“Opium recently manufactured is still unaccount—No, I am sorry. I have already read that. Please. Ah, yes. Illicit channels elsewhere, and it—”
Another catastrophic sneeze.
In the front row down below him he saw Superintendent Jaffer make absolutely no attempt to stifle the most enormous yawn. He had very large, very white teeth.
Ghote shut his eyes for one instant, forced them open again and returned to the paper. He read to the end of the page in front of him in a quick gabble, sneezed again slightly, turned over and read on.
It was only when he heard a distinct titter from the audience that he realised he had turned over two pages together.
He turned back and resumed.
The tittering grew. It was borne in on him that he had turned back not one but two pages and was well launched again into the saga that had caused Superintendent Jaffer to yawn so prodigously.
He took out his handkerchief, blew his wretched nose with a long trumpeting sound, and, forcing himself to be calm, succeeded in locating the place where he was really meant to be. He read the next ten lines with something approaching fire. And then he started sneezing so continuously that all hope of keeping to this hardly-won level of achievement vanished.
But he ploughed on. He ploughed on and on, it seemed to him, for hours. Sneezes shook him and he stopped. He recovered, read a few lines more, and succumbed to sneezes again.
When he had got about two-thirds of the way through he gave up any attempt to correct mistakes he knew he had made. Instead he just read solidly on, not particularly emphasising any words but just saying them, getting them said and thrust behind him.
And at last, with his nose red and raw, with his throat sore and his eyes bleary, he came to the end. The last words were there at the foot of the last page, and he read them. He declined to make the gesture of looking up and even ever so slightly proclaiming them. He simply, and in a dry monotone, read them.
Then he straightened up from his stooping position over the frail table.
And a wonderful feeling of relief came over him. He had read the paper appallingly, totally appallingly, but he had read it. He had got through to the last word, the very last.
Facing him in the audience no one made a sound. The buzz of chatter continued. They had not realised that his task was completed.
And this did it. A sudden blaze of contempt for every single one of them and for everyone and everything else flared up in him. He lifted up his head.
“All right,” he shouted, “ignore what I have read if you like. But drugs manufactured in Bombay are on sale in this very city. Everybody knows where to buy them. Even the singer Johnny Bull was able to tell me just where to go. Without a second thought, just like that. Drugs from Bombay: here. It is nothing short of a scandal.”
And then he turned, leaving Superintendent Ketkar’s carefully planned and executed paper where it lay all pawed over and sneezed upon on the little frail table up on the platform, and fled.
The very sight of the people in busy Kensington High Street was more than he could bear. They all seemed so contented, prosperous, easy, strolling along with their big, brightly patterned shopping-bags, and their well-sprung, luxurious prams, talking together, laughing.
He hurried past, jostling people blindly, looking round for a way of escape. And then he caught sight of the wide open, black ironwork gates to Holland Park.
A park, he thought, on a chilly grey day like this. I should at least be able to get some peace there.
He wheeled abruptly and shot through the gates and on at a rapid pace till he was well inside the great walled-off area of the park, once the proud home of the Lords Holland and the Earls of Ilchester, now a public domain. And, as he had hoped, under the low grey skies with their already half-fulfilled promise of drizzle and dampness, there were only a very few people about to disturb the blackness of his mood.
On the broad walk by which he had entered there were two or three children on tricycles with gay coloured woollen hats and bright rainproof overalls. Elsewhere a solitary walker, mackintosh-wrapped and absorbed, strode through the greyness of the day. But otherwise he seemed to have the whole place to himself.
Stony-faced he tramped through a sodden rose-garden where on the bare spiny branches of the ordered rose-bushes two or three splodged pale pink or yellow blossoms still clung damply to their stalks. On the corner of a wall he saw a robin, a Christmas card robin with a neat red breast, perch momentarily in its search for worms in the damp earth of the rosebeds.
It served to remind him of the infuriating error he had been led into at the Robin’s Nest café and of the humiliating and unpleasant events that had followed from it, through his encounter with the Smith brothers to the hailstorm which had given him this brain-shattering cold to that final moment of despair when he had read in black and white the evidence that the brothers had been safely locked up at the very time the Peacock had disappeared.
He kicked savagely at a pebble lying on the path, and missed.
He strode on through a gravel-pathed cloister where the loud echoing sound of his own steps sent him hurrying off again. He stared at the menu card outside a restaurant in part of the formerly huge Holland House. The prices on it astonished him.
A renewed burst of sneezing brought him, he did not quite know how, into an enclosed formal garden with precisely shaped flower beds each surrounded by an ankle-high little boxwood hedge. White-painted wooden benches, empty and upright, looked blankly on. Its very tidiness and air of placid permanence sent a new spasm of fury through his frame. The whole place seemed at that moment to sum up England for him, ordered, aged, quiet, affluent, formal, damp England. And he hated it.
How glad he would be in forty-eight hours’ time when his plane was due to leave. Whatever troubles awaited him in Bombay, at least he would be putting his present miseries behind him.
He rushed through an ancient, wistaria-enwreathed stone archway and out to a prospect of a big lawn, its grass dankly green and autumn-yellow, and heavy shrubberies surrounding it, the leaves of the bushes slowly dripping with the cold moisture in the air. His sneezing began again.
He saw at his feet a neat row of little dead-looking silver floodlights trained in a battery on some now flowerless shrubs.
To have so much money that you use artificial light to show up the beauty of flowers, he exclaimed angrily to himself. It was intolerable.
He stamped on.
At the far side of the big dank lawn a large bird, startled at the unusual sound of his steps, flapped its wings heavily and took to the air. He saw that it was a crow. But how different from the sun-warmed, boisterous, argumentative crows of Bombay. This creature’s caw of remonstrance seemed like an ugly mocking laugh intended solely for him.
He smelt the rich, harsh odour of rotting leaves in his nostrils. He swung round and tramped off in the opposite direction.
And then it was that he saw them.
Under a trio of tall black-foliaged cedar trees, whose fallen spines carpeted the ground a dead brown, there they were: a pair of iridescent peacocks. The bright blue of their breasts caught his eye infallibly, for all the distance between them. The colour spoke to him of India.
He moved quietly forward towards them. He saw that their plumage was past its summer best. Their long tails were a remnant only of their former glory. There would be no question of them suddenly turning, bowing slightly and setting up their great display fans. But it did not matter. The colour was there, shining, glossy, and with that peculiar simultaneous lightness and depth that seemed to him now the only proper way colour should be.
He got slowly nearer.
At last he was standing only three yards away from them, hardly daring to breathe in case they should be frightened away, lost in admiration of their courtly grace and of the shifting brilliance of their plumage.
And then the larger of the pair turned its beady eye sideways in a quick jerk and made a snatching peck at some morsel it had s
potted. The sheer unreflecting greed of the action made Ghote actually wince.
It was perhaps the slight shock that was responsible. Or it may have been that at this moment his weary brain came to the end of a long half-unconsciously followed trail. But whatever it was, he was suddenly aware that there in his mind, like a hard jewel, was the explanation of the disappearance about a month before from her home at the Tagore Restaurant, Hyde Park Terrace, London W.2 of a girl commonly known as the Peacock.
He spun round and, with his brain working furiously, made off at speed through the now unseen forlorn dampness of the misty park.
SEVENTEEN
As Ghote, some half an hour after leaving the astonished peacocks in Holland Park, came rushing in at the back gate of the Tagore House Restaurant, he met the proprietor of that establishment making his way sedately and stolidly along the brick path through the cluttered yard towards him.
“Cousin Vidur,” he said, “what luck to have caught you just now.”
Cousin Vidur looked at him and blinked.
“What is it that you wanted, Cousin?” he said. “You seem to be very much out of breath. All this Western hurry. It is not at all the right way of going about things.”
“I wanted to ask you a question,” Ghote said.
“I am on my way to visit a wholesaler. But ask, ask.”
“I will,” said Ghote. “Cousin Vidur, what has happened to the pictures that were in the Peacock’s room, the pictures of Johnny Bull all round the walls?”
Vidur looked astonished.
“What pictures are these?” he said.
“The pictures she had of Johnny Bull, the ones with the titles of his songs written out underneath them. Your wife mentioned them the first evening I was here.”
Vidur shrugged his tautly plump shoulders.
“How should I know?” he said. “I suppose the girl would have taken them with her, since she was so lovesick for this man.”
“She would have taken the one with the title ‘Going to My Lover To-day’?” Ghote snapped. “No, Cousin, that she did not take. Because you used those words in the farewell note you pretended she had left, Cousin.”
Vidur’s solidly plump face went pale.
“What does all this mean?” he said without conviction.
“It means that after you killed her you found she had by chance provided you with what looked exactly like a farewell note in her own writing,” Ghote answered. “I have only worked it out in these last few minutes. I had seen the note and later I saw the title of that song on the walls of Johnny Bull’s flat. My visit there was not so useless after all. But until I thought of you as the one who killed the Peacock I had no reason to connect the two things.”
“Why did you think of me?”
Vidur managed a little truculence.
“I thought of you,” Ghote confessed, “because I was watching a pair of peacocks just now and one of them suddenly made a peck at some disgusting morsel on the ground, and I realised that proud birds can be greedy creatures too. As the Peacock was. A dazzling and gay creature, but greedy also. I thought of all those clothes she had, so many that a lot were left behind. Where did she get the money for them all, I asked. And the answer was that she got it from you.”
“I would not give a girl like that money to buy prostitute’s clothing.”
Vidur darted a proud glance from side to side.
“But you had to,” Ghote said. “She had found out, just as I did, that you take opium, and she demanded money from you till one day she tried your proud spirit too far.”
And then Vidur did collapse. Just like a pricked balloon.
Ghote swung away from him.
“Is she buried under all this rubbish?” he asked, nodding his head at the piled high rotting crates and mouldering cartons that completely hid the ground of the little backyard.
“Yes, she is there,” Vidur said.
“You left yourself in a very awkward situation all the same,” Ghote said. “With your wife so devoted to the girl, you were in the position of having to do much more than the little you would have liked to find out why she had left home.”
He laughed sharply.
“I ought to have known that early on,” he said. “From the way you behaved at the airport. Something was bound to be wrong with the proud Vidur Datta getting down on his knees and kissing my feet. There was something that certainly did not ring true.”
Vidur looked at him. All the hard plumpness in his face had sagged away. But in his little eyes there was still a strain of fierce calculation.
“Cousin Ganesh,” he said, “what are you going to do with me? We are cousins, remember. And we are Indians also in this appalling country together.”
“Do with you?” Ghote answered with simple certainty. “I am going to hand you over to the proper authorities. Indian or British, a killer is a killer and the police are the police.”
And, as if by magic, at that very moment the high wooden gate of the backyard opened and the silver-topped tall blue helmet of a Metropolitan Police constable appeared round it.
How he had come to be there Ghote could not imagine. But he saw that at this juncture he would be useful indeed. Always provided he was a reasonably intelligent man. Heaven forbid that he should turn out to be another prejudiced joker like the sergeant at the local station, or, worse, a pompous old idiot like his advice-laden rescuer at the Smiths’ house. He would see.
“Constable,” he called. “Just the man I want.”
“Inspector Ghote?” the constable said. “We were wanting you too, sir.”
He darted his head back through the gate and called something out. A moment later Detective-Superintendent Smart came into the little backyard, craning out of his stiff trench-coat and rubbing his woollen-gloved hands hard together.
“Inspector Ghote,” he said briskly, “we hoped we might find you here.”
“Well,” Ghote replied, “I do not know about that. But I am certainly glad to see you. I have a murder suspect for you.”
Superintendent Smart’s head came half an inch farther out of the tortoise-necked collar of his stiff coat.
“Murder, is it?” he said cheerfully.
“I do not think there will be any difficulty securing a conviction,” Ghote said. “If you will get your constable to take charge of the fellow, I will come along and explain all about it.”
Superintendent Smart’s eyes twinkled and he gave his woollen gloves an extra brisk rub.
“This is the girl who disappeared, is it?” he said. “I heard about that. So it was an inside job, eh? They were very foolish to invite a chap like you on to the premises. That’s two crimes you’ve cleared up inside an hour.”
“Two crimes?”
“Yes, indeed. Your information about that fellow Johnny Bull knowing where opium was sold was just the tip we needed. We made a few inquiries and we’ve got him. He brought in heaven knows how much of the stuff in an old harmonium, if you please.”
He gave a dry little chuckle.
“That’ll be something to tell old Ketkar when you see him,” he said.
And a great warm rosy light invaded Ghote’s whole being. Never mind how he had done it, but he had pulled off a double. He had dealt with the extra burden that had so unfairly been placed on him on his visit here, and he would also go back to Superintendent Ketkar in unexpected triumph.
An enormous grin spread slowly across his whole countenance.
Superintendent Smart gave a quick rub to his gloved hands.
“Well,” he said, “I hope you’re going to give yourself a fine old treat in the rest of your stay here. You’ve certainly earned it. What’s it going to be? A slap-up tour of all the sights? You haven’t had much time for that, I bet.”
Ghote thought of his postponed visit to the Tower. But it no longer held the glamour for him that it had done on the first day of the conference. A lot of changes had occurred in his outlook since then, none bigger than in the last few minutes her
e in this rubbish-piled backyard.
“No,” he said, “I do not think I want to see any sights of that sort. What I would like to do, if I may, is to take advantage of your kind offer and come and see you at work.”
And on Detective-Superintendent Smart’s weather-beaten tortoise-face there appeared a little pink flush of pleasure.
“My dear chap, we shall be delighted.”
“I will be with you early to-morrow,” Ghote said. “Just as soon as I have got my wife a little present. A souvenir of Britain for myself also. It will not take long to get. I know just what I want. It is a teapot, most handsome and what is called, I believe, reasonable.”
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 20