Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  When they were caught, if they were caught, there should be material enough here to make sure of a conviction. Plainly the men were not the sort to know much about handwriting. It should be easily possible to get a good expert into court to state that this was their writing, even with these rough capitals. And there might too be some fingerprint evidence, once the writer of the note was in police hands to be checked, even if the chances of finding clear enough prints now to tie up with a file at Central Fingerprints Bureau were almost certainly hopeless.

  He carefully placed the coarse sheet in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.

  And then his engrained conscientiousness made him ask one more question, though he knew such a pernickety attitude was not going to be popular with the forceful Mr Desai.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘where exactly is envelope now?’

  Manibhai Desai, his bold-featured face still visibly affected by the thought of what his blunder over fingerprints might mean in failure to bring to justice his son’s attackers, sat with broad shoulders drooping on the little orange tub chair and said nothing in answer.

  Ghote looked at the white telephone. If it were to ring at this instant his awkward line of inquiry could be postponed. The telephone sat on the gleaming, laminated mock-rosewood surface of the table, impersonal and cold, as if it was merely some small object whose use was not immediately apparent.

  Ghote cleared his throat as loudly as he could.

  ‘The envel – Please, it is necessary that I should examine the envelope also.’

  Manibhai Desai darted him a glance of quick fury. Such looks, Ghote realized, would in other circumstances send many a senior employee of Trust-X Manufacturing into a cold slide of fear about his continued chances of employment.

  ‘What are you bothering with this?’ the proprietor of Trust-X barked. ‘At any moment the telephone will be ringing and we would be able to take a hold of those filthy swine. What are you bothering with other matters altogether?’

  ‘It is a question of the possible disposal of the envelope,’ Ghote said lumberingly. ‘You told it had been thrown away. In very modern flats of this type there is often, I understand, waste-disposal unit in operation.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Mr Desai agreed. ‘Are you thinking we would not have such appliance?’

  Ghote’s heart sank. The envelope, he felt certain now, would contain some clue to who the kidnappers were.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘while we are waiting would you be so good as to carefully consider whether the envelope was put in such a machine?’

  ‘It was thrown away, thrown away,’ Mr Desai replied with tetchy vagueness.

  ‘But it might constitute valuable clue,’ Ghote burst out.

  ‘Clue? Clue? What clue could there be in an envelope only? A brown envelope of poorest quality?’

  Ghote’s brain flew round. And he could think of no single answer that would not be ridiculous. If the note’s fingerprints had been obliterated, then the ones on the envelope would be doubly so. And was it likely that the kidnappers had meticulously put their name and address on the envelope’s back? Or how could a letter left at the scene of an abduction bear a postmark?

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘in a matter of this sort you can never tell what might be revealed if a very close examin –’

  And then the telephone rang.

  Before Manibhai Desai had time to answer the call himself Ghote snatched up the white receiver, clapped his hand over its mouthpiece and issued his instructions in a fierce whisper.

  ‘Say “Hello” only.’

  ‘Hello?’

  There was a moment’s silence. Their straining ears could detect the insect-clicking murmur of the open line. Then a voice spoke.

  ‘It is Mr Trust-X?’

  His hand firmly over the mouthpiece again, Ghote hissed out more directions.

  ‘Say “Yes” but ask also “Who are you?” ’

  ‘Yes, yes. It is Manibhai Desai speaking. But who are you, you filthy, child attack –’

  Ghote contrived to slide his taut fingers obliteratingly across the front of the mouthpiece. He darted a glance of cold reproof at Mr Desai.

  The telephone was silent. They both looked at the white receiver. At last Ghote could stand it no longer.

  ‘Tell them you are listening only,’ he ordered.

  ‘I am listening,’ Mr Desai uttered clearly into the mouthpiece.

  ‘You had better listen well,’ the voice answered immediately.

  Ghote attacked it with every instinct of analysis he possessed. What class of person was it? It was a man certainly. But young or old? What sort of an accent was this English in? A Marathi one? A Gujarati? A Hindi? A Southern accent?

  ‘Say you are ready to hear what he has to tell,’ he whispered.

  ‘I will hear what you have to tell.’

  ‘Follow this, Desai. We have talked to the kid. We have found out he is not your son.’

  ‘Then you dirt –’

  Again Ghote had to push his fingers over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Ask something,’ he said. ‘Ask something. Ask anything. Ask who they think the boy is.’

  ‘Who are you thinking the boy is that you have got?’

  Mr Desai sounded every bit as authoritative as Ghote could wish. The voice at the far end was silent for a moment. Then it answered.

  ‘Pidku. Tailor’s kid.’

  That and no more. Not nearly enough to work on.

  ‘Ask for proof.’

  ‘What proof are you offering for this?’ Mr Desai duly demanded.

  ‘Just be listening,’ the far voice came back.

  No characteristic accent. Almost certainly above the age of, say, twenty. Uneducated. Flat.

  The voice, apparently satisfied that the proprietor of Trust-X was listening, resumed.

  ‘We are making no difference in our demand.’

  ‘What? What is that? What are you saying?’

  ‘For Haribhai we would have ask twenty lakhs of rupees,’ the kidnapper stated flatly. ‘For Pidku, same money.’

  The manufacturer of Trust-X stood blank with shock. Ghote, equally striving to adjust himself to this utterly unexpected new situation, hissed a flurried, snatched-at direction.

  ‘Tell that you want time.’

  ‘No,’ Mr Desai flashed back at him.

  ‘Yes, say it,’ Ghote countered, putting all his force into the words. ‘Say it. Say it. They must at least be made to talk more.’

  Mr Desai looked at him, his deep eyes hot with mutiny. But then a shake of the head indicated reluctant agreement.

  Ghote took his hand off the mouthpiece.

  ‘Listen,’ Mr Desai said slowly down the line. ‘Listen, please. It is not possible to decide a thing like this straightaway. You must give time. Will you ring again?’

  ‘In one hour. And no police, or we kill. Okay?’

  And with a click of finality that struck like a blow in the tense silence of the luxurious hall of the penthouse the receiver at the far end was put down.

  For almost half a minute neither Ghote nor Manibhai Desai spoke. Ghote was appraising the great stark fact that the mystery caller had plunked down in front of them. He hardly could face thinking about it, so big and brutal did it seem, but rather he approached as near it as he dared, snuffling nervously at its odour. He thought, at one irrelevant moment, that no doubt the proprietor of Trust-X, for all his accustomed incisiveness, must be feeling exactly as he did.

  To demand the enormous sum of twenty lakhs of rupees. It would be enough to pay for, say, a whole fleet of one hundred fine cars. To demand all that, not for the return of a precious son, but for the restoration to another father of his child: it was a stroke of world-reversing magnitude.

  Would Manibhai Desai pay? Would he even think of paying? What would he himself do if he were asked to pay every last paise he possessed to save the child of a stranger? Yet how could one not?

  He had been staring, as had Mr Desai, at
the white telephone ever since he had slowly cradled the receiver at the end of the call, but now, very quietly, he stole a close look at the beneficent dispenser of Trust-X.

  The tall businessman’s strongly-marked features were becoming moment by moment locked more and more in a mask of not deciding. It was plain to see. His wide mouth below the stallion nostrils was growing more and more fixed in a straight line of saying nothing. His deep-set eyes were retreating instant by instant further and further into inward-turned seeing nothing. Gradually but inexorably he was cutting himself off from everyone and everything.

  Suddenly Ghote felt he must make contact with this vanishing mind while there was still some faint chance of doing so.

  ‘Mr Desai,’ he said.

  His voice was unnaturally loud in the quiet. The proprietor of Trust-X started violently.

  ‘Mr Desai,’ Ghote repeated. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘But – But –’ said Manibhai Desai with a vague feebleness that, Ghote guessed, he had perhaps never shown in his life before.

  And then, visibly, he pulled himself together and produced his answer.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I am going to do nothing.’

  He turned sharply away from the table and its telephone.

  ‘Please do not mistake,’ he went on. ‘I am not saying that I refuse totally to pay any sum for the return of this boy. But at present no decision of any sort is necessary. There is one hour remaining before even the next contact with that swine on the telephone. What to do in that hour is for you to decide, Inspector.’

  Ghote felt the weight settle evenly across his shoulders like the great wooden yoke across a broad bullock’s back.

  ‘That is so,’ he assented. ‘That is so.’

  He straightened himself up.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘First we must make arrangements to deal with the next call the fellow makes. Luckily now we have a certain amount of time. One hour is not long, but it ought to be long enough to set up arrangements for tracing the call when it is made. The important thing then will be to keep the fellow talking and talking. But we will discuss that later. First, the arrangements.’

  And he picked up the receiver of the white telephone again and dialled the number of C.I.D Headquarters.

  *

  It took Ghote more than three-quarters of an hour to complete the arrangements for having the penthouse telephone line monitored. In the intervals of waiting to be put through to yet another of the extraordinary number of people it proved necessary to contact he worked out for himself a considerable list of delaying devices which the proprietor of Trust-X could use when, at the end of the kidnapper’s hour, the telephone would ring again. He also reported once more to the Commissioner at his private residence, and once more regretfully advised him that any attempt to round up witnesses of the actual abduction must still be postponed as it was perfectly likely that one or more of the gang were watching the block for any signs of police activity. For the same reason he did not ask to have any help; he would have liked to be merely one of a team – perhaps simply the man deputed to search for that missing envelope – but even the thought that looking after his own mental comfort in this way might bring about the death of the tailor’s son was enough to make him expel the whole idea from his mind.

  But at last his long series of calls was over. He turned to Manibhai Desai, who during the whole of the time had been striding up and down the penthouse hallway, his eyes staring into some unseen distance.

  ‘Mr Desai,’ he said, ‘as perhaps you have heard, full arrangements have now been made to intercept, and if possible trace, the incoming call. But tracing is by no means an easy matter. Therefore it is most important for you to follow my instructions with the utmost care.’

  He was relieved to see that Manibhai Desai was actually paying him attention. He had feared that the proprietor of Trust-X would refuse even to talk under the ever-growing pressure that the kidnapper’s monstrous transferred threat must be exercising.

  But something else was nagging too, something that had been at the back of his mind all the while he had been so busy on the telephone. He brought it forward now.

  ‘But first, before I tell you about the call,’ he said, ‘what about Pidku’s father?’

  ‘Pidku’s father?’ Manibhai Desai replied, as if Ghote had introduced some involved complication he could not even begin to grasp.

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said sharply. ‘Has he been told, the tailor? Does he know that his son is at least safe for the time being?’

  Manibhai Desai did not reply.

  He stood where he was and glared across the hall, as if perhaps he had detected a particularly outrageous piece of bleaching on the heavy-hanging yellow velvet curtains of the window.

  ‘He is waiting in the flat?’ Ghote asked, leaning forward a little towards the withdrawn face looking down at him and putting the hint of a crack into his question like the curling tail of a whiplash.

  And the tiny edge in his voice had its effect.

  ‘Yes, yes, I suppose. He was here when Haribhai came back. He would still be …’

  In the middle of this explanation the proprietor of Trust-X swung abruptly round, crossed the hall and hammered again on the door he had called through shortly after Ghote had arrived.

  ‘My Haribhai?’ he shouted. ‘He is there? He is safe?’

  This time Ghote caught the faint answer coming through the thick teak.

  ‘He is playing only. With his radio-controlled helicopter.’

  Ghote strode across the hall in Manibhai Desai’s wake and tapped him briskly on the shoulder.

  ‘Pidku’s father,’ he said. ‘Please to call for him to come here.’

  The proprietor of Trust-X turned. His deep-set eyes blazed in anger. Ghote wondered whether he was going to be struck.

  But then, surfacing through the glitter of the ire like a timid night-animal putting its head from its burrow in a lightning-storm, something else appeared in the tall businessman’s demeanour. It expressed itself almost invisibly, in a slight sag of the broad, flung-back shoulders, in a hint of a perplexed frown on the high sloping forehead. It was submission.

  Slowly, almost as if he had to wade through a tank of oil, he went over to another door leading off the hall, opened it and called out.

  ‘Koi hai?’

  The prompt sound of bare feet slapping on a stone floor answered. But before any servant appeared the proprietor of Trust-X called again.

  ‘Tell the tailor to come. Ek dum. Ek dum.’

  For a little they waited. Then to break the feeling of constraint Ghote began to tell Mr Desai what he should do when the kidnapper’s next call came, how he should first let the telephone ring as long as he dared and then how he should not answer but leave it to him himself to take the call in the guise of a somewhat stupid servant. But at this point Ghote gave up. It was plain Manibhai Desai was not taking in a word.

  They waited in silence a little longer.

  Then the sound of hesitant steps came to them from the far side of the still open door.

  ‘Tailor? Tailor? It is you?’ Mr Desai burst out in a release of impatience so swift that it sounded almost like fury.

  ‘Sahib, it is me.’

  He came into the hall, swivelling round the post of the door like a battered old crab from down on the beach, victim of innumerable undertows, wearily rounding a rock to face of course danger, the only unknown thing being what form this time life’s assaults would take.

  He looked perhaps sixty, though Ghote guessed it was likely in fact that he was a good ten years younger. He was small and stooped a little, though probably he was taller than he appeared since his spindly legs were considerably bowed. He wore only a dhoti, its once gay check faded with washing after washing, and an old white singlet with a large, breathtakingly neat darn right over the middle of the chest. Steel-rimmed spectacles, clamped low on his nose, had their left-hand lens, which was cracked, mended by a wide strip of heavily y
ellowed transparent tape.

  He brought his gaze to a point somewhere just above the top of Manibhai Desai’s beautifully-hung, grainy silk trousers.

  ‘Sahib?’ he asked.

  3

  Both Manibhai Desai and Ghote stood looking at the stooping, spindle-legged figure of the tailor. Here was a man burdened already, Ghote thought, with the knowledge that once more in a life filled with troubles he had been dealt a thudding blow. Wantonly, for no good reason, his small son had been snatched away to somewhere totally beyond his reach. But, standing by the door post, looking inquiringly at the faintly billowing midriff of the proprietor of Trust-X, he had yet to learn that a new body-blow was about to be delivered.

  He was, for all his troubles, Ghote saw suddenly, still really unscathed. And so he would be until he was told that men who seemed to be without scruples had demanded for his son’s life the enormous sum of twenty lakhs of rupees.

  But he had been summoned to be told just that. And he had come with quickly deferential obedience, and had dared to put that polite question ‘Sahib?’

  The question now had to receive its answer.

  The proprietor of Trust-X noisily cleared his throat.

  ‘You – er – will be wanting to know about your son,’ he said.

  ‘Ji, sahib.’

  As much as to say ‘If it pleases you for me to want to know, certainly I will want.’

  ‘Well,’ Manibhai Desai said with fatherly heartiness, ‘we have received a telephone call from these fellows.’

  He paused.

  ‘Ji, sahib,’ said the tailor after a little.

  ‘Your son is safe,’ Manibhai Desai said.

  Again a pause. The tailor could hardly be seen to react. Yet Ghote thought that in a tiny movement of the eyelids behind the spectacles with the transparent-taped lens he had detected a small gleam of hope which had been allowed to take fire, though ready to be extinguished at an instant should the enemy make as usual a new appearance.

  Manibhai Desai turned away from him.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, with a forced casualness that would have been ridiculous were it not terrible, ‘by the way I had forgotten to tell you who this gentleman is. He is a police officer, specially sent by my friend the Commissioner, to take charge of events. He also heard the call from that man.’