The Baghdad Railway Club(11)

‘Chief Inspector Weatherill!’ he said, when about three-quarters of him had appeared; but the Chief just said, ‘Four pints of Smiths.’

‘Four?’ I said. ‘Hold on a minute!’

‘Bloody emergency licensing,’ said the Chief. ‘You never know when a pub’s going to close. When are you going to close?’ he asked Carter.

‘Not till eight,’ said Carter, handing over the pints, ‘but there’s no long pulls for soldiers.’

We took our drinks, one in each hand, over to the table near the fire. Halfway over the Chief turned back to Carter.

‘I hope you don’t serve milk do you?’

‘Why?’ said Carter, ‘do you want a glass?’

‘Of course I don’t want a fucking glass of milk,’ said the Chief.

The Chief had never drunk a glass of milk in his life.

‘Some pubs are serving milk,’ the Chief told me, taking out his bundle of cigars.

I took my first sip of the Smiths.

‘Well, it’s the law,’ I said. ‘And you are a policeman.’

‘I tell you, this town’s being run by the teetotal cranks and the bloody cocoa men.’

The Chief was down on the York City Council, and he now started in about how they’d changed all the lighting out of fear of a Zeppelin attack, but then he stopped talking about that, and said:

‘I’m taking you up to London tomorrow.’

I eyed him for a while.

‘In that case I should tell you that I’ve developed rather a liking for the Midland Grand Hotel.’

‘No need for an overnight,’ said the Chief.

‘Is it the War Office again, by any chance?’

No reply. Well, the Chief was busy lighting his cigar.

‘Henderson-Richards again?’ I said.

The Chief knew a man in the Intelligence Section of the War Office called Henderson-Richards. He’d taken me to see him back in 1911, after a case in which I’d stumbled on some government-and-railway business that was to be kept muffled up. Henderson-Richards I recalled as having uncommonly long hair and slipper-like shoes. After talking down to me for a while, he’d made me sign the Official Secrets Act.

‘Different bloke,’ said the Chief, while working the cigar with his mouth.

‘Name of . . . ?’

The Chief set down the cigar.

‘Manners,’ he said.

‘Is he a soldier?’

‘Is he fuck.’

*

The Chief would refer to certain young military men who didn’t come up to the mark as ‘boy scouts’, but it was a real boy scout who led us up the great staircase of the War Office towards the office of Manners. The kid was about fifteen, and he and his entire troop were doing the work of the War Office messengers who’d gone off to France. We were put in his charge in the great lobby, which was full of men shaking out their umbrellas in a grey light. As we climbed the wide marble staircase, the scout said that his greatest hope was that the war would carry on long enough for him to be in it. But I hardly heard him. I was thinking of what had happened on the train on the way up.

The Chief and I had had a compartment to ourselves: a First Class smoker of course. The Chief always went First – well, he was The Chief, and he had the highest sort of staff pass, the one that came in a leathern wallet with an outline of the North Eastern territory embossed in gold. (It looked like the head of a cow.) A little beyond Doncaster, with the wind flinging occasional raindrops at the window, he’d leant forward and handed me a letter that nestled in a ripped-open envelope. It was addressed to me at the police office, and it came from France.

‘I opened it by mistake, lad,’ said the Chief, and I didn’t know that I believed him. Certainly he was very free and easy about the mail, often chucking away his own letters unopened, but I also knew he’d been like a cat on hot bricks over the question of whether or when I’d be returning to my unit.

Evidently, the letter had arrived at the police office on the previous Thursday, April 19th, when I’d been at home. It was from Major Quinn, my C.O., and had been despatched from Givenchy. Quinn couldn’t give his exact whereabouts, but I knew he was in charge of a detachment helping the Canadians with light railways behind Vimy Ridge. He gave me his best wishes, hoped I’d got something out of the training course, if only a good rest, and expressed the hope I’d be rejoining the unit soon. On the other hand, he had received, on April 10th, a letter dated March 14th, and sent from Baghdad, Mesopotamia, by a Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, who had evidently sailed for the East within a week of my meeting him. It seemed I’d made quite a score with him at the Midland Grand, and he wanted me to join him in helping run the railways of Baghdad, such as they were. Shepherd himself had been invited out there by a high-ranking officer he’d run across in the early days of the war, and had got the job through ‘what was really the most tremendous luck’. (The old school tie more like, I thought.)