Night Train to Jamalpur(77)

I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes to train time.

I climbed higher, and the gardens gave way to a recreation ground, where some other Chinese-looking children were playing football. The goalkeeper, aged about ten, bowed a salaam to me as I walked past. I returned the bow from the touchline, but so awkwardly that the lad dashed off his goal line to greet me in the manner to which he thought I would be more accustomed. But as we shook hands, a shot was fired into the vacated goal, and there was an uproar from his teammates.

On the other side of the football pitch, I glimpsed a small European man. I thought it was Dougie Poole, but he did not return my wave, and quickly disappeared behind a wall with roses growing over it.

Twenty minutes later, I was walking along Auckland Road, which consisted mainly of big villas and sleepy-looking gardens. The police station was here, with its own front garden, just as sleepy as the rest. There was not only a monkey puzzle tree in the police garden, there was also a monkey. It walked like a man I had once arrested.

Alongside the police station was a villa advertised by a sign on the front lawn as Rockville Guest House. Khan had said he was putting up near the police station: this must be the place.

I walked along the crazy paving that led to the front door, which stood open. It gave on to an empty hallway. No bearer or chowkidar of any kind stepped out to greet me. I read the breakfast menu, posted in a display case on the wall. ‘Sausages and curried eggs,’ I read. The tea was ‘finest Darjeeling’. Well, it would be. There was a high desk to one side – the kind you stood up to work at, a green ledger sitting upon it. The handwriting in the ledger was of perfect clarity: Mr Khan had booked into room 4. Half a dozen keys, with wooden tokens attached, dangled from the underside of the desk. Six keys, but eight hooks. The guests who were in residence retained their keys; the ones who were out hung them here. Branded into the wooden tokens were numbers, and key number 4 was present. I pocketed it; I bounded up the wide stairs.

I knocked on the door of the first-storey room marked number 4. If Khan answered, what would I say? I would say that there was no servant in the house; that I had discovered his room, and that I wanted an urgent word. I knocked for a second time. An urgent word about what? About the Jamalpur Night Mail, naturally. I would confide my suspicions of . . . my suspicions of Canon Peter Selwyn. He was of the Uranian tendency – in short, queer – and such fellows were sometimes in desperate straits and driven to desperate actions. I left off knocking. The house was unbelievably silent. It could not remain so for long.

I took out the key; I opened the door.

The few contents of the room were beautifully ordered: a folded copy of The Statesman on the neatly downturned counterpane; a book on the bedside table written in . . . what? Bengali? Hindustani? To my eye, all Indian lettering looked like the picture of the little dancing men in the Sherlock Holmes story. An oilskin hung from a peg on the door; a pair of highly polished patent shoes waited in shoe trees. There was a wastepaper basket, and inside it a folded brochure for a certain Walter Bushnell, optician of Calcutta. His spectacles would cure your headaches. I was glad to see that Khan needed glasses, this signifying a weakness in his armoury. I stood still. The window overlooked silent Auckland Road. But in the room, a clock was ticking very quickly . . . a small alarm clock propped in its own red leather case. On its face, the word ‘Ego’ was written in gold plate, and I somehow knew that this item would be Khan’s all right, not the property of the house. It was a quarter to four. I had twenty minutes to train time. I was currently about ten minutes from the station, but I had to allow time to collect my baggage from the left luggage office. On the mantelpiece stood an unopened tin of cigarettes, Advantage brand. There were golden cuff links in a clean ashtray, a new and unused box of matches, Cutter brand.

I looked down at the grate. I crouched down. There was kindling in the grate, and crumpled paper, ready to burn, but there was no coal in the room – no coal in the town. Some of the paper had handwriting on it. As I reached out towards the paper, I heard a great roaring coming up from the street. I sprang over to the window to see a soot-blackened steam wagon rolling along Auckland Road. It was burning coal for its own engine, and it was bringing coal to Darjeeling town. A squad of tough-looking mountain men were hauling sacks of coal from the back of the wagon, and carrying them into the front gardens of the villas. All the houses were taking delivery; Rockville would be no exception, and then the coal would be put on to the fires that were made up and ready to receive it. I looked again at the handwritten papers in the grate. They had not been put in the wastepaper basket. Khan had meant them to be utterly destroyed. I plucked up the handwritten papers – it turned out there were two pages – and I quit the room.