Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  Quick, the next room. He seized the knob of the door, jerked it round, flung the door open. And—

  And, clear to see in the diffused light coming in through gaps in the closed shutters, a small square table under the window with its white sheeting thrown back. And on the table a typewriter. A tall old-fashioned office typewriter.

  But no sheet of paper rolled into it. And no one bent over it laboriously typing. No one.

  14

  For a long moment Ghote stood furiously devouring with his eyes the sight of the typewriter standing on the square table under the shuttered window. Surely he must be able to learn something from it. Not two minutes earlier, scarcely one, someone had been striking at those keys. Not two minutes earlier there had been a sheet of paper rolled in there.

  But nothing was left. Oh yes, there would be fingerprints on those keys which the fleeing writer would have had no time to wipe off. There might even have been fingerprints from the times the machine had been used for the other notes, fingerprints that would have been there for him to have found earlier if a proper search of the whole huge house had been in any way a practical proposition. But that would have been a task for a team of ten, at the very least.

  And if this had been the proper world of Bombay instead of this world-to-itself, cut off from everything, then it would have been a simple matter to have impounded the machine, sent it to the Fingerprint Bureau under seal, and to have got comparison prints from all the suspects. The affair would have been wrapped up in hours. But this was not Bombay. By the time the typewriter had been delivered there, by heaven knows what route, it would in all probability be too late. The time for the judge would have come and gone.

  The thoughts ran through his mind in rapid jerks. By the ticking hand of a watch they lasted no more than two or three seconds.

  And then he had wheeled round, was pounding out of the stuffy little room, had swung in the direction of the kitchen quarters, and was pelting full speed towards it.

  That unseen figure had stopped typing less than two minutes before. It would be perfectly possible to catch up, however fast he or she was running with that sheet of paper clutched in one hand.

  There was a bead curtain at the far end of the passage. He charged through it.

  But his quickly darting eyes found no one on the other side, only the passage running onwards. Its walls here were no longer white-plastered but left in their natural reddish clay colour and all along the tops of them ran broad wooden shelves storing boxes and bottles and cartons and net bags, crammed so closely together that there was no room for anyone, however slight in build, to have hidden there.

  He ran past.

  At the far end came the kitchen itself. A big bare room, a smouldering fire under its wide chimney making the already hot and unmoving air all the more sultry. Round the walls in nets and in wire cages hung yet more provisions. In clumps on the floor there rested the implements of cookery, dozens of round iron degshas varying in size from no more than a cup to ones as big as cauldrons; the heavy stone slab of a pata and on it the round rolling vaniata, a big board for slapping out puris and chapatties; a large round iron mortar with its heavy iron pestle leaning inside it. Only one object in the whole big room indicated that this was not two or three hundred years ago—a tall old refrigerator near the far comer.

  As he came to a halt, looking wildly round for any sign of a human presence, the machine gave a shudder and throbbed angrily. A wild thought came to him. He sprinted across and tugged open the tall door.

  But neither the Saint nor the American priest was standing there shivering. Only racklike shelves with pots and jars and basins, milk, cooling juice from the tamarind tree, a solid block of ice cream-like kulfi on a blue plate, the remains of what they had had at dinner on that first night, other lumps and liquids less easy to guess at.

  He slowly pushed the door closed. And then he saw there was a human presence in the big room after all. From the narrow gap between the refrigerator and the corner two dusty-soled feet and two skinny ankles protruded at floor level.

  Was this the Saint? Had he dived crouching for cover there? It could not be that white Naxalite. It could not be Begum Roshan. She had silver rings on her toes.

  It was Raman. He was lying, fast asleep, curled up on a cloth he had spread in this corner, perhaps a quarter of a degree cooler than elsewhere. His eyes were firmly closed. He was breathing deeply, on the verge of snoring. But on his face there was no grin to show that he was dreaming, dreaming of poling a boat through calm, shaded waters.

  Leave him to lie. There was an archway at the opposite corner. The typewriter user must have gone through it. The search in here had taken only seconds.

  He pelted over.

  Beyond the arch there was another room, another store place with heavier, more substantial items stacked against its walls in tubs and crates and gunny sacks, knobbly or bulging. A rapid glance round convinced him that here too there was nowhere anyone could hide. But there was a door at the opposite side, a heavy wooden affair.

  He hurried to it, lifted its large bar, and hauled it wide. It gave onto the outside of the house somewhere, and dazzling light and heat again. It was a courtyard, with a water tap in one comer. The sun’s glare was causing a single repeated drip from it to glint like glass. But there was no one in sight. And through a wide archway to the right there stretched the arid gardens surrounding the house, with dense bushes and shrubs and clumps of tall grasses and small sunken areas and scores of other places where anyone not anxious to be found could easily hide until it was safe to emerge.

  He had lost the typewriter user. Lost him.

  Furious, he turned back to the house, stamped through the storeroom, and into the kitchen again. There he crossed straight over to where Raman lay sleeping and, without any compunction, put his foot firmly onto the fellow’s hip and dug the toe of his chap-pal hard in.

  He would wake him up and demand to know if in his sleep he had by any chance been momentarily disturbed, had perhaps lifted his head, glimpsed someone—who?—hurrying through the kitchen. But he did not really expect a helpful answer.

  Nor did he get one. Raman woke slowly, blinked sleepily, was a long time realising who it was who was standing over him, smiled suddenly when he did, and scrambled at once to his feet, salaaming.

  He asked him his question.

  “Oh no. No, Doctor sahib. I was sleeping. I was dreaming, Doctor sahib. I was back home in the South, far away.”

  “But nothing disturbed you? You did not even hear someone’s feet hurrying by?”

  “No, sahib, no. I heard only the songs of birds in my dreams.”

  He turned away.

  With this last tattered shred of hope whisked off by the harsh wind of fact Ghote felt a slow black avalanche of despair pour down through his mind. To have been so near. To have heard the person he had been sent here to find actually typing one more of those threatening notes. To have been given that superb gift from the gods. And then to have messed up the chance.

  He felt convinced now that the secret typewriter user had heard his own approach, quiet though he had tried to be. It had not been a question of the note being finished and the writer hurrying away to avoid being seen by accident. No, he had been responsible himself for throwing away this magnificent chance.

  He wandered out again through the storeroom, through the courtyard, hurrying then to avoid the monotonous accusing drip of the tap, and on into the gardens.

  And there, trudging towards him, head down, a picture of dejection, was Mr. Dhebar.

  At once his own spirits shot up. The sight of the editor of The Sputnik looking so clearly downcast, with his determined pearshaped head for once drooping, with his elaborately pleated dhoti looking bedraggled, seesawed him up in an instant.

  He strode rapidly over, careless of the paralysing sun.

  “Mr. Dhebar,” he called sharply, “what are you doing here?

  Have you been inside the house? Why are you out in
the sun like this?”

  “Oh, my dear sir,” Mr. Dhebar answered, booming with mournfulness, as soon as he had taken in who was addressing him. “Oh, my dear sir.”

  “Well? Answer please. Were you inside the house just now?”

  So forceful was he that Mr. Dhebar seemed not at all surprised to have such questions fired at him by a visiting Doctor of Philosophy.

  “No, sir, no,” he answered with prompt readiness. “I have not at all been inside. I wish that I had. To get out of this appalling sun. My dear sir, I have walked all the way from the village, from where the weekly bus deposited me.”

  Looking at him, Ghote saw that what Dhebar had said bore all the marks of truth. His feet were dust-caked, the bottom of his dhoti was more red than white, and his shoulders were sagging much as Ghote’s had done after he had lugged his heavy case up from the generator shed. More even.

  So was it certain that the fellow had not been inside the house at the time that typewriter had been used? But he might have made his way up from the village half an hour earlier, going through the gardens when Ghote himself had been inside the generator shed nerving himself up for the trek back. And, if that was what had happened, then to lie at once and stick to the lie would be the only course open to the fellow.

  Ghote cursed himself for not having put his questions in a more roundabout way. But it was too late now, though he would do what he could.

  He coughed.

  “But was it not you I glimpsed just a few minutes ago?” he asked. “Coming out of a room on the way to the kitchen quarters?”

  “Oh, no, no, my dear sir. Would that I had been inside there. In the shade. In the blessed shade.”

  “But what are you doing here in any case?”

  “My dear Doctor, my motor scooter.”

  Ghote felt a twinge of shame. Not once had he thought about how the editor, who after all had been unusually kind, was going to get his machine back.

  “Ah, yes, your scooter, of course,” he said. “Well, it is all right. It is in a safe place. A thoroughly safe place. I have put it in that shed with the generator motor. You know where that is?”

  “Down at the far end of the gardens beside the fort,” Mr. Dhebar said, casting a sad glance over the long sun-battered stretch of baked earth between him and the tamarind tree.

  “Yes. Yes, it is there. But surely you do not need to have the machine straightaway? You can come inside and rest. Raman will get you some cold water.”

  The editor perked up at the suggestion.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Inside. Inside. That would be excellent. Yes, to rest indoors for a little. For some time even. To take a drink of water. Perhaps even to stay until tea is served. To take tea here. From the hand of Begum Roshan. That would make all my travail worth while indeed.”

  A small signal flag seemed to flick up inside Ghote.

  “But this travail of yours?” he asked with a new sharpness. “Why did you undertake it? Why did you come all this way in the heat? Did you have some sudden need for your scooter?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Dhebar, jumping like some fat fish for a gobbet of food. “Yes, a sudden need. Most important.”

  “But then why is it you now intend to remain until tea is served? That is a good time away.”

  “I—I—er. That is to say, I . . .”

  “Yes?” Ghote asked.

  He stood under the unvarying blaze of the sun in front of the dumpy figure of the editor and waited for an answer.

  Mr. Dhebar licked his thick, dry lips.

  “Well,” he said, “it is difficult to explain.”

  “Explain, please, nevertheless.”

  His stand was so unyielding that clearly it never occurred to Mr. Dhebar that he could simply say that he was not going to account for his actions, however inconsistent they might seem, to a mere Doctor of Philosophy. He just stood there patently striving to find some convincing answer.

  And when at last it came it was not what Ghote had expected. “Doctor . . . Doctor, there is something that perhaps I should tell you. It is something that I did not think I would ever tell. Until the time. Until it became a matter of common knowledge.”

  Ghote waited for him to continue. There was no need to press or prompt any more. It had begun: the rest would follow.

  The sun was like an unrelenting screw on the top of Ghote’s head.

  “Doctor, you know me. I am an educated fellow. A graduate, Doctor. Second class honours, nearly first. I am the editor of a journal of opinion.” A dry strangled cough. “But I know where I came from. And I know how far I will be able to go. I believe I have done well for myself; I know that I have. As well perhaps as I could have done. But—but Sir Asif—”

  A check.

  From the moment he had felt, somewhere inside, at the level where feelings say more than any amount of careful reasoning, that what Mr. Dhebar was going to tell him would take a solid place in his inquiries, his interest had been at a constant high point. But now it went shooting up, like the mercury in a thermometer taken from the coolest place indoors out into the sun.

  Sir Asif, the fellow had said. And then he had checked himself, appalled by what he evidently saw ahead.

  But there would be no turning back, not now that what the fellow had to say had been advanced up to this point. All Ghote’s experience of hearing men confess, confess sometimes to the ugliest of crimes, told him that.

  So he waited once more. And once more Mr. Dhebar went on talking.

  “Doctor, Sir Asif Ibrahim is as far above my humble person as Kanchenjunga itself is above the very foothills. Doctor, I am going to marry Sir Asif’s daughter.”

  If the editor had thought that he would surprise him by what he had said, his expectations were fully justified.

  Ghote stood staring at him.

  Abruptly the hammering sun started up a throbbing ache just above and behind his eyes.

  So Mr. Dhebar was proposing to cross the line. The line that had once been drawn, deep as a trench, between Begum Roshan and that Hindu lawyer from the South. The line that had been drawn, little doubt about it, by Sir Asif himself, with the full backing in those distant days of society. And even now, though there were inter-caste marriages enough and inter-community marriages, it was still not at all an easy thing to do, to cross that line.

  And at once a lot of things that the editor of The Sputnik had said and done fell into a pattern. The fellow’s wallowing delight in such ordinary courtesies as Begum Roshan had extended to him. The way the night before that Ghote himself had been admitted to The Sputnik office as soon as he had mentioned Begum Roshan’s name. The very remarks the fellow had made after he had told the story of Begum Roshan’s proposed marriage and how it had come to nothing. All that stuff about things today not being as they were. And then there were the hours and hours he must have spent wading through the stiffening pages of those dusty files of the Hindu to discover the details of that story. And finally there was the readiness with which he had agreed to lend at a moment’s notice his valuable motor scooter, with no good reason given.

  And now . . . now he must have come all the way out here, not of course simply to reclaim that machine but to seek as soon as he could Begum Roshan’s gratitude for what he had done in her name. No wonder he had seemed so delighted at the prospect of staying solemnly to take tea on the terrace with Sir Asif and his daughter.

  And his daughter. But would Sir Asif, proud Sir Asif, who had recounted once with no misgivings the ruthless exploits of his family in bygone days, would he ever allow his only daughter to marry the little editor he so manifestly despised? Would the man who had prevented her marriage with an up-and-coming young lawyer simply because he was a Hindu allow another Hindu, by no means up-and-coming, to marry her now?

  Over his dead body.

  And so—Ghote turned away and began to walk towards the house and its shade—was this man here with him now, in his heavily pleated dhoti, with his solid belly and his determined jaw, was
he coldly setting about a scheme to scare the aged judge to death? Or, failing that, was he planning to kill him so that he could marry the heir to this big old house? So that he could inherit it all, its treasures, its land, its influence?

  It was possible. It was distinctly possible. But it was not proved.

  15

  Ghote preceded Mr. Dhebar towards the house and its promise of shade, if not of coolness. There was no need, he knew, to march along beside him. The battering sun would get him indoors as effectively as if he was surrounded by a guard of rifle-carrying armed police. But, once inside, he would keep the fellow in sight.

  Now that he knew him to have a motive for at the least forcing the judge into a position where he would be unable to object to this marriage with Begum Roshan, he would have to watch over him like a kite once he had a new opportunity of advancing his scheme by leaving yet another note for Sir Asif to find, a note typed out on a machine which would not implicate him as the typewriter in The Sputnik office would.

  But Ghote was not to get out of the heat as soon as he had hoped. When he was within two or three paces of the thin band of shadow which the house was now beginning to cast, his eye was caught by a movement somewhere in the gardens behind him.

  It was not rapid, but any movement in that deadened sun-blasted vista attracted attention. For a few moments he was unable to make out just what it was. He stood, squinting against the glare, halffeeling he was being a fool to stop and look.

  But then he saw it. It was a saffron-coloured shape, hardly visible behind a straggling clump of overgrown oleanders, moving at a quiet and steady pace away from him.

  The Saint.

  The Saint out here in the gardens. There was, of course, no reason why he should not be. Yet it was the time of day when everybody who was able to got himself into the coolest place he could —and stayed there asleep or at least lying still until the worst was over. And it was an undeniable fact that, not so very long before, someone had been typing inside the house and had stopped abruptly and hurried out, out here into the gardens.