Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  Not unless the judge had told him. He would, of course, have tried to read them when his master was not looking, if he had had the chance, but though he might manage a word or two of English, “Danger,” “Keep Out,” “No Parking,” and the like, it was extremely doubtful whether any fellow of his sort would be able to understand that formal language in which the notes had been written. But might the judge have told him what had been said in them? No. Not unless he had wanted from him some information to confirm perhaps a suspicion about who the writer was. Otherwise a man like Sir Asif would never confide in a servant, however trusted, however long-serving.

  Yet, could Raman have guessed from his masters attitude that he was worried—for all the old man’s calm when he had read that last note the succession of threats could not have left him totally unmoved—and have realised that the cause must be these mysterious notes? And then have done a little detective work on his own?

  Servants like Raman might not be particularly literate, but that did not mean they were not often intelligent.

  He decided that the only way he could get round to the far side of the wall of obstinate obedience to Sir Asif's orders which the orderly had patently erected between the two of them was to adopt a roundabout approach.

  He leant a few inches forward again and tried to infuse his voice with casual friendliness.

  “You have been a long, long time in Sir Asif's service, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  Then silence.

  Did that wall stretch even further than he had allowed for? Did it encircle the fellow completely?

  ‘Thirty years, sahib. And more now.”

  Ah, thank goodness. He was talking. Chatting. Keep it going.

  “Thirty years? That is a long time. A really long time. Where was it that you came to him then? Down in the South?”

  “Oh yes, sahib. Down far away in the South. Where I was born.”

  But silence after that. The flow seemed to have trickled to nothingness again. And the big old car was smoothly eating into the night, the long white beams of its head lamps reaching out. He wished that he knew enough Tamil to speak to the fellow properly in his own language. He was willing to bet he would be talkative all right then. That frequent smile of his surely indicated a basically sunny temperament. A happy chatterer. But conversation in fluent Tamil was beyond the bounds of possibility.

  He tried a little more rough-and-ready Urdu.

  “Were you a servant in somebody else’s house before you became judge sahib’s orderly?”

  “Oh no, sahib. I was not.”

  Another silence. They were on a made-up road now, well past the village. The great car’s tyres swished steadily on the layer of dust on the tarmac. Time was slipping away fast.

  “No, sahib, I was not a servant before. I was in prison.”

  “Prison?”

  It was the last thing, working his way gently towards his objective, that he had expected to encounter.

  “I was an under-trial, sahib. I had been there many months.”

  “It happens,” Ghote replied.

  It happened still today, he reflected. Indeed, was perhaps worse than in the British days, this waiting for your trial to begin, coming up before a magistrate for remand time and again.

  But what had Raman, feather-light, smiling Raman, done to get himself in gaol?

  “But why was it that vou were in prison then?”

  “Oh, sahib, I had killed.”

  “Killed? Killed who?”

  He could hardly believe his ears. He knew well enough with the rational side of his mind that all sorts of apparently innocent, easygoing, good-tempered, honest, weak-willed, or subservient people could turn out to be murderers. But it had never for one moment remotely struck him that in Raman the judge was sheltering a killer.

  And if he was a killer, why was he in the house at all? How could he possibly have been in the judges service for so long? It might be possible that his crime had not been such that it had earned him the death penalty, but it surely must have brought him a long term in gaol. So how, as a man of fifty at most, had he contrived to commit his killing and be free and out of prison more than thirty years ago?

  “Sahib, I was killing my cousin.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Yes, sahib. My cousin, younger than me by one year, who was always very, very jealous of me, as his father had been always of mine in our village. And one day, when I was eighteen years old, sahib, he attacked me. With a knife, sahib. But I took that knife from him, and then I killed him.”

  He thought about the circumstances. On the face of things, Raman should not have been freed after a killing like that. It was not murder, but it sounded very much as if it had been a good deal more deliberate than a simple accident in the course of a struggle.

  “You killed your cousin, and then you were arrested and kept as an under-trial? What was the charge against you?”

  “Oh, it was murder, sahib. It was murder.”

  “But . . . but you did not serve a long term in gaol?”

  “Oh no, sahib. Judge sahib let me go.”

  If anything, he felt yet more perplexed. The judge, Sir Asif, responsible for freeing this man who by his own confession had killed his cousin? Sir Asif freeing him from a murder charge? The judge who all his life had been haunted by his own leniency in setting free the old Vaishnavite who had then slaughtered his own daughter? It did not add up. It simply did not add up.

  “Raman, do you know how it came about that the judge, that Sir Asif, freed you? Do you know that?”

  “Oh, sahib, he is saying that it is because of the bus. I am not at all understanding what bus it was, but that is what he is saying. In English, sahib. ‘False in omnibus' he was saying to me. But that was not truly why lie let me go, sahib. It was because I was to be his orderly. When he was hearing that I did not dare go back to my village, sahib, he said, ‘You ought to have served thirty years. But I am in need of an orderly. Do you think you could do those duties?* And I am answering, ‘Judge sahib, I will serve you all the time.’” Ghote wanted to laugh.

  He also, slightly, wanted to cry.

  He thought he could see it all, the actual situation and the wild misconception that had stayed in Raman’s head year after year after year. “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.” The judge himself had quoted the Latin legal principle in telling him about the case of the Vaishnavite singer of holy songs. And, no doubt, it had been on that principle that the judge had relied in freeing Raman. That case, too, had been a village affair and obviously someone must have tried to improve the evidence against Raman, though in all probability a good deal more gravely than in the Vaishnavite’s case. And the judge, in those distant days, had ruled, very properly, if rigorously, that, because the prosecution had put forward some evidence that was clearly not true, the whole of their case must be thrown out. And Raman, poor Raman, his head full of the halfgrasped English word “omnibus” often used then for what everybody nowadays called “a bus,” had believed that Sir Asif, most just of judges, had seized on something incomprehensible to do with a bus as an excuse to let him off a deserved sentence of thirty years just so that he could become his orderly.

  There was no time for either laughter or tears, only for seizing the advantage of the mood of easy talkativeness he had induced in Raman to extract from him as many facts as he could about the people in the big house, now minute by minute further away.

  Where to begin? Ah, yes.

  “So for thirty years and more now you have been serving Sir Asif, is it? And have you served his son also during that time? Have you served Sikander sahib?”

  That should do it. That should slide underneath that wall of his. Just let him see that you knew everything, and he would assume that you did.

  “No, sahib, no. I have not served Sikander sahib all the time/'

  Ha, it had worked. Not a breath of hesitation in the answer.

  “No, first I was serving judge sahib only
. Then when he made Begum Roshan stay in the house I was serving her also. But at that time there was an old ayah, an old, old woman by the name of Gangubai, who used always to take Sikander sahib his food. Only when she was at last dying did judge sahib tell me to do it.”

  “And did you like doing it? Was Sikander sahib always as mad as he is now?”

  “Oh, sahib, that comes and goes. Sometimes he is very quiet for many days. When he is memboralising, sahib.”

  “Mem what?”

  “Memboralising, sahib. It is meaning telling government important matters. Sikander sahib is sometimes memboralising the King Emperor even"

  Memorialising the King Emperor. Of course. Poor mad Sikander was living in the days of the British Raj still. And putting the grievances of his subjugated country to the highest authority.

  But the ball must not drop. Keep the easy chat going. There must be more to learn. If there was still time.

  “And when he has these quiet days, Sikander sahib, is he let out from the fort?”

  “Oh no, sahib. Never. Never in all the time I have been in the house has he been let out. It would not be safe, sahib. And I was here, you know, even before judge sahib retired. May vacation, October vacation”

  Again Raman had ventured into English.

  Ghote felt proud of himself for having disentangled the slurred syllables. But no time for self-congratulation.

  “And Anand Baba, Raman, how long is it since he has been coming to the house?”

  “Oh, sahib, for many years. He was once very, very great friend to Sikander sahib. Two burra Nationalist wallahs together, sahib. And when Sikander sahib became mad, then Anand Baba, only he was not called that in those days, would come sometimes to see how he was. And later, too, when he had put on his saffron clothes, he came then often.”

  “I see. And he has been here long this time?”

  “Oh yes, sahib. In the hot weather now Anand Baba does not walk as much as once. He is getting old, sahib. So this time he has stayed and stayed.”

  “As long as judge sahib has been getting the notes?”

  But it was a mistake. He knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He had penetrated the outer wall of Raman’s defences but there was an inner wall there as well, and one not to be slid under by guile.

  The flat shoulders on the other side of the glass panel hunched a little and, for the first time, the big car gained noticeably in speed.

  Then silent minutes later they were pulling up outside the railway station in the town. He took his sad tan suitcase from Raman and handed him a small sum, seeing suddenly in his mind’s eye the soft browny-white paper of an expenses application resting on the familiar surface of his desk in his office back at headquarters.

  “If there is no train,” he said, “I will be able to spend the night in the station retiring room.”

  “Oh yes, sahib. Good night, sahib. Thank you, sahib.”

  The big car purred away, white head lamp beams swirling round in the wide circle.

  But he would not be entering the station, routing out the station-master, inspecting the accommodation offered by the retiring room, perhaps insisting that a sweeper be wakened to improve it and eventually spending a quiet night there. If he entered the station at all it would simply be for the purpose of sending some telegrams to headquarters in Bombay inquiring what was known about Father Adam and Mr. Dhebar. Because he no longer had any intention of waiting for a train. He had learnt too much during that long fifteen-mile-an-hour car journey for there to be any question now of abandoning his assignment.

  11

  Walking through the dark streets of the town, past the huddle of upturned tongas near the station with the odour of their horses tethered nearby rich on the night air, past the Variety Hall cinema, past two small temples round the corner at the Mission College, Ghote felt his renewed sense of purpose strong upon him. All right, he had not learnt anything wonderfully startling from Raman as Sir Asifs big old car had swished along on its journey but he had discovered a few hard facts to get his teeth into. Gone at last was that sheer floating helplessness he had been so conscious of lying all the long hot afternoon on that hard bed under the ridiculous grunting old inefficient fan.

  Now he had some solid pieces of information to think about. The Saint, for one. If you looked at the case from a strictly factual viewpoint—and that was the way things should be looked at, damn it— the Saint was now a firm suspect. He had had, it was now clear, the opportunity to deliver the threatening notes: he had been a visitor to the house during the whole period they had been received. And he had had the means to produce them too: he was an educated man and if there was a typewriter somewhere in that house, and there must be, then he could have banged out the notes on it. And, it was now clear too, he had a possible motive: had he not been a Nationalist fighter in the old days, a friend and probably mentor of the rabid Sikander Ibrahim? Quite conceivably then, for reasons certainly not precisely plain still, he had waited until now to exact revenge, a slow revenge, on the man who had pronounced the death sentences in the Madurai Conspiracy Case of long ago.

  A second item, more negative but still decent hard information: it was clear beyond doubt now that Sikander Ibrahim could not be the person he was looking for. He had never been let out of that prison down underneath the ruins of the fort. It had always been, quite plainly, too unsafe to risk anything of the sort. The man was liable to erupt at any instant however long he had been quietly memboralising the King Emperor. And that, odd though it was, put him right out of account as a possible murderer.

  But Ghote had learnt another fact. Begum Roshan had been made to come and live in the isolated old house. “He made Begum Roshan stay in the house,” had been Raman’s very words. And there she had remained, never marrying, watching the years pass. So here was somebody with a real grievance against Sir Asif. Agreed it was not clear why she should have waited so long before suddenly acting against him, or even just what it was she might hope to gain by sending him the notes, but here still was a hard fact to take into account. And it was reassuring to have at last some hard facts in the matter.

  Something to get one's teeth into at last.

  Keeping in his head Begum Roshan’s plan of the town, which he had carefully studied under the light of the sole municipal lamp standard he had encountered, he turned off into the narrow street in which the offices of The Sputnik (Weekly Publication Assured) were situated. And there at the far end was a light shining from an upper window.

  He imagined Mr. Dhebar sitting up there composing far into the night the latest in the long series of editorials with which he proposed, aided a little by the stringent comments of the man who had pronounced the Madurai sentences, to wake up India.

  Ghote picked his way as rapidly as he could down the narrow street, just able in the darkness to make out and avoid the shallow central drain running all along it.

  And, sure enough, when he reached the place where the light from the upper storey window was pouring dimly onto the narrow sleeping street he was able to make out a handsome white signboard on which was painted, in a dignified and flowing style, “The Sputnik” with below, in smaller but no less dignified letters, its editor’s name together with the fact that he held the B.A. degree of Ahmedabad University.

  He knocked on the narrow door beside this notice. He waited. Nothing seemed to happen inside. He knocked again. And still the house was silent. The light from the window over his head nevertheless continued to shine. He knocked a third time, long and loud. Nearby a dog began to bark.

  But now there was a change at the window above. A shifting of shadows and at last a pale face appeared at the bars.

  “Mr. Dhebar?” he called up. “It is I. Insp— It is Dr. Ghote. We met at Sir Asif Ibrahim’s.”

  ‘‘One moment. I will come.”

  A long pause. The sound of chappals flapping down wooden stairs. Then, not the rattle of a chain being unhooked from behind the door, but, surely, the more cau
tious clink of one being hooked up. And a moment later the door opened, just three inches and no more.

  The pear-heavy face of Mr. Dhebar peered out, solidly determined not to let any unscrutinised individual penetrate his threshold, perhaps to seize the secret files long accumulated by The Sputnik.

  “Begum Roshan told me to come to you,” he said, already feeling that it was altogether unlikely that the editor would be willing to do all that Sir Asif's daughter asked.

  But her name certainly seemed to be a password.

  “Begum Roshan sent you?” Mr. Dhebar’s lugubrious face lit up. “But come in, my dear chap, come in. If you are here on behalf of Begum Roshan you are thrice welcome.”

  The chain was hastily removed, the door swept open. He stepped inside. In the light coming down the steep open flight of stairs in front of him he could make out that there was only one room on the ground floor, an office with a counter running across it and a large clock with Roman numerals hanging on the far wall, its hands proclaiming the unlikely hour of five o’clock. Propped up against the counter was Mr. Dhebar’s motor scooter.

  Prompted by the sight of it, he explained concisely as he could what he wanted from his host,, though he avoided giving any reason why such curious manoeuvres were necessary. Even as he produced his proposition he could not help thinking that it surely far exceeded the bounds of any polite request. It was damned cheek, in fact.

  But Mr. Dhebar agreed to it without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Yes, yes. By all means. You should leave about one hour before dawn. The machine is not immensely speedy, though reliable, I am glad to say. And I have an alarm clock, so I will see to it that you get off in good time. Yes, yes, if Begum Roshan wants this, I will do all in my power to see to it. Yes.”

  But then there came a sudden glance of doubt, a shrewdness. “Unless you are returning for the purposes of an assignation with the lady. That would be going too far.”