The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  He set off in pursuit.

  Plainly Axel Svensson thought he had found the right trail at last. The inspector felt a wave of anger sweep through his weary brain. What did that great hulking foreign bear want to go rushing off on his own for? His arrival at any house in this area would be known at once. If Felix Sousa were really there he would take fright in an instant. After all, he had seen the stupid Swede that morning. He knew he was associated with the police. And if the D.S.P. got to know that Sousa had been found and warned off… .

  Inspector Ghote broke into a run.

  He pushed his way through the still plentiful number of people wandering about. He shouted abuse at anyone who got in his way. Far ahead of him he could see the Swede’s fair hair high above the black heads, multi-coloured turbans and white Gandhi caps of the passers-by.

  Suddenly the blond coxcomb disappeared.

  He’s gone in somewhere, the inspector thought. Too late.

  He rushed forward in the Swede’s wake. But he had not been near enough to make out exactly which one of the many tiny dark entrances to the various houses the Swede had taken. He darted in here and there on chance. His breath started coming in long, groaning gasps. His legs trembled more violently than ever. His head felt like a giant gourd.

  He plunged into yet another doorway. There were no sleeping figures in the entrance to kick awake and question. But quite unexpectedly from the pitch darkness above he heard voices.

  ‘Hey, you there, chum.’

  He recognized at once the English of an Anglo-Indian.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  Svensson’s polite inquiry.

  The inspector sighed with relief. He looked at the flight of steep stairs dimly visible by the light coming from the street. What was the hurry? He could rest a bit till Svensson had finished with whoever had accosted him.

  He leant against the wall, careless of whether the stains of red betel juice that splattered it would come off on to his uniform. Nothing mattered but two minutes’ peace to get back his energies. He breathed long and deeply.

  From above came another voice, also Anglo-Indian but higher pitched than the first. A youth, even a boy.

  ‘Here, mun, got any money?’

  ‘Money?’

  Svensson was still polite, the way he would be if he had been stopped in the street in Stockholm and asked by an old lady if he knew the right time.

  ‘Yes, money,’ came the older voice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Svensson cautiously, ‘I have a little money.’

  The stair-well of the tall chowl was strangely silent. And in the still, hot air Inspector Ghote heard the sound of a spring being released and the click of metal against metal.

  He straightened up, forcing his tired limbs into readiness.

  ‘Know what this is, chum?’

  ‘It is a knife.’

  The Swede’s voice was steady.

  Quietly Inspector Ghote began moving up the dark stairs.

  ‘Well, do you want to give us your money, chum?’

  The boy had made the demand.

  ‘No,’ said Svensson.

  ‘No?’

  A moment’s silence. Inspector Ghote froze to stillness on the stairs.

  ‘Oh, well, if you don’t, you don’t.’

  The clatter of feet coming down. The inspector slipped into the double shadow of a doorway. By the light coming up from below he was able to make out something of the two shapes that hurried by him. Anglo-Indians, as he had realized, one about eighteen and the other two or three years younger. Both wore black shirts with tattered white fringes at the pockets. The elder one held an open flick knife.

  They went out of the house and were lost in the jostle of the streets.

  ‘Mr Svensson,’ the inspector called, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, is that you, my friend. Yes, I am all right. There were a couple of what-do-you-call-them –’

  ‘Teddy boys.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. But they went.’

  ‘Did you come here with some information?’

  ‘Yes. I met Sousa’s brother. He said he lived on the top floor here.’

  Inspector Ghote made a face in the dark. If the Swede had met Felix Sousa’s brother, no doubt he had been sent anywhere but in the right direction.

  ‘I think he gave me the address before he knew what he had done,’ Axel Svensson said. ‘That is why I had to hurry, before he could give a warning.’

  ‘Very good, sahib. Then let’s see if you were right.’

  The inspector managed to run up the rest of the stairs. At the top he flung open the rickety door on the landing without ceremony and felt about for a light switch. To his surprise he found one, and when he clicked it on a dim light from a single bulb weakly illuminated the room in front of him.

  And there lying on a string bed fast asleep was Felix Sousa, with tired eyelashes drooping on chubby, innocent cheeks.

  Inspector Ghote walked across to the bed, swung his right foot forward and planted it sharply in the Goan’s well-padded ribs. The man sat up like a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘Oh, my god, the police,’ he said. ‘It is not true. I have been here all the time. I swear it. Oh, my goodness, yes. I can prove it.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Inspector Ghote.

  The chubby Goan stopped it. He sat on the edge of the charpoy looking up fearfully at the inspector and behind him the immense spare-framed Swede.

  ‘Now,’ Inspector Ghote said, ‘where is the rupee note you took from the Minister’s desk this morning?’

  ‘Oh, no, sahib. Honest to god, sahib, I never took no note. Good gracious me, no.’

  ‘It is no use telling me you did not take it. We know you took it. What we’re asking is where you hid it.’

  The chubby little peon looked fearfully round the small bare room as if he hoped that the hiding place was not too evident.

  ‘It’s not nowhere, sahib,’ he said. ‘I can prove it, sahib. I can prove every damn word of it.’

  ‘If you took it, it must be somewhere,’ Inspector Ghote said. ‘What’s the use of telling me you can prove you haven’t got it? We know you stole it. We want to know just where it is. That’s your only chance, man. Tell us that, and there’s some hope for you.’

  The tubby Goan licked his lips.

  ‘Perhaps it is in the bed,’ he said.

  Inspector Ghote grabbed one end of the rope bed, tipped the peon off, and shook the whole thing out on to the bare floor. A number of different insects emerged, but it was soon evident that there was no rupee note.

  ‘What do you mean by telling me lies like that?’ Ghote said viciously.

  He looked down at the peon who had not attempted to move from the half-crouching position he had landed in after being tipped off the bed.

  ‘Not lying, sahib. Oh, no, my god, not lying,’ Sousa said. ‘Just making suggestion, sahib. Oh, my gracious goodness, yes.’

  ‘Well, we don’t want your suggestions. We want the truth. We know you took the note. Where is it?’

  Felix Sousa looked as if he was going to be sick.

  And from the doorway Axel Svensson intervened.

  ‘I myself would also very much like to know how you stole the note,’ he said. ‘We know you were not in the office from the time the ten new notes were left there until the time the Minister reported the loss. How did you get at that drawer? You can tell me, you know. I promise to respect your confidence.’

  The peon listened to him open-mouthed.

  ‘Where is that note?’ Ghote said.

  A tiny gleam came into Felix Sousa’s eyes. Somewhere deep down, almost invisible.

  ‘I was not in office,’ he said. ‘Oh, my god, no. I was not in office. Mr Jain will tell you that, sahib. I don’t know nothing about who stole that note.’

  Inspector Ghote looked at the Swede in exasperation.

  ‘But all the same,’ Axel Svensson said, ‘that is to me the most interesting thing. If this man used some power which we i
n the West cannot conceive of, then that is what I want to know about.’

  ‘There is no such power,’ said Ghote testily. ‘It is my duty to obtain a confession from this man. It is of no help at all if you point out that it is logically impossible for him to have committed the crime.’

  ‘Oh, yes, by god, sahib,’ Felix Sousa broke in enthusiastically. ‘It’s impossible I done it. Right away impossible. And I didn’t do it too.’

  ‘Mr Jain was too busy with his papers to see you go into that office,’ Inspector Ghote said.

  ‘Oh, no, sahib Inspector. You ask him. All morning he sat looking at that door. Didn’t do no work with his papers, sahib. You ask clerks in outer office. They talk all the time about it. He just sat looking at the door, sahib.’

  ‘You are lying again,’ the inspector said.

  He felt less conviction than before.

  ‘You ask Mr Jain, sahib,’ said the peon.

  The gleam was very evident in his eyes now. He had a dazed expression as if he had suddenly been the subject of a miracle.

  ‘Then why did you run away from the office?’ Inspector Ghote snapped.

  The light went out in the peon’s eyes.

  ‘Oh, sahib. I never.’

  ‘No? Then why weren’t you there when you were wanted? Why did they search the whole building and not find you?’

  ‘Oh, sahib, it is true, yes. I ran off, sahib. I ran right off.’

  ‘And why? I’ll tell you why. You ran off because you had stolen the Minister’s money. That’s why you ran off.’

  ‘Oh, no, sahib. I never stole that. I couldn’t steal that, sahib. I wasn’t in Minister’s office, sahib.’

  Felix was looking perkier again.

  ‘Then why did you run off?’

  Once more the tubby little peon looked woebegone.

  ‘Oh, sahib,’ he said. ‘Oh, sahib, I knew what they were all thinking. They were all thinking Felix Sousa, the damn liar, stole that money.’

  ‘But if you hadn’t stolen it,’ Ghote said, ‘then you had nothing to fear.’

  He realized he was making a concession, but he could see no way out now. Not unless he declined to admit the logic of the situation. And that he would not do.

  ‘Oh, sahib, I couldn’t have stole it, could I? Was never in that office, sahib.’

  ‘Then why, why did you run away?’

  ‘Everybody thought I stole it, sahib.’

  Inspector Ghote blew out a long sigh of utter exasperation. He turned to Axel Svensson.

  ‘That is the sort of difficulty you get in police work in this city,’ he said. ‘If people would only behave in a simple, reasonable, logical way.’

  The Swede looked disappointed.

  ‘You don’t think he stole the money in a way which defied logic?’ he asked.

  Inspector Ghote was too tired to respond to the plaintive note.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not.’

  The Swede sighed.

  ‘Come on,’ Ghote said, ‘let’s get off to bed.’

  He left the room without another glance at the podgy little peon and trampled heavily downstairs to where their driver was impassively waiting.

  ‘The Taj Mahal Hotel for Mr Svensson,’ he said, ‘and then the office and home for me.’

  The driver saluted with grave cheerfulness. He could afford to: he had not been on the go ever since the night before.

  The inspector slumped in his seat beside the heavy Swede. For once the latter had no problems to discuss. Inspector Ghote thought about his home.

  Protima would be asleep when he arrived. But she would wake at the sound of the car engine and she would be there to greet him. Together they would take a look at their son, sleeping peacefully in his bed at the foot of theirs. Then in a few minutes they themselves would be asleep.

  The vehicle drew up with a screech of brakes outside the Taj Hotel. Svensson got out and stretched his huge limbs.

  ‘My friend, I am tired,’ he said. ‘Tonight I will sleep like a log.’

  Inspector Ghote smiled at him.

  On the short trip back from the hotel to the office he occupied himself in composing a brief factual report for the D.S.P. He stopped himself speculating on how it would be received.

  As soon as he got to the office he wrote out the exact words he had decided on, and left the single sheet prominently on D.S.P. Samant’s desk. Then, rallying his last reserves of mental strength, he reached for the D.S.P.’s telephone. There was one thing more that had to be done before he could sleep. He dared not think how he would feel if at the other end of the line at Lala Varde’s house he heard a voice say that Mr Perfect had died, but the question had to be asked.

  It was a long time before anyone at the far end answered the call, but when they did Inspector Ghote recognized at once the voice of the Anglo-Indian nurse.

  He took a breath.

  ‘Mr Perfect,’ he asked, ‘how –’

  ‘Oh, is it you, Inspector Ghote?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But –’

  ‘Well, there’s still no change with us. No change at all.’

  ‘Thank you, Nurse. Thank you.’

  A few moments later the inspector was being whisked through the broad night streets where the flash and flicker of neon signs of every shape and size was almost the only sign of life. And then just ahead lay the neat house rows of the Government Staff Quarters where he lived.

  He let himself relax at last.

  The vehicle drew up with a sharp yelp of brakes outside his little house. He stumbled out, returned the driver’s ponderous salute, stood for an instant in the warm darkness, yawned like a crocodile and went in.

  As he had imagined earlier on, Protima had woken up at the sound of the truck. She was standing just inside the door in her white night sari. In a few moments, he thought, we will be asleep together.

  Protima looked at him sharply in the faint light.

  ‘Oh,’ she said in a voice hard with bitterness, ‘so at last you choose to come back home.’

  10

  Inspector Ghote felt his tiredness sweep back over him like a huge wave of thick black oil. The momentary lift in his spirits that had come at the thought of home and bed was washed away as if it had never been.

  He shook his head dully.

  ‘Well, where have you been all this time?’ his wife demanded.

  Her eyes were flashing with scalding fury.

  ‘I am telephoning the office all the time,’ she went on, ‘and they are saying only that you are out on job. I am asking to speak directly to D.S.P. and they tell me he has gone home. They say it is after office hours. It is office hours for him, and out all night and all day and all night again for you.’

  Ghote shook his head in blunted negative.

  ‘It’s not so late,’ he said. ‘If you go back to bed now, there is plenty of the night left.’

  ‘Oh, if I go back to bed. If I go back to bed and leave my son ill, sick, dying. What does his father –’

  ‘What’s that? Ved ill? What is it? What’s happened?’

  Protima’s words magnified themselves in Ghote’s weary brain and echoed and rebounded.

  ‘It is what I say,’ Protima replied. ‘There is my Ved ill, and I am left all alone to worry.’

  ‘But the doctor? Have you called Doctor Pramash? What is wrong with him?’

  ‘Doctor Pramash? What good is Doctor Pramash? Doesn’t a mother know better what to do for her child than some doctor man only?’

  A glimmer of light came to Ghote. A trace of hope in the whirling darkness.

  ‘Ved,’ he said, ‘how ill is he? What were the symptoms?’

  ‘Symptoms,’ Protima exploded. ‘Let you and that Doctor Pramash talk about symptoms and treatments and medication this and medication that. I know better. What the boy wants is his mother to comfort him.’

  Ghote felt the chain of hope growing stronger. Link by link he hauled himself along it.

  ‘So you were able to comfort him?’ he said. �
�He is asleep now?’

  ‘Yes, I have got him to sleep at last.’

  Protima’s face was stern and ravaged by her task.

  ‘Yes, at last now he is sleeping,’ she went on. ‘At last. When the father chooses to come home, he finds the sick child sleeping. He doesn’t care. So long as he is not disturbed he doesn’t care what agony the boy has had to endure.’

  Ghote sighed.

  ‘I did not know he was enduring any agony,’ he said. ‘I have hardly been back to the office to get any message. They gave me two cases at once to handle. Two number one priority. I have been chasing there, hurrying here for hours on end.’

  He sighed again.

  ‘I suppose it is just duty,’ he said.

  ‘Duty. Duty. Always it is duty. You and that police force of yours. Never do they think of the wife at home with the child sick and the worry beating at her brain. Oh, no, all they think of is duty. Inspector Ghote go there, Inspector Ghote come here. Never Inspector Ghote go home and see if your wife needs you. It is not your wife you are married to: it is the police force. Your wife is a toy only.’

  ‘It is a way of earning a living,’ Ghote said.

  ‘A way of earning a living. You try that now, do you? What sort of a living do you earn for all your staying out night and day, for all your neglecting wife and child?’

  She clicked her long, elegant fingers in a gesture of entire disdain.

  ‘That,’ she said. ‘That only is what you get. A nothing. A mere nothing. Half of nothing.’

  ‘But it is not so bad,’ Ghote replied. ‘At inspector rate I am in top all-India earning bracket.’

  He looked at Protima. Her eyes, still darkened with kohl, darting fury, her full lips curved in scorn, her nostrils flared, and her body held in a taut defiance from which not even her crumpled sari could detract. There was no doubt she was beautiful. The astrologers whose horoscopes had decreed their marriage were right.

  But at the moment it was apparent that she did not share this view of things.

  ‘Inspector rate,’ she said. ‘Inspector rate. What good is inspector rate? What good is top all-India earning bracket if it takes in together first-class Ministers and people like you? What good is inspector rate when I never get my refrigerator?’

  ‘Oh, so we are back to that refrigerator now, are we?’ Ghote said.