The Baghdad Railway Club(90)

Manners nodded. ‘Unfortunately, Boyd was rather too overt – kept trying to telegraph to her, and when she came up from Basrah, he insisted on meeting her a couple of times.’

‘So word got out that they were lovers?’

‘I suppose so. And that gave Shepherd his cue to develop the clever tale about Major Findlay – who clearly was enamoured of Miss Bailey – having done for Captain Boyd.’

My thoughts raced. Had Miss Bailey known I was investigating Shepherd? She’d given me a good look over on our first meeting. That might have been because I resembled Boyd, or because he had told her I would be arriving in order to work with Shepherd and keep tabs on him. She had asked me, with some concern, the whereabouts of my revolver.

The wife stood up. She faced Buckley. ‘I want to see it again,’ she said.

Manners was looking at his watch. He said, ‘Be my guest, Mrs Stringer. I’m sure you’d all like to see it again before it goes under lock and key. But I have a train to catch.’

He shook all our hands, and I believe he had already quit the Electric Theatre by the time the lights dimmed once more, the whirring began again, and ‘WALLACE KING BRINGS THE WORLD TO YOU’ reappeared before us.

This time we watched the reel in silence, and there was no sound in the auditorium but the flickering of the projection machine – until, that is, Harriet Bailey removed her keffiyah and glared down at Major Findlay, at which point her words were suddenly and very clearly audible: ‘No. I believe you did it.’

It was the wife who had spoken. I turned to her. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s what she said.’

‘You told me in your letter,’ I said, stunned. ‘You can see speech.’

‘Not as well as Margaret Lawson, I can’t.’

‘I knew!’ I said, ‘I knew!’ I turned to the Chief. ‘Did you see Findlay when he drew his gun? There was a delay. He cocked the trigger. It was a single-action. He had Boyd’s gun, not Shepherd. What time is Manners’s train?’

‘Half three,’ said the Chief. ‘London express.’

It was twenty past.

With a clamour of raised voices and questions behind me I was out of the auditorium, out of the Electric Theatre and into Fossgate. I began to run, as fast as my crocked right leg would allow. Shepherd had told me he meant to get hold of a Colt single-action. He would doubtless have put in for one at the armoury. A man wasn’t supposed to have two pieces but Shepherd was a lieutenant colonel and very persuasive with it. What he had told Jarvis about his meeting with Boyd at the railway station had all been true. Boyd had gone back to the range afterwards. He spent half his time at the range, after all. Findlay might easily have found him there, or intercepted him on the way. They had returned to the station to talk privately, just as Boyd had talked privately with Shepherd. Findlay would have challenged Boyd over his connection with Miss Bailey and Boyd would not have been able to tell the truth because the truth – that they were in Intelligence work – was a secret. And so they would have started a fight.

I skittered into Parliament Street.

Miss Bailey‚ too‚ would have wanted to guard the secret of the reason for the connection with Boyd. Perhaps she would rather Findlay thought it a romance than know the truth. Findlay must have thought that, as well as protecting himself, he was saving the lady’s reputation by going back into the club room for the photograph. Perhaps that had been in his mind when he’d killed Boyd – that he was saving the lady from herself. Well, she was a married woman.

I doubted that she’d known what he’d done – not at first. Her declaration in the desert had seemed like a moment of revelation, prompted by Findlay saying something like ‘We have run to ground the killer of Captain Boyd.’

Jarvis had had no need to commit suicide. He had not stood by while Shepherd had killed Boyd because Shepherd had not killed Boyd. But Jarvis had . . . what was the word? He had misconstrued, and what he had misconstrued he had passed on to Findlay. No doubt Findlay did believe Shepherd was a traitor on the strength of what Jarvis had told him, but he couldn’t have believed Shepherd was the killer of Boyd, because he was the killer of Boyd.

Pushing through the crowds in the square, I repeated to myself out loud, ‘Everything Shepherd said was true.’ Everything he had said was true, as far as it went. But he had covered up as well. He had heard of the rumour of his treachery as proved by his decision to confront Boyd, yet he’d let on that he was hearing it from me for the first time. And no doubt he had taken Baghdad railway medals from the bimbashi at the station . . . But he had left out the rest: the arrangement he had made to give over information in return for treasure. He had only come round to discussing this in our desert stand-off, where he’d said he wanted to string the Turks along, to play a private game with them in return for supposed treasure that he insisted was really nothing more than . . .