Night Train to Jamalpur(56)

‘Leave off,’ said Fisher, or something very like. He’d apparently decided to just ignore the snakes. They wouldn’t dare get in the way of his programme, whatever that might be. But it seemed perfectly logical to me that a snake would finally turn up in first class on the East Bengal Railway. It was now the poojahs for the first class types of Calcutta, and they were off up to the hills by means of the East Bengal line.

Presently, I saw Fisher’s legs hanging over the side, since he was sitting on his bunk. He then commenced swinging his legs into the bargain, like a boy sitting on bridge over a stream. Then blue smoke began to loop down towards my bunk, so Fisher was now smoking a Trichie as well as swinging his legs.

I said, ‘You turned up late at the Debating Society dance, I noticed.’

No reply. The legs kept swinging, but more slowly.

‘Fancied a bit of a jig, did you?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Of course, by then the “do” was about finished; only one dance left, I would have thought. You can dance, can you?’

‘Is should think so – all the bloody mess dos I’ve been to.’

The swinging legs regaining some of their speed now.

‘You didn’t come with a partner, though . . . So who had the pleasure?’

‘I don’t know. Some bloody woman.’

‘What was the dance?’

‘A fucking waltz, wasn’t it?’

‘You weren’t there to meet anyone in particular?’

The legs had stopped swinging. There came a knock on the door.

‘Enter!’ I shouted.

An Indian dragged open the door: a steward. He was proposing to collect our booking for dinner, to be taken at a twenty-minute stop somewhere down the line.

‘Nothing doing,’ said Fisher. ‘We’ve already eaten.’

‘Then order for drinks, sahib?’

‘Sling yer hook,’ said Fisher, and the man bowed and closed the door. Fisher’s legs recommenced their swinging.

I did wonder at Fisher’s reasons for wanting to avoid interruption. It was true that we had both eaten, and it was a great palaver to order a meal on the Indian railways. It was always a rushed job, and there was no end of people to tip. So perhaps that was the beginning and the end of the matter. In any case, it would be futile to resume my questioning about the dance. I checked my watch: five minutes until the ‘off’. I took the Webley out of my kit bag and slid it under my pillow. That would come in handy against any snake as well. I put my one bottle of Beck’s in the ice tray.

I opened my paper, and my eye fell upon a report that some outfit known as the Swaraj-something-or-other had been declared illegal by the Governor of Bengal. Ghandi-ites of some kind. I turned over the page: ‘Fierce Fight at the Zoo.’ A tiger had attacked two leopards. The tiger had pulled up the iron drawbridge of its cage by yanking on a chain with its teeth. This had occurred on the Monday – the very day I had seen Hedley Fleming at the zoo. I turned the page, and with a great crash Fisher jumped down from his bunk. He took off his suit coat, revealing a sweat-soaked shirt tunic. No shoulder holster. But the pistol might be in his kit bag, or in the pocket of the suit coat, which he now hung on a peg by the window. He ducked into the little washroom, pulling the curtain behind him. I heard the clunk of the lavatory seat being raised or lowered. Fisher was paying a call of nature – a call of the longer sort, I suspected, from certain ancillary sounds. I eyed the suit coat. Fisher wouldn’t come out of the washroom without first pulling the chain on the thunderbox. You weren’t meant to do that in a station – the prohibition applied even here in India where all railway lines doubled as latrines – but Fisher wasn’t a man for such niceties. His suit coat hung lower on one side than the other. I stood up, put my hand into the lower pocket, and there was the piece: a Webley, like my own. I broke open the gun, and there came the shriek of the platform guard’s whistle. The cylinder was fully loaded. We lurched away, and Fisher threw back the curtain as I thrust the gun back into the pocket. He had not pulled the chain; he was in his undershirt, and he held his unbuttoned trousers loosely about his waist. We were running clear of the station now and rattling over a bridge. Fisher was eyeing me.

‘What are you playing at?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

He seemed willing to let it go at that. I didn’t believe he’d seen me touch the gun. He eyed me for a while, then delved into his kit bag and found a blue-and-white package: Bromo water-closet paper. He returned to the thunderbox and closed the curtain. But then he immediately threw the curtain open again, plucked the suit coat off its hook and took it in with him. So perhaps he had seen what I was about. But surely he couldn’t shoot me with a revolver in a compartment of a fully occupied railway carriage – not if he hoped to escape detection: the report would be too loud. I had heard the shot fired on the Night Mail to Jamalpur, but that had apparently been fired by a wild dacoit about to make off on a thoroughbred horse. If Fisher planned to loose off a bullet in the compartment we presently occupied, then he would need . . . It came to me at last: the word that should have been on my lips when I spoke to Canon Peter Selwyn in the Bengal Club. To shoot someone on a crowded train, Fisher would need a silencer: a silvery metallic tube about six inches long and half an inch in diameter – surely the very article that Selwyn had seen in Fisher’s possession.