Ghote waited an hour more in the temple and by the end of that time he was able to see for himself that there was a clear improvement in the Swami’s condition.
So he set off for the police-station again with the comfortable feeling under his belt that at the very worst he had gained a good length of time. If all went well over the last push, he dared to think, he would have the Chairman in gaol awaiting trial before the beneficial effects of the albumin-water ceased to sustain the Swami any longer.
And, examine his conscience how he would, he could not really find any trace of remorse over the violence he and his cheerful accomplice had done to the old man’s beliefs. After all, the Swami had been attempting to gain his ends by taking a life, even though it was his own. All he himself had done was to use equally strong counter-measures. And they had saved the old man and there was nothing that could be done about that now.
And when he reached the area at the rear of the police-station he found that, thanks perhaps to advance notice of the improvement in the holy man’s state, or thanks simply to the fall of darkness, the attack on the compound wall had melted away. There was no one about in the lane, and, although he gave his torch signal as in duty bound, there was really no need for it.
So within half an hour of leaving the temple he was confronting Dr Patil once more and inquiring about the state of another patient.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ the bland-faced doctor replied, ‘we have had some success. I think I can say that. More success, indeed, than we might have done.’
‘Then I can resume my interrogation?’
Dr Patil raised a dignified arresting hand.
‘Oh no, no. My dear sir, I did not say that.’
‘But you told you had had success.’
‘Yes, indeed. Success we have had. But the treatment must be allowed to take its full course. Tomorrow morning perhaps …’
‘I regret then, Doctor,’ Ghote said with unaccustomed hostility, ‘but I shall have to see the prisoner and form my own judgement. Such a long delay is inadmissible.’
Dr Patil looked offended from the tips of his well-polished black shoes to the crown of his domed and balding head.
‘Very well, Inspector,’ he said, ‘if there is so much urgency, then perhaps you could take a risk and resume your questioning at …’
He paused and consulted his gold-banded wrist-watch at solemn length.
‘… at, shall we say, midnight.’
‘Thank you,’ Ghote said stiffly.
*
So it was a few minutes after midnight that night, when Dr Patil had re-examined Hemu Adhikari and had somewhat reluctantly agreed, that provided he himself was on hand, the pathologist might be fit for questioning, that Ghote got down to work again.
He found, however, that he was tackling an altogether different figure both from the man at the mercy of the yellow monkey he had come back to after his terrible telephone call from Bombay and also from the alcohol-bemused creature he had originally tried to get some sense out of. Dr Patil’s treatment had been every bit as succesful as the tall Gujarati had claimed: Hemu Adhikari was a changed man, alive, alert, aware.
It came out in his answer to Ghote’s first cautious question.
‘You remember what we were talking about before?’
‘I remember nothing, Inspector Ghote. Why are you keeping me here?’
‘So you know my name?’ Ghote said, when he had recovered from the unexpectedness of it.
‘Yes, I know your name, and I know also why you are here. And since I can in no way help you I am asking why you are keeping me in this cell.’
‘I am keeping you here because I believe that you can help me.’
‘You will find not.’
And for a long time it looked, indeed, as if Ghote would find not. He kept pegging away at the pathologist as he had done before, but this time the man fought back. He fought back like a piece of resilient rubber, pushing outwards every time Ghote pushed in and ending always just where he had been before.
Once again Ghote went over every aspect of his case against the Municipal Chairman, looking for the least opening in the rubbery armour of the man in front of him. He told him in so many words that he could prove that the Chairman had manipulated the Coroner’s Committee so that, not only would its members bring in a verdict that meant that no action need be taken, but also that the body, the main piece of evidence for the poisoning having taken place, would be conveniently destroyed.
Hemu Adhikari, still fat with the effects of much drinking but with a skin that no longer hung too slackly from the folds of his flesh, constantly asked what it all had to do with him, constantly pressed to be allowed to go free.
Ghote was constrained simply to pretend the words had not been said. He tried a new tack.
‘Very well, perhaps the proceedings of the Coroner’s Committee were not your direct concern. But something else was.’
He darted a quick look at the pathologist.
‘Inspector,’ Adhikari replied with brightness, ‘all this was many years ago and I will remember nothing.’
‘You will remember performing the first stages of an autopsy on the body of one Sarojini Savarkar.’
‘No, Inspector. Many, many such autopsies I have performed. How can I remember one from another?’
‘You remember this because of what you were asked to do with the organs you had removed to send to the Chemical Examiner in Bombay. You told with your own words yesterday.’
‘I told? Inspector, then I was ill. I did not know what I was saying.’
With flogged-on patience, Ghote went on to his next area of attack.
‘Do you know that on the day that man’s wife died he returned from a sudden trip to Bombay?’
‘Inspector, what have I to do with trips to Bombay?’
‘Because if a man in this town was wishing to acquire a supply of arsenic then he would do well to go to Bombay where such things may be obtained at cheap dispensaries in the suburbs with no one to ask questions.’
‘If you say it is so, I will believe you. But all the same it is nothing to do with me.’
‘It is to do with you. I have reason to believe that the arsenic obtained that day was administered that evening and that you were the one who removed the organs in which the substance was contained, and still would be contained today.’
‘Inspector, there are records up at the hospital. If you wish to know what happened to those organs you have only to consult.’
‘I have consulted. The arrival of the body for dissection is there, and its departure under an order from the Coroner’s Committee is noted also. Nothing is noted about the dispatch of the organs.’
‘Often such records are incomplete.’
‘You were a most conscientious keeper of records. I have the Medical Superintendent’s word for that.’
‘Then for once I must have made a mistake. It is so long ago I cannot possibly remember.’
‘I think you remember well what you did with those organs.’
‘Inspector, after fifteen years.’
‘I think also that those organs are still at the hospital. There are many jars of such things stored there, even some with no labels or with labels with numbers on only. I think those organs are among them still. You were a man, they told me, who was always writing letters but not sending. I think that with those organs you did the same. They are still at the hospital, isn’t it?’
Hemu Adhikari shrugged his well-fleshed shoulders.
‘Inspector, it may be so.’
‘Ah.’
Ghote pounced.
‘Now where are they? Tell, tell. You have only to tell and I will give you again the assurance I have given already: you will come to no harm in this town.’
‘Inspector, I am saying it may be so because I cannot tell otherwise. It is fifteen years since I have been in that hospital. How can I know what is there or not there?’
And he had the impudence to smile.
But Ghote restrained his violent desire to take the fellow and trounce him as he deserved. There might still be a chink in this armour of his, and that would not be found by battering. The time for violence would come when other hopes had been exhausted.
The night wore on. Ghote kept up his questions. Adhikari kept up his rubber-bouncing replies. And of the two, Ghote suspected he himself was becoming the more tired.
‘When it comes to prosecution,’ he said at some stage, wearily hunting for the words, ‘police will have no difficulty in showing motive. We are going to have cast-iron case, make no mistake about that, if you please.’
‘Whatever case you have, Inspector, it will be case without me.’
‘It is not so much you,’ Ghote replied, searching for a quarter inch of leverage somewhere. ‘It is not so much you. It is the material evidence of the organs. They exist still, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
‘Inspector, how can you expect me to know? All those events were so long ago.’
‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘those events were in the past, but there will be events in the future also. I ask you to think of them.’
‘In the future?’
Adhikari looked a little upset at this new line Ghote had hit on.
‘Yes, in the future,’ Ghote pressed quickly in. ‘Let me show you a little of the future in this town. In a few minutes from now you are going to give me the information I want. It will be almost the last item my case needs. And when that case is complete to my satisfaction I shall make arrest.’
He delivered the words with all the force he could bring to them. But he had to acknowledge that so far he was making no impression.
He resumed.
‘And what follows that arrest? Oh, a great deal of legal palaver, of course. A great many attempts to suborn witnesses, to show that I myself am corrupt, to obtain bail. A hundred and one things. But they will all fail. And do you know why?’
‘Inspector, all that will be of no interest to me.’
‘I will tell why. Because when the people here see their Chairman is behind bars all the support for him will melt away. And it will have somewhere to run to, I can assure you of that. A certain eminent figure in State Politics is waiting only for his chance to take over here. One weakness from the Chairman and the tide will turn one hundred per cent.’
Ghote looked hard at the swollen figure beside him. Was this prospect he was holding out, of a town no longer dominated by the flashing crocodile grin of Vinayak Savarkar, was it opening new horizons for this man?
It seemed not, although his expression was at least no longer actively opposed.
Stolidly Ghote set out to paint in the details of his imagined new world.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there will be a new set-up in the town altogether. It will mean many changes. That ugly daughter of the former Chairman – you knew her? – she will no longer as Chairman’s wife be laying down the law to all the ladies of the district. And her son –’
He thought suddenly, not of the idealized picture he was painting for the purpose of transplanting Hemu Adhikari into a clime where a confession of his past misdemeanour would seem an easy matter, but of the real Vasant Savarkar, aged fourteen and condemned to marry no doubt for strictly dynastic reasons.
‘Did you know the Chairman had a son called Vasant, a boy on the threshold of manhood?’ he asked the fat pathologist.
‘What is such a boy to me?’
‘To you, nothing perhaps. But he is a person in this town, and his life will be very much changed by what is going to happen. He will not have to marry a girl who has already been picked out for him, he will lead a life of comparative poverty but one day he will come to marry some other girl, one perhaps more suitable, and then he will live out the rest of his days the way we all do, rubbing along from bad to better.’
‘Inspector, all this is nothing to me.’
‘No,’ said Ghote, ‘but to me it is something, a little. The lives of all the people I have encountered here in this town are something to me. Yours also.’
But the pathologist was still not to be lured by friendship, even though genuine.
‘Inspector, you will go away soon. Perhaps tomorrow and everything here will be as it always has been.’
‘No,’ Ghote almost shouted. ‘No, it will not. I told already at some time in this night that the Chairman is not the Brahmin everyone here has taken him for. Did I not?’
‘Inspector, such things will not be believed when it is a rich and powerful man they are said against.’
‘I could bring his outcaste mother to this very cell to show you,’ Ghote countered. ‘Perhaps she will end her days greeting her broken son as he comes out of prison, though that will be many years from now.’
‘Inspector Ghote, men like the present Municipal Chairman do not go to prison.’
‘Why do they not?’ Ghote retorted, with his confidence growing as he began to believe his own vision of the future. ‘Why do such scoundrels not meet their just deserts? Do you think it is because they have holy men to fast to death for them?’
A sheer clarion call of triumph sounded in his mind.
‘I tell you,’ he harangued the obstinate alcoholic, ‘the Swami who was fasting against my investigation into this crime has eaten. He has taken white-of-egg and water. A most nourishing preparation, as you well know. He has taken that. Now, will you also take your medicine? Will you tell me what exactly you did wrong at that autopsy?’
The pathologist held his face without moving a muscle.
Ghote crowded in any fact he could get to hand.
‘All will be different in this town, I tell you. Others will have nothing to fear, and you need not. There is the man Ram Dhulup I told you of. He too committed a crime at the Chairman’s behest. He gave the Coroner’s Committee information about the deceased’s religious beliefs that he knew to be false. Will he be prosecuted? No. He will live in peace. Certainly he will lose the pension he has been receiving all these years. But he will also lose the wife who would have made the rest of his days a misery. Ram Dhulup will be the happier for the Chairman’s departure. So will you also.’
A smile appeared on the pathologist’s drink-bloated face.
Was this in anticipation of his rosy future?
‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘you are talking nonsense only.’
Ghote faltered.
‘But Bhatu,’ he stammered. ‘But Bhatu the basketmaker. Did I tell you about him? He too will be happy here in this town. The threat that has hung over him, little though he knew it, will be gone. He will live to a contented old age.’
‘Inspector, you are telling tales and no more.’
‘No. You too will end your days in peace. No need to hide in the fumes of alcohol when there is nothing to hide from. Once more your old father will be able to be proud of his son. You will work again even.’
‘No, Inspector Ghote.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, I tell you.’
But all Ghote’s conviction could not penetrate the hard layer of caution that the years had grown on to Hemu Adhikari. And at last he realized that he had tried everything there was to get the tiniest leverage into the minutest crack somewhere.
The time had come for the method of last resort. Probing and patience had failed: it was the hour for violence.
He leapt suddenly and sharply to his feet. He swirled round and glared down with red ferocity at the fat man.
‘Shall I tell you what you are?’ he shouted, leaning deliberately forward so that the spittle from his mouth sprayed on to the grey-stubbled face in front of him.
He watched it land, watched it with pleasure. And he saw too that in the man’s eyes – so much less bloodshot after Dr Patil’s ministrations – a look of sudden fear had appeared.
‘No? No?’ he shouted at him. ‘You do not want to hear what you are? I know very well that you do not. Because you could not bear it.’
He felt the rage he had allowed himself at last to release sweeping through his head like a scouring tide.
‘But I am telling you what you are. You are murderer.’
The old face in front of him had begun to tremble again as it had trembled when he had first put questions to it. Then he had tried to stop that shivering: now he rejoiced in it.
‘Yes, murderer, murderer, murderer,’ he yelled. ‘You are refusing to bring to justice a man who has killed, who has poisoned. You and you alone could do it. And you refuse. I am telling you what you are: you are a murderer just as much as if you had given that arsenic with your own hand.’
He put such venom into the word ‘arsenic’ that it might have been a whip he was cracking down across the trembling face in front of him. And he saw the blow land. He watched the word sinking in, going deep into the brain. He saw the fight not to let it hurt, the struggle to achieve stoniness.
There was a time – a space of seconds that could be counted – when it looked as though the fight to maintain indifference was going to be won. Things hung in the balance.
And then tipped.
One great, gulping, wrenching sob shook the heavy frame of the man cowering on the bench. It was like the breaking of a dam.
‘Yes. Yes. I will tell.’
It was definite, irrevocable.
Ghote knew there was no hurry now. The break had come, and it had been a decision taken in sober blood. It would not be gone back on as the other had been.
He stepped a pace away and stretched himself luxuriously.
‘I think we will go somewhere else,’ he said. ‘We will go to the office I have been lent here. It would be more convenient for the taking down of the statement.’
The old man on the bench was crying quietly now, a long stream of tears slowly being released after the pent years. Ghote raised him up by the elbow and led him out of the cell.
He looked about for the night sergeant or someone equally competent to witness the recording of the statement. And he spotted somebody even better than he had hoped. Superintendent Chavan was sitting at the end of the corridor from the solitary confinement cell, talking to the indefatigable Dr Patil who had been stretching his legs on a hard chair waiting in case his patient was not able to stand the strain of a long interrogation.
He jumped up with an anxious look when he saw Ghote solicitously helping the broken-bodied pathologist along towards them. But Ghote got in first.
‘Superintendent,’ he said briskly to Chavan, ‘I am just going to take statement. Would you be good enough to act as witness?’
The superintendent, uniform with every crease in place even at this late hour of night, looked suddenly delighted. Ghote realized that, for all the man’s allegiance to the Chairman, what counted with him first was the routines of his calling and here he was being offered one of the most satisfying moments of such routines, the achievement of confession to a criminal act. And, Ghote thought with pleasure, perhaps in the years to come fewer pressures would be put on this colleague of his and he would be able to do his duty unmolested.
So it was a small triumphal procession that went along, not to Inspector Popatkar’s office but to that of the superintendent himself to hear in full the confession of Hemu Adhikari.
And it turned out that the supposition that Ghote had put to the pathologist as a means of extracting perhaps a denial, perhaps a part-admission, was the exact truth. The man who had written letters of complaint to drug-manufacturers by the score and had yet lacked the final impetus to send them had done just exactly the same thing with the organs he had removed from the body of Sarojini Savarkar. Her husband had sent his men to frighten him into destroying them, but he had been frightened of doing that too. So he had compromised: he had put them in a jar of preservative and he had filled the jar with a number only on the label.
At this point the superintendent, solicitous still perhaps for his friend and patron, broke in.
‘You put number only on the jar? Then how after all this time can you remember what number that was?’
‘Sir, it was the figures of my birth date. How shall I forget that?’
It was then that Ghote picked up the telephone and got through to the hospital. A voice he thought he knew answered boomingly.
‘Night-duty doctor. Hello.’
‘It is you, Doctor – Doctor –’
He realized he had never known the cheerful Sikh’s name. But Dr Patil had recognized the loud tones.
‘It is Dr Surinder Singh,’ he supplied tactfully.
‘Dr Surinder Singh? Inspector Ghote here.’
‘My friend. What can I do for you, old boy?’
Ghote told him as concisely as he could exactly what he wanted. There was a pause while the doctor went away and made his investigations. It was not a very long pause. Then came the breezy voice on the other end of the line.
‘Ghote?’
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘You’re quite right, old boy. Bottle there, just where you said. Label still firmly adhering. Figures exact. And the contents appear to be … Just a minute. Ah, yes. One stomach, one duodenum and the best part of one jejunum. Very neatly dealt with, too.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. Would you be kind enough to impound the bottle until I can fetch it in the morning?’
‘Certainly, old boy. I’ll pop it in the poisons-cupboard. No one goes there except under my personal eye at this time of night.’
‘That sounds excellent, Doctor. Good night then.’
‘Good night.’
Ghote put down the receiver and turned to the others.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is there. Intact.’
‘Very good, very good indeed, Inspector,’ Superintendent Chavan said, his eyes shining with sheer policemanly pride.
And then, visible to see, another side of him took over.
He coughed.
‘However,’ he added, ‘I feel it is necessary to point out that the mere discovery of organs which we cannot doubt were removed from the body of the late Mrs Sarojini Savarkar, and which we can even concede are certain to be found to contain arsenic, that these do not constitute a sure and certain case against any person. Or persons.’
‘No,’ Ghote admitted, ‘they do not. I have shown that the victim died of arsenical poisoning. I think anyone would be prepared to admit that the Municipal Chairman of this town was a man who had a strong motive for murdering his then wife, but –’
‘But,’ Superintendent Chavan burst in, ‘you have still to show that the Chairman ever obtained such arsenic.’
‘He obtained it in Bombay.’
It was the voice of the pathologist, an almost forgotten figure since he had made his confession. But now, all shaking and bright-eyed, he was plainly intent on hammering every nail that could be got hold of into the coffin of the man he had at last dared to betray.
The superintendent bent on him a glance compounded of shock and distaste. It was no proper thing for an accomplice-after-the-fact to attempt to take part in the investigation.
Ghote hurriedly intervened.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The arsenic was obtained in Bombay.’
‘But you must prove it,’ Superintendent Chavan said. ‘You must prove your accused actually made the purchase in question.’
‘I can,’ Ghote said.
The superintendent looked at him with his mouth positively falling open.
‘You can prove?’
‘Yes. I knew always that the best place for such a man as the Chairman to obtain arsenic was at some small run-down dispensary in some suburb of Bombay, and when I learnt that very shortly after the crime was committed a Gujarati was appointed from nowhere to be Medical Superintendent in a town so distant from his native place as this, and having heard the Chairman boast that every post including that of a boss at the hospital was in his giving, I did not have far to look.’
He swung round and confronted the bland, dignified Dr Patil.
‘You told me yourself that you came from the Bombay Gujarati suburb of Walkeshwar, Doctor,’ he said. ‘That was where I requested investigations to be made. I had a telephone message from Bombay this afternoon saying that they had been successful.’
They had only to see the visible collapse on the Medical Superintendent’s habitually egg-smooth face to know that the case against the Municipal Chairman was complete. Savarkar had obtained the arsenic, he had had clear opportunity to administer it and it could be proved beyond shadow of doubt that it was arsenic that had been administered.
Inspector Ghote had broken through.