The room in which Vinayak Savarkar received Inspector Ghote was on the first floor of the big house. It was evidently the office he used when he worked at home, a big heavily furnished room with a long balcony of intricately carved wood outside, visible to Ghote through the uncurtained windows against the dark backdrop of the night.
The Municipal Chairman himself sat, teeth clamped on a long thin cigar, at a large desk, on which there were a few papers, a large silver tray containing an array of sweetmeats, a silver cigar box and a big glass ashtray half full of squashed and mangled butts as well as an inlaid box containing all the equipment necessary for making luscious and expensive paans – though when he would find time to chew one of these what with his cigars and his sweetmeats Ghote could not imagine.
‘Sit, sit, Inspector,’ the Chairman said as Ghote was ushered in.
Ghote looked round about. In the immediate vicinity of the desk there was only one low cane-work stool. He glanced backwards to see if there was a chair he could boldly march over and collect. The only other seats in the room were great heavy leather armchairs, all far away.
‘I prefer to stand,’ he said.
‘Sit, Inspector, sit when I say.’
Ghote decided that, rather than find himself in an argument over a triviality, he would sit. He lowered himself on to the drum-shaped stool. It was a long way down and his head when he was seated at last seemed to come only just to the top of the Chairman’s desk so that he was forced almost to crick his neck even in order to be able to look the Chairman full in his birth-marked, teeth-flashing face.
‘Mr Savarkar,’ he said sharply, ‘you know why I am here.’
‘No,’ the Chairman said, leaning back suddenly in the leather-padded chair of his desk. ‘No, I do not know.’
Ghote fought back his anger.
‘When I met you in your car two days ago,’ he said, ‘you knew well.’
The Chairman, his cigar back again between his teeth, said something in such a mumbled way that Ghote could not be sure what the words were.
‘What was that, Mr Savarkar?’ he asked tartly.
Now the cigar came out.
‘I am saying you never met me in my car.’
‘But I did. You know that is so.’
‘It is not so.’
‘But your driver, he was there. The tongawalla was there. They were witnesses to that discussion.’
‘You may ask my driver, Inspector. You may ask the tongawalla also. Ask all you want. They will tell that that talk never took place.’
Ghote realized he had to concede defeat.
‘Very well,’ he resumed, ‘let me tell you that I am here to investigate the death of your late wife, Sarojini. And that I wish to question you with regard to the circumstances of that death.’
‘But that is fifteen years ago. What should I remember?’
The cigar was removed again. The crocodile teeth flashed.
‘Even after fifteen years have passed,’ Ghote said, ‘you must remember the way in which your wife died.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Chairman said with sudden solemnity. ‘That I remember. It was so sudden. She was in agony, poor woman. It was bad food she ate, you know.’
‘The cause of her death was never properly established,’ Ghote retorted. ‘I have been examining the papers of the case.’
‘And the papers are not saying it was bad food? Then they are making mistake.’
‘No,’ Ghote persisted. ‘The question is considered to be open still because not enough evidence has been produced. And now I am seeking that missing evidence. And there are various matters I wish to draw to your attention.’
‘Inspector, you are saying that it was by foul means my wife died?’
‘I am saying there is every reason to suspect.’
‘Then, Inspector, you must find the person who did this. Justice must be done, Inspector. If my money can help you, it is there for you to ask for.’
‘It is not your money I am wanting,’ Ghote retorted, ‘it is the truth from you.’
‘The truth? If that helps to find this murderer you shall have the truth, Inspector.’
‘Then,’ said Ghote, pressing himself up an inch or two on his low stool and leaning forward, ‘will you tell me for what purpose it was that you made air journey to Bombay and back on the day of your wife’s death?’
This was his long shot. There had been only one chance reference in the reports to the Chairman’s having returned from Bombay earlier on the day of the death, a mere phrase. But it had struck Ghote that if he was responsible for the death then it was very likely that he would have preferred to get hold of the poison in Bombay rather than locally.
It looked as if the shot might have gone home too. The Chairman slowly lowered his cigar and tumbled it still alight into the big ashtray.
‘In Bombay?’ he said, rather gropingly. ‘But how do you know I was in Bombay on that day, Inspector?’
‘It is in evidence,’ Ghote said firmly.
‘So you are certain?’
‘I am certain.’
The Chairman leant back in his chair.
‘Then let me tell you that I went to Bombay to buy a sari. To buy a sari for my much-loved wife, Inspector. Something very special, of nylon. You remember fifteen years ago, Inspector, a sari of imported nylon was something special. It was as a special present for my wife that I wanted that sari from Bombay.’
‘Why did you want to give special present?’ Ghote demanded, still clutching hope.
‘But, Inspector, because I greatly loved her.’
‘Then what happened to that sari?’
‘Inspector, when the woman I greatly loved died suddenly in horrible circumstances you expect me to remember what happened to a sari?’
‘The woman you greatly loved,’ Ghote retorted. ‘But six months after her death you were married again already.’
‘Yes, Inspector, it is so.’
‘And you still say you greatly loved her?’
‘But, Inspector, when one has known the joys of a good marriage, what would you expect one to do but to try to find again, and as soon as possible?’
The crocodile grin flashed down on Ghote on his low stool with brazen insolence.
Wearily he took up another thread.
‘Mr Savarkar,’ he said, ‘if, as seems likely, your wife died by arsenical poisoning can you suggest when the said arsenic would have been administered?’
‘By arsenical poisoning, Inspector? Is this so?’
‘I believe it is.’
‘You believe, only, Inspector. But you have proof also?’
‘No,’ Ghote admitted grimly. ‘I have got no absolute proof. Yet.’
‘But you will try to obtain, Inspector. Even though the body was unfortunately burned. For my sake you will try to obtain, yes?’
‘I will try to obtain,’ Ghote promised with ferocity.
‘Good, good.’
The Chairman reached forward and began concocting himself a paan, carefully spreading out the betel leaf and taking from his paan-box a careful pinch of this and a judicious measure of that. He continued to do this while Ghote put his next questions.
‘Mr Savarkar, let us assume that death did take place from arsenical poisoning. Your wife died at 2125 hours on the day in question. At about 1900 hours she had ingested according to the pathologist’s report a large meal consisting of mutton, rice, curry, spices, and lime pickle. She ate this meal, according to witnesses from your household at that time, in the old-fashioned manner after her husband had finished eating himself.’
‘That is so, that is so,’ the Chairman agreed. ‘My late wife was a lady of most old-fashioned principles.’
‘And you yourself had finished all the lime pickle laid out at the beginning of the meal, and insisted that your wife fetched more before she ate?’
Ghote banged in the question sharply.
The Chairman paused to masticate smackingly his paan before answering.
‘Such details I am not remembering, of course, Inspector,’ he said. ‘It is all long ago. But if you say, if you say. Certainly I am extremely fond of lime pickle.’
‘I could ask your present wife if this is so, or your servants? I could ask this evening?’ Ghote snapped, taking a small risk.
For a moment the Chairman did not answer. Then his teeth, now red-stained with betel juice, flashed again.
‘Very fond of lime pickle I was formerly, Inspector,’ he corrected himself. ‘But no one makes like my late wife. You understand?’
‘I understand,’ Ghote replied.
He felt entitled to allow himself this small consolation of irony. He knew, however much longer he kept pressing the Chairman, that he had shot his bolt.
*
Standing outside the tall carved gates of the Chairman’s house as the turbaned chaprassi scrapingly closed them, a new and very uncomfortable thought attached itself abruptly to the load of misery Ghote felt he already carried.
His attempt at approaching the house earlier in the evening in the full majesty of the town’s most impressive taxi had left him without any means of transport back. He could, at the end of his interview, have asked the Chairman’s permission to telephone for the taxi again. But that would have been a final drop of humiliation that he could not have brought himself to swallow. So now he was faced with a long walk through the darkness.
Not too much to complain about in that, though he was feeling tired enough. What had, however, really upset him was the thought that perhaps the long delay he had been subjected to before he had got to see the Chairman had not simply been designed to put him at a disadvantage. Perhaps it had been designed to make certain that it was as late and as dark as this before he left the house.
What had the Chairman’s exact words been at that first encounter of theirs? ‘Men who would not hesitate to set upon a perfectly innocent man in the street at night and beat the day-lights out of him’? Something like that.
He looked up at the sky. There was not a star to be seen. The thick grey blanket of cloud must be hanging unbroken all over the town. And only behind it, to judge from the faint light that allowed him to make out looming objects here and there, was the moon shining brightly and serenely.
Resolutely he set out along the softly muddy road.
It was a rare experience for him nowadays to be out at night in a deserted area. Darkness itself he was well enough accustomed to. The law-breakers of Bombay carried out many of their activities after dusk and anyone wishing to catch them was used enough to being up all night. But in Bombay there were street lights, and even in those areas where the municipal blessings had been withheld there was always the occasional Petromax lamp as well as the glow the sky reflected from the pulsing neons and bright bulbs in the rest of the city.
Here there was nothing.
Only shapes emerging blackly from the almost as thick blackness all around them. And noises. Noises that it was not easy to account for.
That distant, but not very distant, howl. What was it? Ah, it was an owl. He remembered the sound they made quite clearly from his boyhood days.
It was not that he was afraid. Just uneasy.
Something plopped sharply and abruptly on to the muddy surface of the road just ahead, and involuntarily he came to a dead halt, his hands spread to either side of him ready to battle off he knew not what enemy.
And then he half-heard, half-saw the rapid movement of big wings and realized that it had only been a fruit bat, a flying fox, sweeping close overhead and letting fall some mangled fig or other fragment.
He walked forward more briskly.
After a little he found he was whistling a film song through his teeth. Well, did it matter? Surely a person was allowed to whistle?
Ahead in the darkness he thought he saw a tiny glimmer of light. It could be anything, he told himself.
It could be a lantern or an electric torch held behind a thick horny hand, another inner voice told him.
He found he was not walking anything like so fast, and that he had stopped whistling.
Then a sudden sweat of pure relief broke over him. Fireflies. There was a pulsating cluster of fireflies hovering over a roadside patch of what might be kika-thorn bushes. Had he forgotten what fireflies looked like? Was his boyhood all that long ago?
So why was he standing stock still?
He drew in a deep breath preparatory to setting out again. And at that moment, in the stillness, he heard them. And this time there could be no mistaking. On the road behind him a number of people, certainly two, perhaps four or even five, were advancing in his direction and taking great care not to make too much noise about it.
He found he was suddenly walking forward at a nice easy pace, looking from side to side as he went to see what advantages there might be for him in the lie of the land. He was still fairly far out of the town. Soon his heightened senses told him that a darker mass rising up to his right was the containing bund of the town water tank, which he had noticed on his way out when the taxi had broken down.
So he had a fair way to go before there were many houses about and the possibility of some help from the occasional street lamps which the town rose to. Should he try and run till he got to this comparative safety? Or should he chance breaking off somewhere?
Unfortunately he knew nothing of what lay in the darkness to either side, while the goondas following no doubt knew every inch of the country round about. But, on the other hand, if he kept to the road, they would know too just how long they could leave him before trying something.
The tank bund was a solid shape directly to his right now.
Quite suddenly he decided to take advantage of it. It provided a slight hill in an otherwise flat piece of countryside. By running quickly up the earthen slope of the bund to where, as he could now make out, a wire protective fence ran round the long and narrow shape of the tank he could get a good view of the men coming after him on the road below. To know just how many he had to deal with would be something.
No sooner said than done.
He took a few more paces along the road, carefully not altering his step. And then he swerved quickly to the right and ascended the steep slope of the bund at a crouching run.
At the top he flattened himself on the grassy earth close up against the wire mesh of the fence and looked downwards. He found he was able to make out at once the party that had been following him. There were four of them. Big men, as far as he could judge, and probably dressed only in shorts or loincloths. Two of them had white headcloths as well. The other two seemed to be bare-headed.
Four, he thought. Enough of them to spread well out if he made a break for it.
And now they seemed to have realized that their quarry had done something unexpected. They had stopped and were evidently having a muttered consultation.
Had he succeeded in evading them?
He looked down at the land to either side of the road. It was difficult to make out exactly how things lay, but it looked as though on the far side of the road there was a patch of scrubland. The blotchy shapes of low-growing bushes, probably more kika, seemed to be clear, intermixed with the faint gleam from a good many puddles. It was hardly the sort of territory through which someone who did not know their way could move without making a fair amount of noise.
So the goondas would work out that he had come up on to the bund.
He looked along the inside of the wire fence. Some twenty or twenty-five yards back down near the steps leading into the great still black pool of the water there was a small shelter, little more than a roof on four poles. And under that shelter, plain enough to see now in the intermittent flicker of sheet lightning that had broken out somewhere on the horizon, was the tank watchman fast asleep.
Ghote contemplated trying to wake him. But the noise he would have to make calling to him from this side of the fence would at once betray his location. And in any case the sort of fellow the town would employ to look after something as little necessary to guard as the tank would be an old man, past anything in the way of help.
He decided to let him lie. If he did wake him, it would only earn him a broken head.
He looked down at the goondas again. They were still conferring, but he could see that they were each in turn looking up at the slope of the bund now.
It would not be long.
He took a quick glance along the fence in the other direction. Perhaps if he were to run full out …
His eye lit on a gap in the mesh, plain against the distant lightning.
He slowly raised himself to a crouching position and then made for the hole in the wire at a run, keeping as low as he could. He cursed the light khaki of his borrowed uniform.
And then he was through. On the far side of the fence the ground sloped slightly downwards till it came to the top steps of the tank, now, with all the rain, only a foot or two above the surface of the water. Ghote dropped down into the scanty cover the ground formed and waited, straining his ears and endeavouring not to breathe heavily, to see if he could hear what the goondas were doing now.
It was some little time, during which he thought he had once or twice caught the sound of low voices calling to each other, before he realized that there was a third person inside the boundaries of the tank.
There was the old sleeping watchman, and there was someone else.
Some fifty yards ahead of him, perhaps not as much, a slim white-clad figure stood on the topmost step of the tank, looking forwards and downwards at the black expanse of the water.
And no sooner had he taken in the presence of this person, than he realized what it was they were there for.
It was a not uncommon way of committing suicide, to take the plunge into the night waters of some half-deserted tank. If one was no swimmer – and here in the very centre of the Indian sub-continent by no means everyone would be able to swim – it was as good a way as any of ending a miserable life.
He watched the still, slim, shortish figure. And he wondered where his duty lay. In the ordinary way as a policeman he would have had no hesitation in approaching quietly such a figure as this and making sure that they did themselves no harm.
But at this moment? At this moment when there were four great muscled goondas waiting to attack him, and when to speak out loud would be inevitably to give away his presence? And there was not only his own safety to consider. He had been sent here to do a job, and if he were put into hospital for months, or left somewhere dead, that job would not get done.
Nor was it only a job.
Damn it, the Municipal Chairman had got away with one hell of a lot. He should not be allowed to get away with this.
In front of him down on the steps of the tank the slim white-clad figure suddenly stopped. When he straightened up Ghote was almost certain he could see a large white envelope that had been placed on the tank step. So it was definitely going to be suicide.
Ghote got to his feet in one quiet movement and walked quickly but very quietly over the soft ground of the bund top towards the still figure.
When he was within a couple of yards he saw to his surprise that it was a boy of only thirteen or fourteen that he was going to have to deal with. For a moment he paused, thinking hard.
Then he took a long pace forward, so that he could grab the boy’s elbow if he had to. When he spoke it was very quietly as if he was coaxing a sacred animal into an enclosure.
‘It is a dark night to be out,’ he said.
The boy started so wildly that he almost lost his footing.
‘Who – Who – What –’ he babbled.
‘I also am out in the dark,’ Ghote said comfortably. ‘It is a night for thinking.’
And for other activities, he added to himself. For an instant he contemplated trying to use this youngster as a shield to get himself to some place of safety. He seemed, from the good quality of his white bush-shirt and shorts, to come from some well-to-do family, probably with a house quite near. If he could lead the boy back there …
But even as the thought entered his mind he knew he would have to dismiss it. Goondas under the Chairman’s orders would not be the sort to balk at the presence of a stripling like this, and the boy was likely to end up badly hurt as well.
‘Yes,’ the boy answered now, the first shock of his fright leaving him, ‘yes, it is a time for thinking.’
There was a strong tinge of self-dramatizing youthful melancholy in the words. Ghote calculated that his task was already half done. But he ought, all the same, to see if he could find out exactly what the matter had been.
‘You were thinking also?’ he said to the boy, speaking in a slightly wondering, here-is-a-fellow-spirit tone and confident in the darkness that his uniform epaulettes would be invisible.
‘I was thinking,’ the boy said darkly.
‘Of what were you thinking, I wonder. Of life … ? Of death … ?’
Ghote could have smiled, the boy reacted so exactly as planned. But more than half his thoughts were on a matter that did not bear smiling about.
‘Yes,’ the boy said, ‘it was of death that I was thinking.’
Suddenly he stooped, snatched up the large envelope that he had placed on the granite tank step beside him and thrust it crumplingly into his trouser pocket. Ghote hastily pretended to be looking introspectively out across the dark water of the narrow tank. He wished he could have looked behind him at the skyline to see whether any dark figures were crossing it. But he did not want to draw the boy’s attention to anything like that. If he was to get out of him what his particular trouble was, he would have to do so in what seemed the complete secrecy of the night.
Now it was his own turn to drop a slow remark into the meditative atmosphere.
‘Often,’ he said, ‘I have longed for death.’
He had been going to add ‘… like a lover longing for his mistress.’ But the youngster seemed a bit young for such a comparison.
‘You also?’ the boy said now, turning quickly to Ghote.
‘Yes,’ Ghote replied, still the mysterious philosopher. ‘There are times in every man’s life when Death seems the solution to so many troubles.’
‘True, true,’ commented his fellow-thinker.
‘But then,’ Ghote went on, after a proper pause, ‘sometimes there is another answer.’
‘Another answer?’
‘Sometimes there comes into a man’s life, mysteriously, he knows not from where, a kindred spirit. And there lies the other way.’
The boy had turned fully to face him now. His mouth was hanging a little open. The words were ready to drop out of it as a plum at its moment of ripeness falls from the tree. It was almost comic. Except that when the words had fallen there would be another, and not so easily solved, problem to be dealt with.
And except that for the boy this too had been a matter of life and death.
‘May I speak to you?’ the boy said now.
‘Speak.’
‘I am going to be married.’
This was not quite what Ghote had been expecting. An examination failure had been more the line his thoughts had travelled on.
‘Married?’ he said. ‘But you cannot yet be fifteen.’
‘I am fourteen just. But, you know, the law can be got round if the father is determined.’
Ghote did know.
‘And you do not wish to marry?’ he asked. ‘You have seen the girl? She is not pretty?’
‘She is very pretty.’
Again Ghote felt he had anticipated too much.
‘But … ?’ he asked tactfully.
Suddenly the boy jerked away from him.
‘Oh, you would not understand,’ he burst out.
Damn, Ghote thought, I have let him go.
He was half tempted to let him go in earnest. He knew that it needed only the slightest wrong answer on his part to have the lad storm off into the darkness now. And if he did that it would give the goondas, who almost certainly had by now heard their voices and were waiting for developments, a few minutes less in which to take up their positions, a few minutes which might make a lot of difference.
But in front of him was a tormented young man, and it was more than probable that his torment was one of the self-inflicted ones of youth.
Ghote addressed himself to the immediate task again. He recalled his own adolescence. And almost as if his mind had been lit up by the distant flash of lightning that at that moment broke in the distance – showing him up more clearly to the waiting goondas? – he found he knew what the answer was.
He spoke softly to the boy.
‘Have you ever seen a baby being born?’ he asked.
The boy’s gasp came clear on the thick night air.
‘How did you know it was that?’ he said.
‘You saw it. Perhaps you peeped through the walls of a hut when some woman in the servants’ quarter of your house was giving birth. You thought even it was something dirty. And you found it was cries and pain?’
‘Yes,’ the boy whispered. ‘And I am not going to make that happen to any woman. Ever.’
Ghote almost smiled in the darkness, only he was afraid the boy might catch a glimpse of his face and feel hurt. The very same experience had happened to him at much this age. And how long had the same implacable resolution he had made lasted? Perhaps a year. Just long enough for the process of growing-up to readjust him.
Yet he had not contemplated suicide. He must say something to this boy to help him break up the hollow burden he had placed upon himself. But what?
That after the pain of the birth the mother was always so content that she had brought a child into the world that all the agony was forgotten? No. More than likely the boy had heard that one, and had rejected it.
‘Listen,’ he said, feeling his way a little. ‘Listen, it is true that the pains of birth are often so hard that they make a woman cry out. But that – do you know the saying there is about this? Old sayings are good things. They are what people have thought concerning the problems that have come to them, just the same, for thousands and thousands of years. Do you know the saying we have about a birth?’
‘No,’ said the boy cautiously.
‘A child is not born without blood,’ Ghote said. ‘And children must be born, you know. That cannot stop. And it cannot be done without blood. Without blood, remember that.’
He waited to see whether he would need to say any more.
There was a long silence while the boy thought at the problem. Then he spoke again.
‘Thank you,’ he said feelingly. ‘And, good night.’
‘Good night,’ Ghote said.
He watched the white-clad boy walk away through the darkness along towards the gap in the wire fence through which he himself had come. He calculated that the goondas, seeing him going, would do nothing until he was out of hearing.