Handed In at 10.08

The monsoon was going out that week, and going badly. No rain had fallen since Sunday, but the air had kept all of it: it lay on Bombay like a wet cloth, and a collar put on at six was finished by seven.

It was ten minutes to eleven by my watch when a constable from the Parel chowki came into the divisional office, out of breath, with a message he had carried two miles on foot. The night signaller at Parel Road railway station was dead in his telegraph office with the back of his head broken. By rights it was no business of ours. The railway keeps its own police; but the railway police inspector was forty miles up the line with a collision to account for, and the station master had sent to the town instead. That night the town was me — an inspector of the City Police, with his coat off and a report half written.

I put the coat on, took the constable up beside me in the office carriage, and we drove north into the mill district. There is no Bombay out there after dark, only walls. The spinning mills stood shut along both sides of the road, long and blank, each with its chimney over it against a sky that showed no stars, and the smell that came over the walls was of banked boilers and hot oil and raw cotton. Down the middle of the road ran the rails of the horse tramway, and under every street lamp they shone as if it had rained after all.

The station stood at the end of that road: a brick front, an arch, and across the arch an iron gate, shut and locked, with a single lamp burning above it. Behind the bars the booking hall was dark. High up in the darkness hung a big white clock face, lit from somewhere I could not see, like a moon that had come indoors.

I got down and walked to the gate. The constable took hold of the bars with both hands and shook them.