Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  But now surely a different complexion altogether had been put on what he knew. What he knew and had been forbidden to act upon directly. Now it was likely, all too likely in his own view, that either Mrs Gulabchand or Professor Kapur had put a tub of shrikhand in the boy’s way with tablet after tablet of Somnomax Five crushed into it. Either of them could have pretended to come across the boy while they were carrying the shrikhand, and, as if on impulse, have given it to him saying they no longer wanted it. Ever hungry, he would not have thought twice about taking it.

  But which? Which of them had done those things?

  And how could he go about proving, one way or the other, first, in accordance with his strict orders, that either Oceanic College’s professor of astrology or the head of its English Department had taken that Statistical Techniques paper from the Principal’s chamber? And then later, if he could arrange matters, how to prove that same person had also attempted to murder Bala Chambhar?

  God, that adage had doubled in tangled criss-crossings now. He found he could even distinctly recall the old notebook in which, in his larger schoolboy hand, he had written that careful note. Adage =. But what? That last word remained completely blank in his head.

  But one thing, he realised, was at least clear. It was too late today to do anything. He would not now get home till a late hour – Protima would be asleep, all unknowing of what he planned for her when he had time – and first thing in the morning he would have to go back out to the college once more. Perhaps he might then try yet again to take further advantage of Dean Potdar’s twinkling contempt of himself to learn something that would help. He could not at the moment see any other way of extracting himself from his terrible tangle.

  So once more he made his way homewards through the mostly sleeping eight-millions mass of Bombay’s inhabitants. Once more he arrived to find only darkness. Once more he crept to bed hoping not to disturb his wife. And once again he swallowed a hurried breakfast before setting off early to repeat nearly the same journey in the other direction.

  But as he arrived a little later than he had meant to be at Oceanic College, thinking with a quick sweat of dismay how much longer than expected his investigation into the missing question-paper had already taken, he felt that something was oddly different about the place.

  It actually took him several seconds to realise what it was.

  The quarter-mad South Indian cycle-stand attendant Krishna Iyer, MA Madras, was not in his place. Nor were there any students cramming round the stand to put their machines away. There were, in fact, no students to be seen anywhere. Not a single one. And, though the wide doors of the college building were standing open, even Security Officer Nath was not marching about just inside demanding to see identity cards.

  Only when he himself entered the building did he discover what had happened. The blackboard he had seen the first morning he had come here, with its notices about enrolment, had been set up, this time just inside the building. But it bore now, in boldly chalked letters, just one announcement. Day of Mourning for Late Sant Shankarananda College Patron No Classes.

  He was surprised. Nothing had been said to him, by Mrs Cooper, by Dean Potdar, by Principal Bembalkar or anybody else, about a total shutdown. Yet surely if a Day of Mourning was to be held it must have been decided on long ago. Perhaps it was an annual event. So there ought to have been plenty of warning. Yet this board with its message had not even been in place the morning before.

  He shrugged. Unaccountable.

  But would Dean Potdar, or anyone else, be here for him to ask about the time of the question-paper theft?

  Slowly he climbed the deserted stairs to the offices on the first floor. The absence of any students, hurrying up them, running down them, standing in clusters on them blocking the way, laughing, larking, arguing, gave him a feeling of odd unease. So he was much relieved, as he turned the corner onto the long veranda outside the offices, to see Dean Potdar himself standing, black-gowned and formal, looking down on to the empty courtyard below.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he greeted him briskly, forgetting in his state of puzzlement to put on his show of stupidity.

  Luckily the Dean did not seem to register his more alert air.

  ‘Good morning, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I am surprised to see you here, though. Can it be that you have still made no arrest in the course of your dynamic investigation?’

  The joking tone was warning enough.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ he said, wagging his head like an idiot, ‘no such luck in all my inquiries till date. No such damn luck whatsoever.’

  ‘So you have come back here, Inspector, eh? But I’m sorry to have to tell you if you are looking for dear Mrs Gulabchand to interrogate in your customary merciless way, or even if you are looking for that good fellow Kapur – Professor Kapur, of course, I should say – then you will be unlucky. This is our Day of Mourning, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I was seeing. In the entrance hall. The board.’

  ‘Ah! You noticed that, Inspector? Well done, well done. Let no one say our police officers are lacking in powers of observation.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ghote said.

  Within he felt an intense longing for the moment when he would be able to show this pompous little man just what a Bombay Crime Branch officer could do. But it seemed plainer than ever that to get the most out of a highly useful source of information there was nothing for it but to go on playing at being altogether brainless.

  ‘But, please,’ he said, ‘what is this Day of Mourning? I was not at all hearing of same yesterday only.’

  Dean Potdar’s eyes behind his gold-rimmed pince-nez twinkled with delight at this.

  ‘Ah, Inspector,’ he said, ‘there was a very good reason for that.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You see, Inspector, the Day was decided on just yesterday itself. And I wonder if you can guess why.’

  Ghote knew what was expected in answer to that.

  ‘Oh, no, sir, not at all. I am not having one faintest idea.’

  The Dean’s round face creased in redoubled merriment.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘did you know that it was today that the University of Bombay in its almighty wisdom has chosen to send to lowly Oceanic College an LIC?’

  Ghote nearly betrayed the fact that he had heard from Mrs Cooper that an LIC was a Local Inquiry Committee, and that he had in fact been aware that such an investigatory team was due at the college.

  But he was just in time.

  ‘Please, what is LIB?’

  ‘LIC, Inspector. LIC.’

  The Dean sounded waspishly annoyed that this joke of his, whatever it was, was in danger of being spoilt by police stupidity.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, LIC I was meaning to say same.’

  ‘Yes. Well, an LIC, Inspector, is an inquiry, consisting generally of two or three senior university administrators, appointed to look into conditions at any of the many constituent colleges in Bombay University where there appears to be cause for concern.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

  ‘And, oddly enough, it has been felt at the highest level in the university that Oceanic College now comes within that definition.’

  ‘They are sending this inquiry team to here?’ Ghote asked, best idiotic fashion.

  ‘Worse, Inspector. They have sent it. The august investigators are expected shortly. Hence our Day of Mourning.’

  Ghote saw it. But knew better than to let that appear.

  ‘But, sir,’ he said, ‘if it is a Day of Mourning and there are no classes, there may be nothing for this LIB – this LIC to witness.’

  ‘Exactly, Inspector.’

  Ghote left it for a few seconds for this subterfuge to sink in to a simple police officer’s mind. At last he produced, not without difficulty, a guffawing laugh.

  ‘Oh, jolly good, jolly good.’

  Then he let his face fall.

  ‘But is no one besides your good self here?’ he asked. ‘Will I be able to see no
body?’

  ‘Well, no, Inspector, you will not. My teaching colleagues have, of course, seized the opportunity of doing no work. However, the Principal is in his seat, needless to say, should you wish to see him and his faithful Mrs Cooper is naturally there as well.’

  Well, another talk with Mrs Cooper might be worth having. Perhaps she would be able to tell him if anybody had been due to have come up to the Principal’s office just after midday last Monday.

  ‘Oh, most good,’ he said. ‘I will talk with Mrs Cooper. She is always very, very helpful.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector, a most helpful lady.’

  The Dean looked at him for a moment through his little gold-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Yes,’ he added with a little jump of abruptness. ‘Most helpful, and devoted, of course, to poor Bembalkar’s interests. Almost too much so at times, I sometimes think. You know, of course, that Bembalkar lost his wife some months ago?’

  ‘Please?’

  Dean Potdar took him by the elbow and led him away a few yards along the balcony.

  ‘I can see I shall have to acquaint you with some of the facts of life, Inspector,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, please?’

  The Dean let go his elbow and twisted his podgy little hands together.

  ‘I suppose things of this sort never occur in police circles, Inspector,’ he said. ‘But in the groves of academe, as we call them, I regret to have to say relations between the sexes are not always as chaste as our great Hindu epics teach us they should be, in so far as they do. So it could well fall out, you see, that even a widowed lady like the good Mrs Cooper might conceive a terrible passion for someone – someone, shall we say, like our friend Bembalkar. Now, while Bembalkar was decently married I am sure that nothing, nothing remotely untoward, passed between those two. But now, don’t you see, Bembalkar is what we might call a loose card. And it is possible – mind, I say no more than that – it is possible that our Mrs Cooper may feel tempted to gather that card into … What do you think of the expression “her ample bosom”, Inspector?’

  For a moment Ghote was genuinely at a loss for a reply. He really needed as much time to think about what the Dean, clearly, intended to put into his head as a stupid police inspector would be expected to take to work out what had been meant. That Mrs Cooper might, for some reason springing from an illicit passion for Principal Bembalkar, have hit on the idea of discrediting him and so secure his resignation.

  And that was possible. If Mrs Cooper had been telling him the truth about Dr Bembalkar’s frustrated desire to quit his difficult post and devote himself to his as yet unstarted book on Hamlet, then was it not likely that she would take this roundabout way of helping him? Or, if not likely, at least just possible? Perhaps, even, when Dr Bembalkar was no longer a dignitary of the college she might have some notion of joining him as his wife.

  ‘Please,’ he said hastily, since the Dean must be expecting some response, ‘I am not very well understanding.’

  ‘No? Then let me put it in words of one syllable. Inspector, has it occurred to you that Mrs Cooper is in love with Bembalkar? And we all of us know Bembalkar would quit his post in an instant if Mrs Maya Rajwani, our revered Managing Trustee, who thinks she has him nicely under her thumb, would let him. So can it be that Mrs Cooper has taken a somewhat extraordinary step to help Bembalkar out of his situation?’

  The Dean may not have exactly used one-syllable words, Ghote thought, but he certainly has not hesitated to make matters altogether plain.

  But was he possibly right? It really seemed a very unlikely thing for anyone to do.

  Except a person truly gripped by sexual desire. Someone like that might do anything regardless of the consequences and often against all that ordinarily was expected of them. And there was this, too. No one could have easier access to Principal Bembalkar’s chamber than his secretary. Mrs Cooper could have taken that Statistical Techniques paper far more easily than either of the other two he suspected.

  Yes, this was another factor altogether.

  Another strand round the adage.

  Of course, Mrs Cooper had no Somnomax Five. Or was even that so? Ridiculous, absurd, as it might sound, it was still possible that like Mr Gulabchand and like Professor Kapur she did not sleep well. And, come to think of it, though at first glance it seemed altogether ridiculous that three people at the same college should each have sleeping pills that were not on wide sale in Bombay, were most likely smuggled, it was quite possible that the tablets had been recommended round the senior common room. Say Principal Bembalkar himself had tried them, and had talked about them to his secretary. He might even have given her part of his own supply.

  The thing to do – it came to him suddenly – was to talk again to Principal Bembalkar, find out what he thought about Mrs Cooper, whether he trusted her, whether he had ever had any cause not to, and perhaps whether, now a lonely widower, he ever thought of her as more than his efficient guardian secretary. And even to ask him if he had ever given her any sleeping pills.

  No sooner thought of than done.

  ‘Well, well, I must not stand here idle all the day,’ he said to Dean Potdar. ‘At least I can make some inquiries now that I have come all the way to here.’

  He knew that the Dean would be delighted to see him go off so promptly once a new suspect had been put in front of him in the way a cat – and he was, or was he, a cat, a cat in an adage? – will lie a mouse in front of its owner. But all the better if this still increased in the Dean’s mind that picture of himself as the simple police officer. There might yet be more he needed to find out from the fellow.

  He heard the clatter of Mrs Cooper’s typewriter before he even opened the door to the Principal’s outer office, and when he entered he found her, wearing today not her customary red blouse but a white one, hammering hard at her machine.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I am wishing to see Principalji. Is he free only?’

  Happily the guardian rakshas was smiling when she answered.

  ‘I will tell him you are here. I do not think he would make any difficulties. As it is a Day of Mourning, I have had to cancel all his engagements.’

  She pressed the switch of her intercom and a moment later Ghote was again facing Principal Bembalkar across his wide table with its rack of well-used pipes. But today the Principal was not protecting himself by sucking and sucking emptily at one of the pipes. Behind his carefully knotted necktie and heavy-rimmed spectacles, he looked a distinctly more decisive figure than when he had confessed to having failed to lock his chamber door on the day that the Statistical Techniques question-paper had been stolen.

  ‘Sit, sit, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Tell me how your investigation is proceeding. I am able to give you more of my time today.’

  Suddenly and unexpectedly he chuckled.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘thanks to our Day of Mourning, our rather suddenly arranged Day of Mourning, I am, as you might say, quite at a loose end.’

  Ghote found himself a little disconcerted. Going into the Principal’s chamber, he had briefly recalled the beaten and bowed-down man who had admitted at last that he had allowed that question-paper to be taken from him. So to find someone now so bouncingly cheerful and cock-a-hoop was a considerable surprise.

  He would have to think again about the way to approach his relations with Mrs Cooper.

  To give himself time to adjust he spoke about the Day of Mourning.

  ‘I was somewhat surprised to find the college shut down just now,’ he said. ‘I had hoped to find many persons here who could answer my questions. When I was leaving here yesterday I was not at all seeing this Day was to take place.’

  Again Principal Bembalkar chuckled.

  ‘No, Inspector,’ he said. ‘You see we arranged the whole thing at very short notice. We were saddled with an LIC, a Local Inquiry Committee you know. Quite unnecessary. Quite unnecessary. And so, acting on Mr Potdar’s advice, I decreed this mourning day. A shrewd fellow Potdar. Our Dean,
you know. You have met him of course?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes. He has been most helpful to me.’

  ‘And to me, Inspector, and to me. I am thoroughly grateful I took his advice. Perhaps a somewhat cunning move, even a little underhand. But effective. Effective.’

  He leant back in his chair.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there are times in this world when one has to act with decision. Yes, decision. Even with ruthlessness. A touch of ruthlessness. It is the only way to get things done. Yes, to get things done.’

  This was a new aspect of the Principal. And one that Ghote felt somehow was not altogether right. Perhaps, ashamed of his lack of decisiveness when Victor Furtado had had his face blackened in the courtyard right outside his office and all that had followed from that, he had swung wildly in the other direction.

  It seemed, too, that happy bravado was not a permanent state. Hardly had he finished his chant of praise for effective action than behind the dark frame of his spectacles a look of caution came into his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, reaching for one of his pipes, ‘but there is one thing, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know how well you have been getting on with my secretary. I gather she has been able to help you once or twice.’

  ‘Yes, sir, she has been altogether helpful.’

  ‘Yes. But let me warn you, Inspector. Not a word to her about – about what I have just mentioned to you. These things need to be kept sub rosa, as we used to say when I was a student in the UK. Yes, sub rosa. Under the rose. Not talked about. Potdar was most insistent on that. And quite rightly. Quite rightly.’

  Ghote felt a small spurt of pleasure. He had been debating with himself how to bring the talk round to the subject of Mrs Cooper without making it evident that she was possibly a suspect in the question-paper theft, and now the Principal had done it for him.

  ‘Oh, no, sir,’ he said quickly. ‘I am assuring you I would never mention such to any persons whatsoever. Not even to Mrs Cooper, though I am supposing she is somewhat in your confidence. There must be matters she is knowing that should not be told to each and every person in the college.’