Night Train to Jamalpur(100)

For all the success of my scheme, there was the problem of time with Fleming, as there had been with Sermon. I had told Fleming that I planned to seek out the snake man in mid-afternoon on this day. Strange though it was to speak of mere timekeeping in that apocalyptic deluge, it was not yet one o’clock. Fleming, like Sermon, had pitched up early. I put this to Fleming, and he said, ‘I am not bound by your appointment diary, Captain Stringer.’

‘Did you know of the boat beforehand?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

I was suggesting that he was a regular client of the snake man, and that he had come here today in advance (as he thought) of my own visit, so as to warn him of my arrival. What I actually said was, ‘We’re only a short walk from the Zoological Gardens.’

Fleming got the point: he was being accused; and he turned on his heel, indignant. He was about to stalk off in a rage when his eye – and mine – fell on the figure of a man standing in the doorway of the half-wrecked pumping station. The figure retreated into the building as we looked his way. He had been a small man, overwhelmed not only by the rain, but also by his own rain cape. Charles Sermon had seen him too, and it was he who pronounced the name: ‘That was Douglas Poole, wasn’t it?’

‘Who?’ Fleming demanded. ‘Because he’s been following me around for days. Perhaps you can tell him for me, Stringer: he’d better desist.’

At this, Fleming walked away, heading back towards Bhawanipore Road, and Dougie Poole emerged from the ruined pumping station to watch him do it, eyeing Fleming in a defiant sort of way until he disappeared into the rainstorm.

Sermon, Gopal, Deo Rana and I now stood in a semicircle before Dougie Poole. Behind him, in the wrecked interior of the pumping station, lay something resembling a giant riveted bath tap fallen over on its side. Poole was sipping from a flask; his rain cap was about two sizes too big.

‘Well, Dougie?’ I said. ‘And by the way, I think you know Charles Sermon from the traffic office?’

‘Yes,’ said Dougie Poole, nodding. ‘I saw you leaping from the boat, Jim.’

‘Did you see the python?’

‘I did. I thought that might account for the leap.’

Dougie Poole offered the flask to Sermon and me; we both declined.

‘I’ve got some fascinating data for you about our friend Fleming,’ said Poole.

Alongside me, Charles Sermon was breathing hard. ‘Shall we step inside this waterworks?’ Poole continued, indicating the pumping station. ‘. . . Not that it has a roof.’

We all moved through the doorway. There was half a roof; therefore half as much rain was falling inside as outside. I now saw that, beside the giant tap that had keeled over, another remained upright by its side, as though in mourning for its dead companion; and there was a mix of abandoned plumbing running all over the muddy floor, the pipes looking snake-like to my mind.

I said, ‘What’s the fascinating data about Fleming, Dougie? Is it the fact that he was walking out with the woman who became Mary Bennett?’

This must have been the ‘intriguing alliance’ – as disclosed by the photograph in the Debating Society dance album – that Mrs Young had been about to reveal to me before the intervention of her riotous son. I was sure that I had seen the glint of Hedley Fleming’s glasses in that photograph. The picture had dated from 1918. Since then the relationship had soured, and Mary had transferred her affections to Superintendent Christopher Bennett.

Poole took a long time to digest this hazard of mine. ‘Well, Jim,’ he said at length, ‘I must admit that my news isn’t quite so fascinating as that, but it’s grist to the same mill. I was only going to say that I’ve been tailing Professor Fleming of late, and I’ve twice lost him in the railway lands of Howrah. Both times he went there with a wicker basket over his shoulder. I couldn’t see any motive though: why would he be stowing snakes on the trains? But now we do have the motive. The woman he loved was stolen from him by the head of the railway police. So he takes his revenge by committing a series of terrible crimes that the head of the police can’t solve. What better way to do it?’

At this, Deo Rana spoke up. ‘If he kill head of police,’ he said, ‘that is better way.’

‘But he may have found it preferable to inflict a long humiliation,’ I said, turning to Deo, and it did seem to me that Fleming himself had been subject to a long humiliation that he would want to revenge: the humiliation taking the form of Mary Bennett’s incessant and very public boasting about her marriage.

Of course, Christopher Bennett knew of Hedley Fleming. It was impossible that two Cambridge graduates of about the same age in Calcutta, who attended the same social functions, would not have coincided. Bennett must also have known of the previous association of his wife and Fleming, and surely he not only suspected Fleming, but could also guess at his motive. This was what he had meant when letting slip that he found the snake crimes ‘ungentlemanly’. Having identified man and motive he was, as he had said, ready to make his move. But he obviously hadn’t made it yet.