For some minutes Inspector Ghote stood quite still in the clinically harsh examination room alone with the broken body of Frank Masters. He forced himself to breathe deeply and slowly.
Calm, he told himself. That was the first thing. Calm to think out everything he had learnt. He must not allow himself to be swept away by the attitude of this arrogant English doctor. Who was she –?
He stopped himself.
And by standing still in the middle of the room and concentrating hard he did at last succeed in getting calm enough to go over quietly and rationally all that he had heard and seen. He was just thinking how little the doctor had really said about Frank Masters himself when a curious faint scratching noise distracted him.
He checked an impulse to dart out into the darkness of the compound to investigate and made himself stand stock still apparently gazing into space.
Without having to exercise much patience he was rewarded. Down at the bottom corner of the open doorway he became aware of a slow, very stealthy movement. Without turning his head even a quarter of an inch he looked as far downwards as he could.
Second by second there crept into the range of his vision first a small brown hand, grimy and ill-kept, then a thin wrist and finally a section of a ripped-up, ragged black plastic jacket.
Ghote took a long, slow, deep breath.
And pounced.
Successfully.
He felt his fingers grip with satisfying hardness into the lean and stringy flesh of the leader of the boys’ gang.
Unable to suppress a faint triumphant smile he hauled the urchin into the hut and on to his feet.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘and what do you want?’
The boy twisted round in his grip.
‘To find out what you are doing, Inspector sahib,’ he said.
He grinned.
‘Inspector sahib,’ Ghote answered. ‘So you have discovered that I am inspector. You have been listening at the window, have you?’
‘Yes, Inspector,’ the boy said, hanging his head a little.
Ghote tightened his hold on the thin arm. The boy winced and looked up at him.
‘Dr Diana give you hell all right,’ he said.
Ghote let the arm go.
‘But she spoke truth, Inspector,’ the boy said.
‘Truth? Why shouldn’t she?’
‘When you were lying, Inspector sahib, she could lie also.’
‘Me lying?’
But no sooner had he spoken than he remembered how he had denied that he had ever said anything to the gang outside the house.
He put his arms on his hips and faced the boy.
‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘I am investigating the death of Mr Masters. This is a very important case: there are a lot of things I have got to do, and quickly. You will not watch over me while I do them. You understand that?’
‘Oh, yes, Inspector sahib.’
‘Very well. And if I catch you at it again I would make sure you are locked up where you would not trouble me any more. Do you understand again?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Understand very good.’
Ghote stepped back. The boy slid gratefully towards the door. In the open doorway he paused for a moment.
‘Understand okay,’ he said. ‘You don’t worry. When Dr Diana make it hot for you, you don’t want nobody to hear.’
Ghote raced out into the garden after him. He caught one glimpse of a swiftly moving shape beyond the wistaria of the trellis and set out in hot pursuit.
The roots of a tree caught his toe and an instant later he was flat on his face with the smell of dusty earth in his nostrils.
It was some three hours after this that he came to deal with the Foundation cook and got his next glimpse of real progress. Not that the intervening time had been idle. During it he worked his way steadily over the whole bungalow, finding out just who lived there and exactly where they had been earlier in the evening. With all the boys in the dormitories it was a formidable undertaking, but, aided by reinforcements from headquarters, Ghote got through it with speed.
He poked and pried into every cranny of the big, spartanly furnished house. He set the team with the ink-pad to work taking fingerprints wholesale; he supervised the departure of the body on its way to the laboratory; he directed the obedient but unimaginative police photographer in taking shots of every possible relevant scene.
He even went so far as to eliminate the possibility, suggested by the boy in the black jacket, that Frank Masters’s death had anything to do with ‘gay girls’. Certainly no one approaching that description had ever been seen at the Foundation.
When he had been at work for about two hours the reporters arrived. The pear-shaped bearer, looking somewhat crinkled at this late hour, came to tell him. He went and met them at the front door.
‘No statement,’ he said stiffly.
There were excited cries of protest.
‘I have no time to be hobnobbing with pressmen,’ he said sternly. ‘I have investigation to carry out.’
‘Yeah?’ said one of the reporters, a tall, beaky-nosed man wearing a brightly-coloured picture tie. ‘We got investigation to carry out too, you know.’
Ghote turned away.
But just as the bearer, with evident pleasure, was pushing the heavy front door closed he relented. After all, though there was something rather shocking about wearing such a tie, the man was right: he had his job to do.
Patiently Ghote allowed himself to be questioned. But when it came down to it he did not have much to tell. In spite of all he had done up to that point, he knew very little.
The reporters left, looking upset. And Ghote went back to see how the police surgeon was getting on. He conducted a casual conversation with him and succeeded in gathering that the arsenic had in all probability been taken about an hour and a half before Frank Masters had complained about feeling ill. He checked and cross-checked on the time this had happened and came once again to the question of the evening meal and its cooking and to the big gas-stove with its heavy butane cylinders, the gleaming refrigerator and the formidable array of pots and pans of the Foundation kitchen.
And there he tackled for the second time the Foundation cook.
‘You cook all the meals in the house?’ he asked once again.
The cook, a plumpish, short little man whose skin gleamed and glistened under the light of the single bulb hanging from the middle of the low ceiling, nodded silent acquiescence.
‘Did Mr Masters eat the same food as everybody else?’ Ghote asked.
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Masters sahib very kind man. He say what good enough for boys from street good enough for him.’
‘Was it good food?’ Ghote asked.
The podgy little cook looked downwards.
‘Not very good food, sahib,’ he said. ‘Not very good cook.’
For a moment Ghote thought about the picture of Frank Masters this evoked. The millionaire from America who was prepared to eat day in day out the indifferently cooked food he himself had provided for the vagrants he had rescued from the pavements of Bombay. The thought of the care and skill Protima, his wife, brought to his own meals rose up in his mind.
‘What did you cook this evening?’ he asked.
‘Oh, very bad food this evening, sahib.’
Ghote felt a stab of impatience.
‘I asked what food it was,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Very sorry, sahib.’
The cook bowed his head. Ghote could see the plump roll of fat on his neck shining as though it were polished.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘This evening mixed vegetable and puris, sahib.’
‘I see,’ said Ghote.
Even with a meal sent in at the office, he reflected, he had eaten far better food than the wheat cakes and vegetables that this American millionaire had allowed himself.
‘Did Masters sahib eat with the boys?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no, sahib. He eat own meal as per usual, sahib. In staff tiffin room, sahib.’
‘His own meal? Then that was something different?’
‘Oh, yes, sahib. It would not be right for the sahibs and memsahibs to eat vegetable only.’
‘Then what did Masters sahib eat as well?’ said Ghote.
‘Beef curry, sahib, and fish curry. Good curry, sahib.’
‘Ah,’ said Ghote, ‘so you can cook well enough when you want, eh?’
He looked down in triumph at the little cook, whose cringing attitude irritated him more and more from one moment to the next.
‘Oh, no, sahib,’ the little man replied promptly. ‘Not good cook.’
‘Then why do you say it was good curry?’
‘Dr Diana come and watch me make, sahib.’
Ghote’s ears pricked up.
‘Does Dr Upleigh always do this?’
‘Oh, no, sahib. Dr Diana got much more important things to do than make sure how I cook.’
Ghote’s interest was totally gripped.
‘So this was an unusual occasion, was it?’ he said.
The podgy little cook looked up bewilderedly.
Ghote tried again.
‘So it was special for her to come?’
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Most special. Most extra special. Very kind. Very kind.’
He rubbed his hands together in writhing gratitude.
Ghote kept the pressure up. This was a piece of luck indeed. The unusual incident, the little difference in behaviour, this was what he had taught himself always to look out for. And now he had really got hold of something.
‘Was this perhaps the only time Dr Diana had ever come to see you cooking?’ he asked.
The cook looked up at him anxiously.
‘Well, was it the only time?’ Ghote said with a jet of impatience.
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Only time she come.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Indeed, yes, sahib. Only time. Most sure.’
Ghote breathed a sigh of relief. When the meal Frank Masters had eaten was being prepared, the doctor had been for the first time ever down in the kitchen pretending to be supervising the cook. And he had got firmly on to it.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me exactly what happened to the food when it had been prepared. What sort of dishes was it put in? Are they still here? Have they been washed?’
‘Oh, sahib, sahib,’ the cook protested. ‘Am only poor man, sahib. Not very much brain, sahib.’
He looked up at Ghote beseechingly.
Ghote took control of himself. The man’s attitude filled him with a desire to march him off to the privacy of C.I.D. headquarters and there to get what he wanted out of him in the most unpleasant way he could. But he was not going to allow himself to think in such a way. The man was a man like any other and he would treat him reasonably, however creepingly obsequious he got.
‘The dishes,’ he said, ‘they have been washed?’
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Most thoroughly washed. Oh, yes, indeed. I know that I must see to that.’
Ghote felt a twinge of disappointment.
‘That is a pity,’ he sighed. ‘However we cannot expect –’
‘Sahib, sahib, you want see dishes before they wash?’ the cook asked eagerly.
He turned and suddenly scuttled off by the door leading out of the house.
Ghote was after him in an instant.
And, just as he had expected, there outside the door he found the little cook busy picking morsels out of an open-ended oil drum that served as an extra dustbin. With delicate artistry he was placing them one by one in a clean dish.
Ghote felt near to tears. So much for getting hold of the unusual incident, the little difference in behaviour. He had slipped into the oldest pitfall of all: he had virtually told the cook what he had wanted him to say and the squirming creature had promptly obliged with a stream of pure invention.
Ghote stepped forward and with a well-aimed kick sent the half-filled dish spinning away into the darkness.
‘Come back inside,’ he shouted.
The little cook trotted meekly into the kitchen in front of him.
And immediately Ghote regretted his violence. Just because he had been so pleased with himself over his discovery, he had taken out the subsequent disappointment on the person who happened to have provoked it. He made a resolution not to let this happen again, ever.
‘The dishes were all cleaned already?’ he asked the cook quietly.
‘Yes, sahib.’
‘And was this, or was this not, the only time Dr Diana had ever come and watched you cook?’
‘She had come before, sahib,’ said the cook.
He spoke humbly as ever, but without any sign of regret at having said exactly the opposite hardly two minutes earlier.
‘When did she come?’ Ghote said patiently.
‘Oh, when Masters sahib was away, sahib.’
‘When he was away? He has been away?’
‘He has been back three weeks only, sahib,’ the shiny-skinned cook said eagerly. ‘He was away for three months, sahib. He was in the Punjab, sahib. He was very interested in refugees from Tibet, sahib. Very holy men, sahib.’
‘Stop. Stop.’
By now, Ghote thought, the wretch had undoubtedly entered the realm of embroidery again, adding to his information piece by piece as it seemed to please or not.
‘And it was while Masters sahib was away that Dr Diana came to see you cooking?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes, sahib. Came to make sure I cook a little better. She say I was most appalling cook in whole of Bombay, sahib.’
The man looked up with something like pride on his plump features.
Ghote’s toe itched. But he kept himself calm.
‘Why did she not come at other times?’ he asked.
‘Oh, she was not in charge then, sahib. When Masters sahib go he put Dr Diana in full charge. She say at least she get some decent meals now, sahib. So she –’
‘That’s enough.’
‘Yes, sahib. Certainly, sahib. I stay quite quiet, sahib. You want to think, sahib?’
‘No, I do not,’ Ghote snapped.
He seized on another question before his temper burst the limits he had set on it.
‘So why did Dr Diana come to supervise you tonight? Mr Masters was here, wasn’t he? Why did she come tonight?’
He waited anxiously for the answer. If there was nothing the fertilely anxious-to-please cook could suggest, this was perhaps after all a piece of behaviour well out of the ordinary.
‘Oh, sahib,’ the cook replied, giving him a sideways glance, ‘that is easy to answer.’
He waited, hoping no doubt that Ghote would give him a clue about the reply he would prefer.
Ghote stayed silent, but decided he could let one shaft of angry impatience dart out.
‘Well, sahib,’ the cook said, ‘it was like –’
Suddenly he stopped short and looked round Ghote as if he had at that moment seen the whole doorway behind the inspector turn into a sheet of flame or a roaring cascade of flood-water.
‘Will you tell?’ Ghote snapped without taking his eyes off him. ‘Why did Dr Diana choose tonight of all nights to come and watch you cooking?’
‘I can answer that.’
Now Ghote did swing round.
He found himself face to face with a woman about sixty years old, dressed in an orange-toned sari, thin-faced with white hair drawn up on her head and the little mouth and quick eyes of a bird.
‘I am Inspector Ghote, C.I.D.,’ he said. ‘May I ask what you are doing here?’
‘It is rather I who should be asking what you are doing,’ she replied.
She spoke English with an accent the like of which Inspector Ghote had never heard before. He realized that in spite of her tanned complexion and workaday sari she was some sort of European.
‘I am investigating the death of Mr Frank Masters,’ he said cautiously.
There could be little doubt that his announcement came as a surprise to her. Of course it was strictly possible that she might have prepared the look of incomprehension and the quick flood of understanding which followed it. He did not know enough about her to tell. But if it was a performance, it was a faultless one.
‘Herr Frank. Herr Frank,’ she babbled now.
‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘I regret to have to inform that he is dead, and that a police investigation is being carried out.’
‘But Herr Frank. But what happened?’
Ghote kept watching her closely. He detected not a sign of calculation in the rapidly blinking bird-eyes.
‘Mr Masters was poisoned,’ he said carefully.
‘Poisoned? But how? But what happened?’
She darted looks all round the kitchen. At the refrigerator, at the grimy burners of the gas-stove, at the ranks of pallid aluminium dekchis.
‘There is no poison here,’ she said.
It was a statement of fact.
She drew herself up.
‘But that is a matter which I am bound to investigate,’ Ghote answered.
‘Then tell me how he came to take this poison.’
‘You had better tell first who you are,’ Ghote said.
She looked at him.
‘Yes. Yes, of course. You would not know. My name is Glucklich. Fraulein Glucklich, citizen of the Republic of India.’
She gave a proud glance round. The cook at least seemed impressed. He salaamed deeply.
‘Ah, Fraulein Glucklich,’ Ghote said. ‘Then you are the housekeeper, are you not?’
He mentally filled in a blank on a list.
‘Exactly,’ said Fraulein Glucklich. ‘And that is why I am able to answer your question. Why did Dr Diana come into this kitchen tonight? Quite simple. Because she knew I would not be here. She knew I would be with the new swami.’
‘The new swami?’ Ghote said.
‘Yes,’ said Fraulein Glucklich with a little toss of her crown of white hair, ‘you do not need to think that only Indians can benefit from the words of a wise man. I am happy to call myself a sannysini of Swami Dnyaneshwar.’
‘And he was holding a meeting this evening?’ Ghote asked.
‘Of course,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘From five o’clock to midnight. It was advertised.’
‘It was public meeting then?’
‘Swami Dnyaneshwar would turn away no one, however unenlightened.’
Suspecting that he was himself one of the unenlightened Fraulein Glucklich had in mind, Ghote persisted.
‘And there were a number of people present at the meeting this evening?’
‘A number of people? I am happy to state that there must have been at least thirty. And great enthusiasm. We went long past the advertised time.’
‘And you yourself were there from start to finish?’
Fraulein Glucklich looked at him sadly.
‘Do you think I would miss one moment at the feet of such a swami?’
‘You were at his feet the whole time?’
A faint blush came up in her withered cheeks.
‘I think you misunderstand,’ she said. ‘I spoke of course metaphorically. I was not in fact kneeling at the swami’s feet the whole evening.’
‘You left for a little time?’ Ghote said.
‘No, no. I could not leave. I sat close to the swami every minute. On the ground, naturally.’
‘Thank you,’ Ghote said.
He supposed he would have to check with Swami Dnyaneshwar. It would not in all probability be an easy task. Religious figures were apt to show little concern for things of this world. Which was excellent in its way: but difficult for a police officer.
In the meantime he could regard Fraulein Glucklich as having a total alibi as regarded putting arsenic that evening into anything Frank Masters had eaten.
‘You were explaining that Dr Diana had perhaps come down to the kitchen for a particular reason,’ he resumed.
‘Certainly,’ Fraulein Glucklich replied. ‘She had come down to meddle. If I had been here, she would not have dared.’
Ghote reflected that seven hours and more with the swami did not seem to have made Fraulein Glucklich regard all her fellow human beings with unmixed love. Though it was certainly true, from what he had seen of Dr Diana, that she would indeed meddle whatever chance she got.
No doubt this after all was why she had come into the kitchen. There almost always was some equally simple explanation for what at first looked like suspicious departures from routine. Ghote felt abruptly tired.
‘I tell you, Mr Inspector, such trouble I had when Herr Frank was away.’ Fraulein Glucklich chirruped on, ‘It is all very well for her to say she caught that man Amrit Singh, but she had no business to poke into everywhere like that.’
‘Amrit Singh,’ said the inspector.
Thoughts raced suddenly through his mind like racehorses crowding in a blaze of jockeys’ silks towards a winning post.
Amrit Singh.
Amrit Singh was a personage well known to every man in the whole Bombay Police. If there was any organized crime happening anywhere at any time, it was safe to say that Amrit Singh, a huge, enormously tough, unshakeably cheerful yet plainly ruthless Sikh, was somewhere at the back of it. Burglaries, street robberies, brothel-keeping, bootlegging, trade in forged licences, smuggling, blackmail, protection rackets, anything and everything solidly illegal was meat and drink to Amrit Singh.
And he had never really been caught. From time to time certainly he had been pulled up and even convicted on some minor charge. But even then, thanks to a battery of sharp advocates, he had never had to do more than pay a small fine.
On these occasions he invariably proffered in satisfaction the largest possible currency note. He had every reason to be cheerful.
And now he had turned up here.
It was difficult to pay any attention to Fraulein Glucklich, jabbing her little pointed nose in and out as she detailed her complaints against the formidable Dr Diana.
‘Oh, yes, we had the notorious Mr Amrit Singh hanging about the Foundation. And, certainly, nobody realized it till Dr Diana took it into her head to question him. But she did not do anything so very clever. After all, he told her straight away who he was.’
The inspector ran over in his mind the information sheets he had seen recently. As far as he could remember there was nothing about Amrit Singh having been notified as causing trouble at the Masters Foundation. If there had been, half the men in the force would have been out looking for him.
‘How long ago was this?’ he asked.
‘Oh, a month or more,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘In any case, it is of no importance.’
Ghote was undeterred.
‘And since then?’ he asked. ‘Has anything been seen of Amrit Singh in the past few days?’
Fraulein Glucklich sniffed. Delicately.
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘He was told the police would be called if he ever showed himself here again, and I suppose he had the good sense to keep off.’
Ghote allowed himself a flicker of inward amusement at this withered-cheeked little European woman’s notion that it was necessary only to mention the police to the huge Sikh thug to scare him off once and for all. But this was no time for jokes. If Amrit Singh was involved in something at the Foundation, he had to get after him just as quickly as possible.
One or two questions still must be asked however.
He glanced at his watch.
‘I would like to know more about what Mr Masters ate this evening,’ he said. ‘Your cook tells that he prepared on Dr Diana’s instructions beef curry and fish. Can you tell –?’
‘Fish curry,’ snapped Fraulein Glucklich. ‘She ought to have known at least that Herr Frank did not eat that.’
‘Oh, memsahib,’ said the cook, ‘that was special for Mr Chatterjee. You know how he like.’
Chatterjee, Krishna, resident social worker at the Foundation, Ghote noted automatically. He began looking for a way of cutting Fraulein Glucklich short without drying up a possibly useful source of information.
But Fraulein Glucklich’s full attention was now turned on the plump cook.
‘So Master Chatterjee likes fish curry, does he?’ she said.
‘Oh, yes, memsahib. All those Bengali fellows like fish.’
‘And since when have his whims been pandered to in this house?’ Fraulein Glucklich asked with a magnificently lofty toss of her little dried-up nut of a head.
‘One moment,’ Ghote said.
Fraulein Glucklich spared him a swift glance.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘I wish to know with great urgency who exactly ate with Mr Masters this evening in the staff tiffin room.’
Fraulein Glucklich indicated graciously that the cook might reply.
‘Yes, memsahib,’ he said in something near a whisper. ‘This evening only three in staff tiffin room, please. Masters sahib, Dr Diana and Chatterjee sahib.’
Ghote glanced at Fraulein Glucklich to see if this was likely. She appeared to accept it. He hurried on.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘when the food is cooked, what happens to it?’
‘Oh, sahib, it is taken to tiffin room by Vidur, the bearer.’
Ghote stored the name away. He remembered the man, a sullen looking, pointed-nose Gujarati.
‘And then?’ he snapped.
‘It is put on serving table, sahib, till Masters sahib ready to eat.’
‘Till he is ready? It is there some time?’
‘It is generally there a great deal too long,’ Fraulein Glucklich broke in. ‘Poor Herr Frank. So many things he has to do. Often I have to tell him several times that the food is waiting.’
Ghote decided that this was something he must pursue however anxious he was to get on to headquarters about Amrit Singh.
‘And the food is often left in the tiffin room like that?’ he asked.
‘Much too often,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘More than once it has been stolen.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Certainly. The clients here, you must know, have no very high moral tone. On several occasions they have reached in through the window and stolen food from the serving table. In spite of the excellent supplies they get themselves.’
Ghote thought of the vegetables and puris the ‘clients’ had had that evening.
‘So that it is most likely that Mr Masters ate the beef curry,’ he said. ‘And almost anyone could have put something in that if they had wanted to.’
‘Put something in it?’ Fraulein Glucklich said. ‘But you cannot think seriously that anyone would have wished to kill Herr Frank.’
She tossed her head.
‘That is ridiculous.’
It was an edict.
For a moment Ghote wished he could heed it. He was beginning to feel very tired now. If only it was impossible that Frank Masters had been murdered, then he would have done enough for one night. He could even go back home and get to bed.
But the desire lasted only a moment.
If Amrit Singh was involved, there was certainly no time for rest. And Amrit Singh must be involved. He had been on the spot not all that long before, and he was not going to be scared away by a warning about fetching a policeman.
Ghote’s heart began to pound.
If he could not only solve the Masters murder but pull in the notorious Amrit Singh for it, then it would be such a triumph as there had never been before. And he would do it. If hard work and patience could piece together a case to stand up in court against the worst the Sikh’s lawyers could do, then he was as good as hanged already.
There was a telephone in the stone-flagged entrance hall, he remembered. With scarcely an explanation, he left Fraulein Glucklich and the greasy little cook at a run.
Headquarters, it turned out, were not able to help much. Nobody knew where Amrit Singh was now. By no means for the first time he had thrown off the watch kept on him more or less permanently and had vanished into the blue. A number of rackets of various kinds were going on that he almost certainly had a hand in, but he could not be pinned down for certain anywhere.
Never mind, thought Ghote. He has been seen here, and that is enough.
He flung himself into a renewed whirlwind of activity, checking and double checking on every aspect of the affair. This time Amrit Singh was not going to slip out of the net through doubts over the evidence.
Tired though he was, he drove himself and his men steadily on. And all the while the thought of what it was all leading up to grew and blossomed in his head. Even the unpleasant business of emptying the dustbins into sealed containers for analysis was a delightful task. He sorted and picked at the mess of rubbish with his own hands.
‘Hey, policeman,’ a familiar voice suddenly called out. ‘Don’t you know that food belongs to the beggars?’
Ghote leapt to his feet.
That damned boy.
He peered all round in the before-dawn darkness out at the back of the house. But beyond the light of the lantern by which they had been working he could see nothing.
He felt his fury rising.
‘If a beggar ate any of this,’ he shouted into the darkness, ‘he might find himself good and sick.’
‘So what?’ the boy called back at his most synthetically American. ‘So what? Then you’d know where the poison was. And a good cheap way.’
Ghote found that he had no answer.
A wave of discouragement assailed him.
It had not abated when, having done everything at the Foundation he could possibly think of and made his way homewards at last, trudging across the patch of garden in front of his Government Quarters house he saw his wife standing just inside the open door. So, once again she had been unable to sleep while he had been away.
And Protima after a sleepless night was not an easy person.
A raucous cock suddenly crowed loudly from somewhere close by. Ghote shook his head from side to side trying to throw off the weariness.
‘A bad case,’ he said into the chilly, dawn-streaked air. ‘A terrible business. I was lucky to get away as soon as this.’
Protima said nothing.
Ghote found he needed to make an effort to take the last step into the house. Behind him Protima closed the door and latched it.
And suddenly she put her arms round him.
‘You would be tired,’ she said. ‘Come, there is tea nearly ready. I made it when I heard the truck coming into the Quarters.’
And, unusually, Ghote found himself telling every detail of the case to Protima. She was by no means the sort of person to appreciate the need for meticulous checking of samples from dustbins or accurate recording of exactly who was where at what time, and for this reason he never gave her more than an outline of what particular job he was on at any time. But the sudden relief of tension was too much for him now, and out it all came – the sense of bafflement he felt every time he tried to find out enough about Frank Masters to guess why he had been murdered, the almost frightening possibility of bringing in Amrit Singh, even the highly upsetting encounters with the boys’ gang. He told her about everything, the samples he had collected, the fingerprints he had had taken, the hopes he put on what the laboratory tests would produce.
He even brought himself to admit how much he hated having to deal with Dr Diana.
‘She was the worst of the whole night,’ he said. ‘The way she stood there, so tall and big, like a machine woman, and all the time making her judgements.’
He felt better for having brought it out. He tried a small joke.
‘No wonder she is not married.’
Protima smiled back at him slyly.
He went over to her and took her in his arms. Through the thin cotton of her white night sari he could feel her body, warm, firm, protective.
‘Oh, I am so tired,’ he said.
‘Come to bed then,’ she answered. ‘Come to bed and sleep.’