Cheating Death

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘And you took one?’ Ghote could not now prevent himself asking directly. ‘You took just only one?’

  ‘No, Inspector. Certainly not. Or, that is, I did indeed reach out with the intention of taking away the whole pile. I admit to that, to my shame. But, as I did so, second thoughts prevailed. Why am I doing this, I thought. I turned and left the chamber.’

  Ghote felt a deep grey sanddrift of disappointment swirling down towards him. He tried to fend it off. No, he told himself, this cannot be what happened. But he knew that it was. Why else would Mrs Gulabchand have admitted to him that she had entered the Principal’s chamber? If she had in fact taken that single question-paper and had meant not to confess to it, she would have continued to deny and deny she had ever been in the room. But she had not denied it. She had told him plainly just what she had done.

  Even to the point – he knew it for truth now – of saying she had withdrawn her hand as she had actually reached out to the pile of question-papers.

  So now, not only was Professor Kapur apparently impossible as the thief, and Victor Furtado plainly too weak to have accomplished all the thief and near-murderer had done, but Mrs Gulabchand, the last suspect he had, was also to be struck from his list.

  He got to his feet.

  ‘Madam,’ he said to the stout, sari-wrapped figure at the table beside him, ‘I fully accept this explanation you have offered.’

  He left her sitting, calm as ever, where she was and went out.

  What to do, he asked himself. What to do?

  How much time had passed, and here he was further away than ever from filling that gap between when the question-paper had been taken and when Bala Chambhar had begun to sell it. It could not be long before he got a message summoning him to the Additional Commissioner to explain. And he had no explanation to give.

  Dean Potdar. He found himself longing to be able to go to the fat little malicious man once again to ask him to search his brain for any other possible new suspect, however unlikely. Was there perhaps after all some other ambitious person in the college who, at a pinch, might be a candidate for the Principal’s seat? Or was there some other reason, however curious, why someone else might want to get rid of the Principal?

  But he had burnt his boats with the Dean. That was certain.

  He stood where he was, in the corridor a few yards along from the staff common-room, racking his brains. But when there came the sudden thunder and chatter of students released from their hour of classes, he had still not been able to conjure up the least semblance of a new suspect.

  ‘There he is. There.’

  The shout, though loud and close to, hardly penetrated his deep interior speculation. But what only a moment later did jerk him back to reality was the sight of an anger-contorted face, a face he seemed half to recognise, thrust close to his own.

  ‘What – What –’ he jabbed out. ‘What are you doing only?’

  And as he shot out his startled question he realised whose face, just six inches from his own, he was looking at. The boy Amar Nath had knocked to the ground at the Paris Hotel.

  Then, taking in at last things around him, he saw that, the boy confronting him was not alone. By no means. Beside him, in a grinning, ominous half-circle were, as far as he could make out, all the rest of Dean Potdar’s kidnappers as well as a whole pressing cluster of other boys.

  Were those rich riff-raffs now bent on revenge? Had he, lost in thought, allowed himself to be caught in a trap he would be lucky to get out of without some broken bones?

  ‘What – What is this?’ he asked, feeling not so much fright as bewilderment.

  It was Mohinder Singh Mann, pushing towards him through the crowd, who answered.

  ‘Inspector, you are being gheraoed.’

  A gherao. Being surrounded by a crowd of protestors until they were granted their wish, whatever it was. Prevented from going anywhere, from taking a cold drink in the heat of the day, from having anything to eat, from visiting the mutri to relieve oneself even. Yes, but why were these students – the gherao was a typical student action – doing this? To him?

  ‘But why?’ he burst out. ‘Why?’

  Mohinder eased himself just into the front rank of the human wall.

  ‘Inspector, it was not at all my idea.’

  ‘No? Then what for are you here? What is this all?’

  ‘Inspector, Sarita was making me come. She said we owed you that much. Inspector, these fellows are objecting to you interfering between them and the Dean. They want you out. Out of the college. It is not just only those friends of Shantaram Antrolikar. They have full backing. Only Sarita and myself –’

  And then half a dozen hands grabbed the tall young Sikh and tugged him away.

  Ghote, pressed hard up against the wall at his back, felt a dart of sadness. Why was it that this boy, so intelligent, so full of goodwill, so determined on justice, why was it that he and Sarita Karatkar, that spring-fresh hope who went with him, got pushed aside by crude, hectoring, thoughtless idiots like these hotheads? But that was the way of things.

  Or perhaps it was not. Perhaps in the end, somehow, the Mohinder Singh Manns and Sarita Karatkars would triumph. They should. They had the force and the willingness to do it.

  But, now, now what a bloody mess it was. What a bloody twisting and twining adage he had got himself yet more deeply into. How was he ever going to get out of it? How was he going to get himself disentangled?

  He looked at the faces encircling him. Contorted with worked-up rage. Eyes bright with the pleasure of inflicting punishment. Taunting. Enjoying.

  How was this possibly going to end?

  TWENTY-THREE

  All thought blotted out by sheer rage, Ghote looked at that ring of hostile, hate-filled, shouting, sneering and yelling faces.

  Was there anyone likely to come to his rescue? He imagined Principal Bembalkar, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, standing at the very far end of the corridor and bleating, as he had done when Bala Chambhar and his friends had blackened Victor Furtado’s face, ‘Gentlemen, as your senior I beg you …’ He thought of Mrs Gulabchand, sitting in the staff common-room, no doubt placidly ignoring the noise only a few yards away. What had she said about that business with Furtado which equally she had heard taking place? Just something like ‘There was some sort of jape’? No, quietly and unswervingly pursuing her own course, she would leave him to the mercy of his tormentors. Professor Kapur? Yes, he had acted with decision to quell the riot in the exam. But he would simply say now, without a doubt, that it was written in the stars one Inspector Ghote should be gheraoed for hours and hours on this day at this precise time. Amar Nath? Yes, he would come flying to the rescue. Only, he was almost certainly away somewhere nursing his bruises from his encounter with the ringleaders here.

  So should he give in? Announce that he would leave? No, he could not. He would not. Damn it, he was a police officer on duty. He had been ordered to carry out an investigation in this bloody damn college. He could not just go away because a bunch of hot-headed students had decided he was interfering with some damn God-given right they had.

  The right to kidnap their own Dean.

  And that was somebody else who was not ever going to come to his rescue. However much, as the man responsible for college discipline, it was his bounden duty. But when it had been made clear to him that someone he had taken to be no more than a stupid police officer was not such, he had gone off, tail between his legs. He would delight now in not sending these riff-raffs about their business.

  What a nasty little ungrateful malice-filled monkey he had turned out to be, acting always behind everybody’s back.

  Then, despite the noise and even heat coming in sickening waves from the ring of mocking students, into Ghote’s head a slow dawning of light began to spread.

  Dean Potdar. The fellow was just only a malice-filled monkey. Inside that black academic gown and that British-style intellectual’s tweed jacket – in all this heat – he wa
s no more than a nasty little mischief-maker. And … And surely that theft from Principal Bembalkar’s chamber been first and foremost an act of mischief?

  That was – yes, it must be – the missing motive he had not been able to think of even just a few seconds ago. Simple mischief. The monkey desire to play a trick.

  No wonder he had been so blind since he had allowed himself to be guided and directed by the very man who had had the best opportunity of any of committing that theft. No wonder he had been unable to see the reason for the theft for what it was. How idiotic he had been. How truly stupid. Not how mock-stupid, how absolutely stupid.

  Point after point came clicking into place as the menacing circle of angered faces so close to his own seemed to recede into an unimagined distance.

  Yes, Dean Potdar with his office only a few yards away from the Principal’s was, of course, in the best position to go in there when it had by chance been left unguarded. And, by God, the fellow must have just come back to his office from the common-room where he had seen the Principal arrive for his early lunch. Mrs Gulabchand had seen him there and had asked if he knew why Dr Bembalkar was not in his seat to keep his appointment with her.

  And, now that he had begun to see the Dean in this light, he realised he had even had a first clue to it all almost as soon as he had come to the college, on the day after that torchlight morcha. Amar Nath had given it to him while they had been drinking horrible stewed tea in the Paris Hotel. Amar Nath had said then something about the Dean ‘making nasty remarks’ directed at everyone ‘from Princi down’. So from then on he had had evidence himself that Dean Potdar despised and disliked Principal Bembalkar. And he had thought only at that time that this meant the Dean wanted the principalship.

  Then, when he had foolishly, if understandably in the circumstances, sought the Dean’s advice, since he was provenly out of the running as a contender for the principalship, the fellow had had the cunning to ask him what he knew about Bala Chambhar’s chances of surviving what everybody then had believed to be attempted suicide. Of course, he would have been desperate to know whether his victim was safely out of the way, whether the poison he had put into that tub from a Monginis cake shop had worked. A Monginis, the sort of place someone as well-off as a college dean might well buy from. And, yes, at the corner of the Ramaprakash Housing Society block where the fellow was accustomed to go visiting his friends, the Gulabchands, there was a Monginis. He had seen the place with his own eyes.

  In front of him the close-pressing circle of bodies swayed to and fro in excitement. He could smell a dozen different breaths, sharp with the odour of chewed paans, or still onion-reeking from the morning meal, or clinging with cigarette odour. Or merely foul.

  But at the thought of how he had invaded the Gulabchands’ flat side by side with the Dean a cold chill came over him. How he had allowed the fellow to dupe him. Because during the time they had been there – he was sure of this now – the Dean had contrived to send him to search the bathroom while slipping rapidly into the bedroom and planting in the nearer of the two bedside tables there the very packet of Somnomax Five he himself must have used. The Somnomax Five he must have bought to end those sleepless nights his secretary had jabbered out about when the fellow had been kidnapped.

  Why had he not listened then instead of rushing to the fellow’s rescue?

  He knew too, he realised now, just when the transfer of the question-paper from actual thief to innocent, duped distributor had taken place. The Dean had had the infernal impudence to mention it to him, unless he had let it slip before he had had time to think. It had been when Bala Chambhar had been summoned to appear before him on a discipline charge ‘just a few days ago’, as he had said. It would have been the easiest thing in the world then to leave the room for a moment with that secret question-paper laid temptingly out for anti-social, indigent Bala to take, as later he must have managed to put the poisoned shrikhand in the boy’s way.

  And then what the fellow had done to him while all the time he had believed he himself was milking him for information. Purposefully and maliciously he had put suspect after suspect in his way, doing his best to send him into a state of utter confusion. And succeeding, damn it.

  There had been Professor Kapur. And, yes, the astrologer had actually mentioned at his flat that he had heard of him from the Dean. That must have been only shortly before his visit, though it had not been clear at the time. And when Potdar had been there he must have seized the opportunity of putting that piece of Somnomax Five foil into the book on the table in the hall.

  Then there was the way the fellow had added Victor Furtado to the list of suspects. Yes, of course, when just outside the hostel he had surprisingly encountered him, the fellow must have actually been on his way to plant Somnomax Five on the Goan. Damn it, he had had the cheek to try to send him off there in the wrong direction while he went round to do that. It had been only because he had happened to see Furtado giving his lecture to solitary Miss Washikar that he had got there before him. If his search of that bare room had taken place a little later, he would have come upon that seemingly damning evidence in place of the squashed box of stuff for countering foul interior gases. And the fellow had even made some attempt to include rakshas Mrs Cooper as a suspect.

  What a fool to have run about here and there like that at that damn man’s sweet will and pleasure.

  Now the surrounding crowd of hostile young faces was less noisy. But no less determined.

  No, Ghote thought, they have gheraoed people often before. They know how it is done. This is the start only of the long agony. They are saying to themselves there may be hours more before this fellow is breaking, but he will break before we do.

  And would he?

  Would the time come, with no rescue in sight, when the heat, thirst, perhaps hunger, or even the humiliation of needing to relieve himself, would force him into surrender?

  But, damn it, that time was not yet. If they wanted a long, long battle of wills, then, by God, they would get same.

  Deliberately he withdrew his thoughts and went back to enumerating all the points against the Dean he could think of. What a nasty, cunning creature the fellow was. That Day of Mourning device had been typical. He should have been alerted when he had learnt of it. From the pleasure the fellow so clearly had got in telling him what he had done, if from nothing else. It was a trick altogether typical of the man. Just like his attempting to make poor Principal Bembalkar look a fool. Just like his covering up that impulsive move by trying to poison Bala Chambhar and, typically again, not quite daring to use enough Somnomax Five to attain his object.

  Suddenly he found floating in his head a curious expression. ‘Letting I dare not wait upon I would.’ Where had that come from?

  Then he knew.

  Back to his mind came that elusive page from his schooldays notebook. And now he saw the complete entry, in his round immature writing in English script. Adage = a saying or maxim.

  So, damn it, he had not been caught up in any trap, or adage, after all. He was not the poor cat. He was not.

  But he was still a man in deep trouble.

  The ring of faces round him had sunk back into silent enmity now. But enmity it was. There and intent on staying there.

  Then, in a flash of inspiration, he saw that he had a way out. A simple and almost foolproof way.

  Without for an instant letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, he addressed the silent faces.

  ‘Listen, it is not myself you should be gheraoing. I am not the man who was announcing that Day of Mourning and taking away your Founder’s Day holiday.’

  ‘You were aiding and helping,’ the boy Amar Nath had knocked down sullenly replied after a silent moment.

  ‘All right, I was,’ Ghote went on. ‘But I am telling you now. I am not helping Dean Potdar any more. In fact, I am wanting just only one thing. To arrest the fellow on one serious charge.’

  His words certainly caused a sensation in the close-
clustered faces round him. He saw quick looks exchanged. Then, in a moment more expressions of incredulity.

  Would it work? Would this stroke, thought up on the spur of the moment, make this mob change its mind? Had he bounced them into it?

  He had. As suddenly as the mob had descended on him it parted.

  ‘To Old Pot-belly,’ someone shouted.

  And in a moment the call was taken up, it seemed, by every boy in the mob.

  ‘To Old Pot-belly. To Old Pot-belly.’

  The tone, too, had changed completely. Where, when he had first been surrounded, every face was angry, now a sudden spirit of laughter ran everywhere.

  ‘To Old Pot-belly. Arrest Old Pot-belly. Prison for Pot-pot. Prison for Pot-pot.’

  Ghote furiously wished he had not gone as far as he had. He was being swept along now by these noisy brainless devils in a wild rush to the Dean’s office. Were they expecting him to arrest the fellow there and then? Well, he had more or less said that that was what he intended to do. But he could have said nothing less if he had wanted to break up the gherao.

  Now he was at the top of the stairs. He was round on to the offices veranda. He was outside the Dean’s door. He was inside the outer office. The Dean’s secretary had risen to her feet. Once more her knitting had fallen to the ground leaving a long trail of pink wool from the needles she still grasped.

  ‘Arrest Old Pot-belly. Arrest. Arrest. Arrest.’

  The shouts had grown in volume till they had become a roar.

  And then the inner door opened and Dean Potdar stood there.

  ‘What – What – Go away,’ he said, his voice getting feebler with every word.

  And now the yelling students round Ghote had fallen back a little and every face was looking at him. With avid expectation.

  But he could not effect an arrest just like that. These things had to be done in the proper way. There had to be two panches there to witness what the accused had said. He ought to have obtained the Additional Commissioner’s backing.

  ‘Inspector Ghote ki jai,’ one of the mob shouted now.