Night Train to Jamalpur(12)

Fisher had been reading as we ate, and he was reading still. Then, it had been the political supplement to the Calcutta Yearbook. Now, it was The Hindustani Manual by Lt. Col. D. C. Philpott. Philpott had the market in Hindustani manuals sown up. Lydia had Domestic Hindustani by the same fellow, and had taken very strong objection to the introduction, in which Philpott stated that this book was meant for ladies, and therefore confined itself to simple, everyday Hindu phrases. If Fisher was learning anything from this book, then it all went out the window the moment he came across any actual Indian. Then it was all ‘You there’, or ‘Yes chum, I’m talking to you.’

I fell to looking out of the window. Now that the sun was overhead rather than coming in directly, we had the slats fully open. I pointed.

‘Why is there a bridge there?’

‘It’s a bloody river, isn’t it?’ said Fisher, barely looking up.

‘There’s no water.’

‘Come back in two months. It’ll be a bloody torrent. Probably sweep the bridge away.’

. . . Which brought me back to my original question.

I thought back over the night before last. I had set down in note form the important data.

1. The Jamalpur night train of 23 April had come to a stand about three minutes before the shot was heard. It had been at a spot called Ghoga.

2. The train had been stopped by the adverse signal guarding the works on the line. Every night train to Jamalpur for the past two months had been stopped at this same signal, and the procedure was that the train waited until a pilotman was sent along by bicycle from the signal box a mile away. The pilotman would then put his bike on to the footplate, and guide the driver over the points and on to the opposite line, and stay with him until he was clear of the works. No driver was allowed to proceed until this man turned up. The line was slightly curved at the point where the train waited, so that much of its length was out of sight to the blokes on the footplate. It was known that this stop might make the train vulnerable to dacoits, and yet it was protected by only two watch-and-ward men, who were not armed, whereas the dacoits who preyed upon Indian railway passengers always were armed.

3. In that three minutes, any number of people would have had a chance to come up to the first class carriage. For example, anyone from the rest of the train might have walked up to it by climbing down from their own carriage and entering via the end doors. There had been seven other carriages in all: four thirds and three seconds. Taken all together there had been about three hundred and fifty passengers on the train.

4. Reading from the rear of the first class carriage, the compartments ran as follows:

Number one: John Young’s.

Number two: mine.

Number three: the one belonging to the elderly European, who turned out to be a churchman attached to St Paul’s cathedral, Calcutta: Reverend Canon Peter Selwyn by name.

Number four: Major Fisher’s.

Number five: the compartment occupied by two Indian servants – the man belonging to John Young, and the man belonging to the Reverend Canon Peter Selwyn.

5. The killer may have come from this very carriage. That is to say, he could have been any one of the above-mentioned men (except me). Yes, I had seen Selwyn, Fisher and the servants emerge from their compartments into the corridor, but any one of them might have shot Young, retreated into their compartment, then re-emerged looking surprised at developments. But it was odds-on the killer had entered from outside, by means of the rearward end door, having failed to open John Young’s exterior compartment door, and my own exterior compartment door. Most likely, the killer was one of the three horsemen seen riding away, and my money was on the one who’d been closest to the train when I’d looked out.

6. The nearest habitation to the line was a farm at a quarter-mile distance. This was east of the tracks. There was a ruined blockhouse about the same distance to the west. The horse riders I’d seen had been heading west, and had perhaps been making for this ruin, but nobody had been able to give chase.

7. On the face of it, the killing had been an act of dacoity or banditry of the sort ever more familiar on the railways of India. The likely scenario was as follows: the killers made straight for the first class carriage, where the richest pickings would be found. They tried a couple of exterior compartment doors at hazard, but these were locked and they couldn’t prise them open, so they moved to the end door, which was not kept locked, and gave access to the corridor. Very likely John Young heard the entry, opened the sliding door of his compartment, and stepped into the corridor to come face to face with one of the dacoits. He had been immediately shot in the head, and had fallen on the threshold of his compartment. One or more of the dacoits had then stepped over the body, entered the compartment, removed John Young’s suit coat from the peg on the wall and taken out his pocket book. From this they had removed all the cash I had previously seen in that pocket book, which I had estimated at four hundred rupees, about thirty pounds. That would represent a month’s wages for a British ticket inspector on the Indian railways; for an Anglo-Indian ticket inspector, it might represent two month’s wages. For a dacoit – assuming the dacoit to be a peasant – that sum represented undreamed of riches, perhaps ten times more than he might expect to earn in a year by his normal labour. The dacoits had then made off on horseback.