Night Train to Jamalpur Read online

  Chapter Two

  I

  Thirty-six hours later, the ‘up’ day train from Jamalpur back to Calcutta was being trailed by its own tall shadow, and the shadow of its steam. The train had the luxury of tracks, but the shadows had to make do with red stony ground. At a spot called Sahibgani, we had gone into the station restaurant to eat a ‘Hindu military meal’, meaning chapattis and curry with meat. I doubted that the Hindu soldiers went in for cheese and biscuits and a glass of port, but we had been offered that after the main course. I had turned down the port because of my quinine tablets, whereas Fisher had turned it down because he never touched a drop of alcohol . . . which always made me think he was saving himself for something, somehow. We had then boarded the train again.

  Fisher had been reading as we ate, and he was reading still. Then, it had been the political supplement to the Calcutta Yearbook. Now, it was The Hindustani Manual by Lt. Col. D. C. Philpott. Philpott had the market in Hindustani manuals sown up. Lydia had Domestic Hindustani by the same fellow, and had taken very strong objection to the introduction, in which Philpott stated that this book was meant for ladies, and therefore confined itself to simple, everyday Hindu phrases. If Fisher was learning anything from this book, then it all went out the window the moment he came across any actual Indian. Then it was all ‘You there’, or ‘Yes chum, I’m talking to you.’

  I fell to looking out of the window. Now that the sun was overhead rather than coming in directly, we had the slats fully open. I pointed.

  ‘Why is there a bridge there?’

  ‘It’s a bloody river, isn’t it?’ said Fisher, barely looking up.

  ‘There’s no water.’

  ‘Come back in two months. It’ll be a bloody torrent. Probably sweep the bridge away.’

  . . . Which brought me back to my original question.

  I thought back over the night before last. I had set down in note form the important data.

  1. The Jamalpur night train of 23 April had come to a stand about three minutes before the shot was heard. It had been at a spot called Ghoga.

  2. The train had been stopped by the adverse signal guarding the works on the line. Every night train to Jamalpur for the past two months had been stopped at this same signal, and the procedure was that the train waited until a pilotman was sent along by bicycle from the signal box a mile away. The pilotman would then put his bike on to the footplate, and guide the driver over the points and on to the opposite line, and stay with him until he was clear of the works. No driver was allowed to proceed until this man turned up. The line was slightly curved at the point where the train waited, so that much of its length was out of sight to the blokes on the footplate. It was known that this stop might make the train vulnerable to dacoits, and yet it was protected by only two watch-and-ward men, who were not armed, whereas the dacoits who preyed upon Indian railway passengers always were armed.

  3. In that three minutes, any number of people would have had a chance to come up to the first class carriage. For example, anyone from the rest of the train might have walked up to it by climbing down from their own carriage and entering via the end doors. There had been seven other carriages in all: four thirds and three seconds. Taken all together there had been about three hundred and fifty passengers on the train.

  4. Reading from the rear of the first class carriage, the compartments ran as follows:

  Number one: John Young’s.

  Number two: mine.

  Number three: the one belonging to the elderly European, who turned out to be a churchman attached to St Paul’s cathedral, Calcutta: Reverend Canon Peter Selwyn by name.

  Number four: Major Fisher’s.

  Number five: the compartment occupied by two Indian servants – the man belonging to John Young, and the man belonging to the Reverend Canon Peter Selwyn.

  5. The killer may have come from this very carriage. That is to say, he could have been any one of the above-mentioned men (except me). Yes, I had seen Selwyn, Fisher and the servants emerge from their compartments into the corridor, but any one of them might have shot Young, retreated into their compartment, then re-emerged looking surprised at developments. But it was odds-on the killer had entered from outside, by means of the rearward end door, having failed to open John Young’s exterior compartment door, and my own exterior compartment door. Most likely, the killer was one of the three horsemen seen riding away, and my money was on the one who’d been closest to the train when I’d looked out.

  6. The nearest habitation to the line was a farm at a quarter-mile distance. This was east of the tracks. There was a ruined blockhouse about the same distance to the west. The horse riders I’d seen had been heading west, and had perhaps been making for this ruin, but nobody had been able to give chase.

  7. On the face of it, the killing had been an act of dacoity or banditry of the sort ever more familiar on the railways of India. The likely scenario was as follows: the killers made straight for the first class carriage, where the richest pickings would be found. They tried a couple of exterior compartment doors at hazard, but these were locked and they couldn’t prise them open, so they moved to the end door, which was not kept locked, and gave access to the corridor. Very likely John Young heard the entry, opened the sliding door of his compartment, and stepped into the corridor to come face to face with one of the dacoits. He had been immediately shot in the head, and had fallen on the threshold of his compartment. One or more of the dacoits had then stepped over the body, entered the compartment, removed John Young’s suit coat from the peg on the wall and taken out his pocket book. From this they had removed all the cash I had previously seen in that pocket book, which I had estimated at four hundred rupees, about thirty pounds. That would represent a month’s wages for a British ticket inspector on the Indian railways; for an Anglo-Indian ticket inspector, it might represent two month’s wages. For a dacoit – assuming the dacoit to be a peasant – that sum represented undreamed of riches, perhaps ten times more than he might expect to earn in a year by his normal labour. The dacoits had then made off on horseback.

  8. I had verified the loss from the pocket book in the presence of Fisher. He had picked it up using a handkerchief so as not to disturb fingerprints. I told him that my fingerprints were already on the thing, and I told him of my conversation with Young, of which he seemed to have been unaware. He had been asleep throughout, he said.

  9. Hovering in the doorway as I spoke had been the elderly Englishman, the Reverend Canon Peter Selwyn. Major Fisher had broken off from talking to me and turned towards Selwyn. ‘Why the hell are you going to Jamalpur?’ Fisher had asked him. Selwyn had replied, ‘Now I am sure you can phrase that more politely if you try.’ ‘But I’m not going to try,’ Fisher had shot back, and Selwyn had answered, but directing his words to me. It seemed he’d booked to preach in the railway chapel at Jamalpur. Perhaps we didn’t realise that half the apprentices were Christian? Yes, they were mainly Catholic, and he was part of the Indian Anglican Church but Selwyn was a great friend of Father somebody or other, and his trip to Jamalpur was a very important part of the ecumenical mission of St Paul’s. ‘Is that so?’ Fisher had asked with folded arms. He had then unfolded his arms, and ordered everyone out of the murder compartment. It was to be sealed off until it could be examined by the fingerprint bureau of Calcutta C.I.D. (since the East Indian Railway force did not run to a fingerprint bureau of its own).

  10. As for the two servants in the first class carriage . . . They were both Mohammedans, and both called Mohammed. They were both in the late fifties or early sixties, and they had been sleeping in the servants’ compartment when they heard the shot. Both seemed decent sorts, and John Young’s man appeared very cut-up about what had happened to his master. They could not be considered suspects to my mind.

  11. Having sealed the murder compartment, Fisher had instructed the watch-and-ward men to walk the length of the train looking for any suspicious characters. They had reported back fifteen minutes lat
er: ‘No anti-social elements, huzoor.’

  12. As regards the investigation of the crime, it would obviously not fall to Fisher and me, as Fisher knew very well in spite of all his shouting. We were witnesses merely. When the shot was fired, we were within the railway police district of Jamalpur. An Indian sub-inspector had been despatched by light engine along the line from there, and had arrived at about four o’clock in the morning – nearly three hours after the shot had been fired. When he arrived, he went into the sealed compartment and searched it, with Fisher shouting at him to beware of disturbing any fingerprints, at which the sub-inspector had coolly replied that he knew his job, and would do it much better without someone yelling in his ear.

  13. The sub-inspector had been unable to find a bullet in the murder compartment. It had, he said, gone clean through John Young’s head, and drilled into the wood of the carriage roof. It might never be recovered. The sub-inspector had then searched the other four first class compartments, and politely asked all the occupants to turn out their pockets and bags. In the process, he uncovered one gun: mine, with its three bullets in the barrel. I explained that it was my old service revolver, a Webley Mark 6, and that I carried it everywhere. I had assumed that Major Fisher did the same with his old service revolver. He certainly provoked enough people to justify carrying a gun. I could not swear to have seen Major Fisher’s pistol, but I was sure I had noticed the bulge of it under his top coat when we had boarded at Calcutta. However, no gun of any sort was found in Fisher’s compartment, and he was not asked about any gun.

  14. As for Canon Peter Selwyn, he had apparently not much more than his overnight things and two books. One was the Bible; the other was called By the Light of Uranus, and it was not a book about astronomy. It contained some rather singular illustrations, and was stamped ‘Not to be taken into England’.

  15. The sub-inspector did know his job. He also knew that the searches were really just for form’s sake. Everyone had been milling about outside the train for hours. Anybody could have got rid of anything just by pitching it into the dust, and I wondered why Selwyn had not tried this with By the Light of Uranus. Perhaps he felt the risk of being caught in the act to be too great.

  16. One thing I myself noticed as missing when the sub-inspector came up was the reservation chart for the carriage. This was supposed to be posted up in a wood-and-glass frame on the exterior of the carriage, by either one of the two end doors. These charts listed the names of those who had reserved compartments. The compartment numbers were also written on the coupons given out with the tickets at the booking offices, and these numbers were supposed to correspond to those on the reservation charts. Therefore the reservation charts were to remind people of what they already knew, and prevent mix-ups in the crush of boarding. But there had been no crush on boarding the night train to Jamalpur, and I had not looked for the reservation chart at Howrah, so I did not know whether it had been there at that point or not. The glass of the cases was often smashed, and the charts were often lost en route, or never posted up in the first place, especially if there had been many late bookings or cancellations. Since the sleeping car attendant had got off at Howrah after seeing the passengers aboard, there was no one to ask about it during the stoppage except the train guard. He was Anglo-Indian, and more Indian that Anglo. He’d heard of the dead man, John Young: ‘A fine fellow – example to us all.’ The guard was sure dacoits had been responsible. They knew about the stop for the single-line working, and since it took place in a remote spot, the train was an easy target. ‘I am betting you,’ he kept saying. He could throw no light on the matter of the reservation chart.

  17. The footplate crew of the Jamalpur Night Mail were British, and their engine was an Atlantic type, of British make. The driver was called Collins, the fireman Jackson, both covenanted men – that is, working for the E.I.R. for a fixed number of years before returning home. They were both late of the London and North Western Railway, where they’d been on a goods link. ‘I got pig sick of Willesden Junction,’ said Collins. ‘Simple as that.’ Now they were on expresses, albeit thirty-mile-an-hour ones. Reaching for Jackson’s shovel, I asked if I could ‘put a bit on’. I did so and, leaning over to inspect the results, driver Collins said, ‘You’ve done that before, haven’t you?’ Even though the engine was stationary, they had to keep a careful eye on the fire, the Bengali coal being so poor. There’d been good Welsh coal in London, and no dacoits to worry about, but there had been Willesden Junction. The two had been warned of the danger at this red signal, but in the event they hadn’t noticed the attack. ‘I never saw nothing,’ fireman Jackson said. Driver Collins was ten years older than Jackson, and would be returning home soon. He had a place lined up at Broadstairs, Kent. He had enjoyed his time in India. ‘Signed on for five years originally, but that turned into a twenty-year touch.’ He had married ‘a half-Indian lass, my green-eyed princess’, but she’d died ten years ago. ‘I still miss her, and I’ll tell you what else I’ll miss when I get back to Blighty.’ He nodded towards the shaking fire of the sun, which was beginning to climb above the horizon. ‘That old bugger.’

  18. After talking to Collins and Jackson, I had returned to the exterior of the first class carriage and looked up at the doors. Judging by the marks on them, the dacoits had tried as hard, if not harder, to get into my compartment as John Young’s, before giving up and going to the end door. Their aim might have been purely to rob, and that certainly appeared to be the case. But it was not impossible they meant to kill John Young, or any other man in the carriage. The facts were compatible with John Young having heard them boarding the carriage, and having tried to stop their progress along the corridor towards one of the other four compartments. There had been a scuffle; Young had been shot. The bandit, or bandits, had fled, pausing only to take the money from the pocket book. Why not take the whole pocket book? I could not say, and perhaps they could not either.

  19. Other thoughts were hard to shake:

  a) I was probably deemed to have read a file that might have disclosed the sort of corruption that could earn a man twenty years in jail.

  b) It was Major Fisher who had suggested we make the trip to Jamalpur, and that we do so on the night train of 23 April.

  c) It was Fisher who had booked me into my compartment.

  20. At five thirty in the morning, the night train to Jamalpur Junction remained stationary, protected by smoke bombs on the single track fore and aft. I was smoking a cigarette outside the first class carriage, and the yellow wooden destination board reading ‘Jamalpur’ seemed like a promise that would never be kept. The train did not move off again until six in the morning, by which time a riot was brewing in third class, and the heat had started.

  II

  We had arrived at the great railway colony and workshops officially known as Jamalpur Junction at 0900 hours on 24 April. The Indian sub-inspector travelled back with us. On arrival, Fisher, Canon Peter Selwyn and I were met by the sub-inspector’s governor, an Inspector Hughes, who ran the police operation at Jamalpur, and was also commanded the surrounding railway police sub-division. Hughes was equipped with a fine moustache, and rolling North-of-England tones that I liked listening to. (He’d cut his teeth as a detective on the Hull and Barnsley Railway before the war.) He walked us over to the great railway refectory, which was empty just then –the apprentices’ breakfasts having all been served – and which smelt of curry and carbolic. We sat down at one end of a long table, and a bearer brought tea, toast, jam and soda. We were joined by the sub-inspector and a new chap, also Indian. Our voices echoed as we talked, and we sat in a tight blue cloud of our own cigarette smoke. Hughes said that some of the bad lads who preyed on the trains were known, so an arrest wasn’t out of the question. The Indian officers then took formal statements from the three of us, and we were very politely fingerprinted.

  The first class carriage in which the murder had occurred would be quarantined throughout the day, then sent back on the evening’s ‘up’
Night Mail to Calcutta. Our statements would be on that train as well, but Fisher and I would not be. We were to overnight in Jamalpur, as originally intended, and it seemed that Selwyn would be staying two nights with his friend, the Catholic chaplain. When the statements reached Calcutta there would be a tussle over whether the case should stay with Hughes and the railway police or be taken over by the civil police. There was also an outside chance that the Calcutta C.I.D. would put its oar in, but Hughes thought this unlikely. It took more than an act of banditry – even a murderous one – for those grandees to stir themselves.

  Fisher and I then got round to the job that had taken us to Jamalpur in the first place: touring the site. Neither Hughes nor the sub-inspectors came on this; instead we were assigned two constables, which was Hughes’s way of saying he considered the whole Commission of Enquiry business a pantomime, and an impertinent one at that.

  Anything metal at Jamalpur was too hot to touch, and all day long, the air was overcharged with black smoke from the foundry chimney. We were shown the railway barracks, the railway hostels, the railway college, railway cinema, railway sports grounds, and the railway golf course. We saw the railway workshops: iron foundry pattern shop, brass fitting shop, turning shop, erecting shop, carpentry shop, paint shop. Hughes said they made almost any part of a train on site except wheels, which seemed perverse of them. Wheels were supplied externally, principally by a company called Macpherson Trading of Calcutta, and we were shown a siding full of flatbed wagons, loaded with Macpherson wheels. Our inspection completed, Major Fisher had informed Hughes that there were two entrances to most of the sheds. Hughes had said, ‘I know that.’ ‘There should only be one, shouldn’t there?’ Fisher had said. ‘So you want to rebuild the whole complex?’ Hughes had enquired, and Fisher had said that it would be cheaper than continuing to sustain the present astronomical losses to pilfering. Single entrances, manned by trusted guards, would help stop the leakage. Fisher said he would be recommending there be half as many guards at present, but that they should be paid twice as much. They would then be less liable to accept backhanders. Well, that put the kybosh on the evening. Fisher should have put forward his suggestions later on – preferably in writing from Calcutta, and with a few ‘may-I-suggests’ to sugar the pill.