Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  They found the glass with ridiculous ease. It was propped in a small rubbish-filled alcove j‘ust at the back of the temple, and it was very plain what it had been used for. The green slime from the tank still adhered to its surface.

  But there was no one in sight who looked as if they had the remotest connection with their discovery. Even the Rajah was a little at a loss to know where to go from there.

  “We’d better put a couple of men to watch it,” he said, looking at the long sheet of glass with one of its ends cutting into the accumulation of rubbish in the alcove and the patches of slime on its surface turning from green to a dried yellow.

  “It does not look as if the joker intends to come to collect it,” Ghote replied. “And in any case, when people realise it has been left only, someone will take it to try to sell.”

  He found himself determined not to allocate men of the Bombay police to any duties at the mere whim of this Rajah.

  The Rajah stood for a few moment looking thoughtfully at the glass.

  “You know,” he said at last, “I think some lunch.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ghote agreed quickly. “You go and get some lunch. I will arrange to have someone keep a watch on Lai Dass. That is where we want a man. As soon as he is fit to speak, I must have a private talk with him, away from all those hangers-on.”

  His decisiveness paid dividends. The Rajah at once looked positively wistful.

  “You will keep in touch, old man?” he said. “Where can I get hold of you ?”

  “There is always my office" Ghote said, feeling for the first time since he had met the Rajah a certain magnanimity. “Yes, yes, your office. Of course."

  : : : :

  They went their separate ways.

  At his familiar, scratched desk in his office, with the grease-spotted newspaper wrapping of a hurried lunch just tossed into the wastepaper basket, Ghote began drawing up a list of the questions he would ask Lal Dass. On the way back from the temple he had had an opportunity to think about the whole business of the joker without interruption and he felt now he knew what he wanted to ask.

  The yogi had been still deeply unconscious when he had left, but he had spotted Sgt. Desai mooning about, doubtless avoiding the people he had taken bets from, and he had very firmly ordered him to stay with Lal Dass and report by telephone the moment he showed signs of returning to consciousness.

  He pursed his lips in thought.

  There was still very little time before he was due to ring Ram Kamdar and arrange to see the Minister on his return from Delhi. But all the same he thought-

  The telephone rang. He snatched it up.

  “Desai? He is coming round?”

  “Inspector Ghote?”

  It was the clerk in the hall downstairs.

  “Yes? What is it now?”

  “Mr. Ram Kamdar to see you, Inspector.”

  “Very well, very well. Have him sent up.”

  He was not exactly delighted. But on the other hand he was not as appalled as he would have been a few hours ago.

  A peon knocked on his door and ushered Ram Kamdar in. He strode across the little office, his hand thrust forward.

  Ghote hastily pushed back his chair and held out his own hand.

  “Ganesh, old man. I had to come down to Headquarters here, and I thought I’d drop in. I missed you after that religio-social disaster this morning, and I wanted to hear your insights on the whole concept.”

  Ghote wondered how to reply. Happily the telephone shrilled again.

  “Ah,” he said into it. “It is Desai now?”

  “Bunny Baindur actually, old man.”

  The voice rang out loudly and confidently. He realised that he had not got over his aversion to it as much as he had thought. He held the receiver a little away from his ear.

  “Yes?” he said with extreme caution.

  “I have news for you, old man.”

  “News?”

  “Yes, I’ve cracked your case for you, old boy. Wide-open, as they say.”

  Ghote clapped the receiver back against his ear. He shot bolt upright in his chair.

  “Well, listen,” he said. “I have news for you too. You ringing up like this has just confirmed what I had begun to suspect this morning. This funny game of yours is up. Definitely. Where are you at this moment?”

  He barked the question out. There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Ghote listened hard to the continuous heavy crackling. Then the Rajah’s voice, the joker’s voice, came again, rather quietly and thoughtfully now.

  “I’m up at my shack at Juhu. Ran up here to get a bite of lunch, actually.”

  “Very well,” Ghote said. “I am coming to see you. Do not leave.”

  He slammed down the receiver and looked up at the big, glossy-looking form of Ram Kamdar.

  “Mr. Kamdar,” he said, “I regret, but I have just had a call that demands immediate attention. I must leave now.”

  “But of course, old man,” Ram Kamdar said. “In the context of a job like yours these sudden meaningful decisions obviously have to be taken.”

  He looked abruptly pleased with himself at this success in fitting a small awkward lump of material into the smooth shape of his existence.

  He stood aside as Ghote picked up his notebook, fitted it into his pocket and gave a final glance round to make sure he had forgotten nothing. Then, as Ghote went ahead of him out of the little room, he laid a friendly hand on his elbow.

  “Just one thing, old man,” he said.

  “Yes?” Ghote answered, his mind busy looking ahead to his forthcoming encounter.

  “My boss man, you won’t forget he’ll be back from the Centre to-morrow morning? You’ll be able to show him some sort of end-product?”

  Well, Ghote thought, I certainly will.

  But he hugged the notion carefully to himself.

  “I will arrange an appointment per telephone,” he said.

  It took him a full half an hour to get to the Rajah’s shack out at Juhu Beach, his truck creeping cautiously for the last mile along a sandy lane between high hedges and then stopping at the edge of the huge sweep of buff-coloured sand beside a clump of three tall feather-headed palms. Ghote got out and walked the hundred yards or so across the shifting, slippery sand to the shack, a substantial new bungalow with a low, cool overhanging roof.

  He knocked at the front door. It was opened by the most sombre-looking Sikh he had ever seen, an immensely broadshouldered man with a fierce bar of black matted eyebrow above each dark, deep-set eye and a bushy crescent of beard all round the lower half of his face. At his side there hung a kirpan, traditional knife of the Sikhs. But this one had a sternly practical, everyday-use look about it that was far removed from any notion of tradition.

  Ghote gave him his name and asked for the Rajah of Bhedwar.

  “Wait,” said the Sikh, and only afterwards added a muttered, “Please, sahib.”

  The door was shut swiftly and blankly in his face. He stood looking at a scatter of marigolds, the only flowers in the sandy square surrounded by a straggling hedge of kika thorn, that represented the shack’s garden.

  Eventually the door opened as swiftly as it had been closed.

  “Come this way. Please.”

  Ghote followed the man into the house. They went through a broad entrance corridor and then the Sikh threw open a heavy teak-wood door and ushered Ghote forward. The room he found himself in was newly but heavily furnished, mostly in oiled teak. There were a number of cane-backed arm-chairs, a low teak table with an array of bottles on it under one of the windows, a big gold-coloured air-conditioner humming away in one corner, and, slap in the centre of the room a heavy card table at which sat the Rajah of Bhedwar, a complicated game of patience laid out in front of him.

  He looked up as the grim black Sikh made him a deep salaam and announced Ghote in the manner of someone punctiliously carrying out a loathsome duty.

  “Ah, there you are, old boy,” he said, not moving from
the array of playing-cards in front of him. “Now what’s all this you were telling me?”

  Ghote confronted him sternly.

  “I was telling that it is you yourself who has committed these jokes,” he said. “Who else both knew Mr. Bedekar and Sir Rustomjee, and was a good shot also. I think you did your best, too, to put Mr. Jack Cooper in front of me, but I happened to hear Mr. Currimbhoy praising your shooting when we called on him. And then when you led me so easily to the plate glass used to trick that poor Lal Dass, it was altogether too much of a coincidence.”

  A look of rueful frankness spread across the Rajah’s fully handsome face.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve been too smart for me, old man. I have to hand it to you.”

  But Ghote was in no mood to be disarmed.

  “Your conduct has been utterly irresponsible,” he said. “Not only have you put the Police Department to a great deal of trouble to end your activities, but you have caused the loss of a large sum in public funds.”

  “Yes,” said the Rajah. “Very wicked.”

  He slid one long line of playing-cards up into a neat pile and tapped it.

  “I have yet to consider the exact form the charges will take,” Ghote said implacably. “But you can be certain I will see that no item is omitted.”

  The Rajah leant back in his chair.

  “But, you know,” he said, “there won’t actually be any charges.”

  “What do you mean?” Ghote snapped. “You need not think this is something you can bribe or bully your way out of.”

  “My dear fellow, I’m not in anything. There’s no need to resort to bribery.”

  “What do you mean ‘not in*?”

  “Just that, old man. Not in any trouble that needs getting out of. You’ll see what I mean when you come to frame those charges of yours. They won’t stick.”

  Ghote glared at him.

  “Just think, old boy. Poor Anil Bedekar’s Derby favourite, do you really think I employed anyone to take that away who would for one moment admit I had anything to do with it?”

  A spasm of fury flamed in Ghote’s eyes.

  “We shall see about admitting,” he said. “Wait till we get them to police headquarters.”

  The Rajah smiled with a flash of too even white teeth.

  “First find them, old boy. And I’ll even give you a clue. You want to go off to Bhedwar to look. They all come from there. And somehow, you know, in spite of being just a distant corner of the great state of Maharastra, Bhedwar is still remarkably loyal to its deposed Rajah.”

  For all his anger Ghote saw the force of what the Rajah had said. Finding who had helped substitute that donkey for the Derby favourite when no one in Bhedwar would be prepared to talk was hardly a feasible proposition.

  “All right,” he said, “but the man who shot those flamingoes was not helped by over-loyal retainers.”

  “No,” said the Rajah. “He wasn’t. He wasn’t helped by a solitary soul. He actually used a game rifle bought anonymously specially for the occasion and now somewhere under the sea. And he didn’t leave a single other clue, did he?”

  For all the open insolence of the query Ghote had to admit that the only answer was that the killer of the flamingoes had not left any clues. His only hope had been to link the bullet recovered from the last of the dead birds and the cartridge he had found in the clock tower with the gun that fired them, and that had just been effectively squashed.

  He ploughed on, but hardly with any hope.

  “But I think it was you yourself who put that pump in Sir Rustomjee’s apparatus,” he said. “That is breaking and entering, a serious matter.”

  “Most serious,” the Rajah agreed. “And you’ll find my fingerprints in the laboratory too.”

  Ghote could not stop the gleam of hope springing back.

  “But of course,” the Rajah said, drinking this in, “I have every right to have my fingerprints here and there on that apparatus : Sir Rustomjee showed it to both of us. Remember?”

  It was the final blow. The traces of that crime had actually then been wiped out under his own eyes.

  “I suppose the man or men who deceived Lal Dass came from Bhedwar also?” he asked miserably.

  “Very probably, very probably.”

  Ghote looked at the Rajah almost desperately. He was flipping together the remaining long lines of cards from his patience game with all the dexterity of one who was well used to handling the slippery rectangles of pasteboard. It was a dexterity which long ago Ghote had prided himself on possessing too, and even amid his present preoccupations he felt an odd pang of envy for someone who could still afford to devote time to the beguiling wastefulness of playing cards.

  So when he came to address his next remark to the Rajah his voice had lost something of the angular severity it had possessed up till now.

  “I must admit you appear to have pulled it off,” he said.

  The Rajah’s eyes flicked up to his face for an instant, a twinkle in them still.

  “But perhaps,” Ghote went on, in his mellower mood, “I can satisfy myself without initiating a prosecution. All that will be necessary would be to obtain your absolute assurance that nothing similar will ever happen again.”

  The cards were now in two neat packs side by side, a red-backed one and a blue. The Rajah raised his eyes from them.

  “But, my dear fellow, I’ve just developed a taste for it all. It wasn’t intended exactly to be a career when I began. I just got that idea about poor Anil and did it. But one thing led to another, and now I’m quite hooked.”

  He regarded Ghote blandly.

  Ghote’s mellowness began to harden.

  “And do you know?” the Rajah went on in the same cumulatively irritating drawl. “Do you know that Minister of yours doesn’t seem to have learnt his lesson. I mean, he ought to have taken the hint when I popped off the first of his wretched flamingoes. But to set the police on to me, and such a damned astute policeman too as it turned out. Not exactly repentant.”

  Ghote thought he saw what was coming next. He made attempts to deal with it.

  “As I told,” he said, “in spite of the great sums of public money that have been wasted thanks to your irresponsibility, I think there would be no need for official action, provided that all such activities cease as from to-day’s date.”

  The Rajah did not at first reply. He took instead the red-backed pack of cards and shuffled them with a sudden quick flick of lithe wrists. And again Ghote could not keep his rogue eyes off the little act. He could not help noticing the extreme dexterity with which it was done. It looked as if the cards had been slipped into each other in neatly alternating slivers of two and three with an astonishing regularity. He himself had not always managed as much even in his youthful heyday. And of course now ... his fingers itched.

  And he found that the Rajah’s limpid brown eyes under the fine arch of the brows were looking up at him with a new note of interest.

  “Why, my dear old boy, I do believe you’re a card-player.”

  “No.”

  The denial shot out with ridiculous force. Ghote felt it at once. He struggled to make amends.

  “That is to say, of course I have played cards—as a boy. But I regret I consider it a totally boyish pastime. Yes, most definitely a shocking waste of time.”

  “A shocking waste of time, eh?”

  The Rajah looked at him with amused speculation.

  “All right, my dear Inspector. I’ll tell you what. I’ll play you at cards.”

  “I regret-”

  “No, wait a minute.”

  The Rajah’s raised hand was gently admonitory.

  “Wait till you’ve heard the whole deal, old boy. I’ll play you at cards for what you want: an assurance that practical joking ceases as from to-day’s date. There you are. How about that?”

  Ghote sat in silence. He could not frame a reply. He tried to persuade himself that this was because he was staggered by the effrontery of th
e Rajah’s proposal. But he knew that this was only partly true: he also desperately wanted to agree to it.

  “I regret,” he brought out at last, “that such an idea could not be acceptable to a police officer.”

  He found he was standing in an extremely rigid attitude in front of the card-table, and tried unsuccessfully to force himself into a position of relaxed authority.

  “But why not, my dear chap? Look, what have you got to lose? Well, if you do lose some paltry sum of money, you can take it out of expenses. Put it down to payments to an informer. That would be rather nice. And if you win, you’ve achieved your object. And I assure you, there’s no other way of doing that.”

  The Rajah took the blue-backed pack and shuffled it with the same skill he had shown before. Ghote, unable to take his eyes off the flittering cards, felt his mouth actually water.

  “Well,” said the Rajah, “is it a bet?”

  “How much cash do you expect me to stake?” Ghote asked.

  It was weakness. He knew it.

  The Rajah smiled. How intolerably regular those white, white teeth were.

  “Oh, I’ll let you off lightly, old boy. The Police Department is terribly poor. Or so at least that appalling bore Ram Kamdar keeps telling me.”

  The limpid almond eyes looked into Ghote’s for a moment, calculating.

  “Shall we say a thousand rupees?”

  Ghote, who had known with cold certainty from the first that there was no question of using Police Department funds for as irresponsible an idea as this, felt his heart give a single pound of delight at the mention of the sum. It was just under the amount he had won on Cream of the Jest. There would be a complete appropriateness about risking it in this cause.

  “Yes, I will play,” he said.

  The Rajah’s long-fingered right hand swept down like a claw on the red-backed pack.

  “Gin Rummy, I think,” he said.

  “All right,” said Ghote.

  The Rajah looked up and gave him a wide smile. “Now we shall see some fun,” he said.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Rajah of Bhedwar pushed aside the red-back pack of cards and took up the blue.

  “Pull up a chair, old chap,” he said to Ghote, “and we’ll begin.”