Night Train to Jamalpur(80)

‘Sure you don’t care for a drop?’ I asked Dougie Poole, and he shook his head. I ought not to be tempting the fellow, but it didn’t seem companionable to drink alone on a night train.

We looked through the window. At Kurseong, the two engines had lit giant searchlights mounted on their boilers, and the light from the rearward engine would occasionally show cliff walls, giant trees or jungly depths of an unnaturally bright green. The female of the two elderly readers was now snoring; her book had fallen shut beside her couch, and her husband had done nothing to save the page. Douglas Poole was eyeing me with a curious expression.

‘Oh, go on then,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ll take a drop.’

I passed over the flask.

‘The trouble with me,’ said Poole, after he’d glugged for a good ten seconds, ‘is I’ve very little in the way of character.’

He’d just been saying how his encounter with the cobra had given him character, stiffened his resolve to get out of India and start again in Blighty. Slurring my words somewhat, I pointed this out to him.

‘Oh, I’m a changed man, all right. Just not quite so much changed as I might have said before. Everybody’s going to see that.’

‘What, for God’s sake?’

‘How changed I am.’

I heard again a rattling from the glass door at the carriage end.

‘Before I quit this country,’ said Poole, ‘I’m going to find out who’s leaving these bloody snakes lying about. That way, I’ll be on the boat with an achievement under my belt. I’d give worlds to find out who this snake man is.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m dead set on finding out.’

‘Got any leads?’ I said, eyeing him.

‘Well, Jim, the real snake fanciers – I mean the real boys – are a breed apart. Chilly customers. Cold-blooded, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about the fellow who ran the pet shop in Seven Dials?’

‘Where you got the over-priced frogs?’

‘He was a rum cove, Jim. He’d sit inside the door of the shop with . . . well, never mind a fur boa, Jim – this bloke wore a boa constrictor over his shoulders.’

‘Didn’t that put people off going in?’

‘Of course it did. But the fellow just sat there staring at the window glass with the thing crawling all over him. Daring you to come in, I suppose.’

‘Rum,’ I said.

‘He wore glasses, Jim, and what with the tropical conditions in the shop they were always steamed up; but he didn’t bother about that either.’

I thought of Professor Hedley Fleming. I then thought of Peter Selwyn, William Askwith and Charles Sermon. I asked Poole, ‘I think you know a fellow called Sermon? He’s in traffic, I believe.’

He nodded. ‘Nice old boy, long-service medallist with the Company. Old India hand . . . Probably got a tiger skin for a bathroom carpet. Something of a war hero too, I think. Lied about his age to get in to the army; I mean he said he was younger than he was, Jim.’ Having completely drained the flask, Dougie Poole set it down on the carriage floor. ‘. . . Sermon was commissioned into the Transport Corps – did two years or so in France. Practically ran Boulogne Docks single-handed by all accounts. Got the D.S.O. for it, I think.’

‘He haunts the Railway Institute.’

‘That’s right. Comes into the office early; does his turn, goes off there for his peg in the late afternoons.’

‘Why?’

Poole shrugged. ‘Cheap whisky? I’ve been there with him on a couple of occasions. Interesting controversialist. Is that the word? Conversationalist. If you can keep him off tiger hunting.’

I then asked Poole a question I would not have asked had I been sober.

‘You ever get wind of any funny business in traffic? Corruption, embezzlement or the like?’

Poole fixed me with his sad eyes for a second. ‘Funny you should say that, Jim. We had a fellow in the department called Harry Jebb. He thought there was some queer business going on.’

‘He told you that?’

‘In a roundabout way.’

‘Name names, did he?’

‘Not a bit of it, Jim. A very discreet chap, Harry Jebb.’

‘He’s not dead, is he?’

‘Not exactly dead. He’s living in Eastbourne. Sailed for Blighty in mid-April sort of time.’

‘Why?’

‘Retired.’

I had received the dossier by post on Thursday 19 April.

I was pondering further questions about this Jebb when the end door of the carriage crashed open, and the elderly female sprang awake. But there was nobody there. Douglas Poole merely turned in his chair, while I rose unsteadily. Standing in the doorway was a monkey, and it was looking for trouble. It must have been on the veranda, and it had somehow managed to turn the handle of the glass door. Poole was indicating the monkey: ‘Do you suppose he has a first class ticket?’