Night Train to Jamalpur(91)

Neither was dated, but both were signed by a certain Sabir Huq, who very generously supplied an address on both occasions, or at any rate the name of a village, which translated as ‘The Place of the Crossroads’. The translator had consulted one of his fellows, who, on being prised away from his typewriter, confirmed that he had heard of this spot, and it was not such a small village either. I had put it to him that it might be near the big railway colony of Jamalpur, and he had said, ‘Fifty-sixty miles east’, which is near by Indian standards.

A man had been done away with, but the wrong man, as this Sabir Huq, assassin for hire, seemed guiltily aware. I wondered which of the horsemen I’d observed fleeing the scene had been Sabir Huq.

I now had little doubt that Huq, and his fellows, had been the agents of Detective Inspector Khan. Khan had set out to dispose of the troublesome Deep or Ganguly, and he had meant to make it look like an act of banditry. He must have been overjoyed at learning through his spies that Deep/Ganguly had booked on to the Jamalpur Night Mail of 23 April. Here was his opportunity.

Why had Deep/Ganguly intended to visit Jamalpur before changing his mind? Perhaps to agitate among the young railway apprentices. A bigger question, to my mind, was whether Khan had acted under his own initiative, or whether he carried the authority of his superiors. He was very much the sort of man who would act alone, I believed.

A bearer came up to me.

‘Telephone, sahib.’

I left the cigar smoking in the ashtray as I walked quickly to the telephone box underneath the main stairs. It was Lydia, three hundred miles away and seven thousand feet up.

‘Enjoying yourself, are you?’ I said. ‘You and Bernadette have been riding every day, I suppose?’

‘She has; not me.’

‘How many cards have you had dropped on you?’

‘And how many bottles of beer have you drunk?’

‘One. My daily allowance.’

Silence for a space.

‘We’ve had enough of it here,’ said Lydia. ‘We’re coming home next week; on Tuesday.’ In spite of her negative remarks, she did not seem quite as blue as she had done beforehand. ‘I’ve had two invitations to speak.’

‘Where? In Calcutta?’

‘Nearby.’

‘Who to?’

‘Indian women.’

‘Right. And what about Indian men?’

‘What?’

‘Khan. I saw you talking to him at the riding place when I was on the train out. You seemed to be hitting if off pretty well.’

‘I was sounding him out. You idiot. I was trying to appear pleasant.’

‘Well, you seemed to be managing that. Sounding him out about what?’

‘About how much trouble you were in, given that you were the only man on the spot with the right sort of gun. Are there people listening on this line?’

‘There probably are now.’

‘I wanted to find out how much he disliked the British. I should say quite a lot, and who can blame him? But he’s no Indian nationalist.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly right. It was thinking he must be a nationalist that threw me off.’

‘Threw you off what?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get back.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘I think he arranged the killing, and John Young was mistaken for someone else – a revolutionary. You know, a Ghandi-ite.’

‘Ghandi . . .’ said the wife, after a pause. ‘I mentioned the Mahatma to him and he said, “That Hindu saint” with a real sneer.’

‘That might be because Khan’s Moslem,’ I said.

‘Or just a policeman,’ said Lydia.

Silence for another space.

‘You’ve seemed a bit blue lately,’ I said.

‘Yes, well.’

‘Are you expecting?’

A longer silence this time.

‘Why would that make me blue?’

‘Because you’re forty-three. You’re ambitious. I was thinking about our . . . thing two weeks ago, when Bernadette went to the Askwiths overnight. I was thinking that your vulcanised device might have perished in the heat.’

‘Jim! There might be people listening on this line!’

She hadn’t minded discussing a murder on it though.

‘You were drinking the beef extract with milk,’ I said, ‘and you seemed annoyed with me all the time.’

‘I like the way it didn’t occur to you that I might seem annoyed with you because I was annoyed with you!’

‘It did.’

She would have the child, I knew that. Those devices – of which progressive women were so in favour – were to stop children but they were also to stop abortions. I felt a great surge of excitement at the thought of this new person coming into the world, like an express train going down a line with all the signals set to ‘Proceed’.