“No bail?”
“No. So they was kept in the cells. Well, of course the boys weren’t having that. Naturally.”
“Naturally,” agreed Ghote.
“So they got this lawyer they have again. The one what gets ’em off when they’ve been caught up with.”
“I see.”
“And in the end he fixed it up for ’em all right. It was all in the papers. He had to go to this Judge in Chambers. But he couldn’t get hold of him till next morning. And why they was in Chambers I couldn’t say. Always thought a chamber was something quite different, if you take my meaning.”
Mrs. Smith laughed richly and wheezily.
“So let me get it clear,” Ghote said, with a cold gulp. “They spent the night of October the twenty-first in a police-station waiting till the Judge in Chambers gave them bail?”
He had to get it absolutely straight: it meant the collapse of his whole patient investigation. He had to have it confirmed beyond possibility of error.
“Yeh, yeh. That’s right,” Mrs. Smith said. “That’s why the date’s ringed round on the calendar there. The only night they ever spent in the cells, my boys.”
She fell to looking broodingly at the three fiercely burning bars of the electric fire at her feet.
Ghote turned round and very quietly walked out.
Once again Ghote took every precaution to avoid an encounter with Mrs. Datta or her husband on his return to the Tagore House. He had gone on foot all the way back from the Smiths’ trying to get the situation into perspective, but even when he reached the restaurant, with the aromatic odour of its curries wafting out into the street all round and the rich glow of light from its discreetly curtained windows, he still had by no means got things straight. So he went quietly round to the entrance at the back and crept up the stairs like a ghost.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, the bed that had once been the Peacock’s, he made one final effort to order his thoughts.
Look at it how he might, he could not get round what Ma Smith had told him. All three of the brothers had been in police-station cells from before the time the Peacock had disappeared until well afterwards. No wonder the constable had said they were already in trouble enough. But however much trouble they were in, it could have absolutely nothing to do with the Peacock vanishing when she had.
He would have to get hold of a newspaper of the day after the brothers had got their bail from the Judge in Chambers. He could hardly simply take Ma Smith’s word for it. But, once he had that confirmation, the trail he had followed with so much difficulty would have come to an abrupt end. What next?
There was, of course, Robin. He had sold the Peacock drugs. He would have to be seen again. And there was Johnny Bull. There were still circumstances connected with him which were to a certain degree unsatisfactory.
But neither line promised one quarter as well as the case against the Smith brothers had done. With a heavy heart, Ghote undressed and got into bed.
On Sunday morning he straight away encountered another setback. Although Cousin Vidur put all his waiters to work looking for an old newspaper of October the twenty-third, there was not one to be found.
So it was in a mood of checked fury mingled with black depression that, shortly before eleven o’clock, he set out to visit the Robin’s Nest once again.
Nor did the sight of the little café itself, with its hectically red-breasted robin so badly painted on the door, do anything to lift his gloom. He almost turned away without so much as going in. But the remnants of pride he felt in doing a job till it was done to the last detail pushed him on and he swung the door back and entered.
He was at once greeted by a blast of unexpected sound. He had not bothered to look inside before going in and it had not occurred to him that at this hour of the morning there would be any customers. But there were. A group of half a dozen teenage girls, all long coloured stockings, mini-skirts and quilted anoraks, clustered round the ancient, patchily spruced-up juke box which for their benefit was going full blast. The robin in the bright blue cage on the top was hopping up and down and round about in a perfect frenzy of delight.
In a moment Ghote recognised the tune. It was the same one as he had heard here before, Johnny Bull singing “It’s Love, Only Love.”
Beyond the girls he saw Robin, busy with his back to the door cutting sandwiches. It did not look as if the girls were making much demand on his services.
Ghote marched up to the counter and tapped on it sharply.
Robin turned. And at the sight of Ghote his round ruddy face with its little beak of a nose went almost comically blank with dismay. He stared and stared as if, try as he might, he could not believe the evidence of his senses.
At last he spoke, trying to keep his voice down under the pounding sound of the juke box.
“You,” he said. “You. I never expected to see you round here. And you look all right too.”
He stopped and stared again, as if to make sure this was indeed the man he had set the Smith brothers on to.
“Yes,” said Ghote, with a strong touch of grimness, “I am here, and lucky that is for you. If what you had expected had happened to me, I would have seen that you paid for it.”
Robin opened his round little mouth once or twice. But there was nothing he could say, and he knew it.
“Now then,” said Ghote, not bothering to keep his voice low, “there is also more to it. There is the matter of your lying.”
“Lying?”
Robin hurriedly stifled the high pitch of his retort.
“I never told a lie in me life,” he whispered passionately.
“Stop that straight away.”
“Well,” Robin conceded with a gulp, “I may tell a lie or two every now and again. But only when strictly necessary, you know. Only when strictly necessary.”
“So why was it necessary to lie to me about the date Billy Smith left here with the Peacock?” Ghote asked sharply.
“The date when Billy left with the girl?” Robin whispered strenuously. “I never told you a word of a lie over that. I swear I didn’t.”
“You told me it was on the night of October the twenty-first, Trafalgar Day.”
Robin’s round, ruddy face was crossed by an expression of hurt.
“Well, how could I be expected to know when Trafalgar Day was?” he said in the same earnest whisper. “It’s all the same to me, I tell you, Trafalgar Day, St. George’s Day, Empire Day. What they want to have ’em all for, I don’t know.”
“But you said that it was on October the twenty-first.”
“Did I? Did I? Well, if I said that, it must have been, mustn’t it?”
“But Billy Smith was in a police-station cell on the night of October the twenty-first.”
Robin’s podgy little hand flew to his mouth as if he had inadvertently made a rude noise.
“Was that the day?” he squeaked. “Well, fancy that. Then he couldn’t have been in here, could he?”
“No,” said Ghote, “he could not. So why did you say he was?”
Robin looked quickly from side to side. From the juke box under the wildly hopping pet bird the voice of Johnny Bull repeating, endlessly it seemed, the words “It’s love, only love” bawled deafeningly on. The girls bunched squeezingly round it.
“I’m afraid I made a mistake, that’s all,” Robin said.
He put his beaky little nose in the air and looked at Ghote challengingly.
“You made a mistake?” Ghote snapped. “A very likely story. You wanted to cover your tracks at all costs, I think.”
“Tracks? What tracks?”
“You wanted to conceal from me that you had a great deal more to do with the Peacock than you were willing to have known. That is why you rang up the Smith brothers while I was there and tried to get them to shut me up. You could not do it yourself.”
Robin clutched at the edge of his well-polished counter with both hands.
“I’m sure I have no idea what you coul
d be meaning,” he said.
“You know just exactly what I am meaning.”
“No. No, I swear I don’t.”
He darted a glance at the still absorbed bunch of girls.
“Then I will tell you,” Ghote said. “I am meaning that you sold that poor girl drugs and—”
“Ssssh,” said Robin frantically.
He looked at the girls. They had obviously heard nothing.
“I already told you about that,” he whispered. “And anyway it was more like she sold them to herself. She must have ’em: needed them to get back her boy-friend, if you please. Pester. Pester. Pester. I simply couldn’t get rid of her.”
Ghote thrust himself half-way across the counter.
“I suggest that is just what you did do,” he said. “In the end you got rid of her.”
A look of purest indignation came on to Robin’s round face.
“Me?” he said.
The word came out as a shrill, irritated squeak. But he no longer attempted to keep his voice down.
“Me? You’re saying I did away with that poor kid?”
He shook his head incredulously from side to side.
“You’re saying I got rid of her,” he repeated. “With the customers never out of the place from seven in the morning till two at night? Do you think I can commit a murder between serving cups of coffee? You must be joking. You really must be joking.”
Rather than go back to the Tagore House and face the possibility of becoming involved in explaining the present state of his investigation, Ghote decided to go straight from the Robin’s Nest to Johnny Bull’s flat at the Carlton Tower. It was not a prospect that filled him with pleasure. But Johnny was now his last slender hope of finding out what had happened to the Peacock. Her relations with him were the last part of her life that held anything of mystery, and he had to discover something in them which would account for her disappearance. He had to.
So, without allowing himself even a moment’s delay, he consulted his by now rather battered London guide and made his way directly from the Portobello Road to Sloane Street. And, again forbidding himself even five minutes to walk up and down the broad pavement outside the huge, glossy hotel on the excuse of needing to order his thoughts, he went round to the entrance to the private suites and almost flung himself into the black-and-gold, silent and rapid lift.
At Johnny Bull’s floor, he marched straight out of the lift and across to the door of Johnny’s flat. He put his thumb firmly on the stainless steel bell push.
There was no answer.
He rang again. He rang once more. He rang at intervals of thirty seconds for five whole minutes. But no one came to the door.
He went down by the lift and made a cautious inquiry from the voluminously coated, much medalled commissionaire. Yes, Mr. Bull had gone out early. He had taken his Jaguar. He, and the lady, often spent Sunday in the country. He usually got back very late.
Ghote went, tail between his legs, home to the Tagore House. And as soon as he had let himself in at the back door he encountered Mrs. Datta. She was standing at the top of the stairs and seemed very glad to see him.
“Ah, Cousin,” she said. “I have been waiting for you. Come up. Come up.”
Ghote hung his heavy coat on the little row of hooks, stroked the rough surface of its cloth once for reassurance and mounted the stairs.
Cousin Vidur was also in the sitting-room. He was standing, as usual, in front of the gas-fire, which was popping away as merrily as ever. Mrs. Datta had, it seemed, finished the piece of deep purple knitting and had begun on a piece of strident green, which she had already picked up before Ghote entered. It was growing fast under her restless fingers.
But her task did not stop her immediately fixing Ghote with a keen look.
“It is time you told us what you are finding out about my Peacock,” she said.
Ghote smiled a little.
“I have had a great deal to do,” he answered. “There has been not only my investigation, but there is the conference. There is a lot of hard work in that.”
“And your investigation?” Mrs. Datta said. “Where has that led you to?”
Ghote clasped his hands together in front of him and rubbed the knuckles of the right hand in the palm of the left.
“I am making a certain amount of progress,” he advanced guardedly.
“Yes, yes.”
“Yes, I think I can say that. It is as much a question of eliminating certain lines of inquiry as anything. But that is a very necessary part of any investigation.”
He shot Cousin Vidur, over by the bottle-lined mantelpiece, a quick look.
“Certainly it must be necessary to find out what has not happened,” Vidur agreed solemnly.
For the first time Ghote felt sympathetic towards him. He had a good deal of common sense after all.
Mrs. Datta’s voice from low down on her couch broke sharply in.
“You went to the house of these criminals called Smith?” she asked.
“Yes, yes. That was a line that had to be pursued. Definitely.”
“And you have found where they are keeping my Peacock?”
“They are not keeping her.”
Mrs. Datta’s head shot up from her bottle-green knitting.
“Then why did you go to their house?”
Ghote sighed. Loudly and clearly.
“That was one of the matters it was necessary to eliminate,” he said. “They had behaved in a most suspicious way, and had in fact offered me personal violence. It was necessary to conduct a most rigorous investigation.”
He looked sternly down at Mrs. Datta.
She looked back at him, her spectacles glinting.
“But they were not hiding my Peacock?”
Ghote felt a spasm of fury. He had told the woman that he had run into considerable danger in his hunt for her niece, and was this all the thanks he was to get?
“No,” he said sharply. “They are not hiding your Peacock. I had to risk entering their house in their absence to discover that.”
Mrs. Datta shrugged her bony shoulders under her sari.
“To discover that someone is not where you think they are is not very helpful,” she said. “Where is she truly? That is the point, you know.”
A jet of pure rage soared through Ghote’s head.
“Perhaps it is not the point,” he said. “Perhaps the point is: who has killed her?”
“That girl could have killed my Peacock,” Mrs. Datta unexpectedly replied. “They could have killed her together.”
“Who could have killed her?”
“Johnny Bull and that girl.”
Ghote blinked.
“You mean the girl Sandra?”
“If that is her name.”
“But why should she have killed her? Why are we talking about her? I do not understand.”
An ugly suspicion that he did understand perfectly well could not altogether be suppressed.
“You do not understand,” Mrs. Datta replied, unperturbed by the fact that Ghote was beginning to shout, “because you are all the time looking for who did not take away my Peacock. You must start to look for who did take her.”
Ghote felt tears of despair coming into his eyes.
“It is the same thing,” he said, forcing himself to speak calmly. “Finding out who did not do a thing is the other half of finding out who did do it.”
“It is Johnny who did it,” Mrs. Datta replied. “Johnny and Sandra.”
She gave her full attention to her knitting again. Ghote, in desperation, turned to Cousin Vidur for support.
Vidur, legs plumply apart in front of the little orange fire, looked grave.
“Yes,” he said, “from what you have told that girl is certainly the worst type of Westerner. To hang around a man like that disgusting Johnny Bull with decadent music always on his lips. It is nothing short of scandalous. Yes, scandalous.”
He gave an emphatic nod to indicate that his judgment was concluded
and relapsed into silence.
Ghote could not refrain from shooting him a glance of quick anger. But he appeared not to notice it. For an instant Ghote was tempted to shout out to his face that he knew him to be nothing but a drug-sodden old afim-wallah. But he found he had not got the heart somehow.
Vidur deflated would be a sight so pathetic that it was worth enduring hours of Vidur inflated to avoid.
He looked from husband to wife, from wife to husband Neither appeared to have any further comments to make. The nasty thought that what Mrs. Datta had said about Johnny and Sandra, however unlikely, was a technical possibility, and one that he had left out of account, could no longer be fought down.
“Well,” he said, his voice sounding even to his own ears over-loud and strained, “to-morrow morning, in any case, I am going to see Johnny Bull and Sandra. First thing.”
But before the time came to see Johnny Bull again a more pressing anxiety had obtruded itself. In the morning post on Monday there was a short note from Superintendent Smart. It told him that owing to a slight change of circumstances he was to deliver Superintendent Ketkar’s paper to the Drugs Conference next day, Tuesday. “We all look forward to it with the keenest interest, as well as to hearing your own views,” the letter concluded.
If there had been one thing to be grateful for in all the unpleasantness of his search for the Peacock, it had been that he had had no time to think about this particular ordeal. But now the thought could no longer be pushed away.
To suit the convenience of the Continental delegates to the conference there was to be no meeting on Monday morning. Ghote had confidently earmarked the time for his second interview with Johnny Bull. But he knew now that he must first confront the brooding spirit of Superintendent Ketkar. Nevertheless he promised himself he would still get to the Carlton Tower before Johnny Bull took it into his head to go for another day in the country, especially as the weather was still bright, if not warm.
So, up in the sanctuary of the Peacock’s room at the top of the house, he extracted the superintendent’s slim, stiffly bound typescript from its resting place in his case.
But the actual sight of it brought on an unwillingness even to look at its contents which was almost physical. Eventually he made the effort and turned to the first page. The words stared back at him as if they had been written in some unknown language.
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 17