It took Inspector Ghote some time to get away from Amrit Singh. The big Sikh offered him the pleasures of an evening at his speakeasy. Ghote found them easy enough to refuse. Amrit Singh suggested his house of ill-fame farther along the street. Ghote pretended to be shocked. At last he consented to take one drink, not from the bar room next door, but from Amrit Singh’s personal supply of guaranteed American bourbon.
He endured patiently a number of jokes about policemen drinking smuggled liquor in an illegal drinking den. And at last he got away.
By consent, nothing more was said about the murder of Frank Masters.
Ghote took a risk as soon as he got out of the Sikh’s house. He had an unpleasant feeling that the moment his back was turned Amrit Singh would slip out and disappear once more. So he went into the first likely shop he saw and asked if they had a telephone. He rang headquarters and in the most discreetly garbled way he arranged for a new watch to be put on the Sikh. As he had expected, the duty telephonist was incredibly slow to understand, and before the talk was finished it must have been plain to the listening shop man that Ghote was not the grubby passer-by he seemed.
Growing more anxious with every minute, he waited outside the shop till he saw a pair of constables, looking distinctly apprehensive, appear some way down the ill-lit street. Then he hurried back to the seedy corner-hotel, so tired now that he could hardly stand. Luckily the place also ran to a telephone. He called Protima and said briefly that he would not be home that night. She sounded sleepy. But before the latent anger in her voice had had time to spark out he rang off.
Something more to attend to when he had time. There was the matter of D.S.P. Naik’s game of hockey, too, if it came to that. He flopped down on the grimy bed, felt the pain in his left heel ease a bit and fell fast asleep.
He woke early next morning. As he had expected, he was pretty badly bitten by bugs. But nothing worse had happened. His clothes were still there. His pockets had not been rifled. His heel hurt much less. He bathed and dressed and went out.
He made his way as quickly as he could to the Masters Foundation and presented himself once more at Krishna Chatterjee’s little narrow book-lined office.
The Bengali social worker had his head studiously bent over a hectically jacketed American work. He looked up as Ghote came in and at once grew very serious.
‘Inspector,’ he said.
His face got steadily more sombre.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am ready to come.’
He stood up. For a second or two he searched over the cluttered surface of his desk and then he picked up a piece of white card closely covered with notes in black ink, underlined here and there in red. He put it down carefully on the open page of the wide-margined American book. Then he took it up again.
‘I suppose it will be no use marking the place after all,’ he said. ‘A gross superfluity.’
He looked down at the card with its close lines of neat hand-writing. His big, almond-shaped eyes seemed to fill with tears.
Ghote suddenly felt wretched.
‘It may be a long time before – before this whole affair is over,’ he said. ‘These things often take years even. Put in your bookmark.’
He coughed.
‘But nevertheless I must do my duty.’
‘Yes,’ said Krishna Chatterjee.
He stood silently by the crowded desk. After a moment or two he picked up the card of notes, slipped it hurriedly into place and slammed the book closed. Then he stood silent again, looking at the book-crammed larder shelves of his cubbyhole almost caressingly.
Ghote cleared his throat.
‘Perhaps you would prefer to tell here,’ he said.
‘Tell?’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘What is there to tell?’
Ghote looked at him.
‘But it is necessary to make a full statement,’ he said. ‘If you want to confess.’
It was Mr Chatterjee’s turn to look surprised.
‘To confess?’
‘Yes. You said you were ready to come.’
Suddenly the round-cheeked Bengali’s face was transformed. From a picture of utter dolefulness it changed in an instant to one of helplessly lost, giggling merriment.
‘Good gracious me,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear fellow, what a mistake I have made. A most comical error, most truly comical.’
Ghote felt a surge of irritation.
‘What error is this?’ he said sharply.
Krishna Chatterjee wiped his eyes with the back of a plumpish hand.
‘A quite simple error,’ he said, ‘but of major proportions, I assure you. You see, I was not offering to make a confession: I was saying simply that I thought you had come to arrest me, and that if I had to go I was ready.’
The simple misunderstanding appeared to break in on him again in its full ludicrousness. A new fit of high-pitched giggles assailed him.
Ghote looked at him.
And bit by bit his irritation succumbed. Abruptly a giggling laugh welled up in his chest. A moment or two later he had his arm round the Bengali’s bent shoulders laughing almost as heartily.
‘You were quite right,’ he said, drawing breath hard. ‘Quite right. A ridiculous misunderstanding. I came for quite another reason too.’
‘You did not come about the murder even?’ Mr Chatterjee asked.
‘Not directly about the murder,’ Ghote said.
‘Oh no, this is too much.’
Once more the plump little Bengali was reduced to helpless tittering.
‘What was it then?’ he asked, looking up at Ghote expectantly, as if whatever he said was bound to be even more ridiculously amusing.
‘Oh, it was nothing. A small thing only.’
Mr Chatterjee managed to subdue his giggles almost to silence.
‘Inspector, if there is anything I can do to help, you have to ask only.’
Ghote pulled himself together.
‘It is a small thing,’ he said. ‘But it is to a certain extent important.’
Into his mind came the line of hard thought that had led him here. The casual remark made by Dr Diana that she had hopes of reforming the boy Tarzan because they knew his home background, that he was from a fishing family. Adding to this Amrit Singh’s presence here at the Masters Foundation, and Amrit Singh’s interest among many other illicit occupations in smuggling. Tack on to this that Ghote knew, as every Bombay policeman did, that the city was one of the big routes for bringing gold from the Middle East, where a little tola ingot might be worth fifteen American dollars, into currency-starved India, where the same tola would be worth the equivalent of forty dollars. Then add one thing more. The incautious word that Amrit Singh had let slip the day before. The phrase about it being possible that gold had been brought into the Foundation without his own knowledge because the boy who was good at standing on his head was not also very sensible.
And now had come the time to play for all it was worth this hunch that Tarzan and his fishing family were a key link in the gold smuggling chain.
‘Just a small thing,’ he said. ‘I happened to hear that you know where the boy they call Tarzan lives. You know the boy? It would be most helpful if I could have his address.’
Krishna Chatterjee had stopped laughing too.
‘Certainly we have his address, Inspector,’ he said. ‘There is rather an unfortunate family situation there. The boy’s mother died and the father took –’
Mr Chatterjee looked the inspector full in the face.
‘Well,’ he said bravely, ‘there is no point in mincing words. He took a paramour.’
He sighed.
‘There was considerable ill-feeling, of course,’ he said. ‘But at least we have the facts to work on. Facts which I know on this occasion to be true. Yes, on this occasion.’
Again he sighed heavily and contemplated the difficulty of arriving at facts which would in the end prove true when dealing with the half-world of young vagrants.
Ghote coughed and looked pointedly at a cluster of card-indexes on one of the long shelves. Mr Chatterjee followed his glance.
‘Yes, quite so,’ he said.
He sat down at his desk.
‘Unfortunately, however, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I cannot let you have the address.’
‘But you said you had it.’
‘Quite so, yes. Yes, we have it. It is there in that index. Under “T”. We have been reduced to filing it under the name the boy prefers to use. Lamentably unscientific.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Ghote said. ‘But did you say I could not have the address?’
‘But of course I did.’
‘But why? Why?’
Krishna Chatterjee drew himself up on the little hard chair behind the cluttered desk.
‘Inspector, it is professional ethics.’
Ghote gaped.
‘But I must have that address,’ he said.
‘I am sorry, Inspector. But absolute confidentiality is the core of the social workers’ code.’
‘But I need that address. It will almost certainly result in the arrest of a major criminal.’
‘Inspector, I think you do not understand.’
‘I most certainly do not understand.’
‘Inspector, it is like this. We have to establish a relationship with our clients. It is of the utmost importance. Crucial, I might say. And to do this it is essential that they can give us their entire and complete trust. So, they must believe that we would not in any circumstances betray anything we have learnt from them.’
‘All right,’ Ghote said. ‘Let this boy believe that. Let him believe anything you choose to tell. But give me that address.’
‘No. Most regretfully, no.’
Ghote felt a pure, burning rage sweeping a clear path before it.
He turned without another word and strode along the narrow book-lined room towards the square of dull red cardboard indexes with their neat rows of little brass handles waiting to be jerked open. He could see the single letter ‘T’ down towards the bottom right-hand corner of the array.
As he reached out to it, the little Bengali’s plump hand banged hard across the front panel.
‘Inspector, I will not let you.’
Mr Chatterjee wriggled round till he was between Ghote and the wall. He stood upright. The sweat was gleaming on his forehead.
Ghote stood looking at him.
Then he abruptly turned away.
‘Very well, Mr Chatterjee,’ he said, ‘if you wish to impede a criminal investigation.’
‘Inspector, it is a matter of the utmost regret. But, I am sure you will appreciate that a principle is, alas, a principle.’
He stayed standing in front of the square of red indexes. Ghote, without another word, stamped out.
And, no sooner had the door of the little office swung to behind him than he took to his heels. On tiptoe he ran out of the big front door, past the corner of the house, through the wilting bushes of the shrubbery and round to the place where Mr Chatterjee’s narrow window looked out on to a prospect of greenery.
There he waited in the deep shadows, with the broad leaves of a hibiscus dappling the sunlight on his face.
He did not have long to wait. A bell sounded fiercely from inside the house. Mr Chatterjee, whose studiously bent back Ghote had been watching as if mesmerized, pushed himself back from his desk. He looked at his watch. Through the small opening between the two frames of the window Ghote could even hear him say to himself ‘Tut, tut.’
Then he got up and with complete unconcern waddled happily away.
Ghote let one whole minute pass while he considered the strain of almost wild determination Mr Chatterjee had so unexpectedly shown himself capable of. That and the ease with which the little Bengali could be deceived.
Then he strolled out of the bushes, put his nails into the crack between the two window frames and prised them easily apart. He swung his leg across the sill, ducked his head through and stood up.
He crossed to the set of indexes, reached out for the handle of the one marked ‘T,’ flipped through the cards and came across the neatly written name ‘Tarzan’ in no time at all. He read rapidly through the notes written underneath, keeping an ear cocked for noises on the far side of the door, and found that they told him nothing new. Except for the last item. The scrupulously printed address, the simple name of a coastal village and its nearest little town and the terse instruction ‘Hut nearest sea.’ He read this twice over and had it by heart. He closed the index, crossed to the window, slipped out, turned and pushed the two frames gently together again and dusted off his hands.
‘Nice work, Inspector.’
It was the voice of Edward G. Robinson. It could be none other.
Ghote wheeled round. The boy was standing among the bushes in much the same place that he himself had stood to watch Mr Chatterjee. He must have seen everything.
‘What – what are you doing here?’ he shouted.
The boy had the grace to look put out.
‘I can explain, Inspector. I can explain everything.’
Ghote breathed a secret sigh of relief. Perhaps the boy had not understood what he had seen. With luck he had even succeeded in putting the boot on the other foot. The boy was going to be the one to do the explaining.
Ghote advanced towards him with heavy tread.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Let me hear it, and it had better be good.’
‘I was making sure you didn’t steal anything, Inspectorji.’
Ghote dived forward, his hands reaching out.
And it was all he could do to save himself from falling head foremost into the soft earth clutching at nothing. From round the corner of the bungalow came a happy laugh.
‘And you did not steal.’
‘I would hope not,’ Ghote muttered.
‘When you could have had a good haul. Not very clever, Mr Inspector.’
Yet, some four hours later, approaching the place where the boy Tarzan had his home, Ghote reflected that perhaps after all he had not had such a bad haul. He had got the link he needed in the chain which might well in the end put Amrit Singh behind bars for a good long time on a gold smuggling charge. And that was more than a little.
With a faint frown of uneasiness, he recalled a certain Inspector Patel, a preventive officer of the Customs. He had met him some time ago at a conference on the very subject of gold smuggling, and he had a distinct feeling that he ought to have informed him of what he had learnt about Amrit Singh. This was the sort of thing that made for a lot of bad blood between a State service like the police and a Central one like the Customs.
He shrugged.
After all, it was vitally important to him to be the actual person who put the big Sikh away. Unless he could get him on a major smuggling charge, D.S.P. Naik would want to know why he had not charged him with the murder of the always enigmatic figure of Frank Masters. And doing that was something Ghote was still determined to avoid.
He looked round.
He had come a good distance, some twenty-five miles or more from the centre of Bombay, first by a slow, crowded suburban train and then in an aged tonga drawn by an aged horse. In front of him lay the sea, the wide sweep of the Arabian Sea stretching out into the far, hazy blue distance. Between him and the water’s edge was a length of muddy sand littered here and there with the debris of the ocean, shells, sea-smooth stones, the skeletons of fish. Directly behind him was a deep green tangle of lush vegetation, sucking rich life from the low swampy ground.
Ahead he had just made out the dark mounds of a number of huts clustered at the point where the sand gave way to the matted vegetation. They must be what he was looking for. In one of them Tarzan’s family would live, the oldish father, the woman Mr Chatterjee had called the Paramour and one other son, a young man of eighteen.
Ghote advanced carefully, keeping under the shade of the ragged palms at the top of the grey beach. A big bird with long trailing legs and widespread white wings suddenly rose up in front of him and lazily ascended into the pale blue sky.
He felt out of place. His shoes were thick with mud and his legs dragged.
He looked at the little village with its scatter of beached boats again. Beyond it the shore curved to form a wide creek. In the distance he could see an immense, low railway viaduct cutting across the soft, muddy landscape. He wished he was on a train there, heading steadily and directly back to the city.
But ahead of him lay his only hope of gaining enough time to break the dilemma of whether Krishna Chatterjee or Amrit Singh had been the one to open with a protective piece of cloth the jar of arsenic trioxide in the dispensary hut and tip out some of the contents. If he could only get enough here to hold the Sikh on that major smuggling charge, he would have bought himself just so much extra time. And then he would press and press until at last something cracked and down went one side of the balance once and for all.
He saw now the value of the terse instruction ‘Hut nearest sea’ on Mr Chatterjee’s precious index card. In all the collection of huts, each constructed in almost exactly the same way out of mud bricks slimed over with a greenish growth and precariously roofed with palm leaves, one stood out by being built a good ten yards nearer the wide expanse of the sea than any of the others. And, sure enough, just outside it stood two figures corresponding to two of Tarzan’s family, a small wiry man of about fifty and his sturdy young son. They were methodically at work repairing a net hanging between a pair of tall bamboo poles. From time to time the young man straightened his back and turned to gaze out to sea. Once he caught hold of his father by the elbow and pointed to the far horizon where a small smudge of dark smoke showed a distant steamship heading south for Bombay Harbour.
The old man looked at the smoke impassively, glanced up at the sun as if to tell the time and went purposefully back to his net-mending. Ghote wondered whether the Paramour was inside the hut. The old man must have hidden qualities, he thought, to have acquired a mistress when his own appearance and demeanour were so unpromising.
He looked round at the rest of the village, noting everywhere the signs of poverty. A youngish woman emerged from one of the huts and came over towards the old fisherman. Ghote looked at her closely. Would she be the Paramour? She wore her sari tucked up hard between her legs in the fisherwomen’s fashion so that it showed every outline of her whipcord body. She walked with a decided sway. Ghote found his thoughts beginning to wander.
The woman said nothing to the two men at their net but went through the gap in the tumbledown little fence surrounding the hut, stooped and entered. The inspector wondered whether the time had not come to approach.
Suddenly from inside the thin-walled hut there came a deep burst of laughter. The young woman came hurriedly out clutching a borrowed wooden bowl and an instant later another woman followed her. She was enormous. A great round, shiny face presided over a pyramid of contented chins, which in turn capped a huge wobbling torso culminating in a vast rounded belly and huge shaking hips. And it was immediately apparent from the comfortable way she looked about her that it was she who was the mistress of all she surveyed, the Paramour.
She went over to Tarzan’s brother and said something which evidently she found colossally amusing. She jabbed the young man in the ribs to emphasize the humour of the situation. His ribs were well-covered: they needed to be.
At last she decided that her joke had been well and truly dealt with. Still chuckling subterraneously she turned back towards the hut. Ghote broke from cover and approached.
They watched him coming with frank stares. He stopped and asked if they had a young son who had run off to Bombay.
‘Oh, that boy, that boy,’ said the Paramour, lifting her great pudgy arms in a gesture of despair. ‘What has he done now? There is a devil in him. I know that. A devil, a real devil.’
She clapped her thickly fat hands to her massive sides and snorted with laughter.
‘Well,’ Ghote said, ‘I will not hide from you that he is causing us a lot of worry. I have come from Bombay to see if I can find the cause.’
The Paramour was still laughing at intervals.
‘Oh, the cause is easy enough to know,’ she said. ‘It is that devil in him. I tell you when first I came to this man –’
She halted herself, waddled heavily over to Tarzan’s father and slapped him tremendously on the back. The little wiry fisherman took no notice at all, simply making use of the interruption in his twisting and tying of the threads of his big hanging net to glance once again at the position of the sun in the sky and then at the little lapping waves of the sea as they advanced slowly up the muddy beach.
‘When I first came to this man,’ the Paramour went on, ‘I took that boy to my heart. Everything of the best I gave him. Milk he had to drink, meat to eat. Never once did I beat him. And you know what he did?’
She swung round on Ghote.
‘He tried to run off.’
Ghote looked serious. But seriousness was foreign to the Paramour. Abruptly she burst into new guffaws of laughter.
‘To run away he tried,’ she shouted. ‘And his brother I had to send after him to bring him back, holding his ear.’
The thought convulsed her. Her massive sides shook like jelly, her enormous thighs wobbled, her immense bosom heaved in and out.
The brother turned from the net-mending to confirm her story.
‘Yes,’ he said with laboured earnestness, ‘he ran away from a good home. Of course, I had to bring him back.’
He stood thinking for a little.
‘I held his ear very hard,’ he said.
This was a new and delightful matter of amusement to the Paramour. She positively stamped on the loose, greyish sand under her feet in an ecstasy of mirth.
Her little spouse turned and looked at her without moving a muscle of his face. Then he glanced once more at the thin scummy line of the advancing tide and from that to the long curving black craft that lay pulled up on the beach in front of their hut.
‘But later the boy ran off again?’ Ghote asked.
‘Oh, he ran off,’ said the Paramour, grinning hard. ‘This time he had reason. After being good to him had been so badly repaid, I started to beat him.’
She looked down at her massive forearm.
‘I beat good,’ she said.
She began to titter again.
Unexpectedly Tarzan’s father left the half-mended net and came up to Ghote.
‘You go,’ he said.
Ghote looked at him. His face was so unmoving that he could hardly believe he had spoken the two abrupt words.
He did not repeat them, but the jerk he gave to his head was eloquent enough.
‘Soon I will have to be off,’ Ghote said easily. ‘But first I must learn some more about this boy. Did he have friends in the village, for instance?’
The fisherman turned away and went over to his son. He muttered something that Ghote could not catch and both of them looked out to sea with shaded eyes.
Ghote turned to the Paramour.
‘What about the friends?’ he said.
She shrugged her huge, well-padded shoulders.
‘It is easy to have friends,’ she said. ‘You make a joke. They laugh. You laugh. You have friends.’
She gave Ghote a hearty slap on his back and burst into a fountain of deep chuckles.
Ghote forced a smile to his lips.
‘Does the boy ever come home nowadays?’ he asked.
Before the massive Paramour had time to reply, the fisherman again came up to Ghote. This time he pointed in a totally unmistakable way.
‘Go. Now.’
Ghote nodded and smiled.
‘In a minute. In a minute I go. But first it is most important for me to know whether the boy ever comes back here. You know, that is a very important sign to us. Whether the runaway still feels a liking for his old home at times.’
The fisherman turned to the Paramour.
‘Tell,’ he said, and jerked his head towards the lean black shape of his boat.
The Paramour raised her two hands in the air.
‘He is going fishing again today,’ she said. ‘Oh, ho, the poor man. Twice in one day sometimes he has to go out on that terrible sea to support his family. And the day after tomorrow is Holi. He will not go to sea on such a holiday, so there is a day lost. And we need money to buy the things for the feast. That is why he must go out today again. The poor man, the poor man.’
She cascaded into a shower of deep, guttural giggling.
‘Ah, it is a hard life,’ Ghote said.
‘Oh, hard, hard, very hard. Before daylight they go out and now they must go again. The catch this morning was so poor, so poor.’
She turned a happy smiling face towards the vast spread of the ocean.
Out of politeness, Ghote looked too. And then something distinctly odd caught his eye. The whole beach in front of the little village was littered, he saw, with dozens of tiny fish. Here and there a big seagull would fly up from the sea, sweep gently down and pick one up in its beak. But it was obvious that the birds, bobbing contentedly on the little chopping waves, had had their fill that day. And the litter of fry round Tarzan’s father’s boat was every bit as noticeable as elsewhere. He had had no poor catch that morning. That was certain.
‘Perhaps,’ Ghote said, ‘you could tell me the names of the boy’s friends in the village here. Often, you know, a boy will tell his friends more than he will tell anyone else.’
He slipped a notebook from his pocket, turned over the pages, perched on a post in the tumbledown fence and sat looking up expectantly.
The fisherman gave his son one short glance of baffled fury and then resumed his habitually dour expression.
The boy came heavily up to Ghote.
‘It is not right to come asking questions of poor people,’ he announced.
Ghote looked up at him.
‘But this is in the interests of your brother,’ he said. ‘Do you not want to help? I think you could tell me a great deal of what I want to know.’
‘He ran away,’ the young man said. ‘He left his good home. He ought to be put in prison.’
He turned on his heel.
His father glanced at him and then looked over at the boat. They went down to it across the soft, unwetted sand of the higher shore and began making sure they had everything needed to put to sea. Ghote turned to the Paramour again.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘there is no hurry. You think about that boy. Think who used to play with him on the shore. And then one by one tell me the names as they come into your mind.’
She grinned and shook her head.
‘Oh, I have better things to do,’ she said. ‘There is the meal to get for these men. They are always hungry, always eating.’
She laughed.
‘Then they will not be at sea long?’ Ghote asked.
‘Long? Long? Who can tell? Who can ever tell with a fisherman? He sets sail when the sea is calm and in a moment the sky darkens and the wind blows, the whirlpools come and he is drowned.’
This thought was too much for her composure. She roared with elephantine laughter, bent forward and doubled up as far as her vast bulk would allow.
Ghote waited.
The two men by the boat, without exchanging a word, began suddenly to push the narrow craft through the sand towards the lapping wavelets. Ghote kept his eyes on the great laughing woman.
‘Now you must tell me the names,’ he said loudly.
The boat had grated its way to the edge of the sea. The fisherman and his son ran round to the stern and bent low to shove it harder.
Ghote leapt to his feet. Still clutching his notebook, he sprinted over the loose, slippery sand.
The boat was afloat now. The fisherman scrambled in over the side. His son stayed at the stern pushing with all his might, the dark greenish water up to the backs of his knees.
Ghote reached the water’s edge. He plunged in, shoes and all.
The boy gave a final, wild shove and flung himself into the boat at the back. It glided easily forward over the little chopping waves. Ghote waded on, leaning against the heaviness of the water all around his legs.
He flung himself almost full length. One outstretched hand just made contact with the rough edge of the little vessel at the side somewhere near the prow. He flung his notebook in with the other hand and heaved with all his strength.
The fisherman came towards him along the length of the narrow, swaying craft. Ghote managed to get his other hand on to the boat’s side. The fisherman stooped and lifted up a heavy wooden gaff. He leant over Ghote’s tightly clutching hands and brought the wooden handle chopping hard down on Ghote’s fingers.
Ghote tightened his grip.
His legs were clear of the bottom now. He gave a terrific jerk with them and felt himself shoot through the water. He heaved hard and got his head up to the edge of the little boat, which leant deeply over towards him.
‘Let go, let go,’ the young man shouted. ‘You will sink the boat. It is wrong to do that.’
‘I am coming with you,’ Ghote gasped out.
‘No,’ said the fisherman.
‘I am coming. Help me in or I will upset the boat.’
He tugged down on the edge of the frail craft as hard as he could. Underneath him he felt the water slipping past his soaking trousers, tugging and pulling.