The Baghdad Railway Club Read Online Free Page B

indicating the magazine.
    ‘ Were you?’ he said, and it was genuine interest too.
    I believe I then spoke for about ten minutes continuously. I began by telling Shepherd of how I was a railway detective by profession, having been deflected from a career on the footplate by an accident involving an unwarmed engine brake and the wall of an engine shed in Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax. (On the basis of this data, I realised, he must be wondering how I came to be a commissioned officer, for I assumed he did credit me with being an officer of some sort.)
    I told him how the police office I had worked in was situated at York station . . .
    ‘On platform four,’ he cut in, ‘I know it.’
    I then started in about how a journalist had come from The Railway Magazine and written us all up, giving prominence to my governor, Chief Inspector Weatherill, and giving me second billing in a way designed to cause maximum embarrassment: ‘The sharpers and dodgers of York station have learnt not to run too close a risk in the immediate vicinity of Chief Inspector Weatherill, and his close associate Detective Sergeant Stringer . . .’
    At this, Shepherd smiled, but I believe he was smiling at the words of the journalist rather than at my own recollection of them. In other words, he was not laughing at me .
    ‘Go on to the war,’ said Shepherd.
    I told him the North Eastern Railway had formed its own battalion . . .
    ‘The Seventeenth Northumberland,’ he again cut in. I nodded, and waited for him to say, ‘. . . known as “The Railway Pals”,’ and he got points with me when he didn’t . I told him that in the second half of the Somme campaign my unit had operated trains to the front from the railhead at Aveluy.
    ‘Little trains?’ he said, again with excitement.
    ‘The two-foot railways,’ I said. ‘They’re everywhere now.’
    ‘Were you running the Simplex twenty-horsepower units?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Never touched the Simplex tractors. Never saw one, or any petrol engine for the matter of that. We were riding the Baldwins.’
    Blowing out smoke, he said the one word, ‘Steam,’ and sat back. He eyed me for a while, sat forward. ‘Are they good runners, the Baldwins?’
    ‘They’re good steamers ,’ I said, ‘but the boilers are set too high.’
    ‘So they’re unstable.’
    I drained my glass of brandy.
    ‘They fall over,’ I said.
    I told him how I’d got crocked, but not about the bad business I’d struck in my own unit – the matter of the bad lads within it. He listened, it seemed to me, carefully, and not just out of politeness.
    His knowledge of railways might have put him in the Royal Engineers. But they were in the thick of the railway construction, and he’d asked his questions as an outsider. He held back, anyhow, which was his right as the senior man. But he again tried to make up for any lapse in manners by returning to the question of the cigarettes, which he had seen had interested me. Indicating the packet on the table before us, he said, ‘By the way, if you’re a regular here, you’d know that it used to be “ Turkish cigarettes” and “ Turkish coffee”.’
    I nodded.
    We were at war with Turkey. You might as well try and sell ‘German sausages’ as ‘Turkish cigarettes’, and this accounted for ‘Smokes from the Holy Land’ or whatever the phrase had been.
    ‘I’m surprised the fellow can still lay his hands on them,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, he can’t of course,’ said Shepherd. ‘His stock’s running very low . . . And they’re becoming rather dried out. With the fires and the steam heating,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘it’s very hot in here, whereas a cigarette wants moisture in the atmosphere.’
    I nodded, thinking: Well of course it’s very hot in Turkey as well. But perhaps it was the humid kind of heat.
    A long interval of silence. Then Shepherd suddenly asked another railway question: ‘How portable are the two-foot tracks?’
    ‘It takes four men to lift