Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  The Patil turned and gave Ghote now a long, steady look. “So,” he said at last with as much deliberation as he had shown in moving his chess queen, “you have spent the day going here and there in my village, talking with this person and that. You have put out questions about myself. You have put out questions about my family members.”

  He gave a quick, almost mischievous half smile.

  “You look surprised, Stranger sahib,” he went on. “Do you not know what like is life in a village? You cough in the morning when you are squatting out in the fields and your wife has prepared ginger juice and honey when you come back in.”

  “Well, yes, Patil sahib,” Ghote answered cautiously. “I am knowing that. I spent my boyhood in a village and went out to the fields every morning like everyone else. But surely it is not surprising that someone should want to learn all he could about such a man as the Patil of Dharbani.”

  The attempt at flattery was a mistake. The Patil’s heavy-jowled face under the thickly wound turban darkened in an instant.

  “Do you think I have lived eighty years sucking my big toe that you try tricks like that on me? Now, what for did you come here? I am asking.”

  No help for it, Ghote thought. I can hardly claim once more to be a watchmaker wanting to set up shop here. The Patil would see through a lie like that in a moment, would see through the best lie I could invent.

  No, however much trouble with the D.G.P. it might get him into eventually, there was nothing else for it but the facts.

  “Patil sahib, let me tell you the whole truth. I am a police officer. I come from Bombay. And—”

  “It is my Ramrao,” the Patil broke in, his voice changing in an instant from heavy threat to desolation. “You have come because of his murder. My sweet boy they were raising almost from the dead.”

  And Ghote felt at once he was no longer facing an opponent, an opponent who was bound to inflict on him an ignominious defeat. A rush of pity swept up in him for this grossly huge old man, powerful though he was. It was plain to see that Ramrao’s death coming, as he had put it, when the boy had been almost miraculously rescued from a fatal illness, had struck him to his very core.

  But the wounded old man was still aware, awake, ready to put himself, as always, one step ahead.

  His shrewd eyes glinted, and not with tears.

  “Yet I was hearing from that fool, S.P. Verma, they had found out who had killed Ramrao. Some watchmaker fellow wanting to rob only. That was what S.P. Verma was telling. So, why now are you here in Dharbani?”

  Again Ghote thought that only the truth would do.

  “Patil sahib,” he said, “it is not cent per cent certain that the murderer was, after all, that watchmaker.”

  “And why is that? How can it be that one day you policewallas are saying it was a watchmaker who deprived me of my life’s remaining joy and next day they are saying it is not? How is that? How?”

  Ghote bit his lip.

  Impossible to say to this man of influence that other men of influence, perhaps of greater influence, had declined to believe in the watchmaker’s guilt, and that it was for that reason alone he had been sent to make inquiries in Dharbani. But there was hardly any other reason to give.

  Except one.

  There was one reason in logic why it was at least doubtful that it had been the influential Dhunjeebhoys’ cousin who had killed Ramrao Pendke. A reason that had come into his mind only here in Dharbani when that gabbling old soldier had talked about running away from the village.

  “Sahib,” he said, looking straight into the Patil’s large, time-blotched face, “there is just only this one doubt. You see, the watchmaker who has been accused of the murder was not in his shop when the—when your grandson was found. It was just only when an officer from the nearby police station had arrived on the spot that the watchmaker was brought back there by some traffic constable. Now, how was it that this constable knew the watchmaker was absconding? The times, you see, are not very well fitting. There was not enough for—”

  “Times, times,” the Patil broke in with quick rage. “Do not be talking to me about your times for this and times for that. That is what you city people are not understanding. What does it matter whether it is one minute more or five minutes less? I will tell you what is mattering, Mr. Police. It is not how you can eat up time, gobble, gobble, gobble, as fast as you can because you are fearful there is not enough of it. It is letting time go through yourself. It is being there and knowing and feeling what is happening at each and every moment. Knowing everything and feeling it, that is what you should be doing with time.”

  Ghote felt a surge of hot resentment. What the old man had said might be true enough, though it would be hard to act in accordance with his philosophy when you were a police officer in hurry-scurry Bombay. But it had nothing to do with what he himself had realized about the case against Rustom Fardoomji. He had seen that false jump in logic speedy A.I. Lobo seemed to have made, in the logic that none other than the D.G.P. appeared to have accepted. But this old, authoritative man in front of his chess cloth had simply refused to consider what he had said.

  Yet in a moment he found that, if the old man in his disdain for city people’s notions of time had blinded himself to the meaning of that lapse in logic, he was still full of the shrewdness that had kept him for so many years lord and master of his wide lands and all who lived in them.

  “So,” he said, before Ghote could respond, “if you are now not believing, Mr. Police, that this watchmaker is the man who must be hanged, who are you believing it should be?”

  More truth? But how could he say to this man of power that he believed it was his own grandson, the nefarious one he had nevertheless protected from the consequences of all his illegal activities, who had committed the murder? Or even that it was the work of the Sarpanch, the man he had married to his daughter and had put into his present office?

  But what else was there to say?

  He looked down in perplexity, and saw, hardly seeing, that on the chess cloth the Patil had achieved an invincible position. His opponent, the shriveled old astrologer, evidently had seen it too, since he was making no attempt to play in his turn.

  We are two of a kind, old man, Ghote thought. The Patil is too good for us.

  “Nothing to say, Mr. Police?”

  “Patil sahib ...”

  No, nothing to say.

  “Then I will tell you what you are wanting to talk, and not daring. You are wanting to tell that that fool of an S.P. in Ramkhed has whispered in some ear that my Ganpatrao was liking to kill his cousin-brother.”

  “Patil sahib, I—”

  The huge old man gave a sudden malicious grin, showing a mouth long devoid of any teeth.

  “Oh, you bewakoof,” he said, “did you not think I had very well seen that for myself? Do you think that because I stay in Dharbani and do not choose to go and be the big man in Ramkhed itself, as that ne’er-do-well Ganpatrao is wanting to do, do you think I am as foolish as the donkeys who bray in the village streets?”

  “No, Patil sahib. I have spoken with you for just only three-four minutes, but already I am knowing you are not at all a foolish man.”

  “Good. You are not so much of an owl as that S.P. fool in Ramkhed.”

  “Then, yes, Patil sahib,” Ghote said, with a spurt of recklessness, “I do believe it is possible—possible and no more—that it was Ganpatrao who killed his cousin-brother. He was not here in the village itself at the time the murder took place. That is so, is it not? I have yet to find out that he was in Bombay then. But I will do it.”

  “Good. Good, little Mr. Police. Then I will tell you what you have not yet found out. Yes, Ganpatrao was in Bombay. He told a servant he was going there. And two days afterward my Ramrao was dead.”

  Now tears had filled the old man’s deep, fat-sunk eyes. Ghote waited for a little.

  “There is one thing more that I can tell you, Patil sahib,” he said eventually. “It is that your son-in-
law, who is sarpanch of this village, went also to Bombay at that time.”

  The eyes in that big, blotched face glinted in approval through the tears that still hung in them.

  “Good again. Good. So I will give you some more. That greedy satan of a grandson of mine, who must have been a rat in his last life, and my son-in-law, who is no satan but slippery as a cobra, they plot and plan together. They think I do not know it. They think that because they go creeping off, each one on his own, into Ramkhed and talk and plan and drink there that I do not know each and every time. And that I do not very soon find out what matters they have been talking.”

  “It was murder they were talking, Patil sahib?”

  “No, no. No, no. If murder was in their hearts, together or each one on his own, then they did have sense enough not to let out such thoughts. No, their plots and plans are about what they would do with my wealth and lands when I am no more. Those I am knowing and knowing.”

  He chuckled, and a trail of saliva, red-tinged from a paan he must have been chewing, began to trickle from the side of his old-man’s loose-lipped mouth. He rolled round on his shiny rexine sofa and spat into a big brass spitoon behind.

  “You know what that idiot Ganpatrao is wanting to do?” he demanded.

  “No, Patil sahib.”

  “He is wanting to go to Ramkhed when I am no more and build there the biggest house of all with—with—”

  Chuckles overflowed again, and he stopped to wipe tears, now of laughter, from his rheumy old eyes.

  “With above—” he managed to get out at last. “Above, a tower for a clock. A clock. He wants nothing more than to see a clock of his owning standing up above entire Ramkhed. He is wanting to have built a tower like one you are having in Bombay, some tajabi-dajabi tower.”

  “The Rajabi Tower, Patil sahib? The one that is over the university in Bombay?”

  “Yes, yes. Rajabi. A rajabi-pajabi tower on top of his house with in it a clock. No. Three-four clocks. What for could anyone be wanting such?”

  “To tell the time by, Patil sahib,” Ghote suggested with caution. “So that everyone in Ramkhed will tell the time by his clocks?”

  “And what for would they be wanting to know what minute-minute it is? What for do people like that want their this-clocks and their that-clocks, their house clocks and their alarm clocks, ping-a-ling-a-ling? What for when there are sparrows in the eaves to wake you each day with their twittering? Do they need two clock hands sticking this way and that when you have only to look up in the sky to know how much of the day has passed? Answer me that.”

  But what the old man had ranted and roared on about had alerted Ghote to just what time it must now actually be, and to how little must remain before the bus came to take him back to Nagpur and on to Bombay.

  He took a look at his watch.

  He could have wished to have done so surreptitiously in view of the Patil’s scorn. But he knew that those eyes, old though they were, would detect any maneuver, however adroit, and despise him for it.

  But he was despised in any case.

  “Oh, ho, Mr. Police, now you even are looking at that little whirligig on your wrist, like a merry-go-round at a mela only. Why do you do it? Does it matter what it is telling you? And it is most likely lying also.”

  Stung because his watch was quite probably lying—it had been erratic for the past few weeks—Ghote could only stammer out by way of answer, “The bus, the time.”

  “The bus? The bus? Oh, no, you are not taking any bus, Mr. Police. There is work here for you to do. You are to find out if that satan Ganpatrao, or Jambuvant Dhoble, who I myself was making sarpanch, is the one who killed my poor Ramrao.”

  Ghote felt as if he had been slapped in the face. He had begun quietly thinking to himself how well he seemed to have got out of the situation the D.G.P had plunged him into by ordering him to come to Dharbani in secret. He had seen himself going back to Bombay and reporting all he had now learned and adding that the Patil had gone so far as to give him aid in his task. And now he was being commanded—commanded—to stay here in Dharbani.

  “But—but—” he stammered, “if—if I stay here tonight where would I sleep?”

  It was feeble, and he knew it. But no other thought had come into his head.

  “Sleep? Sleep? Sleep where you are dropping, Mr. Police. Go at those two fine bastards until you are dropping, and then sleep. Come here then, and I will have beds for you more than you can count.”

  Ghote found he had now adjusted himself to the situation. The only thing to do, after all, was for the time being to obey the Patil’s command. Perhaps, indeed, he would be able to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion in time to go back to Bombay and keep the D.G.P. happy.

  “Very well, Patil sahib,” he said, “I will do what I can. So let me first see your grandson. He is in the house?”

  The Patil’s eyes narrowed to two thin glinting slits.

  “Oh, yes,” he answered, “Ganpatrao is in the house now. But soon he will be going. To Ramkhed. To sleep with whores. And he thinks I do not know how he creeps out each night.”

  He gave a rich chuckle and spat again into his brass spitoon. “He makes a servant he thinks he can trust push that big, big motorbike I was giving him down the road until I would not hear its noise. And I do not hear it. But I hear what that servant has to tell when he is coming back. I hear all, or I would have the skin from his back only.”

  Ghote felt puzzled. Why had the old man not told him to go at once to see Ganpatrao, if he knew he was on the point of roaring away to Ramkhed on his powerful machine?

  “So what you would do,” the Patil said, leaning forward on his sofa, “is to go down the path to the highway and, when you are seeing that motorbike, you must send the servant back to me and catch Ganpatrao there where he is not expecting.”

  “Very well, Patil sahib.”

  It was good thinking, most probably.

  “It is almost the hour of cowdust now,” the Patil went on. “And that is when Ganpatrao is sending the man to push-push that motorbike out. He is believing that because of the dust rising when the cows are coming back to the village I cannot see. But I have got something better than old eyes in my head, Mr. Police. I have got ears to hear what I can make people tell. So, go now and be there. Go.”

  “Yes, Patil sahib, at once.”

  “Yes, Mr. Police, go and find which of those two was killing my Ramrao, and see that he is hanged. Hanged.”

  SEVEN

  Ghote left the Patil’s house almost at a trot. Although the huge old man had said nothing particularly to indicate there was any danger of him failing to reach his ambush place before Ganpatrao, he felt impelled to go as fast as he could. But his hurry lasted only a very short time.

  The evening was too beautiful. He had hardly gone past the shoemaker’s hut in the outcaste quarter when he encountered the first of the cows being driven idly back from where they had been grazing all day. Their hooves were stirring the dust of the path as they went. It rose in the languorously swirling clouds he so well remembered at the hour of cowdust from his childhood.

  The floating dust could hardly make a screen dense enough completely to hide Ganpatrao’s motorbike being heaved along to its rendezvous. But it was turning the light, which during the day had been one single harsh brightness, into something soft, glowing and golden. And, since the sun was at last sinking toward the horizon, there was a wonderful coolness in the air that at once lifted the spirits.

  Yes, he thought, why hurry after all? That servant with the motorbike will not be going any faster than he need. Why should I? There will be time enough.

  So he wandered onward, easily and amiably as the cows coming in twos and threes toward him with a small boy or two armed with frail pieces of stick occasionally remembering to urge them on.

  How different these animals are, he reflected, from the skinny-ribbed scavengers of the streets in Bombay, almost as sharply acquisitive as Bombayites thems
elves going about their grabbing, not-a-moment-to-lose business. Here each flop-eared animal seemed sleek and contented, calmly approaching the evening tryst with the milking pail, swaying gently from side to side, sending up with each easy pace one more puff of dust to add to the floating cloud around and above.

  Tranquillity grew in him with every step. The D.G.P.’s urgency fell into place in his mind. He would take his time here in Dharbani. The Patil had made it impossible for him not to do what he could toward finding out if Ganpatrao had killed his cousin in the Tick Tock Watchworks, or if the murder had been the work of the Sarpanch. Very well, he would do what he could. And eventually, whatever the outcome, he would go back to the D.G.P. and report. Perhaps he would have facts to tell that would put A.I. Lobo in his place forever.

  Overhead, the sky was deepening in color swiftly and steadily. The kites that had wheeled endlessly over the village all day, black-winged outlines against the washed-out blue above, were circling lower now, making their last descending forays on a little running rat or neglected morsel.

  Then, almost exactly where he had expected, he saw Ganpatrao’s motorbike. The servant, who had labored to push it silently all this way, was leaning against its saddle. A leaf-wrapped beedi in his mouth sent a trickle of dark gray smoke up into the evening air.

  He went over to the fellow, at the same easy pace he had adopted from almost the first moment he had met the returning, unurgent cows, and gave him the Patil’s message.

  He stood then and watched the man disappear into the now fast-waning light. Up above, a star had faintly appeared in the deep blue sky.

  After a little he decided to take up a position behind the big motorbike with its wide handlebars decorated with black leather streamers and its great curving chrome leg protectors looking like the shields of an advancing army. He leaned against the wide saddle. If he opened his shirt front, bunched it behind him, and stood quite still, in the gloom he would look not unlike the bare-chested fellow Ganpatrao had sent out.