‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘But hold on, you’re a cop yourself. Are you looking for the bloody darkie who shot him?’
‘You’ve just said I shot him. The investigation is being conducted from Jamalpur.’
‘Being conducted, is it? Who by?’
‘A man called Hughes.’
‘You know, I’m rostered up to Jamalpur from time to time. Maybe I’ll go along and see him.’
‘You’re a travelling ticket inspector.’
‘That’s me – railway boy! How do you know, anyway?’
He kept moving his hair back from his forehead; there was a great deal of it.
‘Your dad told me. I had quite a long talk with him.’
Anthony Young shouted, ‘Boy! Another beer for the sahib. I can see you like beer,’ he said, indicating my empty glass. ‘Where’s that one gone? It’s evaporated, man!’ When the drink was poured, he said to the barman, ‘Put it on the funeral bill.’
I said, ‘You drink it.’
‘No man, I’ve been drinking all day. You know what’s been going on through there?’ He indicated the function room, the place where I’d seen the afternoon party. ‘What’s it called when you have a bloody good drink up after a funeral?’
‘A wake.’
‘Dad’s wake. We buried him today at the church . . .’
‘Which church?’
‘Holy Joe’s. St Joseph’s.’
‘You’re a Catholic.’
‘Do I look like a bloody Hindu?’
‘Why do you think I shot your father?’
‘I’ll be honest with you: I think you had an argument with him.’ The boy leant against the bar, becoming conspiratorial with me. ‘I’ve been asking around about you. You’re on an investigation of corruption by the railway lot, so listen . . . You thought my dad was on the take. Commerical man, working on big contracts. You know how that could go.’
He certainly was a sharp kid. It was almost as if he knew about Schedule C. I said, ‘I liked your dad.’
‘Come on, man, of course you say that!’
‘If he thought I thought he was on the take . . . Then he would have been more likely to shoot me, wouldn’t he?’
Silence for a space.
‘So now you get amused at me? My dad – carrying a gun! Listen, you had an argument with my dad. You know . . . all that whisky the pair of you knocked back. My dad had the top education of India, but he was a booze-ard like you. And he would blow up, man.’
I said, ‘He told me he had a lot of arguments with you.’
‘He did, that’s right. What else did he say?’
‘That you were wasted as a ticket inspector.’
‘You think I want to be like him? I loved my dad, but do you know what I called him? Nowhere man. Too big for the Insty, too small for the big clubs. But not really too small, man – too black. Do you know how many other top men came to see him off?’
‘You mean gazetted officers?’
‘Six.’
From the corner I heard, ‘Anyhow, I ducked just in time to give Stripes a free passage.’
‘Sounds a fair number for a small funeral,’ I said.
‘And how many of those came back here, do you think? Two. You should have heard them. “Oh, you people have made such a lovely job of your Institute, we must come here more often.”’
‘I doubt they said that. Not in so many words.’
‘What are you doubting, man?’
‘They wouldn’t say “you people.” Is your mother still in the other room? I’d like to go through.’
‘Why?’
‘Pay my respects.’
‘Keep your respects.’
The big Englishman who’d been talking about tiger hunting was approaching from behind Anthony Young, who turned aside, indicating the man, saying, ‘Here, you will like him. Another booze-ard.’
The boy then quit the bar.
II
‘His father would have given him a clip round the ear,’ the big Englishman said, ‘or indeed a belt. A very good man, John Young.’
We were sitting in basket chairs on the veranda of the Institute. The Englishman had introduced himself as Charles Sermon, and on hearing the name I realised I’d heard of him. He was an officer of the East Indian Railway, and quite famous for being British and yet haunting the Railway Institute. I accounted for my own presence on the Company payroll in the manner approved by Harrington in London, mentioning only Schedules A and B of the enquiry. He nodded blandly at this. I made it clear that I was not investigating the killing of John Young, and Charles Sermon made no reaction beyond saying, ‘They’ve a sound chap on the job, I hope?’
Sermon was a traffic manager, quite high up on the passenger side. I mentioned Askwith as being the father of my daughter’s friend and he gave a respectful nod. ‘My boss,’ he said, looking across the garden. I waited to see whether there would be any advance on this. As there was not, I mentioned Dougie Poole, and his name brought a smile to Sermon’s face. ‘Dougie’s on the goods side. Great fun is Dougie, but it would be wrong to take him for a lightweight.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, but he’s an interesting chap, bit of dark horse . . .’
I seemed to me that Sermon would neither be on the take, and nor would he finger anyone who might be. These actions would be insufficiently romantic for him. I supposed that he was perfectly good at the complicated work at the traffic department, but that his true mind was elsewhere: in the mofussil.
The mali was now stringing some up some empty kerosene cans. Charles Sermon explained that they would rattle against each other, and so keep the fruit bats off the mangoes. Since the mali spoke no English, Sermon pointed out some of the flowers to me.
There were orchids of various kinds, sunflowers, red dahlias, carnations, African daisies. We sat among the scent of these flowers, with just a hint of manure. The garden was beautifully kept, except for a couple of bushes close to where we sat that looked half dead, with leaves only on the uppermost parts. But they must have been meant to look like that; they would not have been tolerated in that condition otherwise. Sermon offered me a good Turkish cigarette from a good silver case, and we smoked in silence for a while, gazing towards some wagons being shunted in a cloud of golden dust, with the sun setting beyond, and occasionally sipping our drinks. Anthony Young had called Sermon a ‘booze-ard’ but there was a good deal of water in his whisky, and I was on lemonade.
‘You like it here,’ I suggested to Sermon.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I’m tolerated by the regular crowd; they serve a proper glass of whisky, the provender is excellent, and it’s just a short stroll over the bridge from my place off Strand Road.’
But not as short a stroll as the burra clubs of downtown Calcutta would be.
He was an old India hand, and his white drill suit was of a Victorian cut. It was of good quality, but slightly grubby, or at any rate not as white as the flower in his buttonhole, which was not like any I could see in the garden. I believed it was a white carnation, whereas the carnations in the garden were of other colours. He wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that clashed with the rough redness of his face, and seemed to signify the descent from outdoorsman to box-wallah.
‘Do you think he did it?’ I said. ‘Do you think the boy did his father in? Or arranged for it to be done?’
Charles Sermon seemed quite shocked.
‘The two of them would have rows, and they would have rows in here,’ he said, indicating the Institute, ‘but I don’t think it would ever have come to that, old man.’
‘What did they fight about?’
‘Politics primarily, I think. The father was a great loyalist, like most of the Anglo-Indian chaps. The son thought that was rather craven of him, I suppose.’
‘But surely no Anglo-Indian supports the nationalists. They’d be worse off under the Indians than they are under us.’
Charles Sermon shrugged, re
ached for his whisky. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘he was killed by a bandit wasn’t he? I’ve seen a lot of that myself up country . . .’
On the face of it, he was a man for the mofussil, the countryside, and it was the devil’s own job to keep him off hunting, yet from what I could work out he’d long since stowed away his shotgun. He was now just an ink-spiller in the traffic office . . . although not for much longer. I had gleaned that Charles Sermon was coming up for superannuation, and the return to Blighty.
He was saying, ‘Talking of dacoits, I was up with my old shikari pal, Clive Webster, in the Mandlabaju block in the Central Provinces. Now whilst the majority of villages in that territory are—’
‘Do you have a place lined up for when you go back home?’ I said, cutting him off.
‘Oh,’ he said, because he didn’t seem to mind being cut off, ‘your neck of the woods: Scarborough.’
The coast. I should have known. After years of humidity, the old India hands wanted sea air.
‘The Esplanade?’ I suggested, because I knew Scarborough, and I could see him in a flat there, overlooking the floral gardens, the funicular railway and the sea. Every evening at six, he’d go to the Esplanade Hotel for his peg. There’d be people in there who’d listen to his hunting stories. Well, they’d have to. I myself had always hankered after the Esplanade: the grand white houses seemed to capture and hold the sun. But no; Charles Sermon wouldn’t be on the Esplanade . . .
‘Few streets inland from there, old man.’
We drifted on to the snake attacks, and I told Sermon of the photographs I’d seen. Midway through my account, Sermon stood up to help the mali with the kerosene tins. When he sat back down he was wheezing somewhat. He was slightly out of condition.
‘Compare death by tiger bite,’ Sermon said, returning to his seat.
‘Compare it to what?’
‘Snake bite. Ever seen Stripes take down a buff?’
‘A what?’
‘Buffalo, old man. Tiger on a buffalo. Straight to the neck. The buff doesn’t know what’s hit him. A lightning death – almost pleasant in the absence of pain. I recall—’
I told him I was very sorry, but I had an appointment at the Writers’ Building. Sermon seemed to regret my departure. He sent a bearer to collect my hat, offered to accompany me to the garden gate of the Insty. We looked out over the railway lands, which were strangely peaceful under the setting sun: the marshalled goods wagons to one side, the passenger coaches to the right, all patiently waiting – and Horwah still further to the right. Charles Sermon said, ‘There’s only one man to speak to on the snake front . . .’
‘Is he at the zoo?’
‘He practically is the zoo. Professor Hedley Fleming. Cleverest man in Calcutta.’
And he shook my hand warmly.
III
The electric lights blazed from the windows of the Writers’ Building, and the trams moved back and forth in front, shuffling their advertisements for Lifebuoy Soap like cards in a pack. Their motors whined and their bells tolled, but inside the office of Khudayar Khan all was silent.
The room was green. The window blind – half down over the window – was also green, and there was a brown scorch mark in it. I wondered if the sun alone had done that. No electric fan twirled, and yet Khudayar Khan wore a tightly buttoned double-breasted top-coat, and his white tunic shirt was tightly fastened at the neck with a gold pin. As a Moslem high up in the elite police, Khan was a very rare bird indeed, and he seemed to know it. He was handsome in a bony kind of way, and very commanding with his silences, during which he was usually smoking. I had never heard of his brand before; it was called Advantage.
A constable had brought us a cup of sweet tea, and I too smoked.
Khudayar Khan began by asking about my life and police work back home. I was determined to put our interview on an equal footing – we were men of the same rank, after all – and so I in turn asked him whether he had visited Britain. He reluctantly admitted that he had attended London University for a while, and I told him my boy was there at the present time.
He said, ‘And your daughter is here?’
‘She is,’ I said, ‘She is enjoying the social life.’
‘An expensive business,’ said Khudayar Khan, and I felt I’d fallen into a trap. ‘When I was in London,’ he said, after watching me through smoke for a while, ‘I lodged in a place called Somers Town.’ He then spelt it out for me. ‘Not “summer” as in fine weather: that inference would have been grotesque.’
‘It rained all the time, I suppose.’
‘Of course it did, yes. It was a sort of hostel I was staying in. A terrible place.’
I felt like saying, ‘Don’t blame me for London; I’m hardly ever there.’ Instead, I observed: ‘It’s near King’s Cross station.’
‘The trains made a dreadful racket as they came out.’
‘Well they’re working against the grade—’
‘I’m sorry. They’re doing what?’
‘Going uphill. So you’ll get the cylinder beat. I think it’s one in a hundred and seven through Gasworks Tunnel, and much the same through Copenhagen Tunnel. That’s quite steep for a railway.’
He drained his little teacup, watching me carefully.
‘But it levels off at Finsbury Park,’ I added.
‘We haven’t got the results back from the fingerprinting,’ Khan said.
‘You’ll find my prints all over his compartment. I was in there talking to him for a good while.’
‘Talking and drinking whisky.’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the first place, it was only “sort of” whisky . . .’
He didn’t like that. It was an implied criticism of his country, although as a Moslem of course Khudayar Khan would not touch a drop of alcohol.
‘. . . And in the second place, I personally only had one glass of it.’
‘Are you saying he was drunk?’
‘No. My prints will also be found on the warrant badge in his pocket book,’ I added.
‘Why?’
‘He passed it over to me to look at – as I said in my statement.’
I assumed he’d read the statements. There were no papers on his desk, nothing on it but a black statuette of a horse. Come to that, there was no picture of the King-Emperor on his wall.
‘John Young was shot with a high calibre pistol,’ said Khan.
There was a period of silent smoking on both sides.
‘You were found to be in possession of such a pistol.’
‘As would about half the former army officers in India.’ But not Major Fisher. Why not? Should I disclose my suspicions of him? Should I ask what Khudayar Khan had made of the man? Instead I remarked, ‘The reservation chart was missing.’
Khan was now putting out his cigarette.
‘They’re always missing,’ he said, ‘or very often. Shall I tell you something, Captain Stringer? The Youngs live out at Tollygunge. Three months ago, the police – the civil police, I mean – were called out to deal with a row between the father and the son.’
‘It had become heated?’
‘Violent.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Money.’
‘Are you saying the boy is a suspect?’
But my question was met with a question: ‘You saw a dacoit riding away? He was in Indian clothes?’
I nodded. ‘There were two others with him, but further off. They wore, you know, pyjamas.’
He didn’t quite like that, either.
‘Shalwar,’ he said. ‘Loose, light trousers, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, and then kameez – a long shirt or tunic. The two together are called shalwar kameez.’
‘Yes, that fits the bill.’
Had any such outfit been found among the possessions of John Young’s son, Anthony? A search of his house might have accounted for the agitation he had shown at the Institute. It should be simplicity itsel
f to find out whether Anthony Young had been on duty as a ticket inspector on the night of the murder, and if so where. Should I let on about my encounter with the lad? I decided against. I was not meant to be investigating. And for all Khudayar Khan’s interest in Young, I felt I would be lucky not to graduate to the position of suspect myself, in which case I should not be seen to be throwing blame elsewhere. Nor would I mention my suspicion that I had been the intended target. Khan would think that self-important of me, and he would think me incompetent for losing the file. But it was as though he read the drift of my thoughts.
‘You are on a railway Commission of Enquiry, or something,’ he said, and I started in on an explanation of my work, which he cut off halfway through, saying, ‘This whole country needs a Commission of Enquiry.’
Not quite the remark of a fully paid-up loyalist, I thought.
Chapter Five
I
The next day was Friday. The thermometer was nudging the ton, but most of the senior railway police at Fairlie Place were ‘gate-happy’, being about to leave for Darjeeling and the hills.
That morning, Superintendent Bennett went into a conference with two of his detectives about the snakes. The news was all over the police office. Overnight another common krait had been found in a first class sleeping compartment of the night train from Howrah to Moghalsarai. Moghalsarai was on the main line, the Grand Chord, from where passengers changed to the branch for Benares, that city full of Hindu temples (and factories). Moghalsarai was a long way out, about three hundred miles. The snake had been under one of the two lower berths; it had been discovered in the middle of the night, and beaten to death with a cane by a man called Watkins who was the chairman of Blakeborough & Sons, hydraulic engineers of Calcutta. The other men in the compartment were from the same outfit; their trip had been made in relation to a contract with the Railway. I had heard that, after leaving Howrah, the train had made two stops on its journey to Moghalsarai, but I did not know where.
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