The Baghdad Railway Club (7 page)

I saw that there was a particular concentration of flies on the floor, and that they were all coming from or going to the same place: the mouth of a man. I turned away and then looked back, trying for a fresh start, but I had no luck: still the flies, and still the mouth. I was looking at a dead captain. The man was not dissimilar in appearance to me: regular sort of face, dark hair, dark eyes wide open with flies taking it in turns to settle upon them. I set down the lantern and closed the eyelids.

. . . Shirt and tie, with Wolseley sun helmet rolled a little way; three pips on tunic sleeve; Sam Browne belt, holster and ammunition pouch, but no gun to be seen. Beneath the belt, and below the ribcage, the man’s shirt went into his body. He’d been stabbed.

The face was grey, with lavender-coloured bruising about the cheek. I touched the face. There was some stiffness, but his eyelids had closed easily, so he had come through the phase of rigor mortis. He gave off a sweet smell – a garden smell. Not too bad. The gut not yet exploded.

The captain had been dead for something in the region of twenty-four hours.

I heard again the heavy shuffling from the corner, but the snake (if snake it be) fell silent again. I hunted in the pockets of the dead man’s tunic and quickly turned up identity card and paybook, both in the name of Captain C. J. Boyd. Whoever had done for him had taken his gun, but not troubled about his papers – or not thought to look for them.

The flies and moths were besieging me, and the shuffling was renewed in the corner. I walked fast out of the
Salon
, sat down on the edge of the platform and waited, revolver in hand, the unbreathable air closing about me. I leant forward, and the yellow stuff landed on the track gravel between my boots. I had not meant to chuck up in the station, but there was no help for it. Immediately a cool breeze seemed to come down the tracks towards me. I lit a cigarette. I had for the minute forgotten why I’d been hanging about alone in Baghdad railway station, and now I recollected. Boyd had evidence against Shepherd, evidence of the fellow being in hock to the Turks; evidence that would have seen Shepherd shot if proven. If Shepherd had somehow got to know of this . . . then it would be practically odds-on that Boyd should come a cropper. Had the body been put in this particular spot to make it look as though I had killed him? In which case the killer must have known of my arrangement to meet him. But if Manners at the War Office was to be believed, the communications between his office and Boyd were absolutely secure. Had Boyd let on to anyone he was coming here? I thought of the
other
intelligence man on the side in Baghdad, the one Boyd had been advised by Manners to contact.

. . . And who had been witness to my arrival at the station? I thought of the ferryman, the knife-grinder and his assistant or customer; I thought of the station master. He had shown not the slightest sign of knowing that his station harboured a body, still less of being responsible for the killing. I had told Jarvis I was coming to
this side of the river
, but that was all I’d said . . .

I threw my cigarette stump on to the tracks, and stood up. A minute later, I was striding fast over the flat rocky waste, under the dark trees. I came to the place where the knife-grinder had been, and entered one of the dark alleys leading back to the water. I came to the river-beach, and there was less of it than before, but quite enough for me to walk along, while inhaling the petrol smell of the river. There were quiet encampments on the flat roofs of the riverside houses: people sleeping under makeshift canopies, or no canopies at all. Not only did they sleep on top of their roofs, they also slept on top of their bedclothes from the looks of things. After ten minutes, I came to the bridge of boats. An Indian soldier saluted as I stepped on to it – one of a guard of four men. There were half a dozen loungers on the bridge: Arab insomniacs, as I supposed – and they did look to be wearing nightshirts. They watched the black river flowing fast away, or listened to it, for it
sounded
cool at any rate. The bridge moved as I walked across it, and I saw the reflections of the city moving in the water at the same time: the dark silhouettes of the music halls dancing.

Once on the east bank, I entered the labyrinth, and – walking beneath the roof sleepers – became lost for a while, and lost in thought. If any report
should
put me in the vicinity of the murdered man, and I came clean about the mission I was on, would Manners back me up? I might say I’d been in the station to look at the trains. I was a corresponding member of the Railway Club, after all. ‘But there are no trains,’ the answer would come. ‘I know that
now
,’ I would say. It was certain that I would now have to communicate with Manners anyway – and by the ridiculous method he had instructed me in.

I regained the Hotel by skirting the river until I came to the place where
Mantis
had docked. The lobby was nearly empty. All the cloths on which were written the names of the political departments had been rolled up scroll-wise and placed on the table tops. One new cloth was unfolded, however: it read ‘Boiled Water’, and there were glasses and jugs. I poured one out, and drank it off, then took another two. It had been only lately boiled, but I didn’t mind a bit.

From my room a minute later, I looked down into the square, and watched, in the half-light, an Arab going along one of the alleyways over opposite. At first I thought he was riding a slow and wobbly bicycle, but then he went under a giant gas lamp in which a tiny blue flame burned – just enough to see that he rode a donkey, his bare feet almost touching the ground on either side. I knew I felt better, for I wanted a bottle of beer and a sandwich, and the fact that I was on the mend outweighed the thought of Boyd, I must admit. Sluicing down in the bathroom, I wondered whether half the corps would be sleeping on top of the hotel roof. No, I thought, letting down the mosquito net that hung over my bed . . . because the roof consisted of domes. The people would slide off.

And I believe I was asleep at the moment I lay down.

I had forgotten to close the shutters after looking at the square, and the splitting sun woke me at six – or perhaps it was the closing of the door. A breakfast of coffee, flatbread, yoghurt and honey was on the table by my bed, and the coffee was hot. Jarvis had also left a neat map – drawn, I supposed, by himself – giving directions to my living quarters: Rose Court, off Park Street. It sounded a pretty enough spot‚ if not very Arabic. Jarvis would be waiting for me there at six o’clock in the evening with my kit.

I dressed, and walked downstairs to work. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd’s room was 226. On the door was a notice: ‘Railways (Strategy)’. I knocked – no answer. I pushed open the door. The room was dark – sun shutters closed – and Shepherd was not in it. His empire also extended to room 227, however, and here I found a bluff, blond fellow, a Captain Mike Stevens of the Hampshire Regiment who, it appeared, was a second assistant to Shepherd. He walked out the instant I entered, saying he was going to fetch tea. The bed had been removed from room 227, and two cabinets and two desks put in; otherwise, it was similar to the room in which I’d passed the night: Persian rugs on a wooden floor, views of Baghdad on the walls, shutters with the same mosque-shaped holes cut in them. In the square, a team of Royal Engineers was working on the telegraph wires, with long ladders running up the poles. I was glad my office faced this way. A sight of the river would have reminded me of the other side of it, of the station, and Captain Boyd decaying in the
Salon de Thé
.

Stevens returned, and set out the tea things on his desk. He had a touch of the West Country in his accent and his face, which was wide and pink, and offset by straw-coloured hair. He wore shorts, and round wire glasses.

‘So you’re the railwayac?’ he said, a ‘railwayac’ being a railway maniac. But he said it in an offhand way; it did not promise to become a theme of his. He asked, ‘Do you understand book routine?’ but didn’t seem the least bit interested in my answer. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, he continued – still offhand – was not in room 226, but would be there from about lunchtime. He suggested I might like to ‘make a fair copy’ of a map showing the railway line running north from Baghdad up to Samarrah. This would involve combining the details from two separate maps, and after handing me a small glass of tea with sugar lumps in the saucer – the whole arrangement looked tiny in his hands – he went over to one of the cabinets, and produced these maps. He directed me to some pencils and coloured inks in the second cabinet, and sat back at his own desk as I contemplated the maps. On the bottom of both was written, ‘Prepared in the historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence’. One map left the ‘h’ off ‘Samarrah’. Both maps petered out a little way beyond there, although one had an arrow pointing north and reading ‘To Tikrit’. Well, the Turks were up that way.

Both maps were hard to read, for a variety of reasons. In one, the names of the stations kept running into the blue-shaded River Tigris. According to the scale of
this
map, Samarrah lay about sixty miles north of Baghdad, whereas according to the scale on the other it was more like eighty.

I regarded Stevens, whose desk was directly opposite to mine. He was writing letters, from what I could see, and kept looking for addresses in a directory he kept at his elbow. Every so often, he’d jerk his shoulders about in a peculiar manner.

‘The scale on these maps—’ I said, but he cut me off.

‘Just split the difference,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry too much about
scale
or anything, but it’s for Cox himself, so you might, you know . . . make it look pretty.’

I had already determined on that. I didn’t want to make ‘a bad start’ or do anything to convince Shepherd that I was here for any reason but to help him with railway work – and that went double if he was a killer as well as a traitor.

Stevens’s glasses made him look rather schoolboyish. Well, only at first. Throughout the morning, he seemed to expand, filling out his thin cotton shirt, and when he stood and walked over to one of the cabinets, at about ten o’clock sort of time, I saw that he had the legs of a circus strongman.

Seeing me eyeing him, he seemed rather put out, so I made a start in earnest on the maps. The line to Samarrah ran in parallel with – and to the west of – what I had decided to call ‘R. Tigris’, since that seemed more correct than just ‘Tigris’. ‘
River
Tigris’ might have been better still, but I wouldn’t have been able to fit those two words into any of the innumerable bends in the river, of which I was taking an average from the two maps, and which I was tracing in a turquoise ink very far from the actual colour of the river. Towards Samarrah, I lost patience with all the bends of the river, so it tended to get a bit straighter up there. Also, drops of sweat kept falling from my brow, and threatening to smudge the river. I broke off to wipe my face with my handkerchief.

Stevens did not seem to sweat – an odd circumstance, in the case of such a big fellow. He must be in A1 condition. He was really frowning over his work, and kept reaching for the directory.

‘What a rigmarole this is,’ he said, more or less to himself.

‘What are you about?’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘ordering track from the Indian government. Like getting blood out of a stone it is.’

Here, then, was proof of the story I’d heard all the way up the Tigris: that the British and the British in India were at loggerheads over Mesopotamian policy.

‘They’ll send it,’ said Stevens, ‘but they’ll send it
slowly
. They make out they’re having to tear up their own lines to do it, which I don’t believe for a minute.’

‘They think we’re building a railway for the Arabs at their expense,’ I said.

He eyed me steadily for a moment.

‘Just so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think the camel jockeys are
quite
up to running their own railway, do you?’

This might have been just another offhand remark, but I thought it unlikely that any Arabist would have said that, even casually. Was Stevens, in this respect, falling in with his governor, Shepherd? If you were anti-Arab, did that make you pro-Turk? Turcophile? If you wanted to let the Turks in again through the back door, you certainly wouldn’t want the formation of an Arab state.

Stevens stood up and walked over to the window.

‘It’s going to be hot,’ he said, and I don’t believe it was a joke. He turned side on, and the thought broke in on me:
He’s a boxer; a heavyweight.
His nose, in profile, didn’t go as far out as it should have done. And there was no fat on him, for all his bulk. He walked over to my desk, and looked down at the map.

‘We might be riding over that very line – on Monday.’

I frowned at him, thinking of the bruises on the face of Boyd.

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘You, me and The Shepherd.’

‘What for?’ I asked, and he gave a shrug. ‘Can’t remember the word. Oh yes: reconnaissance.’

‘What’ll we use for a locomotive?’

‘The Shepherd has one lined up.’

I thought of the broken-winded engine I’d seen:
Elefant
. It couldn’t be
that
one.

‘But . . . who’ll crew it?’ I said.

‘You fire and I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘Or the other way round, I’m easy.’

‘You can drive an engine?’

‘After a fashion.’

It went without saying – since he had public school written all over him – that he had never worked on the
footplate
, so I asked how he’d come by his driving skills.

‘See . . . my old man has four hundred acres in a little spot called St Keyne.’

‘That’s in Cornwall,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Little railway goes right through our land.’

‘The Lyeskard and Looe line?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, and I could tell what he was thinking:
This bloke really is a railwayac.
‘You know it?’ he said.

‘Read about it.’

‘Why would anyone write about the old L and L?’

‘St Keyne was in
The Railway Magazine
– in a series called “Notable Railway Stations”.’

‘Notable? What’s notable about it?’

‘Its smallness,’ I said. ‘As I recall, the waiting room is the station master’s
front
room.’

‘That’s right,’ said Stevens. ‘Plays war about it, he does.’

‘He told
The Railway Magazine
it gave him the chance to meet all sorts of fascinating people.’

‘Old Williams? Did he really? He’s a bit of a pill actually, is that chap, but the other chaps, the drivers on the line . . . They were all right, and they’d give me rides up.’

‘They taught you driving?’

‘Well, gave me a few pointers, you know.’

‘I’d have given fortunes to have cab rides on a branch line.’

Silence for a space.

I asked, ‘How long have you known Shepherd?’

‘Oh, practically for ever you know. His folks know my folks. His dad was at the University with my dad.’

‘And were you at the University with him? With Shepherd, I mean?’

He shook his head.

‘The Shepherd’s a good ten years older than me. And I wasn’t
at
the University. The Shepherd was, of course.’

‘Oxford or Cambridge?’

‘Can’t recall. One or the other though, I know that.’

‘Why do you call him
The
Shepherd?’

‘Well now . . . why do I call him The Shepherd? Always have done, I suppose.’ I thought that might be the end of the matter, but Stevens was really thinking about it. ‘It’s his name, isn’t it? So that’s one reason, and then again he’s
like
a shepherd.’

‘How?’

‘Well, I don’t mean he keeps sheep. His folks own a fair old patch of Wiltshire, you know, but I don’t believe there’s a sheep
on
it. But he’s calm, and I suppose a shepherd is taken to be a calm sort of chap.’ He paused for a second, before adding, ‘Not that he doesn’t pull off the craziest stunts.’

I thought:
That fits the bill, if what I’ve been told about him is true.

‘What sort of stunts?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

And this time, it seemed, he really didn’t.

‘You’re a boxer aren’t you?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I am.’ And he eyed me shrewdly for a while. ‘How the deuce did you work that out?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but said, ‘You met The Shepherd in a hotel didn’t you?’

‘We got to talking,’ I said, ‘and we found we had a mutual interest in railways.’

He nodded. ‘Nuts on railways is The Shepherd. Anyhow, I’m off now.’

‘Where to?’ I said, trying to keep a light tone, for I felt I was exceeding my limit of questions.

‘Oh,’ said Stevens, ‘number eleven Clean Street.’

You’d have thought the place was known to all, but I put off asking about Clean Street in favour of a flurry of quick questions that got from Stevens the following data during his progress towards the door. His battalion had been one of those that had fought at Gallipoli. (Asked whether that show had been as bad as everyone said, he replied, ‘Oh, you know . . .’) He’d then joined the garrison force at Basrah, where he’d headed a team of PT instructors. He’d run into ‘The Shepherd’ practically the moment that he – Shepherd – stepped off the boat. The two had renewed their old acquaintance, and Stevens had accepted Shepherd’s offer to come up to Baghdad and help him run the railways. Stevens had not fought his way into Baghdad, as Shepherd had done, but come up in comfort on a steamer. As to our present work, I ought to remember – not that it really made any difference – that we were ‘Railways (Strategy)’. When I asked what that meant, Stevens said, ‘Search me. I think it means we try out The Shepherd’s ideas.’ He gave me to understand that most of the routine railway operation around Baghdad – not that there was much of that as yet – would fall to the Royal Engineers.

He quit the room, and I lit a cigarette. A moment later, I was standing at the window, watching him walk through the dazzling square, which he did with head tilted back, and face tilted up, as though to prevent his glasses falling off his nose. That was all wrong, I thought. In a place like this, you ought to look about you. But Stevens was not apparently a curious or very intelligent sort . . . which was probably just as well.

As he disappeared into one of the alleyways, my attention was caught by an Arab appearing from another one: red fez, long black coat. I instantly ducked away from the window. It was the station master, and he was approaching the Hotel at a lick. Evidently, he had discovered the secret of the
Salon de Thé
. There would now be an investigation. Would he supply a description of me? A suspicious white man seen at around the right time. If so, he might be taken to be trying to throw the blame away from his own people. Most likely the Arabs
would
be blamed. If the poor old station master himself should come under suspicion, I would have to speak out, but what would I say? A British lieutenant colonel did this because he was in the pay of Brother Turk, and Boyd knew it.

The call to prayer was coming through the window: a sort of wandering song, rather beautiful in spite of lacking any sort of tune, and which stopped every half minute and started again after a short pause, as if the singer wasn’t happy with it, and meant to try again. It was Friday, and I had the idea that the Moslems did even more praying than usual on a Friday.

I had now written out in pencil all the station names up to Samarrah, and would trace over them in red ink. They were spaced at intervals of about fifteen miles. The first one was Mushahida station; then came Sumaika, Harba, Istabulat, Samarrah. Neither map gave any indication of any settlements, or anything at all, as being located near them. I passed the next half hour in decorating the ‘North’ arrow on the map, and wondering about Stevens. He really was a rather hazy sort of bloke – perhaps he’d boxed too much and had gone ‘punchy’.

Now the map was about finished, and it looked pretty enough. I wrote at the bottom, ‘Prepared by Captain James Stringer’, then wafted it about to dry it, and rolled it into a scroll. I would take it through to Shepherd’s office even though, or rather precisely because, I knew he would not be in there. Delivering the map would give me the chance to have a scout about.