Night Train to Jamalpur(78)

There was nobody on the stairs, nobody in the lobby. I replaced the key on its hook below the high desk, and dashed into the garden. A European woman in gumboots stood near the gate; she was dead-heading flowers while waiting to accept a delivery of coal. I turned sharply right, and doubled back around the house, where I climbed a high embankment, which lead up to a hedge I could not get through. I tracked along the hedge until it was fashioned into an arch over a gate. I went through the gate, and I was now in a lane bounded by the hedges of numerous back gardens. If I missed the train, I would pay no greater penalty than having to stay on in Darjeeling, but I had mysteries to solve, and the answers lay in Calcutta. I began to run.


IV

The ‘down’ train was two trains, just as the ‘up’ had been.

I boarded the last carriage of the foremost one with a minute to spare. A little out of breath, I sat down on a cane chair in the final carriage. It was still the time of year to be arriving at Darjeeling rather than leaving it, and my only companions in the saloon were an elderly couple, both with books on the go. They must have been old hands on the mountain train, because they never looked up as the whistle was blown and we began to creak away. I lit a cigarette, at which the woman did look up, and pretty sharply, so I walked through the glass door at the carriage end, and on to the veranda. We were slowly embarking on the first loop – the one that ran around the flat-topped hill at Ghum.

We began to coincide with the Cart Road, and I saw coming up a big villa with stables attached. Before the gates of the property stood a collection of riders and horses. The light was already fading, and the riders were dismounting, or milling about with horses in tow. Most were women in jodhpurs, and among them would be Bernadette and Lydia. At a slight distance from the main crowd, an impeccable Indian was descending from his horse while a woman in a long coat – not riding clothes – held the head of his horse. We were now running practically alongside the pair, and I saw that the woman was Lydia, the man was Khan. Well, I had known he was a horseman. I watched them talking – he looking much livelier than he ever did when trying to pin the John Young murder on me – until they were out of sight.

I then transferred my stare to the engine of the train that was following our train.

I walked back to my cane seat, and resumed staring, this time at the descending dusk beyond the window. Trees passed by, gradually becoming darker. After a while, I saw nothing but my own haggard face. I looked malarial and old. No wonder Lydia had not troubled very much about the connection between Bernadette and the R.K.: she had an eye for the bloody Indians herself. It was perfectly clear to me now that Lydia was what they called ‘sexually frustrated’. The condition went with being a progressive woman. If they were not frustrated, there would be no point in being progressive, they would just settle for what they had.

Why had Lydia not been riding, but just standing about and spooning with Khan? She’d told me she was going riding with Bernadette. I assumed that Bernadette had been riding, but it occurred to me that I now had no reason to believe anything Lydia might say to me. I reached into my pocket, and the silver flask the R.K. had given me was still there, still full of good whisky. Sod the quinine pills. I unscrewed the top and took a long pull, then a second one. The elderly parties in the saloon were deciding they had a ‘wrong ’un’ in the carriage with them, but I was trying to banish the image of the scene I had observed. It took me a further three pulls on the flask to arrive at the thought that, just as there had been nothing in it between Bernadette and the R.K., so there would probably be nothing in this. And if there was, then she could bloody well have him. She could be the star of her own scandal. It wouldn’t prove so very much of a social advance, since Khan was only a detective inspector like me, and, being Indian, unlikely to rise much higher in the Calcutta C.I.D.

I took from my pockets the two bits of paper I had rescued from the fireplace of Khan, and opened them up. I contemplated the dancing men. They might have been perfectly innocuous: chits written to a tradesman, for all I knew. I looked over at the elderly couple. They looked like a pair of intellects; perhaps they understood this lingo? The odds were against. I thought of the office door in Fairlie Place that bore the faded letters: ‘Convert to English’. I would take the papers there. Whatever they amounted to, these notes would throw some light on something. I made further inroads on the whisky. It had become too dark for my elderly companions to read, and they were both staring into space. I slept a little, then for a longer time.

I awoke in bright light. The carriage lights had been switched on, and we were in a station. But the station itself was all in darkness. I could just make out the wooden station house some way along the platform. Passengers were drifting into it from the train, and the two who had been in the carriage with me had already left. This must be Kurseong, the halfway point, where the supper break would be taken. I was not hungry, but I decided I would benefit from a breath of air, so I stepped on to the wooden platform, where I stood quite alone in the gloom. The station house was at some twenty yards’ distance, a faint orange light at the window. I could hear the throbbing of the petrol engine in the generator wagon: it had been attached to the rear of the train at some earlier stop to give the light for the carriages. Beyond it stood the second train, and that too seemed empty of passengers. From the jungle rising above the station came a repeated animal scream, then came the fast clattering of some bigger beast running through the trees. I could see the dim outlines of the engine men on the platform. They were attending the generator wagon, which was giving trouble in some way. I heard a footfall close behind. There came a sudden blaze of orange light, illuminating a sad-eyed little man.