Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  But then, he thought, Oceanic College must be hanging on to Bombay University only by the skins of its teeth. And if it was, what kind of an efficient officer was its one and only security man? Could what he had claimed about doing his duty and making sure locks were locked be just only boastings? Was the Principal’s chamber, in fact, always safely locked in his absence?

  He decided the time had come to take a tough line.

  He stood up.

  ‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘That question-paper Bala Chambhar was stealing may seem to you to be only some nonsense of your professors. But it is damn important to some people. People who can make one hell of a lot of troubles if they are not getting results they are wanting. So, enough of stating you are doing this and doing that as your bounden duty, and tell me, no shadow of any lie, how many times have you found that Principal’s chamber unlocked?’

  It was plain he had succeeded in knocking some respect into the big Punjabi. But the answer he got did not advance him a single inch.

  ‘Inspector, I swear it by each and every god. That room has never been unlocked when there was no one in. I swear it.’

  ‘Very well. But I am hoping for your sake you are telling truth only.’

  He turned and marched out.

  But he was all too conscious that his talk with the security officer, though it had brought him its share of information, useful or not, had not been the escape from his toils he had hoped for. It had left him just where he was in his self-set task of showing the men from Delhi that there were better detectives in India than the ones who air-dashed here and there at a word from somebody up above.

  SIX

  Ghote could not prevent himself feeling, as once again he approached Mrs Cooper’s desk, that somehow he would find himself yet more caught up like a cat entangled in a fishing net adage. Nevertheless he addressed the red-bloused rakshas with determined optimism.

  ‘Principalji is able to see me now?’

  ‘No, Inspector. He is not.’

  The confirmation of his uneasy feeling did nothing to lessen it.

  ‘But you have told I am here?’

  ‘No, Inspector.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Mrs Rajwani is still inside.’

  ‘She is here so long? You are certain?’

  ‘Inspector, I am all the time in my seat.’

  Would he ever get to see this man, his key witness? Should he insist now? Shout even?

  Then second thoughts prevailed. After all, he did not need to see the Principal at exactly this time. He could certainly wait a little longer. A little. And there was someone else he probably ought to see.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘it is most important I should also be speaking with Dean Potdar. I have many, many inquiries to make.’

  ‘Very well, Inspector. Dean’s office is three doors from here itself.’

  He had had at the moment he proposed seeing the Dean no exact idea what he might find out from him. Indeed, he had half-expected, as a blow to be flinched from, that Mrs Cooper would again compare him to a poor cat, however little he could fathom why she had done so in the first place.

  But, it seemed, he was not in making this request cat-like. No new coils of the adage were ready to flick down on him.

  Then, walking slowly as he could past the doors that separated Principal from Dean, an idea came to him. Just in time. If Bala Chambhar was as much of an anti-social as Amar Nath had claimed and as even the girl in the green sari, Sarita, had agreed, then the boy would surely have come to the notice of the Dean, and on more than one occasion. So it was possible that the Dean might know something about him that might provide a clue as to how he could have stolen that question-paper from what seemed to be an ever-locked room.

  The Dean, he found, also had a secretary in an outer office. But she was no sort of a rakshas, just a large middle-aged lady sitting at her desk comfortably knitting. He gave her his name and asked to see the Dean immediately. She pressed a switch on her intercom box, and a moment later he found himself confronting Dr Potdar.

  The Dean was a small man, looking older than Ghote had expected. He was sitting, for all the steady heat of Bombay’s June, in jacket, tie and academic gown, behind a desk awash with papers. He had a round little face with across his pudgy little nose a pair of round-rimmed gold pincenez, and, just visible at the desk’s edge, a round little stomach protruded. All in all he did not, Ghote thought, seem like the father of so many daughters whom Amar Nath had described so contemptuously. But in such matters you could never tell.

  ‘Well, Inspector – Inspector Ghote, is it? – what is it I can do for you?’

  ‘Sir, I am making inquiries. There has been a theft. A certain question-paper in Statis–’

  ‘Inspector, do you think I do not know about that?’ Behind his pincenez Dean Potdar’s eyes twinkled with what was surely malice. ‘Every single person in this college has been talking of nothing else ever since it came out that young Chambhar was selling that question-paper through entire Bombay.’

  ‘Yes, sir, of course,’ Ghote replied, the notion that he was being made to look stupid prickling sharply through his head.

  He drew in a breath.

  ‘It is, in fact, this boy, Bala Chambhar, I am wanting to discuss,’ he said with some sharpness. ‘You see, sir, it is not so far clear how he was actually managing to commit that offence, and as he is in a state of deep coma we are not able to question.’

  ‘No, Inspector, I can see that even the Bombay police with all their scientific methods, or other more – shall we say? – brutal techniques, would scarcely be able to interrogate a boy in that state. And the coma is, did you say, deep? Profound, I believe is the medical expression.’

  Ghote was tempted to reply yet more sharply that he had heard of the medical term. But caution stopped him.

  Why not, he thought, allow this fat little professor-type to think he was successfully taunting and teasing a thoroughly stupid police inspector? Then the fellow might say things, for example, about Principal Bembalkar who according at least to Amar Nath he despised and disliked, that he would not otherwise let out. And the more he himself knew about the man from whose chamber that paper had mysteriously been spirited the better.

  ‘Profound coma, yes, yes,’ he accepted Dean Potdar’s correction in a tone of fawning gratitude.

  ‘Yes,’ the Dean went on, twinkling yet more cheerfully. ‘So poor young Chambhar is in a state of profound coma. Did they tell you at the hospital what his chances were?’

  ‘I have not visited hospital myself personally,’ Ghote answered, striving to give the impression that this would be something almost beyond his powers. ‘They were sending officers from what we are calling the Central Bureau of Investigation itself. I am just only clearing up the one or two missing points.’

  ‘I see. But these CBI officers – I have heard of that institution, you know, Inspector – what were they reporting about young Chambhar’s state?’

  ‘Oh, sir, that he was most likely to expire without regaining any of consciousness.’

  ‘I see. Poor chap, poor chap.’

  ‘You are feeling very great sympathy for him?’ Ghote asked, pouring on the perplexity. ‘When he is the proven thief of that question-paper?’

  Dean Potdar gave a puffy little sigh.

  ‘Well, I am not denying that Chambhar was a bad lad, Inspector. Very much a bad lad, I am sorry to say. Many a time I have had to have him up for some offence or another. Why, he was standing in front of me only a few days ago, just where you are now. But, my dear fellow, you should not keep standing yourself. Please sit. No need of formality with me.’

  Ghote pulled back one of the three hard chairs drawn up in front of the Dean’s desk, and took care to perch himself awkwardly on its very edge.

  ‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘what for were you just now calling Bala Chambhar as one poor chap?’

  The Dean gave a sharp little smile.

  ‘Precisely because he was
poor, Inspector,’ he replied.

  ‘Poor, sir? I am not at all understanding.’

  ‘Poor, Inspector. Indigent, impecunious, impoverished, penurious.’

  Ghote contrived to blink.

  ‘In short, Inspector, the boy was one of those claiming the Reserved Seats for the Harijan community. In fact, to put it bluntly, he should really not have attempted to acquire a college education. The groundwork was not there. Not at all. But one had to give him credit for some persistence. Which was why I had not resorted to the utmost sanction.’

  ‘And what is that, please?’

  The eyes behind the pince-nez redoubled their teasing twinkling.

  ‘Terminating his career here, Inspector. In other words, giving him, as you might say, the boot.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, yes. That was most good of you.’

  Dean Potdar leant back in his chair, as far as his rotund little frame permitted.

  ‘So what precisely have you come to me for, Inspector?’

  Ghote gave a little cough.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it is this question of when and how exactly the said Bala Chambhar was abstracting –’ he paused as if he had not been quite sure whether he had used the right word. Should he have risked ‘subtracting’? ‘– was abstracting that question-paper from the Principal’s office. I was wondering if you could help me in that.’

  ‘Help you? Well, I don’t see that I can. I imagine it will become clear even to – that it will become clear to you sooner or later.’

  ‘Yes, sir, yes. But it is a matter of sooner, please. I am having to make report to the CBI itself, the Central Bureau …’

  ‘I see. Well then, shall we go over the circumstances? I have no doubt that, once you have got those straight in your mind, Inspector, all will become plain.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So, that paper was stolen on – let me see – why, yes, on Monday. It seems longer with all the brouhaha there has been. All the hulla-gulla, Inspector. And it must surely have been during the luncheon hour that the deed was done. The papers had arrived only that morning, under strict guard, and, if they were being sold all over the city on Tuesday, then Monday it would have been. Now, the only time, so far as I am aware, that there is no one either in the Principal’s chamber itself or in the outer office is for some few minutes after one o’clock. Principal Bembalkar customarily lunches between one and two – poor man he has had little appetite these past few days – and I believe his secretary, the beauteous Mrs Cooper, generally takes a short break earlier so that she is present during at least the latter half of the period the Principal is absent.’

  He gave Ghote a little playful smile.

  ‘You see, Inspector, already we are narrowing things down. No. No, I am wrong. On Monday, I remember now, Bembalkar took his luncheon early.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Was this another piece of his teasing, Ghote wondered. Or was there actually something of value he was about to learn? Because it had looked as if the Dean had truly at just that moment hit on something he had not thought of before.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, there was an incident on Monday. Something that had quite been put out of my head by the subsequent brouhaha.’

  ‘An incident?’ Ghote prompted carefully, afraid the Dean might be too happy teasing his stupid police officer to come out with what he had been about to say.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, you see, there is a certain lecturer in the college, a lecturer in English Literature, by the name of Furtado, Victor Furtado. A person – I am bound to say this, Inspector – not entirely satisfactory as a member of our academic staff. Now, somehow he has recently contrived to get more than usually on the wrong side of his classes. So last Monday a few of the more daring spirits took it on themselves to blacken Furtado’s face.’

  ‘They resorted to abuses, sir?’

  ‘No, no, Inspector. It was literally, as we say, that they had decided on this face-blackening. With some tarry substance, as I understand it. And the place they chose for this ceremony was the courtyard below the veranda here. The affair, in fact, caused so much hilarity – and I dare say Furtado emitted a scream or two – that, I understand, the Principal himself came out to remonstrate. To no effect, I am sorry to say. In fact, he was so distressed, poor fellow, that he took an early luncheon. I myself saw him arrive for it at about half-past twelve. So, do you begin to see what must have happened, Inspector?’

  Ghote had seen. The CBI men in their report had got it wrong. Principal Bembalkar’s office had been without anyone present not just between 1300 hours and 1330 hours, as they had said, but from some time after, say, half-past twelve onwards. So if someone had another key, or …

  He almost jumped up there and then to hurry back to the Principal’s office and see what a few sharp questions there might reveal.

  But caution prevailed. It might still pay off to keep Dean Potdar thinking he had a thickly stupid police officer to deal with. So, wait a moment more and make sure it was not evident he had zoomed already to the end of the Dean’s trail.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said, shaking his head like a bemused bandicoot. ‘I am sorry I am not at all seeing.’

  ‘Why, man, it is simple. For once the Principal’s office was unguarded for a considerable time. From, let us say, 12.30 until at least 1.15. That is when the theft must have occurred, Inspector. Just then. That is when our friend Chambhar must have taken that question-paper.’

  Except, Ghote thought, there is still the business of how Chambhar spirited the paper out of the Principal’s locked chamber. But he kept that thought to himself.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, yes,’ he said. ‘I think you have found the answer, definitely. Thank you very much. You have been altogether helpful. I must now see Principalji at once. To obtain confirmation.’

  Retaining to the last his stupid police officer persona, he made his way, grinning and stumbling, out of the room.

  SEVEN

  Excitement beginning to bubble up, Ghote hurried back along to the Principal’s office. To find rakshas Mrs Cooper breathing new and hotter fire.

  ‘No,’ she said the moment he stepped in. ‘Principalji cannot see you.’

  ‘He is even now still talking with Mrs Rajwani? After so long?’

  He found that hard to believe. Even impossible. And he recalled the ‘soft corner’ he suspected the rakshas had for the one she guarded.

  He stood for a moment listening hard. From the far side of the plain wood door of the Principal’s chamber there was only a deep silence.

  ‘I am not at all hearing voices inside,’ he said.

  ‘Inspector, do you think the Principal of a college of Bombay University is conducting his conversations as if he was a fish-woman shouting and calling?’

  There could be only one answer in face of that. Despite misgivings.

  He strode over to the much-guarded door and thrust it open.

  And there, as he had really expected, he saw no one except, sitting chin in hands behind a wide, well-polished teak table, staring glumly in front of him, the man who could only be Principal Shambu Bembalkar.

  Big and broad-shouldered, he was wearing, as had Dean Potdar, a tweed jacket and a tie, even in the June heat which the grumbling air-conditioner in the nearer of the room’s two windows was doing little to make more endurable. Only missing was the academic gown with which the Dean had dignified his tubby frame.

  At Ghote’s crashing entrance he had hardly looked up over the thick-rimmed spectacles that hid much of his long, heavily jowled face.

  The very lack of an angry explosion gave Ghote pause.

  ‘It is Principal Bembalkar?’ he said, more quietly than he had intended.

  Wearily the Principal seemed to pull himself together.

  ‘Yes. What – What is it you are wanting? I am sorry, who did my secretary say you were?’

  Ghote ignored the fact that Mrs Cooper had not at all announced him.

  ‘I am by name Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch CID,’ he
said. ‘Dr Bembalkar, I must speak with you most urgently concerning this theft of the Statistical Techniques question-paper.’

  Dr Bembalkar heaved a long sigh and gropingly extracted a pipe from a long rack at his elbow.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I gathered yesterday from the officers from Delhi that someone else would want to see me.’

  He put the pipe into his mouth, but then at once removed it.

  ‘Do take a pew,’ he said. ‘And what … What can I tell you? It was Inspector …?’

  ‘Inspector Ghote, sir.’

  Ghote had rapidly come to the conclusion that the way to learn anything from this apparently numbed figure would be to go very slowly. So he contented himself with no more than that repetition of his name.

  A silence fell.

  ‘So what is it you want from me?’ the Principal said at last, apparently realising he had someone on the other side of his wide table.

  ‘It is this, sir. You are aware, no doubt, that the student from this college who was found to be selling copies of the missing paper, one Chambhar by name, Bala Chambhar, is at present lying in the KEM Hospital in a state of coma and is unable to be questioned. But in Delhi they are very, very anxious that this whole matter should be brought to the light down to its last detail.’

  He decided now to let a new silence develop. For one thing from the dullness of the eyes behind the Principal’s heavy-rimmed spectacles it looked as if he was having difficulty taking in much that was said to him, and for another he hoped that if he himself were to say nothing the Principal would at last volunteer some useful facts.

  But why was he so beaten down and bemused?

  Yet it seemed facts were not going to be forthcoming. All the Principal did was to put his pipe back in his mouth and suck at it emptily.

  After a while the sound became so irritating that Ghote was the one who felt impelled to speak.