ahmad had visited me with ginger biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, and a quantity of raisins. I’d told him I was feeling better. He’d said, ‘I prayed for you so what do you expect?’ I’d said, ‘Thank you,’ and he’d said, ‘Now you pray for me. Goodbye.’
It broke in on me that this express train fuming away must be the one the Chief had said he was going to meet. He was expecting a special visitor and this was somehow related to ‘a real treat’ that was in store for me. Knowing the Chief, that might mean any number of things not normally counted as treats. For instance, a trip to the Police Court to see some bad lad sent down for a few years’ hard.
I stood up and put on my suit-coat, still thinking of the Baghdad hospital. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd was still in there. He’d taken an Arab bullet, but according to Manners he would recover fully from his wounds. He would then be taken from the hospital and be shot again, this time by the British Army as a murderer and traitor. Naturally, there would be a court martial first. The treasure he’d taken was being held as evidence. (He’d disclosed its whereabouts to the investigators. He’d simply stowed it in a trunk in his quarters, but not the one whose lid I had myself lifted. I thought it typical of Shepherd to have been so reckless in his choice of hiding place.)
No treasure had been lodged with Brigadier General Barnes.
The documents that Shepherd had admitted to leaving under the first train – the one carrying the motor launches – had been looked for and not found, having fallen into Turkish hands. The second lot of documents – the ones left by Shepherd under the train carrying the crated aeroplane – had been discovered, and all I knew of these was that they had been scrawled in French, and that they would be part of the body of evidence against Shepherd.
The express was still fuming away outside. They must be changing the engine. I heard a footfall, and the door opened. It was the Chief.
‘Hey!’ he said, ‘follow me.’
I might be a British Army captain and an intelligence agent of sorts, but this was still how he commanded me. I followed the Chief, who was lighting a cigar as he walked, towards the First Class end of the train, and there, stepping down from the farthest carriage, was Manners of the War Office.
‘Is this the special guest?’ I called ahead to the Chief.
‘Try to sound a bit more enthusiastic,’ he said, half turning around.
I had only recently been speaking to Manners on the phone, and I’d sent him two full reports of the events of my Baghdad investigation
. The novelty was beginning to wear off the man. I had not forgiven him for furnishing me with such a bloody daft cipher, and it had seemed that on my return I had given him a sight more data than he had given me. For instance, I couldn’t get out of him whether Captain Ferry of the Residency telegraph office was suspected of any corruption. But I did not believe so. Ferry guessed I had been sent to Baghdad on a secret job, hence his asking whether I was sending to Manners. But I believed he had not told anyone else – and indeed that my secret role had remained secret, except in so far as I had deliberately given it away to Lennon of the Residency post room, a man I had trusted at the time and still trusted in recollection.
Captain Bob Ferry was not corrupt. He was if anything too moral. He had visited Boyd and given him a rating for his repeated attempts to send to Miss Bailey when she was down in Basrah. Word of this had no doubt leaked out (the British force in Baghdad being a sort of round-the-clock rumour factory), and had reached the ears of Shepherd, who had then tried to paint Boyd as a man who’d come to grief because of his connection with Miss Bailey.
I supposed that was how it had worked, anyhow.
Manners had also failed to fill me in on what had happened after I’d keeled over in the desert. I believed I had come to very soon after, but memory loss was known to be a symptom of malaria, and it appeared that it had been so in my case.
On top of these grievances, Manners’s tone of amusement also went against him. And he certainly seemed to find York station highly amusing, as he stood waiting for us with the train finally drawing away behind him. Whisking off his bowler, thus shamelessly revealing the entirety of his long, shining head, he said, ‘Lunch, gentlemen?’
Well, it had apparently all been pre-arranged with the Chief, and we wheeled about and headed for platform seven, on which stood a side entrance to the Station Hotel.
‘I believe the new offensive has begun brilliantly,’ said Manners as we entered the hotel.
‘Has it bollocks,’ said the Chief. (In London, the Chief had been rather quelled by Manners, but here he was on his own turf.)
‘You think it’s propaganda, Saul?’
‘If you read it in the paper,’ said the Chief, ‘then it’s propaganda. Or is it something you know in an official capacity?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ Manners said cheerfully. His amusement at the world was out in the open now, whereas in London it had been kept somewhat it check.
The York Station Hotel was a red-padded, silent world, but the war had made a few intrusions. A sign on the reception desk, which we were now passing in front of, read, ‘Guests are reminded to close their room curtains at or before 8.30 p.m.’ Manners had stopped at the desk, where he was now buying postcards of York. ‘I always do this when I come to a new town,’ he said. ‘It saves me walking around the place.’ He seemed to be in holiday mood.
A waitress came up, and even before we’d been seated the Chief had ordered beer.
‘Don’t you select the food first, Saul?’ said Manners. ‘I mean, you order the drink that goes with the food.’
‘I find that beer goes with any food, Peter,’ said the Chief.
This business of ‘Saul’ and ‘Peter’ – I didn’t care for it.
(I did not myself drink any beer. On my return from Baghdad, I’d told the wife all my adventures, adding that since being put on a course of quinine, which was very bitter, I had quite lost my taste for bitter beer, to which she had said simply, ‘Good. Because you drank far too much of it before.’)
The waitress gave out the menus.
‘Any war restrictions, dear?’ enquired the Chief, in a resigned sort of way.
‘No potatoes except Wednesday and Friday, and no meat on Wednesday,’ she said, speaking like an automaton.
‘But today’, said Manners, with happy realisation dawning, ‘is Thursday. We could have meat and potatoes. Cottage pie!’
And that’s what we did order, just because we could. The waitress said, ‘Shall I send over the sommelier?’
‘The bloody what?’ said the Chief.
‘Yes do,’ said Manners.
It was a jolly enough lunch, and over the second bottle of good claret, a few ‘Jim’s began to be floated amongst the Sauls and Peters. Manners asked whether I had heard from the Medical Board (I had not), and there was some speculation about my future. The Chief said he wanted me back in the police office; that I had more than ‘done my bit’. We then talked over the case. It appeared from what Manners said that Shepherd had always been a loose cannon, prone to getting into scrapes whether at school, university or in the army. As a young man, he had travelled in Turkey, and formed an affection for the place. ‘And an affection’, Manners added, ‘for its gold and silver.’ The court martial, he said, would be held in conditions of the utmost secrecy. It would be held ‘in camera’.
Manners paid for the meal, and I said, ‘I’m obliged to you. I was promised a royal time, and that certainly fitted the bill.’
‘Your treat is still to come, lad,’ said the Chief, and he looked at his watch and grinned at Manners.
‘Really?’ I said.
*
We crossed Ouse Bridge under a blue sky and a light rain. The Chief was in the lead, and he was telling Manners how, the night before, he’d attended a party at the Railway Institute, a leave-taking for the timekeeper of the carriage works who’d finally got round to joining the army – the West Yorkshire Regiment. There were speeches, and the fellow had been given a present. Manners asked what it was. ‘A clock of course,’ said the Chief, and that tickled Manners no end. Well, he had at least a pint of claret inside him.
We walked along Lendal, coming to St Helen’s Square, where we passed Pearson and Sons, Gold and Silversmiths. I looked in the window as we went by. It was a small shop, pretty like a jewellery box, only with bars on the window. (And a guard sat in it all night.) I wondered whether they’d got around to looking at the package I’d given in.
We walked along Coney Street, along Pavement, and we came to the start of Fossgate. The Blue Bell was to our right. Its smoke room was the Chief’s home-from-home, and I thought a drink-up in there might be the real treat. But not after all that claret, surely? That would be going it a bit even for the Chief. But instead, we crossed the road . . . and there stood the wife, looking at her watch.
She’d been doing her marketing, and carried her basket. She stood right in front of the Electric Theatre.
‘Chief Inspector Weatherill told me a cinema show was to be held in your honour,’ she said. ‘He let on about it when I bumped into him last week, but I was to say nothing to you. He didn’t really want me to come.’
‘Now that’s not quite right‚ Mrs Stringer,’ said the Chief.
‘. . . But I forced the details out of him, and here I am,’ said the wife.
A cinema show in my honour . . .
With its highly decorated front, the Electric Theatre might have looked quite at home in Baghdad. It was the very place the wife and I and the children had seen Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and I thought I might be in for another showing. I looked at the placards in front of the cinema. Under the familiar words ‘To-Night To-Night’ was advertised ‘The Gentleman Rider’ and ‘In the Hands of the London Crooks’.
‘We’re all in the hands of the London crooks,’ said the wife, and Manners came up to me, speaking confidentially. ‘I’ve been told your good lady wife works for the Co-Operative movement, but I had no idea she was actually a communist.’
He grinned and wheeled away to greet two fellows who’d just stepped out of the door by the pay box. The first was a fat chap called P. T. Buckley, and he was the owner of the Electric Theatre, and was forever being featured in the Yorkshire Evening Press as ‘the man who brought cinema to York’. Of late though, he’d been up in arms about the Council having given the go-ahead for a new cinema: the Picture House in Coney Street. The second fellow was Wilson, assistant to Wallace King. He wore a bright blue blazer and a straw boater, and
I realised how wrong he’d looked in that baggy, badge-less uniform in Baghdad.
I shook his hand, and he said, ‘You look a good deal brighter than when I last saw you.’
Behind him, I glimpsed a third placard: ‘Closed this afternoon for showing of a special item.’
‘Where’s Wallace King?’ I asked Wilson.
‘Oh, Mr King’s never available at short notice . . . But I am,’ he added, offering me a cigarette. I took the cigarette; everyone smoked outside the Electric, since you couldn’t smoke inside. ‘He’s in meetings all this month with some of the production companies is Mr King,’ said Wilson.
The Baghdad Railway Club Page 23