The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  For a moment or two Gautam Athalye did not reply. Then, having had all the time he needed to think out his answer, he looked up.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I did hear. And I can tell you straight away that there’s a lot of truth in what you surmise.’

  Inspector Ghote felt a little flame of pleasure break out into light somewhere inside himself.

  ‘A lot of truth?’ he asked.

  Gautam Athalye sighed.

  ‘Rightly or wrongly,’ he answered, ‘I had insisted that Neena, my only child, should be brought up largely in the Western manner. Times have changed since I was young, and perhaps I wouldn’t do the same thing again today. Hard to tell.’

  He paused and appeared to be conducting some often repeated inner debate. After a little he shook his head impatiently and went on.

  ‘Well, in any case,’ he said, ‘there’s no going back on what’s been done. And in consequence of my decision about the girl’s upbringing, which I am bound to say was not wholly agreed to by my wife, she mixed in all sorts of society from a comparatively early age.’

  His hand slipped into his pocket and came out holding a pipe. He put it in his mouth and sucked at it without lighting it.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the upshot of the whole business was that she took up with this fellow Ram Kamath, who I’m sorry to say is a bit of a bad hat.’

  He took the pipe out of his mouth and laid it on the wickerwork table.

  ‘There was a child,’ he said.

  Inspector Ghote looked under the table at his polished brown shoes.

  ‘I hardly need tell you,’ Gautam Athalye continued, ‘that, in the event, the girl’s chances of a decent marriage were pretty seriously impaired. No use blinking the fact. Though of course we did our best to hush matters up to some extent. And so I was rather surprised when quite shortly afterwards Arun Varde, whom I’d never had very much to do with, came and made me an offer on behalf of his son, Dilip. Of course, that was not at all the way I had intended matters to be carried on. I think arranged marriages are rather out of keeping with some aspects of modern India. However, in the circumstances it was undoubtedly the best thing to do. Mind you, Varde’s terms for a dowry were pretty stiff: he knows a bargain when he sees one. But I had to put up with that.’

  He coughed slightly, brought a box of matches out of his pocket and began to light his already half-full pipe.

  ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘I had one or two conditions of my own to make. No use jumping at a thing without thinking of the consequences.’

  He sat looking reflective. Inspector Ghote leant forward.

  ‘You said Mr Varde came to you. I take it that in actual fact he sent his secretary, Mr Perfect?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Gautam Athalye said sharply. ‘Wouldn’t have done at all to send a secretary on an affair of that sort. Certainly not. Why should you assume he would do a thing like that, Inspector?’

  He looked severely across the little table.

  Inspector Ghote licked his lips.

  ‘I was thinking of a connexion between what you have just been speaking about and the attack on Mr Perfect,’ he said.

  Gautam Athalye shook his head with brisk authority.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You’re highly mistaken if you think that, Inspector. Highly mistaken.’

  His eyes twinkled reticently.

  ‘Some of you fellows have a wonderful capacity for putting two and two together and making five,’ he said.

  Inspector Ghote heaved himself to his feet.

  ‘Thank you very much for your help, sir,’ he said. ‘I hope we haven’t taken up too much of your time.’

  ‘Duty to help the police,’ Gautam Athalye said.

  He stood up and shook hands first with the inspector and then with Axel Svensson. Until they had left the verandah he remained on his feet watching them.

  Outside the club Axel Svensson turned to the inspector.

  ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I wish to apologize for my behaviour.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the inspector. ‘There is nothing to apologize. You were much distressed because of what happened first thing today with the car, but it did not matter.’

  ‘But yes,’ said the big Swede. ‘I made statements which were incorrect. I let my difficulties in understanding the problems of your country betray me into saying harsh things.’

  ‘No,’ Inspector Ghote said, ‘you have not misunderstood the problems. When you said what you did about justice, and obstacles being put in its way, you were quite correct.’

  The Swede shook his head from side to side.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘But it is plain,’ said the inspector. ‘A police inquiry is a police inquiry. Nothing must be allowed to obstruct it. We are dealing with a serious crime.’

  Axel Svensson still looked bewildered.

  ‘You appear down in the mouth,’ the inspector said. ‘Come, get in the truck. I will see you to the Taj Hotel.’

  The Swede allowed himself to be led to the police vehicle. Only when he was seated beside the inspector did he raise an objection.

  ‘But look,’ he said, ‘I must go back on my own. You have got work to do. Where would you be going now if it wasn’t for me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the inspector answered.

  A wave of discouragement washed back at him. He thought of Mr Perfect. Yes, he might have had a good night. But what did that mean after all? Simply that his condition had not got worse. It left him still at death’s edge. At any instant still he could breathe that last faltering sigh of a breath. And where would all those hopeful feelings of the early morning be then? Where would his whole career, his life, be?

  ‘I don’t know where to go,’ he repeated. ‘The more questions I ask the less I find out. What real motive had anybody got to attack Mr Perfect at just that moment?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Swede, ‘it strikes me that Dilip Varde takes too much trouble to make out that Mr Perfect is of no importance. It is a pity you didn’t get around to questioning him about his feelings at being brought back from Delhi.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the inspector.

  He sounded so despondent that the big Swede, troubled though he was, immediately began trying to put matters in a better light.

  ‘I do not think all the same,’ he said, ‘that this is sufficient reason for murder. And especially as Dilip would have been in no hurry. He could have made plans and then acted.’

  ‘Yes, that is so,’ the inspector agreed. ‘The attack shows every sign of unpremeditation.’

  The tall Swede sighed.

  ‘We seem always to be going round and round,’ he said.

  The inspector sat in silence.

  ‘Where to, Inspector sahib?’ the driver asked at last with his customary impassive gravity.

  ‘Taj Hotel,’ said Ghote.

  ‘But what about you?’ Axel Svensson asked.

  The inspector sighed.

  ‘I think I will just go back to office,’ he said. ‘In any case it is not long now till my appointment with Ram Kamath.’

  ‘Do you mind me not coming to that?’ said the Swede.

  Inspector Ghote braced himself up.

  ‘Listen, you must take a sleeping pill and lie down,’ he said. ‘That is the important thing.’

  The big Swede turned his high-boned, pallid and sweaty face towards the inspector.

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said. ‘Good luck with your Minister.’

  *

  As Inspector Ghote followed a peon along the wide corridors of the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Arts towards the office of the Minister he repeated these last words of his Swedish friend over and over to himself. A mantra to put him on the side of the good.

  The pared-away Mr Jain, waiting in the outer office, looked at him with patent curiosity. The inspector waited for him to say something, but he contrived to receive him and to usher him through right into the Mini
ster’s office without actually speaking a word and with the minimum even of controlled gestures.

  Inspector Ghote felt as if he was a smallpox carrier. He wondered whether he was reading too much into Mr Jain’s attitude or whether it was simply the effect of nerves. After all, he had never so much as spoken to the Minister before. He had seen him only in smudgy photographs in the papers and for the one swift glimpse of their passing in the corridor on his first visit to the Ministry.

  He marched forward to the big desk and saluted.

  Ram Kamath, crouched over the shiny surface like a querulous human question mark, peered through a cheap pair of tin spectacles at the document he was reading and did not look up. Inspector Ghote waited, staring down at the Minister’s grey-haired skull and thin scraggy neck. After a while he coughed.

  Slowly Ram Kamath uncurled. He looked up at the inspector, his long neck emerging from his skeleton-thin body like that of a suspicious tortoise.

  ‘Hm,’ he said.

  ‘Inspector Ghote, C.I.D., reporting, Minister sahib,’ Ghote said.

  The Minister said nothing. After a while he pushed his chair from the desk with two emaciated hands and rose to his feet. He looked extraordinarily tall as he stood for a moment hovering over the inspector from the other side of the desk.

  The inspector had to tilt back his head till the muscles at the back ached so as to look up at the Minister with the respect he felt proper. At last the thin figure moved away, and Inspector Ghote quickly tipped his head forward to relieve the pain in his muscles.

  Ram Kamath paced silently up and down the huge room. The inspector, watching him nervously, noted the threadbare white atchkan drawn tightly round his spikily bony body and the bare feet with long jutting horny toes.

  At last, without turning to face the inspector, Ram Kamath spoke in a reedy, dry croak.

  ‘You wonder why I take into account one rupee only?’ he said.

  Inspector Ghote licked his dry lips. It was a difficult question to answer.

  But apparently no answer was required. Ram Kamath, still pacing up and down the rich carpet, looking like a gaunt bat that had accidentally forced its way into human surroundings, croaked out another bare ration of words.

  ‘One rupee is one hundred naye paise,’ he said. ‘Each one of those naye paise is a most useful little bronze coin. There are many things it will purchase.’

  Inspector Ghote waited, his head cocked slightly to one side.

  ‘That is the great mistake people make,’ Ram Kamath croaked on. ‘They neglect what can be bought with even the smallest sum of money. They use such coins quite heedlessly. They even give them away.’

  Inspector Ghote knew he had to assume the expression of a man who is hearing about a temple being defiled.

  Ram Kamath continued to pace on silent bare feet round and about the large area of his office. It was a considerable time before he spoke again.

  ‘You see me,’ he said at last, ‘in this great office with every sign of utmost ostentation. You cannot help wondering, when you think of the lakhs of rupees that have been spent on it, how I can talk of naye paise.’

  The inspector decided that it would be wrong to voice the wonder that had been attributed to him, or even to express it in a polite look of inquiry. He kept his face sedulously blank. But it was true that he had wondered.

  ‘The answer is simplicity in itself,’ said Ram Kamath after another pause. ‘Such furnishings are paid for from State taxes, and that is perfectly right. A Minister is entitled to a degree of state in his surroundings: he is not bound to provide it out of his own pocket.’

  Ram Kamath stopped his pacing, turned, and darted a look of intense suspicion at Inspector Ghote out of his crooked pair of tin spectacles.

  Inspector Ghote was ready for him.

  ‘Of course not, Minister,’ he said.

  ‘Hm,’ said Ram Kamath.

  But he resumed his vulture pacing of the rich carpet.

  ‘That is what I can never understand,’ he said. ‘That people are so ready to spend out. They buy everything, they are quite thoughtless, reckless.’

  He swirled round and again peered at the inspector as if he would anatomize him.

  ‘You have a wife, Mr Inspector?’ he said.

  The unexpected question nearly caught Inspector Ghote completely off balance. He just managed to gasp out an answer.

  ‘Yes, Minister, a wife and child. A boy, Minister.’

  He let himself have one swift, comforting mental glimpse of Protima and Ved.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ Ram Kamath spat out at him. ‘You get yourself a wife. You buy things for her. Saris, bangles, sweetmeats. And you beget a child, and feed it and clothe it.’

  Inspector Ghote tried to anaesthetize his mind.

  With a shorter pause than before Ram Kamath went on.

  ‘You spend money, Mr Inspector,’ he said. ‘You spend out good money.’

  For a moment the thought of Protima’s importunate demands for the refrigerator came into Ghote’s mind, but he thrust the vision loyally away.

  ‘You know I am not married?’ Ram Kamath said, walking away now into a far corner of the big room.

  The inspector hoped no answer was required again. And was right.

  ‘Why marry? Why be put to such expense?’ the Minister for Police Affairs and the Arts rasped out. ‘There is no need for it.’

  He swung round and advanced on the inspector down the full length of the room. His gaunt face under the sparse grey hair was set hard.

  ‘Well,’ he shot out, ‘am I a physically attractive man, Inspector?’

  Inspector Ghote gulped.

  There was no doubt that this time an answer was expected. There was not even much doubt what the answer was expected to be. But the bald truth, the bald ‘No’ seemed impossible.

  ‘You have more important things to do, Minister, than to concern yourself with such things,’ he said at last.

  ‘So I am physically unattractive, repulsive even?’

  The burning eyes in the hollowed sockets again demanded a reply.

  ‘Yes, in a –’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Ram Kamath swung on his bare heel.

  ‘I am totally unattractive physically,’ he said with dried-up precision. ‘And yet, Mr Inspector, I do not find it necessary to go without the solace you and your like find in marriage.’

  Inspector Ghote decided with relief that the questioning was over for the time being.

  ‘You are thinking that I buy women,’ Ram Kamath stated.

  Another long perambulation of the thick carpet.

  ‘I do not find it necessary. If a person has sufficient determination, sufficient resolve not to spend, he will find it perfectly possible to obtain what he wants without paying out so much as one naye paise, not even one.’

  Inspector Ghote was suddenly assailed by an irrational conviction that he would not be able to stop himself blurting out something about Neena Varde. The unsolicited explanation of how a man as gaunt and mean-spirited as Ram Kamath could be responsible for Neena’s downfall, a problem which had been obscurely puzzling him ever since he had set foot in the office, seemed to come so pat that he had an overwhelming feeling that it was up to him to add his piece of confirmation.

  He took a deep breath and forced himself to concentrate on the matter of the missing rupee. He went over in his mind everything he had learnt about it, and at the end of it all he found himself back where he had begun. The ten one-rupee notes put into the drawer in the empty office, the door watched and no other means of entry, and at the end of an hour one of the ten notes missing. Full circles, except for one possible line. The line that had come into his mind as he had watched the fat halwa merchant teasing his boy so cruelly.

  And here something still felt unaccounted for. He reached into the back of his mind. Prying finger tips just touching a tiny neglected nugget of information.

  And suddenly he had it. It had been given to him when his attention ha
d been concentrated on the Perfect case and he had contrived for that reason to ignore it.

  ‘So, Mr Inspector,’ said Ram Kamath abruptly to the great area of plain wall in front of him, ‘so you have learnt what you came for, and you may go.’

  ‘No.’

  Inspector Ghote felt sweat spring from every pore of his body.

  ‘No, Minister sahib. I am sorry,’ he said.

  Ram Kamath stood stock still staring at the white wall.

  Inspector Ghote squared his small shoulders.

  ‘I regret there is a question I must ask if the matter is to be cleared up,’ he said. ‘There is an important discrepancy. Only five people in the whole of Bombay are supposed to know the exact details of the theft from this office. They are myself, my superior, D.S.P. Samant, Mr Svensson, the Unesco expert who has been assisting me, your peon, Sousa, and your personal assistant, Mr Jain. Yet a prominent businessman in the city has asked me why I am so busy about the theft of one rupee only. How can that person have learnt that the theft was of one rupee?’

  For almost a minute there was no sound in the big room except for the buzzing of three mosquitoes. Then Ram Kamath spoke, very quietly and without turning round.

  ‘Perhaps one of the people who knew told this businessman,’ he said.

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Inspector Ghote. ‘But which of them was it? It was certainly not me. It was certainly not Mr Svensson because I know he has not had any contact with this person except when I was there. It was not D.S.P. Samant. He is not the person to talk of an affair like this to anybody at all, let alone to someone who is a civilian. It could not be your peon. He is behind bars. That leaves only Mr Jain. May I question him straight away?’

  ‘No,’ said the Minister.

  Inspector Ghote waited.

  And soon enough the Minister broke croakingly into speech again.

  ‘You know it was not five people only who knew about the rupee, don’t you, Mr Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, Minister sahib.’

  ‘I congratulate you, Mr Inspector. Yes, I am the sixth person who knew. And it was I who took that note from the drawer. Almost as soon as I had put it in. It was suggested to me that my police force would fail this test. You did not fail.’