The Baghdad Railway Club(15)

‘So the telegrams were to the effect X will meet you at Y place?’

‘You’ve caught on splendidly,’ said Manners, who now stood up, walked over to his fire, and dropped the note detailing the arrangement on the low flames. Since it was on the very flimsiest paper, it disappeared immediately.

‘By the way, I trust you committed that to memory,’ he said, with the hint of a returning smile. ‘Boyd’s a good chap – he’ll put you in the picture. You’ll take your place in Shepherd’s office. You’ll gather evidence and you’ll report back.’

‘And the aim is to bring Shepherd to book.’

‘Or put him in the clear,’ said Manners. ‘We’ll settle for either. But there is another aim equally important, and that is the uncovering of the treasure, and the securing of same for His Majesty’s Government.’

I’d forgotten about the treasure.

‘You will spend a month in Baghdad.’

‘Not very long,’ I said, and I knew I sounded relieved, which in fact I was.

‘At the end of that period, you will be recalled as a matter of urgency to your unit in France.’

All of this raised so many questions that, in the end, I didn’t ask any.

‘Can I press on you the need for absolute discretion?’ Manners said. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd is a popular man and highly rated by the command. There would be a scandal in Baghdad if it was found he was being investigated, and that would sap morale badly. Discretion must be absolute. Have you packed yet?’

‘I’ve only just found out I’m going.’

‘You won’t be needing a top-coat. I recommend mosquito cream, quinine, malaria tablets and a well-oiled service revolver.’ He offered his hand. ‘Enjoy yourself out there. Give my regards to Captain Boyd, and we have a message for him from his lady wife . . .’

‘Which is?’ I said, scowling rather.

‘Oh, just that she loves him, and will he please write to her?’

Manners had now walked over to the door, and was holding it open for me and the Chief.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, ‘how do I get in touch with you before the month’s up?’

‘Ah yes,’ said Manners, and he leant into the corridor and called, ‘Boy!’





Part Two


Mespot





Chapter Three


On our third day of sailing up the River Tigris, I resolved to step from under the tarpaulin overhanging the aft deck of the small British Naval gunboat, Mantis, and to remain in the open for some time. I had been told to acclimatise to the sun. Stretched out on a long deckchair some way beyond the tarp was a fellow called Dixon. He was reading a magazine called The Wide World, and he had been reading exactly the same magazine in exactly the same spot the day before. He was already acclimatised.

Under the tarp, I tried to predict the heat, but when I stepped into it my prediction was as usual exceeded by an amazing amount. Into the dazzling white sky overhead flew ragged gouts of smoke from the oil-fired engines of the Mantis.

Oil-fired . . .

From the quay at Basrah, at the head of the Shat-al-Arab waterway, the refineries of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had been pointed out to me, but they were only so many low, white drums wavering in the heat haze on the other side of the water, like something burning in white flames. They seemed hardly there at all, and yet ten thousand men of the British and the British Indian Army were in Basrah on their account. Another forty thousand were in Baghdad. There were in addition garrisons posted along the five hundred miles of river connecting those two spots. In short, the hundred and fifty soldiers and thirty crew aboard the Mantis were not in any imminent danger of attack – not from Brother Turk anyhow. He’d been driven north of Baghdad by the forces of General Maude. And if any Arab tribes encountered on our way might be thinking of having a crack at us . . . Well, they would have the six-inch gun on the foredeck to reckon with, not to mention the machine guns on swivel stands.

On the Shobak Castle, the government-controlled liner that had carried me from Southampton to Port Said, then to the Persian Gulf via the Suez Canal and the Red Sea . . . that three-week voyage had not been quite so relaxed an affair. The tub was well worth a torpedo, and in the Med there’d been half a dozen crew on deck with binoculars at all times.

But on the Mantis, opera glasses for sightseeing rather than binoculars were the order of the day. On either bank of the Tigris, green wheat grew under the burning sky, but the river being below the wheat, I could not make out the desert that I knew lay beyond. Occasionally, I would glimpse the roof of a reed hut or the top of a stone-built building like a windmill without sails, and these, I believed, were to do with the control of the irrigation canals – and the system evidently worked, for everything was besieged by the wheat.