Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  Well then, perhaps this person was hidden in the inhabited part of the house. Right under his own nose. If it was Sir Asif who was doing the hiding—but what nonsense it was to assume that there was anybody hidden—then it would be typical of him to have put the unwelcome cat so near his mouse.

  6

  Treading the noisy stone floor of the old zenana quarters carefully, Ghote returned to the starting point of his search and then, with a squaring of his shoulders, began its second phase, in the more inhabited upstairs rooms of the old house.

  The first door he came to—no trace of light from inside—proved to be that of Sir Asif himself. The room was almost as bare as any of the ones on the zenana side. Only a fine Mirzapur rug indicated that unprotected feet ever walked on its smooth floor. And only a small tilted bookstand on the bedside teapoy containing half a dozen volumes of Urdu verse showed who it was who lay on the high bed during the long hot afternoons, who slept—or did not sleep—there during the scarcely less hot nights.

  Did his fan, too, go errr-bock, errr-bock, ceaselessly from after the tired ceremony of luncheon till nearly time for the tired ceremony of tea? It certainly looked every bit as old as the one in his own room and seemed to lean a little away from the ceiling in much the same fashion too, leaving a thin black rim between its cream casing and the chalky white of the cracked ceiling.

  And under that fan did the old man dream? he asked himself, as cautiously he pulled the tall door closed behind him, his search completed. Did he in dreams see himself setting free again and again the old Vaishnavite singer of holy songs? Authorising again and again the release of certain material evidence, namely one mattock?

  He almost forgot to take any precautions before pushing open the next door along.

  What if it had been Begum Roshan’s room, and she had been there inside it? What could he have said, barging in on her without even a knock? She would like it only a little less than her father, the thought of having a spy in the house, even though he was a spy she herself had been responsible for summoning.

  But there was no thin line of light at the door’s edge, and when he listened no sound at all from inside. Once more—for the eighteenth time? for the nineteenth?—he eased a doorknob round and then as stealthily pushed a door open quarter inch by quarter inch.

  In the filtered moonlight he saw at once that he was in a feminine room and one much more furnished than any he had been in up to now. The diffused rays caught the glint of silver-topped jars and brushes on the large dressing table by the window. The bed had a silk cover in a pattern of silver and blue, its bolster too covered in the same material.

  Yet he knew at once that this was not Begum Roshan’s room. For one thing he was certain that her father, never slow to express irritation, would not tolerate her occupying a room next to his own. But there was another, more immediate, reason for his instant knowledge: it was plain that the room had stayed untouched by any hand for a very long time.

  It had been a series of tiny things—the too stiff folds of the bedcover, the unnatural neatness of the silver jars on the dressing table, and even though nothing could be clearly seen, a pervasive softness everywhere that spoke of a fine layer of long-accumulating reddish dust from which nothing had escaped.

  Then, in a corner that the moonlight did not reach, he made out that in front of what should have been a full-length mirror in the door of the almirah there was hung a length of white cotton material. And, yes, on the mirror of the dressing table, directly in front of the window, there was more cotton sheeting. At once he knew what room this had been: the one that Sir Asif had shared long, long ago with his wife.

  Except for those veiled mirrors, it had been preserved exactly as it had been when she had been alive.

  Or, no. No, it had not. Not quite. In a corner on the far side of the bed, he saw now, there was a pile of small wooden crates. Containers of some sort. And they had been pushed in out of the way by some servant, Raman probably, who had been told to dispose of them.

  He walked round the bed and bent to take a closer look. The top one, which had had its cover prised off and only loosely replaced, was filled, he saw, with wood shavings and nestling among them, plainly untouched since it had been delivered from some department store in Bombay many years before, there was an ornate table lamp.

  Lady Ibrahim must have sent for it, and then, before it had at last been delivered, her death had come.

  And Sir Asif at once had moved out of the room and had given orders that it should be kept exactly as it had been during her lifetime. But he had never ventured back in to see whether his orders had been obeyed. So the servant had taken advantage of that to put these half-dozen awkward unwanted crates there out of his masters sight. If ever Sir Asif did enter this shrine, what a tongue lashing Raman would get. And accept patiently, no doubt, as it seemed that he accepted every other occasion when Sir Asif's bitterness broke over his defenceless head. Thirty years and more of such trouncings.

  He sighed.

  But nevertheless he took good care to go into the adjoining bathroom—the bath had a rim of red rust all round its bottom inch —and to open the shrouded mirror-door of the double-size almirah. It was after all a piece of furniture easily big enough for someone to hide in.

  But it did not contain some mysterious person—who would Sir Asif wish to conceal from him? and why?—only rank upon rank of saris, in silk, in brocade, in finest cottons, and among them what must have been Lady Ibrahim’s wedding sari, a gorgeous garment of shimmering white with an intricate silver border.

  But it had not been “Lady Ibrahim” then. It had been “Mrs. Ibrahim,” wife of a rising young pleader with all the world before him.

  Quietly he closed the almirah’s door and left.

  The next occupied room he came to was that which had been given to young Father Adam—no, in the privacy of his own mind he would not call him Mort—and for a moment he was tempted to make a thorough search among the heaps of papers and books littered about, almost all of which he would have classified as “subversive literature” had he encountered them while carrying out an investigation back in Bombay, to see if he could find some link between the young American and the time-smothered Madurai Conspiracy. Or perhaps there would be a document that showed the fellow was not after all a priest.

  But the possibility of the suspect himself suddenly coming up to his room and finding the Doctor of Philosophy burrowing among his private papers was not to be contemplated.

  Two more bare unoccupied rooms came next, bare beds, empty almirahs echoing when he put his head into them, bathrooms bone-dry.

  Then came the room evidently given to the Saint, although there was little sign of use in it other than the fact that the bedcover had been taken off and folded to make a bed on the hard stone of the floor. But what exactly was such a person as this doing here? Though warranted as beyond all suspicion, he was certainly oddly out of place in this remote yet worldly household.

  Ghote shook his head.

  Next came his own room and three more unoccupied ones, none of which showed any sign of habitation. In one rats or some other creatures had chewed off all the insulation from the wires running down to the switch-block and the bare copper glinted rose-pink in the moonlight. Then he came at last to the one remaining door.

  And here there was a thin outline of bright light, unmistakable even from a distance of a few yards in the dark passage.

  Was this his man at last?

  But, no. He had not yet seen Begum Roshans room. So this must be that. And she herself must be there behind this door and not downstairs with the others. Was she, even at this moment in this isolated end of the big house, setting up a typewriter, usually kept concealed in the bottom of her almirah?

  He stood, still as the thick roundheaded newel post at the foot of the broad staircase down below, and listened hard, his ear not six inches from the door.

  But there was nothing. Nothing but faint in the distance the choked throbbing o
f the old generator engine.

  Well, there was something else he could do, since Begum Roshan was alone. He could ask her what exactly had taken place beside the doors to the house in those few minutes when Sir Asif had been left sleeping in the library and the latest note had been put there beside him.

  He summoned up a little courage and gave a brisk knock on the solid teak in front of him.

  There was a silence, a longish silence—was a typewriter being hurriedly hidden away?—and then Begum Roshan’s voice came calling with a faint note of unease, “Who is it?”

  He went in without answering. Would he catch her just straightening up from some drawer, just closing the almirah?

  But he found her sitting in apparent tranquillity on a stool in front of her dressing table. And there was no sign, as far as a rapid glance could tell him, of anything out of place in the room.

  “Excuse me, madam,” he said quickly. “I very much needed to see you at a time when no one else was near, and I therefore came up here. I hope I am not incommoding?”

  “No, Inspector. No. You are right. We should have a talk.”

  “Yes, madam. Perhaps even more urgently than you think. There has been a new development.”

  “Another note?”

  Her eyes darted quickly from side to side.

  Should she have guessed what “the development” he had deliberately not specified was? Well, it was not unreasonable. He had not had time to frame his words more carefully.

  “Yes, madam, another note. And it seems to me most likely that it was left by one of the guests here in the house.”

  “One of the— But, no. No, Inspector. That is impossible.” “Impossible? But why, madam?”

  “Inspector, they are my father’s guests.”

  He wanted to laugh, though not with amusement. To find the daughter such an echo of the father.

  He stiffened a little.

  “Madam, believe me, I have good reason for my suspicions.

  Would you be so kind as to tell me exactly where each of those guests was in the ten minutes or so before I myself came out and joined you just as Mr. Dhebar was about to depart?”

  She did not immediately answer.

  Is she going to play her father to the end towards me, Ghote wondered. Is she already regretting a perhaps impulsive move in summoning police assistance through her influential Bombay cousin?

  Or is she thinking hard how to cover up her own quick journey to the library where for whatever devious purposes she herself left her father that threatening note?

  But her silence did not last long.

  “Inspector, I realise how important what I can tell you may be. But—but you will think me a great fool, I cannot really help you. I—I was upset when Mr. Dhebar announced at last that he was going to leave. My father—what went on during tea—oh, won’t you understand?”

  The fleshless face looked yet more worn.

  “Madam, I think I do understand.”

  “Yes? Yes, Inspector? Then you will see that I was not in a fit state, not in a fit state at all, to notice who was there and who was not, whether someone, Anand Baba even, slipped away while I was thinking about—about other things.”

  Ghote sighed.

  So he was not going to get anywhere. But make sure that she really did know nothing at all.

  “Madam, I perfectly understand that you were at that time still somewhat upset. Very good. But please to cast your mind back. Did any one of the three guests there with you, the Saint or Father Adam or Mr. Dhebar, did any one of them remain with you the whole time?”

  But he saw by the at once harassed look that came onto her face, by her glances from side to side as if she were a pursued chital deer seeking cover, that he was going to get no satisfactory answer. And he got none.

  “No. No, Inspector, I cannot say. I cannot. You understand that? I really, truly cannot.”

  “Yes, madam, I understand.”

  And there had been nothing more he could do. Nothing more but mutter some reassurances that he was “trying to do his level best” to protect her father, to add discreetly that Sir Asif was not making his task any easier—no point in saying straight out that really the judge himself was the enemy he had to face—and to take his leave.

  And he soon realised that the opportunities at ground level for concealing an extra person in the house, someone who would be able to use a typewriter and to produce good English, were going to be small. In place of the many bedrooms on the upper floor there were only the few large principal rooms and a number of other smaller ones. He did take a careful look at the long-disused billiards room, its wide table shrouded in a dhurry cover, the cues in their racks delicately powdered in reddish dust.

  Soon there were only the rooms underneath those of the zenana quarters left to inspect. Before going to them, as much to put off the moment when he had to admit failure as anything, he decided that he ought to make sure that the Saint and the American priest were still safely shut away in the drawing room.

  And, besides, he might find the young American on his own and then he could try to produce reasons why a Doctor of Philosophy should wish to put questions to him about his exact whereabouts earlier in the evening.

  He was, however, spared this. Both Saint and priest were there together, sitting in stifled silence. No doubt the Saint’s period of self-enforced non-speaking would not end till dawn.

  The moment Father Adam spotted his head coming round the door he leapt to his feet.

  “Ganesh. Come in, man, come in. I’ve just been attempting to get together a strategy on a problem I have, and I’d very much care to hear your insights.”

  "Yes?” he said, apprehensively.

  “Well, Ganesh, it’s just this. You know, of course, about the project of the state government here to alter the course of the river?”

  “No.”

  “No? Well, I suppose, shut away among your books you don’t keep up with what’s going on in the real world.”

  “I had certainly not heard anything of proposals to change the course of the river,” he answered, finding he resented on behalf of all Doctors of Philosophy the insinuation that as a class they wilfully built barriers round themselves. “It is the river outside that you are referring to?”

  “Yes, yes. Certainly. That’s the whole crux of the case. You know that centuries ago that river used to flow on a different course, right over on the other side of the house by the fort? That’s why years ago they built that big bund out there. So the new house wouldn’t get flooded. But no sooner had they build it—hundreds and thousands of hours of labour—than the river upped and changed its course.”

  “Well, Fath— Well, Mort, I did not at all know any of this. I have not seen very much outside the house as yet.”

  “No, well, I guess not.”

  “But, please, what was it you wished to ask? I am actually at this moment somewhat busy. Sir Asif's papers, you know.”

  There were only those half-dozen more rooms to search. But somehow this delay had brought back his conviction that, despite all likelihood, that unknown guest was concealed in one of them— was perhaps even at this minute attempting to obliterate all signs of his presence there before taking to another hiding place.

  “No, no, I won’t keep you a minute,” Father Adam said, plainly with no intention of fulfilling the promise. “It’s just that I’d welcome a second opinion. I’d have asked Anand Baba here. What a dedicated Hindu thinks ought to carry a lot of weight. Only . ."

  A look at the impassive form of the Saint, legs neatly folded beneath him on the faded velvet chair, saffron garments lying in undisturbed folds. And a shrug.

  “If it is a matter requiring the decision of a religious person I regret I do not at all qualify, Father. That is, Mort.”

  “Maybe not. But you’re a scholar, Doctor. A guy who’s studied the great thinkers.”

  The great thinkers. Did Herr Hans Gross, the fourth edition of whose classic work Criminal Investigation
had its place of honour in his cabin back at Bombay headquarters, qualify as a great thinker? It was doubtful if Father Mort Adam would think so.

  He gave a look round the big, half-lit room, hoping for inspiration, and caught the eye of the saint. Who gave him suddenly a smile of such penetrating kindness that for a little he could think of nothing else.

  When he had recovered he simply asked the young American what it was that he wanted an opinion about. He told him he would be glad to give him his view, for whatever that was worth.

  “It’s this, Ganesh. Sir Asif, as you know, or maybe you don’t, has taken out an injunction, or whatever that old legal procedure is, to stop the state government just as they were going to breach the far end of the bund and deflect the river back onto its old course. And, if that was done, you know what? It’d bring the greatest long-term benefits to hundreds of villagers out there living well below the poverty line. So, all I want to ask you is: is that right?”

  All he could think of doing in face of this appallingly slanted question, about which he felt he could have no view, was to turn towards the Saint again. The first time he had voluntarily subjected himself to the power that seemed to emanate from him.

  And once more he found himself receiving that smile. Later he tried to analyse it, but he could pin-point nothing. The flesh round the Saint’s eyes wrinkled a little so that perhaps they seemed to shine more. The mouth in his square white beard certainly moved. And yet . . . Yet he had felt, almost as if he had stepped out into the full generous heat of the sun, that he had been struck, bowled down, tumbled out of himself.

  He wanted to say, “Thank you, Babaji”—he almost did say the words out loud—but instead he turned back to Father Adam, feeling as if he must have let the priest’s question go unanswered for a full minute, for five full minutes even, though he saw nothing in the American’s tense face that showed that the lapse of time between query and answer was anything out of the ordinary.

  “Well, Mort,” he said, quite easily, “I would certainly like to give you my opinion. But, you know, I ought to hear Sir Asif’s side of the question also.”