Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  He knew then that Raghu Barde had made off. He had not gone down to the canteen for a cup of tea. He was not visiting some fellow staff member. He had fled.

  The moment this had fully sunk in he guessed where his man would have gone. To his native place. To Village Khindgaon. He had not mentioned the name of the village earlier. So, in all probability, he believed it would take the police some little time to trace him. He must think he had a safe refuge for some hours, even some days.

  Then there was only one thing for it. To get out to Khindgaon himself as fast as he was able.

  If he drove there, hard as he could go, he could arrive well before Barde taking the night train to Nagpur and having to wait in the morning for the bus out to Khindgaon. He could take him totally by surprise. And then he would get a confession out of him. He could hardly fail. A confession to put up against the one Mike Lobo had got in his own doubtful way. But his confession would be backed by facts, details, times. By God, it would.

  FOURTEEN

  l/lore than once during the long, long drive through the night in a hastily ordered jeep, Ghote thought he was going to have to abandon the attempt to get to Raghu Barde’s native village before the tall, bald, rage-prone mathematician could reach its safety himself. The first part of the journey, out of the long, sea-bound peninsula of Bombay itself, had gone better than he had dared to hope. The great evening traffic snarl had almost come to an end and he had made faster progress than he had counted on. He had expected, once clear of the city, to drive at speed on the almost empty night roads. But he had reckoned without his gray-smeared tiredness after the turmoil that he begun with the motorcycle attack out at Dharbani, which had left him so badly bruised.

  But eventually he realized he was passing that very point on the highway. He thought at once with a shudder then of how his body, had he not been found by Sitabai and had continued to lie there unconscious, might already have been ravaged by vultures there in the long, concealing grass.

  But why had Ganpatrao chosen to attack him in that way? he wondered with weariness. It must have been purely on impulse. Not because he feared this Bombay police officer would prove he had killed his cousin-brother. After all, it seemed probable he had not done that. If Raghu Barde had fled, that was surely a strong indication that he rather than Ganpatrao was the Tick Tock murderer. No, it must have been because he believed that this Bombaywalla knew of the plan to mine manganese. He must have feared that through him the secret would get back to the Patil and lose him his inheritance.

  Yes, that in all probability must be the answer.

  At last, blank with fatigue and with his every bruise another point of fire, just after dawn he found the turning to Village Khindgaon, some fifteen miles beyond Dharbani. He drove then, lurching over the unevennesses of a path a good deal narrower and seemingly much less used than the one leading to Dharbani, as far as he thought it wise to take the jeep. When in the first thin white light of the new day he spotted a small grove of mango trees, he at once swung the wheel and made for its shelter. Then at last, happy that Raghu Barde, when some hours later he would come walking from the bus stopping place, would not spot the vehicle, he clambered down.

  For long moments he stood stretching and breathing in the night-cooled air. His boyhood days came flooding back to him then like a clean tide. Days when, waking early, he would creep out of the house to delight in the newness of everything before anyone else in the world was there to muddy it. Dawns when he had stood, like a sharp-prowed boat awaiting the moment of launching, welcoming the prospect of new experiences, new encounters, to be seized upon, taken in, fitted into the gradually emerging pattern.

  Little had he guessed then that the pattern in the end would sprawl far from village simplicities and unvarying timelessness into the hustle-bustle of Bombay, its ever-ingenious criminal ploys, its minute-by-minute days, ruthlessly parceled out.

  But that had happened to him. He was caught up now inescapably in the clicking, tick-tocking world of duties and events. In the world of his duty to confront one Raghu Barde and explode the times-cunning alibi he had concocted.

  He set off along the dust-thick path toward the village.

  But, barely had he gone a hundred yards, when he was brought to a sharp halt. There was some other person about at this empty hour. A man’s voice, low and murmuring, was coming from behind a bank of earth at the corner of a field where a solitary palas tree grew.

  He took a few steps forward, noiseless on the soft layer of dust, and cocked his head to catch the murmured words.

  “Listen to my prayer, Churail. Hear me, great spirit. Forget my many sins. O Churail, I did not sacrifice a cockerel to you when it was the time. Churail, take away my misfortunes now, and, Churail, two cockerels, two, will be yours on the next night of no moon. Churail, I swear it. This I am promising. Promising.”

  Ghote stood in startled wonder.

  With the rational part of his mind he knew that in many places in vast India, far from the cities, their chronometers and computers, there must be people of primitive simplicity who still sacrificed animals to propitiate active malignant spirits. There had even been a case, famous in the annals of Crime Branch itself, when two Bombay detectives had eventually brought to light a group in the countryside practicing human sacrifice. But to hear with his own city-attuned ears what he had just been listening to brought home to him abruptly just how far he was at this moment from the rational world he had been immersed in now for years.

  At last he went, silent-footed, onward, the murmuring of that frightened prayer gradually dying away behind him.

  Khindgaon, when he came to it, proved to be hardly a village at all. There was a small crumbling badly whitewashed temple and just a cluster of huts, their sides plastered with drying dung fuel-cakes each marked still with the imprint of the hand of the woman who had slapped it there.

  No one was about. Ghote went and sat behind the broken remains of a bullock cart, which looked as if it had been there, slowly falling to pieces, weeds growing up through it, for years without number. And he waited till, with the first warm rays of the sun, one by one the villagers began to emerge and, each carrying a water pot, make their way to the fields.

  He sat on where he was, unobserved, and waited for their return. Then, taking care not to startle anyone, he stepped out and accosted the man he had thought looked most likely to be responsive.

  “Ram, Ram. Tell me, which is the house of the weaver’s son who goes all the way to Bombay?”

  The man looked at him, took his time to decide whether this was a question he could reply to, decided that it was, and pointed to one of the huts.

  “Salubai Ma there only now,” he said. “Raghubhai sometimes coming.”

  Ghote thanked him and went over to the hut. On the mud platform in front of it stood a weaver’s loom with a half-finished piece of cloth, intricate in pattern and rich with color, still on it. In the dark interior, beyond the heavy time-gnarled plank of a door, pushed back to its full extent, he made out the dim shape of an old woman in a white widow’s sari. Bent-backed and pottering, she was preparing to light a fire under the cooking stove.

  After a moment he called out to her, asking if she was the mother of Raghu Barde.

  She came hobbling out into the now warm daylight, tugging the pallu of her sari over her head.

  “You are wanting my Raghu?” she asked. “He is not here. He is in Bombay, far away. In Bombay he is very important sahib. He comes here only sometimes. He helps the weavers and basketmakers to sell what they are making.”

  “Yes, yes. I know. But I believe he is coming back here today. I would like to wait for him.”

  “Oh, no, no, sahib. Raghu has been gone only five-six days. He would not come again for some time.”

  “But I think he will, after all, come today. May I wait in your hut?”

  “Yes, yes, sahib. You are welcome, if you are wanting. I will have tea soon.”

  The old woman tottered back in, an
d before Ghote had even mounted the time-hollowed step up onto the platform of the hut, she emerged again dragging what was clearly her sleeping mat.

  “Sahib, I will put it here for you. There is shade. Sit, sit. Take rest.”

  “No, no,” Ghote answered, seeing his plan to catch Raghu Barde by surprise being innocently frustrated. “I would like to come inside.”

  The old woman made no objection to the curious wishes of the person from the distant city and dragged the mat back in again. Ghote followed her, ducking beneath the embroidered good-luck cloth strung across the hut’s low doorway.

  Inside, he had to come to a complete halt so dense was the darkness.

  Raghu Barde’s mother saw his difficulty.

  “Wait, wait,” she said. “I will light the lamp for you.”

  Ghote would have liked to prevent her. The unstinting hospitality was doubly embarrassing. To begin with, Salubai was plainly poor. But then she was also the mother of the man he had come to Khindgaon to trick into confessing to murder. But there was nothing he could do.

  In the darkness he heard the rattle of a matchbox as the old woman reached it down from some high shelf. There followed the sound of her panting breathing. For a moment it puzzled him. Then he remembered how in his own boyhood it had frequently been necessary to blow on a match head to get rid of the moisture that had accumulated on it during the night.

  A few seconds later his recollection was proved accurate. There came the noise of the match being struck, and a little flare of yellow light sprang up. In a few moments more Raghu Barde’s mother had succeeded in transferring the flame to the wick of an oil lamp.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Ghote said.

  Nor could he stop the old woman then setting to, getting the fire under her stove going, and boiling tea.

  He sat in the orangey light from the wick floating smokily in the oil lamp, sipping the milky brew. He hoped at least it would be finished before the old woman’s son arrived and, in front of her, he had to extort from him an admission to committing murder.

  But he need not have worried. The tea was long finished and there was still no sign of Raghu Barde.

  Salubai left him in the hut and went to work at her loom. He remembered, as she began, that this was Sunday. Bustling Bombay would for a few hours of blessed quiet have come to a standstill. But here there were only days, each the same as the other.

  Here there were hours, though. Hours that crept leadenly along while nothing at all happened. The hut grew hotter and hotter as the sun rose in the sky. Sleep nudged at him. He shook himself. He must stay alert. He must be ready for the least sign of Raghu Barde returning, ready then to descend on his prey with total unexpectedness.

  To keep himself awake he began to make a mental inventory of all the objects in the hut. There were few enough of them. A small chest with an ancient brass padlock, containing, no doubt, the colored saris Salubai had worn before her widowhood and perhaps a few other precious things. On the mud walls two pictures, varnished with the smoke of days and days of cooking fires, one of elephant-trunked Ganesha, one of Goddess Laxmi, serenely seated on Shesh, the snake of eternity. A few cooking implements, a tin grater, two flat metal thalis, a copper water pot and another smaller one of brass, a heavy stone wheel for grinding spices. Then in a corner there was a large tin of vanaspati oil, only pure ghee could be better standing out in bright English lettering on the side facing him, no doubt mere signs to Salubai. A packet of tea, a small pot that had contained milk. Four cups and saucers precariously stored on one of the shelves scooped in the wall.

  Then, as he went over this list for the twelfth or thirteenth time, suddenly the squeak-squeak-squeak, clack-clack-clack of the loom outside, which had gone on monotonously, continuously ever since Salubai had left him, came to a halt.

  He shot to his feet, barged through the hut’s low doorway, and, straightening, saw Raghu Barde standing there, his cotton bag of books hanging from his shoulder.

  “Mr. Barde,” he said, bringing out his long-prepared words just as forcefully as he could have wished. “You and I have more to say to each other.”

  Raghu Barde’s mouth dropped open. His bag of books slipped from his shoulder and fell to the dusty, littered ground.

  Into the eyes below that high-domed forehead there leaped, plain to see, a look of animal fear.

  “Yes,” Ghote said. “You were hoping you had put me off the scent with a lie. You were thinking you could be tricking me by stating you had been at that meeting from its start only. Then, when I was saying I would check up your each and every claim, it was entering your head to escape. Here, to your native place. Did you think, Mr. Barde, the long arms of the police would not be reaching you even here?”

  “But—but—it is not so. No.”

  “No? It is not so that to stop Mr. Ramrao Pendke bringing here manganese mines, with all their machinery, all their noise, all their wanting of coolies only, to this village you are wanting to keep as it has been always, that you were killing him in a rage? Come, tell the whole truth. It is too late for anything else.”

  He had banged out his indictment, blow on blow. With each one he had seen that he was striking home. Until with those last words, “Tell the truth now. It is too late for anything else,” he thought he had seen at last, concentrating as he was on every least flicker of expression, a coming to a decision. There had been an internal straightening of the shoulders, the acceptance of black necessity.

  “Inspector . . .” the man standing beaten and defeated on the dusty ground below the hut platform began. “Inspector . . . yes. Yes, I was lying.”

  For a long moment Raghu Barde looked down at his feet, at the cotton shoulderbag lying sprawled beside them, at a crude little pull-cart toy made from the tin lids of two old jars that some village child had abandoned there. Then he brought his eyes up to look straight at Ghote on the low platform of the hut above.

  “Inspector,” he said, “I do not know, I really do not know, why it was that I was lying. No. No. Yes, I do know. It was because I was afraid. Afraid of the police, as I had been in my earliest days. I had thought I no longer needed to be, that I had now made my place in the world. As a scientist, a mathematician. But I was wrong. The moment you told that you were a police inspector I felt the beginnings of fear in my heart.”

  “You did well to fear,” Ghote said gratingly. “You had committed a crime. The worst of crimes.”

  But, even as he delivered the accusation, he saw from the face of the man he was accusing that, after all, he was not going to hear a plea of guilty. Barde had admitted to lying. But it was somehow plain that he was not going to admit to anything beyond lying.

  “No, Inspector. No. I did not kill Ramrao Pendke. Oh, yes, you have been right in what you were saying. When I was leaving him on the day before he was done to death I was wishing to kill him. He was determined to kill this village that I love. Yes, kill it, kill the life that has been led here for years upon years. And so, yes, I am not sorry that he has been killed itself. But mine was not the hand that killed him.”

  Despite what he had heard, and a tiny doubt that had crept in as he had listened, Ghote persisted.

  “Come, that is so much hot air and nonsense. You were enraged against Ramrao Pendke. You were battering him to death.”

  “No.”

  It was not any shouted, hysterical denial. It was a simple, calm declaration.

  Whether it was a declaration of truth or not, Ghote was unable to judge.

  It is possible, he thought, that the fellow has just only at this moment succeeded to throw off his fear of the police and has begun to defy me myself. It is possible also—he wished he could blot out the feeling—that this is not, after all, the man who has murdered Ramrao Pendke.

  There was no telling either way.

  “Very well,” Ghote went on, still the rock-hard accuser, “if it is that you were lying before about where you were at the time of the murder, what is the truth of the matter? Or what
new story are you going to give out?”

  Raghu Barde licked his lips.

  “Inspector,” he said, “I am not at all giving out any story. This is the whole truth.”

  A look that might have been calculation, or might merely have been an attempt to sort things out in his mind, passed across his face.

  “I admit I did not reach back to T.I.F.R. until after that eleven-thirty meeting had begun,” he said. “But the explanation is simple. I was in the city itself. All that I was doing was visiting—”

  He came to a stop. Then resumed.

  “All that I was doing was intending to visit a posh shop in Queen’s Road where they are selling the cloth the weavers here in Khindgaon make. I was going to ask if they had new orders. But, when I was nearly at that place, I remembered the meeting, and saw that I was almost too late. So I went back as quickly as I could and reached just only some minutes after the starting time. You may ask anybody who was there whether in the end I came. They will tell you it was so.”

  “Yes, very well,” Ghote answered. “Someone has already vouched for it that you were there. But by coming as late as you did, I am well knowing, you had time first to have killed Mr. Ramrao Pendke at the Tick Tock Watch works.”

  He stepped down from the platform and went up to Raghu Barde.

  “I am taking you to Bombay,” he said. “You have much more to answer.”

  FIFTEEN

  A look of horror, of fear almost as animal as that which had come over Raghu Barde when he had first been surprised, appeared on his face now.

  “No,” he shouted. “No. No, I will not go. No. Why should I be shut in your filthy lock-ups?”

  “There is no question of filthy lock-ups,” Ghote answered. “But you have once already lied concerning your whereabouts at the time of the murder. Why should I believe that you are no longer lying?”

  “But—but—but I can prove I was not at that watch shop. I can prove it.”

  “With a proof like your tale only of being at the meeting at T.I.F.R. from its start?”