Night Train to Jamalpur(7)

We’d boarded together at Howrah. He’d arranged the sleeper reservations, and collected them in person from the E.I.R. main ticket office at Fairlie Place. ‘Here’s you,’ he’d said, shooing away the sleeping car attendant who’d been trying to salaam and offer tea. ‘Compartment two.’ Fisher had then handed me the voucher for number two. As I’d settled myself, he’d hung about in the corridor smoking one of his Trichinopoly cigars and getting in the way of the attendant’s attempts to greet other arrivals. I had noticed an oldish fellow crossing past my compartment to get into the next one along, number three, and I’d been vaguely aware of John Young taking number one. At the time, I had taken him for an Indian rather than an Anglo. Soon after we’d pulled away, Fisher had gone into the next-but-one from me in the direction of the engine, number four, and dragged the door shut and lowered the blind. There were only five compartments in the carriage, and I assumed every passenger had a compartment to himself (there not being much call for first class on the route to Jamalpur, which was mainly used by the young Indian apprentices heading up to the great workshops) . . . all except the servants in the servants’ compartment, number five. There were two in there, I believed: John Young’s man and another belonging to the old fellow in number three.

I sat down and broke open the Webley. Three cartridges in the chamber. I had another dozen in my portmanteau, but surely three was enough even for an Indian night train? Some guide or other I’d read ‘For Young Men Heading East’ had recommended nothing more than boiled water, aspirin and a mosquito net for a trip such as this. Then again, the young men in question had probably not been riding on a railway subject to snake attacks, or making enemies ‘all along the line’ by the nature of their work. Had Fisher and I done so with our investigation? We had only been underway for a fortnight, and most of that time had been spent taking delivery of the documents relating to Schedules A, B and C. So we’d hardly had a chance to make mortal enemies. We’d so far looked at only a fraction of the documentation assembled for us by our Indian clerk. The matter relating to Schedule A was mainly so many smudged plans of railway shops and sheds, with confusing dotted lines marked ‘Guard Patrols’. Schedule B was a few bundles of letters: Indian railway clerks denouncing each other for being ‘on the take’ (in perpetuation of feuds that might have arisen decades before in the villages of Bengal), records of footplate men who appeared to keep a home at both ends of the line; records of any men connected to former employees sacked and convicted of offences against the Company, records of employees suspected of being sympathetic to the Gandhian nationalist agitation.

The Schedule A and B papers took up most of the office we’d been allocated in the East Indian Railway headquarters at Fairlie Place, Calcutta. The Schedule C material had originally consisted of only two files; but that was now down to one, and this was the result of a burglary having taken place in the police office. It had occurred four days ago, late at night on Thursday last, 19 April. What was in the stolen file? I couldn’t say exactly. It had come by post that morning, in an envelope marked ‘Railway Commission of Enquiry’. Fisher had been out of the office, doing I knew not what, so I had taken delivery of it. Inside had been in a pasteboard folder, sealed with string and wax, and with no accompanying letter or chit.

I had been in and out of the police office all day. At six o’clock, just before knocking off, I had broken the seal, to be confronted with perhaps thirty sheets of badly typed notes, the topmost headed: ‘Pertaining to corruption amongst the officers of the traffic department . . . compiled by One Who Knows’. It seemed even money whether this would prove useful intelligence or merely the settling of scores by an aggrieved employee. I did not consider that it demanded my urgent attention. I had put the file in a desk drawer and quit the office. The door of the office was then locked by our Indian clerk. I had seen him do it. I had then walked down into the hot bustle of Fairlie Place with the man. Sometime in the night, that door was busted open, either by someone who didn’t have a key, or wanted to look as though he didn’t. Whoever had taken the dossier must have done so in the hope that I had not read it, but on seeing the broken seal they must surely have assumed I had read it. It might therefore be a good idea for me to lay hands on whoever who had so much to lose by the reading of the report, before they laid hands on me. The burglary left us with one remaining file in Schedule C, and that was nothing more than a mass of figures about the Company in which a trained statistician might be able to find some anomalies, but neither I nor Fisher fitted that bill.