Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  “Very well, Inspector,” he said eventually. “I see you are determined to find the confession A.I. Lobo obtained was secured contrary to the regulations of the Criminal Procedure Code, as the brothers Dhunjeebhoy were unfortunate enough to allege here in your presence. That is your privilege, I suppose. But, let me tell you, I will not tolerate this investigation, which has attracted not a little public attention, being allowed to hang fire interminably.”

  He flicked back the cuff of his shirt sleeve and looked at the gleaming Tata Titan Exacto on his wrist.

  “I am going to give you just twenty-four hours, Inspector,” he said. “Twenty-four hours exactly to come up with clear proof that any one of the three names you put before me did indeed kill this fellow at that Tick Tock place. It is now—”

  Another scrutiny of the Titan.

  “It is now precisely fourteen-nineteen hours. Unless by fourteen-nineteen hours tomorrow you have brought me that proof I shall order you back to normal duties. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”

  It seemed to Ghote that it was only one half second later that he was standing outside on the pavement, staring vacantly at the tall hedge surrounding the Oval Maidan across the wide road in front of him, with behind it vague figures in white moving to and fro, the inevitable cricket players.

  Standing staring, and trying to get his thoughts together. Twenty-four hours. It was not long. Not long to come up with definite proof that one of those three had battered Ramrao Pendke to death. If only there was no choice. If only he could be certain, for instance, that Raghu Barde was his man. He could stand there then, for every one of the twenty-four hours if need be, and hammer a true confession out of the fellow. Or, if he was as certain that Ganpatrao Pendke was his man, he could break him inside that time. Arrogance lasted only so long. Or the Sarpanch. Twenty-four hours would be altogether too long for him to go on wriggling and evading and lying. Before the time was up he himself would have pinned that greasy miscreant till he could squirm and invent no more.

  But there was really so little to choose between any of them. And time was already passing. Some minutes already lost forever.

  He glanced at the watch on his wrist to see just how many. And found, of course, there was no watch on his wrist.

  Achcha, he thought, that settles it. At least I know now what to do first. Get myself one watch. I cannot be all the time asking how long it is till the D.G.P.’s deadline when I am all along not knowing whether it is three o’clock or half past ten.

  Seizing his scooter, he rode as fast as he could, hooting his tweety little horn with the best of them, yet again through the jostling traffic up to the Big Ben Watch Stores.

  Would prosing old Mr. Big Ben have actually mended his own watch? Despite the time he had said it would have to take? It was possible. The fellow might have taken to heart what he had said to him about the importance of a police officer possessing a reliable means of telling the time, in spite of all that Shri Kipling stuff.

  But, he thought, snaking his machine through a gap between a smart new red Maruti and a chugging, side-scraped old bus, had he perhaps deserved to be Kipling admonished? With all that shouting and demanding in the shop that morning, had he not failed to behave as a Man, my son? Perhaps been a little childish?

  Well, he would be calm and collected now.

  But his resolution nearly went up in smoke before he had even entered Mr. Big Ben’s shop. In its window the card saying PUNCTUALITY IS THE POLITENESS OF PRINCES (RAJKUMARS) had been replaced by another. It read: FORGIVENESS IS BETTER THAN REVENGE. Was that aimed at him personally?

  No. No, he must not get paranoid.

  He entered the shop. Mr. Big Ben had his back turned to the counter, bending over his workbench, watchglass screwed to his eye.

  Ghote coughed.

  No response, though there was a mirror in front of the bench in which customers entering could be observed.

  He coughed again.

  Still no response.

  Well, concentration on the job in hand without worrying about the passing of time or any other consideration was deserving of praise. But, on the other hand . . .

  “Bhai sahib,” he said loudly.

  At that the old man did turn round.

  “Ah, it is you, Inspector,” he said. “But you have come too early. Too early altogether. And it is as bad, you know, to be too early as it is to be too late.”

  Ghote very nearly banged out at the old man the retort he had had to suppress when the D.G.P. had given him that same infuriating and not altogether logical advice. But his need to have a watch on his wrist once more was too acute.

  “Bhai sahib,” he said, forcing himself to sound reasonable, “I am very badly requiring to have a watch. Is it not at all possible for you to repair mine here and now only?”

  Mr. Big Ben looked at him with an expression of overwhelming piety.

  “And all my other customers,” he said, “why should they suffer?”

  “But—but I am a police officer. My need is greater.”

  “To know whether it is thirteen minutes past the hour or twelve only? My son, you should learn to tell needs from desires.”

  Ghote swallowed that, with as much difficulty as a cat swallowing a hair ball.

  “Well, it is my bounden duty to note the exact times of certain occurrences,” he said. “So, if you cannot mend my own watch, can you perhaps be lending me some other? One that is reliable.”

  “If a watch is leaving this shop,” Mr. Big Ben said with a froth of indignation, “it is guaranteed reliable. Kindly do not question that. ”

  “No, no. I am not at all questioning.”

  For a daring moment then, he actually contemplated laying out cash to buy a brand-new watch. There was a display of Tata Titans on the wall beside the old man, smaller by far than the one in the Tick Tock Watchworks but still impressive. And there was a case, too, of rather dusty H.M.T. products, as carried by Mr. Saxena, of the watches-covered, hairy forearm. But he thought of the economies such an impulse-buy would necessitate over the coming months, if not years, and was checked.

  “Bhai sahib,” he said, “I am asking. Can you find some watch to lend me while mine is repaired only?”

  A gleam came into Mr. Big Ben’s squinty eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, savoring the word. “Yes, I have got one repaired watch here which a customer has not collected for three four months. You can be having that. For a police officer the good citizen will always go to his level best.”

  “Thank you,” Ghote said, striving for the right note of humility.

  The gleam in the old man’s eyes was plainly malicious now. It had been a terrible mistake to hint at the unreliability of any of his work.

  “Mind,” he said, “what I am giving is an Ulhasnagar affair and no more. But those fellows cannot fool me with their name-stamps shame-stamps. I can put right all their workmanship, if I am wanting.”

  Ghote knew he ought to reject the old man’s challenge to accept a fake, however well repaired. But what the fellow had said had started in his mind a spark running fizzingly along a sprinkled gunpowder train.

  Ulhasnagar watches, of course destined not to last in their imitation foreign cases given extra weight with slips of lead. Ramrao Pendke, the rich fool, as Rustom Fardoomji had been persuaded by A.I. Lobo to call him, with his fake Rolex. Fardoomji saying, as a mere aside during his interview with him, that the rich fool had come into his shop wanting a new watch. Why should he have needed a new watch, unless his present one had become broken? And if it was broken, it would have stopped. It would have stopped not at the moment Ramrao Pendke had entered the Tick Tock Watch works, but some time earlier.

  So the battered hands of the fake gold Rolex had not indicated the time of the murder at all. Any calculations based on it having taken place at 11:08 were meaningless. It must have happened at some altogether later time.

  Mechanically he held out his hand as Mr. Big Ben leaned over
his counter holding out the watch he had said he would lend him. Hardly noticing, he strapped it on his wrist and went wandering, still thinking, out of the shop.

  Mr. Big Ben found not a single moral sentiment to speed him on his way.

  Then, standing on the pavement about to mount his scooter, the new watch ticking away unnoticed on his wrist, the full further implications of what he had just realized came to him. Like the swift darkening of a sun-bright day under an eclipse.

  If old D’Sa had been right, after all, and it had really been Ramrao Pendke he had seen in the August Kranti Maidan at, as he had said, precisely 11:27, then the murder must have taken place at, more or less, 11:40, the time it would have taken to go on foot from the maidan to the watch shop. And that meant, first, that Raghu Barde now had a complete alibi. He had been seen at the faraway T.I.F.R. meeting by the pretty engineer, Amita Modi, at seven or eight minutes past 11:30 at the latest. But, second, it meant that Ganpatrao Pendke, and the Sarpanch as well, had a perfect alibi. They had met the mechanic at the Rajabi Tower at exactly 11:32.

  So, was it now certain, after all, that it had been Rustom Fardoomji who had killed his rich-fool customer? No. Not altogether. If, as now seemed certain, Ramrao Pendke had been attacked at the Tick Tock Watchworks at about 11:40, the gap in time between then and when the Parsi had spoken to Constable Vaingankar on traffic control duty at the junction of S.S. Patkar Road and Balbunath Road, a good distance away from his shop, was much less than it had seemed before. So Fardoomji’s first story of having found the body when he came up from his workshop and having gone simply to look for a policeman to report the death was all the more likely.

  It provided him with no real alibi, of course. Mike Lobo could still flourish that confession against him. But now it looked even more possible that the confession had sprung from acute physical fear and no more.

  And there was worse.

  He felt a sudden heaviness inside himself, as if some vital organ—would it be the pancreas?—had been abruptly stricken.

  Now the business of providing clear proof for the D.G.P. that someone other than Rustom Fardoomji was the murderer, and finding that proof within twenty-four hours, had become a thousand times more difficult. More than a thousand times by far, because he must now look for his killer among all eight-nine million inhabitants of Bombay, plus also visitors.

  He got onto his scooter and, kicking it into life, swung into the swirling, hooting stream of passing traffic. But he had no idea where to head for. Anywhere might lead him now to his murderer. Any one place was as good as another.

  Then he thought there was one thing at least he ought to do. If Raghu Barde, behind bars at headquarters, could not possibly have killed Ramrao Pendke, then at least he must be set free.

  The doing of that did not take long, even when in a moment of curiosity Ghote asked the tall, bald young mathematician why it was he had produced his two false accounts of his movements on the morning of the murder.

  Raghu Barde gave him the warm smile he had seen only once or twice before.

  “Inspector,” he said, “you are a better mathematician than you think if you were able to work out that those dabbawallas were unlikely to remember which day in a sequence it was when I tripped on their tray.”

  Then he bit his lip in sudden embarrassment.

  “But I see I must give you my explanation all the same,” he went on. “Well, the fact is that I was down in Kamathipura that morning, and I was ashamed to say I was visiting a whore there. I don’t know if you will understand. But, you see, I feel I cannot marry when I have responsibilities to the poor people I was born among. Yet I am a man and have the desires of a man.”

  “You were going to a prostitute at eleven in the morning?” Ghote asked with visible astonishment, before wishing he had managed to keep his mouth shut.

  “Oh, Inspector, why not? Needs of that sort are not regulated by the clock, you know. They do not take place only between the hours of, say, six-twenty-five p.m. and eleven-fifty-five.”

  It was Ghote’s turn now to look shame-faced.

  “Of course, yes, I know,” he said. “And Barde sahib, may I be wishing you all good luck henceforth in selling those fine baskets and weaving work. May Village Khindgaon never change. Best of luck. ”

  As if he were being rewarded for promptly freeing the Gandhian mathematician, Ghote found, as he left him, that he knew, after all, what his next step should be. It was no great advance. But it was the only thing that seemed to lie ahead. He would have to arm himself with a photograph of Ramrao Pendke and ask anybody he came across in the vicinity of the Tick Tock Watch works whether they had seen its subject on the morning of Tuesday last and if they had noticed anyone following him or entering the watch shop at his heels.

  It was the barest of possibilities. But such pieces of luck had come to him and his colleagues in the past. There were always, thank goodness, idlers in the streets of Bombay with nothing more to do than stare at passersby. Perhaps one of them would have noticed something, might have remembered . . .

  There was only one bright side: it was altogether certain A.I. Lobo would not have undertaken any such time-consuming, wearisome task.

  But first he had to get a copy of Ramrao Pendke’s photograph out of Lobo. And when he got to the station to ask for that, he found, as he had half expected, he was not getting much cooperation from the man whose motto-inscribed watch he had so fiercely rejected. It was plain Lobo very much intended still to be “First Past the Post.”

  “Photo, Inspector? What the hell do you want a photo of the guy for? I told you, your pet suspects are top-notch in the clear. There’s nothing more to be done now, man, till I take our little Parsi friend before a magistrate.”

  Seething with vexation at the thought that his “pet suspects” were indeed in the clear, if not for the reason Lobo thought, Ghote returned to the attack.

  “Nevertheless, A.I.,” he said, “I am wishing to check up to one hundred and one percent on each and every circumstance. I need that photo to be taking to all the places near the Tick Tock Watch works.”

  “Well, sorry to God, man, but I haven’t anymore got a photo.”

  “But, A.I., you were saying you had the same. You were saying you had with all the other material on the case.”

  “Was I, Inspector? Well, bless you, I was wrong.”

  Ghote fumed.

  “Very well, then,” he said, striving to keep his voice icy calm, “I shall have to ask at Mid-Day newspaper. I am knowing they were using one picture.”

  Lobo grinned.

  “And who do you think gave it to them, man? One Mike Lobo. That’s who. Got to make the most of a good murder inquiry landing on your plate, hey? And who do you think asked for the photo back? One Mike Lobo. And where it is now, God alone knows.”

  “I need a photograph of Ramrao Pendke,” Ghote said. “Make a search, A.I. Now. That is an order.”

  “Okay, okay. If you’re so set on it, though Jesus knows what you hope to prove.”

  Watching Lobo go sauntering off, Ghote sighed and thought his chances of ever seeing a photo were almost nil. And he had now only— He looked at his borrowed Ulhasnagar watch. It turned out to be an imitation of an extraordinarily elaborate affair, a Seiko Sports 100, with no fewer than three inner dials, all ticking around, and a sweep second hand that made it even more difficult to decide what the actual time was. But eventually he made it out.

  He now had just over twenty-two hours of the D.G.P.’s twenty-four.

  “Hey, Inspector, did I hear you asking about a photo of Ramrao Pendke?”

  It was Sub-Inspector Shruti Shah. She had just come in, looking as always as if she ought to have been there ten minutes before, hair as usual falling down in front of her face, eyes as usual shining with active zeal.

  “Yes,” Ghote said. “Yes, I am very much wanting.”

  Only some remaining sense of keeping discipline and good order prevented him from adding that he never expected A.
I. Lobo to let him have one.

  “Well, I have got,” Shruti said. “Mike was issuing a few straightaway after the murder, copies of one he was finding in the dead man’s wallet. But then, when they were so pleased with the confession he had got, he asked for them back. But I was late coming that day, and he was missing me. So I still have mine. Do you want it?”

  She began scrabbling in her handbag.

  “Thank you very much, S.I.,” Ghote said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Shruti Shah’s photograph of the Tick Tock Watchworks victim brought Ghote no quick success. Ever aware of the minutes and hours slipping by on his complicated imitation Seiko Sports watch, he trudged here and there for all the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. He visited address after address in the area close to Rustom Fardoomji’s shop to no avail. He stopped every passerby he could, he accosted every idle onlooker, and still found no one who would admit to so much as having seen Ramrao Pendke the previous Tuesday morning. Let alone anyone who had noticed him being followed by someone else.

  He was handicapped in his search, he knew, by not being able to conduct it at exactly the equivalent hour to that which, the week before, Ramrao had left the Shrimati Usha Yadekar Clinic, walked round the August Kranti Maidan, where old D’Sa had seen him, and, returning, had taken his stopped fake Rolex into the Tick Tock Watchworks. But to leave inquiries until the next morning, precisely one week after the murder, would be altogether too much of a risk. There would then be barely four hours before he would have to leave to report to the D.G.P. by his deadline time of 1419 hours.

  No, there were some eighteen hours still remaining in total.

  He must, if he possibly could, use every minute of every one of them. Otherwise, Rustom Fardoomji would be taken before a magistrate and—almost beyond doubt—in trembling fear would repeat the confession he had made to Lobo. And had repeated, again and again, to himself.

  The evening drew on. The character of the people in the streets around Fardoomji’s shuttered shop changed. Gone were the pavement vendors with their small collections of magazines and newspapers spread out in front of them or their tiny displays of items of cheap jewelry or little piles of wilting vegetables. In their place, down at Kemp’s Corner itself, cars and taxis were stopping to disgorge the well-off on their way to the area’s restaurants. No hope at all for a piece of luck there. Nearer the watch shop the less affluent were busy with last-minute marketing, and disinclined, to say the least, to stop and answer questions.