We ascended the main staircase under flickering electric light; ordinary bulbs and black cable were tangled amid the candle chandeliers. Our boots made no sound on the thick and dusty carpet. On the first landing, I heard the sound of a closing door – an official in civilian clothes locking up for the night. Approaching the second floor, Lennon took out his own bunch of keys. We walked fast down the long corridor, passing an open door, through which I glimpsed another civilian: a man with well-oiled hair calmly reading a newspaper – one of the few fat men I’d clapped eyes on in Baghdad. He was perhaps the consul himself: The Resident.
We now approached the telegraphic office – with its sentry outside the door. I had been worried about the position of the telegram archive in relation to this sentry but we continued a fair way past him, and made a left turn with the corridor. As we stood before the unmarked door of the archive we were out of the sentry’s eye line. Private Lennon opened the door of what turned out to be no more than a glorified cupboard.
‘One minute, mind,’ he said, and I was in.
He called after me: ‘Anyone comes along, I shut the door on you‚ sir, all right?’
Given that this cubbyhole was part of Captain Ferry’s empire, I’d thought it would be neater. The room held three sizes of box. The smallest ones accorded to the size of the sending form I’d filled in when communicating with the War Office, so I started on the stack of those. Each box had a paper label pasted on, and some had more than one – and on the label was just a mix-up of letters and numbers. Lennon stood guard some way beyond the half-open door. He commanded the right angle of the corridor, so he would have early sight of an approach from either direction.
I pulled the lid off the first box that came to hand. It held the carbon copies of the forms all right. The first I saw was sent by a Second Lieutenant Foster of ‘Div. 4 Mobile Vet. Section’ to a man called Knight in Basrah, but many were not so clear. Where the handwriting had been decent, the carbon was invariably poor, or vice versa. I flicked through and came to a Captain Windust of what might have been the 26th Punjabis. He’d sent on March 25th; I couldn’t make out the message. The next fellow was somebody Battacharjee. He’d sent on March 25th also, and the message was readable, and had been sent clear: ‘Operation completed satisfactorily.’ Then came messages of March 26th . . . But the papers would take an eternity to rifle through.
In hopes of I-don’t-know-what, I reached for the next box, and took off the lid. But I froze when, from beyond the half-open door, I heard a tread on the corridor carpet. Somebody was addressing Lennon, a whispered enquiry. Lennon said, ‘Fuck off‚ Sinclair,’ and the footsteps retreated. Evidently another Tommy, some pal of Lennon’s, had come up. The bloke no doubt worked a few dodges of his own.
Now Lennon stepped into the storeroom.
‘You’ll have to get cracking, sir. We’ll both be in lumber if the wrong bloke finds us in here.’
‘It’s hopeless,’ I said. ‘I give it up.’
‘Another half minute,’ he said, and he stepped back.
He was earning his extra quid. I began leafing through the second box, picked up a form and read the date: March 17th. So this box was earlier. I glanced at another form: Jackson of the . . . couldn’t read the rest. I glanced down at the message, and it was just four clusters of numbers: some military code. Lennon was closer to the door, becoming agitated. I tried to think of the offence we were committing – offences, more like. Trespass . . . Conspiracy . . . Injuries to the Telegraph. No, that was pulling down telegraph poles. Interfering with the mails – that was more like it. But it went beyond that: a charge of espionage might be preferred, and with only Laughing Jack himself – Manners of the War Office – between me and the firing squad.
I plucked out another form, and . . .
‘Ferry!’ called Lennon.
I stuffed the paper in my hand back into the box, replaced the lid and turned out of the room with fast-beating heart. Lennon had the door locked and we were walking fast away the moment Ferry turned the corner. Had he seen us? Impossible to tell; and uppermost in my thoughts was the image of the last paper I’d held. The name Boyd had been at the top, alongside a number I assumed must have been 185, denoting his machine-gun company. I had not had time to make out the date, the message, or the name of the person to whom it had been sent, all of which had been faint, but there had been something odd about the slip: a diagonal line had been drawn clear through it.
Chapter Fourteen
Come Saturday, I went again to the Baghdad Railway Club.