Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  To Ghote’s prejudiced eyes at the first moment of their encounter, the man’s features seemed grotesquely distorted, as if in distant time some god had taken one of the Head Constable’s ancestors and wrenched his whole head sideways between two omnipotent god-hands.

  But, as the fellow supplied the details of the affair, Ghote forced himself to regard him with an open mind, and he then had to admit that the facial twist which had seemed so pronounced was in fact no more than a drooping corner of the mouth and one ear being oddly longer than the other.

  Ghote had to admit, too, that the chap was efficient. He had all the circumstances of the affair at his fingertips. The girl, named D’Mello – now in a hospital for her own safety – had been rigorously questioned both before and after the birth, but she had steadfastly denied that she had ever been with any man. She was indeed not the sort – the sole daughter of a Goan railway waiter on the Madras Express, a quiet girl, well brought-up though her parents were poor enough. She attended Mass regularly with her mother, and the whole family kept themselves to themselves.

  ‘But with those Christians you can never tell,’ Head Constable Mudholkar concluded.

  Ghote felt inwardly inclined to agree. Fervid religion had always made him shrink inwardly, whether it was a Hindu holy man spending twenty years silent and standing upright or whether it was the Catholics, always caressing lifeless statues in their churches till glass protection had to be installed, and even then they still stroked the thick panes. Either manifestation rendered him uneasy.

  That was the real reason, he now acknowledged to himself, why he did not want to go and see Miss D’Mello in the hospital, surrounded by nuns amid all the trappings of an alien religion, surrounded with all the panoply of a newly found goddess.

  Yet go and see the girl he must.

  But first he permitted himself to do every other thing that might possibly be necessary to the case. He visited Mrs D’Mello and, by dint of patient wheedling and a little forced toughness, confirmed from her the names of the only two men that Head Constable Mudholkar – who certainly proved to know inside out the particular chawl where the D’Mellos lived – had suggested as possible fathers. They were both young men; a Goan, Charlie Lobo, and a Sikh, Kuldip Singh.

  The Lobo family lived one floor below the D’Mellos. But that one flight of dirt-spattered stairs, bringing them just that much nearer the courtyard tap which served the whole crazily leaning chawl, represented a whole layer higher in social status. And Mrs Lobo, a huge, tightly fat woman in a brightly flowered Western-style dress, had decided views about the unexpected fame that had come to the people upstairs.

  ‘Has my Charlie been going with that girl?’ she repeated after Ghote had managed to put the question, suitably wrapped up, to the boy. ‘No, he has not. Charlie, tell the man you hate and despise trash like that.’

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ said Charlie, a downtrodden teenage wisp of a figure suffocating in a necktie beside his balloon-hard mother.

  ‘Tell the man, Charlie.’

  And obediently Charlie muttered something that satisfied his passion-filled parent. Ghote put a few more questions for form’s sake, but he realised that only by getting hold of the boy on his own was he going to get any worthwhile answers. Yet it turned out that he did not have to employ any cunning. Charlie proved to have a strain of sharp slyness of his own, and hardly had Ghote started climbing the stairs to the floor above the D’Mellos where Kuldip Singh lived when he heard a whispered call from the shadow-filled darkness below.

  ‘Mum’s got her head over the stove,’ Charlie said. ‘She don’t know I slipped out.’

  ‘There is something you have to tell me?’ Ghote asked, acting the indulgent uncle, turning back to the boy. ‘You are in trouble. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘My only trouble is Mum,’ the boy replied. ‘Listen, mister, I had to tell you. I love Miss D’Mello. Yes, I love her. She’s the most wonderful girl ever was.’

  ‘And you want to marry her, and because you went too far before –’

  ‘No, no, no. She’s far and away too good for me, mister. I’ve never even said “Good Morning” to her in the two years we’ve lived here. But I love her, mister, and I’m not going to have Mum make me say different.’

  Watching him slip cleverly through his door, Ghote made his mental notes and then continued up the stairs to tackle Kuldip Singh, his last comparatively easy task before the looming interview at the nun-ridden hospital.

  Kuldip Singh, as Ghote had heard from Head Constable Mudholkar, was different from his neighbours. He lived in this teeming area from choice, not necessity. Officially a student, he spent all his time in a series of anti-social activities – protesting, writing manifestoes, drinking. He seemed an ideal candidate for the unknown and elusive father.

  Ghote’s suspicions were at once heightened when the young Sikh opened his door. The boy, though old enough to have a beard, lacked this symbol of his faith. Equally he had discarded the obligatory turban. But all the Sikh bounce was there, as Ghote discovered when he identified himself.

  ‘Policewallah, is it? Then I want nothing at all to do with you. Me and the police are enemies, bhai. Natural enemies.’

  ‘Irrespective of such considerations,’ Ghote said, ‘it is my duty to put to you certain questions concerning one Miss D’Mello.’

  The young Sikh burst into a roar of laughter.

  ‘The miracle girl, is it?’ he said. ‘Plenty of trouble for policemen there, I promise you. Top-level rioting coming from that business. The fellow who fathered that baby did us a lot of good.’

  Ghote plugged away a good while longer – the hospital nuns awaited – but for all his efforts he learned no more than he had done in that first brief exchange. And in the end he still had to go and meet his doom.

  Just what he had expected at the hospital he never quite formulated to himself. What he did find was certainly almost the exact opposite of his fears. A calm reigned. White-habited nuns, mostly Indian but a few Europeans, flitted silently to and fro or talked quietly to the patients whom Ghote glimpsed lying on beds in long wards. Above them swung frail but bright paper-chains in honour of the feast day. These were the only excitement.

  The small separate ward in which Miss D’Mello lay all alone in a broad bed was no different. Except that the girl was isolated, she seemed to be treated in just the same way as the other new mothers in the maternity ward which Ghote had been led through on his way. In the face of such matter-of-factness, he felt hollowly cheated.

  Suddenly, too, to his own utter surprise he found – looking down at the big, calm-after-storm eyes of the Goan girl – that he wanted the story she was about to tell him to be true. Part of him knew that, if it were so, or if it was widely believed to be so, appalling disorders could result from the feverish religious excitement that was bound to mount day by day. But another part of him now simply wanted a miracle to have happened.

  He began, quietly and almost diffidently, to put his questions. Miss D’Mello would hardly answer at all, but such syllables as she did whisper were of blank inability to name anyone as the father of her child. After a while, with a distinct effort of will, Ghote brought himself to change his tactics. He banged out the hard line. Miss D’Mello went quietly and totally mute.

  Then Ghote slipped in, with adroit suddenness, the name of Charlie Lobo. He got only a small puzzled frown.

  Then, in an effort to make sure that her silence was not one of fear, he presented with equal suddenness the name of Kuldip Singh. If the care-for-nothing young Sikh had forced this timid creature, this might be the way to get an admission. But instead there came something approaching a laugh.

  ‘That Kuldip is a funny fellow,’ the girl said, with an out-of-place and unexpected offhandedness.

  Ghote almost gave up. But at that moment a nun nurse appeared carrying in her arms a small, long, white-wrapped minutely crying bundle. The baby.

  While she handed the hungry scrap to his mother Ghote stood
and watched. Perhaps, holding the child, she would …

  He looked down at the scene, awaiting his moment again. The girl fiercely held the tiny agitated thing to her breast and in a moment or two quiet came, the tiny hand applied to the life-giving source. How human the child looked already, Ghote thought. How much a man at two days old. The round skull almost bald, as it might become again towards the end of its span. The frown on the forehead that would last a lifetime. The tiny, perfectly formed plainly asymmetrical ears …

  And then he knew that there had not been any miracle. It was as he had surmised, but with different circumstances. Miss D’Mello was indeed too frightened to talk. No wonder when the local bully, Head Constable Mudholkar, with his slewed head and his one ear so characteristically longer than the other, was the man who had forced himself on her, not the anti-social Kuldip Singh, not the timid worshipper Charlie Lobo.

  A deep smothering of disappointment floated down on Ghote. So it had been nothing miraculous after all. Just a sad case, to be cleared up painfully. He stared down at the bed.

  The tiny boy suckled energetically. And with a topsy-turvy welling up of rose-pink pleasure, Ghote saw that after all there had been a miracle. The daily, hourly, every-minute miracle of a new life, of a new flicker of hope in the tired world.

  1971

  THREE

  The Not So Fly Fisherman

  The telephone on Inspector Ghote’s scratched and whorled little desk in his tiny office tucked into an out-of-the-way corner of Bombay CID Headquarters shrilled out alarmingly. Ghote swallowed once, squared his shoulders and picked up the receiver. Before he even had time to say his name a voice barked out at him from the earpiece. It was Deputy Superintendent Samant, sharp as a terrier dog and not to be argued with even if the truth were not on his side.

  ‘Ghote? I will not have my officers in their seats all day. Goondaism is getting worse and worse, and you are just sitting there. What is it you are doing now? Answer, man, answer.’

  ‘It is figures for you, DSP sahib,’ Ghote replied. ‘You were making most urgent request this morning. Correct figures for goondas arrested while committing violence in the second quarter of last year.’

  ‘Figures, figures,’ snapped the voice at the other end of the line. ‘What good are figures only? We want action, man, action.’

  ‘Very good, DSP sahib.’

  ‘Ghote?’

  ‘Yes, DSP? Here, DSP.’

  ‘There is a man in the building, an Englishman. He has some sort of complaint to make. I have told them to send him to you. You are to deal with it. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, DSP. And what is the nature–?’

  ‘And, Ghote, he has demanded to see the Commissioner himself.’

  The phone clicked dead with total abruptness and at the next moment, after only the most perfunctory of knocks, the office door was thrust open by an extremely scared-looking peon. Then a big-bellied Englishman strode in, his bright-banded straw hat still jammed above a florid, sweating face.

  ‘You the Commissioner or whatever he’s called?’ he demanded at once in a voice so loud that it seemed to fill the little office from dusty floor to fly-haunted ceiling fan.

  ‘No,’ the Inspector said quickly. ‘Unfortunately I am not the Commissioner. My name is Ghote. It is spelt G-H-O-T-E, but it is pronounced Go-tay.’

  ‘To hell with spelling,’ the Englishman battered in. ‘What good did that ever do, I’d like to know? How about someone payin’ some attention to me for a change? I’m the one who’s been cheated out of every penny he’s got.’

  Ghote could hardly have been paying more attention to the cataract of sound that swirled and eddied all round the room, but he made an effort to assume an expression of even greater interest and begged his visitor to take a chair.

  ‘If you will be so good as to supply full details,’ he said, rapidly zipping open the drawer on the right-hand side of his desk where he kept his paper for note-taking.

  ‘Right,’ said the Englishman, plumping down like a sack of coal on the stout chair in front of the desk. ‘Now get this. My name is Harper. Joe Harper to his friends, and they’re many. And I saw this advert stuck on a wall like. Back in Batley where I come from. You’ll have heard of Batley, I dare say.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, indeed,’ Ghote replied with an inaccuracy all the more sweeping for the qualms he could not help feeling in employing it.

  ‘Aye. Well, as I was sayin’, I saw this advert and I gave a ring-up to the number it said. And the moment the feller told me he’d call me back I knew I was on to something. That’s an old trick, you know. Ring back so as to make sure you aren’t gettin’ an inquiry from the police or any nasty, poke-nose lot of that sort.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that would be most regrettable,’ said Inspector Ghote.

  ‘It would,’ Joe Harper agreed with sledgehammer blitheness. ‘Aye. So, as I was tellin’ you, I fixed up with this feller. Golightly his name was, but he wasn’t proper English. More one of your Indian half-and-halves. And what–’

  ‘One moment, please,’ Ghote interrupted, looking up from his note-taking. ‘That name, Golightly. It seems to me extremely unusual. Would you be so kind as to spell it?’

  ‘First you want to spell your name to me, and now you want me to spell his to you. What do names matter? It’s catchin’ the feller I want.’

  Nevertheless, in response to the Inspector’s mutely poised pen the Englishman did at last oblige with the spelling of Golightly. As soon as Ghote had finished writing the name he invited Joe Harper to go on.

  ‘Right. Then I joined this club, the Budleigh Regis Fly Fishermen’s and Deep Sea Anglers’ Association. And off we went. Well, when we got to Bombay we had to change planes to go to this place that begins with a K. You know, where all the filthy carvings are.’

  ‘Khajurao?’ Ghote suggested. ‘That is a great tourist attraction. K-H-A-J-U-R-A-O.’

  ‘Aye, that’d be it. Though why you want to go chanting out letters again is more than I can say.’

  ‘I was thinking it might be of assistance,’ Ghote explained. He committed this one name more to paper and looked up. ‘But there is not any fishing at Khajurao,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say there isn’t,’ Joe Harper agreed with a heavy wink. ‘Not that I’ll ever see the place now, because when we got to Bombay I thought I’d drop off like and go later on my own. Joe Harper’s no one’s dogsbody. And then, when I went to collect my return ticket I found–’

  ‘You had to collect your return ticket in Bombay? Surely that was most peculiar?’

  ‘I’ll say peculiar. ’Specially when it turns out there’s no such address as 346 Taj Mahal Street.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ghote, ‘now I am seeing. You have become the victim of that miscreant with the unusual name.’

  ‘Aye. Golightly. And you’d better set about gettin’ hold of him, pronto.’

  ‘Getting hold? But surely that is a question for the UK police. We will be in instant telegraphic communic—’

  ‘UK police? Don’t be daft. He’s here, in ruddy Bombay. I’ve told you that a hundred times. He came on the flight with us. That’s why I thought the whole deal was above board. Because, I tell you, I had my doubts from the first. There’s no flies on Joe Harper.’

  Looking across at the belly-jutting, puce-faced Englishman, Ghote could not help registering that in fact there were flies on the Budleigh Regis fly fisherman. Half a dozen had been buzzing round him ever since he had settled down, and at this moment a couple were resting on his perspiring neck.

  ‘Mr Harper,’ he said, bringing his mind back to the matter in hand, ‘you are a fisherman and you—’

  ‘Fisherman? I’ve never so much as hooked a tiddler in my life.’

  ‘But the Budleigh Regis Fly Fishermen’s and Deep Sea Anglers’ Association?’ Ghote asked, consulting his notes.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Joe Harper.

  ‘Yes. Well, what I was about to say was that, as a fisherman, you would understand h
ow difficult it would be to catch one particular fish out of all the many in the sea, and that is precisely the problem you are setting us.’

  ‘Aye, I am,’ said Joe Harper uncompromisingly. ‘I’ve given you the feller’s name, I’ve told you he’s here, and I’ve said he’s cheated me. Now get after him. And if he’s not caught in less than no time I’ll be in to that Commissioner of yours wantin’ to know the reason why.’

  A leaden chill welled up in Ghote. He could easily conceive that someone who appeared to be as utterly self-centred as this fat, sweating and aggressive Englishman might well force his way to the Commissioner himself, with fearful repercussions for anyone who had not succeeded in keeping him out.

  ‘Mr Harper,’ he said firmly, ‘if I am to find this one Anglo-Indian from among the thousands in this city, not to speak of the millions of Hindus, the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, the tens of thousands of Goans, the thousands of Parsis and the hundreds of Jews, then you must tell more than you have so far.’

  ‘I’ve told you the lot,’ Joe Harper replied in a fresh squall of aggressiveness.

  ‘No,’ said Ghote. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Not? What do you—’

  Ghote cut into the sharply rising voice.

  ‘For example, you did not tell that you came here on a cut-price flight,’ he said.

  ‘Cut-price—’ The big Englishman suddenly sagged. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’

  A hollowly anxious note had replaced the bluster.

  ‘A great deal of information comes into Headquarters here and is duly circulated,’ Ghote replied. ‘For some time we have been hearing about these false clubs that are set up to tempt people to pay only about half the fare Air India or BOAC charges. When someone is putting themselves outside the law in this way there is scope for many varieties of fraud, as you have found.’