Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  But his resolution lasted barely half the wriggling and weaving journey to the far end of Marine Drive where the Cocopuffs hoarding was going up. Tigga had sat beside him silent and looking so down in the mouth as, plainly, she thought of Roger still held for questioning, that at last he could bear it no longer.

  ‘Miss Tigga, I should not be telling you this, but in utmost confidence let me give you one hint only. Tonight Mr Roger Rajinder could give somebody a ride home on his scooter.’

  The smile that slowly spread over Tigga’s pretty face, like the sun appearing after a day of monsoon downpour and warming the fresh earth, was reward enough.

  Nothing more was said by either of them until the car drew up where, stretching at extraordinary length over the wide sweep of the road, a huge new wood-constructed bridge had appeared.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’ Tigga burst out now more cheerful. ‘Look, you can see the shape of Shivaji’s sword even before all the panels are on at the front. It’s going to be terrific, sweeping right across the road.’

  ‘And it is for Cocopuff biscuits only?’ Ghote asked.

  ‘You bet. The greatest campaign Bombay has ever seen.’

  Ghote sighed.

  ‘Well, I suppose it is necessary,’ he said.

  He began looking for Shantaram Das. But among the groups of busy Sikh carpenters, the labourers from the country districts in their brightly coloured lungis, the crowds of idle onlookers and the many Shalimar Associates executives, even down to the dapper accountant, Tarlok Singh, he failed altogether to find him.

  ‘But where please is Mr Das?’ he asked Tigga sharply.

  Tigga looked in her turn.

  ‘Ah, there he is,’ she said after a moment. ‘Just behind the tower of the hoarding there.’

  Ghote saw the plump poet then. He was in his element. Directing. Ordering. In his element as the new boss of Shalimar Associates. The position he had murdered to reach.

  ‘Shantaramji, Shantaramji,’ Tigga called out excitedly. ‘Shantaramji, listen. Here’s the Inspector again and good news. Good news. Roger’s going to be freed. Freed. Yes, freed.’

  Shantaram Das plainly heard her despite the noise of all the traffic streaming by at speed and the jabber of all the voices. He took a long look at the pair of them as they began to make their way towards him.

  And then he put his head down and charged away in the direction of the traffic-swirling road.

  ‘Shantaramji,’ Tigga called, ‘it’s good—’

  ‘He is absconding.’

  Ghote ran forward, seething with fury at what he and the innocent, joyful Tigga had done to give the man warning.

  There were people by the dozen between him and the heavy figure of the heir to Shalimar Associates. The gawping watchers that any activity in Bombay immediately attracts, the carpenters, their assistants carrying long lengths of rough timber, jeans-clad staff from the firm. Ghote ducked, weaved, shoved past them.

  Shantaram Das had come to a halt at the edge of the road where the last of the great morning influx of traffic into the Fort business area was tearing at breakneck speed along the fine sweep of carriageway.

  He would catch him yet.

  Nimbly he jumped over an old beggarwoman in a greasy sari, brushed aside a boy in a pair of torn khaki shorts and plunged towards his quarry.

  Then he saw the fat poet turn.

  And despite his bulk, the man – swinging from the kerb in one lunging movement – darted back the way he had come and in an instant had reached the foot of the supporting tower of the hoarding and had heaved himself up into it.

  Ghote swerved round towards him.

  ‘Way! Way!’ he yelled. ‘Police! Police!’

  He got little cooperation. But, he told himself, perhaps it did not matter. After all, Shantaram Das was trapped. He had got himself up on to all the criss-cross of bamboo and timber that formed one of the bases of the hoarding, but he would have to come down sooner or later. The later the better really. Given a little time, a whole circle of tough constables could be ringing the base of the scaffold.

  Except – Ghote pushed and bullied his way nearer – except that the fat new Shalimar boss was steadily climbing still.

  And then, looking up at the hoarding and assessing it properly for the first time, Ghote saw that it already formed a rough and dangerous sort of bridge right across the traffic-whizzing highway. Shantaram Das could perhaps, just perhaps, climb and clamber his way across it and escape before he himself could make his way through the eight lanes of daredevil traffic and get to the far side first.

  There was only one thing to do.

  Ghote put his head down, slid and weaved his way forward, reached the foot of the bamboo and timber tower and began in his turn to climb. The unfinished structure swayed beneath the force of his thrusting legs. But it held.

  Already as he reached up each time for a new handhold he could feel the distant vibrations coming from where Shantaram Das, much heavier than himself, was climbing ahead of him.

  Another heave or two, another hoist or two, and he had reached the tower’s top. Ahead, appallingly frail, there stretched the narrow bridge itself, designed only to carry the huge shape of Shivaji’s sword, much of it already in place in the form of great sheets of hardboard.

  But Shantaram Das, he could see clearly now, was making his way quite rapidly forward along the slender swaying criss-crossed wooden tunnel, moving in a low crouch like a monkey, his white churidar-covered rear projecting behind him.

  ‘Mr Das! Mr Das!’ he called out. ‘Stop now! Come back! It’s not safe. You cannot escape!’

  But if the fugitive heard him above the noise of the clacketing, racing traffic below, he showed no sign. Like a big active ape he clambered and crawled steadily onwards.

  Ghote resumed his pursuit.

  Beneath, as he too progressed in a monkey crouch, his hands splinter-jabbed from the rough wood he snatched at with every move, he saw the tops of hurrying cars and the yellow roofs of taxis zooming under him with dazzling speed. In his nostrils he caught the reek of petrol fumes, choking and sickening.

  And ahead despite his bulk, Shantaram Das seemed to be progressing every bit as fast as he was himself.

  At this rate the fellow would get to the ground on the far side sufficiently ahead to make good his escape.

  Ghote lunged yet further forward for his next handhold, shut his mind to every risk, felt the frail structure sway ever more dangerously, plunged and plunged on.

  The bobbing and thrusting white-clad rear in front of him grew bit by bit nearer.

  Then, causing him to grip the rough wood in a freezing of fear, the whole slender bridge suddenly canted hard to the right.

  We will go over.

  The thought planted itself in his mind like a neon-pulsing slogan.

  Death. The cars below. The crash on to a roof. The helpless sliding off. The wheels over his body.

  And then, through sweat-blinded eyes, he saw just what he had forecast for himself. A heavy white shape tumbling rightwards. An arm flailing desperately. And then nothing. Nothing there at all.

  But, below, the howls of a score of brakes jammed hard on. The booming noises as one car after another cannoned into whatever was in front.

  Ghote raised his head and dared to look down.

  He could see Shantaram Das’s big sprawled white form on the black surface of the road just in front of a grey Ambassador.

  He heard himself, still clutching hard on to the rough timber, give a little bark of an ironic laugh.

  Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  Well, Shantaram Das had hoped to live as well as Billy Patel by taking advantage of the sudden opportunity to get rid of him and have that convenient, newspaper built-up, ballooned-up figure of the Cabin Killer blamed. But instead he had died on Shivaji’s sword when his hasty plan had proved not quite good enough, and his yet hastier attempt to involve Roger Rajinder – the badge which he must have put in his own pocket quietly slipped
under Billy Patel’s body with a sliding toe – had, too, come as unstuck.

  Carefully, feeling decidedly sick, Ghote began making his way backwards along the narrow swaying tunnel behind Shivaji’s sword. He reached the supporting tower and at last dropped down to the blessed safety of the firm ground.

  Tigga was there at the foot of the tower waiting for him, her pretty face pale from shock.

  ‘Hello, Miss Tigga,’ he said. ‘You know, it is very, very important to remember always “Murder Must Not At All Advertise”.’

  Then blackness rose up in his head like a swooshing fountain and he saw no more.

  1984

  NINE

  The All-Bad Hat

  Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID was not a frequenter of record shops. But on this occasion he was on an important errand. It was soon to be his son Ved’s birthday and Ghote’s wife, Protima, had declared that the one thing the boy really wanted as a present was a record of the title song from the new hit movie Sant aur Badmash, the one in which two brothers are separated soon after their birth – one becomes a holy man, a saint, a sant, and the other becomes a deepest-dyed villain, a badmash. In the last reel they are reconciled.

  But Ghote was not finding it easy to make his purchase. From loudspeakers in all four corners of the smart new shop – he had been told it was the best in Bombay – music was pounding out at maximum volume. His attempts to make anyone behind the counter hear had so far come to nothing.

  At last he could stand the frustration no longer. He leant across the glossy counter, seized a young man behind it by the sides of his silk kurta and drew him close.

  ‘Please to stop all this noise,’ he demanded.

  ‘Noise?’ the young man said, or rather shouted. ‘What noise is it?’

  ‘That music. That damn music. Kindly get owner here to turn down volume.’

  ‘I am owner,’ the young man answered. ‘Sole proprietor, Loafer’s Delight Disc Mart.’

  ‘Then you must turn down the volume,’ Ghote shouted. ‘Now.’

  ‘Cool it, man,’ the young proprieter shouted back. ‘Be cooling it. That volume’s good.’

  ‘It is bad. Bad, I tell you. I am thinking it may be offence against the law.’

  ‘The law? You are making me laugh, man.’

  Ghote felt a jet of rage fountain up inside him.

  ‘I am an Inspector of Police,’ he shouted.

  ‘That is swinging, man,’ the proprietor riposted. ‘And I am the son of the Minister for Home.’

  ‘Please to behave,’ Ghote answered sharply.

  But whether the young man would have obeyed this injunction or not was never to be put to the test. Down near the entrance of the long, tunnel-like shop with its smart new racks of records and tapes and its dazzling posters decorating every wall, someone else was not behaving well.

  In fact two tough-looking men, roughly dressed in contrast to the shop’s smart clientele, were behaving extremely badly.

  One of the record racks had already been deliberately knocked over. As the shop’s young proprieter reduced the volume of his massive loudspeakers almost to nothing, more as a response to the trouble near the entrance than to Ghote’s demand, Ghote was able to hear what one of the two newcomers was calling out to the other.

  ‘Hey, Chandra bhai, these stands, see how easy they tip over.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the other man, a turbaned Sikh, called back. ‘And these posters. So nice. But, look, already they are torn.’

  They were not as he spoke. But two instants later they were torn indeed, ripped right off the walls by the man himself.

  ‘Stop,’ screamed the young proprietor. ‘Stop. Those are imported. Two hundred rupees each.’

  Rip. Rip. Rip. Another six hundred rupees went cascading to the floor.

  ‘All right,’ Ghote said. ‘I will deal with those two.’

  He began making his way purposefully down the length of the narrow shop. But the place was too crowded for him to be able to get anywhere near the two trouble-makers before, with cheerful shouts of ‘Sorry, Mr Loafer’ and ‘Goodbye, Mr Loafer Delight’, they had reached the entrance and disappeared among the packed pavements of Mahatma Gandhi Road.

  However, Ghote had had plenty of time to study the faces of the two goondas. Altogether forgetting Ved’s birthday record, he had hurried back to CID Headquarters and there gone through the fat, tattered books of criminals in the Records section. It had not taken him long to find the two. The Sikh was one Iqbal Singh and the other was a certain Chandra Chagoo.

  ‘I do not think I would have too much of difficulty to nab the pair of them, sir,’ Ghote said to Assistant Commissioner Samant a quarter of an hour later.

  ‘You are not even to try, Inspector.’

  Ghote blinked.

  ‘Not to try, ACP sahib? But already I am knowing the favoured haunts of those two. I can have them behind the bars in no time at all.’

  ‘You are not to waste your time.’

  Ghote stared at the ACP across his wide, semi-circular desk with its clutter of telephones, pen-sets and tea-cups. He really could not believe he had heard what he had.

  ‘But, sir,’ he pleaded, ‘if you had seen those two goondas, the way they set about breaking up that place, sir. It was a matter of deliberate destruction at a Number One level.’

  ‘No doubt, no doubt, Inspector. And you know why they were doing all that?’

  ‘Protection racket, sir. The young fellow who owns the place was telling me afterwards. He had been asked to pay and said he would rely upon the police to protect him. It is a very black mark for us, sir.’

  ‘And you know why a pair of goondas like that can get away with doing such things, Inspector?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It is because these two goondas that you were taking such trouble to impress on your memory, Inspector, are no more than the small fries only.’

  ‘Small fries, sir?’

  ‘Exactly, Inspector. You can nab them if you want, but when they come up before the Magistrate, what would we find?’

  Ghote decided to leave the ACP to answer his own question.

  ‘We would find that they are having alibis, Inspector. First-class alibis. Two, three, four seemingly respectable fellows willing to swear that at the time in question our two friends were not in Bombay even. And a damn fine advocate to back up the tale.’

  ‘But— but, ACP sahib, alibis and advocates are costing very much of money. And those two did not look as if they are having more than two paisa to rub together.’

  ‘Quite right, Inspector.’

  ‘But then–’

  ‘But the fellow they are working for has got all the paisa you could wish for.’

  ‘And that is who, ACP?’

  ‘Daddyji.’

  ‘Daddyji, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector. Other names he has and has. But Daddyji he is known as always. If you had worked on protection racket cases before you would have known.’

  ‘Yes, sir. He is running many, many such rackets then?’

  ‘Not so many, Inspector.’

  ‘But, sir, if he is not running many many, then how is he so wealthy that he can afford such alibis and advocates?’

  ‘It is because of the kind of places he is specialising in protecting, Inspector. He likes only the best. Anything that is particularly fine. Best class places only.’

  ‘I see, sir. Yes, that is bad.’

  ‘He is bad, Inspector. Daddyji is bad. He is nothing less than an all-bad man.’

  Until this moment Ghote had been following the ACP’s explanations with all dutifulness. But these last words stuck in his craw. An all-bad man? All bad? He could not find it in himself to believe it.

  And foolishly he ventured to express that doubt.

  ‘But, sir, no man is altogether–’

  ‘What is this, Inspector? You, a police officer. You have seen plenty of miscreants, I hope. Am I going to hear you tell me there is no such thing as an all-bad man
?’

  ‘But–’

  Ghote thought better of it.

  ‘I grant that most criminals are not all-bad. They are lacking in the guts to be. But that is not meaning that there are not all-bad men, and of them all, Inspector, the man by the name of Daddyji is the worst. The worst.’

  ‘But, sir–’

  ‘No. Let me tell a thing or two about Daddyji, Inspector. Have you got a father?’

  ‘Sir, everybody is having a father. They may not still be–’

  ‘Good. Well, now, perhaps you may not have had good relations with your father. But nevertheless you were treating him always with a certain respect, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Daddyji has a father, Inspector. He used to run the gang that Daddyji now has. A pretty tough chap also. But then came the day when Daddyji thought it was time that he took over. Do you know where that father is now, Inspector?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Take a walk down to Flora Fountain, Inspector. There you would see a cripple man, propped up against the wall selling little clay figures that he is making.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I am knowing him. Very very popular with tourists the figures he is making, most lively objects.’

  ‘And damn close to falling under Indian Penal Code, Section 292.’

  ‘Obscene books and objects, sir. Yes, sir, I think you are right. But – but what—’

  ‘But it is not those that I am concerned with, Inspector. It is his legs.’

  ‘His legs, sir?’

  ‘I suppose you are too busy always looking at those figures. But that man’s legs are smashed to pieces, Inspector. And it was his own son who was doing that.’

  ‘I see, sir. He must be a very bad hat.’

  ‘No, Inspector. An all-bad hat. An all-bad hat. And much too clever to be nabbed by one inspector only. So, leave him–’

  He broke off as one of the phones on his wide desk shrilled out. He picked up the receiver.

  ‘Samant. What is it? Oh. Oh, yes sir. Yes, Minister sahib. Yes? Yes, your son, Minister sahib. Yes, I see, sir. Yes, yes. Yes, at once. At once, Minister sahib.’