Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  But at that moment, turning a corner, there in front of him in the light of a slowly rising moon was the second largest house he had seen in Dharbani. It possessed, in fact, just a single story and its walls were of unpainted clay. But it was large enough and had other signs of affluence about it. Its roof appeared to be covered with tiles from distant Mangalore. Its wide door was of heavily carved wood, and under that there shone the bluish glint of light from a neon tube.

  The aged astrologer bade him farewell, acknowledged his thanks, offered a blessing, and set off, step by careful step, the way he had come.

  Ghote stood and looked at the wide door in front of him. Nothing for it now but to knock and demand entrance.

  EIGHT

  Jambuvant Dhoble, Sarpanch of Dharbani, when Ghote was led to him by a servant, might well have been mistaken for a servant himself. He was dressed in a grimed, long-tailed shirt over a baggy, red-striped, very dirty pajama. Short and chubby, his round, pudgily double-chinned face had, too, three or four days’ growth of grayish beard.

  Was the cheerful, chatty barber even turned away when he came to the house on his round? And was that out of meanness? Or was it perhaps out of a cunning desire not to draw attention to a prosperous life? And was that why the fellow’s clothes were so far from clean? A man who had electricity in his house and lived under a wide roof of fine tiles from faraway Mangalore ought easily to be able to afford to pay one of the village dhobis and have a clean-washed shirt every morning of his life.

  He was at first a little surprised, too, at the affability the Sarpanch showed. He plastered frequent smiles on his face as he ushered him to a seat in the cool of the inner courtyard. Even if he was in no way guilty of his nephew’s death, Ghote thought, it was strange that he should be so immediately friendly toward a C.I.D. inspector coming to ask about his recent visit to Bombay.

  But perhaps someone had, as he had feared, reached him with news of his presence in the village while that interminable walk with the astrologer had been dragging itself on. Yet, even if that was not so, surely he was being more hospitable than he need be.

  Now he was ordering a servant to bring a fresh meal.

  With only the little he had been able to eat at the chaikhana during the day inside him, Ghote felt constrained to accept, though he hardly liked the idea of questioning a suspect while he ate the man’s food. Nevertheless, as soon as the food had come—his large metal thali was generously piled with a variety of good things—he began putting his questions.

  As much as he could while he did so, he endeavored not to disclose his lack of precise knowledge about the exact time the murder had taken place in Bombay on the morning of Tuesday, March the ninth. And he found, to his inner satisfaction, that he was able to put a good many questions without mentioning precise times.

  The Sarpanch, reaching across with greedy fingers every now and again for some choice morsel on the thali, seemed to be answering with extreme fullness. Yet little concrete emerged.

  It was only, indeed, when, after the almost completely cleared thali had been taken away, the little fat man let slip the Patil’s name that Ghote realized why he was cooperating so fully. It was not because he had had advance warning from some friend of this C.I.D. walla’s visit. It was because he must have had a message from the Patil ordering him to answer to the full any questions that were put to him.

  And he was doing what he had been told to do. Except that the answers he gave, though lengthy, amounted in the end to no more than that he had spent the morning of the murder, or part of it—it was never clear how large a part—with his nephew Ganpatrao in looking over the ancient, dominating Rajabi Tower at Bombay’s university building.

  “Yes, but at what time exactly were you leaving there?” Ghote asked, for the fifth or sixth time.

  “I have told, Inspector. I cannot truly say.”

  He leaned forward and pushed his wrist clear of the grimy cuff of his long shirt.

  “Look,” he said. “Look, I am not having any timepiece. I am not able to afford.”

  Then he had the impudence to reach across, flick back Ghote’s own sleeve, expose his desperately unreliable watch, and add: “I am not an inspector of police with money from above offered always.”

  Ghote could not stop himself reacting.

  “Well, if you cannot answer, or will not, then I must go.”

  He stood up.

  And immediately the thought came into his head that he had neatly been made the victim of a cunning move to avoid further questioning.

  But the Sarpanch was cleverer than this. With many quick smiles coming and going on his pudgy, beard-fuzzed face, he insisted that Ghote should stay, thereby covering himself from the Patil’s wrath while at the same time leaving no opportunity for any more questions.

  “It is too dark for you to be finding your way now to anywhere you can sleep. To the house of my dear father-in-law, perhaps? No, no. You must stay here. I offer your good self the best bed I am having.”

  With defeated reluctance Ghote accepted. And found his dislike of the Sarpanch redoubled when, after the servants had dragged two charpoys out into the cool of the courtyard, the Sarpanch calmly appropriated the obviously better one for himself.

  It took Ghote then a long while to get to sleep. To begin with, the strings of his charpoy, alternately too taut and too sagging, cut into him whichever way he turned. Then, within minutes, the Sarpanch, some ten yards distant, began to snore so loudly that it looked as if he was still awake and making the noise deliberately.

  And all the while his mind kept going whirlingly over everything said during his long session of questioning. Had there been some tiny illogicality he had missed? Was there some change in the repeated versions of how the Sarpanch had spent that morning in Bombay that would give away a false alibi? Had the fellow betrayed somehow his greed to inherit the Patil’s wealth and position? In some single careless word?

  But he could hit on nothing. Indeed, what he remembered most clearly, and gratingly, from all the answers he had received was a moment when it was borne in on him that in his unsatisfactory earlier encounter with Ganpatrao his one seeming triumph had been no more than the result of a misunderstanding.

  The Sarpanch had said at some stage that the day before Ramrao’s death the two of them had visited him at the clinic where he had had his life-saving operation.

  “We were very much wanting, you understand, Inspector, to make sure our dear Ramrao was truly restored to health, as we had all been praying.”

  And at the clinic, he had continued by way of emphasizing how little he could have wanted Ramrao dead, he and Ganpatrao had discussed a scheme which Ramrao had had in mind before his illness to exploit some large deposits of manganese near a place called Khindgaon at the farthest extreme of the Patil’s lands.

  “Ramrao was hoping to start operations as soon as the Patil—” He had broken off abruptly then and twitched out one of his quick smiles. “That is, as soon as the time should be ripe.”

  And the Patil’s certain objections to such change removed, Ghote had added to himself.

  It was then that he had realized that, when he had said to Ganpatrao by way of bluff that he believed inquiring after Ramrao’s health was not the real reason he had gone to Bombay, Ganpatrao must have thought that somehow he had learned of this mining project. He must have been momentarily frightened then that he might tell the Patil. So that one moment of triumph of his had been gained not from his own astuteness but by mistake.

  Perhaps, though, Ganpatrao still believed he himself knew of this secret plan. So should he try tackling that arrogant young man again and make use of that?

  Or not? Was it not rather his duty to leave Dharbani if he could? After all, the Patil had no right to order him to conduct investigations here, impossible though it had been to refuse earlier. He had been sent here by the D.G.P. simply to find out whether it was possible that the antisocial Ganpatrao could have been in Bombay when his cousin-brother had bee
n murdered. He had done that. He had done more than that. He could take now good arguments to the D.G.P. for proceeding to investigate more deeply in Bombay both Ganpatrao and the Sarpanch. A.I. Lobo’s Rustom Fardoomji was certainly now no longer the only strong suspect.

  So he was free to go.

  But was he? Would the Patil have taken precautions to keep him in the village till he had named his beloved grandson’s murderer? Well, at the least perhaps he ought to find out.

  He turned over once again on the torturing charpoy. One more overstretched string bit into his hip.

  And once more he began to go over that interminable, evasive interrogation of the Sarpanch. Surely there must be something he had heard that might let him satisfy the Patil that the fellow would soon be brought to justice? But perhaps there was not. Perhaps even, back in Bombay, A.I. Lobo was right.

  He longed for sleep, for being able not to think. But sleep obstinately kept away, throbbing with fatigue though his brain was.

  The noises of the night loomed over him as if each tiny sound had been picked up on a microphone and was being dinned into his head from loudspeakers. The incessant squealing of the crickets, which in his boyhood village had been a sound that seemed simply part of the night, made, he had believed when he was small, by the circling stars above. A jackal in the distance howling and howling while he waited, tense, for the next mournful cry.

  No, he thought, Bombay. It is my first duty to report to the D.G.P. I am an officer of police. I have my orders.

  The light of the moon, now high in the sky, was shining into the courtyard, strong as a searchlight. In a few minutes, moving inexorably, it would strike his face. Then sleep would become absolutely impossible. And he needed to get sleep. He must wake early if he was to get to the bus stopping place before anyone saw him and informed the Patil.

  And he would not manage it. The creeping moonlight, steady in its advance as time itself, would reach his face and . . .

  Then he found it was not moonlight but daylight. The sparrows in the eaves under the Mangalore-tiled roof of the house must have woken him.

  But what time was it? His last thoughts had been that he must get away early to the bus. Now how late was it?

  The Sarpanch on the charpoy at the other end of the verandah was still asleep, though no longer snoring. It seemed to be quite light!;

  Blinking gumminess from his eyes, he peered at his watch.

  It said 3:20.

  It could not be 3:20. There was too much light, far too much. It must be later, a great deal later. The bus, it might even have gone already. Or at any minute now it would be at the stopping place.

  Furiously he shook the watch.

  And then he remembered how, despite the strangeness of his surroundings, he had managed to keep to routine the night before and wind it. So it must have stopped.

  He shook it. He put it to his ear. Silence. He looked at the hands again. Still 3:20. He snatched at the winder and twiddled it for all he was worth. The hands did not move.

  Broken. Broken. The damn thing was finally broken.

  He did not know the time. He could not, here in timeless Dharbani, find it out.

  He leaped from the torturing charpoy then, and without waiting to see if there was anybody about or to do anything by way of smartening up the clothes he had slept in, he ran to the wide wooden door of the house, tugged its bolts open, and hurried out.

  He ran in what he hoped was the right direction for the outcaste quarter and the path to the highway. There was scarcely anybody about, but he knew there would be no point in asking such people as he saw in the distance what time it was. Daytime, would be their answer. It was all they would know.

  He tried, as he trotted along, dry-mouthed, to see how high in the sky the sun had reached. But, beyond deciding that at least the day was not very far advanced, he found, though like all the boys in his village days who had been able to tell by the sun how much they were in danger of being late for school he once had had the knack, he had lost it altogether now. He had relied for too long on a watch. On the watch that now seemed to have stopped forever. At 3:20.

  He trotted on, at least increasingly confident he was heading in the right direction. And before long he found he had, indeed, hit on the outcaste quarter—he glimpsed the surly shoemaker emerging yawning from his hut—and the winding dusty path that would lead him to the bus.

  And then he was at the stopping place, panting from his long loping run. And the highway in front of him was silent and empty under the slanting cheerful rays of the early sun. There was not even anyone already waiting for the bus, not even Sitabai the steno, his witness that the Sarpanch could have been in Bombay to batter to death the heir to the Patil’s lands.

  I am in time, he thought. At least I am in time. The highway is still traffic free. Those battering trucks thundering along have not yet begun their day. Good. Good.

  He sank down onto the grassy earth bank, taking care to keep well in the shadow of a low-growing thorny babool tree where any messengers sent by the Patil would not be able to see him before he had warning.

  Then, letting out a great sigh, he looked at himself ruefully. His night at the Sarpanch’s, sleeping in his clothes, had done nothing for his appearance. His shirt was limp with sweat and his trousers were creased so comprehensively that they might have been bundled up under a stone and left for days. Certainly, before he went to see the D.G.P. back in Bombay, he would have to change.

  He looked along the road again.

  And at once he was possessed by the notion that it was by chance only that there were no noisy, roaring, rattling trucks on it. Perhaps the bus had already come and gone, bearing Sitabai to her lawyer’s office in Ramkhed, leaving him stranded here once again to come under the Patil’s orders.

  He jumped up and craned forward at the road’s edge, peering in the direction from which the bus to Ramkhed and Nagpur should come. All was calm and still. Only the birds twittering foolishly in the bushes broke the silence. Then from behind him he did hear the sound of an engine. He turned briefly and saw a truck coming, thudding and rumbling, from Nagpur. As it passed him and went away along the black, dusty highway into the distance he saw its load was something bulky wrapped under a bulging black tarpaulin. It vanished. For a little the dust it had raised lingered. Then that, too, vanished and there was only the far horizon to look at.

  Would the bus appear there? Ever? Had it really come and gone? He must have been here now almost half an hour—to judge by his vague feeling for the passing of time—and there had been no signs of life other than that one truck. So was the bus coming chugging toward him? Or was it not?

  Distantly he heard another truck coming from the Ramkhed direction. But he did not dare take his eyes off the point where the bus should appear, somehow illogically convinced that if he failed to see it at the first opportunity it would mean that it had already come.

  It was only when the roar of the oncoming vehicle’s engine grew deafeningly loud close behind him that some inner warning system made him begin to wheel round.

  He had one glimpse of a motorbike, a gleam of chrome leg guards advancing, the rushing prow of some swooping ship. He knew then, without having an instant for calculation, that it was bearing down directly on him himself.

  He started to fling himself sideways.

  And there was a blaze of pain as the machine struck him full on his side and sent him, tossed like a hollow plaster statue, far into the verge.

  NINE

  Ghote never knew how long it was that he lay unconscious in the deep grass beside the highway. He calculated afterward that it could not have been for many minutes because, when he had come to, the pockmarked face of Sitabai the steno was looking down at him. She was kneeling by his side, wiping blood from his neck with the end of her sari. Shakily he had sat up then and in a moment or two had felt clear-headed enough at least to ask what had happened. She had replied that coming to wait for the bus—“It is always late on this day whe
n it has so many baskets made in Khindgaon to take up”—she had just seen one of his shoes protruding from the grass.

  “It was good that I saw, or you would never have been found.”

  He had then a brief, horribly disquieting vision of his body, life ebbed away, lying there first for the vultures to pick it clean, then, over years, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground, at last to be lost altogether.

  After all, he thought, as his state of dazed bewilderment lessened a little, nobody is knowing exactly where I am. Yes, D.G.P. sahib knows I was to go to Dharbani, and, yes, a search would be undertaken. But those searchers might not at all have found my body, and—

  And then Ganpatrao Pendke would have got away with murder, perhaps for the second time.

  Because he was suddenly certain, although he had not actually seen who it was who had been riding the motorbike that had swept down on him, that his attacker had been Ganpatrao. Returning from a night of lust in Ramkhed, he must have impulsively seized his chance to get rid of someone he believed somehow knew of that plan he had shared with his dead cousin to start up manganese mining as soon as the Patil was no more.

  But hardly had Sitabai put these spiralingly unpleasant thoughts into his head than she announced that the bus was approaching. Without at all working out whether it was the best course of action or not, he asked her to help him into it.

  It was only when he was actually back in Bombay, hours later, that he came fully to his senses. The whole journey remained a blur in his head, lit only by short periods of clarity when he had had to force himself to pay attention to his surroundings. He remembered seeing tottering loads of new-made baskets being taken off the bus at Nagpur railway station when he had had to make himself go in to find out about trains to Bombay. But had he managed at Ramkhed to thank at all Sitabai for what she had done for him? After the harsh treatment he had meted out to her in order to find out what he had needed to know about the Sarpanch?