‘It is not for me to tell you of the nature of the evidence that the police department has,’ Ghote replied.
‘Perhaps you are not sure yet that your witness will say the right things?’ Amrit Singh answered quickly. ‘Perhaps he has not yet had enough teaching in his part?’
‘I do not find it necessary to use evidence of that sort,’ Ghote replied stiffly.
‘Ah, no, I beg your forgiveness,’ said the Sikh. ‘I forgot I was speaking to the great Inspector Ghote, the one who never bribes his witnesses, the one who can never be bribed himself.’
Infuriated as he was by the big thug’s cheerful contempt, the inspector could not help feeling at the same time a quick-running vein of pleasure. So he had got a reputation for not rigging the evidence, for not taking any sort of bribes. It was a tribute.
The Sikh laughed.
‘Though it is pity that you will always be so poor,’ he said.
‘If it is necessary to be poor I am happy to be so,’ Ghote said, the words tumbling out before he had time to check them. ‘My rate of pay is enough to live on. There is no need for luxuries and refrigerators and air-conditioning and all those sort of things.’
The Sikh inclined his head in solemn agreement.
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘no need, no need at all. But it is pleasant to be cool, and to drink beer from the ice and to have your own car to ride in.’
‘That is nothing to do with it,’ Ghote stormed. ‘I am asking you questions. Important questions. What food did Mr Masters have to eat on Friday?’
‘Iced beer he had to drink, that I will bet,’ the Sikh replied.
‘I asked what he had to eat.’
The Sikh shook his head from side to side till his big beard wagged.
‘Oh, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I have heard the news, you know. Masters sahib is dead. They say he was poisoned. Am I going to tell you what food he had, even if I knew?’
‘Then you do know?’
Amrit Singh stepped a pace back and held up his right hand as if he was taking an oath.
‘I am not knowing one thing,’ he said.
‘I think you are. Tell me, did you have to open the window, or was it open already?’
The Sikh’s eyes widened enormously.
‘What window is this, Inspector sahib? I know of no windows.’
‘The curries on the serving table,’ Ghote said, ‘how many were there?’
‘What table, Inspector? What curries?’
‘You refuse to answer?’
‘Inspector, how can I answer? I am knowing nothing of all this.’
‘Then what were you doing in this compound on Friday?’
The Sikh bowed his great turbaned head.
‘Inspector, I was trespassing.’
‘But I asked why. Why were you trespassing?’
‘Inspector, I am a very bad fellow. A deplorable fellow, Inspector.’
‘Why were you in the garden?’
‘Such a bad fellow, Inspector.’
Ghote looked at him in silence for a moment.
‘There are ways of making you answer,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ said the Sikh promptly. ‘Very terrible ways. I know. Many have been tried on me.’
He leant forward a little and winked. Hard.
‘But not by the good Inspector Ghote,’ he said. ‘Inspector Ghote does not do such things.’
And again Ghote felt the little quicksilver dart of pleasure. But he did not let it deter him him from his object.
‘Did Dr Diana eat the fish curry or the beef?’ he snapped.
‘Ah now,’ said the Sikh, ‘that Dr Diana I am knowing. A very fearful person, Inspector. Is it not? Most terrible. Enough to make the heart of a man tremble.’
He filled his lungs with air, letting the big muscles swell.
‘But with the curries,’ he added, ‘I cannot help. You would have to ask the memsahib herself, Inspector. Though I can feel for you if you do not want. Even I am a little afraid of Dr Diana.’
Inwardly Ghote fumed. Had Amrit Singh really divined his own timidity about Dr Diana? Or was he just striking at a venture?
‘There is nothing to be afraid,’ he snapped out. ‘Dr Diana is just resident medical officer at Masters Foundation. What is there to be afraid in that?’
Under the tangle of bushy black eyebrows the thickset Sikh’s eyes gleamed with sudden dark lights.
‘Oh, there is nothing, nothing at all,’ he said. ‘Only it is not given to everyone to be as brave as a police inspector. It is not everyone who would face a gun and think nothing of it.’
His hand slipped down towards the heavy sash round his waist. Ghote calculated that he almost certainly did have a gun concealed there.
‘What is this facing of guns?’ he demanded. ‘Do you think Dr Diana threatens me with gun?’
Amrit Singh laughed.
The picture of Dr Diana as a gunman seemed to amuse him a great deal. He laughed with a deep, rich chuckle that shook his entire brawny frame.
At last he wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.
‘Oh, Inspector,’ he said, ‘that Dr Diana does not need gun. But it was not her I was talking.’
He was no longer laughing now.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it is not her who would be threatening the good Inspector Ghote with a gun. Not her at all.’
He looked steadily at the inspector and quietly patted the folds of his cummerbund. The motionless, intent eyes.
Ghote felt a flicker of pure apprehension down in his stomach. An uncontrollable flicker of apprehension.
‘Enough of this,’ he said with sudden briskness. ‘Amrit Singh, I am asking what you were doing in this compound on the evening of Friday last?’
‘Inspector,’ said Amrit Singh, ‘I am not telling.’
‘What were you doing in that hut?’
Ghote pointed at the long dark brown shape of the dispensary.
‘Inspector, you would have to prove for yourself.’
‘Why did you kill Frank Masters?’
‘Inspector, are you going to arrest? I am quite ready, Inspector. I am quite happy to go to your station and be locked up in one of your little cells.’
A faint smile curled the wide mouth hidden in the luxuriant beard.
‘But watch out, Inspector. Watch out when we come to court.’
Ghote knew that he had to let him go. If he was going to get him in the end, he must not rush in and spoil everything. No doubt, Amrit Singh had realized from the drift of his questioning that there was still something needed to make a reasonable case. Otherwise he would have more likely made a bolt for it than have offered himself so happily for arrest.
It would be a bad moment when he got to know about Krishna Chatterjee. His defence team would make a terrible amount out of that.
Ghote resolved that, come what may, he would get at the truth quickly. But until he had got out of his dilemma he was hamstrung. And the balance was still exact: on one scale the quiet little man who could so easily have been pushed by his own virtues into murder, and on the other scale the big bad man, a real killer for all his joviality.
Ghote went home for something to eat rather than face Inspector Chavan and explanations about why the careful net of uniformed men had not been called into play.
He was still thinking about what he would say eventually as he stepped into the little square of garden in front of his small white house. The smell of cooking tickled his nostrils. He hurried in, suddenly devouringly hungry.
Protima was busy kneading dough for chapattis, her bangles jingling rhythmically.
‘Have you made enough for a husband to have some?’ he said.
She did not look up from the soft, whitish slack piece of dough.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you thought I would not know you were back, you policeman with your thumping shoes. Already I have put in more flour.’
Ghote smiled.
‘I am ready to eat all you have made,’ he said. ‘What a terrible morning I
have had.’
‘And so I am going to hear all about it,’ Protima said. ‘All about how this old fingerprint matched that one and that there was some dirt of a most interesting colour under the toenails of some poor man you have hauled into your big headquarters.’
From where he stood Ghote could just see the smile lifting the corner of her cheek. He stooped and put his arm round the curve of her bending back.
‘Oh, stop your nonsense,’ she said. ‘You see I have work to do.’
Ghote stepped back.
He thrust his arms out in a great stretch.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘some fingerprints would have been useful to me today.’
And he told Protima what hopes had been dashed by the lack of Amrit Singh’s prints on the ribbed brown glass of the broken jar.
This time she did turn away from her dough.
‘But my clever Mr Policeman,’ she said. ‘So near to catching a man like that Amrit Singh. In no time at all they will have to be thinking of promotion for Inspector Ghote.’
‘No, no,’ said Ghote hastily. ‘I tell you I am far away from catching Amrit Singh. And beside I am very low in seniority. There is no question of promotion for a long time.’
‘But they do promote out of turn,’ Protima replied. ‘You were telling only three days ago of all the talk because that Inspector Nimbalkar has been made Acting-D.S.P., you know that.’
‘But Nimbalkar is quite a senior man,’ Ghote protested. ‘That is not the same thing at all.’
‘We shall just see,’ Protima said, with a slight, secretive smile.
She began to cook the chapattis with great concentration.
Ghote sat on the edge of the gas cylinder and watched her in silence. Suddenly he sighed breathily.
‘If only I could get into my mind a clear picture of him,’ he said.
‘Oh, but you have a very good brain,’ Protima replied a little absently.
‘But he is so far from anything I have ever known. It is so difficult with a man like him,’ Ghote said.
Protima looked round from the whining flame of the gas-burner for an instant.
‘What man is this?’ she asked.
‘But Frank Masters,’ Ghote said. ‘Who else could it be but Frank Masters? If I had a clear picture of him, then perhaps I could see why either Amrit Singh or Krishna Chatterjee wanted to poison him, whether it was the bad man because he stood in his way or the good man from some twist in his goodness.’
‘Oh, Frank Masters is only rich,’ Protima said.
‘Rich people are like all the others underneath.’
‘But it is not that he is rich,’ Ghote said. ‘If it was that only. … But, you see, that man was good too. All that money he gave up, to live on just the same food as he provided for those vagrant boys he took from the pavements.’
He checked himself.
‘Or nearly the same food,’ he added.
‘Well, if it pleased him to do such things.’
Under her dark blue and green sari Protima shrugged her invariably elegant shoulders as she rose from the gas-rings.
‘Come along with you,’ she said. ‘The meal is ready now.’
‘But do you understand such a man?’ Ghote asked.
Protima looked him full in the face and smiled a slightly mocking, provocative smile above the wide brass dish she had put the food on.
‘I understand the man I have got,’ she said. ‘And I would rather have him than all your millionairing, vagrant-rescuing ones put together.’
In spite of his anxieties Ghote smiled back.
‘Then you do not want more money, little Hindu wife,’ he said. ‘You do not want, for instance, refrigerator?’
Before she could set down the dish and get at him he dodged nimbly away out of the kitchen, giggling like a schoolgirl after a mild reference to the difference between the sexes.
Not a minute later than his due time, Inspector Ghote was back at headquarters. He felt he owed that to himself.
But he waited till he heard voices in Inspector Chavan’s room and went past the glass-panelled door in a swift glide.
When he was seated at his own familiarly blotched little desk a sudden wave of discouragement swept up on him. He thought over the whole Frank Masters affair. And whichever way his thoughts turned, they seemed in no time at all to run up against a blank wall. The fact of the matter was that he had done everything there was to be done. He had been utterly conscientious. He knew it. And all that his every effort had been able to turn up was this appalling balance between the possibility that Krishna Chatterjee, a man whose very goodness might have turned somehow sour, was the one he was looking for and the simple desire to fix the business fairly and squarely on Amrit Singh, who had already got away with murder more than once.
There must be something he had forgotten.
He pulled open the lowest drawer on the right hand side of his desk where he kept his supply of paper and took out a hefty wad. From the little enamelled brass tray he took a pencil. And with the utmost care he set himself to write an account of the whole business from start to finish.
It must show some new line somewhere.
About an hour later, just as he was getting to the end, the door opened.
Ghote looked up quickly. It might be Chavan.
But it was Deputy Superintendent Naik. Hastily Ghote put the sheet he was writing face downwards on the pile in front of him and stood up.
‘Sit down, sit down, Inspector. I am just looking in to see what progress you are making. You are letting him cool off a bit?’
Ghote felt he had no time to think. If it had been Chavan, he knew some reasonable excuse for not picking up Amrit Singh would have come to him in time. But the very sight of the D.S.P., entering so unexpectedly, had driven every coherent thought from his head. He only knew that his careful account of the case, so nearly finished, had not done a thing to give him a new lead.
The D.S.P. plumped down on the squat little chair in front of the desk, puffing heavily. He cocked an eye up at Ghote.
‘Cool off, D.S.P.?’ Ghote stammered. ‘Well, that is – In a manner of speaking, yes. Sir.’
The D.S.P. leant slowly forward.
‘That pimple,’ he said. ‘It does not seem to be getting any better. It is larger than when I saw it before.’
Ghote smiled uneasily.
‘You are not having digestive troubles?’ the D.S.P. asked. ‘That is often the root cause of blood disorders, you know.’
‘No. No, thank you, sir. Really my digestion is very good, considering.’
‘Considering?’
The D.S.P. slewed round in the heavy little wooden chair and gave Ghote redoubled attention.
‘Considering what?’ he said. ‘You have some chronic complaint? A duodenal, perhaps? I have often thought you were underweight, Inspector.’
‘No, no. No, it is nothing like that, D.S.P. It was just a joke really.’
Ghote swallowed.
‘It was just a joke, sir,’ he said. ‘I meant I have a very good digestion considering how often a detective officer has to snatch what food he can from all sorts of eating places.’
The D.S.P. looked grave.
‘Yes, that is a very serious consideration,’ he said. ‘Very serious.’
His hand strayed out to the papers on Ghote’s desk. For an instant Ghote contemplated putting something down quickly on top of the pile, something heavy. But it was too late.
D.S.P. Naik picked up the top sheet, turned it over and began reading. He made no comment. He picked up another sheet, and another and read through them rapidly.
‘Inspector,’ he said thoughtfully, still reading, ‘you have checked on other possible sources for arsenic trioxide?’
Ghote breathed a sigh of relief. This was a question he could answer with a good conscience.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I have had most thorough checks made. And I can trace no leakages. And think of this, sir: you have a man poisoned with a su
bstance like that in one place, and enough of that substance to kill him is stolen not a hundred yards away. Well, sir, the chances of the two being unconnected are most remote.’
The D.S.P. looked up at the ceiling fan for a moment.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I think we can dismiss that possibility altogether.’
Ghote let a feeling of relief begin to creep over him. Perhaps the D.S.P. would be satisfied with having made one cogent observation.
But, no, he returned to his reading with renewed vigour.
Suddenly he jumped up.
‘What was that about leaving Amrit Singh to cool off?’ he said. ‘It looks from this as if you even think he may not be guilty.’
Hot surges of blood ran up and down Ghote’s back. Did the D.S.P. realize he had not actually arrested Amrit Singh?
‘But, sir,’ he managed to say, ‘there is Krishna Chatterjee. Sir, it might just as easily have been him.’
The D.S.P. put his hands on the front of the desk and leant over towards Ghote.
‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘I am surprised any officer working under me could be so ridiculous.’
‘But, sir, it is fact that Chatterjee went into the dispensary at just the crucial time. Sir, social workers can be killers too.’
‘I dare say they can,’ said the D.S.P. ‘So you must just take very good care to see no one ever finds out about your Mr Chatterjee. That is all.’
Ghote made no reply. He was not shocked. No one could have been in the service as long as he without realizing that at times likely evidence was suppressed. But one way and another he had drunk too deeply at the springs of different approaches to crime and justice to feel that the D.S.P.’s attitude was one that, when it came to it, he could ever copy himself.
Up till now he had always succeeded in letting his acquiescence be taken for granted and had avoided compromising himself. But now, thanks to this silly business of allowing the D.S.P. to think he had actually brought in Amrit Singh, he had let himself get caught fast.
The D.S.P. wheezed more loudly.
‘Inspector?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You don’t seem to agree, Inspector.’
‘But, sir,’ Ghote said, ‘I am as keen as anybody to see Amrit Singh on the end of a rope.’
‘I should hope you are, Inspector.’
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