Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  But what about Superintendent Karandikar? The immediate temptation was simply not to tell him about this new development. Then no interference of his would ruin Mr Desai’s generous gesture. And, after all, he had said that confidence between him and the proprietor of Trust-X Manufacturing was at an end. Yet to keep the news from him would plainly be a serious dereliction of duty.

  Was there a way out that would satisfy both the insistent claims that the missing Pidku made and the older, more rational calls that sprang from all his years as a policeman?

  There was. But it did not come at all in the way Ghote had expected. It came from the tall figure of the manufacturer of Trust-X standing beside him. He too had been reading those crude capitals. And drawing his own conclusions from them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said now, ‘it is as I had thought from the beginning. No one would be so cruel in their heart as to kill that boy. So this is first-class. First-class.’

  He rubbed his large, well-manicured hands briskly together.

  ‘What we must do immediately,’ he continued, ‘is to inform the good Superintendent Karandikar. This will give him just the advantage that he needs. In no time at all, if he listens to my advice, we will have those rogues behind bars.’

  ‘But – But –’ said Ghote. ‘But the superintendent said that all confidence between you has ceased to exist.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Manibhai Desai. ‘Always when a person is at fault he attempts to attack. But in business you must never allow such an attitude to irritate.’

  He reached across the stark note and its envelope and picked the receiver off the white telephone.

  ‘What number should I ring for the superintendent?’ he asked.

  Ghote told him, and as the rich man’s long finger worked swiftly round the dial he put to him a hesitant question in addition.

  ‘Mr Desai, are you still willing to provide the sum – that is, the amount – er – the sum that you previously mentioned?’

  The ringing tone from the telephone sounded out clearly in the light-filled hall.

  ‘One lakh of rupees?’ said the proprietor of Trust-X with total briskness. ‘Certainly not. There will be no need for such ridiculous steps as that. There never was. Those men will do nothing.’

  The insistent ringing tone was answered.

  *

  Ghote could not bear simply to stand there and hear the proprietor of Trust-X come to terms with Superintendent Karandikar. He might have gained a sneaking pleasure from hearing a superior officer who had so consistently abused and distrusted him having to take high-and-mighty instruction on how to do his job. But when it came to it he found he hated to hear a civilian tell anyone in the force how to go about their job, and especially was it galling when the person being told had after all a deserved and envied reputation among all his colleagues for efficiency and success.

  So he stepped away and looked round the spacious hall, its expensive Mizrapur rugs and its sun-filled windows with their as yet unrenewed yellow velvet curtains. The pile of folded newspapers was still lying on the floor and he stooped to pick them up.

  As he did so he saw that the attempted kidnapping of little Haribhai, son of the manufacturer of Trust-X, ‘the tonic you owe to your loved ones’, was no longer a matter to be kept quiet. The story, showing evident signs of being a last-minute scoop, was on one of the front pages.

  To divert his mind still more from the exchanges between Mr Desai and Superintendent Karandikar – they had now reached the stage of swapping flowery compliments – he began to read. The story had nothing unexpected to contribute, but it was plain that most of the facts of the affair were now public property. And naturally they were of passionate interest to the paper. The customary aloofness of its news columns was more than once breached. Adjectives spattered. ‘Agonizing’, ‘cruel’ and ‘heart-stretching’, all were pressed into service to describe the dilemma of such a public figure as the proprietor of Trust-X Manufacturing. Was he to exercise ‘his manifest generosity’ – someone had even acutely remembered the previous day’s large contribution to the fund for the Bihar Flood Victims – or was it to be ‘not the least shade of compromise with such miscreants’?

  But at last Manibhai Desai had ended his negotiations with Superintendent Karandikar.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, putting down the telephone receiver and looking across at Ghote, ‘most satisfactory. The superintendent and I have agreed that this new rendezvous at the Great Western Hotel must be kept. But on this occasion the superintendent has decided, at my advice, to act on a smaller scale altogether. I understand he failed to get the necessary cooperation in his moves last night. However this time I do not think we will be troubled with communication breakdowns.’

  ‘And you are hoping to lead his men from the Great Western Hotel to whatever new rendezvous you are given?’ Ghote asked, feeling a sort of careless despondency knocking from side to side in his head.

  ‘Yes, yes. The superintendent expects a further rendezvous to be set up for a time very shortly after the call. However we have agreed that there is no need whatsoever to allow these anti-socials to set the pace. I would tell them that I cannot raise the necessary sum till at least eight pip emma tonight, and that will give us full time to coordinate the whole operation.’

  ‘I take it,’ said Ghote, with continuing depression, ‘that this is a ruse altogether, and that you have no intention of raising any sum?’

  ‘No, no, indeed not. There is only one way to treat weak men like these,’ the proprietor of Trust-X declared. ‘And that is to yield them nothing. Not one anna.’

  At the thought of the absolute zero of his forthcoming expenditure a sharp grin split for an instant his wide mouth.

  In face of it Ghote nevertheless resolutely squared himself to say what he felt he must.

  ‘Mr Desai,’ he began, ‘it did not seem to me from the tone of that fellow on the telephone yesterday that these are men who are weak. I grant that they have shown, as they said, that they have some heart still. But all the same it seems to me that they would still be prepared, if driven to it, to commit some desperate deed against the little boy, Pidku.’

  ‘Inspector,’ said Manibhai Desai, with a large puffing out of his broad chest, ‘I have been most grateful for your support over the past twenty-four hours. But I must tell you that I have not always approved of the advice you have seen fit to give me.’

  ‘But you yourself yesterday feared for the life of –’

  ‘Therefore,’ Manibhai Desai came crashing in, ‘therefore, Inspector, I think that for us there has come the parting of the ways. I no longer require your services. Go home, and I shall ask Superintendent Karandikar myself to see that you have a suitable period of rest.’

  It was the complete dismissal.

  ‘Very good, sahib,’ Ghote said.

  He turned to the wide front door.

  But at that very moment there came a long, insistent and somehow cheerful peal at its bell.

  ‘Shall I open?’ Ghote asked.

  ‘Open, open,’ Mr Desai said. ‘You are not thinking those rogues will attempt to attack me here?’

  He gave a ringing laugh.

  Ghote, with memories of his own pistol-confronted arrival some twenty-four hours earlier, opened the wide door.

  It was the Press.

  There were six, perhaps seven, of them, hungry, yapping, even waving their notebooks. Ghote knew, and did not much like, most of them. He recognized in particular an evening paper reporter whom he considered woefully irresponsible in obtaining information regardless of the propriety of its being made public.

  He turned to the manufacturer of Trust-X.

  ‘It is the gentlemen from the newspapers,’ he said. ‘May I offer a word of advice?’

  ‘Gentlemen, come in, come in,’ the manufacturer of Trust-X said, the scent of publicity suddenly and plainly heady in his stallion-wide nostrils.

  ‘Sahib,’ said Ghote urgently, ‘you would remember that it would not be t
ill tonight that Superintendent Karandikar would be swooping on these men once more?’

  But the proprietor of Trust-X had ceased to pay him any attention. Sadly he went over to the lift, whose gate the journalists had left open, and set off for the ground.

  As the silver-walled cage plunged him swiftly downwards, his spirits sank as fast. Surely Manibhai Desai in his present frame of mind, all the businessman, and Superintendent Karandikar, smarting from a set back and doubly determined to exercise the utmost, cold efficiency, surely together they made a combination that would fail altogether to remember that at the heart of the case there was a little boy of five years of age, torn away from his home, with a life that would be so easy to snap?

  10

  An unexpected day at home did not bring Inspector Ghote the pleasure it ought to have done. He could not rid himself of the thought of little Pidku, presumably shut up in a back room in some crazy, overcrowded part of the city, bewildered, perhaps ill-treated, suddenly taken away from all that was familiar to him. Even the very domestic comforts unexpectedly at hand served by contrast only to nag at his sense of unease.

  He quarrelled with his wife.

  When he had arrived out of the blue she had said something about there not being anything for him to eat at midday. He knew really that she had spoken in joke, although there was not in fact any food actually cooking. But something in him, some stubborn desire to make himself miserable, had driven him to take the remark as being seriously meant. He had replied, though he knew perfectly well that it would be quite easy for Protima to prepare something quickly, that if she was unable to cook for him he could go and get a meal at the Elite eating-stall nearby.

  And Protima, who was looking a little tired as if she had not in fact slept well the night before, had not laughed him out of his over-dramatized bitterness, as at other times she might have done. Instead she had taken his mention of the Elite, a place they had often poured scorn on together for suspected dirtiness and adulteration of its dishes, as a personal insult to her cooking and she had told him to go there if he wanted. And this had made him determined not to go out, though he could see that Protima was now also determined to do nothing about getting anything ready to eat.

  So when the time came to eat each of them got rapidly more hungry and equally rapidly more bad-tempered.

  It was then that Ghote, following a private train of thought, abruptly asked whether the new supply of Trust-X, which he had sent for in good time, had arrived. Protima snapped out that it had not and that Trust-X Manufacturing was always bad about sending the new month’s supply and that this indicated that there was no reliance to be placed on the product in any case.

  Ghote wanted to reply that she was saying this only because, now that he had been able to reveal to her that it was the proprietor of Trust-X, no less, who had been the subject of his case, she was getting at him personally and in addition playing on his long-held, irrational faith in the tablets. But he knew that to mention this would be to expose more of his thoughts than he really wanted, and so he kept silent. And this made him yet more irritable and even more determined to find something to accuse Protima of.

  For most of the afternoon he was not very successful in this unpraiseworthy aim. But eventually he found something of a stick to beat Protima with: his Ved seemed to be late coming home from school.

  ‘How many times have I told that you must see he does not linger?’ he snarled.

  ‘He is four minutes late only,’ Protima answered. ‘And even that is if he had come as quickly as he could. Cannot the boy be allowed to talk with one friend even?’

  ‘That is just what causes the trouble,’ Ghote pounced in. ‘Two boys start to talk. Then one proposes a game. And the next thing is they are far from home and some evil person sets eyes on them.’

  ‘But Ved knows well he is not to talk with evil persons.’

  ‘How can a boy of that age know when a person is evil? There are so many dangers. So many people who would do any wicked thing to obtain a few paise only.’

  He knew perfectly well that his Ved was sturdy and reliable. He knew that he always got home in the afternoon within a set quarter of an hour. But the thought of Pidku darted thin spears of pain into his mind, sometimes easing, sometimes worsening, never stopping.

  ‘I had better go out and look for the boy,’ he said, putting on an air of righteousness, and knowing he was doing it.

  ‘Well, go if it pleases you,’ Protima answered. ‘Ved will like to see his Pitaji for once.’

  ‘He will not like so much when I meet him,’ Ghote retorted. ‘He will not like to get a beating.’

  And he stormed out of the house.

  He met Ved just beyond the gate of the little, scrubby garden of the box-like Government Quarter house that was his home. The boy was with two friends, but he broke away from them at the sight of his father.

  ‘No, no,’ Ghote said perversely, though he had been touched to the core by this sign of preference, ‘I have to go out. Do not leave your friends.’

  He walked off down the road in the direction of the despised Elite eating-stall at the corner, with its wooden benches and crude wooden tables and its big brass cooking-pot always wafting out a smell that was at the same time both appetizing and nauseating.

  And what would he do now, he asked himself. He would have to end the pretence and go back home in a few minutes, and then Ved would be hurt that his happy advances had been spurned. Should he take a cup of tea at the Elite? And risk getting ill? He owed it to Protima not to do that when he could have all the tea he wanted in his own house just by asking for it.

  And then, mercifully, the thought of buying an evening newspaper occurred to him. It would make a perfect excuse for his outing. Generally he avoided buying a paper for economy reasons, but today the purchase would be justified on the grounds of his needing to know if there were any developments in the Desai case.

  But even now, still attached to the last traces of his sulkiness, he refused to let himself get the paper he preferred but paid out instead for the one that employed the reporter he particularly disliked. And this was how he came to see that Manibhai Desai’s decision, made ‘in the best interests of little Pidku’, to trick the kidnappers with a false ransom was being broadcast far and wide some three or four hours before it was due to happen.

  He saw at once what must have occurred. Manibhai Desai had refused to listen to the warning he himself had given him that among the reporters at the door of the penthouse there was at least one from an evening paper, and had simply assumed that they were all from morning papers. Thus he had confidently and brazenly disclosed the ambush plan.

  What would happen? Ghote stood in the full sun with the paper, whose opening two paragraphs alone he had read, held out in front of him. Would the kidnappers perhaps fail to see this particular paper? It was possible, of course. To judge by the spelling of the two notes they were not great readers. And yet that spelling and those capital letters, so crude as to be only marginally useful as handwriting evidence, were they possibly only a disguise adopted by the clever mind behind the whole affair?

  There was still that business of the accuracy with which the kidnappers had fixed on twenty lakhs as the ransom sum to be accounted for. It might be purely a coincidence, but on the whole it argued that there was someone involved who would be capable of making researches into the financial standing of Trust-X Manufacturing. And certainly the man who had scrawled those red crayon capitals, if they were not a disguise, would be far from capable of digging out figures like that. And then there was the elaborateness of the first scheme to get hold of the ransom money, too. Whoever had devised it had, in point of fact, defeated Superintendent Karandikar. And the man who could do that was no everyday goonda from the chawls somewhere. So, if there was an intelligent head of the gang keeping well out of sight – he might perhaps be a man with a full-time job who would have to leave last-minute details to the crude individual on the telephone – then it was m
ore than likely that he would be reading every newspaper he could get hold of to check on each new development.

  And if he had read this …

  Ghote found that the sun-reflecting white sheet between his two outstretched arms was violently trembling.

  He shook his head, retreated to the dense shade of a nearby neem tree and, rapidly folding the open sheets of the paper, applied himself to a detailed study of the rest of its story on the Desai case.

  What he came to read first sickened him and then frightened him.

  Preceded by a formal denial, the reporter had regaled his readers with the suggestion that the whole kidnapping had been planned by none other than Pidku’s father. It was, according to the story, all an elaborate plot to extract money from a universally known benefactor.

  And the worst part of the whole business was that, although Ghote had seen for himself the old tailor’s reaction to that fantastic demand for a fortune of twenty lakhs in exchange for the life of his son, yet the piling up of facts and half-facts in support of the theory began in the end to sap at his belief in the absolute innocence of Pidku’s father. After all, he caught himself agreeing, the tailor had been employed apparently for many years by Manibhai Desai’s first wife as well as his second, so he was bound to know a good deal about the family’s habits – and perhaps even about their ability to pay just twenty lakhs, he added in spite of himself – and then there was, too, the business of the two children changing clothes. Could that, as was suggested, have been part of the plot? A cunning scheme to relieve the kidnapper of the difficulties of keeping captive an awkward and demanding boy like Haribhai Desai?

  Abruptly Ghote felt a need to see his own son. He wanted somehow a reassurance that innocence rang true. He left the compact shade of the neem tree and almost ran through the hot sun to his house.

  As he entered the little garden with its few ragged marigolds drawing a wilting existence from the already dusty soil he heard the telephone begin to shrill.