But today he had felt that the man who had tracked down the elusive Yeshwant was entitled, if ever he was, to that reward. A secret reward for a secret triumph.
However, the moment Pinky Dinkarrao’s mass of scarcely combed grey hair rose up from the staircase leading to the Badshah’s quiet upper room he was struck as if by a bolt of lightning with the conviction that he was somehow going to have to pay dearly for enlisting her help.
Perhaps he might be able to guard the deepest secret of the Ganga-Jamuna, but something else, he knew, would be wrenched out of him. He felt as if the gauntly angular body mounting up to confront him was Goddess Jamuna herself, rising from the river that bears her name, to protect in all ferocity the baby Krishna being carried across out of reach of wicked King Kansa. But would it be protection Goddess Jamuna was offering to him now? Or destruction?
Hastily he got to his feet behind the narrow plastic-topped table where he had been sitting waiting, the only customer in the place at this hour, with his Ganga-Jamuna, its glass frosted with cold, in front of him. The table lurched as his thighs pushed against it, and a small splash of the sacred drink tipped out.
An omen, he could not help feeling.
‘Miss Pinky,’ he said. ‘Most good of you to come.’
He saw a white-jacketed bearer timidly arriving in the goddess’s wake.
‘Please, madam, what can I order for you?’
Pinky took one sharp glance at the glass in front of him.
‘Hm,’ she said. ‘A Ganga-Jamuna, I might have guessed it.’
He waited anxiously to hear what she would ask for. Would this fearful female newshound at once begin to sniff out of him the deep-buried secret of why he had chosen a Ganga-Jamuna?
‘No,’ Pinky said, however. ‘No, I won’t have anything. I’ll just smoke a cigarette.’
Ghote saw the look of consternation of the face of the bearer at this intended desecration of the nonsmoking room. But the man said nothing. Plainly he knew better than to get the Badshah into Miss Pinky Dinkarrao’s bad books. An item in Pinky Thinking denouncing this no-smoking area as a pervertedly strait-laced Western invasion of hard-puffing, pleasure-loving India sprang to Ghote’s mind. He saw some such headline as No Smoking But Much Fire.
Pinky, crashing down on to the chair opposite him, pulled a battered packet of Charminars from the big leather bag she carried and demanded a light.
‘Madam, most sorry. I am not a— That is, I regret I have no matchbox.’
With a heavy sigh Pinky groped in the depths of the battered leather satchel and eventually pulled out a lighter.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘You want some help in putting your hands on my famous Yeshwant. So what exactly are you asking?’
Ghote, though he had prepared his story several times over as he had sat waiting for Pinky, still found himself in a dilemma. How could he disguise as a part of the investigation into the climbing Yeshwant his plan to have Victor Masters followed from Grant Road Station to wherever it was in Kamathipura that he hid himself?
‘Madam,’ he began cautiously at last, ‘for certain reasons it has become necessary to shadow a certain person early tomorrow morning from Grant Road Station to wheresoever he may go.’
‘Okay,’ Pinky snapped out. ‘Three questions. One: what are those certain reasons? Two: who is that certain person? Three: why has the Mumbai Police suddenly become so incapable of undertaking a simple piece of police work that they are having to take the help of a journalist who has better things to do?’
Ghote at once felt as if he were one of his own suspects, marched into the Detection Room and being subjected to an interrogation designed to produce a full confession. Or, he thought with a sudden access of remorse, as if he were Miss Ivy Cooper when he himself had battered at her till she had revealed the deepest secret of her own heart.
He strove to find at least one answer.
‘Madam, the police is fully capable, of course, of undertaking any shadow watch whatsoever. But— But in this instance, madam, there are circum— No. No, what it is: is that I am giving you one fine chance to be in at the end of the case. For your column itself.’
‘Are you, Inspector? And why should you do that? I don’t remember you as being helpful to the press before.’
A thin layer of sweat came up on to Ghote’s forehead.
‘No. No, I see— Madam, perhaps it is that I am turning over some new leaf.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, Inspector. So now read to me what you have found on this newly turned leaf?’
It took Ghote a second or two to unravel the allusion.
‘Oh, yes. The leaf of a book. Yes. Very good, very good.’
‘And what is written on the leaf, Inspector?’
‘Er— Er— Written? Well, yes. Yes. Well, this is written. Yes. It has come to police notice that a certain individual may know who is Yeshwant. But this individual is, for some reasons, unwilling to let any person find out where he stays. So it has become necessary, yes, to shadow him from Grant Road Station.’
Pinky Dinkarrao ground out her cigarette, only half smoked, in the saucer on which his Ganga-Jamuna rested, still untouched.
‘All of which, Inspector,’ she said, ‘raises even more questions than the ones you have so far evaded to answer.’
‘It does?’
‘It does. So, my friend, why not tell me the simple truth?’
Ghote experienced something of the feeling of hopeless relief he himself had brought to many a criminal at the successful end of an interrogation.
‘Very well, madam,’ he said. ‘I will tell you whole thing.’
‘Always the easiest way.’
‘But— But I cannot.’
‘You cannot? Come, Inspector, try. Just try. Make a clean breast of everything.’
‘But, madam, I have taken a vow never to divulge same.’
‘But now is the time to break that vow, Inspector. Isn’t it? Haven’t you already gone too far?’
Ghote thought that probably he had. His conversation with the writer of the Pinky Thinking column had not been intended to be on these lines at all. But, on the other hand, he had pledged to little climbing Mrs Chimanlal that Yeshwant’s secret would never pass his lips.
He found his lips, indeed, had become drily clamped together. He moistened them. And managed to find some words.
‘Madam, I think I may tell you this. After some days you will receive a telephone call. It will inform you that each and every item stolen by Yeshwant has been returned to its owner. You will then, as one excellent journalist, make inquiries of Yeshwant’s victims, and you will find that those valuable items have truly been returned.’
‘Well, Inspector, now you really are telling me something worth hearing. I won’t ask you how you managed all that, nor how big the bribe was that is keeping your mouth shut. Not that I shan’t try to find out. But never mind that. Let’s get back to the matter in hand. Do I take it, when you said you wanted my help in finding out where a certain person stays, that this person may know Yeshwant’s true name?’
‘No, madam. He does not. Definitely.’
‘But that is one of those police lies I hear so much about?’
‘Yes, madam. I regret …’
‘But you still need my help, for some reason that you don’t want to tell me, in tracking down this fellow? I take it it is a man, not a woman.’
‘Yes, madam.’
She thought for a moment.
‘All right, Inspector,’ she said, ‘now we’re on level terms I’ll let you off the hook about telling me the ins and outs of it all. At least until you make an arrest at the end of it. If you do. And in that case I demand to be the first to know.’
‘Madam, yes. If I am making an arrest, you will learn of it before each and every paper and TV newsroom in entire city.’
Ghote thought then, with a tiny fire of inner joy, that he would never now have to reveal that the daring climbing Yeshwant was not a man but an apparently well-behav
ed Gujarati wife. And, he added, Pinky has not at all screwed out of me why I am drinking a Ganga-Jamuna.
He snatched up his glass – it was no longer quite as deliciously chilled as it had been – and drained it to the last drop.
SEVENTEEN
So early next morning it was Pinky Dinkarrao who was waiting at Grant Road Station, where Ghote himself thought it best not to appear. With the full description of Victor Masters he had given her, uniform jacket, if perhaps only carried, short height, hunched shoulders, face equally hunched together, jaw askew, he had no doubt she would be able to follow him along most of the route he had taken the day before.
Taking the precaution of wearing a different old shirt, and even a different pair of trousers, he had positioned himself at the Novelty Cinema, further along Grant Road, ready to take up the hunt. And almost at the same time to the minute, Masters came into sight, wearing as before a white banian with the uniform jacket on his arm. Some yards behind the easy-to-see figure of Pinky was there. Now, watching Masters from his point of vantage, Ghote saw him halt for a moment and take a quick glance backwards. Without doubt he was making doubly sure he was not being followed.
So, why? Why?
He let his quarry get a little way ahead and then set off in the same direction. All went just as he had expected. Masters turned off to the left, earlier than he himself had done when he had lost him, taking Sukhlaji Street leading straight up to the small district marked on city maps as Red-Light Area. For a moment Ghote wondered whether Pinky Dinkarrao would try to come up behind to dicover in her turn whatever turned out to be Victor Masters’ final destination. But he was hardly worried. Pinky was unlikely to be persistent enough to succeed.
Quietly he followed the steadily progressing white banian as Masters penetrated further and further into the ant heap of Kamathipura. With every step he took, he felt increasingly content. Masters had, all too evidently, decided that any possibility of his being followed no longer existed. He was walking along now with all the air of someone simply coming home at the end of a day’s work.
And then at last he swung off abruptly into a passageway hardly keeping apart two rows of wretched houses.
Ghote risked breaking into a run. He reached the galli, so narrow that it lacked even a central drain, just in time to see Masters unfasten the padlock on the thin wooden door of a little cement-walled extension to the back of a building about halfway along. In a moment he had disappeared into it, taking the padlock with him.
There. Tracked down. Here it was at last, the secret hiding-place that this man of secrets had kept hidden from every prying eye. And, surely, that could be only because he had some vital secret to keep to himself.
And soon, soon, though no doubt Masters had locked himself in, he was going to extract from him just what it was he wished to keep from all the world.
Standing at the galli’s entrance, Ghote gave a long sigh of pleasure.
So he was not much pleased when Pinky Dinkarrao appeared at his side less than a minute later.
‘The door without a padlock?’ she asked.
He could not but answer, ‘Yes, it is there.’
‘So we go in after him,’ she said, hardly making a question out of it. ‘And, if when we knock he won’t answer, you are a big strong man, Inspector, and it would be no problem for you to break that wretched door in half.’
‘But I am not going to do it.’
‘Not? But I want to ask that ugly fellow two or three little questions.’
Ghote knew she would. And knew, too, that he must not let her. He it was who was going to ask the questions and at last get an answer that would lead him to the killer of thrice-guarded Anil Ajmani. But then another thought came to him. Victor Masters was not exactly a man to cow down before a single police officer. All too clearly, he saw himself lying in the slime of the passageway, with at best a broken nose while Masters disappeared again among the city’s millions.
Drawing himself up, he pointed the difficulty out to Pinky.
‘So what are you going to do, Inspector?’ she said. ‘Go away and fetch half a dozen of your biggest uniformed jawans? I am quite ready to keep a tight watch here while you are going.’
But fetching any number of tough jawans was something Sam Marlowe could not do. It was not as if Victor Masters was a murderer. If that had been the situation, he would have had no hesitation in calling on all the forces at his command. But it was not the case. Masters was no more than a frail link to the man who had killed Anil Ajmani in his den at Shanti Niwas. Anything that threatened that link, and the respect that following it up should eventually bring him from Mr Kabir, was not lightly to be thrown away.
So should he leave Pinky keeping her tight watch while he went and fetched Sam Marlowe’s faithful Swedish assistant? Together they should be able to get an answer out of Victor Masters. But bringing the firinghi on to the scene would produce questions by the bucketful from Pinky. Swedish Police Officer for Mumbai? he saw her headline.
‘No, madam,’ he said, ‘this is one ticklish business. I am thinking, because I am knowing this fellow has been on his feet all the night, it would be best to let him have a good sleep now. Perhaps if I am coming back later with some trusted fellow officer we would learn who is his friend, Yeshwant, without any of fisticuffs.’
Pinky looked at him. He could see the various considerations going on in her head. Do I believe this policewalla? Shouldn’t I still keep watch on that door? What game is Ghote playing and why, after all, has he taken my help? Or, if I pretend to agree with what he is saying now, will I get more out of him in the end?
It seemed this last consideration was the winner.
Abruptly Pinky turned away.
‘Well, I have a column to write,’ she said. ‘Just you hope, Inspector, your name doesn’t appear in it.’
Ghote’s stomach gave a lurch. But then he said to himself that this was an idle joke only, and managed a smile.
‘So, madam,’ he said, lie for lie, ‘shall we meet here itself at, say, two o’clock? The fellow in there is bound to sleep at least till then.’
‘Very good, Inspector. And I warn you, do not be late.’
Cheek itself, Ghote thought, coming from the woman who had arrived at the Badshah more than fifteen minutes after the time she herself had insisted on for their meeting. But he let it go. After all, he firmly intended himself to be here again at one o’clock if not earlier. Then, safe from Pinky’s prying eyes, he could confront Victor Masters accompanied by his formidably large Swedish friend.
He settled down comfortably to keep his own watch on the sleeping security in-charge, victim of the unknown blackmailer who had plunged the fish knife Inspector Adik had found deep into the heart of protected-protected Anil Ajmani. After a measured thirty minutes by his watch he ventured to creep along the stinking galli and place his ear against the door of Masters’ room. Did he detect the sound of snoring? He thought that he did.
He gave it another measured-out thirty minutes and then left to go to Headquarters and, in the privacy of his cabin, make up his report about failing to track down Yeshwant. Already, he said to himself, I have left it later than I should.
Half an hour later, coming out into the Headquarters compound with the report in his hand, he could not help congratulating himself on having produced a smokescreen that totally hid the activities of Sam Marlowe, private eye. Then he saw Inspector Adik strolling by, looking every bit as pleased with life as he was himself.
Fellow has solved the Ajmani murder, he thought in sudden dismay. I will never now gain any kudos for finding out the man who was blackmailing Victor Masters into keeping locked up those dogs at Shanti Niwas. No respect from Mr Kabir. Never now any important investigation given to myself.
He hardly dared speak to Adik. But he had to know.
‘Adik,’ he called out. ‘Adik, how are things going, bhai?’
He had never before called Adik brother. He had never liked him enough even to think of
it. But now, with anxiety quivering through him, the word had slipped out.
Adik turned and came across to him.
‘Things going pretty well,’ he said. ‘I was telling I found the weapon, yes?’
If it is that only, Ghote dared to hope.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘First-class work.’
‘But one big step more today. Just been reporting to Mr Kabir. I have found out how the fellow was getting into that den of Ajmani’s. You know, everyone was saying it was impossible. The guru the family has sits in meditation where he can see each and every one going towards that room. And the fellow was altogether firm, that, though he was meditating, he was able to see and take note of anyone passing in front of him.’
‘So that is why you were letting off hook all the servants,’ Ghote said.
‘Yes, that was it. But I have been somewhat too clever for our murderer, I am telling you.’
‘How so, bhai?’
That bhai again. Will I have to call him as such for ever now?
‘I will show you.’
From the pocket of his shirt Adik pulled out a small bundle of photographs.
‘Look, you may see it for yourself. I had these photos clicked to make all crystal clear.’
He thrust one of the prints at Ghote.
Blinkingly peering at it in the strong sunlight of the compound, Ghote saw a view of a corridor in a house, Shanti Niwas, he presumed, with right across the end of it, where another corridor apparently ran at right angles, a large teak-wood almirah.
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