Night Train to Jamalpur(5)

Some years before, the government of India had contracted the management of the biggest of the Indian railways – the East Indian Railway, headquartered in Calcutta – to a private company. Now the government was minded to run the show directly. The Company would be nationalised, this being the up-to-date method of running a railway almost everywhere except the homeland, and direct control of such a gigantic and important concern would help the government of India – that is, the British – to remain the government of India. It was anticipated that this transfer would occur a couple of years hence, in 1925 or so, and every man on the Company awaited the date with trepidation.

The government was proposing to invest heavily in the railway, so as to take advantage of the traffic boom occurring since the end of the war. But the money must be properly directed, so economies would be implemented, defects discovered and corrected. ‘Rationalisation’ – that was the word Stanley Harrington had used . . .

Stanley Harrington was a Secretary of the Transport Division of the India Office in London, and it was he who had recruited me to the Commission of Enquiry being conducted into the East Indian Railway. He had done so via my governor in the York railway police office, Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill. The chief had no end of contacts with the so-called intelligence agencies, and it was through him that I had been sent out to Mespot in 1917, to stew in Baghdad whilst keeping cases on a certain loose-cannon of a lieutenant colonel. My knowledge of secret police work and railways combined would make me the perfect man for India, Harrington had said.

Harrington knew the East Indian Railway inside out. On the face of it, the show was economically operated. What with all that coal to hand, together with cheap labour, working costs were a mere thirty per cent of receipts. But Harrington believed there was ‘considerable laxity’ in its operation, and laxity was something he knew all about, being a large, slow-moving man, and the almost permanent inhabitant of a certain Italian restaurant around the corner from the India Office, in which he consumed mountains of ravioli and ice-cream before settling back with a cigar and numerous coffees. Harrington took me there every day for a week (during which he put me up at the Savoy Hotel), and in the first of our luncheons he offered examples of the Indian laxity, some of which were officially sanctioned. For instance, even the European clerks would take off all the Hindu and Moslem holidays. But very often brazen illegality was involved. ‘Would you believe that entire elephants, Captain Stringer, very often go missing from the marshalling yards?’ There was much outright theft; there was fraud, and there was corruption at all levels of the Company.

In the subsequent luncheons, Harrington had explained about the three Schedules: A, B and C. The enquiries under Schedule A would relate to security arrangements in the yards, shops and works of the Railway. Those under Schedule B would touch on pilfering and corruption amongst junior staff – mainly Indians and Anglo-Indians. But it was Schedule C that was the ticklish one, and Harrington spoke of it in low tones even in the half-empty restaurant.

Schedule C enquiries related to corruption amongst the gazetted officers, that is to say the mainly British top brass of the Company. Graft was rumoured to be commonplace at this elevated level, but hard information was in short supply. One had to peer into the interstices of the accounting systems, looking for the discrepancy between passenger numbers on a certain route and receipts obtained, or asking why less coal was consumed than was apparently justified by the number of trains stated to be running, and so on. But assuming these discrepancies were explained by crime, how were the guilty men to be quickly identified? That was a matter of circulating in the burra clubs of Calcutta with eyes peeled and ears cocked. I would be equipped with an expenses budget that would enable me to keep cases on the top men, socially speaking. ‘You’ll be wanting a good Italian restaurant,’ Harrington had said, ‘and Firpo’s on Park Street comes highly recommended. I believe you will recognise some of the puddings there as being similar to the ones served here. We can’t quite run to the real luxury hotels,’ he continued, ‘but I think they’ll do you pretty well at Willard’s on Chowringhee.’

‘Stayed there yourself, have you?’ I enquired.

Harrington shook his head.

‘And you’ve not eaten at this place, Firpo’s?’

He had not.

I was on the track of an idea that had been growing in me since the first luncheon, and as we awaited the bill after the final one, I put the question to Harrington: ‘Have you ever been to India?’