A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (92 page)

*

‘I’m sorry,’ the
MCO
said, ‘I cannot allow private calls of any nature. I am trying to raise Mirat. The lines may be down. Please go away.’

The
MCO
was a Sikh. Sikhs, people were saying, had been among the gang that stopped the train and slashed Muslim passengers to death with swords. But if he feared for his own life he didn’t show it. He had moved freely up and down the platform. Perron had waylaid him on one of his brief visits to the office where a havildar-clerk was constantly on the telephone.

‘If you get Mirat, would you please tell them that Ahmed Kasim, the son of Mohammed Ali Kasim may have to be presumed dead and that the Nawab of Mirat’s Chief Minister should be informed?’

‘Ahmed Kasim? Ahmed Kasim? Who is Ahmed Kasim?’

‘He was travelling with us.’

‘Then why is he presumed dead? You are first-class, surely. Please go away. What is one man among so many?’

‘Mirat, sir,’ the clerk shouted, and handed the phone over.

The
MCO
grabbed the receiver, at the same time saying, ‘Please all of you go away.’ He began talking rapidly in a
mixture of English and Hindi. Perron was not the only unauthorized visitor. There were about six crowded into the tiny office. But all of them were English – people who were anxious to contact friends left behind in Mirat or waiting for them in Ranpur, friends who some time during the day might hear what had happened and start worrying.

‘Let’s try the stationmaster,’ one of them said.

‘He’s worse than this chap.’

They had absorbed the shock. The old reactions were already setting back in, but the impulse to take charge had gone. It was the kind of situation that had always been bubbling under the surface trying to break out, the kind that the
raj
had had to try to control. Now the worst had happened.

‘God knows how they’re going to cope in this place,’ one of the officers told Perron as they went back on to the platform. ‘Premanagar’s always been a dead-alive hole. No proper troops and no pukka hospital.’

The
MCO’S
office was next to the first-class restaurant. The trains always drew up so that the first-class compartments were opposite the places that first-class passengers needed. In this area, then, the platform was an isolated little island, bordered on both sides by the horrors. Perron noticed that armed police had turned up. It was twenty minutes since the train’s arrival. He went to the compartment. The door was open. Inside there were only the two Peabodys – he kneeling by an open bag, she lying full length on the bench, hand over her eyes.

‘Where are the others?’ Perron asked.

‘Women’s rest room.’

From the bag Peabody was taking a webbing belt and holster. The holster had a revolver in it. Perron got down again and went to the women’s rest room. It was crowded. There were several men among the women, looking pale, dignified and protective. At one end of the room he saw Mrs Grace, ayah and Edward, and Susan. He made his way to them, passing from under one area of fanned air to another. ‘Where’s Sarah?’ he asked Mrs Grace.

‘She’s gone to see what she can do to help. I let her. It’s what she wanted.’

Perron pushed his way out again. ‘Savages,’ a woman was
saying. And a man, ‘What do you expect? It’s only the beginning. Once we’ve gone they’ll all cut each other’s bloody throats. Non-violence. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it?’ But it didn’t make Perron laugh. Once out on the platform he forced his way through a little cordon of armed police into the place where the kind of help Sarah had to offer might be needed. He couldn’t see her, so went back again, passing through the area of safety and certainty, out to the other side, through another cordon of police, to another place of horror. Here he saw two Indian nurses, and a stretcher-bearer. A nun. Two nuns. However unpukka the nearest hospital was it had begun to operate. And there were two white women, one elderly, one quite young. A middle-aged Indian in European clothes stopped him. ‘Are you a doctor?’ ‘No,’ Perron said. ‘I wish to God I were.’ And passed on. The two white women were nursing children. The nuns, both Indians, were binding wounds, staunching the flow of blood from terrible looking cuts which revealed the whiteness of the bone, the redness of the flesh under the brown skin. Another middle-aged man, an Englishman this time, looked up and said, ‘Are you the doctor?’ ‘No,’ Perron said. The man said, ‘Never mind. Water’s the problem. Could you help with that? But it’s got to come from the tap down there. Not the one for caste-Hindus. But a lot of these wretches are dying of thirst if nothing else.’

It was at the tap ‘down there’ that he found Sarah. She was on her knees, in the filth and the muck, her skirt wet through, handing up little brass vessels to the man controlling the tap, reaching out for empty ones without looking, placing the filled vessels on the other side. The vessels, mugs, glasses were being brought and taken away by men and women and youths. He knelt by her. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let me take over.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m all right doing this. I can’t do the other thing. But if you can, please do.’

So Perron picked up one of the brass jugs and turned and went among the dying. Or the dead. It wasn’t always easy to tell. He knelt first by an old grey-beard who seemed to be smiling up at him gratefully, joyfully, but who did not respond when he put his hand under the man’s neck to try to raise him. The eyes were glazed and the smile was merely a death-smile.

*

The train had been the 10 a.m. express to Ranpur, its only scheduled stop Premanagar, normally reached at 11.15. The ambush had been laid at a point on the line some miles from the last of three wayside halts, all of which were reached and passed by the express within half an hour of leaving Mirat, and beyond which there was no habitation, nothing but desert, until you reached Premanagar.

As the train came out of a curve on to a straight level embankment, the driver had indeed seen a cow, apparently ruminating. He did not remember seeing more than two or three men asleep on the embankment, but at this point there were a few shade trees growing in the dips on either side, and when he brought the train to a stop he realized there were very many more men. They came up on both sides. Two – armed with swords – climbed on to the footplate. The others began running down the track and climbing into the carriages.

Some passengers said that the attackers were joined by men who had travelled on the train from Mirat and who now produced knives and cudgels and joined the raiders. It must have been one of these men who had noted the compartment Ahmed Kasim got into. Opinions varied about the length of time the train was halted while the men went through it, dragging Muslims out or killing them on the spot. Some said only five minutes, others remembered the slaughter continuing for perhaps half-an-hour. The truth was that it lasted no more than ten or fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, getting a signal, one man released the cow (which had been tethered) and slapped it away to find its own salvation. The two intruders on the footplate ordered the driver to resume his journey and then jumped off. He needed no persuasion. He believed himself lucky to get away with his life and that of his young apprentice. He didn’t look back until the locomotive had got up speed. Then he saw men scattering across the rough rocky ground towards a huddle of ruined huts. He saw no vehicles, got no indication of how the men had congregated in this place, or how they hoped to get away. But there probably were vehicles, an old carrier-truck, perhaps, an ancient bus. It was forty-five minutes before the train reached
Premanagar; perhaps another fifteen before the Premanagar authorities had contacted Mirat; perhaps another half-hour before troops, police and medical units from Mirat arrived at the scene of the ambush, having dropped search parties off at the villages served by the wayside halts. At the scene itself there was only the terrible evidence: the dead and the dying. By then, the attackers had had nearly two hours in which to scatter.

By road, the journey from Mirat to Premanagar could be accomplished in one and a half hours, only fifteen minutes longer than the journey by rail. The first contingent of troops and medical staff and armed police from Mirat arrived at about one-thirty in the afternoon, fifteen minutes later than the scheduled time of the express train’s normally delayed departure for Ranpur, after a leisurely stop for early first-class restaurant lunches. By then, the deputy commissioner and the district superintendent of police had been on the scene since mid-day. The transfer of dead and wounded to an emergency casualty station set up in the goods-yard area was nearly complete. Some kind of order had been restored. The carriages and the platform were being washed down. The rumour was that the train would leave for Ranpur at about 3 p.m., this time under armed guard, and mightn’t be more than an hour or so late reaching its destination that evening. About a dozen of the first-class passengers went into the restaurant. The bar had been in use for some time.

*

Perron’s trousers and shirt were spattered with blood. He had lost sight of Sarah. He made his way from the goods-yard back to the platform and the compartment.

Mrs Peabody was still stretched out on the bench. Peabody was bending over the tiffin-box, pouring a drink from a thermos. The carriage was otherwise empty. The garlands which had been presented to the Peabodys in Mirat lay on the floor.

‘Have you seen Miss Layton?’

Peabody nodded at the lavatory cubicle. ‘She’s in there, changing. The others are still in the women’s room I suppose.
You’d better change too. Will you have some malted milk? It’s very fortifying.’

‘No thank you.’

‘There’s a spare sandwich or two here. Or have you got your own tuck?’

‘I don’t want anything to eat, thank you.’

‘You ought to eat. Especially if you’re going back. I’ve just been having a word with Bob Blake. He’ll take you if you still want to.’

‘Who’s Bob Blake?’

‘He’s
OC
the refugee protection force in the cantonment. They got here a little while ago. I told him what happened to Kasim. He’s ringing the station commander in Mirat. There can’t be anything you can do but you seemed keen, so I told Bob. He knew Kasim slightly. He’ll be here to have a word presently, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Sarah came out of the cubicle. She carried a hold-all. The dress she had on was creased but unstained. And dry. She glanced at his shirt and trousers. She said:

‘Have you had a drink yet?’

Peabody said, ‘I offered him one but he didn’t want it.’

‘I meant a real drink.’

Perron shook his head. ‘I don’t want a real drink, either.’ He felt now as if he was going to be sick. He went down on to the platform. Sarah came down too. She said, ‘Sorry to scrounge. Have you a cigarette?’

He got out his case. He found it difficult to open. She tried to steady his hand while he helped her light up, but they were both trembling.

She said, ‘Are you really going back?’

‘Are you asking me not to? Do you want help in Ranpur?’

‘No. No, thank you. I want to go back too. But I can’t. I can’t let Aunt Fenny cope alone. But they’ll soon know at the palace what happened to Ahmed. Someone ought to go back and try to say how it did.’

‘Mr Perron?’

Perron turned. A stout, rather red-faced middle-aged English officer had come up. Sarah said, ‘Guy, this is Major Blake.’ They shook hands. Blake said, ‘I’m going back in about
fifteen minutes. If you want to come with me can you be ready by then?’

‘Yes, I’ve only got to change.’

‘I’m leaving my subaltern in charge of the train, Miss Layton,’ Blake explained. ‘You’ll be quite safe for the rest of the journey. I’m putting on a whole platoon.’

He took Perron’s arm, guided him a few steps away and said, ‘I’ve been on to the station commander in Mirat. He told me Count Bronowsky’s already phoned him. The news got round fairly fast. I’m afraid the station commander told him that only Muslims in third-class compartments were killed, but that’s what he assumed. He’s going now to the place where the bodies are being brought in. Is there any possibility that Kasim wasn’t killed?’

‘I don’t think so. He just opened the door and went, Peabody saw the rest.’

‘The station commander said that if young Kasim is dead he’d be very grateful if you do come back. Where were you going, Mr Perron, Pankot?’

‘Just to Ranpur, then on to Delhi.’

‘Any urgency?’

‘None.’

‘All the same, I’ll help you in any way I can to get you away again. Did you see the chalk-mark on the door?’

‘Chalk-mark?’

‘Miss Layton noticed it a little while ago. Someone had chalked a moon low on the door of your compartment. It must have been done in Mirat by whoever was watching which part of the train Kasim got into. Yours was the only first-class compartment attacked. All they had to do was look for the chalk-mark. Well. I’ll send a chap to help you sort out your bags and bring them over.’

Blake went back to Sarah. They spoke for a few moments. Then he touched his cap and went. From the bar there came a sudden roar of laughter. Perron went back into the carriage to get his bags down and change. As he did so he noticed a fresh smear low down on the door, where the chalk-mark had been wiped off.

*

Mrs Grace and Susan, Edward and ayah, were still in the rest room. He didn’t want to intrude on them. He said goodbye to Peabody. Mrs Peabody was still prostrate. There was only Sarah to see him off. One coolie had his suitcase, another his hold-all. A lance-naik sent by Blake was in charge of them, waiting to take Perron to the truck, whatever kind of vehicle it was he and Blake would travel in.

‘Are these yours, old man?’ Peabody called, offering something from the open carriage door: a little package and a canvas bag.

The package was certainly his. Dmitri’s gift. Unopened. A book, presumably. Perhaps a translation of the poetry of Pushkin. The canvas bag, for a moment, was unrecognizable. Then was. He came away from the door holding both. Sarah looked away from the bag.