Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  All he learned he had known, more or less, already. The body had been found, he read, by Sideshwar K. Saxena, H.M.T. Watches representative, at 11:41 (time checked by four watches worn by the said S.K. Saxena) calling at the shop by chance. So, he thought wryly, there would have been just long enough, if Ramrao Pendke had been at the August Kranti Maidan when that idiot D’Sa had thought he had seen him, for him to have reached the Tick Tock Watchworks in time to meet his fate.

  And, no, Mr. Saxena had evidently no fixed time for visiting the shop. So no question of an alibi produced by putting back that watch’s hands.

  The said S. K. Saxena, he read on, had looked in the workshop below where the owner, Rustom Hootosh Fardoomji, sometimes worked, but seeing no one there had left and reported the finding of the body telephonically from the nearby Cane Emporium at Kemp’s Corner at 11:44. A.I. Lobo had at once proceeded to the scene, arriving at 11:51. At the same time Constable B. R. Vaingankar (No. 2347), on point duty at the junction of S.S. Patkar Road and Balbunath Road, had arrived escorting the said R. H. Fardoomji, who had stated he had found the body at a time not recorded.

  Ghote looked up.

  “Fardoomji was stating it was himself who found the body?” he asked. “Was he in fact reporting such to this—”

  He glanced at the faded blue writing of the F.I.R.

  “This Constable Vaingankar, Number two-three-four-seven?”

  “That’s what it says in the F.I.R. there,” Mike Lobo answered easily. “But Fardoomji sang a different tune when I got that confession out of him.”

  “Oh, yes? What was he claiming then?”

  “Nothing, Inspector. Except to killing Ramrao Pendke. That was all I was wanting, man.”

  “Well, I would have to see this Vaingankar,” Ghote murmured, returning to the F.I.R.

  “Yeah, you should certainly see him,” Lobo said. “So you’ll know what sort of dumbo we have to work with. Look at what time he states Fardoomji came up to him.”

  Ghote scanned the F.I.R. once again. And jerked up in surprise.

  “At fifteen-forty-two? Fifteen-forty-two?”

  “That’s what the idiot said. Looked at his watch and noted the time. I don’t suppose he really knows how to tell it.”

  Ghote sighed.

  “Yes, well, I have met constables nearly as bad myself,” he said, abandoning another hopeful line.

  He read the remainder of the F.I.R. And learned nothing more.

  He handed the book back.

  “Well, then, now I must see the prisoner,” he said.

  He waited for Lobo’s reply. Would the request be met with the same evasion as before? And, if it was, would that not indicate clearly enough that Lobo was in fact unsure about the confession he had obtained?

  “Bless you, you can’t see the fellow. Not now.”

  Ghote straightened his back, feeling a ripple of sharp pain as he did so, and looked hard down at Lobo, still idly swinging his leg on the corner of the big table.

  “And why cannot I be seeing, A.I., if you please?”

  Lobo gave him a grin.

  “Because, Inspector,” he replied, glancing at the fancy Japanese compass watch on his wrist, “I have an appointment—six minutes ago, to be exact—with your said S. K. Saxena at the Tick Tock Watch works, and I daresay you’d like very much to come along.”

  It took Ghote an instant to recover. Then he answered.

  “Yes, A.I., I would very much like. And I am hoping after to see Fardoomji himself.”

  “Yeah, Inspector, sure you will. If it works out.”

  Ghote decided not to pursue the point. Besides, Lobo had said the H.M.T. Watches man should have arrived at the murder scene six minutes ago. If they were much later getting there, he might well give up waiting and leave.

  “Let’s go, then, let’s go,” he said to Lobo, still sitting on the table.

  “Think our friend Saxena won’t wait? Hell, man, he’d be there if we didn’t come till tonight. Never mind all those watches on his wrist, he still goes by I.S.T.”

  “By Indian Standard Time?”

  Lobo jumped off the table with a broad grin.

  “Indian Stretchable Time, Inspector,” he said. “Indian Stretch-able Time.”

  Cursing himself for having fallen for a joke as old as any in the book, Ghote marched out ahead of his fellow investigator.

  And outside the Tick Tock Watchworks there was Mr. Saxena, not so much as consulting one of the four watches on his wrist. Mike Lobo unfastened the padlock on the shop’s shutter and pushed it clangingly up.

  The interior came as a surprise to Ghote. The chalked outline of Ramrao Pendke’s body, still dustily on the floor, he had expected. But he had thought the place itself would be not unlike his familiar Big Ben Watch Stores, though he hoped not to encounter any moral exhortations. Instead, however, of having just a few clocks and watches waiting for repair on its shelves with a dozen or so new ones for sale, the Tick Tock Watchworks almost lived up to its name. True, after the enforced absence of its owner there were few clocks still ticking and tocking. But clocks and watches that must once have ticked almost to deafening point there were.

  There was a large case of the new Tata Titans, with black faces, with gold faces, with white faces, with smart diagonally striped faces, with gold straps, with metallic straps, with leather straps, black, brown, and white, smooth and embossed. Ranged in row's in the case were square-shaped watches, round ones, oblong ones, with hair-thin hands, with fatly thick hands, with Roman numerals, with Arabic numerals, with no numerals.

  There was a case, somewhat smaller, of Mr. Saxena’s H.M.T. watches. And there were clocks of every conceivable sort, electric and wind-up, cuckoo and carriage, marble and plain wood, grandfather clocks and wall clocks with long dangling pendulums—one of these on the customer’s side of the glass-topped counter (under which were yet more watches, fobs, and repeaters, watches with their works exposed and watches without any works at all) had one of its two long weights missing— tiny clocks and clocks almost lost in huge gold sunburst settings, clocks supported by statuettes, clocks embedded in chunks of raw rock. Clocks on the walls, clocks on the shelves, clocks on the counter, clocks on the floor.

  And almost all of them silent. With no time to tell. Ghote thought suddenly of the mad bus-starter who had seized his arm just outside with his repeated demand of “Time kya? Time kya?” He w'ould get a cold answer here now.

  “Well, A.I.,” he said, “your Mr. Fardoomji was certainly very, very interested in his work.”

  He recalled then that this had been the point one of the Dhunjeebhoy brothers had made to the D.G.P., that someone as devoted to the careful art of watchmaking was not likely to have brutally battered a victim to death.

  “The fellow’s damn interests don’t bother me,” Mike Lobo replied. “All I’m interested in just now is the weapon he used. Couldn’t find it here at the time, so I reckoned Fardoomji had taken it away and thrown it down somewhere. But the bloody fellow wouldn’t tell me where. So, I thought I might as well take another look-see here itself, with the help of Saxena sahib who knows the place.”

  “Yes, A.I. It would certainly be well to have the weapon as Exhibit Number Ek when you bring your case to court. What exactly was it? Did Fardoomji tell you at least that?”

  “No. Never said.”

  “He never said? But you must—”

  Ghote broke off. His fellow officer was indicating, none too tactfully, the presence of Mr. Saxena.

  “Yes. Well, A.I., we must discuss that at—No. Wait. I think I know what that weapon might have been.”

  Turning, Ghote pointed, not without a touch of drama, to the pendulum clock on the wall opposite and the missing weight of its pair.

  “Mr. Saxena,” he inquired, “was that second weight there when you visited this shop before and could not sell Mr. Fardoomji any of your own samples?”

  “Yes, Inspector,” Mr. Saxena answered with sharp assurance. “I am well remember
ing it. And it would have made a first-class weapon, long and heavy like that other there.”

  Abruptly he strode over to the chalked outline on the floor, bent over it, and brought his arm swinging down, time after time.

  “I can just see him do it,” he shouted. “One, two, three. Bang, bang, bang.”

  “A.I.,” Ghote said, turning sharply away, unwilling to witness any more such antics, “were the wounds on the body up to one hundred percent consistent with such a weapon as the second weight from that clock?”

  “They were, Inspector,” Mike Lobo answered, with a tinge of astonishment in his voice. “By God, they were. They won’t be able to challenge that in court. So all we’ve got to do now is find that weight, check the prints on it, and we’ve got Mr. Fardoomji nicely wrapped up.”

  “I was hearing you had done that already,” Ghote said.

  “Well, bit of extra evidence can’t do any harm,” Lobo replied cheerfully.

  So the three of them began to search the little shop and the even more crammed workshop below it, littered with all the watches Fardoomji had been working on before he had been hauled away. It took them more than three hours before they were finished. But at last they were left only with the certainty that the missing clock weight was nowhere on the premises.

  “Still, can’t be helped,” Mike Lobo said, when finally Ghote had conceded there was nowhere else to look. “Won’t make all that much of difference. I’ve got the bastard cold all right.”

  Mr. Saxena nodded in grave agreement.

  “Ah, I would never have thought it of Rustomji,” he said. “But he would be going in for those Tata Titans. He would go in for them.” .

  Ghote felt this a sad summing-up for a man who, if Mike Lobo was right about him, would eventually meet the hangman’s rope at Thana Gaol. His determination not to let that happen, unless some new hard evidence really proving the man’s guilt came to light, fired up anew.

  He turned to Mike Lobo.

  “So now, A.I.,” he said, “will you kindly take me to talk with your prisoner.”

  And, more than a little to his surprise, Mike Lobo simply answered, “Come on, then.”

  TWELVE

  Ghote would have liked to have gone with Mike Lobo directly to Rustom Fardoomji’s cell to collect him. But arriving at the station, Lobo had ushered him straight into the Detection Room, implying that Fardoomji was already there. And then he had quickly disappeared. So Ghote, when he found the room was empty, had to concede he had been neatly outmaneuvered. Lobo would have a few good minutes to put the fear of future punishment firmly into his chosen culprit’s mind should he be tempted to go back on his confession.

  Provided, Ghote said to himself as he stood in the barely furnished room with its one high barred window, that Fardoomji has not truly confessed to killing Ramrao Pendke.

  The door behind him was jerked open and the clocks-obsessed Parsi was thrust in ahead of Mike Lobo.

  Ghote saw a slight figure in nondescript shirt and trousers with a worried-looking narrow face partly hidden by a large pair of spectacles—had they just been returned to him? Ghote wondered—placed rather crookedly on a thin hook of a nose. He was put in mind of nothing so much as an anxious parrot. There were no traces on that face or elsewhere of bruises or injuries. But then, as Shruti Shah had said, Mike Lobo was an expert.

  “Sit there,” Lobo said to his prisoner, pointing to the chair secured to the floor on the far side of the small wooden table that with one other chair was the room’s sole furniture.

  Fardoomji scrabbled to obey, although Lobo had not spoken with any particular ferocity. Ghote noted the cowed look and was reinforced in his belief that the interview ahead was going to be tricky.

  It was a thought that was redoubled when Mike Lobo, instead of leaving, simply perched on the table between himself and the Parsi and sat, as was his wont, swinging his legs.

  “Thank you, A.I.,” he said sharply. “I would not be needing you.”

  Lobo favored him with a knowing grin. But he did hop down from the table and move toward the door.

  “Hope I can trust you not to leave marks on my boy, Inspector,” he said.

  And then, with the door closing, he added a last remark addressed to his prisoner.

  “Don’t like getting hurt, do you, bhai?”

  The Parsi, cringing on his chair, made no reply. Unless a loud gulping sound constituted an acknowledgment.

  Ghote took the chair opposite, one of the bruises on his hip jabbing at him sharply. How differently different people react to pain, he thought. And there are some who shrink from even the threat of injury.

  He gave a little cough.

  “Well, now, Mr. Fardoomji,” he said, looking directly into the anxious parrot-face across the table, “suppose you tell me, and myself alone, remember, just what was happening in your shop on the morning of Tuesday last?”

  “I killed him.”

  The murmured response was so quiet it was difficult even in the small enclosed room to make it out.

  “You killed him? Yes, I know that is what you have told to A.I. Lobo. But tell me why it was that you killed this visitor to your shop. What for, in fact, had he come into the shop?”

  The anxious parrot opposite chose only to answer the second question.

  “To buy a watch.”

  “But I was asking why you killed this man who had come in, as you say, just only to buy a watch?”

  “I killed him.”

  “Yes, I know you have confessed to that. But why were you doing it? Why?”

  Rustom Fardoomji simply looked down in silence at the scored surface of the wooden table in front of him.

  “Do you smoke?” Ghote asked him. “Should I send for cigarettes?”

  Perhaps a smoke would relax the fellow. Get him to a state where he might let his fear of Lobo, if it existed, rise from hiding.

  “No.”

  “You do not smoke?”

  “No.”

  But even that monosyllable was spoken so reluctantly that it, too, was hard to hear.

  Ghote sighed. “Well, then, tea? You would like some tea only?”

  “No.”

  “All right. No tea. But tell me now, why was it that you were deciding to attack this man? That you were battering him to death, as you told A.I. Lobo?”

  “He is saying I wanted to rob the rich fool.”

  Ghote pounced.

  “The A.I. is saying that? Is it true? Is that why you attacked this customer coming in?”

  “I wanted to rob him.”

  “Yes, yes. You have said. But it was because he was a rich fool? You were thinking that?”

  “It is what is in my statement.”

  “But you said it? You yourself said it? Or was A.I. Lobo writing it, and you were signing?”

  For a moment the anxious parrot looked up, and Ghote thought he was going to get at the truth of the matter at last. Learn what shrinking from physical punishment was perhaps keeping locked fast in concealment. But it was a momentary glance and no more, and then the beaky head sank again on the narrow chest.

  “Did you say it, or did the A.I. just only write it?” Ghote asked again, though with little hope.

  “I killed him. He was a rich fool.”

  “I see,” Ghote said carefully. “And what was it that made you realize this customer coming in—he had not been into your shop before?”

  He almost expected Rustom Fardoomji to answer once more with “I killed him,” but he did at least mutter a “No.”

  “Then, what was it that made you think he was a rich fool, that he was perhaps asking to be robbed?”

  Again there was a pause before any answer came, and again Ghote permitted himself a glimmer of hope that he was beginning to rip away the outer garment of an imposed account.

  But once more there came the same dulled reply.

  “He was a rich fool.”

  “But how did you know that? How?”

  “He had a gold Rolex t
hat was a fake.”

  Better, Ghote thought. A proper answer. One small advance. “A fake? One of those watches they are making out at Ulhasnagar?”

  “Yes. Like that.”

  “I see. And how was it that you were able to tell it was such a watch? He did not take it off his wrist, did he?”

  “He was a rich fool.”

  Damn, damn, damn. Back to that.

  He leaned across the battered table.

  “All right. He was a rich fool. And you thought he would be easy to rob, no?”

  No answer now.

  “Did you decide straightaway you would rob, as soon as he had come in?”

  He thought then he saw a baffled look in the eyes behind the askew big spectacles. But when his question was answered he got no further.

  “I have told. He was a rich fool.”

  “So what exactly was happening? Did he refuse to give what you were demanding? Or did you attack at once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which? Which? I was asking two things. Which did you do? Demand, or attack without demanding?”

  “I attacked.”

  Wearily Ghote tried another approach.

  “Mr. Fardoomji, I have heard the testimony of your distinguished cousins, Mr. Homi and Mr. Bomi Dhunjeebhoy. They are saying that you are a person who was never thinking of anything but timepieces only. Is that so? You are that sort of person?”

  “I killed him.”

  In face of that assertion once again, Ghote nearly gave up. But he was determined not to let the least chance go by.

  “You killed him, Mr. Fardoomji,” he repeated. “So you are many times saying. So you were saying to A.I. Lobo.”

  He had put all the emphasis he could on to those last words, and as he spoke them he had looked at the narrow-faced Parsi as intently as a wheeling kite piercingly surveying the ground below. But he saw not the slightest sign of any reaction. No twitch of fear. No tiny spark of hope.

  He sighed and resumed his questioning.

  “You killed him, Mr. Fardoomji? What with did you kill him?”

  “With the weapon.”

  “I see. But what weapon?”