The Baghdad Railway Club (17 page)

We ascended the main staircase under flickering electric light; ordinary bulbs and black cable were tangled amid the candle chandeliers. Our boots made no sound on the thick and dusty carpet. On the first landing, I heard the sound of a closing door – an official in civilian clothes locking up for the night. Approaching the second floor, Lennon took out his own bunch of keys. We walked fast down the long corridor, passing an open door, through which I glimpsed another civilian: a man with well-oiled hair calmly reading a newspaper – one of the few fat men I’d clapped eyes on in Baghdad. He was perhaps the consul himself: The Resident.

We now approached the telegraphic office – with its sentry outside the door. I had been worried about the position of the telegram archive in relation to this sentry but we continued a fair way past him, and made a left turn with the corridor. As we stood before the unmarked door of the archive we were out of the sentry’s eye line. Private Lennon opened the door of what turned out to be no more than a glorified cupboard.

‘One minute, mind,’ he said, and I was in.

He called after me: ‘Anyone comes along, I shut the door on you‚ sir, all right?’

Given that this cubbyhole was part of Captain Ferry’s empire, I’d thought it would be neater. The room held three sizes of box. The smallest ones accorded to the size of the sending form I’d filled in when communicating with the War Office, so I started on the stack of those. Each box had a paper label pasted on, and some had more than one – and on the label was just a mix-up of letters and numbers. Lennon stood guard some way beyond the half-open door. He commanded the right angle of the corridor, so he would have early sight of an approach from either direction.

I pulled the lid off the first box that came to hand. It held the carbon copies of the forms all right. The first I saw was sent by a Second Lieutenant Foster of ‘Div. 4 Mobile Vet. Section’ to a man called Knight in Basrah, but many were not so clear. Where the handwriting had been decent, the carbon was invariably poor, or vice versa. I flicked through and came to a Captain Windust of what might have been the 26th Punjabis. He’d sent on March 25th; I couldn’t make out the message. The next fellow was somebody Battacharjee. He’d sent on March 25th also, and the message was readable, and had been sent clear: ‘Operation completed satisfactorily.’ Then came messages of March 26th . . . But the papers would take an eternity to rifle through.

In hopes of I-don’t-know-what, I reached for the next box, and took off the lid. But I froze when, from beyond the half-open door, I heard a tread on the corridor carpet. Somebody was addressing Lennon, a whispered enquiry. Lennon said, ‘Fuck off‚ Sinclair,’ and the footsteps retreated. Evidently another Tommy, some pal of Lennon’s, had come up. The bloke no doubt worked a few dodges of his own.

Now Lennon stepped into the storeroom.

‘You’ll have to get cracking, sir. We’ll both be in lumber if the wrong bloke finds us in here.’

‘It’s hopeless,’ I said. ‘I give it up.’

‘Another half minute,’ he said, and he stepped back.

He was earning his extra quid. I began leafing through the second box, picked up a form and read the date: March 17th. So this box was earlier. I glanced at another form: Jackson of the . . . couldn’t read the rest. I glanced down at the message, and it was just four clusters of numbers: some military code. Lennon was closer to the door, becoming agitated. I tried to think of the offence we were committing –
offences
, more like. Trespass . . . Conspiracy . . . Injuries to the Telegraph. No, that was pulling down telegraph poles. Interfering with the mails – that was more like it. But it went beyond that: a charge of espionage might be preferred, and with only Laughing Jack himself – Manners of the War Office – between me and the firing squad.

I plucked out another form, and . . .

‘Ferry!’ called Lennon.

I stuffed the paper in my hand back into the box, replaced the lid and turned out of the room with fast-beating heart. Lennon had the door locked and we were walking fast away the moment Ferry turned the corner. Had he seen us? Impossible to tell; and uppermost in my thoughts was the image of the last paper I’d held. The name Boyd had been at the top, alongside a number I assumed must have been 185, denoting his machine-gun company. I had not had time to make out the date, the message, or the name of the person to whom it had been sent, all of which had been faint, but there had been something odd about the slip:
a diagonal line had been drawn clear through it
.

Come Saturday, I went again to the Baghdad Railway Club.

As before, Bob Ferry was already present in the club room, smoking alone under the dark colours made by the stained glass when I arrived with Jarvis. He was beautifully turned out in recently pressed khaki. I said, ‘I do believe this weather suits you.’

Ferry smiled. ‘It’s a case of mind . . . over matter.’

There was no sign of his having seen me raiding his archive.

Jarvis was getting acquainted with our Arab waiter whose name, evidently, was Layth or something of the kind.

‘Your name means lion,’ Jarvis said.

Layth, who had a few words of English, asked, ‘Stanley . . . what mean?’ and I could see the question had knocked Jarvis. What
did
Stanley mean?

As other club members began to arrive and take their places around the table, I asked Ferry how things were going on at the telegraphic office of the Residency.

‘. . . Overwhelmed,’ he said at length.

I heard from the other end of the table, ‘Ah, a glass of fizzle.’

It was the cavalryman, Major Findlay; Jarvis poured champagne for him. We had not run to that at the previous meeting, and I wondered who was paying for it. No doubt Shepherd himself. His parents owned half of . . . what was it? Worcestershire? Why would a wealthy man like that risk his life taking Turkish backhanders?

Miss Bailey arrived, and I stood together with all the other men. She wore a sort of Chinese coat. Now that I studied her again, I could see that her skin had been a little roughened by the desert sun; and she was perhaps a few years older than I’d thought. Findlay looked on very sadly as she took her place, for she was seated at the opposite end of the table to him.

The meeting began, and in spite of the champagne, it did so sombrely, with a speech from Shepherd about the passing of Stevens – evidently a marvellous pugilist, and a bluff fellow who took some knowing but whose behaviour would occasionally (
very
occasionally, it seemed to me) disclose a heart of gold. Shepherd mentioned the forthcoming return to Samarrah, and the brigadier muttered, ‘Tomfoolery. You’re sure to get into another scrape,’ but he did so affectionately. ‘If anyone would care to come, let me know,’ said Shepherd. I thought this might be a joke, but evidently not. ‘It’s a fascinating stretch of line,’ he was saying. ‘I can offer you a fine 2-8-0 engine, albeit of German make, a carriage that was formerly the personal saloon of General von der Goltz . . . the golden dome of the mosque at Samarrah . . .’

He was making a general invitation of it: come and be fired on by Arabs or Turks. It did not seem an attractive prospect, but I observed Captain Ferry take out a gold pen and make a careful note in his pocket book. Miss Bailey said, ‘Might make a diverting day or two,’ at which Findlay immediately said, ‘I’ll come. It’s the Seventh Cavalry up there – I do know they’re short of saddles. I’ll take a load up for them. And I suppose one ought to see the Mosque of the Golden Dome.’

‘It’s called the Al-Askari Mosque,’ said Miss Bailey, rather coldly.

He looked put-out, but rallied quickly.

‘Sounds good anyway,’ he said, ‘and I’m all for seeing it.’

Shepherd now gave me the floor, and – very much doubting that the cavalrymen of Samarrah were short of saddles – I rose to my feet. I’d had in mind a quick rundown of the police set-up at York station, the extent of our jurisdiction, the tremendous size of the railway lands around York, but as I faced my audience, I realised I had not given enough thought to the matter.

‘I’m Captain Stringer,’ I said, and the brigadier looked at me sharply, as if he’d only just realised my identity. (I’d thought by now that everyone in the club would know my name.) ‘Before coming out here,’ I continued, ‘I was with the Seventeenth Northumberlands on the light railways in France – the railway pals, as they’re known, and a first-rate group of lads . . .’

I was being not only dull, but also – as the wife would say – common.

‘. . . But that’s not for tonight,’ I said. I looked down at my hand; it was shaking. ‘Tonight I mean to talk to you about my work as a detective – plain-clothes – on the railway force at York. Now the police office is on platform four at York station, which is the main “up” and anyone heading London-way on a Tuesday morning about eleven o’clock sort of time would have seen the full police strength parading outside. That was before the war, I mean . . .’

I lifted my glass of champagne, drank it all off, and everyone around the table watched me do it. ‘However . . .’ I heard myself saying, and I didn’t know why. Brigadier General Barnes was eyeing me carefully. Major Findlay – redder than the previous week – was looking at the ceiling. Miss Bailey kept adjusting the position of her glass of champagne, and I reckoned I had about five seconds before she dismissed me out of hand as a dullard and a blockhead. I was making a worse fist of this than Stevens had in his early stages, and
he’d
eventually become interesting. How had he done it? By yarning – by telling a tale.

‘However,’ I was apparently saying again, ‘I’m in rather a tight corner here because . . .’

‘Give us one of your cases, Jim,’ said Shepherd. ‘What’s the
queerest
thing that ever happened on a train near York?’

Almost without thinking, I answered, ‘It was the affair of the already clipped tickets.’

‘Sounds worthy of Conan Doyle himself,’ said Shepherd.

‘Not quite‚ sir, but it was a bit of a facer at the time.’

‘And what time
was
it?’

‘Late on in ’thirteen, sir. December. The matter first came up on a bright but cold day as I recall, with just a riming of snow on the streets of old York . . .’

Somebody said, ‘Ah, the thought of it,’ and all of a sudden the whole shining, sweating company was leaning forward. Shepherd nodded to Jarvis, who set down another glass of champagne for me, but I didn’t need it now. I was away.

‘It was Friday morning, and I’d been in the middle of town questioning a suspect . . .’

(I had in fact been buying cigars for the Chief but I left that out.)

‘. . . As I stepped under the station portico I saw that two fellows from the maintenance department were putting up the Christmas tree . . . and they had these coloured lights on a cable. They were untangling them, and Harold Spencer – who was a ticket inspector “A” grade, which meant he worked the main line – came haring round the corner from the ticket gate, tripped over the cable and went flying. This was a turn-up because Spencer was knocking on – probably sixty or so – and had never been known to run before. Well, he was a lay preacher and a Chief Ticket Inspector – not the sort of man who needs a sudden turn of speed. When he got up, he had a nasty graze on his cheek, but he paid it no mind at all, which was also a shock because he was normally very careful of his appearance. He just said, “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve got the rummest tale to tell you.”

‘Evidently he’d just come in off a London train that was heading for Newcastle and had stopped twice before York – at Peterborough and Doncaster. He’d got on at Doncaster and started checking the tickets, only to find that every one given up to him had already been checked and clipped with the regulation North Eastern Railway hole punch, which cuts a crescent-moon shape out of the tickets – other companies have diamonds or squares or what have you. He’d gone through four carriages and it was the same story in every one – some other fellow had beaten him to it. Now Spencer seemed completely floored by this, said he thought he was going nuts, but I said, “It’s not
so
much of a mystery is it?” He said, “How do you make that out?” I said, “It’s obviously the work of another ticket inspector.” He said, “It can’t be. If an inspector boards a train, he tells the guard on doing so, and a note is made in the guard’s log. No such note had been made.” I said, “How about this: he got on the train without telling the guard?”’

. . . At which Shepherd spoke up again, observing to the meeting at large: ‘You see the calibre of men we have in our railway office.’

A good deal of laughter at that, and I fancied I heard in amongst it some shouting from beyond the window, apparently a repetition of the disruption overheard at the previous meeting. I suddenly had cause to think about the Webley. It wasn’t in the haversack; I’d left it at Rose Court. I’d given it to Jarvis for cleaning; he’d handed it back to me, and I’d put it on the bed. The trouble was that I’d been carrying it sometimes in the holster and at times in my haversack – that was how I’d come to forget. The noises had faded anyhow.

Where had I got to?

‘. . . When I put my theory to Spencer,’ I continued, ‘he said, “You’re saying he wasn’t a real ticket inspector. Why? Why would anyone pretend to be a ticket collector?” I said, “To charge excess fares and pocket the money,” and at this Spencer became thoughtful. He
had
asked the passengers if they’d been charged excess, and one woman had said she had been. She’d not been able to find a seat in third, so she’d been sitting in second with a Third Class ticket. It was only a matter of a bob or so. But a second woman, found by Spencer at Doncaster to only have a ticket as far as Peterborough, said that the previous fellow
hadn’t
charged her, but just said, “Don’t trouble about it, only think on next time.” Very nice about it he was, the woman had said. As to his appearance, he was described as a middle-aged man of middling height with darkish hair – and he did have the long black coat with gold-braided collar of the ticket inspector.

‘Over the next week, other inspectors on the staff found a similar thing happening to them. The tickets would be properly clipped, some excesses asked for, some not. I reckoned that if this chap wasn’t taking all the excesses, then he wasn’t in it for the money – and the reason he took some cash now and again was to keep up the front, keep up his credibility. In other words it was more important for him to check tickets than it was to make money out of it, and that put me on the track of thinking he might be a man who’d once been turned down for the job of ticket inspector . . .’

‘A ticket inspector
manqué
,’ said Harriet Bailey – and I had one of her smiles all to myself, even if I didn’t quite take her meaning.

‘Ticket inspectors are employed by the traffic department,’ I said. ‘So I went there and looked over all the records of men shortlisted for ticket-collecting positions but not taken on, or stood down from them. There were plenty. More of the first than the second of course, but dozens all told. The men who’d resigned or been sacked had to hand over their ticket clippers, and the records showed that they always did. There was not a single pair of clippers unaccounted for, and there never had been. But I was curious about the resignations, of which there were quite a few. It was a steady sort of job, and decently paid. Why would a man chuck it up? I was told the main reason was that they didn’t care for the rostering patterns. Every man had to start early or finish late because that’s when most of the fare-dodgers operate – first thing or last thing in the day. It broke in on me then that our phantom ticket-checker did all his work in the morning, so might he not be using the clippers of a man who worked afternoons and evenings?’

Thoughtful nods from around the table. I seemed to have Bob Ferry quite mesmerised. Not Major Findlay, however. It would take more than a tale of petty crime on the line to distract him from Miss Bailey. I could hear no noise from the square just then.

‘I asked for the names and addresses of all ticket inspectors of the York district who worked late. I then picked out the ones who lived with other men – those who lived in digs in other words. There were three that fitted the bill, and I struck lucky with the first: a fellow called Hughes. He lived in a big lodging house in the middle of York – a place not too particular about its tenants. Every night Hughes knocked off late from work, downed a few more pints of ale than were good for him and in the small hours of the morning he put his coat in the hallway, leaving the clippers in the pocket. He put the coat on again when he set off for work at one o’clock the next afternoon.

‘Now there were some ruffians in that house, but it was a quiet chap who caught my eye when I went round the landings knocking on the doors. He was medium build with dark hair, and I could see he was a railway nut because he had
The Railway Magazine
and
The Railway Gazette
on his table top.’

This caused quite a stir. Shepherd – a
Railway Magazine
man himself, of course – was laughing, and one of the R.E. chaps was quite indignant: ‘I’ll have you know that I subscribe to both. Does that make me a railway nut?’

‘Technically, it does,’ said Harriet Bailey, and she gave me another of her lovely smiles, thus increasing the anxiety written on the face of Findlay.

‘The quiet fellow’s name was Randall – Bartholomew Randall. We had him in for questioning, and he came clean. We asked him what he’d done with the money he’d taken for excess fares, and he took us to the collection box for the Railway Mission that stands on platform five of York station. It was all in there. He’d been putting cash in there for weeks in fact, and only a few days earlier, I’d been talking to Father Cunningham who runs the Railway Mission, and he’d said he’d detected what he called “a real access of the Christmas spirit in the city of York” – this on account of the donations in the box. In November, the donations had amounted to four shillings and thruppence or so, along with the usual admixture of foreign coins and amusement-machine tokens. Up to the third week of December fifty-seven pounds ten had been found in the box. But even though he hadn’t kept the money, Randall was charged with theft as well as personating a company officer and travelling on a train without a ticket, since he himself had not
had
a ticket. Of course, the peculiar feature of the whole case was the motive: he’d gone about inspecting tickets
just for the love of doing it
.’

‘A crime of passion,’ said Harriet Bailey.

‘What became of the fellow?’ someone else asked, which I’d hoped they would not, since Bartholomew Randall had hanged himself in the lodging house the day before he was due to appear in the police court, confirming too late the doubts I’d had about proceeding against him, and never put strongly enough to the prosecuting solicitor.