Nor when he had addressed him, cautiously, as “Father” had his quick “Mort, call me Mort” been in any way reassuring. And as for his conversation during the rest of the evening, it had been more suitable for some communist journalist rehearsing scathing editorials for Bombay’s extremist, muck-raking Blitz than for any man of religion.
So, although the fellow was plainly much too young to remember anything at all for the Madurai Conspiracy Case, it was certainly possible that he felt himself to be somehow a representative of a once-oppressed people. But why was such a firebrand a guest in this house?
His one attempt so far, in a wary conversation, to get out of him at least an answer to that had been swept away, when Mort had learnt that “Dr. Ghote” was from Bombay, in a wild flood of talk about the iniquity of the conditions endured by the city’s jhopad-patty dwellers in their huddles of makeshift huts in the shadows of ever-rising tall new office blocks and apartment towers.
Perhaps sometime this evening another try at the fellow might meet with more success. A cunningly framed, casual question about using a typewriter. That might hit a tender spot.
And the time for that, surely, would not be long now. He must have been lying stewing under his absurdly useless fan for nearly three hours now. Before too long it would be possible to get up and move about with the promise of the relative coolness of evening not far off.
But the case against the priest—if he was a priest?—surely it was scarcely more solid than the flimsy circumstances involving the other two possible typewriter users in the house? The judge’s daughter, with her years of looking after her father, and the goodness-radiating figure of the Saint, Anand Baba? Yet the judge had received threats against his life. Threats to kill him “by means of an explosive detonation” in just twelve days from now.
And it was his own duty to stop that happening. Whatever the attitude of the judge was to him, he had been sent here as a police officer to prevent a most serious crime and to detect one scarcely less serious. Then he would do that duty.
Errr-bock. Pause. And then, when it seemed for the thousandth time that the damned thing was going to stop at last, again: errr-bock.
No, the deputy commissioner, old hawk of ancient days, had made the matter crystal clear in giving him his parting instructions.
“Understand vun thing, Ghote. Vat ve have on our backs is not just an M.L.A. only. That fellow is almost as damn influential as the Minister for Police Affairs himself. Ven he is asking, that is ordering. And so here am I, vith heaven knows how much vork to be done, having to find an officer to go and protect that British-loving svine who sentenced those chaps to death.”
“Sir,” he had put in then, those dry-as-fallen-leaves reports of the old case fresh in his mind. “Sir, I do not think Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim was acting from British-loving motives only. Sir, I believe from what he said then that he saw himself as doing no more than upholding the law.”
“Nonsense, man. He knew that independence must come soon. He could have imposed some damn long gaol term, veil knowing that they vould get their pardon ven the day came. Any reasonable man vould have done that. Vy, he embarrassed some of the British even by vat he had done. No, no. I do not vish one bit to help a svine like that.”
“No, sir.”
“But somevun I have got to send, and that is going to be you, Ghote.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But do not be thinking the fellow is going to thank you in any vay vatsoever. His cousin was making it vun hundred per cent clear that he does not vish to be helped. But, you, Ghote, have got to persvade him. I am going to see that the fellow is damn veil protected, and you, Ghote, are vat I am going to do that vith. You are the thin end of my vedge, Ghote. The thin end of my vedge.” “Yes, sir.”
“So vunce you get there, push, man, push”
“Yes, sir.”
2
As it turned out, Inspector Ghote was up from his high, wooden-ended bed, all dark swirls of heavy carving, well before the long afternoon stupor had ended. What jerked him abruptly into a sitting position on the hard wide mattress was a sound.
At first he had thought it was only some slight extra noise coming from the aged fan above him, a new continuous low groan added to the regular, maddeningly delayed, inexorable errr-bock, errr-bock that had kept him half awake all the long deadeningly hot afternoon. But in a minute or so he had realised that the noise was not coming from anything in the room at all. It was coming from outside. Somewhere in the sun-compressed stillness, where every bird was stifled into silence, something was making a sound, a tiny unbroken buzzing.
He sat there on the bed and strained his ears. Was it only the generator down in the tin shed at the far end of the gardens, by the fort? He had understood from Raman, wide-eyed, scared-looking, shyly grinning Raman, that the engine ran only when light was needed in the big house and that the stored power of a set of big old batteries was sufficient for such other needs as there were during daylight hours. But perhaps for some special reason the ancient engine had been started tip early today. No. He recalled the machine’s throbbing sound well enough from the evening before, deep and reluctant, like the fan grunting round above him still, feeble but formidably obstinate.
And the buzzing was getting louder minute by minute.
Suddenly he knew what it was. He slid from the tall bed, went over to the window, and pushed apart the heavy bleached wooden shutters. The light of the sun, although it was not striking directly onto this side of the house, hit him like a blow on the nose. He blinked. But, far away across on the other side of the almost dried-up river, he saw what he had been expecting to see. There, under the jabbing glare, moving steadily onwards like an indefatigable beetle, was a little motor scooter, crouched upon which as if it had a pair of filmy white wings, was a man wearing a white kurta on his upper half and below a baggy white dhoti, its ends streaming out in the slight breeze created by the machine’s modest speed.
A visitor.
It could be nothing else. There was nowhere else to go other than this house along the dusty unmade-up road, once past the cluster of huts that was the village.
But the river? How would that determinedly advancing rider in the dhoti cope with the broken surface of the river bed?
Standing at the window, eyes screwed tight against the quivering whiteness of the sunlight, Ghote watched to see what this newcomer would do.
Who could he be? Someone arriving by scooter could not have come from very far away. In fact, could have come only from the town. There was nowhere else within range of such a little machine. Some municipal official? Perhaps. Yet the judge had said nothing, when the conversation at dinner last evening had turned to how few people they saw, about expecting any visitor, and it was surely likely that if someone was being sent to see a person as important as Sir Asif Ibrahim notice would have been sent to him by letter. And even if the judge had decided to say nothing of an expected caller, Begum Roshan would hardly have kept silent on the subject. There had been several long awkward gaps in the talk at the dinner table which she had made painful efforts to fill. She was hardly likely to have let such a promising topic go unmentioned.
So who was this white-clad figure approaching with such steady certainty?
Was it someone with a typewritten note concealed somewhere about his person? A note containing the words “twelve days only remaining”?
The scooter slowed at last as it reached the top of the gentle slope of the riverbank. The rider weaved his way twistingly right down to the broad bed of the stream itself. Then the noise of the engine—it had become more of an angry whine than a buzz when it had got nearer—abruptly ceased. The rider, who Ghote could see now was wearing a white Congress cap as well as his white kurta and dhoti, dismounted. He seemed to be an individual in late middle age, weighty and deliberate in his movements, though he was still too far away for his features to be at all clear.
He watched him gather the falling pleats of the dhoti in a bunch
in his left hand and then awkwardly grasp the handle bar of his machine. Then he began to make his way across the river bed, pushing the little machine onwards as implacably as when he had been riding smoothly towards the house. He seemed to know the stony terrain well, changing his course from time to time without pausing to choose the best route and contriving never to have to go through water much deeper than the tops of his ankles.
In five minutes more he would be at the house itself. Ghote decided abruptly that he would go down and keep watch over his arrival. Someone who so evidently knew his way to the house could well be the person responsible for delivering those notes—could well then be someone who in twelve days’ time would attempt to murder Sir Asif “by means of an explosive detonation”
Hurriedly he scrambled into trousers and shirt and respectable socks and shoes, pushing away as he did so the niggling thought that he had brought with him too few clothes to keep up for another twelve days the standards he had discovered that the judge expected at his dinner table. Why, he had only one necktie, and that was already looking decidedly creased. Yet perhaps his stay would not now, after all, run to the whole twelve days. Perhaps the new arrival—through his still open window he heard the brisk rattle of the scooters engine being started up again—would before very much longer in some way betray himself as the writer of those notes. And then . . .
He opened the door of his room with caution, remembering that its seldom-used hinges squealed out a brief protest every time it was swung back at all quickly. Then he set out along the wide corridor that would bring him eventually, unless he once more got the geography of the big house confused, to the ornately carved central staircase. There, with any luck, he might be able to lean over the banister at the top and hear, or even see, what was going on in the entrance hall below.
Perhaps Raman, shyly grinning his quick-to-appear, quickly chased away, wide horseshoe smile, would come to the heavy house door and greet the visitor by name if he knew him, or ask him his business if he did not.
The corridor stretched ahead, wide, high, its walls damp-mottled, its marble floor echoing his steps, although he tried to keep them quiet. Rapidly as he could he went past its long row of identical, polished, dark wood doors. How many bedrooms were there? Was there perhaps, tucked away quietly in one of them, someone whom he had not even been told about? Perhaps it was someone speaking good English and capable of using a typewriter whom no one else in the whole big pea-rattling place knew existed.
He shook his head angrily. Fantasy. Fantasy.
Yet a thorough quiet search of the whole house would be worth carrying out as soon as he had a chance.
He turned the corner, and, yes, there in front of him was the head of the staircase, dark and heavily carved. He advanced at a slithering half run. From below there came no sound, until just as he reached the top of the stairs there suddenly groaned out the noise of the wide double doors of the house being dragged open.
Just in time.
Then he heard Raman’s singsong South Indian voice. “Good morning, Mr. Dhebar, sir.”
He had noticed before that, irrespective of the time of day, the orderly always greeted everybody with “Good morning.”
But “Mr. Dhebar.” That name rang a bell. An urgent strident bell. And before the newcomer had had time to reply to Raman, the answer had come to him. One of the Madurai Conspirators had been named Dhebar. And it had been a decidedly special one—the sole member of the party who had succeeded in avoiding capture when the police had raided the house where they were hiding the dynamite. The man had, in fact, never been captured. “The missing conspirator” he had been called throughout the trial, or “the man Dhebar.”
Could this be him? Could that rather squat, weighty, deliberate figure who had come beetle-buzzing to the house crouched over his little scooter be the very man Sir Asif had sentenced to death though he was not standing in the dock with his fellow conspirators? Thirty years ago, all but twelve days?
A single long stride and he was leaning over the rail of the banister. He craned down.
Below he saw Raman’s curly-haired black head, with at the crown a small round patch of grey where the hair dye had grown out. And a foot or two in front of Raman there was the inverted boat shape of a white Congress cap with beneath it the slopes of the white kurta tautly stretched over a solidly pudgy torso.
Yes, a man in full middle age. He clawed at his memory to recall the exact age of the missing conspirator. It must have been mentioned somewhere in those dusty, long-stored reports he had read back in Bombay. But he could not recall it. Not exactly. Yet the missing man had been young, he was sure of that. A man in his twenties. Which would mean a man now in his fifties. And the solid figure down below, standing still on the veined marble flags of the hallway, looked very much as if he was just that age.
And he was named Dhebar.
Was the whole business he had been sent up here to tackle going to be after all quite simple?
“My dear Dhebar, how pleasant to see you.”
It was the precise Englishman’s English voice of Sir Asif. In noticeably friendly greeting.
The old man must have approched without using the polished black, silver-headed cane which he usually carried. Its distinctive tap-tap on the marble floors had been totally absent.
And now he had come into sight. A head swathed in the elaborate folds of a white pagri.
But that friendly greeting had in an instant stood the whole situation on its head. The judge, of all people, must remember the names of the men in the Madurai Conspiracy Case, must know that the missing conspirator had been called Dhebar and would be now about fifty years of age. Yet he was evidently on the friendliest of terms with the newcomer.
Or was he?
Because Mr. Dhebar seemed distinctly surprised, and even put out, by the warmth of his greeting.
“Yes,” he was saying. “Yes, Judge. Yes. That is— Very, very pleased to see you also, Judge. Most altogether.”
Ghote set off to creep, step by step, down the stairs till he could get to a position where he could see the newcomers face properly.
“I trust,” Sir Asif was continuing, “that you will be able to stay long enough to take tea with us, my dear fellow. I know that my daughter would particularly look forward to it.”
“Begum Roshan is most kind, Judge sahib. Begum Roshan is indeed always and invariably most kind to my poor self.”
Now Ghote was far enough down to be able to get a reasonable view of the fellow’s face, although at a sharp angle.
A jaw, heavy and pear-shaped. Above it a small mouth. And above that—he stooped so as to improve his line of vision—a drooping pendulous nose. Just visible to either side of that were two large brown eyes, looking at this moment, so far as he could tell, as if they were desperately searching round for some explanation.
And the judge’s next remark seemed to do nothing to reassure those eyes, innocent though it sounded.
“My dear Dhebar, you know that we both greatly welcome these weekly visits of yours. They are a high point in our somewhat restricted lives. A high point indeed.”
“If I am giving the least pleasure at all to Begum Roshan it is altogether my honour. Oh, most certainly my honour. And to yourself, of course, also. To yourself especially, Judge sahib.”
His head was awhirl with thoughts. Why, if this Mr. Dhebar was in the habit of visiting the house once a week, had neither the judge nor his daughter mentioned him when the conversation at the dinner table had turned to the loneliness and isolation of their life here? Because—he was certain of this suddenly—those visits did not give either of them any pleasure. There had been, looking back, an undertone of irony in the judge’s voice just now, an undertone which Ghote had already begun to be able to recognise. Yet it was plain that Mr. Dhebar, whoever he was, and it was clear that he was a person far below Sir Asif Ibrahim in the social scale, did indeed come here on those regular weekly visits. So what could be their purpose? And since, ob
viously, they gave every opportunity for him to leave notes threatening the judge’s life, was this the man he had been sent out here to apprehend? But, if he was, what was his motive? Why did he want Sir Asif dead? And why was he giving him these warnings? Could he possibly be the missing conspirator after all?
One thing was certain. As soon as there was the least opportunity he must find out from the fellow his full name and as much else about him as he could, and then he must thoroughly check on him.
But already a mountainous difficulty presented itself. How to get in touch with Bombay to carry out that check? A house without a telephone, miles even from the nearest one. He would have to get to the town. But how to do that? Sir Asif, certainly, had a car. That much he had gathered from the talk last night. The vehicle was kept on the far side of the river and seldom used. Would Sir Asif allow him to borrow it? But he could hardly say to him, “Sir, I want to telephone Bombay to check on a regular visitor to your house, a person to whom you give your hospitality.” Yet what did Doctors of Philosophy suddenly need that would make a journey of twenty miles or more a matter of urgency? Extra notebooks? More pencils?
“My dear Dhebar, you must meet our other visitor, Dr. Ghote, who has come to assist me with my memoirs. Come and join us, Ghote.”
The old man had spotted him. Had known he was there listening all the time, most likely. It would be typical. And, no doubt, that warm welcome had been given to Mr. Dhebar with the sole object of putting yet more confusion into his own mind.
He burned with rage. And fought to conceal it.
But the judge’s last remark had, it seemed, caused Mr. Dhebar much greater dismay even than the mysteriously warm welcome he had received.
Hurrying down the stairs, taking their wide flights much too quickly but unable to stop himself, he saw that the newcomer had been plunged into a palpable state of agitation, rendered indeed temporarily speechless.
Inspector Ghote Draws a Line Page 2