Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Just that I have promised you would ring the Commissioner himself as soon as you got in.’

  Mrs Desai paused, savouring her victory.

  ‘I have promised you will ring,’ she added, ‘and tell the Commissioner that you have stopped all this ridiculous business of wanting to protect these wicked and greedy men.’

  Manibhai Desai’s pushingly handsome face took on instantly a look of deep, though secret, obstinacy.

  Ghote, his senses tuned to an ever more acute pitch by the pressure of all that had happened since he had first heard about little Pidku, was able to analyse what the proprietor of Trust-X must be feeling as if it were his own heart that was involved. He had pledged himself to pay out for Pidku, but to what deeper extent was a man such as he pledged to a wife twenty years his junior? And here, there seemed, was a chance being held out to him to believe that the newer, more urgent promise could be satisfied while the older debt was still honoured. But what was this hope that the affair was suddenly near its end? How reliable was what Mrs Desai had said about the kidnappers having been located?

  These, Ghote knew must be the questions Manibhai Desai was asking himself. And they accounted perhaps for that look of reserve. He certainly was not going to go back to the hard line on the strength of what might be only wild words of his wife’s. But neither was he going to reiterate his stand on Pidku.

  Ghote saw now that once again the boy’s fate was in the balance. No one would or could pay for his eventual safety except the manufacturer of Trust-X. And now, despite all the firmness of resolve that had been implied by his decision to tell Pidku’s father himself about the contents of that grisly package, once again his resolution was faltering.

  But was it faltering with right on its side? If what Mrs Desai had told them really did come from the Commissioner himself, then there must be a good deal of truth in it. And, if so, there really might be no need after all to pay the kidnappers.

  Yet what could have happened to put Superintendent Karandikar on the men’s traces? And, if he was closing in on them, was he the sort of man who would give proper attention to little Pidku’s safety at the moment of confrontation?

  Manibhai Desai, who had stood mutinously glaring at his wife, abruptly turned away and shouted for a servant in a voice tingling with suppressed fury.

  Evidently echoes of the high-raging domestic combat had already reached the servants because the door was opened with give-away suddenness and the Desais’ No. 1 bearer presented himself.

  ‘Get me a drink,’ the proprietor of Trust-X ordered. ‘Whisky, a big one.’

  The man padded softly over to the imposing walnut and chrome cocktail cabinet that stood under one of the sunburst clocks and took out a tumbler and the whisky bottle.

  ‘I will have a drink also,’ Mrs Desai said. ‘Bring it to me now. A whisky too. And hurry, the burra sahib has to make telephone call.’

  ‘No, I do not,’ Manibhai Desai countered immediately.

  ‘Hurry with my whisky,’ said his wife to the bearer, on whose face Ghote was able to observe a tiny delight at this drama unrolling just above his head.

  ‘Hurry,’ Mrs Desai repeated. ‘The burra sahib wishes to use the telephone.’

  Manibhai Desai’s face took on a look of doubly pent-up rage. He strode over to the cocktail cabinet like a bull in full reckless charge and brushed the bearer aside.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I will fix myself.’

  He seized the whisky bottle and tipped a hugely generous quantity into a second tumbler. Then, actually snatching the siphon out of the bearer’s hands, he splashed a short spurt into and around his own glass, lifted it and drained it in one.

  Mrs Desai took her drink from the little silver tray on which the bearer had proffered it and then walked over to the refrigerator. She stood beside it and gestured with an elegant, red-nail-tipped hand at the white telephone beside her. She did not say a word.

  Manibhai Desai glared at her. But then suddenly a little brutal smile lit his deep-set eyes.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am tired. I am exhausted. It has been one hell of a day for me. I am going to bed now.’

  His lurking smile broadened into triumph. He gave his wife a full, unabashed look.

  ‘And kindly not to disturb,’ he said.

  Followed by the bearer, whose back was pantomiming a much over-stated show of discretion, the proprietor of Trust-X strode from the room.

  And left Inspector Ghote alone with Mrs Desai.

  Ghote, who during the whole of the lightning-flashing confrontation between the Desais had stood not far from the door into the big room, remained where he was. He said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.

  Mrs Desai also continued to stand where she had been, beside the telephone. From time to time she took a somewhat exaggerated sip from her drink. She posed her free hand on the edge of the refrigerator cabinet, her red nails catching the light, in a gesture of nonchalance so stiffly languid that it made her seem immovable as a carved dancing girl.

  Watching her, Ghote began to feel acutely thirsty. He had endured that long, stinking and hot drive out to the K.E.M. Hospital and he found he wanted nothing more now than a long cool drink. Buttermilk, iced. That would be the very thing. And no doubt the refrigerator contained, among much else, a good supply of buttermilk, deliciously cold and refreshing.

  Abruptly Mrs Desai left her post and went over to the radiogram. She began, again with a show of idleness worthy of a film star, to flip through the pile of records on one side of the long, low cabinet. But suddenly her doubly obvious constraint put a notion into Ghote’s head.

  Up till now he had thought of Manibhai Desai’s wife as being no more than a vivid, jerky, implacable force aimed at keeping every rupee of the Desai wealth in Manibhai Desai’s pockets. Yet could she be as totally single-minded as that? Evidently she had feelings. Why else was she so embarrassed now? So would it not be possible to appeal to the feeling woman?

  At the radiogram Mrs Desai had, it seemed, selected the disc she wanted. She was standing reading its label, holding it rather close to her face, vanity apparently forbidding glasses. At any second she would drop the disc on to the turntable and then no doubt blaring music would blot out any chance of a quiet talk.

  Ghote cleared his throat. The sound, in the silent room, grated even on his own ears as if it was a bullock-cart crossing a street of cobblestones.

  Mrs Desai darted him a glance of fury.

  What if she ordered him out? He really would have to go.

  ‘Mrs Desai. Madam.’

  She raised a thinly-carved eyebrow.

  ‘Madam, I wish to talk to you. I wish to discuss – Please, Mrs Desai, think of that child.’

  Mrs Desai lowered the disc she had been holding so close to her pretty, if tensely so, face. She looked at Ghote with ice-cold disdain. Yet Ghote from his very depths found something which would not let itself be frozen.

  ‘Mrs Desai,’ he said, ‘I am appealing to you. You have had no children. Perhaps you are not very much caring for children. But, think. To some people a child is a treasure greater than money, than any sum of money. The tailor is poor. Yet I know that in little Pidku he has all the wealth he could desire.’

  ‘What do you talk?’ Mrs Desai answered, her voice taking on an edge of lancing anger. ‘What do you know of me? Of children? You have no business –’

  She broke off. But not because Ghote had interrupted. Something from inside her had blocked the thought.

  Suddenly she tossed the record she had been holding over on to the nearest blue silk sofa and strode away across the big room.

  ‘You do not understand,’ she said, in a voice so muffled that it took Ghote some moments to guess at the words.

  He waited. He had the sense that a whole delicate series of scales and balances was rocking up and down under the crude weight he had dropped into one of the pans, little knowing the complexity of the apparatus he had set in altered motion.

  At
the end of her long diagonal promenade across the big room Mrs Desai swung round. She looked at Ghote full in the face, her eyes ablaze.

  ‘No,’ she spat at him. ‘You do not understand.’

  I am going to be told to get out, he thought.

  ‘You could never understand. What do you think my life has been? Do you think I have always lived like this? With servants as many as I wanted? With a roof over my head that I know cannot be taken away? I tell you from the day my father, the Colonel – No, no, I will tell you it all, even what I have not told Mani – from the day my father, who would never be more than Captain, shot himself, then I never knew a moment of security until the marriage ceremony with Mr Desai was over.’

  Her face, till seconds ago a cosmetic mask of fragile gaiety, showed now cracks and rents of wretchedness.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘once we had servants, a few. My old ayah, always. But when he died, my father, when he walked out on us, in a few days we had no one. And was I, a little girl still, able to help myself or my mother? And then, then later when I found I did after all have something. Something to take to the bazaar. Then I was determined I would get a damn’ good price.’

  Suddenly she came racing across to Ghote. Was she going to attack him, the long red nails scratching? But she halted two feet away and thrust that broken pretty face close to his.

  ‘And I got that price,’ she said. ‘I had to fight. I had to plan. I had to wait. But in the end I married Trust-X Manufacturing.’

  There was a hectic blaze in the eyes so close to Ghote’s own.

  ‘And now I am enjoying,’ she said. ‘And he – he has his son and heir. He has Haribhai, and he is well content. But still I must go on pleasing him. And it is not always so easy. You see me, and I am looking fine. I know it. The hairdresser tells me. The beautician also. But there are times when I do not. When I cannot. And he is older, and other things may get a hold on him. How do you think I can risk having children? How do you think I can risk it?’

  Feeling a leaden intrusion in the pit of his stomach, Ghote realized that this was a question he was actually expected to answer.

  ‘I see – I see that – I realize you have difficulties, great difficulties. And I am feeling them. But I am feeling for another person also. For a person with the name of Pidku.’

  Mrs Desai did not take her hot eyes off his face. But Ghote looked back at her, gaze for gaze. Pidku, he willed to her, Pidku. A person. A boy. A human life. A life at stake.

  And then suddenly the contest was over. Mrs Desai’s hot eyes dropped.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We are both human. If he should need still to pay, I will not stop.’

  Ghote felt an absurd sense of happiness. It was as if in boyhood he had been given totally unexpectedly a free ticket to the cinema and a whole sudden prospect of three hours of untrammelled, untouchable enjoyment had spread out before him.

  ‘Well, that is good, that is very good,’ he babbled. ‘If you would excuse me. I must stay in the flat because they may telephone at any instant. The kidnappers. Any instant. They appear to have missed the last rendezvous they gave, you know. So they may get in contact. But I will go. I will remove myself. Elsewhere in the –’

  His incoherent jabber was interrupted by the sharp pealing of the front-door bell.

  ‘Who can it be this time?’ Mrs Desai said, snatching a sort of brightness round her as if it was a garment hurriedly caught up.

  ‘Them,’ Ghote said, his heart suddenly pounding. ‘Them. They may have sent another messenger.’

  He turned and was out of the room and into the hall in an instant. He found the proprietor of Trust-X, his wide-shouldered body in a silk dressing-gown of a deep, magnificent green, just emerging, apparently from his bedroom. He, too, it seemed, had been struck with the same thought about who this late caller might be. He glanced at Ghote apprehensively.

  The No. 1 bearer appeared in his turn.

  Ghote hurried across and flattened himself against the wall next to the wide front door.

  ‘Please to let him in,’ he said. ‘I will make sure he does not leave some message and run away.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the proprietor of Trust-X. ‘That is the way. Are you ready?’

  Ghote nodded his head in agreement.

  ‘Then open,’ Mr Desai instructed.

  The bearer pulled the front door back with admirable suddenness. Ghote began a sideways sliding movement to get behind whoever should come across the threshold.

  And, to his dazzled astonishment, he saw stepping calmly inside the Commissioner of Police for Greater Bombay.

  14

  Ghote flung out a hand against the wall beside him in an effort to stop his impetus-heavy sideways slide. His clawing fingers did at least slow his body down to the point where his other hand no more than lightly brushed the Commissioner’s side.

  The Commissioner turned at the touch.

  ‘Ah, Inspector Ghote,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re still here. I heard that you were accompanying Mr Desai somewhere. It seems you are being of use.’

  He gave Ghote a slight inclination of the head and turned his attention to the resplendent, green-draped form of Manibhai Desai.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I fear I’ve dragged you from your bed. I’m sorry. But I was so anxious – Meena was anxious too. And so I said I would come round.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Manibhai Desai said. ‘I am always delighted to see you. It is most kind.’

  He darted a quick look at his wife. It said ‘You wait’.

  Mrs Desai did not wait.

  ‘Commissioner,’ she said, ‘how good of you to come. But I hope I did not give a wrong impression on the telephone. I am standing right behind my husband in all this, you know.’

  Manibhai Desai’s look of belligerence turned, almost comically, first to bewilderment and then to a tiny flame of trust.

  The Commissioner gave Mrs Desai a smile of great warmth and understanding.

  ‘I’m sure you’re one hundred per cent behind Manibhai in everything,’ he said heartily.

  Mrs Desai in turn smiled at him, brightly.

  The Commissioner coughed.

  ‘But I have come here to put you both absolutely in the picture,’ he said. ‘And you too, Ghote.’

  ‘That is most kind, most kind,’ said the proprietor of Trust-X, bending a little from the waist and clasping his large hands tightly together. ‘Shall we go into the drawing-room? You will take a drink, Commissioner?’

  ‘Well, well, I cannot say that I’m truly on duty,’ the Commissioner said with a jovial laugh.

  For a few minutes there was much coming and going, with the bearer busily presenting his little silver tray. Ghote found that, this time, he was asked what he would have. He eagerly seized the chance of getting his cooling buttermilk. When he had it and the bearer had left, the Commissioner looked all round.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘this is what I came to tell you.’

  The three of them sat forward expectantly.

  ‘We’ve got these fellows on the run,’ the Commissioner announced. ‘Definitely. And a smart piece of work it was too, though I say it of my own men.’

  What had happened, Ghote wondered furiously.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I thought when I put my Superintendent Karandikar on to the case that I couldn’t have chosen a better man, and now I’ve proof of it. Do you know what he turned up? The tiniest thing, and I think it’s going to put those blighters in the bag.’

  Mrs Desai’s eyes, in her miraculously restored to fixed prettiness face, widened in appreciation.

  ‘Tell us,’ she cooed.

  The Commissioner smiled.

  ‘A tiny number of blue grains,’ he said. ‘That’s what caught them. A tiny number of blue grains. When the lab boys on Karandikar’s instructions gave that package the kidnappers sent a one hundred per cent check-over, what did they find under the nail of the finger? A few blue grains. Exa
ctly the same blue grains that were on the outside of the package. You see what that means?’

  Ghote saw what it meant. He saw everything that it meant. But Mrs Desai was still delightfully mystified.

  ‘No, but, Commissioner, you must tell us. This is fascinating. Absolutely.’

  Looking at her in a swift access of sourness, Ghote wondered whether the woman he had uncovered in this very room not quarter of an hour earlier had been only a dream, some sort of hallucination.

  ‘Well,’ said the Commissioner in a kindly manner, ‘it’s like this. That packet was brought here by a boy who, we know, lives in the immediate neighbourhood of a certain factory, the – er – the –’

  ‘The factory of Holitints Limited,’ Ghote supplied quietly.

  ‘Of Holitints Limited precisely. A factory that blows out over the whole area around a blue powder. Well now, if that same powder was found under the nail of that finger, then it indicates quite clearly that the kidnapped child is being kept somewhere not far from the factory. And you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as the lab informed Superintendent Karandikar of that he put a full-strength search operation into immediate effect.’

  ‘And they have found where the boy is?’ Mrs Desai asked. ‘I have been so worried about that poor little mite.’

  The Commissioner shifted a little in his raw-silk-covered chair.

  ‘Well, the search is by no means completed yet,’ he said. ‘These things take a deuce of a long time. Every single house has to be investigated from top to bottom, and you know the sort of warren it is round there. It’s a matter of look, look, look and ask, ask, ask.’

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Mrs Desai.

  The Commissioner drained his glass.

  ‘Well, that’s what I came to tell you,’ he said. ‘And so you can see there’s absolutely no need to worry further. No need to – er – parley with those blighters, if you understand me.’

  He directed at the proprietor of Trust-X a look of keen inquiry.

  Ghote thought he knew what answer Manibhai Desai was going to make. But there was no chance for the words to be uttered. Instead into the big room there came shrilling yet once more the insistent call of the telephone.