But he almost turned and went away.
What finally prevented him, in spite of his almost over-whelming gloom, was some last remnant of curiosity. There were things about Johnny Bull that lacked answers. The scene in the flat that morning for one.
Why, he asked himself, had blonde, plump little Sandra been in such a state when she had answered the door? Had she got something to hide? Certainly his own arrival had seemed to upset her more than it should have done. And Johnny? What was it that he had not been able to find? Just his coat? Or something more important? The way little Sandra had crashed the heavy front door closed with such violence surely indicated that the pair of them had some secret. What was it?
Quietly he pushed the blank iron door wide enough open to slip through and went in.
He found himself in a long, bare, brick-walled, white-washed corridor, completely empty except for a row of three red fire-buckets hanging from iron brackets. He walked on tip-toe all the way to the far end. There, round the corner, were two successive pairs of swing doors with net-protected glass in their upper panels. He peered through.
Beyond a short wide corridor he caught a glimpse of what must be the recording studio itself, part of a wall completely covered in matt white sound-absorbent material and a microphone on a long boom. He could just hear the sound of music.
Very quietly he eased open the first pair of swing doors and went and peered again through the second pair. What he saw encouraged him. The studio was very large and was split up by square fence-like screens into various compartments. There were a lot of people about moving from place to place and busy with their own affairs. It should not be difficult to creep in and quietly observe what was going on.
Inch by inch he opened the second pair of doors and slipped through.
Inside he was struck first by the sheer volume of noise dinning through the air. He recognised the sound of the harmonium, and after a minute located the instrument he had seen in Johnny’s flat. It was all by itself in an open-sided cubicle formed by three of the sound-proof screens. It was being played, not by Johnny as he had expected, but by a very serious-looking young man with heavy hornrim spectacles, a mass of floppy hair and a brightly coloured beach shirt. And apparently something had been done to the instrument since it had left India: no harmonium that Ghote had ever heard could produce one quarter of the volume that this one did.
He took a long look round and spotted a corner that seemed to be unoccupied and which was partly screened off by the back of one of the cubicles. Quietly he made his way past the big sealed window of the control-room—he kept his eyes averted from the anxious-looking men stooping over the immense variety of knobs, switches and coloured lights—and over to his selected vantage point.
From its cover he was soon able to locate the blonde little Sandra. She was sitting on a red-leather bench against one of the walls talking earnestly with a stocky man of about thirty, who was distinguished chiefly for a short and very bristly beard. With so many people wandering about—young men tensely carrying clip-boards, girls in slacks looking as if everything depended on them—it took some time to spot Johnny Bull himself.
When at last he found the boldly handsome singing idol he saw that he was penned up in a smaller cubicle, it seemed, than anyone else in the big studio. His mane of dark hair was clamped down under a pair of huge, fluffy-eared headphones and, insultingly close to the chiselled features of his face, there dangled a black little microphone surmounted by an ominous cue-light.
A few seconds after Ghote had caught sight of him the music from the power harmonium reached a peak and the cue-light in front of Johnny jabbed a sharp red signal. Johnny winced visibly and began to sing.
“We gotta kiss that Kama Sutra way …”
His voice rolled out, deep, more tuneful than Ghote had expected, but somehow expressionless.
“There’s gotta be a great love.”
He hung on to the note, though even Ghote could sense that he did so without the lingering affection for the sheer sound of it that the effect seemed to call for.
Suddenly the dying fall was interrupted by a brutal yell. Ghote saw after a moment that it came from someone who had already caught his attention, a short, dark-haired young man wearing a check shirt carefully buttoned to the neck, though tieless. He had been standing in his own cubicle, wearing headphones. But as he was up on a little rostrum he was able to see and be seen by everybody else in all the other fenced-off compartments. As the harmonium music had blared out he had been solemnly conducting it, marking each beat with such emphasis that he might have been attempting to teach nursery songs to a crowd of deaf children.
“Stop, stop,” he yelled.
He unclamped his headphones and let them dangle on his neck.
“We’re getting nowhere,” he announced. “Bloody nowhere. Everybody take five.”
Then he hopped down off his rostrum and was lost to Ghote’s view. A moment later he appeared again, confronting Johnny.
“Now listen,” he shouted at him, in a voice which no one there could fail to hear. “Listen to me. You’re telling this chick something, see. Telling her. You’ve got to put that over. It’s a feeling. A feeling. It’s got to come from here.”
And with enormous vigour he tapped himself clearly and simply on the head.
“From here, see.”
Johnny swallowed and looked at him.
He mumbled something which Ghote could not hear. The man in the buttoned shirt answered more quietly. Ghote looked round to make sure that in the general movement that was taking place no one was too interested in his own quiet observation of the scene.
He decided he had better retreat temporarily to the depths of his corner.
And it was as he stood quietly there that he heard the three conspiratorial voices.
One he recognised at once as Sandra’s.
“Look, tell me someone,” she was saying, with a plaintive wail, “is he okay or not? If he doesn’t make it after all what I’ve been through, I swear I’ll leave him. I swear I will.”
Ghote’s antennae pricked up. All you went through? Had she gone through being an accessory to murder after all?
There was a chair just beside him, a tubular-legged plastic-seated thing. Cautiously he set it against the screen behind which he had heard the voices. He stepped up.
Peeping gently over, he found he was looking down on to the tops of three heads—Sandra’s neat blonde one, the bristly one of the man he had seen before with the bristly beard, and the bald and shining crown of a big fat man wearing a bright blue suit.
The last was in the act of speaking.
“Never mind all that. He’s got to make it. There’s a lot of money tied up in that property.”
“Yes,” said the man with the bristly beard, “but he’s been between images. Wait till they see that new biog I sent out. It’s pretty fabulous.”
Sandra turned to him sharply.
“Listen, Freddy,” she said, “what’s the good of a new biog, even if it is sensational, if he doesn’t ever cut the disc?”
Freddy. Ghote’s mind clicked. The publicist.
He surveyed the three heads beneath him.
“He’ll cut it,” Freddy answered. “The boys’ll push him through. Look at some of the ones we’ve handled, the discoveries. Those chicks who couldn’t sing a note.”
“But this one’s got to be really good,” Sandra said. “My Johnny needs a Top Ten.”
“Don’t worry,” Freddy answered. “Look, I’m telling the music press they get nothing more about anyone from me unless they use him big when the disc comes out. Colour pictures, definitely. And I’m going to plug it around so hard the jockeys won’t know what’s hit ’em.”
“But will he stand up to it?” Sandra said wailingly. “You should have seen him this morning. Scared. Scared right through. And in the middle of it all I get a bloody Indian detective at the door.”
“An Indian detective?” Freddy asked. “Could I use hi
m? Rush out a quick hand-out?”
“No, you could not,” said Sandra, with the waspish tone Ghote recognised. “You know what that creepy little man thinks about my boy? He thinks he’s a bloody murderer.”
The fat man grabbed her elbow.
“You’re saying Johnny’s committed a murder?” he asked hoarsely.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sandra said. “Johnny’s so doped with his opium he can’t even murder a lyric, much less a real live girl. I had to put that pipe of his down the loo to-day, or I’d have never even got him here.”
Ghote stepped down off the plastic-seated chair. He did not need to hear any more. Sandra’s unguarded words had painted the picture all too clearly. The last faintly promising line of inquiry had petered out. But the Peacock was still missing. Someone must have killed her. Could it still be the Smiths? Or had Robin some way of nipping out of his Nest unnoticed? Or had she been killed by a person or persons unknown? If so, he had entirely failed to find the least clue to whoever it might be.
Yet there must be something. Somewhere there must be something he had missed.
SIXTEEN
Next morning Ghote felt wretched. His head ached and his whole mouth felt abominably dry. He had been up till very late the night before attempting to deal with Superintendent Ketkar’s paper and he imagined he was paying the consequences.
He had sat at the littered dressing-table, where not so long ago the Peacock must have sat at her school tasks, and he had held himself to it until he had read aloud and read again every single word Superintendent Ketkar had written, trying to recall just what it was the superintendent had said to him as he had gone through the same performance in the white-walled private ward at the J.J. Hospital ages ago it seemed. But the moment he woke up he knew that when in a couple of hours’ time he stood in front of all the assembled delegates at the Drugs Conference the paper was not going to sound any better than it had as at about three o’clock that morning he had stumbled at last to the end.
He was not Superintendent Ketkar: that was all there was to be said. He was not Superintendent Ketkar, and try as he might he could not make himself sound like him.
He ate none of the big selection of delicious fried things Mrs. Datta presented him with for breakfast. He drank some tea, but it did not seem to end the dryness in his throat. He left the Tagore House a lot earlier than he needed to.
On the way to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington High Street he called in at the newsagents’ near the restaurant. The back numbers of the papers he had ordered had arrived. He paid for them and took them outside to read, in spite of the low grey clouds overhead which threatened chilly rain at any moment.
He had not expected anything different, but when he found a full and clear account of the Smith brothers’ brush with the law, confirming in every detail what he had learnt from their proud mother, he experienced a new access of rage against all the circumstances that had conspired against him from the very moment that Vidur Datta had flung himself in that ridiculous fashion at his feet at London Airport till yesterday’s last disillusionment in the blaring, chaotic, self-absorbed Regent Recording Studios.
The Commonwealth Institute building with its fantastically-shaped, flyaway green roof, its sky-blue façade, its soaring white concrete struts, its neat rectangular stretches of ornamental water and the gay forest of tall flagstaffs in its forecourt did nothing to lift the dark twisted pleasure he had begun to take in the appalling mess he was about to make.
He plodded grimly round to the auditorium, thinking savagely of all the extra difficulties caused by having to read the paper in unknown surroundings.
And, just as he got to the auditorium entrance, a quite unexpected and somewhat ominous thing occurred. He sneezed. Once and violently.
It was only once, but it was enough. It accounted for his headache and his extraordinarily dry throat. He had caught a cold. He thought of the way he had had to stand, coatless, in that damp and green-moulded little area spying on the Smiths’ house with the sharp hail beating down on him. That must be when it had happened.
If only it had been to any purpose.
Grimly he entered the auditorium. It was, if anything, more awe-inspiring than the hall at Wood Street police-station. Here, instead of a few rows of neat black leather chairs, there rose up a raked sweep of seats between tall matt-black walls ominously sprinkled with groups of spotlights. They seemed to concentrate the whole auditorium like a crouching diver on to the narrow strip of the stage in front on which there was a very small table and just two chairs, one for himself and one for Superintendent Smart.
He stood letting the gloom soak deeply into him.
The other delegates, chatting animatedly together, took their places in the rows of steeply-raked, modish dark-grey seats. Ghote wished he could join them. How comfortable it would be to sit there and watch someone else perform up in the cruel light of the platform.
But instead he had to wait, alone and at every moment more panicky, for Superintendent Smart to come and lead him up on to the stage.
And nothing happened. The minutes went by and Superintendent Smart did not come. The time the proceedings were due to start arrived and went, and still no Smart. Ghote, who had been dreading his arrival in case he made some cheerfully optimistic remark about the paper, now began to long for it as a prisoner in gaol longs for release.
At intervals of about a minute and a half he sneezed.
Glumly he looked towards the mass of delegates sitting waiting to judge him, and apparently quite unconcerned at the delay. In the very front row, relaxed and brimming over with vitality, was Superintendent Jaffer of Karachi. He was whispering something to his neighbour with a slight wink. The remark, whatever it was, provoked an uncontrollable roar of laughter. Ghote wondered whether he was being ridiculously touchy to suppose that he himself was the subject of the quip.
And still no sign of Smart of the Yard. And still at regular intervals those explosive sneezes.
Then at last relief arrived. Smart came suddenly bustling in, looking a little put out, peeling off his woollen gloves and pushing them into the pockets of his over-large stiff trench-coat.
He came straight up to Ghote.
“My dear Inspector,” he said, “I really must apologise. The fact is I came up from Surrey by train and we got into Charing Cross nearly twenty minutes late.”
So much for this land of punctuality and regularity, Ghote thought bitterly. He might as well be back in Bombay.
He murmured something about the delay not mattering.
“But of course it matters,” Superintendent Smart said. “To keep you waiting when you’ve got a paper to deliver. It’s a nerve-wracking experience at the best of times. Or at least it is for me.”
And he caught Ghote firmly by the elbow, gave him a smile of great sweetness and led him up the side-steps and on to the platform.
Then he went straight over to the little table and tapped on it for silence. As usual he secured instant quiet.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I will apologise only briefly for having kept you, and Inspector Ghote here, waiting. The main thing is to get on with our programme as I expect the paper we are to hear will provoke a good deal of discussion.”
Ghote found that the sweat on his palm had caused his hand to stick to the hard cover of Superintendent Ketkar’s typescript. He peeled it away.
“However,” Superintendent Smart went on quietly, “since this is our last day, I must take just a moment to extend to any one of you staying on after the conference a most cordial invitation to come and see the department at work at Scotland Yard. You have only to let me know.”
He looked up briefly and smiled.
“But now,” he said, “there is no need for me to introduce you to our friend, Inspector Ghote. He is, of course, speaking to us with the voice as it were of Superintendent Ketkar.”
The voice of Superintendent Ketkar, Ghote thought. If only it was going to be.
He sneezed
.
“Superintendent Ketkar,” Smart of the Yard went on, “whose forceful analyses of the international dangerous drugs situation must be known to every one of you, is, as you have heard, laid up in Bombay. But we can feel he is with us in spirit to-day—in the person of Inspector Ghote.”
He sat down. There was applause. Ghote approached the little table. Three sneezes shook his whole body. He spread out Superintendent Ketkar’s neatly typed, efficiently bound manuscript. He took a deep breath and turned towards the audience.
All along he had hoped that at this moment oblivion would mercifully descend.
It did not.
He sneezed again, and, hardly able through his watering eyes to make out the letters on the white paper in front of him, he began to read.
For five minutes he was listened to in intent silence.
He read a little, he stopped to sneeze, he read another phrase or two, he sneezed again. Twice realising he had made a slight mistake he went back a few lines. Once the second attempt was better. On the other occasion it was worse.
But after the first five minutes he began to notice from down in the body of the hall a series of slight sounds—rustling, coughing, even whispering—that indicated with chilling clarity that he was rapidly losing everybody’s attention.
He ploughed on.
Words and phrases from what he was reading suddenly made a particular impact on him, and he let his thoughts dwell on them for a few moments. Then he discovered that he had no idea what it was that he was actually reading a line or two later.
The little hum of subdued chatter from the steeply-raked, grey seats rose gradually in volume. Ghote peered harder at his typescript. He read off another batch of words—“considerable quantity of opium recently manufactured is still unaccounted for and it may be presumed that a proportion of this has found its way into illicit channels elsewhere.” A sneeze halted him. He pulled out once more his already sodden handkerchief, muttered an apology and went back to his reading.
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 19