Breaking and Entering

by H. R. F. Keating

And, most of all, he wanted to question the servants. Could any one of them have told Yeshwant that the necklace was there to be stolen?

  He ought, too, perhaps, to be getting more exact details of where else in the apartment Yeshwant must have been. Somewhere still there might be some tiny piece of evidence the dizzying climber had left behind, a fragment of cloth, a fingerprint that could be identified. But what hope was there with this utterly faraway mother in front of him? The two days of his investigation had been—

  His train of thought was suddenly and brutally interrupted.

  The door behind him was flung open and, turning, he saw come striding in a man, wearing smart sports clothes, short of stature but nevertheless totally commanding, full-faced, double-chinned, the whole suffused with rage. He could be none other than Shri R. K. Patel, son of a minister and himself an MLA.

  And it was immediately evident, as scrambling to his feet he assessed the situation, that he was not going to be able to get from the newcomer even as much as he had so far extracted from his wife. Such overwhelming rage could not be penetrated.

  ‘Tea,’ the MLA spluttered out, hardly, it seemed, taking in the fact that he was not alone with his wife. ‘Tea. Where is my tea? I am coming back from Bombay Gym, tired and exhausted after my hard work-out, and where is my tea? Where? Where?’

  Absorbed as she had been in her tiny daughter, Mrs Patel could not but respond to the irruption.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, you are back itself already? What time it is?’

  ‘What time? What time? It is time for my tea. And where is it? Where?’

  ‘Oh, I had not realized it was so late. I was— Darling, this is a police inspect— Oh, please, please, Inspector, ring that call-bell that is just beside yourself.’

  Ghote, a little bewildered, looked round, saw on the wall near him a big brass push-bell, pressed it.

  And found that R. K. Patel’s rage had, momentarily, been redirected. To himself.

  ‘Police. Police. What in God’s name is a policeman doing here? In my drawing room. Some jack-in-office itself?’

  Ghote glanced back at Mrs Patel, but saw at once that she was not going to offer any explanation.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Sir, I am Inspector Ghote. From Crime Branch. I am here, sir, in connection with the burglary that was taking place. Sir, one sapphire necklace, with gold chain of altogether little monk—’

  ‘Damn it, Inspector, do you think I don’t know what my own wife’s stolen necklace was made of. It cost enough, let me tell you. It cost—’

  But at this moment through the door that R. K. Patel had left swinging open there appeared a servant boy. Pale with terror, he was holding in front of himself a large tray on which there rested teapot, cup and saucer, sugar bowl, and plate heaped with spicy-smelling snacks. He scuttled forward and placed it all on a table beside what was evidently the master’s chair.

  ‘At last. Tea.’

  R. K. Patel slumped down in the chair, reached forward, snatched the carefully folded napkin matching the tray’s pretty embroidered cloth, spread it over his fat little tummy, seized a samosa from the heaped pile, thrust it towards his mouth, bit half of it off, masticated noisily.

  Ghote wondered if he could after all go back to putting his questions to Mrs Patel. She had, at least, been thoroughly roused from her baby-oriented dreamworld by this invasion.

  Hastily he reviewed the conversation he had so far had with her. Yes, permission to speak with the servants. That must be next.

  He took a short step forwards.

  But from beside him, from the master chair, there came then a scream of fury, louder even than anything that had gone before.

  ‘Teaspoon. Teaspoon. No damn teaspoon. Put sugar in my tea, and nothing to stir it with. Damn it, damn it, damn it.’

  And R. K. Patel rose to his feet like a giant sea-serpent shooting up from the depths, seized the tray beside him, lifted it into the air and brought it crashing down, sending tea from the pot streaking out along the richly carpeted floor and the remaining samosas scattering everywhere like so many pieces of an exploding bomb.

  Ghote saw that now the only thing he could do was to leave. As unostentatiously as he could.

  But, almost at the door of the apartment and its waiting servant, he had a piece of luck. From somewhere a little further along the wide carpeted corridor there emerged a man who could only be the family guru Mrs Patel had spoken of. He was an odd-looking figure, at least in contrast to the opulent apartment he seemed to be at home in. Out in the streets half a dozen wandering sadhus, three white stripes across their foreheads, might look much as he did. But here he stood out. He was, to begin with, totally naked except for a cloth hanging from his somewhat fleshy hips and twisted under his loins. Then his hair, which was grey almost to whiteness, had been allowed to grow to its fullest extent and appeared to be caught up behind him in half a dozen loose ropes, coloured by the years to an unappetizing yellow.

  But, despite his outward appearance, he at once betrayed, in speaking in excellent English, a degree of education no one would necessarily have expected.

  ‘Good morning. I believe I am addressing Inspector Ghote?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. But how were you knowing …?’

  A roguish twinkle in the old man’s eyes.

  ‘Are you looking for supernatural powers, Inspector? Have you forgotten that servants talk?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, I suppose that is the answer.’

  He wished once again that he had been able to question these servants. Was it possible that one of them might have sent a message somehow to Yeshwant telling him that the necklace was there for the taking?

  ‘Yes,’ the curiously disconcerting guru went on. ‘That has given you one answer. And I am able to set your mind at rest on another matter, too.’

  ‘Yes, Guruji?’

  What other matter could the man have in mind?

  A smile on the full, fattish face in front of him.

  ‘You have been hoping one of the servants here has been able to tell this famous thief Yeshwant where he could find madam’s sapphire necklace, yes?’

  ‘But— But—’

  ‘But how did I know that, Inspector? How did I know what it was you were thinking? My mysterious powers? No, not at all. Think. Think, as I have done. What else but that would a visiting police officer want to know?’

  ‘Well, yes … Yes, I see now that is— Obvious.’

  ‘Just because a man has undergone what is necessary to free himself from the world and its cares, it does not mean that he has lost all the brains God has given him, you know.’

  ‘No, no … I— I am sorry to—’

  ‘But not to mind. What you are wanting to know is whether your Yeshwant had a spy in this household, yes? And I can answer that easily. How could he? How could any servant know that madam would leave her necklace outside her safe that night? And if any one of them did by some unlikely chance, how could they then tell this climbing thief of yours in time for him to come when he did? Yes, Inspector?’

  Ghote thought. But he needed to think only for a moment.

  ‘Yes, Guruji, you are right. I do not think it is at all worth surmising on the servants here any more. Thank you.’

  Another faint, there-and-gone smile of the plump face.

  ‘So, tell me, before you sensibly left madam after that tea-tray crashed so noisily to the floor, were you finding the other questions you came here to ask answered equally well?’

  Again Ghote paused a moment to think. But no reason not to tell the simple truth.

  ‘No, Guruji. In fact I was not gaining very much of new knowledge at all.’

  ‘Madam much occupied with her little Amrita, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she was.’

  Then an idea came to him.

  ‘But you, Guruji,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can give me some better informations?’

  ‘Fingerprints? Footprints? A thread caught on some protruding ledge? No, Inspector. I was no
t here when the robbery occurred. And even if I had been I am not someone likely to notice smudged surfaces, dirt on the floor or little pieces of cotton where they should not be. I am, after all, detached from this world.’

  A sharp look from his droopily large eyes.

  ‘I think I see you are asking yourself how it can be that someone who can speak English as it should be spoken is still one who has renounced the world. Let me rid you of that problem. You see, I came from a very well-off family, and before I was twenty years of age, while I was still at college, my father and mother had found a good match for me. She was a girl in a family whose business would fit in well with that of my father. Now, at that time, I was by no means averse to the feminine. I do not want you to think I was someone like those hijras down in front of the building just now. Not at all. But I felt that a marriage simply for the sake of joining two families together, although it was to a girl who though I had never seen I might have liked, was altogether too much of an intrusion upon me. So I took the only course I saw as open. I ran away. I became a wandering sadhu, and eventually I found myself up in the Himalayas, in a cave, alone. And there for some long time, perhaps it was years, I meditated. And at last I found I had filled my head with inner peace. Then I felt able to come down to the world, to my native Bombay even. And here I have been able to give advice to people facing the problems of daily life, even if I sometimes put that advice in ways they are able to accept. And so I became the guru of a distinguished family in the city, and I go also to other houses from time to time. There, does that put your mind at rest, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course, Guruji.’

  Were there other mysteries this man, who seemed to know so much about what went on in this sky-high isolated apartment, could explain?

  But he was not to discover.

  ‘However, enough of myself. Or rather enough of the man you see before you, whose life I can look at from a distance as one used to look at lives in books. No, Inspector, all I have to tell you now is that you will hardly learn more from poor Latika.’

  From the abruptly distant expression on the guru’s plump face Ghote saw that he was going to hear nothing else from him.

  ‘Well, Guruji,’ he murmured, ‘I am glad to have met.’

  He turned towards the front door where the servant was still patiently waiting.

  So, one other interview, he thought, when I have learnt nothing of any actual use. But somehow I must. If I myself could only be the one to lay by the heel this Yeshwant …

  FOUR

  Ghote had promised, against his better judgment, that he would join Axel Svensson for lunch at the Taj’s daily buffet. He would have much preferred to have gone straight to the next person on his list of Yeshwant’s victims. He had hoped, having seen Mrs Latika Patel, that this would be to a ninth-floor flat in a block called Green Apartments at Worli Seaface. But when he had telephoned to make sure Yeshwant’s victim, a Mrs Gulabchand, would be there he had been told that she was ‘out at family shack, Peace and Quiet, at Juhu Beach’. But, of course, she had a mobile phone with her.

  He had called her then and arranged a meeting.

  So, however much he would have preferred to be going alone on his scooter in the heat to Juhu than to be sitting in the cool of the Taj, he knew he could do nothing else. But the wave of concern he had felt when it was borne in on him that the big Swede was a wretched and lonely man had made him promise to join him. He must stick to that.

  From the moment, however, that they had each collected a plateful from the long tables and found themselves chairs, before either of them had taken so much as a mouthful, he discovered his concern was going to be ill-rewarded.

  ‘Ganesh. Ganesh, my old friend, I must tell you something terrible.’

  Ghote’s spirits, fragile at best, tumbled. Why did this have to happen to him? One moment contentedly on a case that required only steady work and some decent luck. Then a shout from the door of a Rajah Super Airbus and a sharp complication entering his life. Almost at once to be followed by that lancing appeal to his sense of compassion. And now, a sudden multiplication by two, those words something terrible. What could it be that, within twenty-four hours of Axel Svensson’s arrival in India, had been terrible?

  ‘But tell me what it is,’ he said resignedly. ‘I am sure whatsoever has happened may be put right.’

  ‘Ah, it is not what has happened to me. It is what might happen. Or it is like a foretaste of what may happen to me, or to anyone here in India. You know, I came here with such hopes. At home everything seemed gloomy and miserable. With us, winter is a long wearing time, at its worst almost without any daylight, and cold, bitterly cold. I thought, with all the sadness I had, I could not endure the winter that is just about to begin back there. So India seemed such a hope, such a joy for me ahead.’

  ‘Yes, yes. A winter like that must be terrible. As terrible as our summer, when it is at last getting so hot you cannot move or even think. But what it is that has made you feel India is no longer having what you were hoping would chase out your sadness?’

  ‘It is a thing I heard.’

  ‘Heard? Heard only?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I thought, as you were not able to let me come with you this morning, I would take a stroll to see how much I could remember of Bombay. No, of Mumbai. I have got it now. Mumbai.’

  ‘Yes, a good thing to do surely?’

  ‘It might have been. Yes, it might have been. But I had not long left the hotel when up beside me there came a man, not very well shaved, wearing just a shirt, not too clean, some no-colour cotton trousers, and on his feet a flapping pair of rubber sandals. What is it you call them?’

  ‘Chappals, chappals.’

  ‘Yes, chappals. So this individual came up beside me and at once he began to talk. He had very good English, which was excellent for me. You know sometimes I am hardly able to understand the English some Indians speak. Not you, my dear fellow. Not you. But with some people I have asked questions.’

  Served you right for going up to people and breaking in on them with your questions-pestions, Ghote thought. But he kept his face intent.

  ‘He was most kind, this man. And most interesting. He saw I was a foreigner and he took it on himself to tell me all about his city.’

  Yes, Ghote thought. One of the many idlers who hang about the Taj, offering their services as guides. If not worse. If not as sellers of all sorts of doubtful substances, or of rupees for dollars, with cheating also.

  But again he said nothing.

  ‘So we walked a lot in the streets, the two of us. It was hot. But it was so interesting, so full of life, that I didn’t mind that at all. I saw a man sitting on the kerb having his underarms shaved. I saw a small boy earning his living by hiring out a weighing scales. I saw a man in a big orange turban – from Rajasthan, my friend said – sitting playing a sort of fiddle and singing and singing all to himself. I saw so many things, women in beautiful saris in every colour under the sun, bandsmen in uniforms even more fantastic than the ones South American generals used to have. And then my friend took me to a juice bar. I don’t remember just where, but it was next to somewhere called the Ever New Hairdressing Hall. I remember that. I think I shall never forget it.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But what was happening?’

  ‘Well, first we had some excellent cold drinks.’

  Which you paid for.

  ‘And then my friend was telling me this story, this horrible story. And all the pleasure of the day was taken from it.’

  ‘So, what was this story?’

  ‘Listen, this is what he told me had happened. He was swearing to me it was hundred per cent true.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was this man. He met up with some others and they went drinking somewhere. Just as they might have done in Sweden. And then something was put in this man’s drink and after a while he fell into a deep sleep. Well, that also might have happened in Sweden. Not everybody there is a saint. But in Sweden that ma
n would have been robbed and nothing more. Here … Here it was different. It was worse, worse.’

  ‘But what it was? Axel, you must tell me.’

  ‘It was this. In the morning when he woke up he felt the most appalling pain in his back. He lay there in agony for a long while, and then at last he dared to feel behind himself. And he found— He found a piece of cloth. A piece of cloth, thick with encrusted blood. He called for help and at last was taken to a hospital. There they told him that, while he had been drugged into unconsciousness, he had been cut open and— And one of his kidneys had been taken.’

  ‘A kidney removed? But had he, this fellow, been carried off to one of those doctors who pay the poors to give a kidney, more or less legally, to someone who is badly needing transplant? I was having some experience of that once.’

  ‘No, no. That perhaps is rather bad. But this was much, much more terrible. The people who did this thing were not doctors at all. They were thieves. Plain and simple thieves. I suppose they sold the kidney afterwards to some unscrupulous surgeon. But it is terrible. Ganesh, there are people in this city who will dig into your very body and steal your kidney. This is a terrible place. It is terrible, your Mumbai.’

  ‘But, no. No, Axel, my friend. Very well, I am admitting that this account you have given shows an altogether black side. But think. Howsoever much this fellow you were talking to was swearing and swearing his story was true, it does not have to be so. A fellow like that— Tell me, were you giving him money?’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, of course, he was giving me so much of his time that it was only right I should give him something in exchange.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well, I was taking a fifty-rupee note from my wallet, and he was actually seeing that I had some one-hundreds there, so …’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. You see, he would be wanting to push into your mind he had done you some maha favour. So that in the end you would be happy to hand over whatsoever he was asking. He was wanting to set that there in your head.’

  ‘No, no. What he said must be true. He was swearing it was.’

  ‘But I am telling you it is more likely it was some made-up thing. Yes, something like it may have occurred. But, if it was less of horrible, he would not have been able to make you feel you were owing him so much because he had told you about it.’