Findlay looked along the platform and saw me. After a moment’s hesitation on either side we saluted, and he climbed up into the carriage. I would have to confront him before long. As far as I could recall, I had not yet spoken a word to the man. From the other end of the platform, Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd had watched Findlay climb up. He came towards me.
‘Did you speak to him about the picture, sir?’ I said, indicating the carriage and Findlay within it.
Shepherd smiled, shook his head, in his bashful sort of way. ‘But we’ll force the issue one way or another,’ he said. So perhaps Shepherd would do the confronting. He carried his pack, wore his haversack over his shoulder. There didn’t seem to be anything much in the haversack, but his Colt revolver was in his holster, and he carried a spare Sam Browne belt with spare ammo pouch.
Shepherd was evidently convinced that Findlay had put Captain Boyd’s lights out. That would be enough to set him against Findlay, but I had fanned the flames by speaking of the ‘rumour’ of Shepherd’s treachery, and raising the possibility that Findlay had known of it. Shepherd climbed up, and I watched through the dusty window as he and Findlay saluted one another. The smiles that followed were somewhat reserved, but cordial relations were being preserved for the moment. I heard a loud chuffing, and was for a moment back in the marshalling yards of York station, where I would wander on quiet days in the police office, just to watch the engines working. As a result of whatever ailed me, I found I was inclined to float in and out of myself.
The chuffing came from the tank engine that did duty as the Baghdad shunter, and it was bringing up a flat-bed wagon on which sat two radio cars held down by strong ropes. Captain Bob Ferry walked along the platform with his pack on his back, keeping pace with the wagon in a proprietorial sort of way, for they were his radio cars that sat upon it. My understanding was that he would be taking them to Samarrah and staying there a while with them, demonstrating their use to the men of the garrison – that he would not be entering the no man’s land, in other words. Ferry wore shorts, and they had recently been ironed. His whole person had been ironed, it seemed to me, and he’d polished his Sam Browne belt. You were supposed to polish the belt, but nobody did. His revolver was a Webley, like my own. It too was highly polished, and looked deadlier as a result. We watched as the wagon was coupled up.
Ferry said, ‘When’s the . . . off?’
‘Five minutes,’ I said.
The radio cars looked like grocers’ delivery vans with the rear sliced away, and wooden boxes covered with switches and dials stuffed in. Long wires stuck up from them, but the wonder of it was that these wires weren’t connected to anything. It was all wireless. I said, ‘It’s the latest thing in field communications, I believe.’
‘In their present state of development,’ said Ferry, ‘machines such as these are less efficient than . . .’
I waited. On the opposite platform, an Arab in a fez was staring at me: the bloody Baghdad station master. I had to get out of his line of sight, which meant I had to get away from Ferry. I would have to hurry him. ‘Less efficient than the telegraph?’
‘Than the . . .’
‘Telephone?’
‘. . . carrier pigeon.’
I moved along the platform, so as to put the carriage between me and the station master. Ferry came with me. He climbed up, and I watched through the window as he took his seat at the opposite end of the saloon to Shepherd and Findlay. There was a small plaque fixed to the window where he sat. It might have read whatever was Turkish-Arabic for ‘No Smoking’, or it might have read ‘Smoking’. Either way, Ferry took from his pack the leathern wallet that held his pipes.
I walked forwards to the engine, and climbed on to the footplate where my fireman, a Royal Engineer, was fettling the fire. He was a pleasant sort; he’d said he was ‘rotten at firing’ but he knew his way around an engine all right.
I was about to start oiling round when I heard a voice from along the platform. ‘Where can I put Mr King’s champagne?’
I jumped down, and the whole station reeled. I shouldn’t have done that. Wallace King’s assistant was on the platform with the cine camera over his shoulder, a pack on his back, and a canvas bag in his hand. He was addressing an R.E., who leant from the carriage window. King himself was bringing up the rear, and carrying nothing. He overtook his assistant and came up to me, saying, ‘Can’t seem to get any sense from anyone about how to keep the champagne chilled in the desert.’
‘No?’ I said. I had still not stabilised after my leap.