The Baghdad Railway Club Read Online Free PDF

good thing to be a scrawny old man in a dullish line of work. With Chief Inspector Weatherill – my governor as was – it was the opposite case. The Chief loved a scrap. His war had been out in Egypt in the eighties, and his great regret ever since was that a fellow didn’t come up against too many dervishes on the railway lands of York.
    Wright was moving about the office slamming drawers. He didn’t take kindly to seeing me with my leg up, but he could hardly say anything about it, for the Chief, sitting at the desk over opposite, had both his legs up. He was reading the Yorkshire Evening Press about the British occupation of Baghdad. The date on the paper was Monday April 23rd.
    ‘They’ve got their tails up in Mespot,’ he said, and I recalled to mind the talk I’d attended at the Railway Club.
    ‘A hundred and twenty degrees it is over there,’ said Wright, who was perhaps hunting up the missing witness statements. ‘ Bit on the warm side.’
    ‘Fancy a walk?’ said the Chief, lowering the paper.
    ‘It’s raining,’ said Wright, from over near the fireplace, where he was blocking the heat.
    But the Chief hadn’t been asking Wright, and he continued to look his question at me.
    We walked through the station with the rain thundering on the great roof. I liked to look up and watch it roll over the dirty glass. As the Chief collared a messenger boy, and sent him off to the Lost Luggage Office with a sixpence and instructions to bring back two umbrellas, I watched an Ivatt Atlantic come in, mixing its own roar with the roar of the rain. It was London-bound, and there weren’t many takers for its carriages.
    At the ticket barriers, the Chief said, ‘Where do you want to walk to?’ and he named a couple of pubs. Then he said, ‘But I was forgetting . . . you’re a hotel man now, en’t you? What do you reckon? Lowther’s? The Royal?’
    As we stepped out from under the station portico, and raised our brollies, I said, ‘Let’s go to The Moon, shall we?’
    The Full Moon was in Walmgate. It was most certainly not a hotel. You couldn’t even get a bite to eat there. You could drink beer .
    Now that I was an army captain, the Chief would constantly set traps for me – giving me opportunities to put on swank, and I did my best to dodge them. He might be a chief inspector in the railway police, but he’d risen no higher than sergeant major in his own days with the colours. This was partly through choice. The Chief didn’t want to be doing with writing up reports and dining in the officers’ mess. He would scrape his knife against his plate; he didn’t know which way you passed the salt.
    It was a ten-minute tramp to Walmgate. On Lendal Bridge, with the rain redoubling and the river seething below us, the Chief brought his umbrella close to mine, passed me a cigar, and lit both it and his own. We walked on through the darkly shining York streets, under endless sodden Union Jacks.
    ‘Well,’ I said, as we turned into Parliament Street. ‘What is it?’
    Because he obviously wanted to talk to me about something.
    ‘Tell you in the pub,’ said the Chief. He liked to draw these things out – a bit of a sadist, was the Chief.
    The Full Moon was not full. In fact, it was completely empty and silent. The Chief walked up to the bar, and bawled out ‘Carter!’ which was the name of the landlord – after which the silence gradually returned. Everything was brown, and slightly ticking – the clock, the tables, the benches. After a while, I began to hear the drumming of the rain above the ticking. The Chief swore, called out ‘Carter!’ again, and nothing happened again, but I noticed that the trapdoor in the floor behind the bar was open.
    ‘He’s in the cellar,’ I said.
    Presently, we heard the trudge of Carter on the cellar steps, and he began to come up through the trapdoor.
    ‘Chief Inspector Weatherill!’ he said, when about three-quarters of him had appeared; but the Chief just said, ‘Four