Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Well, yes,’ the Sikh agreed. ‘Only, if you remember, Shantaramji, I was not actually sensing.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Shantaram Das concurred. ‘I am the one who senses in this office and you Tarlok, have the head for detail. All those figures at your fingertips.’

  He turned to Ghote with a smile of great sweetness, tinged a little with sadness.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘you see in me a poet. I am, I admit, on occasion a little carried away. I exaggerate. Isn’t that so, Tarlok, Roger, Tigga? I exaggerate, don’t I, Tigga, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, Shantaramji, you exaggerate,’ Tigga confirmed with a heavy mock sigh.

  ‘But, Inspector,’ the self-confessed poet went on, ‘Inspector, believe me, you can trust me to tell you every detail exactly of what happened to poor Billy. That vile criminal must be caught and, if there is anything I can do to help, that I will do. Even to sacrificing the element of poetic enhancement.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Das,’ Ghote replied. ‘So, kindly tell me about the – what was it you called it? – the desk-computer.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Yes. A clue for you, Inspector. A good, solid unpoetic clue. You see, poor Billy had on trial on his desk this week the very newest mini-computer. Smuggled, of course. He saw a great future for it at Shalimar Associates. Instant assessments. Files at his fingertips. All our accounts revolutionised. A very valuable piece of apparatus, Inspector. Just the thing the Cabin Killer would like. And it’s gone. Gone. You couldn’t have better proof than that, could you?’

  ‘A very valuable machine?’ Ghote asked. ‘A very, very advanced one?’

  ‘Exactly, Inspector. You have seized on – what shall I say – the nub. The nub of this business. I can see that you are no poet, my dear fellow, and a very good thing that is too. It is down-to-earth qualities we are wanting to get this appalling killer. Yes, down-to-earth qualities.’

  ‘Down to earth,’ Ghote said slowly, echoing the words. ‘Yes, Mr Das, just a little I am wondering …’

  Nudging the back of his mind there was a feeling that something about this particular room was different.

  He turned from Billy Patel’s huge glass-topped desk, where the missing computer was represented by a square cleared space, and, carefully circumnavigating the body on the floor with the false Shivaji’s sword protruding from it, he went over to the room’s expanse of slat-covered windows, through which the noises of bustling Bombay, furious (and illegal) horn blasts, the roar of heavy construction trucks round the ever upwardsleaping new buildings, shrill hawkers’ cries, could be heard more distinctly than in the air-conditioned other parts of Shalimar Associates’ offices.

  ‘Yes,’ he said suddenly, ‘I thought that must be so.’

  He reached out and lifted back one of the smart dark brown slatted blinds. The window behind it was wide open. It was through here that the street noises were penetrating this above-it-all eminence.

  ‘Yes, I thought there would be a window open,’ he muttered. ‘A little strange, isn’t it?’

  He put his head through the large square opening and craned out.

  ‘A garden far below,’ he called back into the room. ‘And, yes, right in the middle of a clump of what is looking like bakain bushes there is a square grey object.’

  He pulled himself back in and turned to look at the four members of Shalimar Associates staff.

  ‘Now, what would you be thinking such an object must be?’ he asked.

  There was a silence, broken at last by Tigga.

  ‘The desk-computer?’ she asked. ‘Is that what you are saying, Inspector? That the Cabin Killer threw the desk-computer out of the window? But why should he do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote answered. ‘That is excellent question altogether, Miss Tigga. Why would a fellow like this so-called Cabin Killer, a fellow who is liking to take bottles of first-class imported whisky from the desks of office bosses and then give a clean slip to all, why should he pilfer a very, very advanced computer, and then throw it through an open window only?’

  ‘Because …’ Tigga answered slowly. ‘Because – are you saying this, Inspector? – Billy was not murdered by the Cabin Killer at all?’

  ‘I am much inclined to be thinking that, certainly,’ Ghote said.

  ‘And if that is so,’ Tigga went on, her eyes intent in quick thought. ‘If that is so, is this what you call an inside job, Inspector?’

  ‘I think it very well may be,’ Ghote answered. ‘An inside job, yes. Mr Patel murdered by someone in these offices.’

  He would have dearly liked to have seen the reactions to his announcement. A glance of suspicion from one of the people in the cabin to another, a look of fear perhaps, or even the murmured name of some person not in the room: any fragment of a hint would have helped at that moment. But instead everyone’s attention had been caught by a loud commotion outside the door, and a moment later this was thrust open by Sergeant Sawant, the fingerprint wallah, together with one of the police photographers and a pair of constables with a stretcher ready to take the body for medical examination.

  While Sawant was at work, puffing and dusting, and the photographer – with a great deal of unnecessary crouching and leaping – was taking his pictures, Ghote did his best to learn something more from the poetic Mr Das, who had begun in an unpoetic way to be more concerned with re-establishing office routine. Both Roger Rajinder and the dapper Tarlok Singh had been sent to ‘put an end damn quick to all that hulla-gulla outside’ and only Tigga remained. It was from her that he was able to discover a little more about the dead man. He had, it seemed, been a go-getter indeed, a great figure in the Bombay advertising world, renowned for a lifestyle almost as flamboyant as a film star’s.

  ‘Inspector,’ Tigga concluded, ‘Billy had created more first-class ads per rupee of billing than anyone else in the industry.’

  Ghote almost asked, ‘What industry?’ so surprised was he to learn that the concoction of advertisements and advertising films was dignified with such a description. But he was beginning, in spite of Tigga’s Western ways, to like her very much, so he forbore.

  At last Sergeant Sawant had covered almost every surface in the cabin with his powders dark and light, and the photographer had clicked and flashed away from every conceivable angle. ‘Okay to take away body, Inspector sahib?’ the senior constable asked.

  Ghote waved assent, battered and inwardly furious at the way his investigation had got lost amid all the play-acting.

  The constables laid their stretcher beside Billy Patel’s heavy corpse and with an ‘ek, do, teen’ lifted it up and over.

  And the moment they had done so a small object just underneath the recumbent form caught Ghote’s eye.

  He crouched quickly and picked it up by its edges. It was a metal lapel badge, shocking-pink in colour, with one word clearly painted on it in fancy black letters: ‘Roger’.

  Slowly Ghote got to his feet with the little disc cupped in his hand. He was aware that both Tigga and Shantaram Das had seen just what he had picked up. Tigga was holding herself unnaturally still, as if the blood in her veins had all in an instant turned to a steely-strong skeleton. The poetical Mr Das’s eyes were flicking to and fro like a fugitive looking every which way for escape from an utterly fearful situation.

  Ghote elected to address him.

  ‘Mr Das, tell me please, this is a badge such as is worn by staff members of Shalimar Associates?’

  The massively large white-clad account executive did not answer for some moments. Then he heaved a deep sigh.

  ‘Inspector, it is.’

  ‘And who else besides Mr Roger Rajinder is known in the firm by this British name?’

  ‘No one, Inspector.’

  ‘Then I must at once see Mr Rajinder,’ Ghote said, turning to the door.

  But he was not to get through it. Like a leaping ball of fire, red kurta-clad Tigga leapt to it before him. She stood guarding it like a panther, all claws to defend her cubs.

  ‘Now, Miss Tigg
a, please,’ Ghote said. ‘You know that I must talk with Mr Roger Rajinder.’

  ‘Fuzz. Bloody fuzz.’ Tigga spat the words out as fiercely as that mother panther spitting defiance. ‘That’s all the idea you CID wallahs have of solving crimes, grab the first person your fancy takes and beat a confession out of him.’

  ‘Miss Tigga, I am not at all beating.’

  ‘Oh no, not yet. But wait until you get him in one of your cells. I know what sort of things go on there. Torture, torture, torture till your victim doesn’t know who or what he is.’

  ‘Miss Tigga, I am wanting to question only. Even you must see there is prima facie case against Rajinder sahib.’

  ‘Faked evidence. Another rotten fuzz trick.’

  ‘Miss Tigga, that badge was underneath the body. You must have been seeing that clearly, as was Mr Das here also. It is possible, I am willing to admit, that the badge was lying there on the floor long before Mr Billy Patel was killed. But it is not at all likely, isn’t it? In such a smart cabin as this, with the clean, clean carpet and not a speck of untidiness anywhere. You must see that.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Tigga shot back, not moving an inch from the doorway. ‘The badge was there. I know that. But you are going to build up a whole case on just one thing. That, plus beating and torture.’

  Ghote sighed.

  ‘Miss Tigga, I am guaranteeing absolutely that nothing of torture will be used.’

  He said the words with all the firmness he could muster, but he knew in his heart that they were not strictly true. Very well, the Bombay CID did not use the crude methods reported from distant parts of India. But there was such a thing as dangling a cigarette in front of a deprived smoker – and a hundred and one other tricks and strategies.

  Still Tigga did not move. Instead she began calling out.

  ‘Roger. Roger. Get out quick. This damn plainclothes wallah wants to get you. Roger.’

  The door of Billy Patel’s cabin was thick, but Ghote wondered whether on the far side someone might hear and warn Roger Rajinder. Who might then take to his heels.

  ‘Miss Tigga, stand away from that door,’ he said.

  ‘Never.’

  He did not wait for any further defiance. Two hands shooting forward to grasp the girl by her elbows, a quick flex of the knees, a lift, a swing round and she was dumped safely out of his way.

  In fact he found Roger Rajinder still at his desk, and took him back at once to CID Headquarters for questioning. He had no alternative.

  It was not, however, in a scream-proof cell that he questioned the young man but in his own office, its bat-wing doors open to the day – even if a wiry constable was standing outside. But it came as no surprise when Roger implacably denied that he had gone back to the offices during the time they were almost deserted at the lunch hour, even though he admitted that he did not have an alibi for the whole of that period.

  No, the boy said, he could not account for his badge being under Billy Patel’s body. He had worn it two days previously at a conference to present the firm’s new Cocopuffs campaign. He must have taken it off afterwards, but he could not remember doing so or seeing it at any time since then. He had never wished Billy Patel any harm. He had received an increment only one month earlier from him and it had been every bit as much as he had hoped to get.

  All that was worrying. The young man really did not seem to have even the shadow of a motive for killing Billy Patel. Yet there under the body there had been that badge, and there was no reason why it should have been on the floor unless in the course of the murder it had fallen there.

  At last Ghote told the boy simply that he would be kept in custody overnight.

  A locked door during the long hours of darkness was often enough, with a person used to a comfortable middle-class life, to reduce the proudly defiant to the readily cooperative.

  And an hour or two of extra suspense when daylight came again was, too, a useful topper-up for any self-induced fears. So Ghote went first next morning not to Headquarters but back to the tower-top offices of Shalimar Associates. He asked to see Mr Das – now, he gathered, in charge following Billy Patel’s demise.

  He found him, indeed, in the late Billy’s cabin, its wide desk already covered in papers. And with him he found Tigga. Not in the most favourable circumstances.

  With the object of preventing Das donning his poetic mantle before answering some simple questions about the routines and politics of Shalimar Associates, Ghote had stopped anyone announcing him and had entered the cabin without even knocking.

  He found Tigga standing closely beside the bulky seated form of Shantaram Das, with his arm round her waist.

  It might have been there as the protective act of a mere uncle figure, he told himself later. Certainly, after an instant’s flinching the plump poet had left the arm where it was for a few seconds and then had said, all kindness and consideration, ‘Well now, you run along, Tigga, my dear, and don’t worry your head. Perhaps Inspectorji had already come to tell me that young Roger would be released right away.’

  ‘No, sir and madam,’ Ghote said, ‘I regret my inquiries are not yet complete.’

  Shantaram Das chuckled comfortably.

  ‘But I am sure that they will be in a few hours only,’ he said, ‘and then we would have young Roger in his seat again.’

  Tigga made no answer before she left the room. Unless to glare long and hard at Ghote was an answer.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Shantaram Das said as the door closed. ‘The poor girl is in a hell of a state. I feel it my duty as head now of the firm to offer what comfort I can.’

  Ghote did not pursue the subject. He decided that Das’s attitude to Miss Tigga was something that must wait for examination when he had leisure. For one thing, it had seemed to him that the girl had not been at all averse to that friendly encircling arm. But, if this was so, it spoilt the picture he had built up for himself of young love looking all the world in the face, a picture he had by no means managed to rid himself of even when he had been questioning Roger Rajinder the night before. For all that he told himself again and again that such a notion was no more than filmi nonsense.

  So it was in no very cordial mood that he questioned Das about the people of Shalimar Associates. Whenever the literary fellow showed signs of building up one of his towering, improbable fantasies he ruthlessly brought him down to earth. But, long though the session was, he found at its end that he had not learnt anything revealingly new. Roger Rajinder was the bright hope of the firm and had had a recent large increment. Tarlok Singh was a wizard with figures and had ‘a head for detail that is positively amazing’. One or two minor employees might have small grudges about this or that, a bright idea rejected, a hoped-for increment not arriving as soon as expected. But that seemed to be all, if what Shantaram Das had told him was the truth. No one, not even Roger Rajinder, had any real motive for killing Billy Patel.

  And, bar those beginnings of poetic flights, he had been exemplary in producing long-forgotten half grudges and half injustices for Ghote’s consideration, even down to a peon he remembered as having been sacked some three years earlier: ‘A one-eyed fellow, Inspector, a man whom I never did trust, with a distinct air of malevolence.’

  ‘Please,’ Ghote had asked sharply, ‘what is malevolence?’

  ‘Ah. Well, shall we say “ill-will”?’

  ‘Ill-will towards which persons?’

  ‘Oh, I do not think towards anyone in particular. A general ill-will, or as we may say malevolence. Difficult to pin down, you know. The fellow’s name was Budhoo, as I recall. You would be able to locate him easily enough. I think he still uses the garden wall outside here to sleep under. I have seen him there when I have been working late. Find him, Inspector. He is a very very likely suspect for you. Very very likely altogether.’

  ‘I do not think that will be necessary,’ Ghote said.

  And on that quelling note he had left. To go back to Headquarters and see what a long night’s reflecti
on and an awkward couple of hours afterwards had done for Roger Rajinder.

  They seemed to have done nothing. No, the boy said again, he had no reason, conceivably, for wanting to kill Billy Patel. He had admired him. He was a man who had come up from nothing and had ended with a fine flat in the prestigious Pali Hill area. He had an imported car. He was a big success. No one had known more about creating a need and then backing it to the hilt with advertising films in every one of India’s many cinemas, with newspaper and magazine ads of startling originality, with hoardings that had made all Bombay laugh.

  Roger hoped he would do half as well himself and be able to marry some day and find a flat and have a family.

  Ghote thought of Tigga and Shantaram Das’s uncle-encircling arm. Or not so uncle-like?

  He took his questioning back to the matter of the badge under the body. But Roger still had no idea, he said, how it had got from his pocket – where he supposed he must have put it two days earlier – to the floor of Billy Patel’s cabin.

  Ghote, increasingly exasperated, began to wonder about a bit of ‘torture’. Hitherto he had let young Roger smoke as much as he wanted. Yet if he deprived him now of cigarettes … But the thought of Tigga’s jibes made him determined to break down his suspect without the least suspicion of illicit pressure. Indeed, he went even further in the direction of scrupulous behaviour. Conscious that in all probability he was being a sentimental fool, he even allowed Tigga to come and see Roger in an interview room, unsupervised.

  In the meanwhile he occupied himself in going through the list of Shalimar Associates employees, in the faint hope of finding something pointing to another possible murderer.

  Then late at night, when he hoped that Roger Rajinder would be relaxing sure that his interrogation was over for the day, he had him brought to his office once again. And, bracing himself, he determined to make use of a thoroughly unfair trick.

  ‘Well, Mr Roger,’ he said, without any other preliminary, ‘what do you think of your girl friend now? You know she is allowing Mr Shantaram Das all sorts and kinds of liberties, isn’t it? She has deserted you altogether, I am thinking. Yes, altogether deserted.’