Night Train to Jamalpur(92)

‘I’m bowled over, kidder,’ I said. ‘I’m really bowled over.’

‘Well, Jim,’ she said, ‘Good. That’s good.’ And finally she laughed. ‘You cottoned on. I’m amazed.’

‘You shouldn’t underestimate me. I’ve cracked the John Young case; now I’m going to see about the snakes.’

‘Jim, are you sure you’ve only had one bottle of beer?’

‘I might go on to champagne next.’

‘You should have something to eat.’

‘I’m having a cigar. That’s a similar thing.’

‘Jim.’

‘What?’

‘Be careful.’





Chapter Thirteen



I

The next day was Saturday. I went into the office in the morning, and spent a desultory few hours looking over Commission of Enquiry papers, and giving an occasional glance at some of the files to do with the year 1919 in the history of the East Indian Railway. Much of the time I spent considering what to do about the fact that Detective Inspector Khan had commissioned a political murder that had led to the death of an innocent man. Of course I had not much in the way of evidence, unless the two crumpled chits could be counted as such. I had considered telling the whole tale to Bennett, who might then have a word with one of Khan’s superior officers, who might or might not have been in on it. Either way, that felt rather dishonourable, too much like splitting, and I was currently minded to keep that option in reserve, depending on how far Khan pushed his efforts to throw blame on me.

In the middle of the afternoon, I stepped into Fairlie Place. Having been unable to get hold of a police tonga, I hailed a motor taxi, and asked for Howrah station. The motor taxi men felt themselves a cut above the tonga-wallahs, but they all had the famous Howrah Bridge traffic block to contend with. Midway over the bridge, the driver turned his motor off. I kept the passenger window down until the first mangled beggar approached along the walkway. I had wound it up by the time he’d arrived, so that the crying of the gulls, the tooting of the horns, the blaring of the ships on the river all became muted and the air in the taxi became unbreathable. The beggar was knocking on the window with the palm of his hand, and that was because he had no fingers. The driver, a Sikh, was reading The Statesman. He didn’t look up from his paper, still less attempt to shoo the man away.

Half an hour later, the driver pulled up at the rank in front of Howrah station. I walked a little way into the blue-black, smoky interior, and saw fewer European faces than usual, on account of the exodus to the hills. This was how it would be when the British pulled out of India. That was only a matter of time. ‘The balloon’, as somebody told me, had ‘gone up’, and it had gone up at Amritsar. It was strange that Detective Inspector Khan couldn’t see that for himself; or perhaps he did, and he was merely fighting a rearguard action.

I came out of the station, and walked on to the railway lands. There was a sharp smell of white spirit in the hot air. Every so often, the pounding of my boots caused a rat to bolt into a dirty hole; but the queer thing was that I never saw the rats until the moment they did bolt. That was the one good thing you could say about snakes: they killed rats.

When I came to the end of some goods wagons I’d been shadowing, I cut diagonally across the tracks towards the passenger carriage sidings. Ahead of me lay the burnt godowns, the work of the man who had stolen the name of Dr Ganguly. Behind me the orange cloud was rising over the railway lands. The passenger carriages alongside me were dusty green, in the main. The closed venetian slats made them appear to be sleeping, and they were top-heavy with various kinds of overhanging sun canopies. Where were the armed guards? I had hardly seen a single Company employee since entering the railway lands – a couple of Anglo-Indian foremen, a couple of coolies. Fisher believed that the coolies working for the Railway should be given a different designation, something more dignified like ‘charge hand’. They’d be more loyal in that case, and less likely to pilfer. He had his points, did Fisher.

I cut through a gap between two rakes of carriages, and my object was in view: a pale blue church-like building with a pretty garden surrounding, so that it looked like a kind of oasis materialising in the dusty railway lands: the Insty.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the Anglos generally stayed in town during the heat, so the place was busy. Children played a scratch game of cricket on the tennis court; one of the peacocks was on the tennis court as well, and periodically doing its display, as though practising until a more distinguished audience came along. At the burra clubs, neither incursion would have been allowed. The grass on the tennis court of the Insty was rather worn and burnt, and I imagined its upkeep did not interest the resident gardener, it affording no opportunity to grow the vivid flowers that bloomed in the remainder of the garden.