Night Train to Jamalpur(104)

Whereas Lydia now wanted to return to the hotel to work on the first of the two talks she was scheduled to give to Indian women, I wanted to continue walking and revolving my thoughts. Two dusty roads, Dufferin Road and Mayo Road, intersected at this part of the maidan, and the occasional tonga would come along them. A tonga was approaching along Dufferin now. It was heading north-east, the direction of the hotel. I wouldn’t have let Lydia walk back over the darkening maidan alone, but she would be all right in a tonga. So I flagged it down.

I knew the wife’s talk was fixed for the coming Friday, but I had forgotten where, or perhaps I had never known. As she climbed up, I asked her.

‘The coal place,’ she said. ‘Asansol.’

I’d had a vague idea it was out of town, but I hadn’t realised it was quite as far out as that.


II

The tonga rattled away, and I was left alone in the velvet darkness of the maidan. The city sounded very far away. I headed due south over the blackened grass, towards the great bulk of the Victoria Memorial. After a minute I heard the fast-approaching sound of horses’ hooves; I turned about to see two riders approaching at a gallop. I stepped aside, but not before the second one had shouted, ‘You there – out of the bloody way!’

It was Fisher, and the rider a little way ahead of him was Detective Inspector Khan. They raced past me in the gloom, pounding on towards the reservoir called Elliot’s Tank, but they slowed before reaching the Tank; they then stopped and conferred, turned about and came thundering towards me. Fisher, I realised, was very nearly as good a horseman as Khan. I was not very surprised at that – Fisher was a remarkably capable fellow all round – and I was not so very surprised to see them together either. I had sent a chit to Khan that morning, marked as being strictly for his personal attention, and hinting at everything I knew about his plot to kill the revolutionary called Deep, or sometimes Ganguly, which had resulted in the death of John Young on the Jamalpur Night Mail.

When they came up, I spoke first to Fisher, and I thought I would be rude to him before he could be rude to me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.

‘Collecting my things, aren’t I?’ he said.

‘Off up to Suryapore, are you?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And you’ve come back here to collect your things—’

‘I’ve just bloody said that.’

‘. . . And to have one last review of the blunder you made with your co-conspirator.’ I indicated Khan. I faced Khan, and I found I was shouting at him. ‘Fisher here saw India as a land of opportunity. He’s struck lucky with a maharajah, but a few weeks back he’d have done practically anything for cash. How much did you pay him go after Deep or Ganguly or whatever the name?’

Khan jumped down from his horse. He had a rifle attached to the saddle. The police would practise riding with rifles. He said, ‘This appears to be a continuation of the absurdities you were peddling in your note.’

‘They’re facts, and you know it!’

‘If you continue shouting at me, Stringer, I will run you in. I’m on the point of doing so anyway for the killing of Young.’

I said, ‘Pull the other one, pal,’ and he winced at that. I’d known he would; it was why I’d said it. ‘If you were serious about pinning it on me, you’d have got Fisher to testify against me. You get credit for stopping short of that anyway. You were only questioning me to find out what I knew, and when you heard I’d been sniffing around about the reservation chart you were panicked into coming up to Darjeeling. I wonder if you two liaised up there? I doubt it. You knew you shouldn’t be seen together.’

‘I’m going to bloody lay you out,’ said Fisher, but he remained on his horse. ‘You’re off your bloody nut’, he said, ‘if you think I shot Young.’

‘You didn’t shoot him. A bloke called Sabir Huq had been hired to do the job, together with some of his confederates. Your role was to supervise the thing, make sure it all went off according to plan. When you went into that compartment, and you figured out the wrong man had taken the bullet, you didn’t bat an eye. You covered up brilliantly. Then you pretended to be interested in finding the culprit. For a while – until the Rajkumar came along with his business proposition. Well, I’ve got a proposition for the two of you: release Deo Rana from the Alipore nick, and I’ll say no more about it.’

Of course, it was only Khan who could fix this for me. It was probably to be expected that Deo Rana would be run in after the shooting. But the murder charge was not to be expected. It had come from the C.I.D., and I believed it was Khan’s doing in particular. I also believed he had done it because I knew I was on to him about the killing of Young, and he wanted a bargaining chip. However, he said nothing but just looked at me in a disgusted sort of way (at which he was very good), before remounting his horse and riding off with Fisher in tow, the pair of them cantering at first, then starting to gallop hard.