It was a shame. I would have liked to have told them something else they already knew, namely that Fisher’s brief had also been to finish off Deep/Ganguly if Sabir Huq and his fellows should funk it. Of course, it never came to that, but Fisher would have equipped himself with a small calibre pistol, which he managed to dispose of unseen, and a silencer, which Canon Peter Selwyn had observed him disposing of.
I had previously concluded that the item Fisher had been seen pitching away must have been a cigar tube, but on the Friday last I had called into Hatzopolo’s cigar shop on Lindsay Street. I bought myself a couple of Havanas, and I asked about ‘my great pal’ Major Fisher. It was Mr Hatzopolo himself that I spoke to. He knew of Fisher and was evidently amazed that anyone should speak of the man as being a ‘pal’. I said I was interested in buying my pal a cigar tube, and Mr Hatzopolo regretted to inform me that Major Fisher was already in possession of such an item.
Fisher had been in the habit of coming in for Trichies, but on Wednesday 2 May (the day Fisher and I departed for Darjeeling) he had called in to buy a Havana and had also splashed out on a silver retaining tube. It had been perfectly clear that Fisher had never previously owned such a thing. Mr Hatzopolo recalled the conversation distinctly. He had attempted to persuade Fisher to buy one of the double tubes, which were only a little more expensive, and much more companionable. ‘You see,’ Mr Hatzopolo had explained, ‘you can carry one cigar for yourself, and one for a friend,’ and it was with a pained expression that Mr Hatzopolo recalled Fisher’s reply: ‘Sod that for a lark.’
The point was this: Fisher had not had a cigar tube in his possession when he rode on the Jamalpur Night Mail.
III
William Askwith knew something was up. Not that any expression appeared on his face as such, but when we sat down in Firpo’s restaurant, he immediately asked whether I would be having wine. I replied that I would be having one Beck’s beer, but that he should order away, and this he did without inhibition, going for ten rupees’ worth of decent red.
I had suggested that we meet, and it was Askwith who had suggested Firpo’s. Having practically ordered me to visit this famous Italian restaurant, it seemed to me that Stanley Harrington of the India Office could not begrudge the cost, and I intended to return at least once with Lydia before we sailed for Blighty. I liked Firpo’s. There was an affinity between the Italians and the Indians. At any rate, I was surrounded by a special, beautiful breed, of white-coated men with highly villainous moustaches, and slender, lustrous women who flowed from one graceful pose to another with no awkward moments on the way. The small band played something that hovered between ‘jass’ and chamber music, and the palms, and propped-open green window shutters, and the goldenness of the sunlight made me forget the feverishness of Cal, and think instead of the Riviera.
Askwith was entitled by his wealth and standing to move in this world of beauty, even if he, with his blank, white dot of a face, could contribute nothing to it. As a rule, this knowledge would have allowed him to enjoy Firpo’s, but not today. Today, on Thursday 17 May, William Askwith knew he was on the back foot.
He had returned from his house at Darjeeling just the day before, to find my chit proposing a meeting. He had agreed immediately, adding – anxiously, it seemed to me – the speculation: ‘I suppose you would like further details concerning the unfortunate Mr Sermon, such as may assist you in wrapping up that case, on which successful outcome, by the way, I offer my heartfelt congratulations.’
We had spoken about Sermon at first, but only until the waiter came for our food order. I went for ravioli, and Askwith followed suit, obviously not caring at all about the food, but only about what I might have to say. He must have been cursing me inside. I didn’t doubt that he thought me uncouth, barely a cut above Dougie Poole, and I had been rubbing it in by suggesting that the ravioli was ‘up to scratch’ and hoping that his wine – Chianti, naturally – was ‘a decent drop’. But whatever he thought of me, Askwith had had the good manners to keep it pretty well hidden, and so I did not prolong his agony but got down to business directly upon the arrival of the main course.
‘I received a document alleging corruption in the traffic department,’ I said.
Askwith ate a mouthful of ravioli. At the moment of swallowing, his face seemed to contract, his features becoming even smaller. ‘From Harold Jebb would that be?’
‘The document was sent anonymously.’
‘Is he not still at sea? I’m terribly sorry, Captain Stringer . . . James, if I may . . . It is imperative that I give you some important data about Harold Jebb.’
Askwith put down his knife and fork, and there was no prospect of his finishing the ravioli. His two-thousand-plus rupees per mensem, his freedom, his very life, now hung in the balance. ‘Harold Jebb – some people called him Harry . . . he and I never really saw eye to eye. He was perhaps in some degree resentful not to have achieved the promotions to which he felt merited by his abilities, and it’s possible he found me a hard taskmaster in a difficult and demanding job. I don’t wish to appear uncharitable, but I’m afraid it’s perfectly likely that this document of his would have contained numerous libels against his superior officers, and in particular against me.’
‘Well, I don’t know what the file said.’
‘No?’
‘Except that it alleged corruption. It was stolen from me on the very day I received it: 19 April.’
‘But . . . who do you suppose would have stolen it?’
‘I suppose you did.’
Askwith poured himself another glass of Chianti. His hand did not shake, but he drank it off fast, his face contracting with each gulp, somehow like one of those pale creatures that live on the bottom of the sea. ‘I most certainly did not,’ he said, setting down his glass.
‘Then somebody did it on your behalf. Perhaps your friend Superintendent Bennett?’
Askwith now sat back from the table, relinquishing the whole meal.
I said, ‘I have since been given some idea of the contents of the file.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the man who sent it.’
‘You have contacted Jebb, presumably telegraphically? But surely he is still at sea?’
He was spot on about the telegraphic communication, but not about Jebb being at sea. He had arrived safely in Eastbourne.
I said, ‘The source, when confronted, was only happy to identify himself as the author of the document, and to give the gist of its contents. He said had received intelligence that you had been given five hundred rupees by Macpherson Trading, makers of wheels for trains, in return for which you would argue the case for substantial increases in rolling stock. Of course, if that case were made successfully, the Board would sanction a big order from Macphersons.’
‘I see,’ said Askwith. ‘And did he say how he had found that out?’
‘At first, again, he was reluctant.’
‘But not for long?’
‘When pressed, he said the intelligence came from a senior man at the firm of Walker-Mitchell Engineering.’
‘Who also make wheels,’ said Askwith, nodding slowly.
‘Correct.’
‘But who are in a smaller way of business,’ Askwith continued, ‘and whom we may assume look upon the market position of Macphersons with more than a little jealousy.’
Askwith was rallying, and this wouldn’t do.
‘Is the allegation true?’ I asked.
His small face gave another spasm, and there was suddenly a tear in his eye. I had not bargained for this, and it quite mortified me. I asked if he would care for some water. Askwith shook his head.
‘I took the money,’ he said. ‘It was a cheque, payable to me personally, and drawn against the Macphersons account. It was sent by a man I know a little. I am not well acquainted with him. His name is Beattie: Patrick Beattie, a director of the firm. We had had a discussion about the traffic situation on the line; about how we as a department were over-stretched, and
how the fleets ought really to be supplemented, in both passenger and goods. This was, and is, genuinely the case.’
‘But still you took a bribe.’
‘That’s how it looks, but I had discussed another matter with Beattie. The St Dunstan’s Fund. I think you know of it. My wife is a patron.’
I nodded. ‘She gave me a leaflet about it. Two leaflets, in fact.’
‘It feeds the poor children of Calcutta. The cheque from Beattie was accompanied by a chit. It read simply, “For the cause that is dear to both our hearts.”’
‘But the cheque was made out to you.’
‘I decided to interpret that as a slip of the pen, and it wasn’t so great a sum. In any event I paid the cheque into my account, and I immediately transferred the same amount to the St Dunstan’s account.’
‘You have the records to prove this?’
‘Of course, of course. But my action was naive. And it came to seem to me that it could prove disastrous.’
‘You somehow got wind that Jebb was splitting on you. You learnt of the dossier, and you arranged for its removal from my office.’
‘I did so with the assistance of a friend. I would rather not say more, except for this: what Jebb stated was true as to the facts, but wrong as to the construction put upon them.’
‘You also stopped contending that new vehicles were required, and you wanted that to be a matter of record. You told me in Darjeeling that you had decided to make better use of the existing assets, and that a plan was in hand for improved diagramming of traffic.’
‘There was, and there is.’
‘But that is Dougie Poole’s plan.’
‘I did not say it wasn’t. But I accept that I pooh-poohed it when it was first presented, and I was too slow to give him credit for its virtues. Poole is a clever man, but he is . . . unorthodox.’
‘He rubbed you up the wrong way something rotten.’
Askwith winced at this, but I had delivered my last blow. I believed the man, or at least . . . I would give him the benefit of the doubt.
IV
This police statement requires that I recollect in accurate detail events occurring in a matter of seconds, events that went from being so much a matter of routine that I was hardly paying attention to such horror that I believe I ‘blacked out’, leaving only scraps of memory. But I will do my best.
I was travelling with my husband in a first class compartment of a train on the East Indian Railway. We had the compartment to ourselves, and we sat facing one another. The train was running over the main line from Calcutta, which I believe is called the ‘Grand Chord’. We were heading for the town of Asansol, where I had an engagement. As we approached a station that I later found out is called Khana Junction, my husband looked about for his newspaper, The Statesman, which he read every day. I said, ‘It’s still in your bag’, and he stood, and reached up to the luggage rack over the seats on his side. He got hold of his bag, and he fished about in it, saying, ‘I can’t see it here, did I leave it in the tonga?’ for we had taken a tonga from our hotel to Howrah station, and he had been looking at the paper then. We were both looking up at the luggage rack, and all I can say is that when my husband gave up his search, and turned back around, I noticed a snake on the floor by his feet. I assumed it must have come out from under the seat on his side. It was about three foot long, and black with white stripes. My husband saw it, and I cried out ‘Don’t!’ even as he lowered his right hand towards it. I shall never be able to account for this movement of his, but I believed he meant to grab hold of the snake behind its head as being the one sure way of eliminating the threat. Or perhaps he did not think it was venomous, but that I can’t believe since my husband has, of late, had a good deal of experience with snakes.
The snake lifted its head, and it bit my husband’s wrist. I screamed, and it was when I realised the snake would not let go, that it was showing the full force of its evil – that is when everything went black for me . . .
I lay aside the statement of Anne Kerry, wife of Colonel Kerry, who had been bitten at Khana Junction, on the Grand Chord, on 23 April, the day I had boarded the train to Jamalpur.
I eyed my own wife, who was sitting opposite. We too were rolling along the Grand Chord, and soon we too would be at Khana, and then Asansol, where she would be giving her talk to the women of India, or about fifty instances thereof.
The embroidered panels of our compartment were green, with a pattern of vines. The fan did not overexert itself, and yet, beyond the window slats, a mobile fire continually burned: King Sol was fighting to come in.
Lydia was sipping a soda and wearing her new reading glasses (which she would only wear in front of her family) as she worked on her speech. She’d got into rather a tangle with the idea of ‘co-operation’. Here she was, a representative of the British Women’s Co-Operative Guild (Yorkshire division), and she would be addressing a society of Indian women who would undoubtedly be keen on the Mahatma’s notion of non-co-operation. I had suggested that her theme might be the necessity of co-operating in order to bring about non-co-operation. But this had been a joke, because pursuing any such theme would probably have got her arrested. In fact, the message she was bringing from the Yorkshire Co-Operative Guild was that socialism could help Indians – Indian women especially – to fulfil the noble Hindu idea of Vedanta, or enlightenment through oneness. (Whether her senior colleagues in Yorkshire would have approved of this message had they known about it was another matter again.)
Bernadette sat next to her mother. She also sipped a soda, while reading a magazine called Mainly for Memsahibs. She was looking at pictures of hats. Earlier on, she had been reading Philpott’s Hindustani Manual, and I had watched her lips moving as she attempted to pronounce the phrase for ‘I have one elephant’. Prior to that, she had been asking me how ‘one’ would get from York to Oxford on the train. ‘There’s no direct service,’ I’d replied rather warily. Theoretically I should have been in a state of outright panic, since all the signs pointed to her having formed an alliance with some new young man, probably Indian, who was proposing to study at Oxford University. But the question of Lydia’s pregnancy continued to override such considerations. Bernadette did not yet know that her mother was pregnant.
Bernadette put down her magazine, kicked off her shoes, and curled her legs up beneath her. She eyed me.
‘Spill,’ she said.
She meant that I was to tell her the full story of the killing of John Young, followed by the full story of the snakes on the trains, as I had promised to do. I gave her the two stories, with Lydia looking up and scowling at me whenever I became too graphic in describing the effects of snake bites. I would certainly not be disclosing the distressing details of Anne Kerry’s statement for example, which I had brought along with me, together with all the papers I could get hold of touching on the snakes. I rather fancied there was book in it all, something in the Edgar Wallace line. I had my future to consider, given that I would soon be resigning from the Commission of Enquiry, thereby letting down Bennett (not that he wouldn’t be keen to see the back of me), but also, and more importantly, my chief in York who had recommended me in the first place.
Perhaps the R.K. would come up trumps, and push a lot of money my way for turning up some small-gauge railway kit in Blighty. Or perhaps that had been nothing more than a fleeting notion in the mind of a young man with a generous nature and far too much money. My speculations on that front were, of course, kept from Bernadette, as were those concerning the perhaps-dubious behaviour of her friend Claudine’s father, William Askwith.
But as my mind ran along these lines, Bernadette was still considering the matter of Charles Sermon. Picking her magazine up again, she said, ‘Well, it shows the racial question should not come into matters of romance.’
‘Yes,’ said Lydia, breaking off from her work to look with approval at her daughter.
‘You feel sorry for Mr Sermon, then?’ I asked Bernadette.
‘No .
. . No, I don’t. It’s the horse I feel sorry for. I think your Deo Rana jolly well should go to jail for shooting the horse in the head, at least for a while.’
But Deo Rana had been released from the Alipore Jail early the previous evening, the murder charge against him dropped. Then, towards midnight, a package had been left for me at the hotel reception: a single silver cigar tube with a Havana inside it, and a rolled-up note:
See how you go along with this. A better class of smoke than you’re used to.
Yours,
Fisher.
Squinting through the window slats, I said, ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s interested in seeing a superb assortment of East Indian Railway tank engines?’
The wife looked up at me, and smiled: ‘You’re right about that, Jim.’
About the Author
Andrew Martin is a journalist and novelist. His critically praised Jim Stringer series began with The Necropolis Railway in 2002. The Somme Stations‚ the seventh Jim Stringer novel‚ won the 2011 CWA Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award.
Praise for Andrew Martin and his Jim Stringer novels:
‘Martin’s skill at evoking period and place with meticulously chosen and lightly applied detail‚ takes his novels far beyond the supposed bounds of genre fiction.’ Sunday Times
‘Iconoclastic‚ entertaining and often devastatingly witty.’ Barry Forshaw‚ Independent
‘Impressively researched‚ his novel captures the language of the era in often humorous ways . . . the novel is certain to continue entertaining devout Jim Stringer fans as well as those picking up the series for the first time.’ Financial Times
‘A clear winner in literary crime writing . . . Dazzling attention to detail and quality from one of our best contemporary male novelists.’ Daily Express
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