Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  “And will he win next year?” Ghote asked.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t think he’s got anything in his stables now to touch Roadside Romeo, and he’s getting on a bit to win a Derby now. And from all I hear there’s some other quite promising nags coming up.”

  “Then will Mr. Bedekar not want this criminal fellow caught?” Ghote said.

  The Rajah turned to him.

  “And have the whole business gone over again in the papers when you bring your man up for trial? I don’t think so. In fact, we’re going to have the greatest difficulty with this end of the business. Anil sacked the chowkidar who let himself be tricked, you know. So heaven knows where he is. And his people at the Poona stables won’t talk, not if he’s told them they’re not to. It’s more than their jobs are worth. Friend Anil is not exactly a benevolent institution.”

  Ghote felt each of these arguments as a hammer stroke coffining his hopes. He made himself look on brighter things.

  “We shall see,” he answered. “Obstructing a police officer in the course of his inquiries is something that no one can be allowed to do. And in any case there is another side to the investigation I have not yet gone into.”

  Suddenly he grinned.

  “But one thing before I go anywhere else,” he said with cheerfulness. “Tell me, please, what is the procedure for collecting my winnings?”

  “Winnings?”

  “Yes. My twenty-five to one bet on Cream of the Jest.”

  The Rajah’s left eyebrow was going up again in that lazy way.

  “But my dear fellow, didn’t you see the flag?”

  “Flag? What flag is this?”

  “The objection flag, my dear chap. You can hardly think that Cream of the Jest had really won after that appalling business half-way down the course. There was bound to be an objection.”

  Ghote felt the joy positively running out of him, like water out of a basin.

  “My fifty rupees,” he said. “What happens to them?” “They go to add to J. Kumar and Co.’s immense profits,” said the Rajah. “That’s racing for you, my dear old chap.” Ghote watched the image of a magnificent air conditioner march out of his mind and images of a series of quarrels and explanations with his Protima replacing it inexorably. He had been absolutely right never to have anything to do with betting on horses: it was sheer irresponsibility. It was treating life as a joke.

  “I am going to see Mr. Bedekar,” he announced. “I am going to see him now. I wish to obtain full details of the criminal act that took place on the day of the Indian Derby.” Without a word of farewell, he marched off from the Rajah and across to the low white gate of the Members’ Enclosure. The two tall turbaned chaprassis seemed this time more willing to let him through.

  Lucky for them, he reflected stormily. In a cell they would have been and quick about it if they had tried obstructing him.

  And only then, striding across the trim lawn towards the neat tree where he had seen Anil Bedekar before and thought he would see him again, did he realise that the enclosure was almost deserted. No wonder he had been let past without trouble. There was no one there whom he was going to upset. Since he had been here last racing had started. No one was going to stay here where they could not get a good view of the course.

  And now Anil Bedekar would take a lot of finding. Depressedly he turned and made his way out of the enclosure. He set about looking for the part of the course where the best-dressed people might be. Here, he supposed, he might spot the bulging-suited Anil Bedekar.

  But before he had got very far he spotted instead someone very different, Sgt. Desai.

  The sergeant was mooning along away from the crowds, hands in pockets, looking the picture of gloom. The sight of him came as a salutary warning to Ghote. Had he been looking as ridiculous himself?

  He walked forwards briskly.

  “Well, Sergeant,” he said in a tone of sharp reprimand, “and where have you been all afternoon?”

  Sgt. Desai looked up.

  “Inspector,” he said in astonishment. “It’s you-I-

  Oh, Inspector, I been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Not very hard, I imagine,” Ghote replied, still snarly.

  “Oh, Inspector, I had such a rotten afternoon,” the sergeant replied, as if Ghote had politely inquired after his well-being. “You remember that nag I gave you the tip for?”

  “Cream of the Jest,” Ghote said.

  He found it was a source of some satisfaction to him that Desai too had been a loser in that topsy-turvy business.

  “And Inspector I never put an anna on him. I met a boy I know, and he gave me something else and I changed my mind.”

  He would turn out to be lucky like that, Ghote thought. He just would.

  “You changed your mind?” he said, forcing himself to be charitable. “Then you are a luckier man than you deserve to be, Sergeant. There was an objection to Cream of the Jest. It did not win. Perhaps your horse did.”

  Sgt. Desai shook his head slowly.

  “You just never would understand this business, Inspector,” he said. “Trouble is you are not what I call a born racing man. That objection only lasted two minutes, then the judges threw it right out. Cream of the Jest won all right. I could have got twenty to one on him.”

  “Too bad, Sergeant,” Ghote said briskly, a ridiculous wild joy beating suddenly all over the place inside him. “That should teach you not to bet. Now, wait here and do not move till I come back. There is someone I have got to see.”

  And just as quickly as he could he went and saw that someone, the representative of J. Kumar and Co. And though, incomprehensibly, his winnings did not come to the full tally of Rs 1250, they at least were not far off it.

  It was while he was stuffing the last of the notes into an inside pocket that the Rajah of Bhedwar strolled up to him again.

  “Ah, my dear chap. I see you’ve been visiting the good J. Kumar. I was looking for you : I thought you might not have grasped the business about that objection being ruled out.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, thank you, I did,” Ghote said, with a certain amount of distance in his voice. “And thank you for your tip. And for all the information you gave me to-day. Most helpful. Though it is sad it came to nothing.”

  He inclined his head a little.

  “And so I'll say good-bye,” he added. “And thank you once more.”

  The Rajah’s lazy left eyebrow lifted.

  “Not good-bye, old boy,” he said reprovingly. “We’re just off to see Sir Rustomjee Currimbhoy. That is if you care to come along.”

  CHAPTER V

  As the truck came to a halt outside the big house on the fringe of Malabar Hill which the Rajah of Bhedwar indicated as being Sir Rustomjee Currimbhoy’s, Ghote told the mercifully miserable and silent Sgt. Desai to stay where he was. He jumped down on to the wide pavement and made some attempt to smarten himself up. After all, this was supposed to be a social call he was paying, with his friend Bunny Baindur, on the Rajah’s acquaintance, Sir Rustomjee.

  His friend, Bunny Baindur, Rajah of Bhedwar. The whole idea seemed alarmingly false.

  But there had seemed to be no alternative. The Rajah had put the matter baldly : after the debacle of the exposure of his lifetime ambition in the pages of the newspapers Sir Rustomjee was not seeing anybody, yet alone the police. The only people with access to the house were friends of his brother, Mr. Homi Currimbhoy and it so happened that Mr. Currimbhoy and the Rajah’s late father had been the closest friends for years. It had been blackmail really, though the Rajah had taken polite pains to wrap it up. But that is what it had amounted to : fall in with my fad of playing detectives and I will make things a lot easier for you, or be the touchy policeman and see where you get.

  Ghote watched the Rajah press a languid finger on the big button of the round brass bellpush. From inside the house, an old two-storeyed substantial place with heavy wooden balconies shaded by a huge rambling overgrown tree, there came the s
low jangling of the bell. But the big front door was opened unexpectedly quickly and the bearer who stood there was smartly uniformed and spry. Such a man cost money.

  He smiled at the Rajah as a familiar visitor.

  “Mr. Homi is in the drawing-room, sahib,” he said. “Who shall I say is the gentleman with you?”

  He inclined his head, pudgy and yellowish in skin-colour —he would be a Goan—in Ghote’s direction.

  “I am Mr. Ganesh Ghote,” Ghote said quickly, emphasising the “Mr.”

  The bearer left them.

  “Ganesh,” said the Rajah thoughtfully, and in a low tone. “And you must call me Bunny.”

  He looked at Ghote’s slightly reluctant face with amusement.

  “Bunny,” he repeated. “Everybody does.”

  “Mr. Homi asks you to come in,” the bearer said, returning on soft silent shoes.

  The room into which they were shown was large, and old-fashioned. It looked as if nothing in it had been altered for fifty years. The big dark-red, tall-backed arm-chairs stood each in their seemingly appointed place; the brass trays on much carved boxwood legs beside each of them looked as if they were never by the slightest error interchanged ; the serried ornaments on the high wooden mantelshelf, which surely never had seen a fire, each plainly had its appointed place to a hairsbreadth; the heavy, tassel-edged curtains looked as if even the folds into which they fell were unchangeable.

  Against this heavy, ordered background the figure of Homi Currimbhoy seemed at once both floatingly transient and yet part of the fixed whole. He was elderly, probably into his seventies for all the straightness of his back and the smoothness of his pale Parsi face above which the hair was spread carefully across a balding skull.

  “My dear Bunny,” he said as the Rajah entered. “This is nice. It’s too long since you came to see us, must have been well before the West Indies Test.”

  Suddenly he sprang forward, thrust out his right knee firmly, glanced piercingly in front of him and then made a wide sweeping gesture, grasping what Ghote realised after a second or two must be an imaginary cricket bat. “Garfield Sobers. Marvellous,” he said.

  “He was, he was,” the Rajah said.

  Homi Currimbhoy backed up sharply to a bumper, took it on the top of the bat, flicked a glance round to the slips and smiled with relief.

  “You’ll stay to dinner?” he said. “Rustomjee will be down in a minute. I think he’s up in his study, listening to the gramophone or something.”

  He stepped quickly aside from a high one well outside the wicket.

  “Yes, well, as I was saying,” he went on, “we don’t see enough of you, Bunny. Don’t see enough of you here, don’t see enough of you out there.”

  He was looking in the direction of a pair of french windows deeply embowered between their thick red curtains as he spoke, and for a moment Ghote peered out at an only moderately well kept garden and wondered why the Rajah of Bhedwar should be expected to be out in it.

  In the meanwhile Homi Currimbhoy was giving the Rajah a straight look.

  “Now, out with it,” he demanded. “Do you play any games at all these days? You aren’t out on the cricket pitch, I know. But you used to be pretty good at almost everything that was going. What do you do?”

  Bunny Baindur smiled.

  “Nowadays,” he answered, “I’m mostly a detective.” “A detective? What damned silly joke is this? We can’tafford a fellow of your abilities going creeping around with a magnifying glass, you know.”

  “A magnifying glass,” the Rajah said thoughtfully. “Now that’s something I hadn’t thought of.”

  Homi Currimbhoy, looking even more like a will-o-the-wisp than before, squared up to him.

  “You’re not serious about this, are you?” he said. “Being a detective. Wasting your time. Why, you might as well be off to try walking on the water like that extraordinary fellow the papers are so full of.”

  The Rajah smiled.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “all this moral tone is making me forget myself: I haven’t introduced Ganesh Ghote to you.”

  Homi Currimbhoy swung round and offered Ghote his hand. It was very cool to the touch.

  “Delighted,” he said, “Delighted. Any friend of young Bunny’s is a friend of mine. Knew his father in the old days. Some wonderful times we had in his state, you know. Marvellous stable, duck on the lakes. Bhedwar’s hard to beat. Or was.”

  “Ganesh is a detective,” Bunny Baindur said, with the utmost casualness.

  But Homi Currimbhoy was hardly disconcerted.

  “My dear fellow,” he said. “You must forgive me. That young scamp let me go on. To tell you the truth, I dare say I’m a bit obsessed with cricket, you know. Cricket and other sports. They seem to have bulked pretty large in my life, and when a damned fine cricketer like Bunny here won’t play, I go off the deep end a bit.”

  Ghote was saved from making much of a reply to this by the advent of Sir Rustomjee Currimbhoy. He looked at the distinguished scientist with curiosity while Bunny Baindur performed introductions. He was a solider figure than his brother and looked noticeably younger, though the family resemblance in the oval faces with their long straight noses and long ears was marked. But it was in the eyes that the greatest difference lay. Homi Currimbhoy’s were vivid, dancing, alive : Sir Rustomjee’s were noticeably more deeply set and had about them a concentrated, zealous wintriness which Ghote found at first impressive and then disconcerting.

  For a while the conversation settled on inquiries after relatives of Bunny Baindur’s whom the Currimbhoy brothers knew, and Ghote, sitting in the middle of one of the tall red arm-chairs, was able to watch them both in silence. It gave him time to analyse what it was about Sir Rustomjee that was so vaguely disquieting. And before long he got it: as the old man talked, across those deep-set wintry eyes every now and again there passed a screen, a look of sudden total uninterestedness that ran upsettingly counter to the passion that seemed proper to the man.

  The hoax, Ghote reflected. Had it really hit him as hard as this?

  His question was soon answered. The list of friends and relations to be inquired after had been run through, Bunny gestured towards Ghote himself.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he said to Sir Rustomjee. “My friend Ghote here is a detective. A regular Sherlock Holmes of a fellow, and I am his Watson.”

  “It’s time you settled down, young fellow,” Sir Rustomjee replied.

  The remark began as a light reproof, but half-way through the screen abruptly descended and it ended as a flat statement. But Bunny Baindur did not seem to notice.

  “No, you know,” he said happily, “I don’t think a Watson is quite right. To begin with, I couldn’t stand quite such a subordinate role, even to my friend Ganesh here. And secondly I seem to remember the great Holmes had some more active allies. Those boys. What were they called?”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” Homi Currimbhoy said. “I was always being egged on to read him as a boy, but I preferred to be out of doors, you know.”

  Bunny Baindur turned to Ghote.

  “What were they called, those boys?” he said. “You must know.”

  “I am afraid I have never read the volume in question,” Ghote replied, as little stiffly as he could.

  “Sir Rustomjee,” Bunny persisted. “You can surely help me out.”

  “Help you out, my dear boy?”

  “By telling me who were the street arabs who used to assist Sherlock Holmes.”

  “They were called the Baker Street Irregulars,” Sir Rustomjee replied with an effort. “But why this sudden interest in them?”

  “I was telling you. I’m going in for the detective business. In fact, that’s why Ghote and I dropped in. To solve your mystery of the missing, or rather unmissing pump.”

  “No.”

  The wintry eyes now flashed cold fire.

  Sir Rustomjee looked stonily at the Rajah.

  “I wish to hear nothing more of that,” he sai
d.

  So, Ghote thought, the joke had been as cruel as that. A clammy embarrassment swept over him. How was he to get away now that the Rajah had put him in this position?

  He stood up.

  And at once Sir Rustomjee turned towards him.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “please don’t feel that you’re unwelcome here. What’s past is past, but I don’t like having things raked up unnecessarily.”

  He cast about for some new topic, and produced one with a quickness that did credit to a long habit of politeness.

  “Now tell me,” he said, “how did you happen to run across young Baindur?”

  “We met this afternoon only,” Ghote answered, still feeling decidedly uncomfortable. “Up at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse.”

  Sir Rustomjee was keeping the screen from closing over those deep-set eyes. They even seemed to twinkle now.

  “Were you there for business or pleasure?” he asked.

  And just in time Ghote saved himself from telling the truth.

  “I had the pleasure of winning Rupees one thousand,” he said. “Thanks to a tip from the Rajah.”

  “Then you got more out of him than most people do,” Sir Rustomjee said. “Bunny, you’re a young--”

  He turned to address the Rajah. But he and Homi Currimbhoy had left the room.

  “Hmph,” said Sir Rustomjee. “I suppose Homi is insisting on showing him his latest trophies of the chase. You know, that man is seventy-two years of age. Five years older than myself. And he’s still totally absorbed by frivolous pastimes like hunting and cricket.”

  He smiled.

  “Our old father used to say he’d grow out of it all eventually when I used to complain about him,” he went on. “And I did used to complain. I was a very serious young man, you know, and I thought everyone should be as much wrapped up in some serious subject as I was in my research.”

  And with that word the screen did come down. Sharply and it seemed finally. Sir Rustomjee sat in his tall-backed chair and said not a word more. And before long Ghote realised that he had let slip the chance of adding to the conversation in any way that might seem at all natural.