Night Train to Jamalpur(52)

Beyond the glass, the Indian boy had now turned sideways on, and was shouting at the top of his voice through two cupped hands for someone he knew – mother or father, no doubt – to come and take a look. If he wasn’t careful, a keeper would come and chuck him out for making such a racket, but on my side of the glass, I couldn’t hear him at all, and nor could the king, the king being deaf. The king was moving his head up and down. The other, smaller door must have given the Indian access to king’s tail end, and the Indian was busying himself at the trolley again, pouring water into a saucer. He then put this into the aperture revealed by the small door. The king’s head was still swaying about in the bigger rectangle. The king’s hood was open wide, and I was hypnotised by its weirdness. It was like a case of flat mumps. A hood should be above, not below, your head. It was as though the snake had been lying down on one of the dusty roads of Bengal when a motor car had come along and run it over just behind its head, so flattening out the neck.

Professor Hedley Fleming stuck his left hand – the hand with the big glove on it – into the enclosure, and held it in front of the snake’s head, like a policeman stopping traffic. The snake looked at the glove, then smoothly pulled its head back out of the rectangle of light so that it was lost to my view. The Indian was now looking through his own opened trapdoor with folded arms. His posture suggested . . . not pleasure exactly. It was more that something had occurred that did not surprise him. I walked over, took up position behind his back, and looked. The snake’s head was at this end now, and it was drinking the water from the saucer. But the scene was soon interrupted, for both men were now shackling their doors. The Indian then walked over to the trolley, and began pushing it back to the door by which we had come in, with Professor Fleming following. The trolley squeaked loudly.


III

I put it to Professor Hedley Fleming that he had trained the snake.

‘I wouldn’t put it quite as strongly as that,’ he said. ‘The king cobra knows that if he turns away from the raised glove, there’ll be a drink of water waiting for him.’

‘A drink of water is enough reward?’

Fleming nodded.

I said, ‘Do you think you’ll be able to build on that – take the training any further?’

‘Unlikely.’

I wanted to observe that snakes seemed to have blanket policy of doing nothing appealing. They ate the worst possible food (rats or other snakes), and in killing people they caused the worst possible sorts of death. But Hedley Fleming was glancing at his watch. It was the second time he’d done it since we’d come into his office. He’d been willing to see me, just as a doctor is willing to give an appointment, and as with the doctor’s appointment the time for chit-chat was limited. He had not offered me tea.

‘About the poisonous snakes on the trains,’ I said.

‘Venomous,’ he said. ‘Poison is ingested. There are a couple of snakes in South America that have poison glands on the backs of their heads. If you ate one of those, then, yes, you’d be poisoned. Where the snake bites you, it’s venomous.’

‘I see,’ I said. It was the second time I’d been corrected on this point.

Fleming’s desk was in the middle of the room. Beyond it was a sort of laboratory table, and on the wall beyond that was one of those university photographs that clever people have on their walls to remind everyone how clever they are. It showed the massed ranks of their particular year of a particular college at Oxford or Cambridge, but Fleming’s was too far away for me to make out the detail.

Hedley Fleming asked, ‘Are you the officer investigating these cases? That wasn’t clear from Mr Sermon’s chit.’

‘Not directly.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m assisting a colleague.’

‘Formally?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and so he had brought a lie out of me. ‘The head of the investigation’, I continued, ‘is Superintendent Christopher Bennett. Do you know him?’

‘Why should I know him?’

‘Socially. Evidently six hundred people went to his wedding.’

Hedley Fleming eyed me. I didn’t much care for him, and he didn’t much care for me.

‘You say “evidently”,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you there yourself?’

‘It was before I came to India. He gave another party later, and I went to that.’

‘Well I didn’t, Captain Stringer. Now how can I help about the railway cases?’

I said, ‘Is this the first you’ve heard of snakes being used as a weapon?’