The Baghdad Railway Club

by Andrew Martin

  The booklet contained a folded sheet of flimsy paper.

  ‘Open it out,’ Manners had commanded.

  I had done so in his office, and I did so now, seeing the following words in capitals, with their meanings set down alongside in lower case.

  ANCHOVY – Move immediately to arrest and detention of suspect.

  RUSTIC – Request prolongation of investigation.

  GRUFF – Request identity of local agent.

  RATIO – Impossible to proceed with investigation, request immediate return to London.

  LOCOPARTS – Turkish treasure located and secured.

  RELAX – Request telephonic communication.

  The beauty of the cipher – according to Manners – was that the words in capitals corresponded to the ciphers in the railway code book. In that, as I knew without looking, ‘Anchovy’ came under the heading ‘Missing and Tracing’, and meant ‘Item certainly sent; have further search made, and wire result’, while ‘Rustic’ was under ‘Forwarding’ and meant ‘Wire full particulars of despatch under delivery’.

  Now the telegraph clerk in the British Residency – a trusted man supposedly, but you never knew – would either have an understanding of the railway codes, and believe that I really was asking the Head Clerk‚ Department F, War Office – Manners, in other words – to wire further particulars in some railway matter. (Not completely unlikely, since I was in the railway office of Corps HQ.) Or he would just be baffled by the word ‘Anchovy’, recognising it as some new code, separate from the standard military ciphers (with which he would be closely familiar). The third possibility was that, as a student of codes in general, the clerk might recognise ‘Anchovy’ as belonging to the railway code, know its meaning as given in that book, but realise that in this particular communication it was being given some new meaning. In which case, as Manners had said, ‘So what?’ For he would not know the new meaning, and could not discover it without having sight of the paper I now held in my hands.

  And whatever he thought, it was the clerk’s job to send the message.

  Also listed on the paper were the words I might receive by way of reply:

  CHRISTIAN – Will act as instructed.

  CRATE – Cannot accede to your request, continue investigation.

  JUMP – Terminate investigation.

  I recalled that in the railway code ‘Christian’ stood for ‘Nothing to indicate sender or cosignee’. I could not remember the railway meanings of the other words.

  I was restricted to this cipher. Therefore, I could not send ‘Boyd is dead. What do I do now?’, much though I would have liked to.

  Manners had considered the code a very clever dodge indeed, and amusing into the bargain. ‘However,’ he had said, ‘I would much prefer that you did not use it. The matter is too sensitive. Unless you wire “Rustic” you will remain in Baghdad for a month collecting evidence and acting quite independently.’

  Should I need to send a wire, he had stressed, it was imperative I did so from the telegraph office of the Residency, since the strategic and diplomatic communications were sent from there rather than from the telegraph office of the Hotel. The men at the Residency were more trusted, in other words. To make use of that office, a fellow needed a document of authorisation, and I had one of these in the same envelope as the code. Most of the words on this chit were typewritten. The important ones, however, were scrawled in a shockingly bad hand that I could not read. It began, ‘For the Attention of’, and then I couldn’t make out who it was for the attention of. Then it said, ‘Captain J. H. Stringer is hereby authorised to despatch and receive telegraphic communications of level . . .’ and the level I couldn’t make out either. It was signed by an unreadable personage (it might have been ‘Manners’) of ‘Department F, War Office’.

  I approached the gates of the British Residency, which was another palace on the river, this one set around a quadrangle.

  ‘It’s no go, sir,’ said the sentry, when I explained my business, showing all necessary credentials.

  ‘You mean you won’t let me in, Corporal?’

  ‘By all means go in, sir. You’ll find they’re serving tea and cakes on the veranda. Only, the telegraphic office is shut.’

  ‘What is it, Corporal? Half-day closing?’

  ‘Some wires are down, sir.’

  ‘Cut by the natives?’

  ‘Ten-to-one on, sir. The telegraph office in the Hotel ought to be operating, sir. Why not try there?’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s out,’ I said. ‘I must send to . . .’

  I looked through the gates and saw, in the quadrangle of the Residency, the man with the cine camera – bloody Wallace King. He stood by the side of the thing, for now he had an assistant to turn the handle, and the lens pointed directly at me. I turned on my heel, and the sentry called after me, ‘Come back tomorrow, sir! Be all fixed up by then!’

  In the labyrinth once more, I reflected that Wallace King and his camera would be the death of me. The man was a liability. But at least this reverse put off the question of whether I should send ‘Gruff’ or ‘Relax’, the two options I’d been revolving.

  I found I was wandering amid displays of dates, pastries, biscuits, breads. A sort of roof began to close over my head: wooden beams running between the houses with rushes laid over. Four sepoys came bearing down on me from the opposite direction, the second patrol I’d seen in ten minutes. This would be on account of the cut wires and – perhaps – the discovery of Boyd. I turned two more corners, and broke free of the labyrinth, finding myself walking towards the bridge of boats. Two army vans crawled across it, forcing the Arab river-watchers hard up against the rope barriers on either side . . . And the call to prayer was once more rising up from all over the town. Many Arabs were coming towards me along the river bank road, and I had a feeling of helplessness. I was outnumbered. But they began diverting to the right, towards a steeply rising terrace fringed by palms. It rose up towards a glittering mosque.

  I came to a brick and timber quay: a hurly-burly of loading, men and animals. Even the gulls seemed to say ‘Allah! Allah!’ A hot wind rose, sweeping dust off the top of a crumbling yellow brick wall that stood over the road from the quay. It enclosed a garden of palms, orange, lemon and other trees. In this garden – rising up from the river – a horse rider came and went between the trees, and I moved closer to the wall, trying to make sure of what seemed on the face of it an impossibility. The rider was a woman – a white woman. She wore jodhpurs, a white shirt, and some species of bowler hat. It was a funny sort of hat, but then everybody in this town wore a funny sort of hat, and she carried hers off particularly well. There was in general a trimness about her, and this taken together with the command of the horse . . . it all added up to a person I would like to have seen at closer quarters. But as I moved towards the wall in the fading light, an urgency came into the world, so that the wind rose, the prayer-call reached higher notes, the horse’s canter became a gallop, and it was up through the trees, clear of them, over a stretch of gravelled track by flower beds, and gone from sight through the gate of a castellated wall.

  I took from my pocket the map Jarvis had supplied. He’d taken a good deal of trouble over it. Some of the highlights of the eastern bank were marked: The Hotel GB, The Residency, Big Bizarre. (By which I took Jarvis to mean ‘Bazaar’.) Some streets were drawn in, and the names given them by the Tommies were set down: Dog-Pack Square, Straight Street, Cemetry View (as Jarvis had it), Clean Street, and here number 11 – the intended destination of Stevens – was marked although no reason given as to why. The park I now faced was also marked. With my back to the river, I looked at it. To the right of it lay streets with names that seemed to take their cues from the park: Rose Lane, Jasmine Lane, Lemon Tree Grove, and the address I’d been allocated, Rose Court. Beyond the park was the Cavalry Barracks, then the North Gate of the wall, which was the principal one. If Turks came back, they’d come by that way.

  I began skirting the park
(where thoughtful-looking Arabs sat under trees), making for Rose Court. As Baghdad streets went, Park Street was pleasantly wide and smooth, and to demonstrate the fact, a smart phaeton came trotting along it pulled by a well-groomed horse. But it was in the nature of this place that the horse should lift its tail as I looked on, and that it should deposit on the road bricks a considerable poundage of shit, which was then scattered by the wheels of the carriage in the vicinity of one particular set of open gates, beyond which I saw dark red roses. The place corresponded to Rose Court on my map.

  I was half an hour early for Jarvis, but I crossed the road and passed through the gate, where I saw many rose beds, fertilised by other instances of the stuff the horse had dropped. The garden air was overcharged with the dizzying smell of roses and horse shit, and the twisting sounds of evening birdsong . . . And voices. These came from behind a thicket of palm trees, and they were very English voices – one upper-class, one not so. Something told me to retreat from them, and I backed into a second area of palms, this one enclosing a rectangular ornamental pond of very green and dead water with rose petals scattered over it, unable to sink. It was Jarvis and Shepherd who were speaking. I could not make out particular words, although Jarvis broke through with ‘. . . That’s it, sir . . . reported by the station master . . .’

  There was then a question from Shepherd – and the soft civility he’d shown to me was evident, even though here was an officer addressing a private soldier. They separated after additional muttering, and I watched Shepherd go through the gate. As he crossed the threshold, a sudden rattle of piano music from one of the apartments in the compound seemed to cause him to give a skip, and to move away down the street at the double.

  I closed on Jarvis; a Ford van was parked behind him. He saluted, but did not snap to it as he had the night before.

  ‘Number four’s ours, sir,’ he said. ‘Very nice, sir, but dusty. The boy’s just giving it a clean over.’

  We eyed each other; the music had stopped.

  ‘Your things are already in there, sir,’ said Jarvis, leading off along a gravel track between low brick buildings.

  ‘How are you acquainted with Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, Jarvis?’ I enquired as we walked. ‘He was leaving as I arrived.’

  Jarvis didn’t break stride: ‘I’m not, sir, but I know who he is. I mean, I know he’s your governor in the railway department, sir. But besides that, I know he was at the railway station when the city fell. He was there with another officer, a man I do count a friend – or did.’

  I was nearly but not quite so blockheaded as to say, ‘You mean Boyd?’

  ‘. . . Name of Captain Boyd, sir,’ Jarvis ran on. ‘The police team put the notice up in Part One Orders just after lunchtime, sir. Found dead at the railway station this morning – in the buffet.’

  ‘And you were breaking the news to the lieutenant colonel?’

  ‘They’d seen action together. I thought it only right. Everyone knows they were the first men into this place – if you take the station to be part of Baghdad.’

  What would I ask if this were all new to me? I settled on ‘What unit was Boyd with?’

  ‘Hundred and Eighty-Fifth Machine Gun Company, sir.’

  ‘And how did you know him?’

  ‘I was batman to him down in Basrah. Before that, he’d done me a bit of a good turn, and that’s how we’d got acquainted.’

  So I had been given as batman the very fellow who’d done the same job for the man whose murder I was investigating.

  Was Shepherd behind this? Had Boyd himself been behind it?

  ‘You said he’d done you a good turn?’

  ‘Kut, sir . . . Saved my life, did Captain Boyd. I was very sorry when I was transferred back to driving duties after being with him three months.’

  ‘He saved your life? How?’

  ‘He brought me a drink of water . . . So I’m a bit down now, sir.’

  And he did seem genuinely cut up by the death of a man he thought a lot of; I would have to get the details out of him later.

  There were perhaps half a dozen small houses in the enclosure. An Arab stared at me from the doorway of one. ‘This is Ahmad, sir,’ said Jarvis. ‘He’s the boy.’

  ‘Hello Ahmad,’ I said, touching my cap.

  ‘Ack-mad,’ he corrected me.

  He was about six and a half foot tall, and at least forty – a rather glowering sort of fellow in a black robe and white turban. I nodded to him and he stepped aside, saying, ‘You will like it here,’ as if to say ‘You’d better do.’

  It was a hot box, really, with plenty of flies in it, but quite a decent diggings all considered, being pleasantly furnished, with two wicker sofas, scattered rugs on a stone floor, a divan, green-shaded oil lamps. Ahmad now upped the ante by saying, ‘You will really like it,’ a good deal of threat put into that word ‘really’.

  One doorway connected to a slightly more modest version of the same room: Jarvis’s quarters; another led to a narrow stone room running along the side of the building – a sort of scullery. Jarvis too had a door leading into this area, which in turn had its own exterior door leading out into the compound. Ahmad, who had his own sleeping quarters elsewhere, would come and go by this.

  We were back in the main room. Ahmad was pointing to the divan, saying, ‘You will have a piece of sleep.’

  He appeared to be commanding me to go to sleep there and then. It struck me that he might mean the peace of sleep. Jarvis, who was distributing my things about the room, said a couple of words in Arabic to Ahmad, who then went off.

  ‘He’s squared for half a dozen bottles of Bass, sir,’ said Jarvis; ‘he’ll be back with them in a minute.

  I said, ‘I hope he has them in a cool place. Do you suppose it was an Arab who did for Boyd?’

  Jarvis may have nodded.

  ‘They’re starting to turn, sir. A stone was pitched through the window of the Hotel.’

  ‘They were throwing flowers when we arrived,’ I said.

  ‘Some of them were,’ said Jarvis. ‘You see they’re not all the same. There’s the Sunni and the Shia. They have a disagreement about the religion. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but the Sunnis have been top dogs in Baghdad under the Turks, and they’re shaping up to be the same with us. They know how to toe the line, sir.’

  Ahmad returned with a bottle of Bass. I had a vision of him taking the cork out with his teeth – he had a good face for doing that sort of thing – but I saw it had already been removed. He handed it to me together with a small glass in a metal holder.

  ‘Clean glass,’ he said, in his sinister sort of way.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, nodding, and setting bottle and glass down on the low table in the centre of the room.

  ‘Drink,’ said Ahmad, eyeing me.

  ‘Can you tell him to go?’ I said to Jarvis.

  Jarvis got him out of the room, more by gestures than words.

  ‘Which do you suppose he is?’ I said when he’d gone. ‘Sunni or Shia?’

  ‘Shia, I think,’ said Jarvis.

  So he was part of the awkward squad. That was a bad look-out. I took up the bottle of beer, and thought for a moment: What if he’s poisoned it? It would have been a perfectly reasonable move on his part; I knew for a fact that no Arabs were allowed in the kitchens of the Hotel or the Residency, but I was parched so I raised it to my lips. After I’d taken a belt, I said, ‘You’ll have one of these yourself, won’t you, Jarvis?’

  ‘I will do sir, yes. Later on.’

  It wouldn’t really do for us to drink together, I knew that much.

  Jarvis said, ‘I don’t believe it was an Arab who killed Captain Boyd, sir, and I mean to find out who did. I’ve plenty of free time, sir. I mean to turn detective.’

  I gave this faintly alarming news the go-by, or tried to.

  ‘You were a detective yourself, weren’t you sir? On the railway force at York?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Jarvis,’ I said, ‘how
was it that Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd was actually here in Rose Court?’

  He was fixing the mosquito net over my bed.

  ‘I saw him walking past the gates just as I was driving in.’

  Having fixed up the net, Jarvis said, ‘This flipping place, sir.’

  ‘I thought you liked it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, I do try.’

  He was much less given to chirpiness than I’d first thought. And his uniform was quite black with sweat.

  Chapter Seven

  I traversed the Baghdad labyrinth. It was getting on for nine. The heat had hardly abated; the only difference was that the light had turned dark green again. Jarvis and Ahmad between them had prepared my evening meal: some species of spiced meat (Ahmad’s contribution), with fried potato (Jarvis’s doing). Jarvis had not eaten himself, but had gone off early to his bed with a bottle of beer. It bothered me that there was a connection between him and Shepherd. I’d now got possessed of the idea that they were in league; that Shepherd had been somehow instrumental in having Jarvis posted batman to me. But why would Jarvis have anything against a man who’d saved his life?

  I must find out more about what had befallen him at Kut-al-Amara.

  I turned into an alleyway, and saw a camel’s head on a pole. It stuck out from the front of a shop made bright by unshaded lamps and white tiles. In it sat two Arabs conversing pleasantly amid a litter of bloody camel parts. I saw two other camels’ heads further along, signifying another couple of butcheries. In fact it seemed this street was given over to the selling of camel parts just as certain quarters of any town in Blighty would be given over to the selling of motor-car parts. The heads put me in mind of one of my daughter Sylvia’s toys – hobby horse. That was a horse’s head on a stick, and it too looked pretty glum about it. I thought of the four weeks’ voyage that separated me from Sylvia. That was if malaria didn’t do for me, or cholera, or the ferocious Ahmad, or Shepherd and his associates (if any). In the ordinary military sense, I was safer in Mespot than I had been on the Western Front, only it was too hot here. It didn’t do to dwell on the fact, but I could hardly breathe.