“Most interesting.”
“But that’s my new sound, feller. The Indian sound. And then there’s the Indian look. That’s why I got me this new gear.”
With a long-fingered, well-manicured hand he patted his dark grey, close-fitting, high-buttoned coat. Ghote saw that it was indeed a version of the familiar atchkan, much popularised by such figures as Pandit Nehru.
“It’s all going to do it,” Johnny said. “Bring the old career right up to those heights again. The Indian look, the Indian sound and a touch of that old Kama Sutra stuff in the publicity. Just the hint, you know. Just the tip that bed with Johnny boy is something you don’t come across every day of the week.”
Sandra, standing attentively by the door, giggled softly. She came across and sat on the broad arm of Johnny’s chair and leant nuzzlingly towards him.
“Yes. Publicity,” said Ghote sharply.
Johnny pushed Sandra morosely aside and sat up.
“It’s hell this publicity business,” he said sorrowfully. “You’d think, wouldn’t you, that nothing would be better than having the tale go round that I kept a slave-girl or two. But I tell you, it’d be death. Death.”
“Death?” said Ghote.
“Death to the image, feller. Policemen hanging round, inquiries, all that. It’s nasty. The fans don’t like it. The record companies don’t like it. There’s nothing worse.”
“So we must find out what has happened to the Peacock,” said Ghote decisively.
“The Peacock,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “It wasn’t a bad name for the kid, you know. She was a dresser all right. She paraded her charms for all to see. I can make a guess at what happened to her.”
“The bitch,” said Sandra.
Johnny smiled up at her lazily.
“All women are bitches,” he said.
“One moment, please,” Ghote said sharply. “We are getting away from the problem. What is important for you is to make it completely plain that you could not have had anything to do with the Peacock’s disappearance. Can you prove that?”
“But I was telling you, feller—” Johnny began.
“Where were you on the night of October the twenty-first last?” Ghote shot out at him.
Johnny looked at him, his eyes widening.
“The night of October the twenty-first,” he said. “You sound like a detective or something.”
“I am a detective,” Ghote said.
Johnny blinked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “Sandra told me. Indian detective. Somehow I never thought they had ’em.”
“We do,” Ghote replied, not allowing himself to be riled. “And when someone has disappeared, they ask questions. Questions like: what were you doing on the night of October the twenty-first last?”
Lazing back in the big, square, chocolate-coloured chair, Johnny looked at him with a hint of a grin.
“Feller,” he said, “I haven’t the least idea when the night of the twenty-first was, nor the twenty-second, nor the twenty-third.”
“The twenty-first was the day the Peacock disappeared,” Ghote said. “Trafalgar Day.”
“Trafalgar Day, was it? Then I’ll tell you what I must have been doing: climbing Nelson’s Column to celebrate.”
“This is no time for joking,” Ghote said. “Please remember, the answers you give might put a rope round your neck.”
But Johnny, lying back in the big chair with one black leather slipper flipping and flapping at the end of an extended foot, was not impressed.
“Not a rope, feller,” he said. “This is an enlightened, civilised country. We don’t hang people no more.”
Ghote fought down his annoyance. He ploughed on.
“Very well. Perhaps you would be good enough to tell me exactly what were your feelings towards my cousin—towards the Peacock in the days preceding her disappearance?”
“Just the same as they had been for the past couple of months. If you must know.”
And the black leather slipper flipped insolently up and down.
“And what had they been in that period, if you please?”
Johnny looked at him straight down the length of his straight, straight nose.
“I was stinking fed up with the cow,” he said.
Ghote reflected with modest pleasure that, engrossed in his task, he was able to ignore completely the calculated insult to someone asking about a relative in distress.
“You were fed up with her?” he replied sedately. “Why was this?”
Sandra, snuggling closer than ever into Johnny’s side, answered for him.
“Why was this?” she mimicked. “This was because I came along.”
“You get to need a change once in a while,” Johnny explained carelessly.
“Not any more you don’t,” Sandra said.
Johnny slowly rose to an upright position in the big chair. He twisted round a little and looked the softly plump little Sandra in the face.
“Get,” he said.
She promptly attempted to wind herself round his chest, making a little cooing, murmuring noise. He grasped her two elbows with his large, well-formed hands, gripped hard and peeled her off like a length of sticky plant-tendril.
“Get out,” he said, with theatrically quiet menace.
Sandra blinked her pallid eyes.
“Yes, Johnny boy,” she said.
Johnny, back almost flat in the chocolate-coloured chair, watched her in silence as she walked the length of the room and went out, carefully closing the door behind her.
“You have to keep them in their place,” he said. “If they get out of hand they cause no end of trouble.”
“And the Peacock caused no end of trouble?” Ghote asked.
Johnny smiled. The black slipper began to flip to and fro again in a maddeningly slow irregular rhythm.
“The Peacock caused trouble,” he said. “And that was the simple reason I wouldn’t see her any more.”
“But she forced her way in?”
Johnny shook his head from side to side.
“No, feller. She did not.”
Undismayed, Ghote tried a small experiment.
“She did not try to see you,” he said, “even though she was with child?”
For a little Johnny did not reply. But the black slipper flipped and flopped.
Then he grinned.
“You wouldn’t be trying it on, would you?” he said. “I don’t remember hearing anything about anything like that when I had that angry old uncle character on the phone. And I’d have thought he’d do a big line over his little girlie being ‘with child’.”
A vision of Vidur Datta sombrely indignant over such an outrage came into Ghote’s head. Johnny certainly was armed with plenty of shrewdness.
But for form’s sake he held to his line a little longer.
“You are not denying that the Peacock could have been with child by you?”
Johnny shrugged.
“Do I sound like I’m denying?” he said. “But if you ask me that girl was a pretty slick chick. She wouldn’t have gone getting herself into that sort of trouble. She knew her way around.”
“But if all the same she had got herself into that sort of trouble,” Ghote persisted. “She could have made things most unpleasant for you?”
Johnny shook his head.
“Now that’s the sort of publicity that does no harm at all,” he said. “Nice little affiliation order or two, makes the girls know you really mean business. Same as when they slap a fine on you for what they call ‘possession of dangerous drugs.’ Then everybody knows you’re a real swinger.”
And with the words “dangerous drugs” Ghote realised in the space of less than a second what exactly the curious odour he had noticed on first coming in was. It was the smell of opium. The highly characteristic, sweet yet acrid smell of opium. If he had not been able to place it instantly, it was only because he had never expected to encounter it anywhere in England. In Bombay he had smelt the unmistakable ta
ng often enough in the course of his duties, even before he had joined Superintendent Ketkar’s department. In places like the crowded district behind the commercial dignity of the Fort area, as you pushed your way along the noisy, narrow lanes, every now and again you came across it, even seeping out into the open. And there would be a fifth-rate eating-house with a narrow flight of stairs at the back and a signboard in front of it in English and Chinese. You might raid it with a team of tough constables and you would find half a dozen Chinese-born seamen stretched out in the faraway languor that comes after smoking what they called chandu and what is known in Hindi as afim, opium.
But to come across that odour here in England, this was a different matter.
He leapt to his feet and pointed accusingly at the reclining figure of Johnny Bull.
“Opium,” he said. “You make use of opium.”
And flip, flop went the dangling black slipper.
“You want a couple of smokes?” Johnny said.
Ghote checked himself. He was letting his sense of outrage at what was being done in this land he admired run away with him. It would not get him anywhere with his inquiry to denounce Johnny Bull as a vile degenerate.
“No,” he said, sitting quietly down again, “I am merely a little surprised that this is the drug you choose.”
Johnny smiled comfortably.
“It’s going to be the one they all choose soon,” he said. “Yeah, give it a year or two and coke and L.S.D. and all that lot will be for squares. The pipe’s going to be the thing. It’s got class, and it’s real dreamy to use.”
“You have been using it long?”
“Since my trip to India, feller. Came across it in Bombay. You ever in Bombay?”
“I work there.”
“And you don’t smoke? You’re missing something, feller.”
Ghote ignored the lazy jibe.
“The smoking of opium is illegal in this country,” he said.
“So are lots of other nice things that don’t do any harm.”
Johnny grinned impudently. Ghote decided not to give him a lecture about the long-term effects of opium-smoking.
“Where do you obtain your supplies from?” he asked casually. “Did you bring them in bulk from Bombay?”
His professional interest was aroused. This might be a useful way of improving his stock at the conference.
“Now don’t be stupid, feller,” Johnny said. “You think I’d risk bringing in that stuff. You get prison for that. No, I buy myself a little bit whenever I need it.”
He gave Ghote a decidedly sharp look.
“But I thought you were meant to be finding out what happened to that Peacock girl of yours?”
“And what do you think happened to her yourself?” Ghote shot quickly back.
But Johnny simply smiled again.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what’s happened to her,” he said. “And what’s more I don’t care. India will do fine to give a bit of new life to the old image, but don’t let me have any more to do with Indians. They’re so crawly I could stamp on them.”
“But you are British,” Ghote said, “a fine British singer making lots of money and keeping British records on all the hit parades?”
The contented look stayed on Johnny’s face.
“You’ve said it, feller,” he answered.
“Then let me tell you something,” Ghote snapped. “I have seen your like by the dozen in India. You are nothing but a typical playboy Indian film-star. I have had dealings with them in plenty, and most of them are nothing but spoilt brats.”
And the last shot got home. Johnny’s dark eyes narrowed in sudden fury. He opened his mouth to reply and found nothing to say.
Ghote jumped up and headed for the door.
But before he reached it Johnny Bull found his tongue.
“All right,” he said. “All right, Mister Bloody High-and-mighty. But let me tell you something about your precious relative, something that’ll come as news to you.”
Ghote turned.
Johnny was sitting on the very edge of the big chocolate-brown chair now. He was bolt upright and shaking with rage.
“Your precious Peacock,” he said, “was nothing but a low-down little drugger. I may smoke because I need it for my work, but she just drugged to make herself lower than she was. She went down to that place off the Portobello Road, the Robin’s Nest, and did anything, anything in the world, to lay her hands on whatever she could get.”
EIGHT
Hurrying away from the Carlton Tower along the now glowingly lit and even more implacably opulent Sloane Street, Ghote had been tempted to seek out the place called the Robin’s Nest, whatever it was, at once. He would have liked to find out at the earliest possible moment just where what he had heard from Johnny Bull was going to lead him.
But within a few minutes he had come to the conclusion that it would be better to approach the whole matter with some caution. For one thing, he had only the scantiest information to go on. It would have been useless to have asked Johnny for further details.
What was clear was that his accusation was basically true: he had got too much satisfaction out of making it for it to have been something which was going to get disproved. Ghote wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Datta were going to say when they heard.
He found them both comfortably installed in their wilfully Indian sitting-room, Mrs. Datta busy with some sewing and Cousin Vidur standing in front of the popping little gas fire, with the ranks of laxative bottles and packets on the mantelpiece ranged comfortingly behind him.
As soon as Ghote came in, Vidur began to deliver himself of a few observations which he seemed to have been storing up for just such an occasion.
“Well, Cousin Ganesh,” he said, “and what do you think of these English, now that you have seen them in their own country for a little? A pretty rotten lot, isn’t it? Wearing the mini-skirt, eating beef.”
He looked down severely in the direction of his own solid little belly, not one ounce of which could be attributed to nourishment derived from anything even half as sacred as the cow.
“I tell you,” he continued, “I cannot wait for the day when I can sell this place, lock, stock and barrel, and go back to the ancient decencies of our native land.”
A visionary gleam came into his two little eyes.
“And that may not be too long now,” he said. “We thought we were in for a bad setback when they abolished the tax allowance for expense-account entertaining. But in the end it came to nothing. In a few months the bar returns were one hundred per cent back to normal.”
Ghote, in spite of the fact that his views on British life seemed now to have got much closer to Cousin Vidur’s, decided that he was not prepared to voice a note of sympathy. He need not have pondered the matter.
“Yes,” Vidur hammered on with scarcely a pause, “it is a degenerate, religionless land we have to earn our poor living in. Drinking alcoholic liquors, kissing in the public streets, driving here, there and everywhere in fast cars. There is no end to it, no end at all. And then, the night-clubs. Open to all hours, displays of women in all their nakedness, taking the business from places that have the right to it. Disgusting, thoroughly disgusting.”
“I know what you mean,” Ghote cut in quickly.
He had seen a chance of sounding out the Dattas on what he had learnt about the Peacock and was determined to take it.
“It is not only alcohol,” he went on quickly. “There is drug-taking too. I hear that—”
“Yes, certainly,” Vidur broke in forcefully. “It is a nation of drug-addicts also. Cocaine, heroin, stuff from America that has the most undesirable effects. The whole thing is rife everywhere.”
“Are drugs easy to obtain here then?” Ghote snapped in.
“Oh, yes, yes. They are sold in the streets. It is common knowledge.”
“In any particular area?” Ghote asked. “I heard mention of the Portobello Road. Is that what they call it? Whereabouts is that?�
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Mrs. Datta answered. She could no longer bear not to have a part in such a vigorously denunciatory conversation.
“The Portobello Road is not far from here,” she said. “There is a market for antiques and a vegetable market. Once I used to buy vegetables there, but when I started to take my Peacock with me I found I had all the time been cheated.”
“The Peacock knew the area then?” Ghote asked quickly.
Mrs. Datta drew herself up proudly on the low divan where she was sitting.
“All London she knew,” she said. “Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Carnaby Street. Everywhere.”
But something in the way Ghote had put his question had alerted Vidur Datta.
“Why do you ask if the girl knew that area?” he said, with a quick glance from his shrewd eyes embedded in their dense flesh.
Ghote drew a deep breath.
“Because of something I learnt when I visited Johnny Bull this evening,” he said.
“You have visited Johnny Bull?” Mrs. Datta said, immediately agog.
“What was this you learnt?” her husband asked, more pertinently.
Ghote looked at him squarely.
“I learnt that the Peacock was in the habit of obtaining drugs from a place off the Portobello Road called the Robin’s Nest,” he said. “Do you know where that is?”
“No,” said Vidur Datta. “Certainly not.”
“But it is a café,” Mrs. Datta said sharply. “You must know it. You have often been to the Portobello Road, and it is easy to see as you walk along.”
And, to Ghote’s fury, a classically interminable family argument promptly broke out. The question of the Peacock being a drug-buyer was completely ignored. Instead the likelihood of Vidur Datta having noticed a café a few yards off the Portobello Road reigned supreme. With the greatest vehemence, he maintained that he could have no notion of where the place could be and that in any case he had hardly ever even been to the Portobello Road. With unending persistence, his wife claimed that he could not have failed to have seen the café, if he had walked only once along the length of the narrow market-street, and that in point of fact he had been there many times. She got down to dates and occasions.
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 9