‘Kindly walk all way to top-top floor. There you would see bell of Parulkar memsahib’s flat.’
Ghote tramped his way up, only pausing for a moment outside the flat to mop the sweat from his forehead and make a quick check of his notebook. Then the door was opened by a hunched old servant in khaki shorts and jacket, his duster over his shoulder.
‘Memsahib is having pedicure,’ the fellow said flatly. ‘Mr Noronha is here.’
He seemed to be implying that any intrusion on his mistress at this sacred moment would be the equivalent of entering a temple in shoes.
‘Go in,’ Ghote said, feeling the sweat spring up again all down his back, ‘and tell Parulkar memsahib Inspector Ghote is here, by appointment. Police inquiries cannot give way to any pedicures whatsoever.’
The man almost scuttled away. In less than two minutes he was back.
‘Memsahib is saying, if Inspector sahib will not be minding Mr Noronha being at work, she is ready to see now.’
‘Very well, take me to her.’
It was still a little lacking in respect, he felt, to want him to conduct his interview while the lady was having her feet attended to. But he was willing to make that sacrifice to advance his inquiries. The wife of an eminent barrister would be able, more likely than most, to provide clear details of the way her expensive pair of diamond karas had been stolen, even though the theft had been Yeshwant’s first. It had been a sub-inspector from the nearest police station who had investigated months ago, and his report had been perfunctory at best.
He found Mrs Parulkar reclining in a lounging chair in her drawing room. One of her feet was resting on a towel on the lap of a kneeling, surgically white-uniformed Mr Noronha. The other was resting in a fragrant basin of warm water, its surface glinting with soapy bubbles.
‘Inspector,’ Mrs Parulkar said. ‘You must forgive me. When I agreed to see you at this time I had altogether forgotten it was the day for Mr Noronha’s monthly visit. But please ignore his presence altogether and ask me whatsoever you wish. Mr Noronha is the soul of discretion, I promise you. You are, aren’t you, Mr Noronha?’
The Goan pedicurist looked up for one moment from his tender ministrations.
‘Oh, I am discretion itself,’ he said in tones as soapy as the water in the basin beside him. ‘Not one word have I ever said about poor Mrs Parulkar’s wonderful missing diamond bangles. Not one.’
It suddenly occurred to Ghote that unexpectedly he had a chance now to find out finally whether the theory that had come to him at Green Apartments was true or not. Rather than someone at Pappubhai Chimanlal’s being the means whereby Yeshwant obtained his knowledge of where his rich hauls were to be found, it might be that this very man kneeling here was Yeshwant’s informant. After all, the smarmy fellow would very likely pick up from his wealthy customers all sorts of gossip about their lives, including, if he wormed his way in, full boastful details of any new jewellery they had acquired.
More, if the fellow did turn out to be some friend of the unknown Yeshwant, it would put intrusive Axel Svensson’s nose nicely out of joint.
‘Are you having many customers you visit, Mr Noronha?’ he asked in an idly conversational tone, going round to where he could see the man’s face more clearly.
‘Oh, no, Inspector. I go to a few precious customers only. Just people like Mrs Parulkar who fully understand how important it is to have truly beautiful feet.’
Ghote glanced at the foot Mr Noronha was cradling. It was slim and callus-free.
‘But there are some other ladies you visit?’ he asked. ‘They are in this part of the city? Or do you go here and there to see them?’
‘No, Inspector. All the ladies I go out to visit are at homes close to my little place, which is in Third Pasta Lane not very far from here, as you must be knowing.’
Ask the slimy fellow if Mrs Latika Patel, of Landsend, miles distant, was a customer?
No. End of road. It really was so unlikely that the man could go about all over the area Yeshwant had made his own that it was not worth pursuing. If the Goan had been Yeshwant’s informant over the other thefts, he would never have risked claiming that none of the other victims was a customer of his. It could too easily be checked.
So, no. Pappubhai Chimanlal’s loomed nearer, and a triumph for Axel Svensson.
But there were still questions to put to Mrs Parulkar. One in particular. But that, somehow, he wanted to leave for as long as possible.
‘Madam,’ he said now, ‘when the investigating officer came after the theft of your karas, was he asking if you had noticed any signs of disturbance? Any signs at all? Some footmarks? Or perhaps Yeshwant, as he was climbing in, was leaving some threads from his clothes on the ironwork of your balcony?’
‘Inspector, yes, I am good at noticing the smallest thing out of place, a ragged nail, a tiny wrinkle somewhere that can be made away with by some special cream I have, perhaps just a single grey hair. They can even come to a woman in her early thirties, you know.’
Ghote, who guessed Mrs Parulkar was well past her early forties, felt a growing impatience. Why would none of these wealthy ladies answer a simple question?
‘Madam, if you are so noticing, kindly tell: did you or did you not see any signs left by Yeshwant?’
‘Inspector, Inspector, don’t press me so. Give me time to think. You know what you are doing? It is like what my little son is always saying to me, Ma, give me some space!
Mr Noronha looked up a moment at this. A fleeting sly smile conveyed to Ghote that the little son had long left home.
‘Inspector, if you give me some of that space,’ Mrs Parulkar went on, ‘then I may give you the answers you are seeking.’
‘Yes, madam.’
He waited patiently while Mrs Parulkar lay back, deep in thought to judge by eyes hidden behind delicately kohl-darkened eyelids. There seemed to be no frown lines of concentration on her smooth forehead, however.
Minutes passed.
At last she spoke.
‘Mr Noronha, you dear man, don’t you think it is time for the other foot now?’
‘Madam,’ Ghote broke in. ‘Have you remembered even one small thing out of place after Yeshwant’s intrusion?’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, that awful person. But, do you know, Inspector, I don’t think I have noticed anything. I am afraid I cannot possibly help you.’
Ghote sighed.
So now that question which he wanted and did not want to hear answered had to be put.
‘Mrs Parulkar, I find it is failing to state in the report Sub-inspector Mathur made where it was that you were purchasing your beautiful karas. Please, for final details, can you tell me that?’
But it had been a mistake, in trying to ensure her attention, to have put in that word beautiful.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ Mrs Parulkar said. ‘Yes, how true. There is nothing that enhances the beauty of one’s hands, if one is gifted with hands of a certain elegance, than to wear beautiful karas on one’s wrists. Each sets the other off.’
And, for his special benefit, she held out both her long-fingered hands, decorated at this daylight hour with no more than bangles of simple gold, and gave them each a graceful twirl.
‘And you were purchasing those stolen karas where, madam?’ Ghote asked, now with a sharpness he could not suppress.
‘It was my husband who bought them, Inspector. A twent— An anniversary gift. He went, of course, to Pappubhai Chimanlal, Inspector. That is much the best place to go.’
So, yes, Ghote registered. More support for Axel Svensson’s too-enthusiastic backing of my own idea. Should I even take this as conclusive? Go at once to Zaveri Bazaar? Do as Axel Svensson suggested, make some noisy inquiries, all the while keeping one eye out for signs of guiltiness?
No.
He pulled himself up.
No, I must not let the firinghi’s unprofessional enthusiasm run away with me. I said I would ask and ask of Yeshwant’s victims till the list of possible Pappubhai Ch
imanlal customers is one hundred per cent complete, and I will do it. There are, in fact, now two more names only to be asked. There is that Punjabi lady staying in a block called Sea Scape at New Marine Lines, Mrs Shantilal Mehta, wife of a senior executive of Peshawar Pharmaceuticals. And there is the lady I am so far failing to see in the Bombay Hospital, Mrs Marzban. If both of these have been Pappubhai Chimanlal customers, I will have to admit to my pushing and pushing Swedish friend he was right, and go to there straight away. If one of them fails to be, I will not expect to find Yeshwant so easily.
Mrs Marzban I must leave as long as possible. After all, she would only just be recovering from whatever operation she was having, some ‘nose-job’ as they are calling it or some excess fat perhaps to be cut away. But perhaps now I can try to see if Mrs Mehta is at home. Then I can talk to her without any interferences from my Swedish friend or, as bad, Miss Pinky Dinkarrao.
But, interference or no interference, I will find Yeshwant.
Somehow.
SEVEN
Ghote, standing in New Marine Lines outside The Blossoms English-medium school for small children, looked across at Mrs Shantilal Mehta’s yellow-painted, smooth-faced, modern block, Sea Scape, scene of the most recent of Yeshwant’s exploits. Sea Scape, he thought. How many apartment blocks in the city seized on the word Sea for their names? Sea Dream, Sea Foam, Sea Land, Sea Site, he had seen all of these one after another when he had left the old house where the Parulkars lived. And there had been an Ocean View as well. With all the buildings that had come up in recent years, not many of the people in those sea-named places could have nowadays much more than a twisted glimpse of the sea. Yet each name spoke of the longing to look out over far-stretching water with all its promise of escape into peacefulness from the city’s ever inward-breaking turmoil.
Not that you needed a distant sight of the Arabian Sea, he thought, to feel at times, to feel almost all the time, that longing for unpressured peace.
Never mind all that, there was work to be done.
Mrs Mehta’s drawing room, he saw as he entered it, was very different from the softly feminine one where Mrs Parulkar had offered her elegant feet to her pedicurist’s attentions. Nor was it much like the richly decorated and scrupulously clean room from which he had gone for his privileged view of Mrs Gulabchand’s equally clean bedroom. Nor, again, was it like the one where Mrs Patel, nested in her huge brocaded armchair, had until her husband erupted on to the scene devoted herself so completely to her baby. Mrs Mehta’s drawing room was – no other word for it – filmi. The furnishings might all have been carried off from the sets of one of Bollywood’s most elaborate song-and-dance films. On the wall to the left of the door there was a lifesize statue of an apsara, voluptuously full-breasted as only a celestial maiden could be, naked save for a few jewelled ribbons. On the opposite wall a huge bright red refrigerator thrummed and shuddered. Four large and glittering chandeliers were dispelling the early evening dark. Glossy calendars, some with pictures of the gods, one with a photo of a swimsuited woman holding up a huge tube of Peshawar Pharmaceuticals’ Hand-protection Cream, hung here and there. An enormous gold starburst clock proclaimed that it was five minutes past six.
Mrs Mehta, robustly handsome in a brilliant orange salwar kameez, was standing underneath the two furthest chandeliers. Ghote went up to her. A heavy cloud of perfume, he found, surrounded her like a defensive sphere. Into his mind there came the voice of his mother telling him, time and again, the story from the Mahabharata of the thirteenth day of the great battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas when Drona, leader of the Kauravas, had arrayed his forces in the impregnable lotus formation, which only Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna, could penetrate.
However much in those childhood days he had pictured himself as brave Abhimanyu, now he felt he was by no means such. Nevertheless, he advanced into the perfumed aura. Time once more to dart out the questions he had asked so many times since he had been given the Yeshwant inquiry.
‘Madam, it is concerning the theft of your diamond ear-tops. The police is hoping that this thief they are calling as Yeshwant can be laid by the heel if we are able to find out how he is getting to know such items as your ear-tops were within his reach. So, madam, first I must be repeating the question Inspector Adik from Crime Branch was putting to you. He was writing in his report that you were altogether certain your servants would not have talked to anyone about your jewelleries. Can you be confirming same?’
‘My servants?’ Mrs Mehta replied. ‘Yes, Inspector, I can tell you absolutely that not one of them could be the person who was passing to Yeshwant that I always kept my jewels in the drawer beside my bed. All our servants are Punjabis who have been in our family their whole lives, and came on with us from Delhi where my husband was last posted. They hardly speak any Hindi, and not a word of Marathi.’
Ghote was about to thank her for being so directly informative. His next question, the vital one about which jewellers had supplied the ear-tops, was in his head waiting to be asked. But suddenly something in the way Mrs Mehta had replied struck him as not quite right.
Not one of her servants, she had said, could be the person who was passing to Yeshwant that I always kept my jewels in the drawer beside my bed. But this meant surely that there was someone who did know where her jewels were kept and might have told Yeshwant.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘who then was it who was informing Yeshwant of this?’
He was afraid he had been too blunt. But the look of cautious calculation on Mrs Mehta’s handsome face as she chewed with lipstick-stained teeth at her full lower lip told him that bluntness might be about to pay off.
‘Inspector …’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Inspector, I have a confession to make about this matter.’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Yes. When that other Crime Branch officer came …’
‘Inspector Adik, madam.’
‘Yes. Adik. I remember now. When Inspector Adik asked me if I could suggest how this Yeshwant fellow had got to know about my ear-tops, I first of all asked him if he was sure no one from Pappubhai Chimanlal and Co. could have passed on information that I had just acquired them.’
Pappubhai Chimanlal’s once more. One other victim only now to be asked. Well, if it was so, it was so.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Mehta went on, ‘Inspector Adik was at once laughing to scorn that idea. All right, he was saying some employee at Chimanlal’s may have known about my purchase. But how could they know the ear-tops were in my bedside-table drawer? He was asking that in very sharp manner.’
Mrs Mehta stopped, and looked over at the round-breasted apsara on the wall, as if hoping for guidance from swarga above in what she still had to say.
‘Inspector Adik is one first-class officer,’ Ghote prompted, though in fact he had always believed Adik too ready to be aggressive in his questioning.
‘Yes, yes. That is what I was afraid of.’
‘Afraid, madam?’
‘Yes. Afraid that Inspector Adik would find out what I was not, at that time, at all wanting anyone to know.’
‘And that was what, madam?’ he asked, with all the quiet carefulness he could muster.
‘It is what I have to confess to you now, Inspector,’ Mrs Mehta replied, flicking a glance of gratitude out to him. ‘When I was talking to Inspector Adik I was just managing to throw some dust in his eyes by mentioning servants as passing on information. But he questioned me about mine then, and very soon it came out, as I have told, how they are speaking hardly anything but Punjabi.’
Again handsome, self-confident Mrs Mehta fell silent.
‘Yes, madam,’ Ghote said. ‘But you told you were going to confess something to me.’
Am I being too much like Adik?
‘Inspector, do you have any brothers?’ Mrs Mehta said abruptly.
Ghote blinked.
‘No, madam, no,’ he answered. ‘Sisters I am having, but no brother.’
‘The
n perhaps you will not find it easy to understand what I am going to tell you.’
‘Madam, I would try.’
‘Inspector, I do have a brother. A much younger brother, but he was the first son in the family.’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Perhaps you know how the first son is always so much apple of the parents’ eyes. Always, you know, there is a danger he will be spoilt by too much of tenderness, by too much of not correcting faults.’
Again a silence.
‘And this was what was happening to your brother, madam?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Yes, Harilal is a spoilt brat. That is the truth.’
Ghote took in a breath. This was the moment.
‘And it is your brother Harilal who, you think, may have informed Yeshwant where were your diamond ear-tops?’
Ghote’s first reaction – he cursed himself that it was so – was that this put an end to Axel Svensson’s claim that Yeshwant must be a Pappubhai Chimanlal employee. He ought, he knew, to be regretting that a hopeful line had proved a dead end. But he did not.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if, as you are stating, your brother would pass on to this thief Yeshwant where your diamond ear-tops were to be found, why would your brother not be stealing same himself?’
‘Ah, no, Inspector. Harilal would not dare take my ear-tops when it would be evident to me, and to my husband also, that he was the one who had done it. No, he must be the person who was just only passing on this information to Yeshwant, whoever he is, seeking to be given his share of proceeds.’
‘I see, madam. But kindly state: why did you not tell Inspector Adik all this? And why are you telling myself now?’
Mrs Mehta again bit at her full lower lip.
‘It is quite simple,’ she said eventually. ‘When Inspector Adik was here I believed that Harilal’s new videos store was being a great success. He was saying and saying it. I thought we had done at last with his borrowing and never paying back, with his sometimes making off also with something here that he could sell. Yes, he was always doing that, Inspector, my brother. It was for his gambling and fast living. But then, just only after Inspector Adik was here, Harilal was coming once more and wanting me to get him money. He was threatening that the family would be disgraced if it came out he had bought the stock for his new shop without having wherewithal to pay for it, when also we had already given him funds for that itself. Well, I was begging my husband, and he was agreeing once more to pay up. But he was saying, Last time. And I was knowing from the way he said it that now Harilal had gone too far. And I, too, was hardening my heart to say it. No, if Harilal was the one to tell Yeshwant about my ear-tops, I am ready now to see that bad hat stand in court.’
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