Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  But all the same he felt the faintest of uneasinesses at the back of his mind. It was as if, he thought, back in his village boyhood some sense of which he was hardly aware had warned him that a snake was coiled asleep under a rock he was about to sit on.

  Even this new alibi, though for the life of him he could not see how it was not all that it seemed to be, was somehow unsatisfactory.

  He sighed.

  Yet, if the alibi was the simple truth, it meant conclusively that Barde was not the murderer of Ramrao Pendke. But then neither was Ganpatrao Pendke nor the Sarpanch: there was, so it appeared, the evidence of the clock mechanic at the Rajabi Tower for that.

  Which seemed to leave only wretched Rustom Fardoomji. And Mike Lobo right after all.

  A spasm of rage and determination flared up in him.

  No, he would not go along to headquarters and let Raghu Barde go, as he had begun to feel he ought to do. He would still keep a glim of belief that somehow the fellow’s second alibi was as false as the first.

  And neither, by God, would he give up Ganpatrao and the Sarpanch just on the strength of those few shouted words from Mike Lobo as he had sat there on his scooter at the red signal at Flora Fountain. He would go straightaway, yes, and see if he could get hold of the Rajabi Tower mechanic at Lund and Blockley Watchmakers. From his lips he would insist on hearing just what that no-good pair from Village Dharbani had done at the tower. Just what time they had arrived and what time they had left.

  At Lund and Blockley’s—Ghote shook his head in wonder that this was the same firm whose Mr. Lund, back in 1858, had constructed the extraordinary thirteen-dial timepiece, now permanently stuck at twenty-five minutes to two, which he had used up time contemplating when he had been too early for that first meeting with the D.G.P.—he found he had run into a piece of luck. The mechanic in charge of the Rajabi Tower clock, he was told, had left to go there only a minute or two earlier. It was the regular day when the great clock had to be wound.

  He hurried off in the man’s wake to the university building overlooking the Oval Maidan. In the porch of the big old British-days building with its statues in niches of the peoples of Western India as seen by the English sculptor, the mild Hindu, the shrewd Kutchi, the fierce Rajput, the prayerful Parsi, he caught up with the mechanic and his two attendant coolies. They were just about to begin their climb up to the top of the tower. He hailed the mechanic and explained his business.

  “An assistant inspector, one A.I. Lobo, was coming to see you yesterday, no?” he concluded. “I am just only checking up on one or two additional points.”

  The mechanic, a sturdy, keen-eyed fellow in a neat check shirt and well-creased trousers, nodded in agreement.

  “You are wanting to come up also and see the clock workings?” he asked. “Your A.I. yesterday did not. Too much of hard work, he was saying. Well, I must go up myself every fifth day, hard work or not, week in week out, isn’t it? Feast or festival, it is making no difference.”

  “Achcha, I will come up also,” Ghote said, determined to accept a challenge Mike Lobo had declined.

  Up and up they climbed, slowly and steadily. Ghote, to begin with, attempted to make some conversation.

  “Tell me, bhai sahib, how old is this tower actually? It was here when I was coming to Bombay first, and even then it was looking ancient.”

  “Oh, yes, it is dating from year 1869 and is in height two hundred and eighty feet,” the mechanic intoned. “It was taking nine years to build, gifted by one Mr. Premchand Roychand, who was known by the name of Uncrowned King of Bombay. It was his mother only who was one Rajabi, so it is Rajabi Tower.” Ghote was feeling every step of those 280 feet now, on bruised back and aching legs.

  “Used to have fail-safe electric mechanism,” his guide went remorselessly on, apparently not at all out of breath. “Back in the 1930s. But the fail-safe itself was failing. Look.”

  He gestured at a row of huge grimy switch-boxes on the wall beside him, greened over and fused with rust.

  “All things pass,” he said prosily. “All things excepting only Time itself. And my old clock that is recording its each and every minute.”

  Ghote, grabbing a faint puff of cooler air coming in through one of the narrow vents in the tower’s sides, was unable to get out any answer.

  On they went. The mechanic stepping easily upward, Ghote toiling just behind him, the two coolies padding on naked feet a few steps in the rear.

  At last, when Ghote had almost come to believe he would have to cry off, they came to a narrow door and the mechanic halted. He drew a large key from his pocket and turned it in the door’s lock.

  “Machine room,” he said.

  To Ghote the place looked not unlike the navigator’s cabin on some ship. It had, too, four small doors, one in each wall, leading out to balconies underneath the four gigantic opal-colored glass clock dials. Through the room from ceiling to floor there ran a massive steel rope, the centerpiece of the clock mechanism.

  “Look downward,” the mechanic said. “You can see the metal discs we are putting on the bottom which as they descend turn these cogwheels.”

  Ghote took a quick look down, stemming the first traces of vertigo.

  “What is that loud noise I am hearing?” he asked, quickly straightening.

  “Oh, it is what we are calling escape mechanism. Look upward and you can see it. It is regulating the clock, letting the weights drop only one little bit at a time. But my fellows are ready to begin winding the weights to the top again. I must just screw in the turning wheel. One moment only.”

  He jumped up on a plank and set to work. Then, at a signal, his coolies started marching around and around, winding the steel rope onto its huge barrel above.

  Ghote took advantage of the pause while they worked to ask the questions he felt he had earned by his long climb.

  “This clock of yours is keeping very good time?” he began cunningly.

  “Perfect. Perfect time.”

  “So, I suppose you yourself are always having a very good idea of what is the time?”

  “Yes, yes. I am always checking my own watch. At office we have chronometers. Never one half second out.”

  “So you would know just exactly what time those gentlemen that A.I. Lobo was asking about came here and left also?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. To the minute I am knowing.”

  “So, kindly refresh my memory, what time was it you told the A.I. they were arriving and departing?”

  “Oh, I was not at all telling him exact times. Did he inform you I was?”

  “No, no,” Ghote said hastily. “I was not explaining very clearly. A.I. Lobo told me only what you were telling him.”

  “That those two gentlemen were here just only some time in the morning of that day? He was not asking precise times.”

  “Yes, yes. That is it. So what were those precise times?”

  Had Lobo once more been too expeditious, Ghote thought to himself. But what would the precise times reveal?

  “They were coming at eleven-thirty-two,” the mechanic said. “It was arranged we would meet at eleven-thirty. I was here, but they were two minutes late. And they were leaving at eleven-fifty-seven. I had said I could give one half hour to them.” Ghote felt joy running through him, sharp and biting as the fierce joy of a hunting leopard. So Mike Lobo had got it altogether wrong. Ganpatrao Pendke and the Sarpanch had neither of them an alibi for the time of the murder, that 11:08 marked out forever on the smashed hands of Ramrao Pendke’s fake gold Rolex.

  Now he had under his hand two men, both more than ready to disregard any law that stood in their way, each with good reason for wanting Ramrao Pendke dead. While, set against them, Mike Lobo’s Rustom Fardoomji had as motive only that sudden seizure by greed, which Lobo, in any case, seemed to have thrust into his mind. A man obsessed with his clocks and watches to the point of disregard for everything else, one it was hard to believe in as a brutal, battering murderer.

  And also, Gho
te thought, I can release Raghu Barde now. Forget that niggling feeling of something being a little wrong with his second alibi.

  But, damn it, he added, the hunting joy still coursing through him, Mr. Barde can wait. What I must do now is to think just exactly what will be my next step so as to get myself a first-class case against those two, one of them or both. I want a case no one can blow away, not Mike Lobo, not the D.G.P. himself.

  Plan. Plan carefully. That is the thing. Get it right. From start to finish. Each and every time and detail.

  And at that moment, without a watch, he knew from the clock in his stomach that it was time to eat. And where better to eat and to plan in peace and quietness than in his own home? And, besides, it would be a chance to look for Ved’s book, The Human Body in Pictures.

  At home, Protima seemed delighted to see him, despite the spat of rage with which he had left her at the start of the day. She made no difficulties about preparing him some lunch without warning, and appeared distinctly pleased to be going to do better herself than the couple of bananas she had intended as her own modest meal.

  While she was busy in the kitchen, Ghote looked about for The Human Body in Pictures. He found it almost at once and took that as a good omen. As soon as he had eaten he would get down to planning his operation in peace. He would see his way to success. Things had begun to go well from the moment that the Rajabi Tower mechanic had declared that he was such an accurate timekeeper. They were going to go on getting better and better.

  He riffled eagerly though the big colored pages of Ved’s old book. And, yes, there they were, the kidneys.

  There was a big diagram, on a left-hand page, of the body seen as a kind of factory. At the top someone sat in the head at a computer panel. Just below came two massive cogwheels, not unlike the black-greased cogs of the huge clock he had just been looking at, the teeth. Then there was a sort of downward-plunging factory chimney, labeled oesophagus, with at its foot two sewerwallas busy shoveling away in the stomach. And, to the left and right of that, there came a pair of wooden presses, each worked by a merrily grinning boy, much like the old oil mill of his village days, though much cleaner, the kidneys.

  So now he knew where those were, at least.

  And on the opposite page, to confirm his new knowledge, there was a more realistic representation of the inside of the body, an outline skeleton on a black background. And there again, printed in a cheerful blue, were the two kidney-shaped objects, with between them something lumpy in pink, the pancreas, whatever that did.

  He felt yet more pleased with life, happy almost as the two grinning boys churning away at their oil-mill kidneys.

  Protima brought in the meal she had cooked, delicious fried slices of spiced purple-skinned pale yellow baigan with a quartered sweetlime beside them and curds with cucumber, cooling and nourishing. He tackled both with greedy pleasure. Filled with this, he would get down to his planning with double vigor.

  “Sit, sit,” he said to Protima, through a mouth filled with aubergine. “Eat also. This is delicious.”

  “And for once you are at home,” she answered with the tiniest touch of sharpness, something he thought he would ignore.

  “Take more,” he said, seeing how little she had helped herself to.

  “Yes, today you come home. But where were you the night before last? And the night before that? Where were you again just only ten days before that? Away then for two nights and three days.”

  “Oh, come,” he answered amusedly, “that was when we were questioning the culprits in the Bandra bank dacoity. That was three weeks ago, more.”

  But, to his surprise and sinking dismay, temper flashed up at once in Protima’s eyes.

  “Three weeks? Three weeks? That is what you are thinking. That is how you look on your wife. Someone you cannot remember whether you were away from three weeks ago or three months. I tell you, the time you were away those two whole nights and three whole days with your bank dacoity question-questions was just only ten days past. Not one more.”

  Foolishly, hardly knowing why, he contradicted her.

  “No, no. It is you who are wrong. That was at least three weeks ago. What day is it today? Monday. Well, then, it was three weeks ago exactly. We began on a Monday. We broke them on the Wednesday.”

  “No.”

  He might have slapped her with a chappal, so outraged did she sound.

  “Yes, I tell you, yes,” he answered, all good humor drained away as if from the oil-mill kidneys in Ved’s book.

  Protima sat and glared at him, reduced for a few instants to enraged silence.

  “Wait, I will prove it,” she exploded then. “Do not be relying on me. I am just only your wife. Your wife that you think cannot so much as count the days on a calendar. Your wife who has to stay in the house all day and every day until she is no more able to tell one from another. But I will prove it. I will go straightaway next door to Mrs. Govekar. She is remembering everything, she can put one thing after another, she always is getting it right. You would see.”

  At any other time Ghote might have taken up the challenge. They had consulted the Mrs. Govekar oracle before, and he knew that the lady in her busy, clockwork mind did indeed keep a chronological list of every event in the neighborhood. If sometimes after a little “No, that was the day your Radha Auntie came to see you” and some “No, no, the day before when in the market watermelons were so cheap,” she could finally be relied on always to produce the correct facts.

  But at this moment something Protima had ripped out in her rage had struck him dumb.

  “Your wife who has to stay in the house all day and every day until she is no more able to tell one from another.”

  That was by no means actually true of Protima, who lived a life of not a little variety. But it was true of someone else. The dabbawalla he had spoken to at Churchgate Station. Dabbawallas lived lives that were truly ones of unvarying routine. Up each day at the same hour in order to be in time to collect the dabbas from the houses they served and get to the station when the train was due. Pushing the same racks of dabbas into the same compartment of the same train as on the day before and the day before that. Sorting the dabbas on the train, moving the same cans from one place to another without variation. Unloading at Churchgate Station on the same few square feet of platform each day. Taking the heavily laden trays to the same appointed spot on the pavement outside to sort them again. Handing the same dabbas to the same fresh dabbawallas to take them on bicycle or running with a head-load or trotting a loaded handcart through the unyielding midday traffic—different in individuality but the same always in its mass—to the same office buildings and shops. Taking the same lifts up to the same upper floors of the same high-rises. Collecting the same dabbas empty in just the same way again each day. A hundred thousand of them in all, so they said.

  Their lives must be a blur, a whirl in a tiny endlessly self-repeating world, with only Sundays, day of blotted-out rest, to interrupt it.

  So how could such fellows mark out one day from another? How could they be certain that any particular incident had happened on a Tuesday rather than on the Monday before it or the Wednesday after?

  And, in all likelihood, Raghu Barde, the mathematician, had worked this out in a moment when he himself had so unexpectedly demanded of him out at Khindgaon where he had really been the previous Tuesday at 11:08. It was a risk to have taken, but it was one that had very nearly succeeded.

  Thank goodness he had not let the fellow go.

  He was too dazed by the possibilities of this new revelation to do anything more than to say tamely to Protima that, after all, she was probably right about when it was that he had had to be away interrogating the Bandra bank dacoits. She did not seem altogether pleased at his sudden acquiescence. For a moment a spark of his previous rage leaped up again and he thought of demanding if she was wanting him to go on claiming to be right so that she could have the pleasure of abusing him yet more. But he was too caught up by all that ha
d just come into his mind to have the heart for that.

  And before he had had time to say something nice about how good the lunch had been, the telephone rang.

  It was the D.G.P.’s secretary asking where he could be found. The D.G.P. was wanting to see him urgently.

  SEVENTEEN

  The urgency with which Ghote was wanted by the D.G.P. turned out, when, sweaty and somewhat muzzed from dashing once more through Bombay’s chaotic traffic on his scooter, he arrived at the D.G.P.’s office, to have been entirely in his secretary’s mind. All that the D.G.P. required was a progress report.

  Ghote felt happy to provide it. Thanks, he felt, to his determination in checking every exact time of each suspect’s alibi, he could say with confidence that Raghu Barde had twice provided false information. Coupled with the clear motive the man had, there was a very good case against him. And he was safely in custody, put there by himself. Even as a fall-back he had, too, ascertained that Ganpatrao Pendke’s account of his movements at the time of the murder, and those of the Sarpanch, had almost certainly been deliberately vague. So, altogether he could present the D.G.P. with three suspects, each of whom looked much more likely to be guilty than the Dhunjeebhoy brothers’ watches-obsessed cousin.

  The D.G.P. would surely be delighted to be given an explanation of the murder that answered the plea the Dhunjee-bhoys had made. And now perhaps he would take a different view of the merits of a certain A.I. Lobo.

  But, as he brought forward times and places one after another, Ghote saw the D.G.P.’s expression had not changed from the look of acutely critical attention he had assumed at the outset. It was clear that each logical deduction was being absorbed. But none of them seemed, Ghote began increasingly to be aware, to be having the effect he had hoped for.

  At last he brought his recital to an end.

  “Hm,” said the D.G.P.

  He propped his elbows on his wide desk—Ghote in front of it did not dare relax from his position of strict attention—and considered.