Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ghote had no idea what he was talking about. But if his suspect was willing to confess, no matter what to, he was not going to let him off the hook.

  ‘It is for me to be saying whether you had done nothing,’ he snapped out.

  Again Victor Furtado licked his lips.

  ‘But many, many people were protesting also during Emergency days,’ he said. ‘And today all that is forgotten.’

  ‘So,’ Ghote banged back, ‘you are one hothead, is it? Protesting and making troubles. We are well knowing what to do with such.’

  ‘But, please, please, I have done nothing. My life has been so hard. It was once only I was protesting. Since then I have taken utmost care not to offend. Rather I have been a victim of protests by others.’

  Ghote pounced. Surely the fellow had left the way open to bring up the very thing that had made him want to revenge himself against Principal Bembalkar?

  ‘Victim, is it?’ he said with piled-on scorn. ‘I suppose next you will be telling you have been assaulted by your own students?’

  ‘But, yes. Yes, that is what happened to me.’

  Ghote gave a prolonged laugh.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘A respected lecturer at the mercy of just only some students? Was it Miss Washikar from up there who was beating up and bullying you? Is it that you are expecting me to believe?’

  ‘But it is true, Inspector. I am swearing I speak God’s truth itself. It was not Miss Washikar, no. She is almost the only student who shows any respect. But it was the boys in this class. They blackened my face, Inspector. They did that itself, especially one Bala Chambhar.’

  ‘Bala Chambhar?’ Ghote leapt in again. ‘Bala Chambhar who is even now lying in KEM Hospital on point of death. Death by poisoning. What do you know about that, Mr Victor Furtado?’

  The look of blank fright that appeared on Victor Furtado’s moustache-blurred face might well have been the look of a murderer about to confess.

  ‘Poison,’ he gasped out. ‘But they were saying the boy was taking his own life.’

  ‘That is what we were giving out, yes,’ Ghote hammered on, allowing himself no time to think in the excitement of this sudden chase. ‘But we know better than that, you and I, Mr Victor Furtado, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. No. No, no, no.’

  ‘You are denying? You are daring to deny that first of all you handed to that boy a question-paper you had taken from Principal Bembalkar’s chamber, hoping that selling copies of it would get him into damn serious trouble, but then fearing it would after all come out you had taken that paper you tried to poison Bala?’

  ‘But – But, Inspector, how could I poison him? How?’

  ‘Suppose you tell me. Suppose you tell me just exactly how you were attempting to get rid of that witness to your thieving.’

  Victor Furtado’s mouth opened and shut. No sound emerged.

  Ghote allowed himself to feel he had, at almost the outset, hit on the truth of it all. But then Victor Furtado did manage to get some words out.

  ‘Inspector, how could I have done that? I was no more seeing Bala Chambhar after he had – after he had done what he did to me. I was just only hearing some time later he had been taken to hospital.’

  ‘Oh, yes? That I would believe when I am believing you can sweep the sky with a broom.’

  ‘But it is true, Inspector. By Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it is true.’

  Tears were beginning to creep down Victor Furtado’s fleshy face from under his plastic spectacles.

  Yes, it was possible he had his man under his thumb.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, abruptly switching his line of attack, ‘after they were blackening your face what was it you were doing?’

  ‘Doing?’

  Victor Furtado looked utterly bewildered.

  ‘Yes, yes. Doing. You were not standing there under the Principal’s balcony from that time to this, were you? So what was it you were doing?’

  ‘I – I – I am forgetting.’

  ‘No, you are not. Something like that does not happen to a person and he is passing it off as if it was just only a fly he had brushed from his face. Tell me exactly, and now only, just what it was you were doing when at last those boys left you in peace?’

  ‘But – But – But what else should I do? I was attempting and trying to get that stuff off my face.’

  With a thump of dismay, Ghote realised that this had all the sound of being the simple truth. Anyone whose face had been smeared with thick black stuff, thick and clinging, would want at once to get rid of it. And that would be a process not to be completed in five minutes. So what Dean Potdar had put into his mind, that picture of a furious Furtado, boiling with anger against Principal Bembalkar for failing to rescue him from the hands of his tormentors, going up there and then to complain and, when he found the Principal’s chamber open and unguarded, stealing the question-paper as revenge, was, to say the least, unlikely.

  Or was it? Certainly at first glance it would seem that Victor Furtado must have been busy scrubbing at his face for some considerable time, peeling away the sticky blackness. But just how long would that process have taken? How thorough had the fellow been over it?

  He tried to put himself into the Goan’s mind, to feel what he must have been feeling after that attack. Yes, his first instinct would have been to rid himself of the badge of shame. But, after he had made some efforts, what would he then have felt? Would he have been driven by an urge to remove every last trace of humiliation? Or would sudden despair have reached up at him? And then, face still smudged but more or less clear, what would he have done? Would he have gone to hide away somewhere? Or would he possibly then have decided to go to complain to Principal Bembalkar?

  But, if he had, would he by that time have found the Principal back in his chamber, quite oblivious of the fact that in his absence and while his keys were carelessly left in the door, with Mrs Cooper not back at her customary post, someone had entered and had taken away that question-paper? Or would he have reached the office before the Principal had returned from that early lunch, while Mrs Cooper was still absent?

  It was possible. Either account was possible.

  Abruptly he made up his mind.

  ‘Mr Furtado,’ he said, ‘I am requiring to examine your place of residence.’

  THIRTEEN

  Again the look of haunted fear came into Victor Furtado’s eyes. But there was no deciding whether it was the active fear of a misdeed being found out or the more general fear of a man who seemed to go through life prey to every sort of anxiety.

  ‘But, why, Inspector, why?’ he bleated now. ‘What are you going to find in the room that I have?’

  ‘That we shall see,’ Ghote replied. ‘Kindly take me there.’

  He marched Furtado half a pace ahead of him towards the entrance hall, deliberately keeping a grim silence in the face of the few pathetic attempts at speech the fellow made. But in the hall he encountered a check. Amar Nath was standing there, feet apart, hands behind his back, massive moustache curling, looking loftily at such students as were hurrying past. But at the sight of Ghote he had burst into life.

  ‘Inspector, Inspector, I have important-important message.’

  What the hell . .?

  He went over.

  ‘Yes? What it is?’

  Amar Nath felt in one of the pockets of his green uniform and produced an envelope, already battered and crushed.

  ‘From hot-pant Cooper Mrs,’ he said. ‘Love letter, I am thinking.’

  He was still laughing away when Ghote had finished reading the short note. Station House Officer Dadar P.S. rang to say box in question cast on to dust heap.

  Inwardly Ghote cursed. A piece of hard evidence, something that could not but have impressed the Additional Commissioner. And in the time since he had visited Bala Chambhar’s mother she had chosen to get rid of this reminder of her son at the point of death.

  Well, he had better find some Somnomax Five with one or other of his suspects.
Nothing less would convince the Additional Commissioner that the crime under investigation now was not the theft of one question-paper but murder itself. And Victor Furtado was still perhaps as good a bet as any as that would-be murderer.

  Coming out of the college gate with him, Ghote was surprised to see the Goan turn unhesitatingly to the right and not the left. Surely Dean Potdar, in giving him his directions, had said he should turn left? He had said it twice even.

  Was Victor Furtado planning flight?

  He moved a little closer, ready to grab.

  But his suspect showed no sign of taking to his heels, and before long they came to a side-road down which he turned as unhesitatingly as he had turned out of the college gate.

  Ghote decided that either Dean Potdar in his effort to explain clearly to a thick-head police officer, had contrived to muddle himself, or that he, in his effort to appear a thick-head police officer, had got it wrong. Or had the Dean deliberately given him wrong directions as a malicious little joke? It was possible. Definitely possible.

  The notion was confirmed less than two minutes later when Victor Furtado pointed to a tall water-stained barrack some two hundred yards ahead.

  ‘It is there I am staying,’ he said, with a glance half of fear, half of dim defiance.

  ‘Very good,’ Ghote answered tersely.

  Evidently this must be the place. No attempt to cut and run on the part of his timid, sad-faced suspect. So, a joke of Dean Potdar’s. Never mind, a day would come …

  Then, as they neared the hostel a group of boys hanging out of one of its windows – why are they not in class? Ghote thought – started to whistle and shout at a girl in a red and orange sari walking by on the opposite side of the road.

  ‘Oh, you beauty,’ one of them called.

  ‘Oh, yes, you bloody beauty,’ another yelled.

  Ghote felt a sharp sense of affrontedness. In his day no boy would have dared shout such words. Should he call up and tell them to behave?

  He decided his business with Victor Furtado was more pressing. And then promptly wondered whether he was being any better than Principal Bembalkar when he had failed to stop the face-blackening beneath his balcony. Perhaps his own mistake now had been to think about what he should do. If he had acted straightaway, run ahead a few yards and given those riff-raffs a good reprimand, would they have learnt a lesson?

  There was no telling.

  But, worse, as they turned in at the hostel’s wide, white-painted, rust-streaked metal gate – its top hinge had broken and it was leaning permanently open – the boys at the window began calling down directly to them.

  ‘Hey, it is Furtado potato,’ the first of them shouted in English.

  ‘What you doing away only from your shaky-shaky-Shakespearing?’ another called.

  ‘Pinching the girls also,’ a third voice joined in, this time in Marathi.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Ghote snapped, not that Victor Furtado was showing signs of doing anything else.

  They stepped into the merciful shade of the entrance.

  Boys like that should be beaten, Ghote said to himself, aware at once that he was enraged because he had failed to take any action.

  As I have not taken action against Protima, he added with an inner twist of self-condemnation. Well, tonight …

  But in the meantime he had more urgent things to do.

  ‘Your room,’ he snapped at Victor Furtado.

  ‘Yes, yes, Inspector, we are going there.’

  To Ghote’s relief the lecturer’s room turned out to be on a floor below the one where the boys had been leaning idly out of the window. At least he could get on with the business in hand uninterrupted by other concerns.

  Victor Furtado took out a key and undid the padlock on his door. The room Ghote stepped into close behind him was almost as dispiriting as the man to whom it belonged, a narrow, bare rectangle, its walls painted pale green, peeling here and there. There was a low, iron-framed bed, above which on a sagging rope hung Victor Furtado’s spare clothes with a sheet of newspaper pinned up behind to prevent the paint of the wall flaking off on to them. In front of the barred window there was a small table with two piles of tattered books on it and a wooden chair tucked under. Beneath the bed Ghote caught sight of an old suitcase.

  Beyond that there was nothing.

  ‘How long is it since you have stayed here?’ he asked in dismay, before it occurred to him that he ought not to show such friendliness to his potential suspect.

  ‘It is six years. Ever since I was getting my post here.’

  ‘And you have not thought of shifting to somewhere better?’

  ‘How can I, Inspector? I was having to find a big bribe to get the job, and I still have not paid back all I was borrowing.’

  Yes, Ghote thought, as without asking permission he tipped over the two piles of books and, finding nothing, jerked open the drawer in the table, of course a fellow like Furtado would not get a post in a college such as this, however high his qualifications, without paying out to gain precedence over duller people with better connections.

  ‘But you are married, no?’ he asked, looking down into the drawer in front of him.

  Really he must stop feeling sorry for this fellow. Damn it, he may well be the person who put that tub of luxury shrikhand in Bala Chambhar’s way. That tub now gone for ever.

  And yet would he have done? Would someone living as bare an existence as this have produced shrikhand from Monginis as bait for his victim? More likely it would be some wretched fried snack from a street vendor. And Bala, if he was as poor as that room in Chawl No 4 indicated, would most probably have gobbled that up. And, again, would someone as hard-pressed financially as Victor Furtado have a supply of American-imported Somnomax Five?

  But that at least could soon be checked. He scrabbled the contents of the drawer to the front where he could see all there was.

  And in the meanwhile Victor Furtado, sitting himself timidly on the edge of the bed and making no effort to protest at the way his table was being searched, was answering that careless question.

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector, I am married. I am very married. But how can I keep a wife here in Bombay? It is forbidden in the hostel. So, when I can afford it I go back to Goa in the holidays. Also I have to send her parents, where she stays, what I can when I earn a little from giving tuitions.’

  Nothing in the drawer even resembling Somnomax Five. Nothing much in it at all. A few stubs of pencils, a half-used pad of writing paper, two curled-up aerogramme forms, a stub of eraser, half a dozen ballpoints all looking dried-up.

  He turned to the suitcase under the bed, brushing it roughly against the Goan’s dangling legs as he pulled it out.

  ‘My pay is very low,’ Victor Furtado went on, ignoring Ghote kneeling beside him ferreting through the contents of the suitcase, underwear, socks, a thread-pulled pullover, a single book The Works of William Shakespeare. ‘And sometimes College is saying they must withhold salary for a month. Lack of funds. Once it was three months. And how am I able to live when they are doing that? Are they ever considering?’

  Briefly Ghote thought of Mrs Rajwani. She must be very well-off, and yet it was worth her while apparently to be Oceanic College’s Managing Trustee. There must be some money to be made running the place. Despite what they said they had had to do to Victor Furtado’s monthly salary.

  Ah, what’s this?

  Tucked away at the very bottom of the case, the flattened remains of a brightly printed cardboard box, its top torn away. Something that looked as if it might have contained a bottle.

  Somnomax Five?

  Could the fellow have been careless enough to have kept the outer container of the expensive preparation he had somehow acquired after using the stuff to poison the boy who could betray him as the question-paper thief?

  The name of whatever had been in the bottle inside the box was missing. Peering hard in the insufficient light from the narrow window, Ghote examined the mass of tiny print stil
l remaining.

  Excessive generation of foul gases in the abdomen creates a feeling of heaviness even when very light food is taken. Low and loud sounds from different parts of the stomach, feeling of disturbance as though from pinpricks, feeling as though water moves inside the stomach, emanating gas attacking region of chest and growing pain –

  Just some stuff for the stomach. Despite his disappointment, Ghote could not help reading on.

  … feeling of being bitten by ants or traversed by insects, severe pain in different parts of the head, watering from the eyes, reduced or blocked hearing, bad dreams (experience of many people show that majority of gastric patients have sleep filled with bad dreams), intolerance to noise, desire to lie down always, fungus on the tongue, noxious odour in the mouth, insatiable thirst, bloodlessness, aversion to work, lack of thinking power.

  Had Victor Furtado been attacked by all these unpleasant sensations? Or even some of them? To add to his other troubles. But at least those troubles did not appear to include his having impulsively stolen that question-paper and then having had to resort to murder to get himself out of it.

  Or did they?

  ‘Get up from the bed,’ he snapped.

  As soon as Furtado had obeyed, which he did without a murmur, Ghote heaved up the mattress – it was as thin as those he had seen in the KEM Hospital – shook it hard and felt it all over. But there was no sign of any concealed object. And nor was there now anywhere else to look in the little stone-floored room.

  So, even if Victor Furtado was the person who had attempted to poison Bala, there was no hope of finding tangible evidence against him.

  When it came to searching Professor Kapur’s residence, if he could contrive to do it, would he have as little luck? Or at Mrs Gulabchand’s? And if he was as unsuccessful, what could he then go with to the Additional Commissioner?

  FOURTEEN

  Ghote had felt when the affair had changed its object so dramatically that he was at least no longer that poor cat entrapped in the adage, if an adage was a trap and not something altogether different. With murder to be tackled, rather than the mere finding out how it had been that a wretched exam question-paper had been whisked out of a room apparently locked, he would be no longer a cat but a tiger. Yet now it seemed to him the adage was still there, only it had grown bigger, big enough to entrap any tiger. And yet more entangling. Could he ever fight his way out?