Inspector Ghote was too sensible to defy D.S.P. Naik’s orders then and there where he had been given them. He at once grabbed his telephone and with a great deal of shouting ordered a truck to take him round to Wodehouse Road.
The D.S.P. stood beside the open door, still wheezing hard, and stared at him in silence.
Ghote wished he would go.
He wanted a few moments to think. He had had to say he would obey orders, but there must still be a way round. Only, unless he had a little time to himself, he would not be able to sort things out. And now he had been pressured into calling for transport to take him to the Foundation. He could always stop the truck outside and sit and think on the spot, but if he did the driver would begin to wonder why he had been sent out at a moment’s notice and now was being made to hang about at the kerbside. And nothing must distract him from thinking this through properly.
There must be a way out.
Ghote collected a notebook and put it in his pocket. Still the D.S.P. said nothing, and still he remained exactly where he was, leaning a little bit forward and wheezing ever more slowly with each breath.
Ghote turned towards the doorway.
And down in the corner where he kept his filed information sheets he saw that the same little lizard had contrived once again to imprison itself in the glass-fronted bookshelf. If he left it in there in the shut-up office it might die. He might be away all the rest of the day if he did have to try and pull in Amrit Singh.
He hesitated.
And then he quickly picked up one of the sheets of paper on which he had so painfully written out his account of the case and rolled it into a cylinder.
As he did so, his eye fell on the words he had written at the top of the page. ‘From information received from Dr Diana Upleigh, resident medical. …’ And suddenly he knew that there was after all something that he had left undone in his investigation. He had not got all that he should have done out of Dr Diana. She, more than anyone in the Foundation, knew Frank Masters. And it was in the character of the young American that the reason for his death must lie. Once he had a firm idea of what that was, then it should surely be obvious whether he had died at the hands of a stop-at-nothing thug or at those of a talkative, pedantic, over-the-edge little Bengali intellectual.
Ignoring the still expectant figure of D.S.P. Naik, Ghote stepped swiftly over to the glass-fronted bookcase, opened it, flicked up the little lizard with his paper cylinder, slid it off near to the crack at the edge of the floor and tossed the paper into the wastepaper basket.
‘I am going now, D.S.P.,’ he said.
The D.S.P. made no reply. He was staring at the empty patch of floor where an instant before a tiny lizard had blinked its two beads of eyes twice and had darted incredulously to safety once again.
The stately, pear-shaped bearer at the Masters Foundation showed Ghote, when he asked for Dr Diana, into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Ghote had glanced into the room when he had made his first tour of the bungalow just after the crime, but now he stood in the doorway and looked with care.
It was cool and quiet for all the unrelenting brightness of the sun outside. At each of the windows a heavy split cane blind hung, letting in only broken and jumbled bars of light. They caught the flowered pattern on the material of the soft armchair in which Dr Diana sat. They caught too the real flowers in a blue pottery bowl on a low table of dark wood, carved with heavy scoops in a curious rough pattern. Ghote had seen such work in the homes of other Britons: it always made him feel it came from somewhere very distant, where the people were as brutally decided as the thick strokes of the carving.
He looked up from the low table with its bowl of soft-bloomed flowers. On the walls there were a mirror and two photographs. Each was in a dark frame carved in the same fierce style. He looked away.
Dr Diana, who had been reading an illustrated magazine sent from England, laid it down. Ghote registered the smell of the thick, shiny paper and the sepia brown squares of the photographs of clumps of Englishmen and women standing about in ungainly but determined poses.
‘Well,’ Dr Diana said, ‘and what can I do for you?’
She looked up at him from the billowing mass of her flower-covered armchair. She was wearing a frock in much the same pattern as the chair material though the flowers were smaller and more tightly bunched. Her face was aggressively pink and white. The rather coarse eyebrows were raised in an attitude of direct inquiry.
Ghote braced himself.
‘I have come to you,’ he said, ‘because I think you are the one who can most help me in the next stage of my investigation.’
‘Oh,’ said Dr Diana, ‘then your investigation has got past one stage, has it? I’m glad to hear that.’
‘My inquiries have revealed a great deal,’ Ghote said.
‘But not anything on which you can actually take action?’
Ghote made himself ignore the rebuke.
‘My problem is otherwise,’ he said. ‘I have discovered too much in many ways. Too much about what has been going on at the Foundation here, and too little about the person who suffered from it.’
Dr Diana sat up straighter in the billowing, flower-covered armchair.
‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘If you’ve discovered anything that’s been going on here, it can’t have any bearing on Frank’s death. And you don’t need to go poking your nose into his whole life history to find out who killed him either.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Ghote, ‘but I think the opposite is the case. I have found that there were people in a position to obtain the arsenic trioxide, but until I know more of their relations with Mr Masters, I cannot decide whether they would want to administer.’
‘Well, there isn’t any mystery about Frank’s relations with anybody,’ Dr Diana declared, flopping back in the big chair. ‘Frank was as open and straight as anyone in this world.’
‘That is something to have learnt,’ Ghote replied. ‘But I would like to learn more.’
‘All right, learn more if you want to. But don’t come bothering me for it. I’ve got the whole of this place to run now, and I really haven’t got time to attend to inessentials.’
‘Of course I understand that you are very busy, but –’
‘I’m more than very busy. If the Foundation’s to go on without Frank it’s absolutely essential that I should take hold of the reins firmly right from the start. Otherwise the whole place’ll go to pot. I know, I’ve seen it happen to other places before.’
‘Then you are taking over permanently?’ Ghote asked, seeing how he could discuss what Frank Masters had done in a way acceptable to Dr Diana.
‘Yes, yes, of course. That was always understood,’ she said brusquely.
‘And you are to carry on with the same policy?’
‘Naturally. Frank Masters set the pattern. We shall always honour his memory. His plans will be carried through to the last detail. Except where circumstances alter, needless to say.’
‘Of course,’ Ghote agreed. ‘And how would you describe these principles?’
‘My dear man, I should have thought they would have been obvious to anybody.’
Ghote said nothing. And, as he had hoped, Dr Diana after a short pause did go on to explain the self-explanatory principles on which the Masters Foundation had run during the lifetime of Frank Masters himself.
‘Frank was a very rich man,’ she said. ‘He had had great advantages. But he knew that he must share them with those less fortunate than himself. You’ve got to give sometimes in this world, you know.’
She looked at Ghote challengingly.
The thought came into his head that he himself gave very little. He remembered the beggar on the office steps. The last time he had given him anything was when he had wanted a few moments to think about the Masters case the night he had come out here for the first time.
But Dr Diana was continuing with her exposition of the principles behind the Foundation. She rose like a lioness from the big chintz-covered armchair and strode up and down the cool, dark room.
‘We in the West have got to give to those countries that need help,’ she said. ‘We have all the advantages: we have got to share them.’
She swung round.
‘Of course, you have your own way of life,’ she went on. ‘We respect that. Frank respected that. He went up to the Punjab, you know, a month or two ago and did a lot of work studying the religious outlook of the Tibetans, and all that sort of thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote, ‘I had heard.’
Dr Diana looked at him briefly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, that was all very well, but of course there were a great many practical things that needed doing here too.’
‘It was then that you discovered that Amrit Singh was making a nuisance of himself in the Foundation?’ Ghote put in quickly.
He was delighted that a chance to introduce the Sikh’s name had come up so easily. Perhaps he could get on to mentioning his possible links with Frank Masters.
‘Oh, him,’ Dr Diana said shortly. ‘Yes, I dealt with him. But, as I was saying, Frank did more than simply give money. He could have stayed at home in America and done that. Or, I could have stayed back in the UK and organized a few raffles and things for the Church Missionary Society. But Frank was not just a giver: he was a doer. He came out here and got down to a spot of good hard work.’
Ghote bowed his head slightly.
‘That’s the trouble out here,’ Dr Diana went on.
Her pacing of the cool darkness of the room had grown swifter now. She covered its length in a few long strides, came up against a wall, halted as if affronted, swung round, and set off again.
‘That’s the trouble with so many of you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got the simple bloody guts to get on with the job. That’s all that’s needed, you know. Roll up your sleeves and get down to it.’
She came to a full halt again in front of the mirror in its dark coarsely carved frame. She looked at her reflection in it for a few seconds. Her muscular pinky white arms were bare to the elbow.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘people out here are mostly in a damned appalling muddle. What they need is a swift leg-up. Over the stile.’
She swung round sharply and marched up to the inspector.
‘But don’t you go thinking that we aim to help them every inch of the way,’ she said. ‘That’s not it at all. Help them to help themselves. That’s what Frank believed in.’
‘A most excellent principle,’ Ghote observed.
He felt he was at last beginning to get a grasp of the hitherto totally enigmatic figure of Frank Masters. It was not helping him to see why he had been killed yet. But it was filling him with a certain awe. He himself was so much below this.
‘Well, there it is,’ Dr Diana said tersely. ‘That’s what Frank believed. Heaven knows, I don’t want to be a nursemaid to anybody myself. It just so happens I’ve a good clear mind, and I can see what has to be done. And when I do, I go ahead and do it.’
She had come up against the mirror again. She swung away from it after a few instants.
‘And that was what Frank was like too,’ she said. ‘He had a clear mind. He saw what was to be done and did it. And this city has a lot to be thankful for because of that.’
Ghote could only agree.
‘That is most true,’ he said. ‘Most true.’
A niggling thought reared up.
‘But Amrit Singh,’ he added. ‘Mr Masters did not realize that Amrit Singh was bad influence?’
Dr Diana looked shocked.
‘Now, just you listen to me,’ she said. ‘Frank Masters had the widest open eyes of anybody I ever met. He was no sloppy, sentimental fool, all think beautiful thoughts and do nothing. When he saw that something was wrong he got up on his two feet and darn well did something about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote.
He left Dr Diana seated once more in her billowing chair turning over again the thick, odoriferous leaves of the English magazine. He felt doubly oppressed now. To begin with nothing that she had said seemed to indicate clearly one way or the other whether Krishna Chatterjee or Amrit Singh was most likely to have poisoned Frank Masters.
But, more than this, the thought of Frank Masters himself was oppressive. The picture of someone with so much, not only giving and giving abundantly of what he had, but getting up, in Dr Diana’s expressive phrase, ‘on his own two feet’ and doing what needed to be done in this world, made him feel simply inadequate.
He decided, in spite of D.S.P. Naik, to seek refuge in his office and try to pull himself together and decide what to do. As the truck approached the headquarters building he leant forward and told the driver he would get out where they were. The man shrugged and stopped for him. Ghote waited on the pavement till the Dodge was well out of sight and then set off towards the office on foot. It had occurred to him that he stood a much better chance of reaching the sanctuary of his own little room if he went in by the back way.
He made his way through the jostling crowds on the pavements thinking over and over the details of Frank Masters’s life as Dr Diana had recounted them to him. And suddenly he stopped in his tracks.
A thought had struck him. By going round this back way he was once more avoiding the beggar on the front steps.
He turned and marched back the way he had come and round to the front of the building. At the steps he stopped, took out all the coins in his pocket and selected the largest. He went up to the monotonously whining figure crouched at the edge of the wide steps. And then he stopped again. He plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a second coin. Quickly he thrust them both into the beggar’s grimy paw. The man swept them away out of sight even more quickly.
He did not look at the inspector. His begging whine continued unchanged and unabated.
Ghote crept into the building and up to his room. Although the D.S.P. was nowhere to be seen, he still did not feel very happy. He sat at his desk, but he could not bring himself even to contemplate the complications of his life. He knew that in fact once he did begin to think there was only one thing to work out. D.S.P. Naik had ordered him in the clearest possible terms to prepare a number of witnesses with false statements as a preliminary to getting up the case against Amrit Singh. Well, Amrit Singh might well be guilty. He probably was. But equally –
He stopped himself going on. He must not think about the dilemma. The two equal blank walls would oppress him to desperation.
Almost stealthily he fished the newspaper out from behind his desk. It was at least a way of preventing himself thinking of anything else.
West Silent on Pak Guilt. Many members of the Lok Sabha referred today to the sad fact that the world had displayed an incredible indifference to the sufferings of the East Pakistan minorities. There had been some stirrings only when it became known that Christians were also being persecuted by the Pakistanis.
He lowered the paper.
This did not seem to be in the spirit of Frank Masters. On anybody’s part. He wondered what he would do about it if he was actually faced with the problem. Ought he perhaps to face himself with it? He could give up his job, give up everything, go to the Pakistan border and by example and exhortation …
He thought of Protima and little Ved at home. How would they live if he went off? And were there not problems enough in Bombay? Perhaps having a proper police force in the city was a help even.
Except that the police force was not being at all successful in the case of the wanton murder of Frank Masters.
He tried the paper again.
Guerrillas Active in China. Reports reaching Western capitals speak of serious anti-Government unrest in China. Trouble has broken out in various parts of the country.
If only it was as easy as that. If only your problems really did solve themselves. If only something would happen in the mysterious land on the far side of the Masters case which would solve his problem.
But that was not the way things went.
He skimmed indifferently down the rest of the column.
A group of 400 guerillas has been causing trouble in Yunnan, according to … Corroborating reports of unrest in Canton the Hongkong Tiger Standard said … According to an eye-witness report a special meeting was held.
‘Inspector.’
He looked up.
D.S.P. Naik was standing right up close to his desk, looking down at him coldly. Slowly he lowered the paper and tried to stuff it away under his chair.
‘Inspector, I do not expect to find my officers idling with the papers and such trash in working hours. A policeman must be a dedicated individual, Inspector. He should be above such trivial nonsense.’
Ghote slowly stood up with head bowed.
The D.S.P. regarded him in silence.
Now comes the moment when he asks why I am back here, Ghote thought.
His stomach muscles tightened. He felt sick.
‘And Inspector.’
‘Yes, sir. Yes, D.S.P.?’
‘You do not look at all well. There is a distinctly greenish tinge to your complexion. I spoke to you before about the need to take regular exercise. Have you made any arrangements yet? Have you asked the Sports Officer when he can find you a place in a hockey team?’
‘No, sir. Not yet, sir.’
‘Then see to it, Inspector, see to it. There is one thing I will not stand and that is unfitness among my officers. That I will not stand.’
And to Ghote’s amazement, with those words D.S.P. Naik turned and, wheezing like a dynamo, stumped out of the room.
Ghote straightened his shoulders as the door shut. There was nothing else for it now. He would have to go and see those boys.
He hoped he would not find them. The Foundation’s clients were supposed to take jobs when they could, and Ghote hoped that this would be a day when all the boys of the gang would be employed somewhere in the city, and that no one would know where. It was possible. It was possible even that they would all choose just this day to drift mysteriously away from the temporary security the Foundation offered. This was something that could happen. He knew that much from his first long, patient night of investigation.
But it had not happened today.
The pear-shaped bearer took him with great solemnity round to the boys’ dormitory. He did not throw open the door and announce him, but not being able to do so obviously left him feeling uneasy. He salaamed to Ghote with extra deepness as if to put the situation to rights.
The dormitory was simply a large room in the big, rather old, bare bungalow. It may once have been a drawing-room. It would have needed a large, very expensive carpet to cover the big area of floor. Now the heavy tiles were bare, with here and there a black crack snaking jaggedly across them. The only furniture was two ranks of serviceable string beds running down the two long walls. Once there must have been a lot of chairs, sofas, tables to fill the empty echoing space.
On the bed in the farthest corner the whole gang was assembled. At the head, squatting smoking a stub of cigarette, was Edward G. Robinson in the dignity of his tattered black jacket. At the foot, comfortably upside down, was Tarzan, resting on the nape of his neck with his bare legs running up the wall. The others lounged between them, half on the floor, half on the creaking bed.
Before Ghote said anything he held a quick debate with himself. Should he or should he not talk in the film American he had used before? It had worked then, but he had a strong feeling that he had over-rated its success. After all, Edward G. had behaved very badly over helping Krishna Chatterjee when he had attempted to get away. It was no thanks to the boy that he had not disappeared entirely.
On the other hand, there was the fact that Amrit Singh had not been warned off. Edward G., with his mysterious appearance when the big Sikh had entered the compound, had even seemed to be on Ghote’s side.
Ghote abruptly came to a decision.
It was not good enough. He was a police officer. He was not going to hang on every whim of a dirty, cheeky little street urchin like that.
‘Yes,’ he said sharply, ‘you are the boys I wanted to see.’
Edward G. removed the butt from between his crinkled lips with finicking care and blew out a cloud of rank smoke.
‘Now, you listen to me carefully,’ Ghote said. ‘It seems you do not realize what has happened in this house where you are treated so well. Mr Masters has been murdered. That is no joking matter.’
He looked at them severely.
It was difficult to be sure whether Edward G. did or did not make some tiny movement of command. Possibly Tarzan simply took it into his head himself. But whichever way it was, he lazily but with plain intent swung his wiry legs round and moved them pointedly apart in a gesture which could only indicate the lewdest contempt for the inspector and everything he had to say.
Ghote ran forward and delivered a stinging blow with his open palm on the boy’s lean thigh.
Tarzan took absolutely no notice.
‘Now, look –’ Ghote began to shout.
And then he pulled himself together. After all, what he wanted from these boys was co-operation. And this was certainly the wrong way to go about it. Whether he really did want them to cooperate as fully as D.S.P. Naik had ordered, he did not know. But he was at least going to do everything he ought.
He decided to approach the matter obliquely.
‘You must tell more about the message to Amrit Singh,’ he said. ‘It is not clear how he came to know that Mr Masters had found the smuggled gold and locked it in the dispensary.’
He reflected that this was true enough. That whole part of the business, he had hoped, would have made itself clear after Amrit Singh had been arrested. Now it would form a very useful introduction to the subject of ‘witnessing’ the big Sikh actually take the poison from the dispensary.
He glanced at the boys. For the most part their faces were stony. He might as well have not been there. Only Tarzan appeared to react at all. He slowly lowered his legs and swung himself round till he was sitting upright with his back to the inspector. That was something.
‘Come on,’ Ghote said sharply. ‘I want answer.’
Still the boys said nothing. Edward G. puffed intently at the stub of cigarette. Ghote addressed him directly.
‘And from you,’ he said, ‘I want explanation. Your behaviour when I was questioning Mr Chatterjee was deplorable.’
‘I had to give the sucker a chance,’ Edward G. said casually. ‘Guess I had my fun with him. So now I help.’
‘What do you mean “sucker”?’ Ghote said. ‘Mr Chatterjee is a very important person. He is charged with great responsibilities for your welfare. How dare you speak of him in such terms?’
‘If the guy’s a sucker, he’s a sucker,’ Edward G. explained with tired patience.
‘He is social worker.’
‘Brother, you said it.’
Ghote tried another tack.
‘When I have gone to great trouble for you boys,’ he said, ‘that is hardly the reward I expect.’
Edward G. slipped off the bed and walked across the room. Ghote turned to watch him. The boy kept silent. He crouched on the floor in the opposite corner and began scuffling at the broad tiles. Ghote could not quite make out what he was doing. He spoke sharply.
‘Well, I am waiting for explanation.’
Edward G. answered without turning round.
‘Listen, fella, you are a cop. You don’t get treated nice. Get it?’
‘But I have been better to you than a policeman might be,’ Ghote argued.
For a little Edward G. did not bother to reply. Ghote saw that he had succeeded in prising up one of the tiles. Now he dipped his hand into a hole under it. Only when he had secured a crisp and shiny packet of American cigarettes did he say anything.
‘Listen, fella, when the cops have got something to give, they get something too. When it’s nix, it’s nix.’
‘In this world it should not be get, get, get only,’ Ghote said fiercely. ‘Sometimes it should be give. I am going to ask you to give.’
Edward G. replaced the tile and tapped it into place with the heel of his bare foot.
‘Mister,’ he said, ‘for give you have come to the wrong guy.’
He dropped his hands to his sides and stood in front of the inspector. Ghote looked at him. The bare feet, the bare thin legs, streaked with dirt, the battered and filthy pair of shorts hardly kept up round the desperately thin waist, the bare chest with the remains of the black plastic jacket hanging from the shoulders above, the diseased and wrinkled old man’s face on the boy’s head. No, he had indeed come to the wrong guy for giving.
He felt confused.
All he could do was to plough on. He was a policeman. He had received clear and categorical orders from his superior officer. All he could do was to carry them out to the very best of his ability.
‘I have come to discuss your evidence when we make arrest for the murder of Frank Masters,’ he said.
The boy could not prevent a quick dart of interest.
‘You must know who it is we are going to arrest,’ Ghote went on.
‘It would take more policemen than you have got to get Amrit Singh out of the Morton Road place,’ Edward G. said.
‘We shall see about that,’ Ghote answered quickly. ‘You boys need not think that the police come out worst every time. Your friend Amrit Singh may be pretty tough, but we are not so weak.’
He puffed out his chest a bit. It was important that the gang should be taken in by this boast. Otherwise they would realize they had let slip where Amrit Singh was hiding.
‘Oh,’ said Edward G., his crinkled face splitting with delight, ‘I would like to see Amrit Singh taking you apart, Inspectorji. Oh, that would be good to see.’
‘But you will not,’ said Ghote. ‘You will see your friend Amrit Singh in handcuffs before too long. We shall find him all right wherever he is.’
The boy was after all only a boy. Ghote had no difficulty in detecting the faint look of relief in the wrinkled face at the thought that he had not really given away the Sikh thug’s hiding place.
‘Now,’ Ghote went on, ‘it is when we have arrested that you boys will come into the picture. It is a question of evidence.’
He saw them look at one another with open uneasiness.
‘Well,’ he said sharply to Edward G., ‘you have important evidence to give. You were the one who saw Amrit Singh go into the dispensary where the poison was kept. It will be your duty to state that fact in court.’
‘Mister,’ said Edward G., casually taking out one of the American cigarettes, ‘I ain’t going to court.’
‘You are,’ Ghote said. ‘You will be called as witness. It is too late now.’
‘You call away, mister.’
‘We would do more than call. If you did not come by yourself, you would come in handcuffs.’
Ghote thought again of how he had threatened to use handcuffs before and how ridiculous he had felt when the boy had held out his stick-like wrists. But perhaps he had been wrong to have allowed himself to be influenced by the thought of the ridiculousness of the situation. After all, D.S.P. Naik expected him to get his witnesses and if this was the only way …
‘You would have to find first,’ Edward G. said.
‘We would find,’ said Ghote. ‘But now it is a question of just what you would say in court.’
‘I would say nothing, mister.’
Ghote decided to ignore this persistent line.
‘You know,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the string bed next to the one the boys were lounging on, ‘you know, we have to be very careful about the way we tell the truth when it comes to court. This is one of the difficulties a policeman faces.’
The boys received this insight into another kind of life with stoicism.
‘Yes,’ Ghote went on, ‘it is all very well to come out with the simple truth. But the defence employs lawyers. Very clever lawyers. If we are not careful, they can make the simple truth look like simple lies.’
‘That is bad,’ Edward G. stated.
Ghote began to wonder if after all he was not beginning to make contact again. Perhaps all that was needed was to show that even a policeman had his difficulties.
He sighed.
‘It is hard for us,’ he said. ‘Very hard. We would like to tell the truth just as it happened. But if that will not be believed, what are we to do? That is why sometimes we have to –’
He stopped and searched for an analogy which might make it clearer to his audience.
‘Sometimes we have to polish up the truth a bit,’ he said. ‘You know, like you polish up a brass ornament so that it shines and everybody can see that it is what it is.’
Edward G. Robinson puffed out a long conical cloud of tobacco smoke. The rich smell of best American tobacco.
‘Hey, Tarzan,’ he said, ‘go and polish the ornaments, boy. They ain’t shining too good.’
The joke was extremely successful with the other members of the gang. They lay on their backs, kicked their legs in the air, and roared with laughter.
Ghote frowned.
‘That was to give you a general idea of what I meant,’ he said. ‘You do not have to have ornaments to understand.’
But the boys went on laughing. Only when they had stopped did Edward G. answer.
‘You want me to fake some evidence?’ he said. ‘How much you going to pay, copper?’
Ghote’s heart sank.
He had not expected this. Somehow it had been in his head all along that he would have the greatest difficulty in persuading Edward G. to agree with the Deputy Superintendent’s plan. And now it looked as if he had known from the start what Ghote would be bound to ask and would be only too pleased to agree, if the price was right.
‘It is only a question of stating what we know to be true,’ Ghote said. ‘We know Amrit Singh poisoned Mr Masters. You yourself saw him go into that dispensary. You were too far away to see him take the jar of poison down and take some of the powder out, but if you had been looking through the window you would have seen.’
‘Oh, but I did see, mister,’ Edward G. said.