The Baghdad Railway Club(33)

I began skirting the park (where thoughtful-looking Arabs sat under trees), making for Rose Court. As Baghdad streets went, Park Street was pleasantly wide and smooth, and to demonstrate the fact, a smart phaeton came trotting along it pulled by a well-groomed horse. But it was in the nature of this place that the horse should lift its tail as I looked on, and that it should deposit on the road bricks a considerable poundage of shit, which was then scattered by the wheels of the carriage in the vicinity of one particular set of open gates, beyond which I saw dark red roses. The place corresponded to Rose Court on my map.

I was half an hour early for Jarvis, but I crossed the road and passed through the gate, where I saw many rose beds, fertilised by other instances of the stuff the horse had dropped. The garden air was overcharged with the dizzying smell of roses and horse shit, and the twisting sounds of evening birdsong . . . And voices. These came from behind a thicket of palm trees, and they were very English voices – one upper-class, one not so. Something told me to retreat from them, and I backed into a second area of palms, this one enclosing a rectangular ornamental pond of very green and dead water with rose petals scattered over it, unable to sink. It was Jarvis and Shepherd who were speaking. I could not make out particular words, although Jarvis broke through with ‘. . . That’s it, sir . . . reported by the station master . . .’

There was then a question from Shepherd – and the soft civility he’d shown to me was evident, even though here was an officer addressing a private soldier. They separated after additional muttering, and I watched Shepherd go through the gate. As he crossed the threshold, a sudden rattle of piano music from one of the apartments in the compound seemed to cause him to give a skip, and to move away down the street at the double.

I closed on Jarvis; a Ford van was parked behind him. He saluted, but did not snap to it as he had the night before.

‘Number four’s ours, sir,’ he said. ‘Very nice, sir, but dusty. The boy’s just giving it a clean over.’

We eyed each other; the music had stopped.

‘Your things are already in there, sir,’ said Jarvis, leading off along a gravel track between low brick buildings.

‘How are you acquainted with Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, Jarvis?’ I enquired as we walked. ‘He was leaving as I arrived.’

Jarvis didn’t break stride: ‘I’m not, sir, but I know who he is. I mean, I know he’s your governor in the railway department, sir. But besides that, I know he was at the railway station when the city fell. He was there with another officer, a man I do count a friend – or did.’

I was nearly but not quite so blockheaded as to say, ‘You mean Boyd?’

‘. . . Name of Captain Boyd, sir,’ Jarvis ran on. ‘The police team put the notice up in Part One Orders just after lunchtime, sir. Found dead at the railway station this morning – in the buffet.’

‘And you were breaking the news to the lieutenant colonel?’

‘They’d seen action together. I thought it only right. Everyone knows they were the first men into this place – if you take the station to be part of Baghdad.’

What would I ask if this were all new to me? I settled on ‘What unit was Boyd with?’

‘Hundred and Eighty-Fifth Machine Gun Company, sir.’

‘And how did you know him?’

‘I was batman to him down in Basrah. Before that, he’d done me a bit of a good turn, and that’s how we’d got acquainted.’

So I had been given as batman the very fellow who’d done the same job for the man whose murder I was investigating.

Was Shepherd behind this? Had Boyd himself been behind it?

‘You said he’d done you a good turn?’

‘Kut, sir . . . Saved my life, did Captain Boyd. I was very sorry when I was transferred back to driving duties after being with him three months.’

‘He saved your life? How?’

‘He brought me a drink of water . . . So I’m a bit down now, sir.’

And he did seem genuinely cut up by the death of a man he thought a lot of; I would have to get the details out of him later.

There were perhaps half a dozen small houses in the enclosure. An Arab stared at me from the doorway of one. ‘This is Ahmad, sir,’ said Jarvis. ‘He’s the boy.’

‘Hello Ahmad,’ I said, touching my cap.

‘Ack-mad,’ he corrected me.

He was about six and a half foot tall, and at least forty – a rather glowering sort of fellow in a black robe and white turban. I nodded to him and he stepped aside, saying, ‘You will like it here,’ as if to say ‘You’d better do.’