Dead on Time

by H. R. F. Keating

  “Yes, yes, the one I was releasing you from, with that long fresh-looking scar all round his side. You were letting him go walking off without completing inquiries. Well, that is not my idea of proper policework. Not my idea at all.”

  “Yes,” Ghote said hollowly then. “Yes, I was letting him go. D’Sa sahib, we must find him. Find him at once. He must be the man who was battering Ramrao Pendke to death.”

  NINETEEN

  D’Sa looked at Ghote as if he were the one who was mad.

  “Inspector,” he said, “you are altogether fagged out. Let me go on with inquiries here. You go home and take rest.”

  Ghote heaved a burdened sigh.

  “No, Inspector,” he replied, “I have got good reasons, many of them, for stating what I have just said. That fellow—Good God, I am not even knowing his name—is almost certainly the man who killed Ramrao Pendke. And you yourself put me on to him, D’Sa sahib. That big, fresh-looking scar you were mentioning, I had seen it also. Who could fail to be seeing it the way the fellow is always clad in such a torn, open shirt? And that scar, curving round under the ribs, it is just what would be made if you were taking from a person one kidney. Do you know where are the kidneys in the human body, Inspector?”

  D’Sa looked affronted. Then wily.

  “They—they are somewhere at the back,” he said. “Or, more, near the front.”

  “Inspector, I am knowing. Definitely. They come one on each side of the stomach. They are like little oil— Well, never mind what like they are. The fact is that such a scar as that man has would be made when a kidney is removed to be sold to some rich person, a person like Ramrao Pendke, grandson and heir to the very, very rich Patil of Village Dharbani in District Ramkhed.”

  D’Sa was beginning to look less openly skeptical.

  “Yes, well,” he said, “everybody is knowing that Ramrao Pendke was at the Shrimati Usha Yadekar Clinic receiving a kidney from a donor. It was in the Mid-Day. But, Inspector, is it that a donor is informed who is getting his kidney?”

  “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is not,” Ghote answered. “Even in nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine cases out of one lakh. But when I was talking with Dr. Mrs. Yadekar at the clinic—she is running administrative side and is also having American degrees in psychiatry—she was letting slip that in one case recently at the clinic a mistake had been made. She was giving a sack to one clerk because of same.”

  For a moment he thought of how once it had just entered his head that this clerk himself, seeking revenge for his dismissal, had for some reason committed the crime.

  “And you think that this case was Ramrao Pendke and this mad fellow? You are thinking that his madness was brought on in the end by having lost his one kidney and that he had one great grudge against Ramrao?”

  “Yes. That is it. To a nutshell. And I have some evidence also. Not good court evidence, but evidence. First, he was jabbering out once in his madness that he had received one large sum. It was stolen from him, he said, by his own son who was having gambling debts. Then, second, when I was showing him that photo of Ramrao just only three-four hours ago, it seemed as if I had put in front of him something altogether terrible. He was seizing that photo—you saw it yourself, D’Sa sahib—and looking and looking at it as if he could devour it only.”

  “Well, yes, Inspector. You had one devil of a job to get it from him. If I had not come along ...”

  “But there is more, Inspector,” Ghote said. “There is what the fellow was muttering. At the time I was thinking it was just only mad talk. But I am able to remember his very words. He was saying ‘Saturn, Saturn, it is Saturn’ and ‘You cannot stop Saturn.’ You see, it had come into his mind then that even beating to death the man he believed had brought that evil upon him, the man he was thinking was Saturn himself, even that had not lifted the curse he believed he was lying under.”

  “Yes,” D’Sa said with slow thoughtfulness. “Yes, I also heard him say those words, or words very much like. And at the time even I was wondering why the fellow was saying them with so much of despair. Inspector, I think you must be right.”

  “Oh, I am right,” Ghote answered. “It is plain enough. The fellow must have seen the man he remembered as having taken from him his kidney just entering this Tick Tock shop here. He must have gone in behind him, seized the heavy weight from a clock that is there on the wall, and at once have beaten his victim to death, even in his frenzy smashing the watch on his wrist.” But, as the very scene passed through his mind confirming him in the sudden insight he had had, he found himself spiraling down in an access of swift depression.

  “But that is not the end of it, D’Sa sahib,” he went on, almost groaning aloud. “You see, I have been given by the D.G.P. himself just twenty-four hours to produce for him good proof that someone other than Rustom Fardoomji committed the crime. Otherwise D.G.P. sahib will allow A.I. Lobo to take Fardoomji before a magistrate to repeat his confession under Criminal Procedure Code. And so frightened is that fellow I believe he would do it.”

  “You are under the D.G.P.’s direct orders?” D’Sa said, visibly impressed.

  “Oh, yes. But, you know, I have a feeling I was chosen for this duty just only because, if it was bringing trouble, mine would be an easy head to chop.”

  “And it will bring trouble?”

  Ghote thought for a moment or two then.

  “Well,” he said, “if we can find this pagalwalla and show that he was committing the crime, then, in fact, no one would be better pleased than the D.G.P. After all, some very, very influential people have told him they believe Rustom Fardoomji must be innocent, and we would be clearing the relatives of the Patil of Dharbani also, something D.G.P. sahib is very much wanting.”

  “Then, Ghote bhai, we had better begin to look.”

  With evident relish D’Sa pulled out once more his Sweety Pad and drew new green-ballpoint columns on a fresh little page.

  “System is the thing,” he said. “What we must be doing is to conduct a search in regular circles spreading out from this spot. Report back here at each half hour as before. We will find him, bhai, never fear. A fellow like that will not have a home to go to.”

  “Yes,” Ghote answered more pessimistically. “I am hoping.”

  They set off first, however, for the station to collect a couple of flashlights.

  “If A.I. Lobo will not prevent us taking,” Ghote said.

  “Let him just try,” said old D’Sa, straightening his ancient back.

  In fact, it turned out that Lobo had long ago departed, and Ghote was able to take a minute or two to telephone Protima. Once again he had to tell her he would not be home all night. He did not like to think, hastily replacing the receiver, what sort of reception this would earn him when he did at last get home. That was for tomorrow.

  On the station steps D’Sa consulted his watch, not without some solemnity.

  “Just past twelve-twenty a.m.,” he said. “But I think it would not be wrong to add ten minutes extra to the first half hour. I will meet you outside the Tick Tock Watch works at one am. precisely. ”

  “Achcha,” Ghote said, plunging off into the velvety darkness.

  Then began a long, long, miserable, fatiguing round of poking into every possible place where a wandering lunatic might have chosen to fall asleep. Ghote probed with his torch into doorways, under stairways, under handcarts left chained up outside by their owners or daily hirers. He looked at the broad window ledges of public buildings. He went along the stretches of pavement where the poor lay by the dozen in the comparative cool, sometimes with the comfort of a straw mat, sometimes without. He sent rats, squeaking and vicious, running from their hiding places. He did not let sleeping dogs lie.

  His pitch of determination soon became such that he unhesitatingly tugged aside a cotton sheet over a sleeping head, or even a sari if the form under it was not clearly feminine. And he was as ruthless in sending the beam of his flashlight circling around
inside the frail plastic sheeting or woven grassmat constructions of such pavement huts as led a precarious existence here and there in the area of his hunt.

  And each half hour, to the minute by his mended Ulhasnagar Seiko Sports 100, he took care to be outside the Tick Tock Watchworks to meet old D’Sa. But neither of them once had anything at all to report.

  Half past one, two o’clock, half past two, three o’clock.

  Tiredness dragged at Ghote like a huge, heavy-hemmed cloak. His bruised side, which till now had been hardly painful, began to tweak savagely at him with every movement. And the thought of the passing of time, of the steady running-out of those twenty-four hours he had been arbitrarily given, weighed on him like an unwanted crown.

  He forced his way, pushing one aching leg in front of the other, along streets and lanes almost completely silent at this dead hour. Only the occasional fit of coughing from some troubled sleeper or the barking of a solitary dog disturbed the darkness.

  He thought of the very different night he had spent under the huge old Patil’s masterful orders out in Dharbani in the Sarpanch’s courtyard, watching the calm moonlight advance and hearing the incessant creek-creek-creek of the crickets that in his infancy he had thought was the sound of the circling stars.

  And Saturn is among those stars, he thought, a planet moving inexorably. A planet that must seem to the madman I am hunting to be moving with all the stately unswerving motion of an executioner coming to carry out the cruel commands of some long-ago all-powerful maharajah.

  A car, bound on some mysterious errand at this late hour, swept by. Its pale headlights momentarily flickered across a slogan-scribbled wall beside him. Hastily he consulted his watch by their light. Almost time to be turning back for the next rendezvous.

  Half past three, and D’Sa was coming toward the watch shop, walking more slowly now than even at the last meeting, his shoulders stooped.

  “D’Sa sahib, you have done enough. More than enough. Kindly go home. Come again in the morning, if you are liking.”

  “No, no, young Ghote. I have told you, an old man is not needing much of sleep.”

  Ghote managed a sort of smile.

  “At least today then,” he said, “you will not be getting out of bed at five-fifty-nine exactly.”

  “No, no. Unless by then we have found our fellow.”

  “Yes. We may have. Why not? He must be somewhere. See you at four, then.”

  “And not one second after.”

  The old detective turned and trudged away, painfully slowly, into the darkness. Ghote tramped off to his next area of search, scarcely less slowly.

  Four o’clock. Half past. Five o’clock.

  The first pale, pale signs of day had begun to show at the horizon where, down a street or up a lane, it could be seen.

  Ghote thought now—his thoughts were moving with lumbering slowness as if they were not airy imaginings but leaden-weighted lumps of hardly connected logic—of Khindgaon and the morning he had arrived there ahead of Raghu Barde and had come upon the man promising the spirit Churail to sacrifice two cockerels as penance for failing to sacrifice one. How different that tranquil dawn had been as he had stepped out of the jeep into the delicious fresh countryside air. How different from this dawn, a grim indication of how the hours were passing in his hurried, mean, tearing, gritty, unpitying hunt for a man driven mad by the city and its harsh time-constricting demands.

  Then, turning into the next yard-wide galli on his route, he saw, down at the far end in the pale light hardly different from the darkness it was dispelling, a figure moving away from him. It was hard to make out, even hard to know whether it was that of a man or a woman. But something in the way it was moving, a wanderingness, went like a dart into his gray-fuzzed brain.

  New life spurted up in him.

  He set off at a run, leaping from side to side in the narrow lane to avoid the rubbish littering it, a discarded red plastic bucket, a crumpled bicycle wheel, an old oil drum, and as he got nearer and nearer to the wandering figure his hopes rose. That must be the same mass of bushy hair, even if from the back the fellow’s beard was not to be seen.

  He plunged on, slid wildly on a banana skin or something, recovered, arms flailing, and turned the corner around which the madman, if it was the madman, had disappeared.

  It was not the madman.

  Little more than ten yards away, standing looking up toward the sun, which at that moment had risen above the horizon to send a glowing band of red all along the street in front of him, was a sadhu, loftily worshiping the new day. His hair, though bushy, was white rather than gray, and though he did have a beard, it too was white, long, and flowing instead of bushy and tangled. Nor was he wearing a shirt open at the front to reveal the scar of an operation to remove a kidney, but a flapping kurta in a dull shade of orange.

  Sick with disappointment, Ghote stood for long seconds merely staring at the holy man as he worshiped in silence. He wondered, vaguely, about the time-freed life such a person must lead. Dimly he cursed him for not being the madman, freed in truth from time’s harassments yet obsessed with that reiterated, desperate question “Time kya? Time kya?”

  Then, peering once more at the watch on his wrist, he decided he might as well begin making his way back to old D’Sa. To log up one more unsuccessful half-hour period.

  There were others to record, too, as the light of day gradually strengthened over the sprawling, awakening city. And at each rendezvous poor D’Sa looked yet more drainedly fatigued, and yet more sullenly determined.

  “Right, then, off we go,” the old detective said, thick-voiced, at half past eight. “We do not want to waste time, young Ghote. There is not so much of it to spare now, you know.”

  Blearily putting two more ticks in his Sweety Pad, he turned and plodded off.

  Marching wearily away in the other direction, Ghote grimly acknowledged to himself that now their chances of finding the bus starter were very many more times less. While the fellow had been asleep somewhere—But where? Where had he slept that they had found not one trace of him?—he would have been at least in one place. But now, almost certainly, he would be awake and wandering. Either one of them could arrive somewhere the fellow had been half a minute after he had left. The madman, in his turn, could appear at some place that one of them had just searched half a minute afterward.

  Why not just pack up? Let wretched, hopeless, stupid Rustom Fardoomji go to whatever fate awaited him. Let him take his passion for watches and clocks to the hangman’s rope at Thana Gaol if he was fool enough, and be damned to him.

  But he knew he could not do that.

  And on he went with his self-imposed, mountainous task. Wearily he pushed past bunches of schoolgirls in neat white blouses and neat gray or blue pleated skirts making their way to their various schools in time for the bells summoning them to their first classes. Wearily he avoided scrambling packs of schoolboys bound on the same errand, stringy striped ties at their necks, puppy-fighting as they went. He saw, without seeing, the pavement vendors setting out their wares for the day ahead with scrupulous care in ordered rows or carefully piled pyramids.

  And, wherever he went, he forced his gummy eyes to stay wide, to dart looks to left, to right, forward, backward.

  Never to any avail.

  Where can the damn man be, he thought with dulled hammeringness. Where can he have hidden himself all night? Why is he not wandering up to me now? Now? Now?

  Surely he and D’Sa had been right in their assumption that the fellow would not stray beyond this immediate area. He had been present twice outside the Tick Tock Watchworks and he must have been there a third time when he had seen Ramrao Pendke enter the shop and had followed him in. So why was he not here somewhere now?

  Nine o’clock rendezvous. Half past nine rendezvous. Ten o’clock rendezvous.

  Leaving once again, Ghote tried to force his stupefied mind into doing some arithmetic. Why, his mind absurdly insisted on asking, was Raghu Barde
not here to do the sums for him? To produce some primes and expressibles. But, no, they were not what he wanted. He wanted just some times. At what time was he going to have to set out for the D.G.P.’s office? How much time would he have to allow for getting there from here? How many more rendezvous could he afford to make with old D’Sa, if D’Sa had not dropped dead before the last of them? At what time should he reach the Oval Maidan so as to be sure of knocking on the D.G.P.’s door at 1419 hours precisely, neither early nor late?

  At last he contrived to work out that he could safely leave setting off until after the 13:30 hours rendezvous. And if by that hour they had neither of them spotted the bus starter, then that would be that.

  He halted suddenly and began furiously winding his fake Seiko Sports 100. What if he had, in his utter tiredness, forgotten? Allowed it to stop? Had no idea that the time was nearer 1419 hours than he believed?

  He shuddered at the notion.

  But, at the rendezvous at one o’clock, as he watched in dulled hypnotism D’Sa make his one but last set of green-ballpoint ticks in his Sweety Pad and looked up to ease the twanging ache across his shoulders, he saw, coming up toward the Tick Tock Watch-works, ambling and shambling, the flapping, bushy-bearded apparition of the madman.

  TWENTY

  Ghote could hardly credit what his bloodshot eyes were seeing.

  He swallowed, dry-mouthed.

  “D’Sa sahib,” he managed to get out. “Look.”

  D’Sa turned in the direction in which Ghote was staring. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. The criminal is always returning to the scene of the crime. It is an old truth. But never forget it.”

  Nonsense before, Ghote thought, and double nonsense now. Only a madman would—

  He licked his parched lips. The madman was still coming waveringly toward them, or toward the rust-streaked shutter of the Tick Tock Watchworks just behind them. Side by side he and D’Sa watched the quarry they had hunted so long. Neither of them able, it seemed, to move toward him or to step aside in case, seeing the men who had the day before shown him the photograph of his victim, he might suddenly take flight once more.