Ghote, despite a grating undertow that told him he was being more than foolish to alienate his best source of inside information, felt a rush of fierce delight at what he was doing to this supercilious, intolerable Dr Watson.
‘Yes,’ he repeated, letting the words rip out, ‘you damn well listen to me. I have had altogether enough of your superiorities. Do you think you got out of that mess you were in by your own unaided powers? No, you are owing that to that altogether decent fellow Amar Nath. And to me also. And do you think I was coming to the rescue out of stupidity only? Not at all. I was weighing odds and deciding if your heart condition was so bad this was one and only thing to do. I tell you, Mr Dean, a Bombay Crime Branch officer is every bit as good at dealing with life problems as any damn academic. We are knowing what is going on in world. A hundred percent better than you ivory-tower wallas. And we are able to act on what we know. Which is worth one great deal more than sitting idle and telling other people to go and do whatsoever is coming into your head. So let me be hearing no more clever remarks from you. Now, or for ever.’
There it was done. It was out.
Now for the whiplash back.
But, to his amazement, all Dean Potdar said in answer, with only a trace of his customary waspishness, was ‘Well, Inspector, if you choose to take that attitude, we had better part.’
And the fat little man went off, hobbling a little still, in the direction of the college.
Ghote stood where he was looking at him.
He felt a spreading area of surprise. He did not know exactly what he had expected in reply, but he had been fully prepared to get as good as he had given. More and worse even. And he had received nothing more than that almost mild parting shot.
So perhaps all was for the best. One burden was lifted from his shoulders, even though on the other hand he would no longer be able to consult this guru about the goings-on in the college.
That, however, might still prove a considerable disadvantage. After all, he still had no answer to the mystery Delhi so urgently wanted dealt with. He could not at this moment add one single word to the report he had begun cheerfully outlining as he had stepped out of Principal Bembalkar’s chamber having discovered his keys had been left in his door.
He was equally far, too, from knowing the answer to what, to his mind at least, was the far more important thing, the mystery of who had added crushed tablets of Somnomax Five to the shrikhand that had been put in the way of that poor harijan dupe, Bala Chambhar.
Yes, it looked now as if Professor Kapur, spied at the time of the question-paper theft trying to break into the Student Union office, could not be responsible for the near-murder since he could not have been in possession of the stolen paper. And, again, it was hard to imagine someone as feeble as Victor Furtado had shown himself to be in the exam hall riot as ruthless enough to attempt murder, even on a sudden impulse.
Which left only Mrs Gulabchand.
Yet could he, simply on the grounds of that elimination, state in his report that the head of Oceanic College’s English department had stolen the question-paper? No, he could not.
But what he could do, perhaps all the better for not being urged on by Dean Potdar, was to question Mrs Gulabchand again. To question her hard. If, when she had gone to her appointment with Principal Bembalkar to discuss this poet Hardy Thomas, she had actually entered his chamber despite her calm denial, then under pressure he might still catch her out in some small, significant discrepancy. The truth was, he thought, up to now he had let himself be overawed by the lady. It had been the effect, perhaps, of that atmosphere of academic superiority Dean Potdar had succeeded in imposing.
Well, he had blown that sky-high now.
So would he be able to manage better with Mrs Gulabchand? At least he would damn well see.
He glanced along the road. Both Amar Nath and Dean Potdar had vanished into the college. At a vigorous pace, despite the heat of the sun now near its peak, he set off in their wake.
No doubt Mrs Gulabchand would be lecturing to some class now that he wanted her. Just what he would expect in this damn business. And, after, he would be told that, although she ought to be taking another class, she had gone out of the building.
But he would wait. He would wait till midnight if he had to. And somewhere, either in the college or back in her flat, he would get hold of her and question and question her until he broke through.
When, however, he went to Mrs Cooper and asked where he could find the Head of the English Department she had only to consult an enormous timetable for a minute to say Mrs Gulabchand would have just finished one lecture and was not due to give her next for another hour. He would almost certainly find her in the staff common-room.
And he did. She came to the door herself in answer to his knock. More, he could see she was there alone. Nothing to stop him asking his questions, and going on asking them until he got answers that satisfied him.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I was not altogether happy with what you were telling when we were last meeting.’
Standing in the doorway, he took a good look at the room in front of him.
Where would it be best to conduct this interrogation? He must not let Mrs Gulabchand, embodiment of Queen-Empress Victoria, place herself on any sort of throne. He himself was going to be the one occupying a dominating position.
Happily there seemed to be hardly anywhere in the dark, shabby-looking room, its walls lined with battered wooden lockers, to suit a queen-empress. The greater part of its space was filled by a wide table, left dusty in a long patch in its centre and dotted here and there with small piles of dingy books abandoned no doubt by other lecturers. Only at the head of this table, where there was a tall wooden chair somewhat more imposing than those pushed in at intervals along its length, was there anywhere Mrs Gulabchand might claim.
He walked boldly in, almost brushing the imposing figure who had opened the door, and claimed that head-of-the-table place.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘kindly sit.’
Mrs Gulabchand gave him a look of serene placidity.
‘Yes, Inspector,’ she said, ‘I will sit. It is polite of you to ask me.’
But he was not going to be intimidated by this. He waited until Mrs Gulabchand had taken the chair on his right.
Then he leant forward.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘when I was asking your whereabouts at the time that question-paper was taken from Principal Bembalkar’s chamber you were telling that you had gone just only into the outer office there and no more. Was that so?’
‘Inspector, are you doubting my word?’
The rebuttal was put in the quietest of tones. But it was as firm as a wall of stone.
To Ghote, however, it was like the unexpected offer of a drink of cold water after being long out in the sun. Why had this Queen Victoria answered in that way when she could have simply replied that, yes, what she had told him before was so? Why instead had she challenged him? It must be to deflect any further pointed questioning.
But, if that was her object, she had misjudged her opponent.
‘Mrs Gulabchand,’ he said, not allowing the least trace of deference into his voice. ‘To doubt itself is the duty of an investigating officer. I repeat: did you do no more than go into that outer office, see those keys in the Principal’s door and leave?’
For several moments now Mrs Gulabchand sat in silence.
Why, Ghote thought. Why? If she really did just only what she told me before, why is she not saying so?
‘Madam,’ he interjected with sharpness, ‘it is no good to pretend with me. You did not just only look at those keys, isn’t it? Madam, you were entering the Principal’s chamber.’
‘Inspector,’ Mrs Gulabchand said, without apparently losing any of the placidity she had retained ever since he had entered the room, ‘let me explain.’
Then, at once, Ghote knew he was not going to hear that final answer. This calm woman, quietly agreeing she had told him a serious falsehood was no would-be murderer breaking down in face of unyielding questioning.
Inwardly he resigned himself.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Kindly do explain.’
‘Inspector, I went to see Principal Bembalkar that morning. We had, as I think you know, a long-arranged appointment. It was to discuss introducing the poetry of the novelist Thomas Hardy into our course, something I had felt was long overdue. So you can imagine I was surprised to find in the absence of the Principal’s secretary his keys hanging in his door. I knew, as did everybody else in the college, that question-papers for the examinations had been delivered for safe-keeping to the Principal himself. We hear so much of cheating these days the arrangements to prevent it are endlessly discussed.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Ghote put in, beginning to be a little irked by the continuing calmness of her recital.
Mrs Gulabchand gave a sigh.
Ghote thought he detected in it a trace of shame. Was he after all mistaken then? Was the thief and the would-be murderer about to admit her crime after all?
‘Inspector, I then did something which I have since regretted. Bitterly regretted.’
‘Yes, madam?’
Suspense, tense as lightning-jittery clouds, tingled suddenly in his brain.
‘Inspector, I decided that Principal Bembalkar should be taught a lesson. How I came to think that, why I came to think it, I shall never understand. I am not one for thoughtlessly laying down the law. I make my judgments, certainly. But I am no Dean – Well, let us say I hesitate to impose my views on others. But on this occasion, perhaps because I had allowed myself to be irritated by Dr Bembalkar’s lack of politeness in forgetting our appointment, I decided, as I say, that he should be taught a lesson.’
Now. Now, despite everything, it was going to come, surely. She had gone in, she had seen the Statistical Techniques question-papers, she had taken the topmost copy, she had contrived to put it in Bala Chambhar’s way. And then she had tried to cover up her action by getting rid of the young harijan. Yes, that must be it.
‘Go on, madam,’ he said, barely daring to speak.
‘I saw that, although most of the newly-arrived question-papers had been put away, there on Dr Bembalkar’s table – he must have been arranging them or something of the sort – was a pile of papers for the exam in Statistical Techniques.’
‘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?