Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  The American’s face fell a little.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, I guess you’ve got a right to do that, Ganesh. But let me just warn you. Choose your time carefully to ask about it. The old boy can get pretty sore on the subject.” Ghote took that as a chance to make his escape. Those half-dozen unexamined rooms scratched at his mind like a household pet tirelessly demanding entrance.

  But disappointment awaited him, as all along a cold factual voice had assured him it would. The rooms were no longer in use in the big house, little more than somewhere to put unwanted furniture. Chairs, sofas, and tables were shrouded in white sheeting and even by the pale moonlight it was easy to see that on each mound the reddish dust lay in undisturbed layers. Even the ridiculous possibility of the person whom Sir Asif wished to hide being crouched there holding his breath while this impertinent inspector from Bombay poked and pried had to be completely discounted.

  And then at last he finished. There was the kitchen at the end of this passage—the one with the mildew-stain map of Bangladesh on its wall—still left unvisited and the servants’ quarters, but no one of the typewriter-using class would have been put there by Sir Asif Ibrahim. No, the hunt had come to an end, and it had been as unsuccessful as from the start he ought to have known it would be.

  He stood at the foot of the great staircase in the hall, beside the carved newel post, and gave a long weary puff of a sigh, feeling defeat settle down into every crevice of his mind.

  And then, through the window on the left of the wide double doors to the house, out in the moonlit garden, he caught a clear glimpse of Raman. Raman was hurrying past, head bent, carrying in front of him a large tray draped with a white cloth.

  So there was a someone extra. Someone not hiding inside the old house, but concealed somewhere in its gardens. And a person who got meals taken to him by a servant was quite likely to be someone with good English and able to use a typewriter.

  Ghote felt a huge spout of hope shoot up within him. He was going to achieve what he had been sent all this way to do. He was going to find the person who had been sending death threats to Sir Asif Ibrahim, and when he had done so he would effect an arrest.

  Instantly he hurried across to the panel of brown bakelite light switches fixed to the wall near the house door, their wires running in an untidy clump up to the ceiling above. Only one of the switches was in the “On" position. He clicked it sharply back. At once the heavy brass lantern that illuminated the hall was extinguished.

  He pulled open one of the double doors beside him, confident now that no giveaway beam of light would betray him.

  Raman was still near enough to be seen. The back of his short white cotton jacket stood out clearly even when he passed through the sprawling purple shadows cast by the moon. It looked as if he was heading for the far part of the gardens down near the ancient generator.

  And, yes, this was the way that led to the old fort.

  The judge had told him its history the night before while they had been eating dinner up in the coolness of the roof. It had been the original home of the family, built on a small tuft of a hill, the only one such in all the far-stretching flatness, when centuries before they had taken the land in brutal conquest, spilling out from the north, pillaging and raping. Sir Asif, most law-abiding of men, had not seemed in recounting the story to have disapproved of this as strongly as he might have done. “Possession is nine points of the law, you know, Doctor.”

  Eventually, about a hundred years ago, the rugged building had been adjudged too comfortless and the present house had been erected to replace it. But somehow the impression had been left that the fort had become a total ruin, a couple of walls only standing above heaped stones.

  It was an impression, he guessed now, that he had been intended to get. The place, almost certainly, was after all at least in parts habitable.

  He followed the moving shape of Raman’s white jacket through the night, alternately silvery with moonlight and velvety with shadow. The chug-choke, chug-choke of the old generator engine grew louder and clearer. Areas of sweet scents came and went as his rapid steps took him past different looming overgrown shrubs. From away somewhere on the far side of the high-mounded bund, abandoned long ago by the capricious river, there came the howl of a jackal.

  It would be the moon, he thought. Jackals in his boyhood days had always howled loudest when the moon was at its brightest.

  For a moment in a shadow somewhere ahead Raman’s white jacket disappeared. But it was only because he had reached the long tin shed under the branches of the tamarind tree where the generator was chugging away and had turned round its comer.

  Ghote quickened his pace.

  He had not the least doubt now that it was to the fort that Raman was taking the tray.

  If it was at all possible he must see exactly where Raman went when he had climbed the little hill.

  Ghote reached the generator shed and pausing a moment he tugged the knot of his necktie loose, slipped it over his head, stuffed it into his trouser pocket, and whipped off his light-coloured shirt. The trousers, thank goodness, were much darker. In the gloom now he would be much less easily seen if the orderly did chance to turn round.

  At the corner of the tin hut he stooped and thrust the shirt under a tall clump of long-dried grass. It would be easy enough to find it there later.

  Then he hurried on.

  As he had thought, the fort, when he got to the foot of the little hillock it stood on, was a good deal more substantial than Sir Asif had led him to suppose. Parts of it were certainly in ruins. But the four main walls stood upright, solid block on solid block of what looked in the moonlight to be pinky-red stone.

  Raman, he saw, was following a path right under the walls, going round to the far side. He moved round below to keep him in sight. And then suddenly the white jacket disappeared into a narrow slit of a doorway.

  No use trying to go in after him. The fellow might quite easily simply be waiting somewhere just inside. Better to watch till he came out and then attempt to make contact with whoever it was in there.

  He stood where he was, confident that he would be invisible to the orderly whenever he emerged, and strained to hear the least telltale sound from inside the fort. Certainly Raman seemed to be taking his time. He had already been a good deal longer than would be needed just to put down the tray, salaam, and leave. Was he keeping this mysterious person in touch with events in the house? “The doctor from Bombay spoke with judge sahib for half an hour tonight. I do not know what they said, but judge sahib was very very angry after.”

  Or would it be a very different kind of report? “Yes, sahib, I was leaving the note you had written on your typewriter for judge sahib to find, as you told. And the doctor from Bombay saw. Sahib, I do not trust that man”?

  In the darkness a beetle whirred close past his head.

  No, Raman would not have been saying that. He was too much the judge's man to have lent himself to any enemy. Twenty-four hours of seeing master and servant together had been enough to have made that plain beyond doubt. Raman—had he not been in the judge’s service for more than thirty years?—was devoted to the old man. Look at the way he quietly accepted those outbursts of rage. No insult exceeded the bounds of his patience. It was remarkable even that he had gone so far as to have offered the judge his notice, if that was what one of the old man’s shouted remarks had meant. No, it was quite clear: Raman could be in no way an accessory to anyone threatening Sir Asif.

  So he must then be Sir Asif’s agent, coming to bring food to whoever it was that the judge wanted to keep out of his own way. For whatever reason.

  Suddenly in the deep black slit in the walls a white shape appeared. Raman in his white jacket, with the empty tray and its cloth now held carelessly at his side.

  He drew back deeper into the bush that hid him.

  But the judge’s servant walked past him in complete unconcern, humming quietly to himself what sounded like some old boatman’
s song from the South, a regular rhythm like the steady dipping of a paddle.

  7

  He let five minutes go by, measured by counting to himself steadily under his breath. And then he ventured to move. Alert for the smallest unexpected sound, he climbed up the little hill and made his way carefully round the massive walls of the ruin. It was not difficult to find the doorway where Raman had disappeared.

  He peeped in. It was just possible to make out a flight of steps leading sharply downwards.

  So the habitable parts of the fort were underground. It was likely enough. Places of this sort were always built with underground rooms in them, to hide treasure, to keep prisoners safe, to protect powder for the cannon.

  Cautiously he felt his way down first one deep step and then another. He paused a moment. Still no sound and ahead only inky blackness.

  Then, as carefully, he felt his way down further, step by step. He had counted twelve of them, enough to have brought him well below the level of the ground of the fort, before his exploring foot told him that there was a floor in front of him.

  A choking odour came into his nostrils. Bats. It was the smell of bats’ droppings deposited here year after year after year.

  Had Raman really penetrated this far into the darkness? Endured this much stink? He must have. There was nowhere else to go but onwards.

  With arms spread out in front of him till his finger tips were touching the sticky walls to either side, he advanced. And then, after perhaps six or seven yards, there came a sharp right-angled turn and, as soon as he had negotiated it, ahead he saw a faint light.

  Should he call out? No, better to gain the advantage of surprise over whoever it was living down here. And with that advantage to find out why he or she was threatening the life of the old judge.

  He might even at any moment begin to hear in this bat-stinking darkness the sound of a typewriter.

  Thanks to the dim light ahead, he was able to move forward along the new passageway—it was as narrow as the first—at a slightly better speed. And a few yards further down he saw at the far end, where the light came apparently from round another sharp comer, that there were bars, iron bars shutting off the entire height of the passageway like those of a lockup in some police station back in Bombay.

  Still moving as soundlessly as he could he glided onwards until he had come right up to the bars. They formed, he was able to make out, a gate with a heavy lock in it and behind them there was a stone ledge in the wall forming a narrow table on which there now rested three broad green banana leaves, each with neat heaps of food on it.

  Plainly Raman had just put them there. But a meal to be eaten off banana leaves as if it was some village repast, yet served to whoever was here by the judge’s own orderly? It did not add up.

  He gave the barred door in front of him a cautious tug. It was firmly locked.

  A prisoner then? Some person imprisoned down here? But why? Had the judge in his old age gone mad and begun to administer his own justice? Sentencing those who had infringed his strict moral code to so many years in his private gaol? But who? Who would he have found for this extraordinary punishment?

  He stood beside the barred gate feeling the questions spring up and flutter furiously in his mind as if they were the very bats hanging above him parting in panic from their resting places.

  In the silence then he began to make out one tiny insistent sound. Water, or some other liquid, dripping somewhere on the far side.

  The barely discernible sound, the stink of the bat droppings, the darkness behind, and the faint light in front: there was nothing else.

  And then, with complete suddenness, into that quiet and stillness there came a raging blast of noise.

  It was a scream.

  And there in an instant, not a yard away on the opposite side of the barred gate, was a man. A wild, powerful caricature of a man, bare chest like a boulder, shoulders like two heaving, thrusting pistons, a head that was savage, beard jutting out at every angle, leaving only two rolling eyes and a small triangle of compressed nose to be seen, and the open mouth glinting with fierce, canine teeth. The noise, the deafening roaring, was issuing from that, like steam from some split in the earth.

  Two huge hands had seized the bars of the gate and with force enough it seemed to tear the whole thing from the ancient hewn stones in which it was embedded they were shaking it like an enraged gorilla in a zoo.

  And those rolling eyes were conscious of him, there in the darkness back where he had stepped.

  Then from the welter of noise there emerged words. Words in recognisable English.

  “Spy. Traitor. Damned spy. British lover. Spy. Spy. Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.”

  It raged on. But at last it slackened, if only for an instant or two. He leapt in.

  “Please. Who are you? Who are you?”

  The sharpness he had infused into his voice had an immediate effect on the creature on the far side of the bars. His screaming abruptly stopped and he stood glaring in silence.

  Glaring, it came to Ghote in an almost ridiculous sidestep of the mind, with a force parallel to nothing other than the smile of the Saint, the smile he had experienced not so long before in the ornate drawing room of the old house.

  He was so taken aback by this involuntary association that for several moments it did not occur to him to take advantage of the sudden silence to repeat his question to the man crouching in front of him. Then he became aware of the spicy odour of the food on the three broad banana leaves on the far side of the bars, tickling his nostrils, and he collected himself.

  “Please tell me who it is you are?”

  The man glared back at him. But then at last he produced not a direct answer but some coherent words.

  “The British. They have planned this. They know that if Sikander Ibrahim is free their raj will end in blood. They know that, the swine. In blood. In blood. In blood.”

  The voice rose to a throbbing scream again, and once more the bars of the door were rattled till it seemed the whole thing would come heaving down from the stonework.

  But there was no need now to try the effect of another sharply put question. He had learnt, he realised, what he needed to know.

  The name the wild creature had given himself, to begin with. Sikander Ibrahim. That and one characteristic feature of that convulsed, bearded face had told him that here kept behind bars underground in this ruined old fort was, surely, Sir Asif Ibrahim’s own son, down to his very squashed-in nose.

  And it was plain too, plain beyond any possible mitigation, that Sikander Ibrahim was mad. He was living in a state where no bounds of any sort controlled him. And he was living, too, in a past that had long gone.

  The judge’s secret. He had penetrated it.

  No wonder Sir Asif had not welcomed the arrival of an inspector of police in his house when there could be no doubt that his son should be kept in a proper asylum for the violently insane.

  So what was he going to do with this piece of knowledge he had gained?

  The answer came to him even as he posed the question. He was going to make use of it. It was quite wrong not to make immediate arrangements to have this man transferred to the appropriate state institution. But the threat of being able to do that had at last put into his hands a really powerful lever with which to move the old immovable judge.

  Because one thing seemed clear: those carefully typewritten notes could not possibly have come from the raging maniac on the far side of the bars. Even in the highly unlikely case of his being able to leave this prison, he would never creep anywhere—if he got out he would surely rage and destroy and perhaps even slaughter.

  So, for the judge’s own good, he must make the fullest use of this weapon he had been lucky enough—or, no, not just lucky, persistent enough, too—to get into his hands. There was no other course of action open to him. He must blackmail the just judge.

  8

  Back in the house, his rescued shirt once more on his back, though crumpled and m
ore than a little earth-stained, Ghote found that it was already the hour for the next stage in the slow unvarying routine of the establishment’s life. It was “Drinks Before Dinner” time.

  He had experienced the ritual the night before and had not liked it. He had been offered whisky and soda, nothing else, and had declined. So too had that then incomprehensible figure, the American priest, a refusal which temporarily made his vocation seem more likely. Until almost at once remarks had come from his lips which, to Ghote’s mind, could be called nothing other than “sheer Naxalitism,” the young American rivalling India's most extreme Leftists in the extravagance of his denunciations of contemporary power structures. The Saint, on that occasion, had not even been approached by Raman with his silver tray and array of cut-glass tumblers, whisky bottle, and soda jug. Nor had Begum Roshan.

  So “Drinks Before Dinner” had consisted of the four of them sitting in the big faded drawing room, its air still torpid from the day’s heat despite the rose water which the servants had flung against the chick blinds, watching Sir Asif sip his way slowly through two long tumblers of indolently bubbling liquid while they batted to and fro occasional insipid remarks.

  Then he had not known what a Doctor of Philosophy ought to be saying in such circumstances. Twenty-four hours later he was no better informed.

  But now he dreaded the occasion a good deal more. Because at some time during it—the evening before it had lasted a full hour— he would have to ask the judge to give him yet one more private interview. And if necessary, if the unbending old man refused to grant his request, as it was most likely that he would, then matters would have to be taken a stage further and he would have to hint plainly at the power he now had.

  But having the power was not going to make it any easier to use. That he knew.

  And he was already a little late. No time, damn it, to put on another shirt. He tried brushing at the reddish earth marks with the tips of his fingers. It was not a success.