In the tonga, I sat next to Charles Sermon. Deo Rana and Gopal the mali sat opposite. I unbuttoned my rain cape, so as to air my sodden trousers. Sermon had done likewise, although he could not have been as soaked through as I was. He had not, after all, gone bathing in Tolly’s Nullah. In the course of arranging my clothes, I discovered in my suit-coat pocket the bundle of documents concerning the doings of the Company in 1919. I had ‘borrowed’ these papers from the office, and now they were no doubt ruined. Jogendra would not be pleased. I unfurled the bundle, and instantly read ‘News from the Out-Stations’. That was in bold, so I didn’t need my reading glasses to make it out. I had opened the bundle at a page of the Company magazine describing social events, and weddings in particular. The date at the top of the page was also clear enough: September 1919, as was the sub-heading ‘Burdwan Blessings’. Burdwan was on the Grand Chord, not far out. For the most part, the print of the article itself was a little more hazy, but I read, ‘Mr F. De Souza, the very popular engineer, married Miss Noreen Ford, late of Calcutta, and daughter of Mr P. Ford, Permanent Way Inspector.’ There was a picture of the happy couple. It was a pound to a penny that they were Anglo-Indians. She was very pretty, and she carried a wreath. In a photograph without colour the flowers appeared white, and I believed that was because they were white.
Charles Sermon, by my side, wore glasses at all times. He could therefore read perfectly well, even in the semi-gloom of the shaking tonga . . . and he was breathing heavily. The flowers in the wreath held by the bride were white carnations. I turned to my left and saw the white carnation in the buttonhole of Sermon’s suit coat. He wore a white carnation every day, and he had taken the trouble to obtain one this morning even though he knew the business he had in store was not of a very decorous nature. The white carnation, then, was of the greatest importance. It went to the very heart of the man. I delved into my suit coat for my reading glasses, and I put them on. Deo Rana was eyeing me carefully. Sermon was wheezing. I read the confirmatory words, ‘The bride carried a beautiful bouquet made of her favourite white carnations.’
I removed my glasses, as the truth broke in upon me. The ‘intriguing alliance’ that Mrs Young had meant to show me at the Insty was not that of Hedley Fleming and the woman who became Mary Bennett (even though I believed I had glimpsed Fleming in the assembled party, and possibly standing beside that same Mary). That, I now realised, could not possibly be the liaison Mrs Young had in mind. After all, she did not know Christopher Bennett. When I had indicated him to her as the Debating Society dance, she had looked blankly, and on top of that, she had lowered her voice when pointing to the photograph. If she had been referring to Christopher Bennett, she would not have needed to do that: he was not in the bar of the Insty, but Charles Sermon had been in the bar, and sitting only a few feet away. Was it not possible that the surprising alliance was that of Charles Sermon, long-time bachelor and pukkah sahib, and a young and beautiful Anglo-Indian woman: between Charles Sermon, in fact, and the young woman smiling up at us from the page of the East Indian Railway Magazine: Miss Noreen Ford? Snakes had first appeared in the first class compartments of the Railway when Miss Ford, lost to Charles Sermon, had moved from Calcutta and married a fellow Anglo-Indian, an altogether less surprising alliance.
But why had the snakes made their reappearance in April of this year, and with far more devastating results than the first time?
I turned towards Charles Sermon. I indicated the photograph.
‘What do you suppose came of her?’
Sermon did not answer my question, but he held a gun in his hand. At a nod from Sermon, the mali flung open the door of the tonga. We had rolled to a stop, and we were at the zoo. The giant birdcage was beyond the swinging door of the tonga, and so were two police constables. I did not know how the constables had come to be there, but the sight of them checked the flight of Gopal the mali. Sermon turned to me with gun pointed. He said, ‘I will thank you not to say “she” when speaking of a lady,’ and Deo Rana shot him in the head. There came a mighty screech from the giant birdcage and the giant bird inside it began circling madly at its uppermost level. The tonga had now set off again but it, like the bird, was not going anywhere, only circling. I climbed down. One of the two horses that had pulled the tonga had been killed by the continuation of the bullet that had killed Charles Sermon, and the surviving horse was endeavouring to drag the whole equipage around in a circle, which was evidently a more fascinating form of animal entertainment than offered elsewhere in the zoo, for in spite of the teeming rain, we were surrounded by quite a crowd.
Chapter Fourteen
I
It was Wednesday 16 May, and I was walking with Lydia on the Calcutta maidan. She and Bernadette had returned from Darjeeling that morning. It had been business as usual for King Sol throughout the day, and he was now winding up his operations. It was five o’clock, and we had just had tea on the terrace of Willard’s Hotel. Lydia was glad to be back, beyond the range of the visiting card tyranny, and she was looking forward to giving her talk to a branch of the Women’s India Association. We were fairly confident that Bernadette was at that very moment practising piano in the basement music room of the hotel.
As we walked, I said, ‘What is the condition of her love life?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lydia, ‘and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’
In fact, I believed that she did know, but I did not want to cause her undue anxiety by pressing for an answer. I had forgotten – it was becoming ever more embarrassingly evident – almost every detail of the wife’s first two confinements. (I could remember little beyond the persistent smell of something called Scrubb’s Cloudy Ammonia.) But I assumed that undue anxiety was the sort of thing a pregnant woman should be avoiding. Also, I myself was now less anxious about Bernadette, the wife’s unexpected pregnancy having suddenly promoted her in my mind to the status of adult.
But for most of our walk, and for most of our tea, we had been discussing the shooting of John Young, and the bad business that had occurred at Tolly’s Nullah two days previously. As to the first, I had explained in full Khan’s actions, and I said I still didn’t know to what extent he had acted alone. Lydia had not believed that Khan could have acted alone. He must have had the authority of his superiors. I put this down to her willingness to think anything bad of the British ruling classes, but her point was a bit more subtle. She saw the beginnings of an alliance between the imperial power and the Moslems. The British, she thought, would attempt a policy of divide and rule, buying off the Moslems with political concessions so as to get their support against the Hindus who were the mainstays of the nationalist movement. But I didn’t believe Khan was anybody’s stooge, and when I put that to the wife, she had nodded rather wistfully in agreement. I believed that in spite of all he’d done she rather admired Khan, found him romantic and dashing.
As for Tolly’s Nullah and the bloody denouement at the zoo, I had told the wife the tale, but in a rather fragmentary way, since I had been coming and going all day between Willard’s Hotel, Fairlie Place and the Alipore Jail, where Gopal, the mali of the Railway Institute was being held as yet without charge, and where Deo Rana was also being held, on a charge of murdering Charles Sermon.
Lydia said, ‘When exactly did this Noreen Ford die?’
‘That’s not quite clear. But late March of this year, in the Railway Hospital at Burdwan.’
‘And it was a cancer?’
‘Yes. Sermon would have heard of it by early April one way or another, and then he started leaving the snakes on the trains.’
‘In co-operation with this other fellow, the gardener at the Institute?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was in it for him? The gardener, I mean.’
‘Money. It made sense for Sermon to have an accomplice: they could divide the duties, alternating the jobs of collecting the snakes and putting them into the carriages.’
We walked on.
It ‘made sens
e’ only insofar as any of it made sense. Charles Sermon was a nut. But then again, it appeared that he had courted Noreen Ford in a civilised and loving way, and it had been a genuine alliance even if a strange one. It might even have lead to marriage in spite of the age difference, but the girl had been rejected by Sermon’s fellow railway officers; rejected, that is, by first class-travelling society. Or so he thought.
Earlier that day, I had questioned the head of traffic, William Askwith, on the point. He was still in Darjeeling (although just about to return) so I had spoken to him by telephone. I had told him the story of Sermon, and he had found it ‘both horrible and deeply sad’, but it also seemed to me that he was relieved I was not calling on another matter.
Regarding Sermon, he said, ‘We British started crooked on the Anglo-Indian question, and crooked we have remained.’ For him, the Anglos were an important prop of British rule, and they were the crucial prop when it came to running the railways. He himself had always made efforts to bring them on. Yes, he had seen Sermon together with the girl at a couple of social events at about the time of the end of the war. He did not believe they had been ostracised. ‘It was more a case of people being bemused, or even, I’m afraid, amused. Sermon was a lifelong bachelor you know . . . I suppose the pair of them might have thought they were being cold-shouldered.’
Lydia said, ‘I don’t quite see how the death of the girl could have triggered it all. I mean, she would presumably have died of the cancer even if she’d married him and stayed here? So how can he blame the Railway for that?’
There could be no answer, except to say that the death of the girl had put Sermon into a rage.
We continued our walk.
Lydia said, ‘And tell me again . . . why were the police constables at the zoo?’
‘They were accompanying Superintendent Bennett. He’d gone there either to question or arrest Hedley Fleming. He suspected there might be trouble, but at the last minute he’d asked them to hang back, and he’d gone into Fleming’s office alone.’
‘But Fleming was quite innocent?’
‘Quite. In fact, he’d begun his own investigation of the matter, which is why he’d been going off to the railway lands . . . as observed by Dougie Poole. There’s more to him than meets the eye, you know.’
‘Which is probably just as well.’
‘I approve of Dougie Poole. He says he hasn’t much “character” but in spite of everything, he’s dogged. He’s what I call a “stickler”.’
‘That’s the wrong use of the word.’
‘But you know what I mean. The way he—’
‘“Tenacious” is what you mean.’
‘The way he agreed to come out to India because his wife wanted it . . . he tried his best for her, but then when he saw he wasn’t cut out for the life, he made the decision to take his family back home. As for his difficulties at work . . . he found the system used in the office too complicated, and he put up with it for a while; then he came up with a better one. Finally, he tried to find out who the snake man was, and he’d identified his suspect and begun shadowing him. It was the wrong suspect, but I bet he’d have got on the track of the right one before long.’
‘I don’t see him beating his drink addiction,’ said Lydia.
‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to.’
‘What about the snake he had when he was a boy? What kind was it after all?’
‘I still don’t know. He’d written in about adders, but when I think of it now, he was only asking for advice on them. That’s no proof he actually kept one. Perhaps he knew that letter had survived in the collected volumes. Perhaps he also knew it might be a hostage to fortune given what was happening on the trains, so he tried to muddy the waters about what his true interest had been. But he didn’t cut out the page of the Insty’s edition of The Captain. Sermon did that to throw suspicion on Poole.’
‘But from what you say, he went inside the building to get the book, and came out a moment later with the page cut. So that was quick work.’
‘I believed he used the gardener’s scissors.’
‘To go back to the constables at the zoo . . .’ said Lydia. ‘They saw Deo Rana shoot Sermon.’
‘Apparently they said they had a clear sight of it, through the open door of the tonga; and they make out that it wasn’t necessary for Deo to shoot Sermon.’
‘But Sermon held a gun.’
‘They say he was giving the gun up.’
‘Why would they say that?’
‘Perhaps they really think it. I don’t know what they really think.’
‘But Deo Rana was only protecting you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he could end up hanged?’
‘Or in jail for a long time.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Something.’
We had come to a stand.
‘How do you know all that about Sermon anyway?’
‘From the confession of the mali, from diary entries and other material found in his flat.’
Whereas Lydia now wanted to return to the hotel to work on the first of the two talks she was scheduled to give to Indian women, I wanted to continue walking and revolving my thoughts. Two dusty roads, Dufferin Road and Mayo Road, intersected at this part of the maidan, and the occasional tonga would come along them. A tonga was approaching along Dufferin now. It was heading north-east, the direction of the hotel. I wouldn’t have let Lydia walk back over the darkening maidan alone, but she would be all right in a tonga. So I flagged it down.
I knew the wife’s talk was fixed for the coming Friday, but I had forgotten where, or perhaps I had never known. As she climbed up, I asked her.
‘The coal place,’ she said. ‘Asansol.’
I’d had a vague idea it was out of town, but I hadn’t realised it was quite as far out as that.
II
The tonga rattled away, and I was left alone in the velvet darkness of the maidan. The city sounded very far away. I headed due south over the blackened grass, towards the great bulk of the Victoria Memorial. After a minute I heard the fast-approaching sound of horses’ hooves; I turned about to see two riders approaching at a gallop. I stepped aside, but not before the second one had shouted, ‘You there – out of the bloody way!’
It was Fisher, and the rider a little way ahead of him was Detective Inspector Khan. They raced past me in the gloom, pounding on towards the reservoir called Elliot’s Tank, but they slowed before reaching the Tank; they then stopped and conferred, turned about and came thundering towards me. Fisher, I realised, was very nearly as good a horseman as Khan. I was not very surprised at that – Fisher was a remarkably capable fellow all round – and I was not so very surprised to see them together either. I had sent a chit to Khan that morning, marked as being strictly for his personal attention, and hinting at everything I knew about his plot to kill the revolutionary called Deep, or sometimes Ganguly, which had resulted in the death of John Young on the Jamalpur Night Mail.
When they came up, I spoke first to Fisher, and I thought I would be rude to him before he could be rude to me.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.
‘Collecting my things, aren’t I?’ he said.
‘Off up to Suryapore, are you?’
‘That’s it.’
‘And you’ve come back here to collect your things—’
‘I’ve just bloody said that.’
‘. . . And to have one last review of the blunder you made with your co-conspirator.’ I indicated Khan. I faced Khan, and I found I was shouting at him. ‘Fisher here saw India as a land of opportunity. He’s struck lucky with a maharajah, but a few weeks back he’d have done practically anything for cash. How much did you pay him go after Deep or Ganguly or whatever the name?’
Khan jumped down from his horse. He had a rifle attached to the saddle. The police would practise riding with rifles. He said, ‘This appears to be a continuation of the absurdities you were peddli
ng in your note.’
‘They’re facts, and you know it!’
‘If you continue shouting at me, Stringer, I will run you in. I’m on the point of doing so anyway for the killing of Young.’
I said, ‘Pull the other one, pal,’ and he winced at that. I’d known he would; it was why I’d said it. ‘If you were serious about pinning it on me, you’d have got Fisher to testify against me. You get credit for stopping short of that anyway. You were only questioning me to find out what I knew, and when you heard I’d been sniffing around about the reservation chart you were panicked into coming up to Darjeeling. I wonder if you two liaised up there? I doubt it. You knew you shouldn’t be seen together.’
‘I’m going to bloody lay you out,’ said Fisher, but he remained on his horse. ‘You’re off your bloody nut’, he said, ‘if you think I shot Young.’
‘You didn’t shoot him. A bloke called Sabir Huq had been hired to do the job, together with some of his confederates. Your role was to supervise the thing, make sure it all went off according to plan. When you went into that compartment, and you figured out the wrong man had taken the bullet, you didn’t bat an eye. You covered up brilliantly. Then you pretended to be interested in finding the culprit. For a while – until the Rajkumar came along with his business proposition. Well, I’ve got a proposition for the two of you: release Deo Rana from the Alipore nick, and I’ll say no more about it.’
Of course, it was only Khan who could fix this for me. It was probably to be expected that Deo Rana would be run in after the shooting. But the murder charge was not to be expected. It had come from the C.I.D., and I believed it was Khan’s doing in particular. I also believed he had done it because I knew I was on to him about the killing of Young, and he wanted a bargaining chip. However, he said nothing but just looked at me in a disgusted sort of way (at which he was very good), before remounting his horse and riding off with Fisher in tow, the pair of them cantering at first, then starting to gallop hard.
Night Train to Jamalpur Page 28
