No doubt this after all was why she had come into the kitchen. There almost always was some equally simple explanation for what at first looked like suspicious departures from routine. Ghote felt abruptly tired.
‘I tell you, Mr Inspector, such trouble I had when Herr Frank was away.’ Fraulein Glucklich chirruped on, ‘It is all very well for her to say she caught that man Amrit Singh, but she had no business to poke into everywhere like that.’
‘Amrit Singh,’ said the inspector.
Thoughts raced suddenly through his mind like racehorses crowding in a blaze of jockeys’ silks towards a winning post.
Amrit Singh.
Amrit Singh was a personage well known to every man in the whole Bombay Police. If there was any organized crime happening anywhere at any time, it was safe to say that Amrit Singh, a huge, enormously tough, unshakeably cheerful yet plainly ruthless Sikh, was somewhere at the back of it. Burglaries, street robberies, brothel-keeping, bootlegging, trade in forged licences, smuggling, blackmail, protection rackets, anything and everything solidly illegal was meat and drink to Amrit Singh.
And he had never really been caught. From time to time certainly he had been pulled up and even convicted on some minor charge. But even then, thanks to a battery of sharp advocates, he had never had to do more than pay a small fine.
On these occasions he invariably proffered in satisfaction the largest possible currency note. He had every reason to be cheerful.
And now he had turned up here.
It was difficult to pay any attention to Fraulein Glucklich, jabbing her little pointed nose in and out as she detailed her complaints against the formidable Dr Diana.
‘Oh, yes, we had the notorious Mr Amrit Singh hanging about the Foundation. And, certainly, nobody realized it till Dr Diana took it into her head to question him. But she did not do anything so very clever. After all, he told her straight away who he was.’
The inspector ran over in his mind the information sheets he had seen recently. As far as he could remember there was nothing about Amrit Singh having been notified as causing trouble at the Masters Foundation. If there had been, half the men in the force would have been out looking for him.
‘How long ago was this?’ he asked.
‘Oh, a month or more,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘In any case, it is of no importance.’
Ghote was undeterred.
‘And since then?’ he asked. ‘Has anything been seen of Amrit Singh in the past few days?’
Fraulein Glucklich sniffed. Delicately.
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘He was told the police would be called if he ever showed himself here again, and I suppose he had the good sense to keep off.’
Ghote allowed himself a flicker of inward amusement at this withered-cheeked little European woman’s notion that it was necessary only to mention the police to the huge Sikh thug to scare him off once and for all. But this was no time for jokes. If Amrit Singh was involved in something at the Foundation, he had to get after him just as quickly as possible.
One or two questions still must be asked however.
He glanced at his watch.
‘I would like to know more about what Mr Masters ate this evening,’ he said. ‘Your cook tells that he prepared on Dr Diana’s instructions beef curry and fish. Can you tell –?’
‘Fish curry,’ snapped Fraulein Glucklich. ‘She ought to have known at least that Herr Frank did not eat that.’
‘Oh, memsahib,’ said the cook, ‘that was special for Mr Chatterjee. You know how he like.’
Chatterjee, Krishna, resident social worker at the Foundation, Ghote noted automatically. He began looking for a way of cutting Fraulein Glucklich short without drying up a possibly useful source of information.
But Fraulein Glucklich’s full attention was now turned on the plump cook.
‘So Master Chatterjee likes fish curry, does he?’ she said.
‘Oh, yes, memsahib. All those Bengali fellows like fish.’
‘And since when have his whims been pandered to in this house?’ Fraulein Glucklich asked with a magnificently lofty toss of her little dried-up nut of a head.
‘One moment,’ Ghote said.
Fraulein Glucklich spared him a swift glance.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘I wish to know with great urgency who exactly ate with Mr Masters this evening in the staff tiffin room.’
Fraulein Glucklich indicated graciously that the cook might reply.
‘Yes, memsahib,’ he said in something near a whisper. ‘This evening only three in staff tiffin room, please. Masters sahib, Dr Diana and Chatterjee sahib.’
Ghote glanced at Fraulein Glucklich to see if this was likely. She appeared to accept it. He hurried on.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘when the food is cooked, what happens to it?’
‘Oh, sahib, it is taken to tiffin room by Vidur, the bearer.’
Ghote stored the name away. He remembered the man, a sullen looking, pointed-nose Gujarati.
‘And then?’ he snapped.
‘It is put on serving table, sahib, till Masters sahib ready to eat.’
‘Till he is ready? It is there some time?’
‘It is generally there a great deal too long,’ Fraulein Glucklich broke in. ‘Poor Herr Frank. So many things he has to do. Often I have to tell him several times that the food is waiting.’
Ghote decided that this was something he must pursue however anxious he was to get on to headquarters about Amrit Singh.
‘And the food is often left in the tiffin room like that?’ he asked.
‘Much too often,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘More than once it has been stolen.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Certainly. The clients here, you must know, have no very high moral tone. On several occasions they have reached in through the window and stolen food from the serving table. In spite of the excellent supplies they get themselves.’
Ghote thought of the vegetables and puris the ‘clients’ had had that evening.
‘So that it is most likely that Mr Masters ate the beef curry,’ he said. ‘And almost anyone could have put something in that if they had wanted to.’
‘Put something in it?’ Fraulein Glucklich said. ‘But you cannot think seriously that anyone would have wished to kill Herr Frank.’
She tossed her head.
‘That is ridiculous.’
It was an edict.
For a moment Ghote wished he could heed it. He was beginning to feel very tired now. If only it was impossible that Frank Masters had been murdered, then he would have done enough for one night. He could even go back home and get to bed.
But the desire lasted only a moment.
If Amrit Singh was involved, there was certainly no time for rest. And Amrit Singh must be involved. He had been on the spot not all that long before, and he was not going to be scared away by a warning about fetching a policeman.
Ghote’s heart began to pound.
If he could not only solve the Masters murder but pull in the notorious Amrit Singh for it, then it would be such a triumph as there had never been before. And he would do it. If hard work and patience could piece together a case to stand up in court against the worst the Sikh’s lawyers could do, then he was as good as hanged already.
There was a telephone in the stone-flagged entrance hall, he remembered. With scarcely an explanation, he left Fraulein Glucklich and the greasy little cook at a run.
Headquarters, it turned out, were not able to help much. Nobody knew where Amrit Singh was now. By no means for the first time he had thrown off the watch kept on him more or less permanently and had vanished into the blue. A number of rackets of various kinds were going on that he almost certainly had a hand in, but he could not be pinned down for certain anywhere.
Never mind, thought Ghote. He has been seen here, and that is enough.
He flung himself into a renewed whirlwind of activity, checking and double checking on every aspect of the affair. This
time Amrit Singh was not going to slip out of the net through doubts over the evidence.
Tired though he was, he drove himself and his men steadily on. And all the while the thought of what it was all leading up to grew and blossomed in his head. Even the unpleasant business of emptying the dustbins into sealed containers for analysis was a delightful task. He sorted and picked at the mess of rubbish with his own hands.
‘Hey, policeman,’ a familiar voice suddenly called out. ‘Don’t you know that food belongs to the beggars?’
Ghote leapt to his feet.
That damned boy.
He peered all round in the before-dawn darkness out at the back of the house. But beyond the light of the lantern by which they had been working he could see nothing.
He felt his fury rising.
‘If a beggar ate any of this,’ he shouted into the darkness, ‘he might find himself good and sick.’
‘So what?’ the boy called back at his most synthetically American. ‘So what? Then you’d know where the poison was. And a good cheap way.’
Ghote found that he had no answer.
A wave of discouragement assailed him.
It had not abated when, having done everything at the Foundation he could possibly think of and made his way homewards at last, trudging across the patch of garden in front of his Government Quarters house he saw his wife standing just inside the open door. So, once again she had been unable to sleep while he had been away.
And Protima after a sleepless night was not an easy person.
A raucous cock suddenly crowed loudly from somewhere close by. Ghote shook his head from side to side trying to throw off the weariness.
‘A bad case,’ he said into the chilly, dawn-streaked air. ‘A terrible business. I was lucky to get away as soon as this.’
Protima said nothing.
Ghote found he needed to make an effort to take the last step into the house. Behind him Protima closed the door and latched it.
And suddenly she put her arms round him.
‘You would be tired,’ she said. ‘Come, there is tea nearly ready. I made it when I heard the truck coming into the Quarters.’
And, unusually, Ghote found himself telling every detail of the case to Protima. She was by no means the sort of person to appreciate the need for meticulous checking of samples from dustbins or accurate recording of exactly who was where at what time, and for this reason he never gave her more than an outline of what particular job he was on at any time. But the sudden relief of tension was too much for him now, and out it all came – the sense of bafflement he felt every time he tried to find out enough about Frank Masters to guess why he had been murdered, the almost frightening possibility of bringing in Amrit Singh, even the highly upsetting encounters with the boys’ gang. He told her about everything, the samples he had collected, the fingerprints he had had taken, the hopes he put on what the laboratory tests would produce.
He even brought himself to admit how much he hated having to deal with Dr Diana.
‘She was the worst of the whole night,’ he said. ‘The way she stood there, so tall and big, like a machine woman, and all the time making her judgements.’
He felt better for having brought it out. He tried a small joke.
‘No wonder she is not married.’
Protima smiled back at him slyly.
He went over to her and took her in his arms. Through the thin cotton of her white night sari he could feel her body, warm, firm, protective.
‘Oh, I am so tired,’ he said.
‘Come to bed then,’ she answered. ‘Come to bed and sleep.’
FOUR
In the morning Inspector Ghote’s hopes of the laboratory tests were answered. They showed that Frank Masters had taken arsenic in the form of arsenic trioxide. And when Ghote read the neatly compiled facts about this form of the poison he felt a growing sense of pleasure. Things were beginning to link up in a decidedly satisfying way.
Arsenic trioxide, he read, was a form of the substance moderately rare but often used as the basis of lotions for the treatment of certain severe skin diseases.
He did not need to dive into his notebook to remember the name of the man he wanted to see next. Sonny Carstairs. The dispenser at the Foundation. He jumped up from his desk.
And so it was with the irritating, but necessary, vision of the crinkled face of the boy in the black jacket in his mind’s eye that Ghote began questioning the Anglo-Indian dispenser as he sat neatly on a high wooden stool in the back room of the dispensary hut.
‘Tell me,’ Ghote said, ‘you must have a very big list of complaints to treat here. Is that so?’
‘That certainly is so, man,’ Sonny Carstairs said.
He pulled down the edge of his high-collared, trim white overall.
‘Those boys,’ he went on, ‘you’ve no idea, man. They suffer from every disease there is. We have such a time with them. But worth it, worth every minute of it. For Frank’s sake, you know.’
He looked up at Ghote with a quick smile. His brown eyes were luminous.
‘I think I saw one boy with some terrible skin trouble,’ Ghote said. ‘Is that the sort of thing?’
‘Oh, yes. Him I know well. That’s a terrible case, man. We’re doing our best for him, but it’s hard work, hard work. That trouble has got so engrained.’
Sonny Carstairs sighed deeply. He took his left hand in his right, examined it for a moment and pushed down the cuticle on the neatly-trimmed nail of his third finger.
‘What treatment do you apply in such a case?’ Ghote asked.
‘Oh, that’s quite simple. We use something called Fowler’s Solution. It’s a slow business, man, but we have to be patient, you know.’
‘Fowler’s Solution?’ Ghote said. ‘What’s that?’
Sonny Carstairs looked up helpfully.
‘It’s just a solution that a chap called Fowler invented,’ he said. ‘It’s basically arsenic trioxide.’
Suddenly his look of mild benevolence faded away.
‘Arsenic,’ he said. ‘You don’t think …?’
‘Do you make the solution up yourselves?’ Ghote said.
Sonny Carstairs slipped from his stool and went across to one of the big, white-painted cupboards hung all round the room. Ghote rapidly repeated in his mind the exact intonation the dispenser had used when he had said what Fowler’s Solution consisted of. He could detect no falsity. Yet …
Sonny Carstairs opened the cupboard and selected one of a number of ranged brown glass jars with black screw-top lids and big white labels.
When he turned to face the inspector again his expression was even more uneasy. Ghote was quick to spot it.
‘Something is wrong with the jar,’ he said.
Sonny gave him a quick, worried glance and then looked down at the ribbed jar which he had put on the broad white shelf in front of him.
‘Well? Come on.’
Sonny looked up from the jar as if reluctant to end a delicate scrutiny.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘That will not do,’ said Ghote. ‘Something is wrong with the jar. What is it?’
He stepped up close to the white-overalled Anglo-Indian and looked at him hard.
Sonny Carstairs swallowed.
‘For God’s sake, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I tell you it may be nothing.’
‘But it may not be,’ Ghote said.
‘I suppose so.’
It was a reluctant, shame-faced admission.
‘So what is wrong?’ Ghote said.
‘Some may be missing. The jar feels emptier than when I stowed it away in the cupboard here.’
‘And that was when?’
‘It was only yesterday, man. When a lot of stuff arrived from the pharmacist’s.’
Sonny was almost whispering.
‘What time exactly?’
‘In the afternoon.’
The neat little dispenser stared down glumly at his well-kept hands resting palm down on
the edge of the shelf by the little, ribbed glass brown jar.
And quite suddenly he brightened up.
‘It’s okay,’ he said.
‘Okay? You’ve made a mistake? There is none missing?’
Sonny looked up.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I think it is missing all right, but I can tell you for certain. Just you wait a shake-o.’
He bobbed down and opened a big, flat drawer under the shelf. Ghote, looking in over his shoulder, saw a handful of stiff-cover exercise books, a couple of chewed pencils and an old box which had once contained Flor de Dindigal cigars and now held three rusty razor blades.
Sonny took out the newest-looking of the exercise books.
‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Register of purchases.’
Ghote watched him open it. On the first page only there was a list of items, in precise, rather flowery handwriting, each with the day before’s date against it and two bold initials in another hand, in red. ‘D.U.’
That was easy: Diana Upleigh. Who else? Even if he had been unable to read, the totally unhesitant assertiveness of the big capitals would have told him.
‘A new book has just been started?’ he asked.
Sonny Carstairs straightened up. With pride.
‘A new system has just been started,’ he said. ‘We are making up a lot of medicines we need now. For reasons of economy.’
‘Ah,’ said Ghote encouragingly. ‘Your idea, I suppose?’
‘Oh, no, no.’
Sonny seemed shocked.
‘We owe this to Dr Diana,’ he said. ‘It takes someone of her calibre, you know, to institute real reforms. She saw that we could make a considerable saving.’
Ghote thought of the doctor’s descents on the kitchen in the absence of Frank Masters and reflected that the actions of a person of such a calibre did not always receive the acknowledgement they got from Sonny Carstairs.
He watched Sonny’s only faintly brown finger, with the neatly pared nail, skim down the column of the register.
‘Ah, yes,’ Sonny said, ‘there we are. Just as I expected.’
Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade Page 4