Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  “Did you try to find out yourself?” he asked.

  “For a day or two. But soon I saw it was no good. The job was too well done."

  “Yes," Ghote agreed. “It was well done. It must have been done by a person with great resources."

  “Yes."

  “And by somebody who knew you well?"

  “Yes. That also."

  “And you thought of no names even?"

  Anil Bedekar walked over the wet grass in silence for a little, thinking.

  “No," he said. “I could not think of a single name."

  Ghote decided it was time to play another card.

  “Not even the name of the Rajah of Bhedwar?" he said.

  Anil Bedekar came to a complete halt. He looked at Ghote hard.

  “What are you telling?"

  “I asked if you had thought it was possible the Rajah was the one responsible for that joke."

  “No," said Anil Bedekar decisively. “You are wrong, Inspector, if you think that. Yes, he was rich. He could have done it. He had the money. And, yes, he knew me and my habits quite well. But, Inspector, there is something you have not thought."

  “What is that?55

  “Inspector, a man does not rise from the gutters of Bombay to be leading owner year after year without being able to tell things about people. That is what you have to know. What the people you are facing would do. And I tell you this: the Rajah of Bhedwar did not care one pice for me. He did not care enough to joke me even."

  “That is what I would have thought," Ghote replied, looking steadily at the racehorse owner. “But towards the end of his life that man did begin to care. To care about playing his jokes. And the day before he died he confessed it to me.”

  Anil Bedekar thought about this. The lines on his squat brow were twisted in plain thinking.

  “Inspector,” he said. “That too was one of his jokes. That confession. He told me he had joked you already. He made you bet more than you wanted on a horse that was not a chance. Cream of the Jest.”

  “But it won,” Ghote said.

  “By a big mistake. And that time the joke was on the Rajah.”

  “The joke was on him both times,” Ghote said. “He did not confess till I showed him I knew all about him.”

  “And you were going to prosecute? Was it suicide?”

  Anil Bedekar’s mind was quick.

  “No,” Ghote said. “We had not enough evidence to prosecute. But if I had come to realise who the joker was, someone else could have done also. It was murder.”

  He was taking in every detail of the racehorse owner’s appearance. Looking for the least tell-tale sign. A change in breathing rate. A tap of the foot. A clenching of the fingers. However slight.

  But there was nothing.

  And that meant nothing either way.

  He decided he would have to put down yet one more cautious card.

  “Did the newspaper account you read tell you very much about the circumstances of the Rajah’s death?” he asked.

  “That he was found dead the evening before, in his shack at Juhu Beach only. And that foul play was suspected,” Anil Bedekar replied.

  Ghote saw that he was going to have to begin the patient process of feeding the racehorse owner suggestion after suggestion about the killing, hoping that at one answer he might betray more knowledge of the circumstances of the death than he ought to know. But for this time was needed, and it was hard to be sure how much time Anil Bedekar was prepared to give him without his making a fuss and thus warning his man to take care.

  He made a start.

  “Yes,” he said, “the local police called me out to Juhu and I arrived-"

  He stopped short.

  Away in the low range of stable buildings a sudden high, sobbing, extraordinary howl had shattered the early morning calm. By his side Anil Bedekar swung round. Fifteen yards away the group round the heavily breathing horse turned sharply. But Ghote ran.

  He ran full pelt towards the stables and he cursed himself at every pace. That howl could only be Desai, and heaven knows what had happened to him. But the man with the shotgun was not in the party out with the horse, and he had looked as if he would have no hesitation in using the gun. There had been no shot so far, but with an idiot like Desai in a blind panic you could never tell what might happen. The crack of a shot and the thud of pellets entering a solid body might come at any moment.

  CHAPTER XI

  Not a sound came from behind the closed door of the stable building as Ghote reached it. He seized the door knob and twisted it hard. The door remained obstinately closed. Ghote took a step back and surveyed it. It was not particularly solid. He might be able to break it open. He must be able to. To have Desai shot because of a whim of his own, because for a joke he had left him asleep there, wouldn’t bear thinking about.

  He swung round, marched five paces away, turned and charged.

  There was a sharp rending sound as his shoulder came into biffing contact with the door at the exact point for maximum leverage. The flimsy affair flew wide open.

  In the empty stall where the horse at exercise had been stabled an alarming sight met his eyes. The squinting man with the shotgun was lying flat on his back in the dung-melded straw on the floor. The gun was across his throat and holding it firmly with one hand at the end of the barrels and the other on the stock was Desai, solidly astride the squinting man’s chest.

  For several seconds Ghote stood and stared while his mind tried to grapple with the startlingly reversed situation his eyes told him existed. Behind him Anil Bedekar, Jack Cooper and the jockey came curiously up.

  Ghote quickly shook himself free of his perplexity.

  “Well, Desai,” he said, “were you having trouble?”

  Sgt. Desai turned his head a little, after having given the helpless man underneath him a glare of warning.

  “This chap tried to hold me up with that gun of his, Inspector,” he said. “He told I was a racing spy.”

  “But why should he have thought that?” Ghote snapped irritatedly. “You came in with me. He knew that.”

  A sheepish look spread over Desai's dark face.

  “Inspector,” he said, “let me tell you the truth.”

  “Certainly.”

  “I fell asleep, Inspector.”

  “I know that, you idiot.”

  “Well, Inspector, when I woke up I found I was all alone, so I thought anyway, in Mr. Anil Bedekar’s stables.”

  “Well?”

  “Inspector, what a chance. I thought I could find enough hot informulation to last me months. Inspector, I have to keep a wife and children on my betting, you know. What else could I do?”

  From behind Ghote Anil Bedekar himself jumped forward.

  “And what the hell did you find?” he shouted.

  He was extremely angry.

  Desai's face went doubly anxious. He scrambled off the prone body of the squinting man and got awkwardly to his feet.

  “Mr. Bedekar, sir,” he said. “Not a damn' thing. That was the worst part.”

  Ghote swung round.

  “Never mind that, Mr. Bedekar,” he snapped out. “Just tell me where you were on the evening that the Rajah was shot?”

  For a moment two emotions, anger and curiosity, struggled for mastery on Anil Bedekar's face. Ghote glared at him and his anger with poor Desai was chased from the field.

  “So Bunny Baindur was shot?” Anil Bedekar said reflectively.

  Ghote registered the mark up to innocence, and discounted it almost as quickly. Bedekar was no innocent in other ways. This would not have been the first big bluff of his life.

  “Yes,” he said to him, “the Rajah was shot. During the evening. Where were you then?”

  “I was here, of course.”

  “In the stables?”

  “At my house on the other side of the road.”

  “And could you prove that?”

  Ghote had little doubt that he could, and he felt all the exasp
eration of coming to the end of a promising trail. But it was a fact that people like Anil Bedekar did not spend the evening at their own house all alone. There would be servants by the dozen who would have seen him, and whose evidence could be cross-checked till it was pretty well proven. There would be friends for dinner by the dozen too, no doubt.

  “No, Inspector,” Anil Bedekar said, with calmness. “I cannot prove I was in my house.”

  “You cannot? But why?”

  “Inspector, at this time of year as often as not I am up at three or four in the morning. I am getting on in age, Inspector, I need my sleep.”

  “So you go to bed early ?”

  “Often very early. Very early indeed when poor Bunny Baindur was shot.

  “And no one can prove you were in bed?”

  “Not absolutely, Inspector. I could have got out of my own house unobserved if I had wanted.”

  Anil Bedekar stood looking at him quietly, almost insolently.

  : : : :

  The drive back to Bombay seemed interminable. The truck got hotter and hotter. Ghote’s head, thick from the lack of sleep the night before, began to thud. He gave Desai a turn at the wheel. It was not a success. When for the fourth or fifth time the truck wandered squarely into the middle of the road, along which other vehicles were apt to be coming at speeds of anything up to seventy miles an hour, Ghote ordered him tersely back into the passenger’s seat.

  Nevertheless when they got to the city centre he did not take the turning towards Headquarters. Desai, sitting grinning away amiably to himself, looked round.

  “Hey, Inspector, you took the wrong way.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  The earnest solemnity simply fed the fire of Ghote’s fury like generous pieces of dry fuel being dropped one by one on to the sulky heart of a fire. In a moment they would blaze into life.

  “Oh, yes, Inspector. To get to H.Q. you have to turn left just back there. It won’t be so easy to do now, Inspector. This is a no-through road here.”

  “I can see a sign as big as that for myself, thank you.” “Yes, Inspector. I thought as you missed the way once you might not be driving so well just now, Inspector.”

  “I did not miss the way.”

  “Oh, but yes, you did, Inspector. You ought to have taken that left turn back there. Going to be very difficult to get out of this, Inspector.”

  He began craning all round, looking at the state of the turbulent city traffic.

  “It is not going to be difficult,” Ghote stated flatly.

  “Oh, but yes, Inspector, to get to H.Q. when you missed the turning from here is not easy.”

  “We are not trying to get to H.Q.”

  The look of surprise on Desai’s face was exactly what Ghote had expected. Why then, he asked himself, did it make him so doubly furious?

  “Oh to hell, man,” he snarled. “We are going to interrogate Lal Dass, of course. This is a murder inquiry: not a chance to drink tea in office.”

  “No, Inspector. I mean, yes, Inspector.”

  Lal Dass, the hathayogi, had had his ashram, crowded with disciples, at the sea-shore up beyond Worli. Everybody knew that. It had been endlessly repeated in the papers. Where exactly it was, Ghote did not know. But he reckoned that all he would have to do was to inquire.

  As soon as they got near to the sea he stopped the truck, leant out and shouted at the first person he saw, a solid grey-haired grandmother voluminously wrapped in a dark green sari.

  “I am looking for Lal Dass.”

  That should be enough. It was.

  The serious, solid face under the tightly drawn harsh grey hair split wide open in a monster grin. The stout old lady laughed till she had to wipe her eyes. It was a long time before she could talk.

  “Only now you are looking,” she spluttered.

  “Yes. I am looking now,” Ghote said.

  He had the feeling that the laughter was directed partly against himself for looking for Lal Dass at all as well as against the discredited hathayogi.

  “Yes, I am looking,” he said. “And I am police officer.”

  The grandmother wiped her eyes with the corner of her sari.

  “Police officer, is it? You are going to arrest? Good. My son-in-law he lost fifty naye paise over that man.”

  “Where can I find?” Ghote said, more sharply.

  The stately green-clad figure pointed.

  “Down there till you come right to the sea,” she said. “And then along to right. You will see where they all had their tents when they believed in that fool. And now there is one tent only.”

  Vengeance darted from her solid face. Fifty naye paise, half a rupee, that was real money.

  Ghote let the clutch of the truck in with a jerk.

  In less than two minutes they were down at the beach and there, true enough, were the signs of a recently numerous tent colony, dirt, mess and rubbish scattered generously. And past it all, up against the rough grey stones of a short section of sea-wall there was one tent left— if tent it could be called.

  It consisted of a single sheet of coarse sacking held to the top of the wall by four or five heavy stones and supported at the lower end by two crazily angled bamboo sticks. Even from a distance it was possible to see the whole interior. It consisted solely of a large water-jar and Lal Dass.

  The hathayogi was sitting cross-legged on the sand, his head bowed, his plump figure motionless. Ghote stopped the truck. He turned to Sgt. Desai. Somehow he could not contemplate this sight with that bumbling figure standing at his elbow. Before he knew it the fool might fling himself on the hathayogi the way he had flung himself on Anil Bedekar’s squint-eyed syce.

  “Sergeant,” Ghote said, “take a good look at where we are, and then go and find the nearest telephone. Ring in to Headquarters and let them know where I am. All right?”

  Desai sat in the passenger seat of the truck and the various parts of Ghote’s orders passed one by one over his moony countenance. At last he came to the end of them.

  “Okay, Inspector,” he said.

  “And when you come back” Ghote added, “just wait nearby till I see you.”

  “I come back?” Desai said.

  “Yes, you come back. You go and telephone and then you come back here, which is why I told you to take a good look at where we are. And you tell me if anyone at Headquarters had any messages also.”

  “Oh, I see now, Inspector. Yes, sir. I would do that.”

  Ghote waited. Desai sat where he was.

  “Then go,” Ghote said quietly.

  “Oh, go? Yes, go. I see. Then bye bye, Inspector.”

  And he did go. Ghote watched him marching away along the dirty sand and turning out of sight with a wondering air. It would take him a good deal of time to locate a telephone. There should be long enough to get what he could out of Lal Dass.

  He walked slowly over the sand towards the sea-wall and the pathetic awning. Four or five yards away he took care to kick at an empty, battered tin lying in his way. He saw that it had once contained something called Cocoa Maltine. It made a satisfactory clatter. Lai Dass did not so much as move a muscle.

  Ghote walked on right up to the edge of the tent. Still the hathayogi did not move. Ghote altered his position a little so that his shadow fell squarely across the scuffed up sand in front of the plump man’s eyes.

  And then he did look up.

  “You have come for my advice, my son,” he said.

  It was no sort of a question.

  With great graciousness Lal Dass gestured with his right hand at the sand in front of him under the shade of the awning.

  “Sit, sit, my son,” he said.

  Ghote weighed it up for a moment. Then he ducked down under the awning and sat cross-legged in front of the hathayogi. He noticed, with a faint sense of surprise, that he looked no different than he had when he had seen him across the smooth water of the tank waiting to begin that feat of levitation that had ended so ignomi
niously. His light brown skin was still as smoothly shining in the plump folds across his belly. His loin cloth still looked as fresh and white and uncrumpled as it had done on that day of days when the press of half a dozen foreign countries and the complicated rig-out of the television cameras, not to speak of thousands of his fellow countrymen, had waited for his least move. His smile was still as gentle, as placid, as benign. His brow was as unfurrowed.

  “No,” Ghote said sharply. “No, I have not come for advice. I have come for information. You are speaking with a police officer.”

  The hathayogi inclined his head half an inch to the right in gentle acknowledgement, but said nothing.

  Ghote began again.

  “I have come to investigate the trick that was played on you,” he said.

  LalDass looked over at him and smiled. It was a smile of simple serenity.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  “An elaborate hoax was played on you by someone,” Ghote said. “It is our duty to discover who. Have you any idea yourself?”

  He leant forward ready to memorise each word. One slip, one wrong emphasis and he might have a clue as to whether Lal Dass knew the Rajah and knew that it was he who had so cruelly humiliated him.

  Lai Dass was smiling still.

  “It is finished,” he said softly. “Why must you think of it still?”

  “But he tricked you, made a fool of you before thousands of people, television cameras even.”

  “He did not make a fool of me, whoever he was,” Lai Dass said. “It was I who made a fool of myself.”

  For a moment Ghote was nonplussed. There was too much of truth in what the hathayogi had said for one thing. But he recovered quickly enough.

  “It is not a question only of you looking a fool,” he said. “A great deal of public confusion was caused. A great deal of money was wasted.”

  “Wasted?” the plump figure in front of him said musingly.

  “It was lost,” Ghote replied with sharpness. “A great many members of the public lost large sums owing to this ridiculous hoax.”

  “Yes,” said Lal Dass.

  He lapsed into silence for a little.

  “Yes,” he repeated at last. “It is good for them to lose money. We must all lose money.”