Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  Then a thought came to him. A happy idea.

  He would not go back to Headquarters. He would go home. He was entitled to take rest. He had been out at the college and fighting his way there and back for many more hours than strict duty laid down. And, besides, there really was nothing he could do till next day.

  No, a good rest was what he deserved. And, taking it, he might after all come up with some way of getting to that answer.

  He headed for home feeling better than he had done ever since his early morning start. For the rest of the day his way was clear before him, even if it could lead nowhere. He had done all he could.

  It was not until, more than an hour later, he arrived home that it struck him that there was something else he could do there besides taking that needed rest. He could beat his wife.

  All the circumstances were right. Ved would be at school. Protima would have done her shopping early when there was the best choice in the market. They would have the place to themselves.

  Then, abruptly, he was overcome with confusion. He had not planned this out. He had not had time to. To begin with, he had never definitely settled on just what he would use. He remembered that, sitting in the Oceanic College students canteen, he had decided, more or less, that the right thing would be a good leather belt such as some of his fellow officers boasted of using. But he had not got any such thing. Merely three or four cotton or nylon ones plus his best-uniform Sam Browne belt. But to make use of that, even if it would be practical to clutch that brass-fitted combination of belt and shoulder strap, was unthinkable. It was the symbol of his calling as an officer of police.

  While he had been waiting for Mohinder Singh Mann he had half-decided on a cane or a whippy stick of some sort. But, again, he had no such thing to hand.

  In the meantime, quite without thinking, he had rattled the latch on the door. Now Protima opened it.

  ‘It is you,’ she exclaimed, much surprised. ‘Are you well? What it is?’

  The look of instant concern on her face at once chased away all thoughts of dealing out retribution for past offences.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I am quite well. Hundred percent, except only I am damn hot.’

  ‘Come inside, come inside. I will bring you a cold drink. Take off your shoes. Sit, sit.’

  He went in and dropped into his chair.

  But even as he did so a tiny prickle of resentment ran up and down inside him. Yes, what Protima had suggested was exactly what he wanted. But he had not wanted her to tell him what he wanted. If he had said, ‘Fetch me one cold drink. I am going to take off my shoes and take rest’, then he would have been delighted to sit, to sip slowly at the cold drink when she brought it. Limca. Limca would be nicest, tart and refreshing.

  He bounced angrily to his feet.

  ‘But you are not sitting,’ Protima said, coming back with a glass and a bottle of Mangola. ‘Sit, sit. Let me take off those shoes. How hot you are looking. Sit and drink this only.’

  Now. Now would be the time to do it. Now when she had brought him syrupy Mangola which she obstinately believed he particularly liked because she herself did. Now when she had ordered him to sit rather than waiting for him to sit or stay standing as he liked. Now would be the time to beat her into a different frame of mind. From henceforth only.

  Except.

  Except what was he to do it with? He looked down at the shoes he had not kicked off. One of them might do, though it was too stiff and clumsy to get a good grip on.

  He glanced rapidly round the room. Nothing. No stick of any sort. Nor anything that could at all substitute for a leather belt.

  He could march into the bedroom and find one of his chappals there. But he had rejected a chappal as being too childish for the importance he wanted to give to this. Or there was a hairbrush. Her own hairbrush.

  But, no. In their early married days they had sometimes played a game of him pretending to spank her with a hairbrush. With the very same hairbrush she still used. To use that would give quite the wrong signal.

  Wait, a broom. Surely they had a broom somewhere in the kitchen or just outside. A bundle of straight thin hard twigs would be just right, just the right length, about two feet, just the right whippiness. But. But the broom, if he could remember where it was kept, would be appallingly dirty. It would not be right to use such a thing.

  ‘But still you are not sitting? Are you dreaming only? And still you are looking hot. Hotter even than before. Now, sit at once.’

  And he sat.

  Protima poured the Mangola, crouched and pulled off his shoes.

  Certainly, that felt better. And it was delightful to be sitting. He leant back.

  Perhaps later. Later this afternoon. When occasion arose. There was plenty of time before Ved would get back from school.

  He drank the Mangola. It was pleasant, and deliciously cold. And if it was more syrupy than he liked, well, it was.

  ‘So, now, tell me,’ Protima said, going to put his shoes by the door, ‘why have you come home so early? The case? Is it over?’

  ‘Oh, if only it were,’ he exclaimed before it occurred to him that he did not really want to have to tell her anything about that terrible adage he was encoiled and entrapped inside.

  And in any case talking about the business would mean, if he was not careful, explaining to her what an adage was. And that was something he was totally unable to do. How stupid he would look.

  He squeezed his eyes half-shut and tried to picture yet one more time that old, old school notebook. Adage = Equals what? The picture, as ever, eluded his inner vision.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Protima said.

  ‘No. No, I do not want.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘I just only do not want.’

  ‘But that is nonsense. You know sometimes when a case has been extra difficult you have told me about it, and by the time you had finished you were able to see what you had missed.’

  ‘I was able to see,’ he snapped out bitterly. ‘You are meaning that Madam Detective solved the case when her poor husband could not.’

  But that, in one instance at least, had been true. Or partly true. He felt a searing burn of resentment.

  ‘No, no,’ Protima said. ‘You know well I am not at all able to do your work. All I was meaning was that sometimes, when you tell me your all problems, you yourself are seeing what is answer.’

  And that, again, was true. Absolutely true.

  Which did nothing to lessen his feeling of fury.

  So, now. Now was the time to teach her that lesson.

  No. No, it was somehow too soon. Not the true and proper moment. It would be wrong to let her think what he did was just because of one thing she had said. It all must be done calmly. In the way a magistrate handed down sentence.

  So, watching himself like a neck-swivelling vulture in case that word ‘adage’ slipped out, he started at least to give her the outline of the business that had entangled him in so many twists and turns.

  Soon he found he was recounting every last detail. How he had learnt a little about Oceanic College during that absurd night morcha, striding along beside green, swaying, spring-fresh Sarita Karatkar. How he had overcome eventually every obstacle in getting to see Principal Bembalkar. How in that long battle of wills with the Principal he had at last learnt about the keys left to dangle in his chamber door. How he had worked out what the reason for taking just that one question-paper must be, and how he had discovered there were only two candidates for the principalship who could have done what had been done.

  Here Protima had interrupted.

  ‘But are you sure there could be no other reason than to make this Principal resign so as to take his seat?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he had answered, irritation seeping upwards again, ‘Dean Potdar was suggesting that one Mr Victor Furtado, a young lecturer Principal Bembalkar had failed to rescue from a rag, might have done it out of revenge only.’

  Protima had laughed at that.

>   ‘Come, you are not in some film. It is not Naseeruddin Shah playing Inspector.’

  And, yes, he thought, before he had had time to resent her remark, she is right. It is absurd to think of a man like Victor Furtado attempting to discredit the Principal in that way.

  But then Protima had gone on to add something that did bring his resentment, boiling and bubbling, to the surface.

  ‘No,’ she had said, ‘there really must be some other reason, besides making that Principal resign, for taking away that question-paper.’

  ‘What? What reason. What?’ he had shot back. ‘Tell me one good reason for anyone to do that. Just only one.’

  It would be too bad, altogether too bad, he thought with sharp rattling anger, if Protima finds the answer I have not at all been getting near. How then will I ever be able to act as a husband should? To beat my wife for daring to put her way over mine?

  ‘Well, I am not knowing,’ she said then. ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am right. One hundred and one percent right.’

  After that he had lapsed into sullen silence. But when at last Protima had said coaxingly ‘But go on, tell more. It is a so difficult business,’ he had grumblingly complied and explained at great length about the more appalling crime he seemed to have discovered at the KEM Hospital and in that bare little room in Chawl No 4.

  For all of that Protima had had nothing but praise and admiration.

  Well – the thought just tickled the edge of his mind – perhaps after all she is more of a good Hindu wife than I was believing.

  But at once the memory of the choice of Ved’s college, even of the insistence on Mangola over Limca, came back to him, and he abandoned his half-fulfilled change of mind.

  Before much longer he felt he had been right to do so. It was when he had reached the point in his long narrative, which in the beginning he had not expected to tell, where the Additional Commissioner had given him the order not to take time himself to investigate the possible murder, or attempted murder, of Bala Chambhar.

  ‘But that is not right,’ Protima exclaimed. ‘No, you must not let that man tell you what you must do. You must investigate that poisoned shrikhand to the very end.’

  Then anger rose up in him once more. Full and fiery.

  How dare she. How dare she tell him what he must or must not do in his working life. How dare she set herself up against the Additional Commissioner himself.

  Yes, she did deserve a sound thrashing. Here and now. With whatever first came to hand. Chappal, broom, hairbrush, even Sam Browne belt itself. Yes. Now.

  He jumped up from his chair.

  And at the outer door came a noisy, familiar tapping.

  Ved. It was Ved back from school.

  Like a child’s balloon, its tied neck suddenly untwisted, Ghote sank back into his chair.

  NINETEEN

  Once more Ghote made sure he arrived at Oceanic College well before the start of classes. He was feeling grey with depression at the prospect in front of him, although he knew this was as much as anything because of the frustrated time he had spent at home, miserable and uneasy. Ved had chosen not to go out, and so he had found he had lost any opportunity for doing what he had been on the point of doing – surely, surely? – when his son had tapped at the door. He had sat there feeling dully furious with Protima, feeling as furious with himself, even feeling furious with Ved for working at his school books instead of begging to be allowed to go and see his friends ‘just only for one half-hour’.

  But at least now he was determined to have the maximum time to dig and burrow as hard as he could everywhere in the college, however little chance there seemed to be of getting to the heart of the business. There must, he told himself angrily, be someone who had been somewhere near the offices on the balcony during the time the question-paper was stolen. All right, no one might actually have seen some unauthorised person disappear through Mrs Cooper’s door. But there ought to be someone, or a succession of people, who had been somewhere in the vicinity and who should remember seeing anyone else there. Perhaps a person who had no good reason to be up on the balcony just then.

  Possibly even, if luck was really with him, he would find a student or perhaps a peon carrying a message or a file, who had actually seen Professor Kapur where he had denied ever being. It would be a pleasure to confront that gentleman with a witness to his lying.

  He had decided on the way out, going past the factories and mills, smoke creeping oily and black from their chimneys even at this early hour, that he would begin by stationing himself at the cycle stand again. There he would ask every single student he could catch where exactly they had been at around midday on the day of the crime. He might, too, have better luck than he had had before in discovering one of Bala Chambhar’s particular friends. They, in turn, might know who it was who had handed Bala the stolen paper. Or perhaps have been told by Bala simply how it was he had come across it, which in itself might be enough of a clue to the original thief.

  Unless, he thought with a sudden squirt of bitterness, Protima was somehow right and the question-paper had not after all been stolen as a means of making Principal Bembalkar resign.

  He thrust that notion away. Protima could not be right. She must not be right.

  At the college compound he saw, with some grudging pleasure, that at least today things were back to normal. Krishna Iyer, MA Madras, was back on duty, at his still empty cycle stand, shunting about here and there, busy and puffed-up, but aimless. The doors of the building were standing wide open and the tall figure of Amar Nath in his green uniform could be seen looking out at the world from just inside, ready to jump on the first of the students as they made their way in. And only three or four minutes after his own arrival the earliest students did begin to put in an appearance.

  But, though he succeeded in getting hold of as many as twenty or even twenty-five boys and a little later a dozen or so girls, and after that a number of peons and even a couple of sweepers, he got nowhere. The theft of the question-paper had taken place during the lunch recess. So it was natural that almost everybody in the college, students, staff, peons, everyone, was eating the midday meal. The staff had almost all been in their common room, where lunch was served. The students had crowded into the canteen or risked the over-boiled tea and greasy omelets of the Paris Hotel, or those of them with well-off parents had gone to the cars that had come from home carrying food, home-cooked in best ghee, in steel containers. Peons and sweepers had crouched where they could, chewing at what they had.

  Nor did any of the students he spoke to admit to knowing Bala Chambhar more than by sight. Again, he thought, that was reasonable. From all that Sarita and Mohinder Singh Mann had told him Bala was something of a loner. So if in his questioning now he had not chanced to come on one of his few friends, or even someone who knew who they were, this was not out of the way.

  In the end, when the students were in the first classes and the compound deserted, he thought he would have to bring himself to undergo yet another consultation with Dean Potdar. It would risk his being accompanied for the rest of the day by a Dr Watson who totally reversed the standard relationship between Great Detective and humble hanger-on. But that was a penalty that would have to be paid.

  So eventually, having wandered about for some time hoping to catch one or two more students for some reason not in their classes, again he made his way gloomily up the stairs to the balcony.

  Then, just as he was passing Mrs Cooper’s door, an extraordinary figure shot out of the Dean’s office ahead. It was his secretary, the comfortable knitter. But she looked anything but comfortable now. Her face was a picture of shock, mouth stuck half open, eyes rolling upwards. In her hand she still clutched the piece of knitting she had been working at. It trailed at her side, unravelling more and more with every lunging step.

  ‘Inspector, Inspector,’ she managed to gasp out. ‘Help. Help.’

  What has happened now in this crazy place, he thought w
ith a jab of viciousness.

  For half a second a vision of pompous, dignified, tubby little Dean Potdar attempting rape flashed into his mind.

  But he had no time for speculation.

  He strode up to the distraught secretary, grasped her firmly by the arm trailing her knitting, and almost shouted her into coherence.

  ‘Madam. Madam. What is it? What has happened?’

  ‘Dean sahib, Dean sahib,’ she moaned, now almost collapsing. ‘They have kidnapped him.’

  ‘Kidnapped? What are you meaning, kidnapped?’

  ‘It is true, Inspector. True. Dean sahib seemed to be late this morning, and I was wondering where he could be. Then – then the telephone was ringing. I thought it might be himself. He was perhaps once more indisposed, another of his bad nights. But it was some boys, some boys from the college. We have kidnapped the Dean, one of them was saying. When we are getting our Founder’s Day holiday back we would let him go.’

  ‘You recognised the voice? Did whoever it was give a name only?’

  ‘No, no, Inspector. Just that message, and then he was shutting the line. Inspector, you must help. You must save him before they are doing him some injury.’

  ‘Well, madam, this is a matter for local police itself. What you must do is inform Principal Bembalkar, and he will get in touch with your nearest PS.’

  Thank goodness, he thought to himself as he took his hand off the secretary’s arm, here is something I do not have to deal with. One twisting line of the adage has missed me altogether.

  ‘But, Inspector, you are not understanding. Dean sahib is not at all a hale and hearty man. If they are rough with him, he may be having one heart failure.’

  No, oh, no.

  If one flicking adage length of fish-line, thorn, pliant bamboo, whatever it was, had seemed to curl round in the wrong direction, it was only so that now another could come in more tightly from the other side.

  He gave a huge sigh.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will come with you to the Principal, and then we would see what I can do.’