Night Train to Jamalpur(6)

‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a six-week round trip!’

It appeared he was too busy administering India to go there. Besides, as he explained, he had a young family to take care of – and at this, I made my swoop. Might I take out my own wife and daughter? He agreed to my proposition before I could ponder the wisdom of having made it. My secondment was to last six months. When asked what I was about in India, I was at liberty to mention Schedule A and I might, with discretion, mention the closely related matter of Schedule B (it would be widely assumed that I would be giving hell to the humble Bengali clerks and coolies in any case) but Schedule C was top secret. Only the senior men in the East Indian Railway Police force, under whose auspices I would be working, knew about Schedule C, and it was on no account to be mentioned to anyone else. The stakes were too high. The Railway Board in India would press for the severest penalties where corruption was found among gazetted officers, and that had already started. A year before, a certain British mechanical engineer of a small ‘up-country’ workshop was found to have been constructing boilers of a slightly lower specification than the ones he had been accounting for, and pocketing the difference to the tune of a sum in rupees amounting to not more than several hundred pounds. Even so, he – a married man with two young children – was now sweating out seven years in the Alipore nick, Calcutta, from which he would be lucky to emerge alive.

I would be assigned a colleague for my investigations, and the two of us would form an ‘enquiry team’. This other fellow had only just been recruited. He would also be briefed by Harrington; he would sail for India just two days after me, and his name was Major Fisher.

‘The brief is to examine the crime-prevention measures, and look for loopholes,’ I said to John Young, after I’d told him some of the above.

‘And that’s why you’re going up to the Jamalpur workshop?’

I nodded. ‘Just a bit of a poke around.’

John Young was shaking his head, though still smiling. ‘It’s one big loophole, Jim!’ he said. ‘Take the goods side – consignors and consignees on the fiddle, almost always with the connivance of the railway staff. I tell you Jim, what’s not lost to outright burglary goes in insurance frauds.’

He was rather squiffed now. The level of Loch Lomand was sinking fast, and it was his doing, since I’d been refusing his offers of a top-up. I was on quinine tablets to keep down the malaria, and strictly speaking I was supposed to lay off the drink altogether.

‘Small things would help,’ John Young was saying, pouring the last of the whisky into his glass. ‘Elementary checks like locks and rivets on wagons. But where is this Major Fisher?’ he added, for I’d mentioned my colleague Fisher.

I indicated with my thumb over my shoulder: ‘Next-but-one compartment along. Did you not see him on boarding?’

John Young shook his head. ‘Only from the back. And his blinds have been down ever since.’

‘Have been since Howrah,’ I said.

‘Is he ill?’

I shook my head, thinking of Fisher. He was very far from ill. He’d served on the North West Frontier during the latter half of the Big Stunt, and seemed to have become inured to the Indian climate as a result. Accordingly, Major Fisher was able to expend a great fund of energy on the betterment of Major Fisher. A picture of him composed in my mind: a big, incredibly rude man, with a big, brown cannonball-like head, on which he wore an outsized, coal scuttle-like sola topee. He was on the make all right, with ambitions lying well beyond police work. He, like me, was a detective inspector with the British railway police who preferred to use his army rank. Before and after the war, he’d been on the force of the Southern Railway. Well, he was a Londoner born and bred, lived in a spot called Camberwell. Beyond these bare details, I could not go, because Fisher kept his cards very close indeed to his chest.

‘You two don’t get along?’ John Young suggested.

I gave a slight nod.

‘Then that is obviously his fault,’ said John Young.

I attempted to convey nothing much by a smile.

‘But the two of you must stick together! With this investigation of yours . . . you will be making enemies all along the line!’

While silently applauding his knack for hitting nails on the head, I could not afford to discuss these matters with John Young. I rose to my feet and extended my hand.

‘I’m obliged to you for the peg,’ I said. ‘And I’ll see you in the morning.’


IV

My own compartment was oven-like, even though the fan still toiled. I locked the sliding door from the inside. Anyone proposing to sleep on an Indian train would do the same, the instances of dacoity – banditry – being high. I then adjusted the levers of the window for maximum flow of air. Looking out, I saw that we were rattling past the silhouette of . . . not so much a hill as a great lump of rock, a giant meteorite, perhaps, that had long since crashed on to the dusty Bengal plain. There were a couple of telegraph poles at the top of it, leaning at crazy angles, together with what looked to be a half-ruined castle. I watched it until it was out of sight. I pushed up the armrests on one of the bench seats, and that was all that was needed to make the couch. Now for the bed roll. It would be stowed in the cabinet. I opened the door, and there was the white cotton bag with E.I.R. stitched in red on the side, and very badly stitched. The job had been done with sullen reluctance, and I knew where – in the workshop of Alipore Jail. I shook it about to wake up any snake that might be sleeping inside. Pulling out the not over-clean sheet, an idea broke in on me: perhaps there had been a snake in Fisher’s compartment. Maybe it had done for him soon after we’d pulled away from Howrah, and that was why I’d not seen him since.