Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Sir. Sir, no. Sir, he has denied. I think, DSP sahib, with respect, all we can do now is to go.’

  In the darkness a sharp gleam seemed to come into the River Man’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, more briskly than anything yet. ‘Yes, go. Leave me in peace.’

  DSP Samant looked at him in bafflement.

  ‘But then how was it …’ he began. ‘Oh, damn and blast. The Commissioner would have … Well, look here, in any case, what is your name, then?’

  ‘Yes, go, peace,’ the River Man answered.

  ‘Sir,’ Ghote ventured again, ‘I think since he has asked …’

  ‘Peace,’ the River Man muttered, seemingly far away now. ‘Peace. Ponder. Think it out.’

  ‘Yes, but all the same,’ the DSP persisted, answering Ghote. ‘Why did the fellow not give a straight answer in the first place?’

  He swung round to the River Man again.

  ‘Look, you, are you not after all truly Dr Walsingham?’

  ‘Go, go,’ he answered. ‘What do you want here? How could I be the great Dr Walsingham? Look at these hands of mine. They shake, they tremble. Are these Dr James Walsingham’s hands?’

  In the sun-shaded gloom Ghote could see the River Man was holding out both hands. The nails were long and curling, split here and there and grimed with earth. And certainly they shook.

  But DSP Samant pounced.

  ‘Hands,’ he repeated, with rising delight. ‘Hands that shake. Never heard of Dr James Walsingham? Those were your words. Then how was it that you knew it mattered whether his hands would shake? A surgeon’s hands, an eye-surgeon’s hands? Eh? Eh?’

  He glared down at the thin-armed old man on the bed. It was some time before the aged, tired voice could get out more than a few broken words. But at last more came.

  ‘No, no. I did not say that. A mistake. All a mistake. I take it back.’

  ‘What is said is said,’ returned the DSP. ‘There can be no taking back of the truth, Dr Walsingham.’

  Ghote bobbed in.

  ‘But, please, Dr Walsingham,’ he said, ‘please do not think we are meaning you any harm whatsoever. That is far from the case.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the DSP added, coming back to the realities of the situation. ‘We are here to help only. To act with the utmost discretion.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ the DSP asked. ‘What no is this?’

  The old man raised himself a little and looked at them with a new steadiness.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you think you’ve got me trapped, don’t you? Think you’ve got a poor old man trapped?’

  ‘It is not at all a question of trap,’ the DSP replied.

  ‘But you haven’t,’ the old man went on. ‘You have not. That’s a trap I can walk right out of.’

  ‘I repeat,’ said the DSP with a touch of returning asperity. ‘There is no question of trap, Dr Walsingham.’

  Down on the charpoy what could only be an expression of animal cunning came over the dirty aged features.

  ‘No,’ the old man said. ‘Not Dr Walsingham. Not at all. Listen to me. I deny that I am Dr James Walsingham. I tell you that I am not. I walk out of it.’

  ‘But, look here—’ the DSP began.

  ‘No. If I say that I am not that man, what can you do about it? Ha? Who should know better than I who I am? And I say that I am not Dr James Walsingham. There.’

  The River Man’s pleasure was malign.

  ‘But … but, Mr River Man,’ Ghote said, ‘we are not at all meaning to accuse.’

  ‘No,’ he almost snarled back. ‘No, I shall hear not a word more. I am not Dr James Walsingham, and there you will have to leave it. You must.’

  ‘But then, Mr River Man, who are you?’ Ghote asked simply.

  For a palpable moment the River Man did not reply. Then he spoke, and his voice once again had taken on a plaintive note.

  ‘Who am I? Young man, you ask more than you know. There you are – what are you? A police inspector? There you are, going about your business of arresting people, detecting crimes, whatever it is, and never for one moment do you stop to think. Do you?’

  Ghote saw that the ancient, staring eyes were demanding an answer.

  ‘Well, excuse me,’ he said, ‘but often I am attempting to consider my whole position in this world. But on the other hand there are a great many duties I have to undertake. Statistics to compile, reports—’

  ‘Routines,’ snarled the River Man. ‘I was caught in them myself – once.’

  ‘But, no,’ Ghote protested. ‘Saving the sight of so many people, that was not at all routine.’

  At once the cunning look came back into the old, old face.

  ‘Hah, you think you can catch me that way? Saving sight? That was Dr Walsingham. That wasn’t me; I am not Dr Walsingham.’

  ‘Dr Walsingham,’ Ghote said, ‘please. Please, DSP Samant has already proved. But, Doctor, why is it that you do not wish to admit to being what you were? Sir, if ever I have hoped to do good to my fellow men, sir, it was from you that hope came.’

  But the River Man only glared back at him malevolently.

  ‘Look, please, Dr Walsingham,’ Ghote went on. ‘Here is proof of how much you were meaning to one small boy. All these years he has remembered this.’

  And he abruptly thrust forward the glinting, shiny-packed Garibaldi biscuits.

  ‘Sir, you liked,’ he said.

  ‘What? What?’ the River Man blurted out, reduced suddenly to an old, confused creature.

  ‘They are Garibaldi biscuits,’ Ghote explained.

  ‘Garibaldi biscuits.’

  There was – plain to hear – a note of wonder in the River Man’s voice. A chord struck and faintly reverberated.

  ‘To us boys you were calling them always squashed flies,’ Ghote said. ‘It was joke.’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured the River Man. ‘Yes, seeing them there, holding them now, the taste buds tingle. And so long ago that I … So is it the same thing in me that quickens to these absurd, flat, currant-filled sweet things? In me? Is it?’

  DSP Samant stood above him and rocked gently back once on his heels.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Excellent. And now, Dr Walsingham, now that we have finally dealt with the matter of identity, perhaps I could ask a number of questions? Now, have you been in residence on this island since the date of your retirement, I understand in 1945?’

  The River Man looked up at him from his clutching at the shiny packet with the bright picture of its contents.

  ‘I retire in 1945?’ he returned. ‘And who are you to say that that was me?’

  The DSP sighed.

  ‘I much regret, Dr Walsingham,’ he said. ‘But the matter of identity has now been thoroughly established. All that I am asking is have you been resident here since 1945?’

  ‘No,’ said the River Man, ‘I cannot answer. It is too hard.’

  ‘Too hard? What non—’

  The DSP remembered where he was. He began again.

  ‘Dr Walsingham, I think there must be a misunderstanding. All I have asked is how long you have been in residence here. There can be nothing difficult to that.’

  ‘Nothing difficult? You pup.’

  The River Man spat back the words.

  For one long instant Ghote watched the DSP’s face, saw the blood come up into it, the cheeks puff hard, the eyes widen.

  ‘DSP sahib,’ he said hastily. ‘I am sure that Dr Walsingham did not mean …’

  The DSP rounded on him.

  ‘Mean? Mean?’ he barked. ‘He said it, man. He said it. He said that that simple question was too hard to answer. Pah!’

  He wheeled back to the River Man.

  ‘That is nonsense, Dr Walsingham,’ he declared. ‘Altogether nonsense.’

  The River Man rose, still holding the shiny packet, till the top half of his rib-revealing body was almost upright. He gave the DSP a look of sweeping contempt.

  ‘Oh, you poor certainty-monger,’ h
e said. ‘What do you know? I am Dr Walsingham, am I? The great, benevolent eye-surgeon, the friend of the poor? Is that it? Is it? Is it?’

  In face of these demands the DSP straightened his back.

  ‘If you are stating, then yes,’ he said.

  ‘And what if I say no?’ the River Man roared back, his voice high and cracking. ‘What if I say, no, I am as different from that man as cheese is from chalk? What if I say I am a killer? A mass-murderer? The foulest of killers? Eh?’

  ‘Dr Walsingham,’ the DSP said, ‘that is thoroughly ridiculous.’

  ‘Ridiculous? You pig-headed jackass. I tell you that I am. I am one Jack Curtin. Jack Curtin. Never heard the name? No? Then perhaps you’ve heard of my title? The title they gave me? The Beast of the Beaches.’

  And the instant the words were uttered Ghote, at least, knew that he had heard of Jack Curtin.

  ‘DSP,’ he said, feeling himself floating in an unknown sea, ‘DSP, that is a well-known case of past times. But I was reading of it only recently. In the Illustrated Weekly of India, DSP sahib. It was a case that occurred in Bombay itself some sixty years ago.’

  ‘Yes, that’s so, read it myself,’ the DSP said slowly. ‘A celebrated case.’

  Ghote looked at the scrawny figure on the dilapidated charpoy.

  ‘Dr Wals— Mr River Man,’ he said, ‘are you telling that somehow you were the perpetrator in that affair?’

  The River Man looked at them both with blazing scorn.

  ‘Well, what do you feel now, you cock-sparrows?’ he asked.

  ‘Sir,’ Ghote said doubtfully, turning to the DSP, ‘I suppose it is possible. He is looking as if he is in excess of eighty years of age, and the killer was a youth of twenty only. And that man was never apprehended. That is the point. He was never apprehended.’

  The DSP pulled his face into a semblance of stern inflexibility.

  ‘Am I to understand,’ he asked the matted-bearded old man, ‘that you are confessing to be the killer of six Anglo-Indian girls on the beaches in or near Bombay during a period of some four months in or about the year 1910?’

  ‘Sir, no,’ Ghote burst in. ‘I see what he is doing now. He is attempting only, for reasons of his own, to persuade us to leave. He is attempting to create a state of confusion.’

  ‘You fool,’ snarled the River Man. ‘I am making it clear. At last I am telling you everything. And you will hear.’

  His lean body was taut now with the passion of what he was saying. The eyes under the tangled eyebrows were wide and fierce.

  ‘DSP sir,’ Ghote said softly and quickly, ‘I think that we ought to leave without delay. If this River Man is truly Dr Walsingham, sir, he is telling something he ought not.’

  The DSP made an apparent effort to put the affair on a level of normality, shrugging his shoulders loosely and assuming a man-of-the-world expression.

  ‘Now, look here, Dr Walsingham,’ he said, ‘I do not know what all this is about, but let me assure you it is altogether unnecessary. Inspector Ghote and I are here simply to help. Here are you, living in appalling conditions, and your friends in Bombay are anxious about you. All we need is a few particulars.’

  ‘Anxious about the Beast of the Beaches?’ the River Man answered with a cutting edge to his voice. ‘Anxious about the man who within one month took six lives for his pleasure?’

  ‘I do not know anything about all that,’ the DSP persisted. ‘You have shown me to my own satisfaction that you are Dr Walsingham, and that is all there is to be said. This other business is sheer tommy-rot.’

  ‘You need convincing still, do you? It was here, you know. Here, to this island, that I came, came when they were hunting me.’

  ‘Doctor, Mr River Man,’ Ghote said urgently. ‘Do not utter one more single word.’

  But the old man appeared not even to have heard him.

  ‘The last one of them, the seventh one, screamed,’ he went on in a voice that was low but terribly clear. ‘Screamed and screamed. People were coming down to the beach. I had to leave her and run. To run through the heat of the night. And then I saw the boat, and got out to sea in it. But they brought up a steam launch. If it hadn’t been for the mist they would have caught me like a wriggling fish. But in the mist I left that boat and swam for it, and when the sun came through I was here in the river mouth. And on this island I found shelter.’

  ‘Sir,’ Ghote asked the DSP in a whisper, ‘do you think this fellow has been here for sixty years, that he is someone else?’

  ‘No, no, man, nonsense. I have proved he is Dr Walsingham.’

  The River Man had caught the words; he glared at the DSP.

  ‘You block of wood,’ he said. ‘You still do not understand, do you? What do you think I did here? What do you think Jack Curtin – the lad who had been a butcher’s apprentice in England before he took that job as a liner steward – what do you think he did?’

  The wild eyes were glaring at Ghote now. Ghote swallowed.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I do not know.’

  ‘No, you lily-livered creature,’ the River Man spat at him. ‘No, you wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have the guts even to guess. Why, I carved at myself, man, carved at myself.’

  ‘Carved?’ Ghote asked.

  ‘Carved my face, you loon. I still had my butcher’s knife, my killing knife, and I carved the flesh of my own face, looking down into the water of the river there, carved it and let the cuts heal, and carved again. I made myself a new face.’

  ‘DSP,’ Ghote whispered. ‘It is possible. Inside that beard Dr Walsingham’s face was somewhat lumpy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the River Man, dropping a little from his rigid pose. ‘Yes, I tricked them. I went back to Bombay and I walked the streets, safe as safe. I got myself work, made money, enrolled at Grant College. I studied.’

  The voice abruptly took on a new note. The tinge of almost childish pride dropped away, to be replaced by a wondering.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I became a different man.’

  Again he paused. Neither Ghote nor the DSP made the least sound.

  ‘Yes, tricked them,’ the River Man said. ‘Became a new man. But who else did I trick? Did I trick myself as well? What did I do to myself?’

  And there was now, plainly, an appalledness in the old, old voice. If the DSP and Ghote had been silent before, they were now doubly held so. Only able to stand and to try to grasp just what they had heard.

  So that two women’s voices, talking loudly, were already within twenty yards of the shack before either Ghote or the DSP was aware that they were no longer the only visitors on the island.

  The DSP wheeled round on Ghote.

  ‘What do you mean by it, Inspector?’ he let rip. ‘Allowing persons to land here? Did I not specifically say this was a matter requiring the greatest discretion?’

  ‘But, sir, how could I prevent?’

  The DSP was saved from explaining how easily Ghote could have been at one and the same time down by the shore and in the old man’s shack by one of the two women outside saying loudly, ‘It is here,’ and the opening to the hut being at the next moment blocked by the figure of a woman aged about thirty-five, dressed in a sari at once expensive and functionally neat, wearing a pair of heavy spectacles on her smooth-skinned face.

  She stood for a moment blinking at the shadowed gloom inside. Then she turned and addressed her companion.

  ‘Intruders, Dr Abrahams,’ she said. ‘It seems we have intruders.’

  ‘Well,’ came a thick voice from outside, speaking English with a strong Germanic accent, ‘well, it would seem so, my dear.’

  A moment later she came into the hut, a tough-looking old lady of perhaps seventy-five, dressed in old-fashioned white clothes, a blouse and thickly pleated skirt, and a sun helmet.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, as soon as she had got accustomed to the gloom, ‘but one of these intruders is known to me. Deputy Superintendent Samant, is it not?’

  The DSP stiffened.

&nbs
p; ‘Dr Frieda Abrahams,’ he replied. ‘And what are you doing here?’

  ‘I imagine,’ Dr Abrahams replied, with a certain heaviness, ‘that I am on the same business as you yourself.’

  ‘But—’ the DSP stammered. ‘But how was it that you knew there was any question of … of Dr Walsingham being here?’

  Dr Abrahams gave him a smile that was at once pitying and comforting.

  ‘It was you who came to me with a lot of questions about a colleague I thought was dead. An old woman who has seen something of the world can draw conclusions, you know.’

  Appalled and ashamed at hearing this revelation of how indiscreet the DSP had been in a matter so heavily labelled ‘Be discreet’, Ghote hardly listened as the formidable German lady went on to explain that, with the aid of a few inquiries at CID Headquarters, she had been easily able to find out where the DSP had said he was going, and that she had followed posthaste with the young woman who had first entered the hut, Dr Sooni Doctor, a specialist in the care of the aged, just back from Britain and America with a string of impressive qualifications. He was only fully aware of what was going on when Dr Abrahams turned to the darkest corner of the hut where the River Man now lay flat on the old charpoy, only a pair of red-rimmed, wide-open eyes betraying that he was at all aware of the invasion of his lonely home.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘all this talk, all these introductions, and I have not yet greeted my old friend.’

  She moved across to the charpoy and looked down at the silent, bearded, hostile-looking form of the River Man.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘My old friend. It is Frieda Abrahams after these many years.’

  The River Man said nothing.

  ‘James?’

  ‘Dr Abrahams,’ the DSP said, quietly and quickly, ‘you are in no doubt that this is Dr Walsingham?’

  Dr Abrahams turned to him.

  ‘It is many years. He is much changed. Indeed, I do not think he is in a very good state at all. So, well, really, if it was a court of law I could not swear. But, before this, why is he staying so silent?’

  She looked at the DSP with sharp shrewdness and concern plainly stamped on her square battered face. Then Dr Sooni Doctor, who had stepped briskly forward and given the River Man a quick professional scrutiny, turned round.