The Baghdad Railway Club(10)

I had done my officer training course after all. My commanding officer, Major Quinn, had written from France politely insisting upon it. Six weeks in a country house outside Catterick. The grounds of the place were apparently famous, but I had mainly seen them blurred through window glass, for it had rained almost every day. I had spent most of my time sitting down and being lectured, and sitting didn’t suit my bad leg. It got so that whenever one of the officer-instructors said, ‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ I’d think he was trying to do me in, and when I was driven out of the place, in the charabanc that shuttled between house and railway station, my limp was more pronounced than when I’d arrived.

Old Man Wright, the clerk of the police office, thought I was putting it on. He might easily have been seventy-five, and he’d been bucked up no end by the coming of a war from which he was exempt. The crisis made it seem a good thing to be a scrawny old man in a dullish line of work. With Chief Inspector Weatherill – my governor as was – it was the opposite case. The Chief loved a scrap. His war had been out in Egypt in the eighties, and his great regret ever since was that a fellow didn’t come up against too many dervishes on the railway lands of York.

Wright was moving about the office slamming drawers. He didn’t take kindly to seeing me with my leg up, but he could hardly say anything about it, for the Chief, sitting at the desk over opposite, had both his legs up. He was reading the Yorkshire Evening Press about the British occupation of Baghdad. The date on the paper was Monday April 23rd.

‘They’ve got their tails up in Mespot,’ he said, and I recalled to mind the talk I’d attended at the Railway Club.

‘A hundred and twenty degrees it is over there,’ said Wright, who was perhaps hunting up the missing witness statements. ‘Bit on the warm side.’

‘Fancy a walk?’ said the Chief, lowering the paper.

‘It’s raining,’ said Wright, from over near the fireplace, where he was blocking the heat.

But the Chief hadn’t been asking Wright, and he continued to look his question at me.

We walked through the station with the rain thundering on the great roof. I liked to look up and watch it roll over the dirty glass. As the Chief collared a messenger boy, and sent him off to the Lost Luggage Office with a sixpence and instructions to bring back two umbrellas, I watched an Ivatt Atlantic come in, mixing its own roar with the roar of the rain. It was London-bound, and there weren’t many takers for its carriages.

At the ticket barriers, the Chief said, ‘Where do you want to walk to?’ and he named a couple of pubs. Then he said, ‘But I was forgetting . . . you’re a hotel man now, en’t you? What do you reckon? Lowther’s? The Royal?’

As we stepped out from under the station portico, and raised our brollies, I said, ‘Let’s go to The Moon, shall we?’

The Full Moon was in Walmgate. It was most certainly not a hotel. You couldn’t even get a bite to eat there. You could drink beer.

Now that I was an army captain, the Chief would constantly set traps for me – giving me opportunities to put on swank, and I did my best to dodge them. He might be a chief inspector in the railway police, but he’d risen no higher than sergeant major in his own days with the colours. This was partly through choice. The Chief didn’t want to be doing with writing up reports and dining in the officers’ mess. He would scrape his knife against his plate; he didn’t know which way you passed the salt.

It was a ten-minute tramp to Walmgate. On Lendal Bridge, with the rain redoubling and the river seething below us, the Chief brought his umbrella close to mine, passed me a cigar, and lit both it and his own. We walked on through the darkly shining York streets, under endless sodden union   Jacks.

‘Well,’ I said, as we turned into Parliament Street. ‘What is it?’

Because he obviously wanted to talk to me about something.

‘Tell you in the pub,’ said the Chief. He liked to draw these things out – a bit of a sadist, was the Chief.

The Full Moon was not full. In fact, it was completely empty and silent. The Chief walked up to the bar, and bawled out ‘Carter!’ which was the name of the landlord – after which the silence gradually returned. Everything was brown, and slightly ticking – the clock, the tables, the benches. After a while, I began to hear the drumming of the rain above the ticking. The Chief swore, called out ‘Carter!’ again, and nothing happened again, but I noticed that the trapdoor in the floor behind the bar was open.

‘He’s in the cellar,’ I said.

Presently, we heard the trudge of Carter on the cellar steps, and he began to come up through the trapdoor.