I took from my pockets the two bits of paper I had rescued from the fireplace of Khan, and opened them up. I contemplated the dancing men. They might have been perfectly innocuous: chits written to a tradesman, for all I knew. I looked over at the elderly couple. They looked like a pair of intellects; perhaps they understood this lingo? The odds were against. I thought of the office door in Fairlie Place that bore the faded letters: ‘Convert to English’. I would take the papers there. Whatever they amounted to, these notes would throw some light on something. I made further inroads on the whisky. It had become too dark for my elderly companions to read, and they were both staring into space. I slept a little, then for a longer time.
I awoke in bright light. The carriage lights had been switched on, and we were in a station. But the station itself was all in darkness. I could just make out the wooden station house some way along the platform. Passengers were drifting into it from the train, and the two who had been in the carriage with me had already left. This must be Kurseong, the halfway point, where the supper break would be taken. I was not hungry, but I decided I would benefit from a breath of air, so I stepped on to the wooden platform, where I stood quite alone in the gloom. The station house was at some twenty yards’ distance, a faint orange light at the window. I could hear the throbbing of the petrol engine in the generator wagon: it had been attached to the rear of the train at some earlier stop to give the light for the carriages. Beyond it stood the second train, and that too seemed empty of passengers. From the jungle rising above the station came a repeated animal scream, then came the fast clattering of some bigger beast running through the trees. I could see the dim outlines of the engine men on the platform. They were attending the generator wagon, which was giving trouble in some way. I heard a footfall close behind. There came a sudden blaze of orange light, illuminating a sad-eyed little man.
‘It’s Dougie Poole, Jim,’ he said.
What had occurred was that the engine men had connected the generator to the station lights, and Poole now stood revealed beneath one of the platform lamps.
‘Clever,’ I said, indicating the lights.
‘What would be clever, Jim,’ he said, ‘is if they could light the train and the platform.’ And it was true: the little train was in darkness once again. The generator could illuminate either one or the other, but not both. Poole was for once not drunk, whereas I was groggy from the whisky.
‘You coming through for the supper?’ he said.
‘Hold on.’ I said. ‘Were you at the recreation ground in the town?’
‘Took a stroll that way, yes.’
‘I saw you.’
‘I never saw you, Jim.’
Had he been tailing me? Had he finally worked out that I knew of his interest in venomous snakes?
‘Where are you off to?’ I said.
‘Calcutta, of course.’
‘Where’s Margaret?’
‘Staying on in the hills,’ and he indicated the steep forest rising beyond the station.
‘So’s Lydia,’ I said, grimly.
‘There you are, then,’ said Poole. ‘No danger of the social round coming to an end. You all right, Jim?’
‘I’m half cut,’ I said, producing the silver flask. ‘Fancy a belt?’
Poole shook his head. ‘I’m off the drink,’ he said. ‘And for good.’
‘What’s brought that on?’ I said.
‘Come on, I’ll stand you the supper.’
The little dining room of the station looked like an English tea rooms, right down to tea cosies and chequered tablecloths. But the only food going was no-meat curry.
‘I’ve been given the chuck, Jim,’ said Poole.
‘Eh?’
‘Askwith – at the dance. He took me aside, said I ought to be considering my future.’
‘That’s not the same as giving you the chuck.’
‘Yes it is. Game’s up.’
‘Was it to do with the new system?’
‘Eh?’
‘Askwith told me he’s bringing in a new system of traffic control,’ I said.
‘He said that, did he? Well, it hardly matters. Point is, I was canned at the dance, and he said he’d seen me in a bad state too often. India was clearly doing me no good, and I’d be better off going home. I wouldn’t qualify for the full pension, but he’d see me right financially, and give me a good character. He said it wasn’t too late for me to start again in traffic – said he had connections in the London and North Eastern set-up.’
‘Decent of him, I suppose.’
‘I didn’t put up a fight, Jim. You know why? It was meant to happen. The snake had tipped me the wink, so to speak. An omen. Get out while you can. You know what the Hindus call fate? Karma. I was locked into it Jim, but now I’ve escaped, and that’s called moksha. Release, letting go. I’m letting go of India,’ he added, as a platform guard came in and announced we had five minutes to finish up before the train departed. There was no time for pudding. Poole picked up an orange in lieu of his.
‘So you were fated to escape your fate?’ I suggested, when we were back on board the little train. Poole had joined me in my carriage. We sat on opposite cane chairs, with the elderly parties reading once again in the background.
He nodded. ‘That’s very well put, is that, Jim.’ (But you never quite knew when Dougie Poole was joshing.) ‘Askwith’s right. I’m not cut out for India. Look at me: I’m halfway up a bloody mountain and I’m sweating like a pig. Can’t ride, can’t shoot . . . I’m not moaning about it, Jim. I mean there’s very few from Walthamstow who can ride and shoot. I’m generally not up to the mark as a sportsman, apart from the funny sports. You know . . . egg-and-spoon in the Company revels on the maidan . . .’
‘Good at egg-and-spoon racing, are you?’
‘Not particularly, no. But you’re meant to lose at that, aren’t you? Also, I’m not particularly clubbable . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
I heard a rattling sound. It was the door leading to the veranda. Poole didn’t seem to hear it. He’d removed the orange from his pocket, and was cutting into it
‘And it’s all clubs here. You’re practically clubbed to death, Jim.’
A dark station floated past. Poole blew out his cheeks, and fell silent. His sad eyes glittered. I took a belt on the whisky in the flask. Interesting though Poole’s news was, I couldn’t stop thinking of Lydia and the infernal Khan. Were they conducting a liaison? It couldn’t possibly be. She wasn’t that sort. In all the time I’d known her . . . Well, there was Major Briggs in our home village . . . We often bumped into him on the riverbank with his numerous dogs. That was because he owned the riverbank, or a long stretch of it, and I believed that was half the reason Lydia like to walk there – on the off chance of meeting him, and she always blushed when he raised his hat to her. I took another pull on the whisky.
‘Sure you don’t care for a drop?’ I asked Dougie Poole, and he shook his head. I ought not to be tempting the fellow, but it didn’t seem companionable to drink alone on a night train.
We looked through the window. At Kurseong, the two engines had lit giant searchlights mounted on their boilers, and the light from the rearward engine would occasionally show cliff walls, giant trees or jungly depths of an unnaturally bright green. The female of the two elderly readers was now snoring; her book had fallen shut beside her couch, and her husband had done nothing to save the page. Douglas Poole was eyeing me with a curious expression.
‘Oh, go on then,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’ll take a drop.’
I passed over the flask.
‘The trouble with me,’ said Poole, after he’d glugged for a good ten seconds, ‘is I’ve very little in the way of character.’
He’d just been saying how his encounter with the cobra had given him character, stiffened his resolve to get out of India and start again in Blighty. Slurring my words somewhat, I pointed this out to him.
‘Oh,
I’m a changed man, all right. Just not quite so much changed as I might have said before. Everybody’s going to see that.’
‘What, for God’s sake?’
‘How changed I am.’
I heard again a rattling from the glass door at the carriage end.
‘Before I quit this country,’ said Poole, ‘I’m going to find out who’s leaving these bloody snakes lying about. That way, I’ll be on the boat with an achievement under my belt. I’d give worlds to find out who this snake man is.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m dead set on finding out.’
‘Got any leads?’ I said, eyeing him.
‘Well, Jim, the real snake fanciers – I mean the real boys – are a breed apart. Chilly customers. Cold-blooded, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about the fellow who ran the pet shop in Seven Dials?’
‘Where you got the over-priced frogs?’
‘He was a rum cove, Jim. He’d sit inside the door of the shop with . . . well, never mind a fur boa, Jim – this bloke wore a boa constrictor over his shoulders.’
‘Didn’t that put people off going in?’
‘Of course it did. But the fellow just sat there staring at the window glass with the thing crawling all over him. Daring you to come in, I suppose.’
‘Rum,’ I said.
‘He wore glasses, Jim, and what with the tropical conditions in the shop they were always steamed up; but he didn’t bother about that either.’
I thought of Professor Hedley Fleming. I then thought of Peter Selwyn, William Askwith and Charles Sermon. I asked Poole, ‘I think you know a fellow called Sermon? He’s in traffic, I believe.’
He nodded. ‘Nice old boy, long-service medallist with the Company. Old India hand . . . Probably got a tiger skin for a bathroom carpet. Something of a war hero too, I think. Lied about his age to get in to the army; I mean he said he was younger than he was, Jim.’ Having completely drained the flask, Dougie Poole set it down on the carriage floor. ‘. . . Sermon was commissioned into the Transport Corps – did two years or so in France. Practically ran Boulogne Docks single-handed by all accounts. Got the D.S.O. for it, I think.’
‘He haunts the Railway Institute.’
‘That’s right. Comes into the office early; does his turn, goes off there for his peg in the late afternoons.’
‘Why?’
Poole shrugged. ‘Cheap whisky? I’ve been there with him on a couple of occasions. Interesting controversialist. Is that the word? Conversationalist. If you can keep him off tiger hunting.’
I then asked Poole a question I would not have asked had I been sober.
‘You ever get wind of any funny business in traffic? Corruption, embezzlement or the like?’
Poole fixed me with his sad eyes for a second. ‘Funny you should say that, Jim. We had a fellow in the department called Harry Jebb. He thought there was some queer business going on.’
‘He told you that?’
‘In a roundabout way.’
‘Name names, did he?’
‘Not a bit of it, Jim. A very discreet chap, Harry Jebb.’
‘He’s not dead, is he?’
‘Not exactly dead. He’s living in Eastbourne. Sailed for Blighty in mid-April sort of time.’
‘Why?’
‘Retired.’
I had received the dossier by post on Thursday 19 April.
I was pondering further questions about this Jebb when the end door of the carriage crashed open, and the elderly female sprang awake. But there was nobody there. Douglas Poole merely turned in his chair, while I rose unsteadily. Standing in the doorway was a monkey, and it was looking for trouble. It must have been on the veranda, and it had somehow managed to turn the handle of the glass door. Poole was indicating the monkey: ‘Do you suppose he has a first class ticket?’
The monkey commenced to urinate with great force.
‘Honestly,’ said Poole. ‘This bloody madhouse.’
And unfortunately there was no more whisky left to make it go away.
Chapter Eleven
I
‘King Sol’, said a giant advertisement on the platform we pulled into at Sealdah station. It was for a brand of beer, but it might have been advertising the sun itself, and I was glad to step out of that shadowy, thronging station and into the full glare. It was eight o’clock in the morning on Thursday 10 May. King Sol didn’t do much for my hangover, but he was a plain dealer. I had grown tired of the damp, blue mists of Darjeeling, which seemed to symbolise the fogs in which my mysteries were mired.
I ought to visit the telegraph office at the front of the station to wire my safe arrival to the wife, but she could bloody well whistle for it. Smartly uniformed, Deo Rana waited for me with a police tonga – I should have married him.
I would have offered Dougie Poole a ride into town but I had separated from him at the foot of the mountains, in Siliguri. He hadn’t had a ticket for the Calcutta Night Mail, and he’d had to queue for it in the booking office. I’d had a compartment to myself, and I’d slept all the way back.
As the tonga drew into the Howrah bridge traffic block, Deo Rana put a copy of that morning’s Statesman into my hand. I looked at the place indicated. Yet more ‘illegal associations’ – no, that wasn’t it. He was pointing to an item headed ‘New Snake Death’. R. P. Biswas, Indian barrister-at-law, travelling on East Indian Railway business, had been found dead the previous midday at Rannegunge, one stop before Asansol. And so we were back – snake-wise – to the East Indian, and the Grand Chord. The corpse of Mr Biswas had been discovered sharing a first class compartment with a snake called a Russell’s viper. On the face of it, that crime could not have been committed by anybody who had been in Darjeeling at the time; but only on the face of it.
‘We must go and see the snake men’s uncle,’ I said to Deo Rana.
He shook his head vigorously, meaning he agreed absolutely: ‘We are overdue for him. I have found place.’
‘His address?’
‘Not address. Place.’
He handed me a fragment of a Calcutta street map. A fairly central location was circled. I was surprised to see that it wasn’t in the Black Town. Would more baksheesh be required? Evidently not: the snake men we had encountered on the Howrah railway lands were now acting out of revenge. For some reason or other, they had it in for their uncle, and so they had told Deo Rana that he would be discovered holding court, and no doubt selling snakes, in this particular spot on the afternoon of Monday 14 May. He would be there at what Deo Rana called ‘three-four o’clock’ on that day.
At Fairlie Place, Deo Rana went off to other duties, while I dispatched a coolie with my luggage to Willard’s Hotel; then I stood alone for a moment on the steps of the booking office – alone, under the strongly raying sun, in the shifting crowd, wreathed in smoke from street cooking, incense and cigarettes. I turned and went through the courtyard arch. I climbed the hot iron steps to the police office.
I found Superintendent Bennett in his office. He looked like what he was: a man who had missed a holiday . . . and his office was changed. On the wall, besides the framed scrap of artistic cloth and the picture of the King-Emperor, there was a photographic portrait of his wife, Mary. There were now papers on his desk, and cigarettes had joined the tin of St Julien tobacco. I knew what the man was about: he was trying to own his office; trying to stay in it.
‘How were the hills, Jim?’
‘Mostly occluded. I had a visit from Khan of the C.I.D.; can you think why?’ Bennett commenced to light his pipe. I said, ‘I believe he thinks I did it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Bennett, shaking out a match. ‘I don’t want to traduce a fellow officer, but by seeking you out for an urgent second interview, he could claim an expenses-paid trip to Darjeeling. The fellow does have a social life, I believe, against all the odds.’
‘Yes,’ I said bitterly. ‘I think he does. Have you heard from Fisher?’
‘Had a wire yesterday,’ said Bennett. ‘Fellow’s quit. Had a better offer elsew
here.’
I had started in on an explanation about Fisher and the R.K., when a voice came from the doorway: ‘Major Fisher is leaving us in the lurch?’
It was Jogendra Babu, and he was beaming behind his spectacles. He bowed to me: ‘Please come through to my office when opportunity arises, Stringer sahib,’ and he walked on.
Bennett produced a pasteboard folder from his desk. ‘Recommendations for your enquiry from the man Sinclair. Looks like you’ll be pursuing them on your own – or not at all, of course. They’re only recommendations.’
Even so, it seemed positively evil of Sinclair to have been formulating proposals over that lazy tiffin of Friday last. Bennett pushed the papers towards me, but I would not be party to any attempt to make everything seem normal. I said, ‘I’ve just read about the barrister, Biswas.’
Bennett nodded.
‘. . . And the Russell’s viper,’ I added.
Bennett gave me a warning look, but I made my plunge. ‘The question, if you ask me, is when was that train made up? I mean, when was it cleaned and prepared for the trip?’
‘I know what “made up” means, Jim,’ said Bennett, and he was studying the etching of the calm man on the tobacco tin, as though seeking inspiration. ‘Naturally, we asked the traffic department about that. That rake of coaches was thoroughly cleaned and prepared ten days beforehand.’
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