Night Train to Jamalpur

by Andrew Martin

  Charles Sermon removed his horn-rimmed glasses, fished out a handkerchief from beneath his cape, wiped his glasses and set them back on his nose. Having verified my identity, he raised a hand in greeting, before turning to say a few words to his Indian companion.

  When we converged on the black beach – with the rain repeatedly relenting with a sigh, only to then redouble its force – all was gentlemanly. Sermon, wheezing badly, shook my hand. I introduced Deo Rana to Sermon, who indicated the mali, saying ‘You’ll recognise Gopal from the Institute.’ He added in a confidential tone, ‘He’s the stoutest of fellows, Jim,’ although ‘stout’ was exactly what Gopal was not. Shouting over the rain, Sermon continued, ‘I owe you an apology, Jim, for trespassing on your investigation, but when you said you were on the trail of the big snake chief of Calcutta, I spoke to Gopal, and he knew just who you meant. Gopal knows snakes, Jim. Every gardener in the city wages a constant war against them.’

  ‘But where is he?’ I said. ‘The big snake chief?’

  Sermon turned and pointed along the black waterway. Beyond the broken sailing ship, in the direction that might have been called ‘upriver’ if the water in Tolly’s Nullah could be said to flow, there was another boat. Deo Rana was already making towards it. I had figured this craft for a bamboo hut constructed on the very edge of the water, whereas in fact the mass of thatch I had seen through the rain formed the roof of the cabin of a moored boat.

  ‘He’s in there?’ I asked Sermon.

  ‘He’s in there all right, along with a lieutenant or comrade of some kind. The boat is a sort of floating reptile house. It’s moored at its regular berth, Jim. According to Gopal, he sails up the Nullah every few weeks, bringing snakes from up country.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Sell to the charmers, Jim. Or anyone else who wants one, and I don’t think he’s too particular about his clientele. Hold on a moment,’ Sermon added, and he walked over to the waiting tonga-wallah and spoke a word to him, dismissing the fellow. I began walking towards the snake boat, with Sermon and Gopal following behind. I could see that it was sharply pointed and upraised at bow and stern, like a paper boat.

  ‘I don’t know how you want to play it, Jim,’ Sermon called out, ‘but I’m at your service if you want to try and run him in.’

  I didn’t see how we could do that, since we now had no carriage in which to convey an arrested party. Sermon was walking at my shoulder. ‘I’ve taken the day off work especially for this, Jim.’

  I had hoped to see Sermon here, but had he anticipated my arrival? Was anything to be made of the fact that he had pitched up in advance of the time I had mentioned as being that of my own rendezvous? The question went begging as two white-clad Indians emerged from the black bamboo cabin of the moored boat, and stood on the small foredeck. One of the two might have been twenty, the older might have been eighty. The younger carried an ordinary cane chair, and the elderly party now sat in it. The assistant then ducked back into the cabin, and re-emerged carrying a thick black-and-white snake – a python, I believed. He draped the snake over the shoulders of the elderly party, who now sat in state in the pounding rain, ready to receive petitions, like a mayor with his chain of office, and his assistant took up station beside him like the town clerk. But it seemed the elderly party wasn’t happy with the way the snake had been draped, and he wanted it adjusted by his assistant. When this had been accomplished, the snake chief set about staring directly ahead from his chair – and I was powerfully reminded of the pet shop owner of Seven Dials, London, as depicted by Dougie Poole.

  Deo Rana was the closest one of us to the boat. He stood by the half-rotted mooring post to which it was tethered. Alongside this post, and practically keeled over, was one of the half-dead-looking bushes supposed to give protection against snake bites: a manasa tree. It was the only instance of vegetation on the riverbank, and it did not look very long for this world. Half concealed beneath it, I saw a white stone.

  Deo Rana called out to the two on the boat, and it was the young assistant who gave the reply. They began a conversation I could not understand. I stepped forward, so that I was by the side of Deo Rana.

  ‘Not here,’ said Deo Rana, half turning towards me.

  ‘You mean I shouldn’t be standing here, Deo?’ I said. ‘In that case, why are you?’

  Deo Rana was indicating his own right ear, while pointing towards the old chap on the boat. He had said, ‘Not hear.’ The snake man was deaf, like his bloody snakes. I had been warned of this, and I had forgotten it. He looked deaf as well somehow, or at any rate appeared sunk in on himself. He looked blind too, for the matter of that, with too much white in his eyes.

  Deo Rana leapt on to the foredeck of the boat. The young assistant began yelling abuse at him, while the old chap commenced a fast, low muttering, as though uttering an incantation or a curse.

  ‘Looks like we’re in for bother,’ said Sermon.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ I called out to Deo Rana, meaning what was the young Indian saying. It was Charles Sermon who answered: ‘He says it is forbidden to board the boat.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘But I’ll not take orders from that gentry. We go on after your man, do we?’

  I leapt aboard. Honour demanded that I follow Deo Rana. The snake man increased the speed of his cursing. The python was circulating about him, following a path familiar to it. His companion was screaming at Deo Rana, who had now stepped inside the bamboo cabin. I stepped in after him. There were barrels and boxes and baskets in there; an oil lamp hung from a central bamboo beam, and it smoked the place out. The rain was dripping through the roof. The boat gave a jolt, and as I put my hand up to the beam to support myself, Deo Rana called ‘Huzoor!’ A snake was coiled tightly around the beam; and I had touched it. I stepped back, heart racing. It was coiled like toffee; yet it had felt like oiled, rough leather, and it was green. Above all, it had felt like leather, like an old book, and so it was like a moving book. The young assistant was now inside the creaking, dripping cabin alongside us, and his rage had taken a different form. He was quite silent as he went about his business of upending boxes and kicking over baskets.

  ‘Boat is moving, huzoor,’ said Deo Rana, and the snakes were also moving, flowing all about the cabin. I had not yet touched a second snake, but there was a whole uncoiling heap of them by my boot. If I moved my boot an inch, I would touch them. And so I didn’t move my boot. But the snake on the beam was also unwinding, and its head was wavering towards me, and so I needed to move. But because of the boot snakes, I could not move. Deo Rana had picked up a basket lid to protect himself. He was shouting, ‘Huzoor, you have gun! Shoot!’

  Shoot what? The snake man’s assistant was no longer with us. I kicked out three times at the boot snakes. That sent some of them away, but others were coming back. Marshalling all my courage, I tried to drag the coiled snake away from its beam, but it tensed and held on, like a disembodied arm flexing its muscles. Its wandering head was looking for me again, and now its mouth was open.

  Deo Rana was shouting his latest bit of bad news. ‘Door is closing, huzoor.’

  The door was woven bamboo like the rest of the place, but it looked pretty solid, and pressure was evidently being put on it from outside. The snake man’s assistant was attempting to shut us in. I took out my pistol and fired at the door. While I was at it, I fired twice into the tangle of floor snakes, and there was now a massed hissing combined with the seething of the rain and the creaking of the bamboo. The hissing was exactly like the noise made by a human audience that disapproves of the words of a speaker’s words. Heedless of snakes, with head down and eyes shut tight, I marched at the door and lunged thought it, gaining the foredeck; Deo Rana followed, and we stood there under the rain and the black sky. We were spinning forlornly in Tolly’s Nullah just as the smaller boat upstream had been set spinning by the rising waters. The snake man had vacated his post, but his chair remained. Of his young companion there was no s
ign. My bullet would have gone through the door; therefore I might have shot him into the water. I still held the Webley. On the black riverbank, I saw Sermon and Gopal the mali. Had Sermon attempted to come on board? Who had cast the boat off from its mooring? Had that been Sermon’s doing? Sermon was signing to us, indicating that we should jump for the bank, and the rotation of the boat would take us within leaping distance of the bank inside a few seconds . . . but I would not have the luxury of waiting, because with a mighty slap the python landed on the foredeck between Deo Rana and me. It was as if the weather gods had hurled down a giant snake, having concluded that the rain was not having a bad enough effect. I leapt as the beast began to flow over the deck boards, and I landed on the slimy bank, half in and halfout of Tolly’s Nullah. The water was warm, and slimy like oil, and I had to claw at the bank to drag myself out of it. Deo Rana made a better leap and he landed a few feet away. I had dropped my pistol as I landed, and Deo picked it up off the riverbank mud. I looked back at the boat. The snake man and his assistant had somehow transferred to the small aft deck. They must have scrambled over the roof of the cabin, and one of them must have pitched down the python from up there. But pythons were not venomous, so I supposed that was no worse than having a log pitched at you.

  The snake men’s boat was now spinning away, receding behind a curtain of rain. Charles Sermon and the gardener, Gopal, were now walking away along the beach, heading downriver, back in the direction from which we’d all come; and they had been joined by a third man, who wore a tightly buttoned white mackintosh. Even through the swirling rain I could see that this newcomer was Professor Hedley Fleming, and I felt pride in having lured him here. I almost had a full complement of suspects.

  I rose to my feet and, half-sodden, I approached these three.

  ‘Who cast the boat off?’

  ‘The young fellow,’ said Sermon. ‘I’m sorry, but I was rather distracted.’ Sermon indicated Fleming, saying, ‘I was just asking the doctor if he’d be good enough to explain his business here.’

  Professor Hedley Fleming’s spectacles were steamed up by the storm, but that hardly mattered, since he seldom made eye contact anyway. Hedley Fleming was attempting to explain to Sermon his presence at the waterside. ‘Stringer here showed me his map. As far as I could gather, he seemed to think the site was significant in terms of the dealing in snakes.’

  ‘Did you see the boat?’ I said. ‘It was full of them.’

  ‘I daresay it was.’

  I said, ‘You don’t think there’s anything queer about a boat-load of bloody snakes?’

  Professor Hedley Fleming removed his glasses, and wiped them with a handkerchief, but not for the purposes of looking at me. Instead, he was looking down at my mud-soaked trousers. ‘Do you have any notion of how many snake charmers there are in this city?’ he demanded, ‘and how many snakes the average one of them gets through per mensem, never mind per annum?’

  For all the success of my scheme, there was the problem of time with Fleming, as there had been with Sermon. I had told Fleming that I planned to seek out the snake man in mid-afternoon on this day. Strange though it was to speak of mere timekeeping in that apocalyptic deluge, it was not yet one o’clock. Fleming, like Sermon, had pitched up early. I put this to Fleming, and he said, ‘I am not bound by your appointment diary, Captain Stringer.’

  ‘Did you know of the boat beforehand?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  I was suggesting that he was a regular client of the snake man, and that he had come here today in advance (as he thought) of my own visit, so as to warn him of my arrival. What I actually said was, ‘We’re only a short walk from the Zoological Gardens.’

  Fleming got the point: he was being accused; and he turned on his heel, indignant. He was about to stalk off in a rage when his eye – and mine – fell on the figure of a man standing in the doorway of the half-wrecked pumping station. The figure retreated into the building as we looked his way. He had been a small man, overwhelmed not only by the rain, but also by his own rain cape. Charles Sermon had seen him too, and it was he who pronounced the name: ‘That was Douglas Poole, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Who?’ Fleming demanded. ‘Because he’s been following me around for days. Perhaps you can tell him for me, Stringer: he’d better desist.’

  At this, Fleming walked away, heading back towards Bhawanipore Road, and Dougie Poole emerged from the ruined pumping station to watch him do it, eyeing Fleming in a defiant sort of way until he disappeared into the rainstorm.

  Sermon, Gopal, Deo Rana and I now stood in a semicircle before Dougie Poole. Behind him, in the wrecked interior of the pumping station, lay something resembling a giant riveted bath tap fallen over on its side. Poole was sipping from a flask; his rain cap was about two sizes too big.

  ‘Well, Dougie?’ I said. ‘And by the way, I think you know Charles Sermon from the traffic office?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dougie Poole, nodding. ‘I saw you leaping from the boat, Jim.’

  ‘Did you see the python?’

  ‘I did. I thought that might account for the leap.’

  Dougie Poole offered the flask to Sermon and me; we both declined.

  ‘I’ve got some fascinating data for you about our friend Fleming,’ said Poole.

  Alongside me, Charles Sermon was breathing hard. ‘Shall we step inside this waterworks?’ Poole continued, indicating the pumping station. ‘. . . Not that it has a roof.’

  We all moved through the doorway. There was half a roof; therefore half as much rain was falling inside as outside. I now saw that, beside the giant tap that had keeled over, another remained upright by its side, as though in mourning for its dead companion; and there was a mix of abandoned plumbing running all over the muddy floor, the pipes looking snake-like to my mind.

  I said, ‘What’s the fascinating data about Fleming, Dougie? Is it the fact that he was walking out with the woman who became Mary Bennett?’

  This must have been the ‘intriguing alliance’ – as disclosed by the photograph in the Debating Society dance album – that Mrs Young had been about to reveal to me before the intervention of her riotous son. I was sure that I had seen the glint of Hedley Fleming’s glasses in that photograph. The picture had dated from 1918. Since then the relationship had soured, and Mary had transferred her affections to Superintendent Christopher Bennett.

  Poole took a long time to digest this hazard of mine. ‘Well, Jim,’ he said at length, ‘I must admit that my news isn’t quite so fascinating as that, but it’s grist to the same mill. I was only going to say that I’ve been tailing Professor Fleming of late, and I’ve twice lost him in the railway lands of Howrah. Both times he went there with a wicker basket over his shoulder. I couldn’t see any motive though: why would he be stowing snakes on the trains? But now we do have the motive. The woman he loved was stolen from him by the head of the railway police. So he takes his revenge by committing a series of terrible crimes that the head of the police can’t solve. What better way to do it?’

  At this, Deo Rana spoke up. ‘If he kill head of police,’ he said, ‘that is better way.’

  ‘But he may have found it preferable to inflict a long humiliation,’ I said, turning to Deo, and it did seem to me that Fleming himself had been subject to a long humiliation that he would want to revenge: the humiliation taking the form of Mary Bennett’s incessant and very public boasting about her marriage.

  Of course, Christopher Bennett knew of Hedley Fleming. It was impossible that two Cambridge graduates of about the same age in Calcutta, who attended the same social functions, would not have coincided. Bennett must also have known of the previous association of his wife and Fleming, and surely he not only suspected Fleming, but could also guess at his motive. This was what he had meant when letting slip that he found the snake crimes ‘ungentlemanly’. Having identified man and motive he was, as he had said, ready to make his move. But he obviously hadn’t made it yet.

  It would be up to us
to make it for him.

  IV

  Against all the odds, we found a tonga in Bhawanipore Road. There was room for only four inside, so Dougie Poole volunteered to follow on foot. Our destination was a mere half mile away: the Zoological Gardens, and the office of Hedley Fleming. Or perhaps we would overtake him on the way. I had it in mind to simply confront the professor with the facts as we knew them, and see how he reacted. I would then take those facts, and the news of that reaction, to Superintendent Christopher Bennett. I would force Bennett’s hand, in other words. Later on I would likewise confront Detective Inspector Khan, and give him my theory about the killing of John Young on the Jamalpur Night Mail. I had nothing to lose; I would bail out of the Commission of Enquiry, just as Fisher had done. My wife was pregnant and I wanted to get her home as soon as possible.

  But no: that train of thought was utterly illogical. I had a great deal to lose by Khan learning that I knew the truth, and not so much to gain. My knowledge of his crime was a card only to be played in extremis.