Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock

by H. R. F. Keating

  Suddenly from just outside the flimsy door of the bare room there came shatteringly an extraordinary explosion of sound. It was a voice. A man’s voice. Shouting. Very, very loudly. In Bengali.

  Ghote hardly spoke the language and consequently had little idea what the shouting was all about. He looked, a little bewilderedly, at Mrs. Datta, who had glanced up from her bundle.

  “It is my husband,” she said placidly. “The waiters. They know nothing.”

  The noise abruptly ceased, the door was thrust open and Vidur Datta came in.

  A very different person, Ghote thought, from the feet-hugging weeper at the airport.

  With eyes still flashing from his exercise of power down the narrow, resonating staircase outside, he looked all round the bare room. His solid little stomach jutted out now with a distinct air of command, and his head on its squat tower of neck was held at a definitely condescending angle.

  “Ah, it is you, Cousin,” he greeted Ghote. “So you have decided to come. I hope my wife has made you comfortable.”

  “Yes, thank you, most comfortable,” Ghote answered.

  He picked up the tumbler of tea again and cradled it appreciatively in his cupped hands.

  “Well,” Vidur replied, “we must look after you if you are to stay with us. It must be a stay you will enjoy.”

  There was more than a trace of satisfied ownership in his voice.

  “I am hoping to enjoy my time here also,” Ghote replied. “When my duties at the conference are over, that is.”

  The reminder that he was here for a purpose would not come amiss, he thought.

  “Well, we shall try to do our best to make you feel you are not too far away from home,” Vidur said. “We try to keep the West outside our doors as far as possible. As you will see.”

  Ghote looked round at the irritatingly over-Indian room.

  “Yes,” he said. “Though I was hoping to be able to see something of London during my stay. There is the Tower, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, New Scotland Yard.”

  “If you want, if you want,” Vidur replied. “But such things cannot match our Taj Mahal, our Jagannath Temple, our Jaipur Palace of the Winds, our painted caves at Ajanta.”

  It was a rebuke, no doubt about it.

  “But all the same,” Ghote said, “when I am here there is much that it would be a shame not to see. And then I want if possible to visit the shops too. I must take back something for Protima, you know.”

  He looked hard at Mrs. Datta as he said this. After all, Protima was her cousin, and it was as well to let her know that he had family obligations as well as everything else.

  “Yes,” she said in answer, “there are many things in the shops. It would not take long to find something.”

  Ghote seized on this opportunity, frail though it was, to get the conversation well away from the subject of the missing Peacock.

  “I would be glad of your help in this,” he said to Mrs. Datta. “I do not know what to buy. I want something that will be typical of the U.K., you know.”

  To his delight, Mrs. Datta put on a sharply considering look.

  “It is difficult to tell,” she answered. “I have seen some fine tea-towels with the Union Jack on them. That is very British.”

  The thought horrified Ghote. That flag, symbol of a proud and glorious nation, to be used as a tea-towel.

  At the risk of snubbing Mrs. Datta and sending her back to her chief preoccupation, he spoke with some sharpness.

  “No, no. I do not think that sort of thing at all. Something of traditional British craftsmanship.”

  “But what is such craftsmanship?” Vidur Datta broke in. “Have they anything to beat our Benares brocades, our Punjabi silverware, our Madura pottery, our Sylhet ivories, our Mirzapur carpets?”

  He turned to his wife.

  “Show him your blue shawl,” he said. “Very old, but still first-rate. A first-rate job.”

  Mrs. Datta drew herself up.

  “But I am showing,” she said. “It is here. I am just getting out of it the letter from my Peacock.”

  Caught.

  “Oh, that girl and her letter,” Vidur said. “We have had enough of her. Show Cousin Ganesh the shawl.”

  But his wife’s eyes, behind the slanting steel-rimmed spectacles, were flashing.

  “What are you meaning?” she flamed. “My Peacock is in the hands of this abductor, and you talk of shawls only. Cousin Ganesh is here to help us. He cannot do that until he sees the letter.”

  Ghote half-expected to find himself the witness of a fierce family quarrel. He felt that would be all he needed to complete his day. But disconcertingly Vidur abruptly gave way. He turned his back ostentatiously on the proceedings and tramped over to the mantelpiece where he stood examining the medicine bottles and packets ranged all along it.

  His wife, an expression of active triumph on her face, finished unwrapping the shawl-enclosed bundle and took from the pile of much-handled papers that was revealed a single small sheet a little fresher than the rest.

  She held it out to Ghote. He did not see how he could refuse to take it.

  He read it.

  “These five words only?” he asked depressedly, turning the slip over.

  “It is enough,” Mrs. Datta answered. “It says she is going to Johnny Bull. Clearly it says.”

  “It says ‘my lover’,” Ghote corrected her.

  “But Johnny Bull is what it means,” she said. “Johnny Bull is the only person that can mean. And she says she is going to him. I do not read very often, but when I looked at the note straightaway I could see that.”

  “And the policewoman who came, she examined it?” Ghote asked, though he knew what the answer was bound to be.

  “Certainly she examined.”

  “Did she ask to see anything else the Pea—anything else Ranee had written?”

  It would be a neat test of the efficiency of the investigation.

  “Her exercise books she saw,” Mrs. Datta said proudly. “Her exercise books she saw. Nineteen out of twenty. Nineteen out of twenty. Eighteen out of twenty. All the time. My Peacock could not have done better.”

  So the policewoman had passed the test. Yet Ghote found himself unwilling to explain her efficiency to Mrs. Datta. He had a feeling she would not be impressed.

  He turned the note over again.

  “Ranee did not sign?” he asked, although he could see very well that there was no signature.

  “Why should she sign?” Cousin Vidur said harshly, turning away from his sulky contemplation of the top of the mantelpiece. “Why should she sign? It was enough that she had written.”

  He tapped the top of the mantelpiece with an angry little rat-tat.

  “It was here,” he said. “Here it stood, in front of the bottles. Where all could see.”

  “What time was it that it was found?” Ghote asked, almost in spite of himself.

  “It was the late afternoon,” Vidur replied. “It must have been there ever since she left. But when my wife came back from her shopping—on Fridays always she goes to do the shopping, there are good Indian food shops in Drummond Street—when she came back she did not see. She does not take much notice of things written in English.”

  “But you saw it when you came in here in the late afternoon?” Ghote asked.

  “Yes, I saw. I read. And then I said: ‘So the creature has run off. That is what comes of all this Englishness. That is what comes of English friends all the time. That is what comes of English clothes’.”

  He marched over to Ghote.

  “She wore mini-skirt,” he spluttered. “Mini-skirt. You have seen?”

  “In magazines only,” Ghote said.

  “But so well she wore it.”

  It was Mrs. Datta. She was proclaiming her faith in the Peacock and in the Peacock’s triumph over a difficult and alien way of life.

  “So badly she wore,” Vidur shouted back. “Bad. Bad. Badly. No wonder it was away she
ran.”

  “No. It was not so. By this man, by this Johnny Bull she has been abducted.”

  She swirled round on Ghote.

  “Cousin, you must find. You must.”

  “Oh yes, find,” Cousin Vidur stormed in his turn. “Find, find. Find or we shall have no peace in this house.”

  And abruptly he wheeled round on his solidly fat little legs and pounded out of the door, slamming it behind him with a crash that seemed to shake the whole wall of the room.

  FOUR

  Mrs. Datta seemed unperturbed by her husband’s abrupt departure. She took the slip of paper on which the Peacock had written her curt farewell note from Ghote’s fingers and carefully replaced it in the bundle of documents lying on her blue shawl.

  “You must not mind my husband,” she said as she worked. “He has gone to make puja only. Every night about this time he goes to the prayer-room he has made and offers puja. He says it is more than ever necessary in this terrible land.”

  Ghote felt on the whole relieved that Vidur was no longer with them. It was going to be difficult enough making it clear that he was not going to be able to take any active part in the search for the Peacock without having two quarrelling people to contend with.

  For a moment he was tempted not even to try to explain anything to Mrs. Datta that night. He could say with truth that he was deadly tired. But a substratum of pride prevented him.

  The instant Mrs. Datta closed the drawer of the battered mahogany chest on her precious bundle he spoke.

  “There is something I must say before we go any further,” he began.

  Mrs. Datta looked at him sharply through her skewlensed spectacles.

  “You are going to tell you will not do it,” she said with quiet bitterness.

  Ghote looked down at the bare floor.

  “But you must understand my position,” he answered.

  “I understand enough: you will not help.”

  Ghote looked up.

  “Please,” he said, “if I was here for a holiday only, believe me, I would give it up at once. Even though I know there is nothing I can do. But I have work here, important work.”

  Mrs. Datta shook her head in sharp dismissal.

  “You would have time,” she said. “You will have time for sight-seeing, time for shopping.”

  Ghote bit his lip.

  “Very well then,” he said with a trace of anger, “hear the truth. I will not get involved in this. I think you are asking for trouble, a great deal of trouble. And I will not let that sort of thing distract me from making a good job of my part in the conference.”

  “Yes, that is it,” she said. “Trouble.”

  “But I cannot have my mind distracted,” Ghote said.

  Mrs. Datta looked up. The light from the unshaded bulb caught her spectacles.

  “Trouble,” she said emphatically. “That is what you are afraid of. Trouble. Trouble with Johnny Bull because he is a famous man. Trouble with the English because they are burra sahibs. That is what you are afraid of. I feared it even before you came.”

  “No.”

  Ghote felt that he would like to seize her and batter her against the drab wallpapered walls of this bare, ugly room till he had forced some sense into her.

  “No,” he shouted. “Do you think I am worried by anything of that? I am inspector of police. I have men under my command. Do you think I would let that sort of thing interfere with me if I did not want?”

  His voice had risen to a high note of indignation. He could hear himself. He was protesting too much.

  He was in fact a little afraid of this Western world. He had looked up to it for so long and from so far off that it awed him. And he knew that he ought not to let it do so.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Datta said in a quiet, exhausted, end-of-the-road voice. “Yes, I see that you are afraid.”

  Ghote clamped his teeth hard together.

  “Very well,” he said. “It is against my better judgment. But I will make time for your affairs. I will do it. I will do what has to be done.”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed in the little room at the top of the house that had until three weeks earlier been occupied by the Dattas’ niece Ranee, called the Peacock, Ghote miserably considered the events that had led up to his present situation.

  How different things were on this, his first night in London, from what he had imagined they would be. The fact that he was on his way to bed in a small and dingy room in a neglected old house and surrounded by someone else’s belongings did not much worry him. The prospect of life in the large Bloomsbury hotel at which he had been booked into had had complications which he was not sorry to have avoided. But he would dearly have liked not to have found himself in such an Indian atmosphere. It was not for this that he had come to modern, contemporary, yet stolidly traditional London.

  But he could have put up with it. The real misery was having got himself saddled with a case, and as tricky a type of case as could be found.

  He made up his mind not to do more now than just open his fearful, bulging suitcase and pull out what he would need before getting into bed.

  But he did not succeed in forcing himself up. Instead he stared gloomily at the wall in front of him. It was papered in a drab shade of beige, bleached by long years of exposure until it had reached the colour of palest coffee. Here and there it had been disfigured in various ways by the successive inhabitants of the little room. Even the Peacock, he saw, had left her mark, with a series of rectangles slightly less blanched than the surrounding areas and with rusted drawing-pins at their corners. These would be the only traces of her prized photographs of Johnny Bull, snatched down before her departure.

  Determined not to let his thoughts begin to mesh with the problems these faintly dark rectangles presented, Ghote shoved himself to his feet, got his suitcase open and began making minimal preparations to go to bed.

  To-morrow, or some other time, he would try to work out the meaning of the various articles the girl had abandoned all round him. Mrs. Datta had apologised about them when she had shown him up to the room—the bright dresses drooping bedraggledly in the cheap wardrobe, the froth of nylon underwear in the drawers of the dressing-table, and the collection of cheap-looking, three-parts used cosmetics on its top, pushed by some tidying hand into a single solid clump.

  But now he had to get to bed and sleep. If he was to conduct himself well next day at the conference, he must not let his thoughts get on to the racing treadmill they were all too ready to send whirling interminably round far into the night.

  He slumped down on the edge of the bed ready to swing himself in. And his bare toes came into contact with something that had been hidden by the cotton counterpane. He looked down.

  Beside his foot was one of a pair of Indian-made chappals, the imprint of the toes of the girl who had owned them worn deep into the old, much-used, glistening dark leather.

  The discarded object spoke to him, clearly and with inescapable simplicity, of the girl whose foot had made those marks on the stained sole. All the newly-bought, cheapish underwear and the jostling, frilly mass-produced dresses had told him only that his case was concerned with an empty-headed teenager, one like thousands of others, in Bombay, in Calcutta, in London, anywhere in any of the big cities of the world. But the old chappal had belonged to one distinct person, the Peacock. It was pitifully imprinted with her mark.

  Girls of her age grew up fast. The day three weeks ago when she had abandoned this relic of her past life she had been almost a woman, sophisticated and knowing. The day when this chappal had been bought for her, two or three years before, she had been a child. Her whole history was in the grooved and stained leather. The rapid development on the hardly secure base, the suppressed anxieties and fears, the bold front and the still childish creature beneath.

  Ganesh Ghote stood up in the little room at the top of the old house and made a resolution. If there was one small thing he could do to find this girl and bring her back to her rightfu
l place, to this room, to this narrow bed, he would do it.

  He got into the bed, humped the blankets over his exposed shoulder and fell deeply asleep.

  But from the moment Ghote awoke next morning, feeling much more capable of dealing with the onrush of events after nine hours of heavy sleep, he realised that for all the vividness of the image of the missing Peacock that had risen up in front of him the night before, he was going to have to put the whole business of her disappearance right to the back of his mind. The Conference on the Smuggling of Dangerous Drugs overwhelmingly filled the foreground.

  He knew from his briefing papers that the opening session of the conference was to take place at 10 a.m. in a hall at Wood Street police-station off Cheapside in the City. He decided to leave Tagore House in plenty of time. Unless he had ample opportunity to spy out the lie of the land, he knew he would not be happy. The prospect of pushing forward to ask about things he could possibly be expected to know for himself was one he was not going to submit to if he could help it.

  So, after an ample breakfast, not of the sausages, tea and toast he had fondly imagined he would have on this morning, but of well fried rice and Mrs. Datta’s carefully prepared pickles, he heaved his enormous English-style coat off its peg, plunged his way into it and set out.

  He followed his cousins’ directions carefully to the nearest Underground station, Marble Arch, and there, to supplement the instructions in his briefing, he bought himself a guide to London. Even handing over two such extremely English coins as the couple of half-crowns he parted with for this was, he found, a positive pleasure. And now he felt really well equipped. He could go here and there in this great city with the minimum need to show himself an ignoramus by having to ask for help at every turn.

  Cautiously he made his way down to the Tube platform. The train, when he got into it, was immensely crowded, but the mass of people seemed infinitely more orderly than those of the similar morning rush in Bombay. Even in the very closest proximity they contrived to ignore each other with magnificent calm. He felt proud of them.