Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘I had the damned boy in the interrogation room today for eight solid hours,’ he said. ‘I have kept him standing up. I have been drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in front of him. I have had a trestle set up and Head Constable Kadam standing there swinging a lathi. But nothing has moved him one inch.’

  ‘Inspector,’ Ghote said with some hesitation, ‘is it possible that those ropes on his wrists had been altogether badly tied by the real miscreants and not faked only?’

  Dandekar sat in silence glaring down hook-nosed at his desk.

  ‘Well, anything is possible,’ he said at last. ‘But, damn it, I cannot believe it, I just cannot believe it.’

  So Ghote was up at Shivaji Park before eight next morning, waiting for the tricky Fariqua and telling himself that there was no reason why the fellow would not come to work as usual.

  But the surge of relief he felt when the Muslim did appear made him realise how he was now expecting everything about the affair to go wrong. He pounced like a kite dropping down on a tree-rat.

  It did not take long to reduce the fellow to a state of abject fear. And then he talked.

  ‘Aiee, Inspector. No. No, Inspector sahib. I swear to God I had nothing to do with it. Inspector, I just got to know those fellows. We used to sit and talk when I was sleeping here. Inspector, I did not know they were badmash fellows. Inspector, I am swearing to you. And then that night, that one Budhoo – Inspector, he is a really bad one that one, a devil, Inspector – Inspector, he said more than he was meaning. He said something was going to happen that night. We were in the kitchen of their flat, Inspector. All of them were out, Sahib, Memsahib and the boy. I did not know it was going to be murder, Inspector. I thought they had a plan only to take the jewellery, Inspector. They were saying she had jewellery worth one lakh, Inspector. They would hide under a bed. But no more were they telling me. And then they threatened that I should stay with them. But after they said I could go, Inspector. Then it was too late to go to Andheri. But Reymond Sahib had his door open still and I was able to creep in. I swear to you, honest to God, Inspector, I am never knowing anything about killing. But they said also that they would kill me if I spoke. Inspector, will you be saving me, is it? Is it, Inspector? Is it?’

  Ghote stood looking down at the shrunken cringing figure. Was he letting the fellow trick him again? It did not really seem likely. What he had said this time had been more than simply logical, like the story of card-playing with the Punjabi’s driver. This account of inconclusive talk with two of the murderers in the kitchen of the dead couple’s flat had rung true through and through. No wonder the fellow had tried to set up an alibi if that had happened.

  Of course, there had been no mention of any involvement by the son. But then the other two would have kept quiet about that. Yes, what he had learnt would scarcely help Dandekar.

  ‘You will be safe enough from your friends,’ he growled at Fariqua. ‘In the lock-up.’

  Without the rest of them there would not be a case worth bringing as an accessory before the fact. But no harm to have the fellow to hand.

  He marched him off.

  He gave the Noted British Author the news by telephone. A witness who had heard and not properly heard the criminals’ plans, hardly the sort of thing for the pages of Mr Peduncle Plays a Joker. A man induced by threats to join a robbery and then let go before it had begun: not exactly the sort of event for Mr Peduncle Hunts the Peacock.

  And indeed questions and doubts poured out so fast that he was reduced at last to pointing out sharply that Mr Reymond was now without a servant. At that the Noted British Author betrayed signs of disquiet. So Ghote explained he could get a replacement by talking to his neighbours and was rewarded by the author quite hastily ringing off.

  Encouraged by this, he hurriedly set out for the address he had got from Mrs Hazari late the night before. It was, her husband had said, a Mr Dass whose wife, now dead, had first briefly employed John when he had come to Bombay. He lived in a block of flats in B Road behind Churchgate.

  Climbing up the tiled stairway of the building, Ghote found he was retaining – despite the rather shabby air of the place – all his optimism. Louzado’s trail had been long, but now it must be near its end. This was, after all, where the fellow had had his first Bombay job. They could go no further back. But it was equally the most likely place for an employer to have noted that Goa address.

  On the door of the flat a small tree-slice name-board had painted on it in much-faded script ‘Mr and Mrs Gopal Dass’. It must, Ghote reflected, have been a long while since there had been a Mrs Dass if it was her demise that had brought Louzado’s first Bombay job to its abrupt end. And certainly the little irregularly-shaped board had a strong look of dusty neglect.

  He rang the door bell.

  There was such a long silence that he almost became convinced he was to experience yet another defeat. He was even turning towards the next-door flat to make inquiries when the door opened by just a crack.

  He swung round.

  ‘It is Mr Gopal Dass?’

  The door opened a little more. Ghote saw in the bright light from the room beyond a man who had once been fat.

  Afterwards he was able to account in detail for the instantly stamped impression. It had come in part from the old European-style suit, its jacket drooping from the shoulders in deep encrusted folds, the trousers hanging in baggy rucks from the hips. But even the face had shown the same signs: flesh seemed to sag from it.

  ‘What is it you are wanting?’

  The voice, too, appeared to be coming from someone no longer there, hollow and without force.

  Rapidly Ghote introduced himself and stated his problem. He felt that the slightest chance might cause the tall empty man to close the door so barely opened.

  Mr Dass heard him out however. Then he sighed, driftingly like a puff of night breeze with hardly the strength to ruffle lonely waters.

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said. ‘No addresses. Everything like that went when my wife left me for another life. Everything.’

  He turned slowly and looked into the room behind him. Ghote saw over his shoulder that it was almost completely bare. No curtains, no carpet, no pictures of the gods. Just a small table with a brass bowl, a brass tumbler and a packet of Mohun’s cornflakes on it, and in a corner a bed-roll.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Dass said. ‘I got rid of everything. My life is at an end, you know. At an end.’

  Very slowly, and without any sense of discourtesy, he turned and closed the door.

  And I too, Ghote thought in the thick sadness he felt billowing from the shut door with its once gay tree-slice name-board, I too have reached an end. The end of my hunt for John Louzado.

  But one part of the affair certainly was not over. The Noted British Author would undoubtedly be out pursuing his hiatuses before much longer. He might be doing so already. One conversation with a neighbour could well have found him a new servant.

  He ran clatteringly down the empty echoing stairway, drove full-out back to HQ, glancing wildly at Dandekar’s office as he came to a gravel-squirting halt, and ran for his telephone to stop the Noted British Author descending on HQ alone.

  ‘Ah, Inspector Ghote.’

  The British author’s enveloping smile seemed to come all the way down the line. ‘Ah, good. I was just setting out to see you. You’re speaking from your office?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote answered. ‘That is – no. That is …’

  ‘There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy,’ the plummy voice said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Ghote answered with sharpness. ‘I am at office and I shall be here all morning.’

  But when the Noted British Author arrived he was magnificently insulated from him. Within two minutes of his call Inspector Dandekar had asked him to take over his interrogation. It had been something of an admission of defeat for Dandekar. He had told Ghote he felt he dared no longer leave unexplored the possible trails in the Bombay underworld. If the boy was innocent despite
everything, then inquiries through the usual network of touts and informers must be pursued now with extra vigour.

  ‘Mind you,’ he had concluded, ‘I still swear young Raju is guilty as hell. I hope you can break him.’

  So, with Dandekar gossiping to thief acquaintances in such places as the stolen goods mart of the Chor Bazaar and thus safe from any British botheration, Ghote felt perfectly justified in leaving the author to cool his heels.

  And in the meanwhile he faced young Raju, cocksure graduate of Bombay University, adopted son of the murdered ice-cream manufacturer and, as Dandekar had discovered at Shivaji Park, openly mutinous at having been assigned the fairly humble job in his new father’s firm of going round to shops and restaurants instead of having a fat sum given him to start up on his own.

  It was with this point that Ghote began.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. ‘I have been going over your answers to Inspector Dandekar, and there is one small thing I cannot understand., You wanted a sum to start up a business. But it is not at all clear what is the business.’

  The boy sat down on the hard chair in front of Ghote’s table and with deliberate casualness put one leg over the other.

  ‘You are not catching me that way, bhai,’ he said. ‘All along I am denying and denying I asked for money.’

  Ghote sighed.

  ‘But we have a statement from a neighbour to whom you yourself complained,’ he said. ‘Two others also heard loud quarrelling.’

  ‘Lies,’ Raju answered contemptuously.

  Ghote did not let himself be discomposed. But for all the calmness with which he went back to the point and for all the reasonableness of every other question he asked in the next two hours, he got, it seemed nowhere. Some of the hard and shiny contempt left the boy’s voice, and the two of them eventually might have been friendly acquaintances, but the answers, though different in tone, were never one whit helpful.

  So when a constable came in with a chit saying Inspector Dandekar had returned Ghote felt decidedly relieved. He had not really hoped for success where Dandekar had failed, but a small gleam in him had licked at the possibility. And now he knew it would not be.

  Dandekar he found equally gloomy.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said in answer to a query about his luck with the informers. ‘Not a whisper. Of course there may be something still, you know. When the newspapers get on to a case people hold out. But I did not get one word.’

  And if you did not, Ghote thought, no one else could.

  ‘The boy is also the same as ever,’ he said, ‘I talked and cajoled and urged but he did not give one thing, except to stop back-answering.’

  ‘That little rat. I am going to have him, Ghote. I am going to get him talking if it is the last thing I do. I am going now.’

  And, all solidly compact determination, he marched out.

  Ghote sat where he was on the small chair beside Dandekar’s desk. He felt he could not face the waiting British author; he had used every atom of his patience with young Raju. He leant forward, banged the brass bell on the desk and when the peon came ordered tea.

  He took his time sipping at the hot milky liquid and had not quite finished when suddenly the bat-wing doors clapped back with a noise like a pair of quick following pistol shots and Dandekar came striding in again.

  But now his face was alight with a dark joy.

  ‘Got him,’ he said. ‘Got him. I knew I would, and by God I did.’

  Ghote’s first feeling – he tried to overcome it – was chagrin. He had had Raju all morning and had ended up where he began; Dandekar had had him for scarcely twenty minutes and had broken him. But never mind who had done it, the boy had talked.

  ‘He confessed everything?’ he asked Dandekar. ‘Faking the ropes, planning it all with Louzado and that Budhoo?’

  ‘Everything. Thanks to you, Ghote.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Oh yes. When I heard you had taken that soft line I thought that perhaps how one good hard push would do it. And it did. They did not set out to murder, of course. But when that Budhoo found not one lakh of jewellery but four or five rings only, he went mad. That accounts for all those wounds.’

  ‘Shabash, Inspector, shabash,’ Ghote said, a rush of warmth swirling through him.

  But Dandekar, slumping down into his chair, opening a drawer and pulling out a towel to dab his sweaty face, had begun to look less triumphant.

  ‘It is all right, Ghote,’ he said. ‘But you know as well as I do that when it comes to court, as likely as not young Raju will shamelessly deny every word.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said. ‘We need Budhoo, though we would be lucky ever to find that one. Or we need John Louzado.’

  He began recounting how that trail had ended. But in a minute a look of wide-eyed staring came on Dandekar’s hook-nosed face. Slowly Ghote turned, though he knew almost for a certainty what he would see.

  And there it was, looming over the top of the doors like a bristling hairy moon, the face of the Noted British Author.

  Resignedly Ghote pushed himself to his feet.

  ‘Mr Reymond,’ he said, his voice ringing with brightness. ‘I was just coming to tell you. We have broken the case.’

  But congratulations did not come as freely as he felt they should. Indeed, as out in the sunshine his story progressed, the bushy beard gaped wide more than once with hardly restrained interjections.

  Discrepancies, Ghote thought. Hiatuses. ‘Significant variations.’ Surely there could not be more.

  And at last he ran out of words and had to face the author’s objections.

  ‘Inspector, I feel bound to point out a few things. You and Inspector Dandekar have been most kind to me. I can see that as soon as I get home I shall write a story called Mr Peduncle and the Indian Inspector. And it would be nothing short of a betrayal if I kept silent.’

  ‘Most kind. But I assure—’

  ‘No, Inspector, it is the least I can do. First then, let me say that I know young Raju well. He and I often had long, long talks when he came to phone friends in Delhi and other places. And I promise you, Inspector, he is not the chap to set criminals on to rob his own benefactors. There’s a simple discrepancy between what the boy is and what you say he did. But that’s not all.’

  ‘No?’ Ghote said.

  ‘No. You see, there’s one piece of the puzzle which still doesn’t fit. And time and again my Mr Peduncle has said to Inspector Sugden, “You’ve got to fit in every bit, my dear fellow, every bit of the puzzle.”’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, Inspector, hear me out. I know this can’t be easy to take, but you can’t get away from pure logic. What you heard from Fariqua this morning simply didn’t add up. You’ve only to think about it. And if he’s lying there can be only one reason. Young Raju wasn’t the third man – Fariqua was.’

  Ghote stood there fuming. Who was this detective-story writer to come telling them what was and was not so? Him and his logic and his hiatuses.

  But, even as he encouraged the rage to squirt and bubble inside him, he also felt a streak of cold doubt.

  Logic. Well, logic was logic. And suspects – even college-eduated – had been known to confess under pressure to crimes they have not committed, right up to murder. And Dandekar, first-class though he was, certainly could put pressure on.

  Was it possible that, despite what seemed plain facts, that story of Fariqua’s – seemingly unlikely but perfectly in accord with the way things happened – was just a story?

  One thing was certain. The shame, the ridiculousness, of having an author of detective books get to the right answer first must not make them ignore that answer. If only they were not relying wholly on that confession but had Louzado or Budhoo in a cell too. If only the trail of addresses had not …

  And then, like a last monsoon storm coming winding rapidly in across the sea long after the monsoon ought to have ended, bringing a last welcome sudden coolness, an idea came winding and leaping into his
mind.

  ‘Sir, sir,’ he said. ‘Come with me straight away, sir, if you please.’

  And without giving the author a chance to reply he bundled him into the car and set off into the darting traffic.

  They made it to the Shivaji Park flat in record time. There, still begging for patience, Ghote took one fast look round the sitting-room – couches spread with cotton counterpanes, bookshelves, two tables and, yes, the telephone.

  And next to it ‘the little book’ in which, so the Noted British Author had told him soon after they met, people from nearby looked things up. His mention just now of Raju telephoning distant friends had at last brought it to the front of his mind. He flicked at the indexed pages with sweat-slippery fingers. L for Louzado. And yes. Yes, yes, yes. There it was. The address.

  He seized the phone, dialled furiously, shouted instructions for a Lightning Call and miraculously was speaking to the Goa police in Panjim in minutes. And got splendid cooperation. They knew the place, they would find the man, no doubt they would find his share of the missing rings. The fellow would be behind bars in half an hour.

  It was almost as if he was putting a hand on his shoulder himself.

  He turned from the telephone and looked the bursting-bearded British author full in the face.

  ‘Let me tell one thing, sir,’ he said, savouring the irony to the last drop. ‘Let me tell one thing: never to neglect a hiatus.’

  1975

  SIX

  The Wicked Lady

  Inspector Ghote sat on the terrace of the tourist hotel looking down on the loveliest beach in all the beauty-crammed little State of Goa, and did his best to look like someone on holiday. On the white sand of the beach some fifty yards away there sprawled Dattu Phadkar, the young man the newspapers never ceased to call ‘The Crown Prince of Smugglers’. But he did not, Ghote reflected for perhaps the twentieth time, look at all like a big-time operator in the middle of setting up a big-time deal. Yet none of his own senior officers back in Bombay had believed that such a fellow as Phadkar would go all two hundred miles to out-of-season Goa except for the purpose of conducting some huge deal. And so under the pretence of being a holidaying civil servant, he in his turn had been sent on the same journey to keep an eye on the young smuggler whom, luckily, he had never happened to encounter in the course of their parallel but opposed careers.