‘Oh, but, Inspectorji, I am wet only, nothing to mind.’
Ghote froze with rage.
‘Inspectorji? Inspectorji? How dare you speak to me in such familiarities? Report to me tomorrow morning and get away off to your quarter before I have you put in the lock-up.’
‘I am going, Inspector. I am going. No need to lose the ballyrag.’
Mercifully, before Tiger could say anything more, the fellow did actually reopen the main door and go out into the night, raising both arms to the tumbling rain and giving a yell of ridiculous joy.
As the rest of the long evening wore on, with Tiger showing no signs of slackening in his various inquiries, Ghote gave permission one by one for all the personnel in the station, which except for a sentry outside was not manned at night, to go to their beds. Tiger next day would no doubt be bustling round everywhere and everybody had better be at their most alert. Besides, now that the monsoon had begun, the men would be anxious to get back to their lines to make sure no wild rain was swirling in through an unprotected window or penetrating a heat-cracked roof.
At last he found himself left only with the dog-devoted Shinde, splay-toothed in smiles and whenever the least occasion arose splay-fingered too in his parody of a salute.
So when yet another roar came from within Inspector Khan’s transformed office demanding a certain First Information Reports book Ghote hurried into the Records Room himself. It did not take him more than two or three minutes to locate what Tiger wanted. It was, he saw, the book containing that last feeble copy of the report on the attack on the dairy cooperative chairman, with clipped to it, thank goodness, his own memo recommending further inquiries. He went quickly back to give it to Shinde to take in to Tiger. Tiger, stickler that he was for the correct way of doing things, had not been pleased when earlier in the evening he had himself brought him a document he had wanted.
‘Inspector,’ that incisive bark had come, ‘have some self-respect. You are not a bloody peon. Don’t behave like one.’
But Shinde, the bloody peon, was no longer sitting on his bench outside the office.
Suppressing a flicker of annoyance, Ghote set off to look for him. Faithful though he was, he must after all from time to time have to answer a call of nature.
However, he could find him nowhere. As he hastened back, it just occurred to him to open the door of the Muddamal Room in case the fellow had gone in there for some reason.
He had not. But in a corner, sitting on an upturned vegetable walla’s basket, an idiot grin beginning at once to spread all over his face, was Sergeant Desai.
Ghote could not restrain himself from yelling at the idiot.
‘Sergeant. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Oh, this is where I am always hanging my jacket when it is getting wet, Inspector. There is plenty hangers here. Look.’
‘I thought I told you to go back to your quarter. And Shinde, have you seen him anywhere?’
‘Oh, yes, Inspector, I have seen.’
That and no more.
‘Where is he? Where is he, you fool? I am urgently wanting.’
‘Oh, I was just only sending to get me a cigarette, Inspector. I am out of stock.’
Ghote felt a bomb of outrage blow up in his head.
‘You – You what?’ he shouted.
Patiently Desai repeated word for word what he had said before.
Ghote found nothing that he could summon to his lips could at all convey what he was feeling. For several moments he stood regarding the still grinning Desai in blank silence.
‘That will be one more thing I will see you about in the morning, Sergeant,’ he blasted out at last. ‘But for now you can put on your jacket, button it up properly and take this F.I.R. book in to the A.D.I.G.’
His held-in ferocity seemed at last to have made an impact. Desai scrambled into his still damp jacket, did up all its buttons with fumbling fingers, took the F.I.R. book and tramped off.
Ghote watched him until he reached Tiger’s door, gave it a knock that was more of a thump than a tap and plunged in – letting the memo attached to the wanted F.I.R. go leafing down on to the floor outside.
For a long moment Ghote stood looking at the sheet where it lay. Should he leave it there? Or wait till Desai emerged and tell him to pick it up and take it in, with all the chances of some disaster which that risked? Or should he retrieve the sheet himself and go into the office in Desai’s wake?
Whatever he did was certain to bring a blast of rage from Tiger.
Best probably to do what was quickest.
He hurried along the passage, scooped up the sheet and entered the office with it.
Tiger was bent over papers he was examining and Desai was standing looking down at him with mouth-agape interest, the F.I.R. book still clutched in his heavy paw.
‘Desai,’ Ghote said, putting all the snap he could into his voice. ‘Put down the F.I.R. Mr Kelkar wants and get out. At the double.’
‘Oh.’
Desai emerged from his reverie, looking round as if he was unsure exactly where he was.
Then he realized.
‘Oh. Oh, yes. F.I.R. book for A.D.I.G. Sahib. Take it in right away.’
He stood there.
‘I told you to take it in,’ Ghote said with forced patience, ‘and then give it to the A.D.I.G.’
‘Yes, Inspector. Give it. Right away, Inspector.’
Desai reached forward and attempted to place the book in front of Tiger, slap on top of what he was reading.
And, as he did so, the sleeve of his jacket just caught in the jutting hinge of the brass inkpot.
‘Watch out, you – ’
But Ghote’s shout served only to precipitate the accident it was intended to avert. Desai jerked back his arm. The inkpot rose up with it, tilted over and sent a stream of new, beautifully black ink shooting across the desk top and down on to Tiger Kelkar’s immaculately pressed trousers.
At least the idiot realized what he had done. He emitted a sound something like the swirl of fast-gathering rainwater guggling down a crack in the earth and leapt backwards towards the door, his moony face plastered with fright.
And Tiger Kelkar, dark with fury, snatched up the inkpot and hurled it at him.
It hit him, too.
It just caught the side of his head and he went down as if he had been struck by a thunderbolt.
Ghote stood staring, first at Desai, lying like a great heap of mud on the floor, then at Tiger sitting at his desk, his expression switched in a moment from wild rage to blank incomprehension.
As well it might be, Ghote confusedly thought. What had happened was extraordinary. Extraordinary that the inkpot, seized in an instant and as quickly hurled, should have hit Desai at all. Extraordinary that having hit him the merest of glancing blows, so it seemed, it should have pole-axed the fellow like that.
Was he shamming? Was he putting on an act? It would be quite of a piece with his general idiocy of behaviour for him to exaggerate the effect of a touch of a blow like that. Except that he could never, dim-witted fool that he was, have reacted even half as quickly.
No, that hastily flung missile had actually knocked the chap out. No doubt about it.
Ghote stood while time seemed suspended staring at the inert mass of the man on the floor, too amazed at what had happened even to move.
It was Tiger who was the first to recover from the shock.
‘Good God,’ he said, shooting up from the desk and sending chair Number LI toppling over backwards. ‘I’ve laid the fool out.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Ghote managed to say.
He went over to where Desai lay, the empty inkpot neatly resting on the floor beside him. Kneeling, he turned the fellow’s head to see exactly what damage had been done.
There did not seem to be much. The temple was marked by a small gash. But the wound did not look particularly deep. Blood had gushed from it, jetting out on to the collar of the fellow’s jacket, but now there was only a very
little seeping slowly down his cheek.
But it was somehow seeping much more slowly than might be expected, too slowly, and a terrible thought flashed into Ghote’s mind. Surely …
He grabbed Desai’s wrist.
What he found there, or did not find, caused the flicker of thought he had had to grow and swell in his head like a cluster of buzzing blowflies in the first flush of a monsoon.
‘Sir,’ he said, steadily as his voice would allow. ‘Sir, I am not altogether liking … Please, A.D.I.G. Sahib, come and examine this man.’
Tiger Kelkar crossed the room in two or three sharp strides and knelt beside the dumped, recumbent form. He lowered his head and placed an ear against the unmoving chest.
For several seconds he remained fixed where he was. Then he slowly straightened up and faced Ghote.
‘You’re right, Inspector,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’
Ghote saw that his face had gone grey as the greyest hairs of the moustache above his iron-straight mouth.
‘He has expired, sir, isn’t it?’ he said.
But he knew that was a question that did not need an answer.
3
For what seemed to Ghote a period of many, many minutes the two of them knelt there on either side of the dead man, looking at each other and stunned into speechlessness.
At first, coherent thoughts could hardly enter Ghote’s mind. It was filled swampingly with the feeling that everything had in an instant been turned upside down. That nothing was as, moments before, it had been.
But then one notion made itself clear. And when, a little later, he became capable of examining the thought he could only wonder at what this catastrophic reversal had brought to the fore. It was, simply, that Tiger Kelkar was, of all the officers he had ever served under, the one he most admired.
He had never been wholly conscious of this before. He had hoped that he could contrive to act with something like the dedication and efficiency Tiger had shown, both back in the past in Bombay and now in the whirlwind days of his Inspection. He had wanted to be able to command in Tiger’s way. But he felt now that he desired more to possess and use an anger that would make everything in his own work and, as well, the work of men under him sharply better.
Yes, he admired Tiger. Almost he seemed to worship him. Tiger was what he ought to become, however far off the goal.
Then another thought had come. Tiger, his worshipped Tiger, in one moment of rage, of the same anger that drove him and drove those to whom he gave orders to clean and castigate the evils of the world, Tiger had brought his whole career tumbling in ruins around him. Like a tall tower struck by a jaggedly thick blue-white spear of lightning he was suddenly a useless thing.
It was wrong. It should not be. It should not have been. But it was so, and nothing could change it.
Opposite him across Sergeant Desai’s body, Tiger slowly got to his feet.
He stood looking down at the dead bulk on the floor, and Ghote, squatting back on his heels, looked up at the man he wished himself one day to be.
To have been – Ghote’s thoughts raced – because now that man, that hero, was nothing other than the wreck of himself. It could not be otherwise. Whatever Tiger’s intention had been, he had in rage seized a heavy object, thrown it at a subordinate and killed him. There could be nothing more for him in the police service, of which he had been until only a few instants ago an ornament and an inspiration.
Now, in all probability, what awaited him was a term in prison. Indian Police Code, Section 299, culpable homicide.
Evidently a similar train of thought must have been passing through Tiger’s own mind. Suddenly now he barked out an order, his voice still sharp and unfaltering.
Old habits do not die straight away.
‘Inspector, effect an arrest under Section 299.’
Ghote pushed himself to his feet, a darting ache shooting up the backs of his thighs.
He had no thought other than to obey Tiger’s order. As he had always obeyed.
But the words he uttered, when they came, surprised even himself.
‘No, sir. No, I will not do that.’
But he knew as soon as those words had passed his lips that he meant them. He realized their implication, that he was going to abet Tiger in defying the law, and he knew still that he meant the words as deeply as any he had ever uttered.
He was not going to arrest Tiger as, a duty-bound police officer, he should. He was going somehow to get him out of the appalling situation he had fallen into. He was, he realized, more committed to Tiger, to anger-fuelled Tiger, than he was to the code of police conduct which he thought had entered into his very bones.
Yes, Tiger and his searching, saving anger had to be preserved, cost what it might.
But fury had flashed into Tiger’s eyes, the same anger that would have sparked out before had any officer under him hesitated to obey an order. Then at once he knew he had lost his right to anger.
‘Ghote,’ he said, his voice now lacking all the bite it had had, his broad shoulders slumped. ‘Ghote, man, you’ve got to do it. It – It’s your duty. You’re here. You saw what happened. Do it. Your duty.’
‘No, Kelkar Sahib,’ Ghote answered, the words now coming pouring out, as if in the traffic-blocked rush-hour streets of Bombay by some miracle a giant unseen hand had lifted out a clear path in front of him. ‘No, Kelkar Sahib. There is something you are not knowing. You see, all during this evening I have one by one been sending off duty all personnels. They needed to get sleep, you see. Sir, there is no one here now but you and me, except for one sentry fellow outside.’
‘What are you saying?’
Tiger looked to Ghote suddenly like some wild dacoit in the hills who, believing himself surrounded, had at the last moment seen a way out of the trap. He looked – somehow his very hair had become lank and dishevelled – as if he only half believed what he was seeing and yet could not distrust his eyes.
‘Sir, I am saying that there has been no witness to the event, except only myself. There is no one in the station to have heard anything even.’
Abruptly the thought of Shinde came into Ghote’s head. How far would the fellow have had to walk at this time of night before finding somewhere to buy that fool Desai his single cigarette? Would he come back into the station at any moment?
But even if he did, almost certainly it would not matter. Shinde, for whatever reason, had his eyes-melting devotion. He would, if it was asked of him, see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. No matter how the deception outraged his better feelings, he would not lift up a sword.
He gulped twice and continued.
‘Sir, if we are only somewhat lucky we can make this all look as if it was something altogether different.’
‘Different?’
Tiger Kelkar was still the bewildered brigand.
‘Yes, sir, different. Sir, there is no reason why this man should have been killed here. He should not have been within the station at all, sir. Many hours past I was sending him to his quarter.’
Now, slowly the light of understanding was creeping into Tiger’s wild eyes.
‘What exactly are you telling me, Ghote?’
‘Sir, this death, we both know, was the most unfortunate of accidents only. Well, sir, why should it not have occurred as the result of an accident that was happening elsewhere?’
‘But where, man? And why?’
‘Sir, that has already come to me. The fellow was for ever boasting, sir, that he was a Number One fine swimmer. Sir, there is Lake Helena. Its shore is not far from here.’
‘Lake Helena? You’re suggesting that somehow we should contrive to make it look as if … as if the fellow got himself into the lake and – what? – drowned himself there? Hit his head?’
‘Yes, sir. It could be done. If we are acting quickly, A.D.I.G. Sahib.’
Ghote cursed himself then for having let Tiger’s rank slip out. Would it remind him who he was? What his duty was, or what until only minutes bef
ore it had been?
It seemed to. For a moment Tiger drew himself up, straight-backed as ever, and a hint of his old fiery anger blazed up.
But it was replaced almost at once. By a look of pure longing.
And that won. Tiger Kelkar stooped, picked up the brass inkpot and put it back exactly where it had been on his desk.
The prospect, however chancy, however slim, of being once more all that he was meant to be was too much for him.
‘But, Ghote, why on earth should this fellow, why should anybody, get themselves into the lake on a night like this?’
And, as if to reinforce his point, at that moment the steady rain beating down on the solid tiled roof above them broke into a tattoo of frenzied fist-blows.
But the answer to Tiger’s question had already come to Ghote in that single moment when the whole idea, the traffic jam of other thoughts ahead mysteriously cleared, had appeared in his head.
‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘Desai was a damn fool only.’
‘Well?’
‘Sir, he was notorious. He was boasting always of his swimming powers, taking up bets each and every day. Sir, it is not at all unlikely that he would have got someone to put him up with a bet to swim across Lake Helena in the uttermost middle of the first monsoon downpour.’
‘But – But – Let me think. The bet, Ghote, the bet. No one can come forward to say he made it. They do not exist.’
Ghote felt the ideas springing up in his mind, uncurling one after another like new growth in this lush monsoon time.
‘Sir, no one would come forward.’
‘Exactly, man. There is no one.’
‘No, sir, no. Kindly listen. If you had taken up such a bet with a fellow like Desai and he had gone and done that thing, attempted to swim across Lake Helena in such a storm as this and had then deceased, would you afterwards admit?’
Tiger thought for just a moment.
‘No, by God,’ he said, ‘I’d keep my damn mouth shut for ever.’
He gave Ghote a look. His eyes were shining with something like their old vigour. There might have been a party of gold smugglers coming to a rendezvous somewhere round Bombay and he waiting in command of half a dozen armed police to seize them.
Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery Page 3