‘Were you speaking Bengali?’ I asked Sermon.
‘Hindustani,’ he said. ‘Picked it up in my travelling days. Not much use in the traffic office, of course.’
Mention of that office prompted me to ask if he knew Harry Jebb, the fellow Dougie Poole had mentioned as suspecting corruption. Sermon nodded. ‘I knew him a little. He’s taken superannuation, I believe.’
‘Any grievance against the Company?’
‘Not that I know of. Why bring him up? He can’t be responsible for the snakes. He’s back in Blighty.’
‘Oh, Dougie Poole just happened to mention him.’
‘Poole,’ said Sermon, in a thoughtful sort of way. ‘Curious chap . . . deep thinker.’
He’d said much the same about him the last time we’d discussed Poole. I might be speaking out of turn by letting on that Poole had got the chop, but I steered the talk towards Askwith, and I did let on that he’d told me about his new system of traffic control.
Sermon frowned. ‘Now I know a new scheme is being talked of – part of the drive to economical working . . . But I rather thought it was Poole himself that had cooked it up.’
It was my turn to feel an access of excitement, because I had suspected just such a thing.
‘And it’s not as if he was given a special duty to do it,’ Sermon continued. ‘He just dreamed it up on a venture, and he’d been hawking it around without much prospect of success.’
I said, ‘I’ll tell you another curious fact about Poole. He has an interest in venomous snakes.’ I ought not to have said it, but I couldn’t resist.
‘Does he now? How do you know he has that interest?’
I was so far out on a limb, there was no going back. I said, ‘When he was a boy, he wrote to one of the boys’ papers asking advice on how to keep them.’
‘What paper?’
‘The Captain.’
‘We have The Captain here. What number?’
‘March 1897, page 33.’
‘Hold on a moment.’ Wheezing somewhat, Charles Sermon rose to his feet and walked into the Insty, as I sat in the heavy heat of late afternoon, and thought about Dougie Poole. A couple of minutes later, Charles Sermon came out holding the volume of Captains that corresponded to the one I’d read in Bertram’s Club, Darjeeling, but this one was bound in the maroon covers rather than blue as at Bertram’s. Sermon was holding the book open.
‘Rum,’ he said, passing it over.
There was no ‘Naturalist’s Corner’ on page 33; there was no page 33 at all. It – apparently alone of all the pages in the volume – had been neatly sliced out near the spine.
III
Monday dawned with a suffocating grey sky. It made the white municipal palaces of Calcutta seem whiter still, giving them a sort of gold-edged glow – and it trapped in the heat. I spent the first part of the morning in the office on Commission of Enquiry business. I then glanced again at the documents relating to September 1919, but Charles Sermon had convinced me that the unrest among the railway top brass in 1919 was a matter of no account as far as the snake business was concerned. I had not yet unrolled the bundle of documents I’d made on the previous Friday. I’d been carrying it in my suit-coat pocket off and on, and it was there again now. At eleven o’clock I considered returning to the Insty in hopes of inspecting more closely the photograph of the Debating Society dance in 1918 – the one Mrs Sonia Young had been about to show me before I’d been pounced on by her son. I wanted to verify what – or rather who – I thought I had glimpsed in that photograph before the violent interruption. I had in fact returned to the bar of the Insty after my talk with Sermon on the Saturday afternoon, only to discover that Mrs Young had left for home and taken the albums with her. I was now frustrated again, because Jogendra Babu informed me that the Insty was closed all day Monday.
At midday, Deo Rana came into the office. He was keen to be off to the snake men’s uncle, even though we’d been told he wouldn’t be pitching up until the mid-afternoon. I said, ‘Won’t we be early?’
‘Better than late,’ said Deo.
I still didn’t understand this assignation. Was the snake men’s uncle only open for business at certain fixed times? If he were itinerant, then how could his nephews (who were apparently also his enemies) be so certain of his movements? If Deo Rana knew, he wasn’t letting on. I caught up the map showing the location, and I stowed my Webley in my suit-coat pocket. We went down into Fairlie Place and, there being no police tongas available, we hailed one plying for hire, a two-horse job.