The first thing that came fully into Ghote’s mind then was, incongruously, So this is why it has been the ACP’s Thomas who has brought down my orders all morning. Then other thoughts, more to the purpose, one by one made themselves manifest. Bikram is dead. His head has been hacked away from his body. Yes, when I got a glimpse deeper into the bag I made out that death did not come in one clean cut. Bikram had not, going home in his usual state of drunkenness, walking beside some railway line, fallen down and stayed there, out to the world. No, he did not come to die as a train rumbled by. He has been murdered. Brutally murdered.
And that should not have happened to him. It should not happen to anyone, any human being whatsoever. Bikram’s life was sacred. Sacred despite the way he always contrived to get his peon’s khaki shirt and shorts altogether more stained and shabby-looking than those of any of the others fetching and carrying from one Crime Branch cabin to another.
Yes, despite the drunkenness he was hardly able ever to disguise, Bikram was a man, a human being. He should not have been killed in that appalling manner.
He looked down again at the bloody mess of the head in the shopping bag on the floor now at his feet. Then he heaved it back again, out of sight beside Inspector Patil’s still-closed typewriter.
Yes, he reasoned, twisting himself upright again, someone must have brought Bikram’s head, in that bag, from wherever it was that he was killed. They must have carried it here, themselves looking little different from the thousands of other bag-carrying shoppers going each day to markets all over Bombay. But where had this particular one been carried from? Where precisely? Where was it that Bikram’s killer hacked away his life? And then carried that shopping bag from wherever it was he had done it to … to here. Into my cabin. My Crime Branch cabin itself.
But Bikram’s killer, who can he be? He? Yes, it must be a he, a man, and one ruthless and brutally strong enough to have done what was done. But who can it have been? Who? And where was it that he put drunken Bikram’s head into this particular bag and then carried it right into my cabin? Or …? Yes, this is possible: did he get someone else to carry it here? But who could that be?
All right, the bag could easily enough have been brought into the Headquarters compound by almost anyone. Inside the compound there are, after all, living quarters for police lower-ranks. The occasional person could wander about there unchallenged at any hour of the night. And my batwing doors are, of course, open to the whole of the compound, which is why at night I have to make sure everything is under lock and key. Yes, if someone wanted – but why should they? – to put Bikram’s head in the very place where the wretched fellow went about his duties, so far as he ever did, then my cabin is where, in the whole of Crime Branch, it could most easily be left.
But what reason would anyone have to bring Bikram’s head here? In all probability it must surely have been for some specific reason, however it had been managed.
If whoever killed Bikram in this terrible way had simply wanted to get rid of the evidence they could have simply dropped the body and the head, too, into the sea surrounding almost the whole of the city. Very probably the body itself must already have been consigned to the waters, to be within a short time rendered unidentifiable. Provided it was without a head. So that head would have had to be dealt with in some other way.
Whoever had hacked it from Bikram’s body could hardly have taken it to the new Electric Crematorium that, in growing and growing Bombay, takes some of the burden off the Burning Ghat. But neither did the head have to be brought into Crime Branch. Yes, murder, or rather, patent evidence of murder, had been brought right into Crime Branch itself.
So … A new thought. Surely that murder must be investigated by Crime Branch, however far removed the case might appear to be from the important and influential affairs the Branch is actually here to handle. However much Bikram was at the very opposite end of that scale.
So what to do? One answer only. Report this discovery at once to the Head of Crime Branch. To ACP Divekar himself.
But then yet another thought. One almost as disturbing as the finding of Bikram’s head, if in quite a different way. It is this: might it be that Mr Divekar would give the investigation to the officer who actually discovered the severed head? To me? After all, with the victim being no more than a peon, and a wretched enough one too, the case can really be only a small one. One, isn’t it, quite suitable for a newly arrived officer to try his teeth on?
Ghote stood looking at the winding stone stair that led, from almost beside the batwing doors of his own cabin, up to the ACP’s airily spacious one on the balcony above. This will be, he thought, only the second time I have entered same. The first was after Superintendent Ghorpade, Crime Branch second-in-command, had shown me, with full explanations and much friendliness, all over our building. Then he took me to Mr Divekar for my official welcome. But that first meeting with the ACP turned out to be more of a warning than a welcome. A warning about the conduct expected of any officer working under him and the strict obedience he required, plus then a little of welcome also.
But now, up at the top of the winding stairs, on my own, unescorted, I must peer through the little square of glass in the ACP’s door, as I saw Mr Ghorpade do, and make certain Mr Divekar is disengaged. And then …
Then I must give the door one good hard tap. A much harder tap than the one I gave when waiting outside before. My quiet knock then earned me, as soon as I stood before Mr Divekar, a sharply fierce shelling. Did I not realise it was necessary to knock loudly enough to be heard above the sound of the fans overhead? And those, I saw, were full seven-bladed ones, the whole row of them.
Inside, I must remember now, since I am wearing uniform, to give a full-hearted, snapped-up salute. Superintendent Ghorpade kindly informed me that, out of uniform, simply clicking heels sharply together suffices. But in uniform, as I was on that first day, a salute is always required.
Now, in answer to the ACP’s Well, Inspector? I will have to tell him, altogether briefly and unhesitatingly, what it is I have, just only this minute, found in my waste bin.
Into Ghote’s mind then came the image of the altogether imposing cabin he would have to enter, vividly as a film in a cinema hall. But not any of the black-and-white films I mostly have seen. No, this is in sharpest colour, tinged with menacing underlights.
First, the huge curving desk, with six chairs – if I counted right – lined up in front of it. Its densely black covering protected against sweaty hands by a wide sheet of gleamingly polished glass. The three telephones waiting on it, each differently coloured. Beside them, a set of four presentation pens juts up from a rose-pink marble holder, clearly never intended to be other than a sign of prestige. Then, directly in front of the ACP himself, there is that very, very large leather-cornered blotter, its absorbent white paper unsmirched by a single ink-spot.
Beside that, the film in my memory shows, there are two neat piles of round silvery paperweights, half a dozen of them, altogether necessary to keep in place under the beating air from those whirring seven-bladed fans above, the documents the ACP may need to consult. And, yes, each of the topmost little weights, I saw, was incised with the letters RVD, the ACP’s own initials.
But what of ACP Ramprasad Divekar himself? I can hardly put a face to him, so overwhelmed I was then under that fierce shelling, and altogether worried as I am now by the prospect before me. Yes, he has grey, grey eyes. Or does he? And does he have, even, a moustache? Or is it that I am just only imagining the sort of moustache he ought to have? Bristling, well-trimmed to the last whisker, and angry? He was, I cannot forget, blastingly angry when I stood in front of him before because of my too-polite tap on his door.
But in two minutes only, less even, at the top of these winding stairs, I will be facing, once again, the man himself. There to tell him about the appalling discovery I have made. So now … now it is a matter only of going up these steps to the balcony and along to that door. Then to look through its single thick glass pane before giving the door a tap, altogether hard enough to be heard. Yet not too hard.
But no … no. No, there is something vital I must do before I am at all reporting. I must at once go back into my cabin and replace every item of the evidence just where it was before. Everything must be exactly at the same spot it was when I leant down to get hold of the typewriter and saw the frothy falooda mess of the Matunga News. There will be photographs to be taken. There must be also the possibility of fingerprints on the bin itself. And, oh God, there may, too, somewhere on those blood-marked newspaper sheets, be my own prints. They will almost certainly be also on the shopping bag’s handles that I was holding so tightly.
A bad mistake for me. I should have known better than to touch those handles, even if I was at that moment not at all knowing I was about to discover Bikram’s severed head. But perhaps even Sergeant Moos, Number Ek expert though he is, will be unable to lift even one decent print from among all that mess.
He turned and hurried back into the desecrated cabin, sweating suddenly with relief that out of sheer necessity the moment of confrontation above had been postponed. Then, checking that the batwing doors had swung firmly closed behind him, he snatched from his desk the wooden ruler he always used to underline any important phrases in the schedule, something Patil’s typewriter never managed, and sliding it through the two twine handles of the bloodied shopping bag he raised it, and, with the most delicate care, replaced it in the waste bin, still waiting in its dark corner, not moved by so much as an inch from its original position.
One last fierce inspection. Yes, surely the newspaper sheets concealing poor Bikram’s tangled, scurf-encrusted hair are now just as they were when I first lifted out the bag.
And left my fingerprints all over its handles, if nowhere else.
That will be something I will have to confess to. Confess – it would be best – in just a few minutes’ time to bristling moustached Mr Divekar. Or not bristling moustached.