Night Train to Jamalpur Read online

  I had forgotten about her. It struck me that John Young might easily be Catholic. Many of the Anglos were.

  ‘In India,’ John Young continued, ‘people have lots of names.’

  He resumed his examination of the photograph. Bernadette was rather cat-like in features, and her hair gave off a beautiful light, as could be seen even from the picture.

  ‘A clever girl, no doubt,’ John Young said.

  ‘She got into the high school on a scholarship,’ I said.

  ‘Our boy, too,’ said John Young. ‘We thought it would be the making of him,’ he added, but he was still studying Bernadette. ‘And she’s left the school now?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Has she been finished off?’ he said, grinning. For a moment I was minded to clout him, until I clicked that he was referring to finishing school.

  I shook my head. ‘We don’t go in for things like that in York.’

  Bernadette’s new friend Claudine Askwith, whose father was top brass in the traffic department, and came from Hampshire . . . she’d been to finishing school. Apparently, the main thing it had taught her was how not to appear educated.

  The train was slowing again, and none too smoothly. From beyond the closed curtain came a repeated clanging: most likely the flush chain on the thunderbox clashing against the carriage side. Presently we came to a complete stop.

  ‘Is this the single-line working?’ I asked after a while.

  John Young was at the window. ‘No, we’ve come into a station.’

  He invited me to look out.

  ‘I am using the term loosely, Jim.’

  The only sign of life was the haze of insects around each platform lantern. Nobody at all in the waiting shed. As a rule, you could expect some sleeping Indians, and any number of pi dogs. Then again, nobody had boarded or alighted from our carriage at any of the dozen or so stops we had made since Howrah. Someone out of sight blew hard on a pea whistle and we lurched away. I glanced down at my watch. Midnight, dead on.

  John Young said, ‘Are you in India on business, Jim?’

  III

  This was John Young’s own country, and it was only fair I should provide some explanation as to what I was doing in it. To buy time, I offered him a Gold Flake. I lit it for him, and lit my own. I sat back. John Young was a likeable fellow, and so he would get the truth; but not the whole truth.

  Some years before, the government of India had contracted the management of the biggest of the Indian railways – the East Indian Railway, headquartered in Calcutta – to a private company. Now the government was minded to run the show directly. The Company would be nationalised, this being the up-to-date method of running a railway almost everywhere except the homeland, and direct control of such a gigantic and important concern would help the government of India – that is, the British – to remain the government of India. It was anticipated that this transfer would occur a couple of years hence, in 1925 or so, and every man on the Company awaited the date with trepidation.

  The government was proposing to invest heavily in the railway, so as to take advantage of the traffic boom occurring since the end of the war. But the money must be properly directed, so economies would be implemented, defects discovered and corrected. ‘Rationalisation’ – that was the word Stanley Harrington had used . . .

  Stanley Harrington was a Secretary of the Transport Division of the India Office in London, and it was he who had recruited me to the Commission of Enquiry being conducted into the East Indian Railway. He had done so via my governor in the York railway police office, Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill. The chief had no end of contacts with the so-called intelligence agencies, and it was through him that I had been sent out to Mespot in 1917, to stew in Baghdad whilst keeping cases on a certain loose-cannon of a lieutenant colonel. My knowledge of secret police work and railways combined would make me the perfect man for India, Harrington had said.

  Harrington knew the East Indian Railway inside out. On the face of it, the show was economically operated. What with all that coal to hand, together with cheap labour, working costs were a mere thirty per cent of receipts. But Harrington believed there was ‘considerable laxity’ in its operation, and laxity was something he knew all about, being a large, slow-moving man, and the almost permanent inhabitant of a certain Italian restaurant around the corner from the India Office, in which he consumed mountains of ravioli and ice-cream before settling back with a cigar and numerous coffees. Harrington took me there every day for a week (during which he put me up at the Savoy Hotel), and in the first of our luncheons he offered examples of the Indian laxity, some of which were officially sanctioned. For instance, even the European clerks would take off all the Hindu and Moslem holidays. But very often brazen illegality was involved. ‘Would you believe that entire elephants, Captain Stringer, very often go missing from the marshalling yards?’ There was much outright theft; there was fraud, and there was corruption at all levels of the Company.

  In the subsequent luncheons, Harrington had explained about the three Schedules: A, B and C. The enquiries under Schedule A would relate to security arrangements in the yards, shops and works of the Railway. Those under Schedule B would touch on pilfering and corruption amongst junior staff – mainly Indians and Anglo-Indians. But it was Schedule C that was the ticklish one, and Harrington spoke of it in low tones even in the half-empty restaurant.

  Schedule C enquiries related to corruption amongst the gazetted officers, that is to say the mainly British top brass of the Company. Graft was rumoured to be commonplace at this elevated level, but hard information was in short supply. One had to peer into the interstices of the accounting systems, looking for the discrepancy between passenger numbers on a certain route and receipts obtained, or asking why less coal was consumed than was apparently justified by the number of trains stated to be running, and so on. But assuming these discrepancies were explained by crime, how were the guilty men to be quickly identified? That was a matter of circulating in the burra clubs of Calcutta with eyes peeled and ears cocked. I would be equipped with an expenses budget that would enable me to keep cases on the top men, socially speaking. ‘You’ll be wanting a good Italian restaurant,’ Harrington had said, ‘and Firpo’s on Park Street comes highly recommended. I believe you will recognise some of the puddings there as being similar to the ones served here. We can’t quite run to the real luxury hotels,’ he continued, ‘but I think they’ll do you pretty well at Willard’s on Chowringhee.’

  ‘Stayed there yourself, have you?’ I enquired.

  Harrington shook his head.

  ‘And you’ve not eaten at this place, Firpo’s?’

  He had not.

  I was on the track of an idea that had been growing in me since the first luncheon, and as we awaited the bill after the final one, I put the question to Harrington: ‘Have you ever been to India?’

  ‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a six-week round trip!’

  It appeared he was too busy administering India to go there. Besides, as he explained, he had a young family to take care of – and at this, I made my swoop. Might I take out my own wife and daughter? He agreed to my proposition before I could ponder the wisdom of having made it. My secondment was to last six months. When asked what I was about in India, I was at liberty to mention Schedule A and I might, with discretion, mention the closely related matter of Schedule B (it would be widely assumed that I would be giving hell to the humble Bengali clerks and coolies in any case) but Schedule C was top secret. Only the senior men in the East Indian Railway Police force, under whose auspices I would be working, knew about Schedule C, and it was on no account to be mentioned to anyone else. The stakes were too high. The Railway Board in India would press for the severest penalties where corruption was found among gazetted officers, and that had already started. A year before, a certain British mechanical engineer of a small ‘up-country’ workshop was found to have been constructing boilers of a slightly lower specification than the ones he
had been accounting for, and pocketing the difference to the tune of a sum in rupees amounting to not more than several hundred pounds. Even so, he – a married man with two young children – was now sweating out seven years in the Alipore nick, Calcutta, from which he would be lucky to emerge alive.

  I would be assigned a colleague for my investigations, and the two of us would form an ‘enquiry team’. This other fellow had only just been recruited. He would also be briefed by Harrington; he would sail for India just two days after me, and his name was Major Fisher.

  ‘The brief is to examine the crime-prevention measures, and look for loopholes,’ I said to John Young, after I’d told him some of the above.

  ‘And that’s why you’re going up to the Jamalpur workshop?’

  I nodded. ‘Just a bit of a poke around.’

  John Young was shaking his head, though still smiling. ‘It’s one big loophole, Jim!’ he said. ‘Take the goods side – consignors and consignees on the fiddle, almost always with the connivance of the railway staff. I tell you Jim, what’s not lost to outright burglary goes in insurance frauds.’

  He was rather squiffed now. The level of Loch Lomand was sinking fast, and it was his doing, since I’d been refusing his offers of a top-up. I was on quinine tablets to keep down the malaria, and strictly speaking I was supposed to lay off the drink altogether.

  ‘Small things would help,’ John Young was saying, pouring the last of the whisky into his glass. ‘Elementary checks like locks and rivets on wagons. But where is this Major Fisher?’ he added, for I’d mentioned my colleague Fisher.

  I indicated with my thumb over my shoulder: ‘Next-but-one compartment along. Did you not see him on boarding?’

  John Young shook his head. ‘Only from the back. And his blinds have been down ever since.’

  ‘Have been since Howrah,’ I said.

  ‘Is he ill?’

  I shook my head, thinking of Fisher. He was very far from ill. He’d served on the North West Frontier during the latter half of the Big Stunt, and seemed to have become inured to the Indian climate as a result. Accordingly, Major Fisher was able to expend a great fund of energy on the betterment of Major Fisher. A picture of him composed in my mind: a big, incredibly rude man, with a big, brown cannonball-like head, on which he wore an outsized, coal scuttle-like sola topee. He was on the make all right, with ambitions lying well beyond police work. He, like me, was a detective inspector with the British railway police who preferred to use his army rank. Before and after the war, he’d been on the force of the Southern Railway. Well, he was a Londoner born and bred, lived in a spot called Camberwell. Beyond these bare details, I could not go, because Fisher kept his cards very close indeed to his chest.

  ‘You two don’t get along?’ John Young suggested.

  I gave a slight nod.

  ‘Then that is obviously his fault,’ said John Young.

  I attempted to convey nothing much by a smile.

  ‘But the two of you must stick together! With this investigation of yours . . . you will be making enemies all along the line!’

  While silently applauding his knack for hitting nails on the head, I could not afford to discuss these matters with John Young. I rose to my feet and extended my hand.

  ‘I’m obliged to you for the peg,’ I said. ‘And I’ll see you in the morning.’

  IV

  My own compartment was oven-like, even though the fan still toiled. I locked the sliding door from the inside. Anyone proposing to sleep on an Indian train would do the same, the instances of dacoity – banditry – being high. I then adjusted the levers of the window for maximum flow of air. Looking out, I saw that we were rattling past the silhouette of . . . not so much a hill as a great lump of rock, a giant meteorite, perhaps, that had long since crashed on to the dusty Bengal plain. There were a couple of telegraph poles at the top of it, leaning at crazy angles, together with what looked to be a half-ruined castle. I watched it until it was out of sight. I pushed up the armrests on one of the bench seats, and that was all that was needed to make the couch. Now for the bed roll. It would be stowed in the cabinet. I opened the door, and there was the white cotton bag with E.I.R. stitched in red on the side, and very badly stitched. The job had been done with sullen reluctance, and I knew where – in the workshop of Alipore Jail. I shook it about to wake up any snake that might be sleeping inside. Pulling out the not over-clean sheet, an idea broke in on me: perhaps there had been a snake in Fisher’s compartment. Maybe it had done for him soon after we’d pulled away from Howrah, and that was why I’d not seen him since.

  We’d boarded together at Howrah. He’d arranged the sleeper reservations, and collected them in person from the E.I.R. main ticket office at Fairlie Place. ‘Here’s you,’ he’d said, shooing away the sleeping car attendant who’d been trying to salaam and offer tea. ‘Compartment two.’ Fisher had then handed me the voucher for number two. As I’d settled myself, he’d hung about in the corridor smoking one of his Trichinopoly cigars and getting in the way of the attendant’s attempts to greet other arrivals. I had noticed an oldish fellow crossing past my compartment to get into the next one along, number three, and I’d been vaguely aware of John Young taking number one. At the time, I had taken him for an Indian rather than an Anglo. Soon after we’d pulled away, Fisher had gone into the next-but-one from me in the direction of the engine, number four, and dragged the door shut and lowered the blind. There were only five compartments in the carriage, and I assumed every passenger had a compartment to himself (there not being much call for first class on the route to Jamalpur, which was mainly used by the young Indian apprentices heading up to the great workshops) . . . all except the servants in the servants’ compartment, number five. There were two in there, I believed: John Young’s man and another belonging to the old fellow in number three.

  I sat down and broke open the Webley. Three cartridges in the chamber. I had another dozen in my portmanteau, but surely three was enough even for an Indian night train? Some guide or other I’d read ‘For Young Men Heading East’ had recommended nothing more than boiled water, aspirin and a mosquito net for a trip such as this. Then again, the young men in question had probably not been riding on a railway subject to snake attacks, or making enemies ‘all along the line’ by the nature of their work. Had Fisher and I done so with our investigation? We had only been underway for a fortnight, and most of that time had been spent taking delivery of the documents relating to Schedules A, B and C. So we’d hardly had a chance to make mortal enemies. We’d so far looked at only a fraction of the documentation assembled for us by our Indian clerk. The matter relating to Schedule A was mainly so many smudged plans of railway shops and sheds, with confusing dotted lines marked ‘Guard Patrols’. Schedule B was a few bundles of letters: Indian railway clerks denouncing each other for being ‘on the take’ (in perpetuation of feuds that might have arisen decades before in the villages of Bengal), records of footplate men who appeared to keep a home at both ends of the line; records of any men connected to former employees sacked and convicted of offences against the Company, records of employees suspected of being sympathetic to the Gandhian nationalist agitation.

  The Schedule A and B papers took up most of the office we’d been allocated in the East Indian Railway headquarters at Fairlie Place, Calcutta. The Schedule C material had originally consisted of only two files; but that was now down to one, and this was the result of a burglary having taken place in the police office. It had occurred four days ago, late at night on Thursday last, 19 April. What was in the stolen file? I couldn’t say exactly. It had come by post that morning, in an envelope marked ‘Railway Commission of Enquiry’. Fisher had been out of the office, doing I knew not what, so I had taken delivery of it. Inside had been in a pasteboard folder, sealed with string and wax, and with no accompanying letter or chit.

  I had been in and out of the police office all day. At six o’clock, just before knocking off, I had broken the seal, to be confronted with per
haps thirty sheets of badly typed notes, the topmost headed: ‘Pertaining to corruption amongst the officers of the traffic department . . . compiled by One Who Knows’. It seemed even money whether this would prove useful intelligence or merely the settling of scores by an aggrieved employee. I did not consider that it demanded my urgent attention. I had put the file in a desk drawer and quit the office. The door of the office was then locked by our Indian clerk. I had seen him do it. I had then walked down into the hot bustle of Fairlie Place with the man. Sometime in the night, that door was busted open, either by someone who didn’t have a key, or wanted to look as though he didn’t. Whoever had taken the dossier must have done so in the hope that I had not read it, but on seeing the broken seal they must surely have assumed I had read it. It might therefore be a good idea for me to lay hands on whoever who had so much to lose by the reading of the report, before they laid hands on me. The burglary left us with one remaining file in Schedule C, and that was nothing more than a mass of figures about the Company in which a trained statistician might be able to find some anomalies, but neither I nor Fisher fitted that bill.

  It had occurred to me that Fisher had stolen the file, simply because I found him to be a generally suspicious character.

  I thought of Fisher as I stood pissing into the thunderbox, the dark sleepers flickering past the bottom of the dirty tin hole. When we’d first teamed up, I’d thought I must have got across him somehow. But it seemed that everyone had got across him. Fisher was as rude to the railway officers as he was to the Indian constables. His mantra was ‘You have a complaint, brother? Put it through the proper channels.’ Or ‘You know where the bloody complaints book is, don’t you? Here, I’ll fetch you a pen.’ And yet he was learning Hindustani. He had a book on it; and in the two weeks I’d been walking about Calcutta with him, I’d seen him give money to beggars – whole rupees, not just a few anas. On a tour of the goods yards around Howrah, he’d suddenly broken away from our party and given assistance to half a dozen Indians trying to push a great bale of cotton up a ramp. ‘Put your bloody backs into it, can’t you?’ he’d roared at them.