The Baghdad Railway Club(86)

The stationary express was somehow making the sound of a rainstorm.

I began to think of my five days in Baghdad military hospital. Existing on a diet of quinine and bad dreams, I had slept in a sort of dark cave, for my cot had been surrounded by a thicket of mosquito nets – three of them. It had been a case, as I had confusedly told the gentlemen of the Royal Army Medical Corps (apparently many times), of ‘bolting the stable door after the horse had locked’. Yet I had kept parting the curtains, in hopes of letting in a draught. How I had longed for coolness, yet now I was contemplating walking out to the driver of that northbound express and asking him for a few lumps of good anthracite to get a blaze started in the police-office grate which held only screwed-up six-month-old pages from the Yorkshire Evening Press.

Towards the end of my stay in the hospital, Ahmad had visited me with ginger biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, and a quantity of raisins. I’d told him I was feeling better. He’d said, ‘I prayed for you so what do you expect?’ I’d said, ‘Thank you,’ and he’d said, ‘Now you pray for me. Goodbye.’

It broke in on me that this express train fuming away must be the one the Chief had said he was going to meet. He was expecting a special visitor and this was somehow related to ‘a real treat’ that was in store for me. Knowing the Chief, that might mean any number of things not normally counted as treats. For instance, a trip to the Police Court to see some bad lad sent down for a few years’ hard.

I stood up and put on my suit-coat, still thinking of the Baghdad hospital. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd was still in there. He’d taken an Arab bullet, but according to Manners he would recover fully from his wounds. He would then be taken from the hospital and be shot again, this time by the British Army as a murderer and traitor. Naturally, there would be a court martial first. The treasure he’d taken was being held as evidence. (He’d disclosed its whereabouts to the investigators. He’d simply stowed it in a trunk in his quarters, but not the one whose lid I had myself lifted. I thought it typical of Shepherd to have been so reckless in his choice of hiding place.)

No treasure had been lodged with Brigadier General Barnes.

The documents that Shepherd had admitted to leaving under the first train – the one carrying the motor launches – had been looked for and not found, having fallen into Turkish hands. The second lot of documents – the ones left by Shepherd under the train carrying the crated aeroplane – had been discovered, and all I knew of these was that they had been scrawled in French, and that they would be part of the body of evidence against Shepherd.

The express was still fuming away outside. They must be changing the engine. I heard a footfall, and the door opened. It was the Chief.

‘Hey!’ he said, ‘follow me.’

I might be a British Army captain and an intelligence agent of sorts, but this was still how he commanded me. I followed the Chief, who was lighting a cigar as he walked, towards the First Class end of the train, and there, stepping down from the farthest carriage, was Manners of the War Office.

‘Is this the special guest?’ I called ahead to the Chief.

‘Try to sound a bit more enthusiastic,’ he said, half turning around.

I had only recently been speaking to Manners on the phone, and I’d sent him two full reports of the events of my Baghdad investigation. The novelty was beginning to wear off the man. I had not forgiven him for furnishing me with such a bloody daft cipher, and it had seemed that on my return I had given him a sight more data than he had given me. For instance, I couldn’t get out of him whether Captain Ferry of the Residency telegraph office was suspected of any corruption. But I did not believe so. Ferry guessed I had been sent to Baghdad on a secret job, hence his asking whether I was sending to Manners. But I believed he had not told anyone else – and indeed that my secret role had remained secret, except in so far as I had deliberately given it away to Lennon of the Residency post room, a man I had trusted at the time and still trusted in recollection.

Captain Bob Ferry was not corrupt. He was if anything too moral. He had visited Boyd and given him a rating for his repeated attempts to send to Miss Bailey when she was down in Basrah. Word of this had no doubt leaked out (the British force in Baghdad being a sort of round-the-clock rumour factory), and had reached the ears of Shepherd, who had then tried to paint Boyd as a man who’d come to grief because of his connection with Miss Bailey.

I supposed that was how it had worked, anyhow.

Manners had also failed to fill me in on what had happened after I’d keeled over in the desert. I believed I had come to very soon after, but memory loss was known to be a symptom of malaria, and it appeared that it had been so in my case.