Perched up on a creaking wobbly chair in the office of the Deputy Commissioner (Crime), the peon put one broken-nailed finger against Inspector Ghote’s name on the painted board behind the DCC’s desk. He swayed topplingly to one side, scraped hold of the fat white pin which indicated ‘Bandobast Duties’, brought it back across in one swooping rush and pressed it firmly into place.
Watching him, Ghote gave an inward sigh. Bandobast duties. Someone, of course, had to deal with the thousand and one matters necessary for the smooth running of Crime Branch, but nevertheless bandobast duty was not tracking down breakers of the law and it did seem to fall to him more often than to other officers. Yet, after all, it would be absurd to waste a man of the calibre of, say, Inspector Dandekar on mere administration.
‘Yes? Dandekar, yes?’
The DCC had been interrupted by his internal telephone and there on the other end, as if conjured up by merely having been thought of, was Dandekar himself.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ the DCC said in answer to the forcefully plaintive sound that had been just audible from the other end. ‘Certainly you must. I’ll see what I can do, ek dum.’
He replaced the receiver and turned back to Ghote, the eyes in his sharply commanding face still considering whatever it was that he had promised Dandekar.
And then, as if a god-given solution to his problem had appeared in front of him, his expression changed in an instant to happy alertness. He swung round to the peon, who was carefully carrying away his aged chair.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Put the bandobast pin against – er – Inspector Sawant. I have a task I need Inspector Ghote for.’
The peon wearily turned back with his chair to the big painted hierarchy of crime-fighters ranging from the Deputy Commissioner himself down to the branch’s three dogs Akbar, Moti and Caesar. Ghote, in front of the DCC’s wide baize-covered desk, glowed now with pure joy.
‘It’s this Shivaji Park case,’ the DCC said.
‘Oh yes, DCC. Multiple-stabbing double murder, isn’t it? Discovered this morning by that fellow who was in the papers when he came to Bombay, that noted British author.’
Ghote, hoping his grasp both of departmental problems and of the flux of current affairs would earn him some hint of appreciation was surprised instead to receive a look of almost suspicious surmise. But he got no time to wonder why.
‘Yes, quite right,’ the DCC said briskly. ‘Dandekar is handling the case, of course. With an influential fellow like this Englishman involved we must have a really quick result. But there is something he needs help with. Get down to his cabin straight away, will you?’
‘Yes, sir. Yes, DCC.’
Clicking his heels together by way of salute, Ghote hurried out.
What would Dandekar have asked for assistance over? There would be a good many different lines to pursue in an affair of this sort. The murdered couple, an ice-cream manufacturer and his wife, had been, so office gup went, attacked in the middle of the night. The assailants had tied up their teenage son and only when he had at last roused the nearest neighbour, this visiting British author – of crime books, the paper had said, well-known crime books – had it been discovered that the two older people had been hacked to death. Goondas of that sort did not, of course, choose just any location. They sniffed around first. And left a trail. Which meant dozens of inquiries in the neighbourhood, usually by sub-inspectors from the local station. But with this influential fellow involved …
Emerging into the sunlight, Ghote made his way along to Dandekar’s office which gave directly on the tree-shaded compound. He pushed open one half of its bat-wing doors. And there, looking just like his photograph, large as life or even larger, was the Noted British Author. He was crouching on a small chair in front of Dandekar’s green leather-covered desk, covering it much like a big fluffed-up hen on one small precious egg. His hips, clad in trousers already the worse for the dust and stains of Bombay life, drooped on either side while a considerable belly projected equally far forward. Above was a beard, big and sprawling as the body beneath, and above the beard was hair, plentiful and inclined to shoot in all directions. Somewhere between beard and hair a pale British face wore a look of acute curiosity.
‘Ah, Ghote, thank God,’ Dandekar, stocky, muscular, hook-nosed, greeted him immediately in sharp, T-spitting Marathi. ‘Listen, take this curd-face out of my sight. Fast.’
Ghote felt a terrible abrupt inward sinking. So this was how he was to assist Dandekar, by keeping from under his feet a no doubt notable British nuisance. Even bandobast duties would be better.
But Dandekar could hardly produce that expected rapid result with such a burden.
Ghote squared his bony shoulders.
Dandekar had jumped up.
‘Mr Peduncle,’ he said, in English now, ‘I would like you to—’
‘It’s not Peduncle actually,’ the Noted Author broke in. ‘Important to get the little details right, you know. That’s what the old shell collector in my books – he’s Mr Peduncle – is always telling his friend, Inspector Sugden. No, my name’s Reymond, Henry Reymond, author of the Peduncle books.’
The multitudinous beard split with a wide, clamorously ingratiating grin.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dandekar briskly. ‘But this is Inspector Ghote. He will be assisting me. Ghote, the domestic servant of the place has disappeared, a Goan known as John Louzado. They had no address at his native-place, but we might get it from a former employer. Will you see to that? And Mr Ped—Mr Reymond, who is expressing most keen interest in our methods, can attach himself to you while I talk with the young man who was tied up, the son, or rather adopted son. I think somehow he could tell a good deal more.’
Ghote put out his hand for Mr Reymond to shake. He did not look forward to dealing with the numerous questions likely to arise from that keen interest in Bombay CID methods.
As Ghote drove the Noted British Author in one of the branch’s big battered cars down Dr D. N. Road towards Colaba, the area where the fleeing servant’s former employee lived, he found his worst forebodings justified. His companion wanted to know everything: what was that building, what this, was that man happy lying on the pavement, where else could he go?
Jockeying for place in the traffic, swerving for cyclists, nipping past great lumbering red articulated buses, Ghote did his best to provide pleasing answers. But the fellow was never content. Nothing seemed to delight him more than hitting on some small discrepancy and relentlessly pursuing it, comparing himself all the while to his Mr Peduncle and his motto ‘The significant variation: in that lies all secrets’. If Ghote heard the phrase once in the course of their twenty-minute drive, he seemed to hear it a dozen times.
At last when they were waiting at the lights to get into Colaba Causeway, he was reduced to putting a question of his own. How did it come about, he interrupted, that Mr Reymond was living in a flat up at Shivaji Park? Would not the Taj Hotel just down there be more suitable for a distinguished visitor?
‘Ah yes, I know what you mean,’ the author answered with an enthusiasm that gave Ghote considerable inward pleasure. ‘But, you see, I am here by courtesy of Air India, on their new Swap-a-Country Plan. They match various people with their Indian equivalents and exchange homes. Most far-sighted. So I am at Shivaji Park and the writer who lives there – well, he has written some short stories, though I gather he’s actually a Deputy Inspector of Smoke Nuisances and a relation of your State Minister for Police Affairs and the Arts, as it happens – well, he at the present moment is installed in my cottage in Wiltshire and no doubt getting as much out of going down to the pub as I get from being in a flat here lucky enough to have a telephone. People are always popping in to use it and while they’re looking up a number in the little book, they talk away like one o’clock.’
The Noted British Author’s eyes shone.
‘Yes,’ Ghote said.
Certain queries had occurred to him. Could there, for instance, be an exchange between a police inspector in Bombay and one in, say New York? But somehow he could not see himself getting several months Casual Leave, and he doubted whether many other similar law-enforcing Bombayites would find it easy.
But he felt that to voice such doubts aloud would be impolite. And his hesitation was fatal.
‘Tell me,’ Mr Reymond said, ‘that sign saying “De Luxe Ding Dong Nylon Suiting” …’ And, in a moment, they had struck full on another ‘significant variation’.
Desperately Ghote pulled one more question out of the small stock he had put together.
‘Please, what is your opinion of the books of Mr Erle Stanley Gardner? To me Perry Mason is seeming an extremely clever individual altogether.’
‘Yes,’ said the Noted British Author, and he was silent right until they reached their destination in Second Pasta Lane.
Mrs Patel, wife of a civil servant and former employer of John Louzado, was a lady of forty or so dressed in a cotton sari of a reddish pattern, at once assertive and entirely without grace.
‘You are lucky to find me, Inspector,’ she said when Ghote had explained their business. ‘At the Family Planning office where I undertake voluntary work, Clinic begins at ten sharp.’
Ghote could not stop himself glancing at his watch though he well knew it was at least half-past ten already.
‘Well, well,’ Mrs Patel said sharply, seeing him. ‘Already I am behind schedule. But there is so much to be done. So much to be done.’
She darted across the sitting-room, a place almost as littered with piles of paper as any office at Crime Branch, and plumped up a cushion.
‘Just if you have the address of John’s native-place,’ Ghote said.
‘Of course, of course. I am bound to have it. I always inquire most particularly after a servant’s personal affairs. You are getting an altogether better loyalty factor then. Don’t you find that, Mr— I am afraid I am not hearing your name?’
She had turned her by no means negligible gaze full on the Noted British Author. Ghote, who had hoped not to explain his companion, introduced him with a brief ‘Mr Reymond, from UK.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Patel. ‘Well, don’t you find … ah, but you are the Mr Reymond, the noted British author, isn’t it? Most pleased to meet you, my dear sir. Most pleased. What I always find with criminological works is the basic fact emerging, common to many sociological studies, a pattern of fundamental human carelessness, isn’t it? You see—’
But river-spate rapid though she was, she had met her match.
‘One moment – I am sorry to interrupt – but there is a slight discrepancy here. You see, there are two different sorts of crime books involved. You are talking about sociological works, but what I write are more crime novels. Indeed, it’s just the sort of mistake my detective, Mr Peduncle the old collector of sea-shells, is always pointing out. “The significant variation: in that lies all secrets.”’
‘Ah, most interesting,’ Mrs Patel came back, recovering fast. ‘Of course I have read a good deal of Erle Stanley Gardner and so forth, and I must say …’
She gave them her views at such length that Ghote at last, politeness or not, felt forced to break in.
‘Madam, madam. If you will excuse. There is the matter of John’s native-place address.’
‘Yes, yes. I am getting it.’
Mrs Patel plunged towards a bureau and opened its flap-down front. A considerable confusion of documents was revealed, together with what looked like the wrappings for a present bought but never handed to its intended recipient.
Prolonged searching located first an unhelpful address-book, then ‘a list of things like this which I jot down’ and finally a notebook devoted to household hints clipped from magazines. But no address.
‘Madam,’ Ghote ventured at last, ‘is it possible you did not in fact take it down?’
‘Well, well, one cannot make a note of everything. That is one of my principles: keep the paperwork down to a minimum.’
She gave the British author some examples of Indian bureaucracy. Once or twice Ghote tried to edge him away, but even a tug at the distinguished shirtsleeve was unsuccessful. Only when in return he himself began explaining how British bureaucracy was a crutch that fatally hampered people like Inspector Sugden in his own books did Ghote act.
‘Madam, I regret. Mr Reymond, sir. We are conducting investigation. It is a matter of urgency.’
And with that he did get the author out on to the landing outside. But as Mrs Patel was beginning to close the door with many a ‘Goodbye, then’ and ‘So interesting, and I must try to find one of your books’, Mr Reymond broke in in his turn.
‘Inspector, there is a small hiatus.’
Ghote stared.
‘Please, what is hiatus?’
‘Something missing, a gap in the logic. You haven’t asked this lady where Louzado worked before he came here. Mr Peduncle would have a word to say to you. If there’s one thing he always seizes on it is the small hiatus.’
The bursting-out beard parted to reveal a roguish smile.
‘Yes,’ said Ghote. ‘You are perfectly correct. Madam, do you have the address of John’s former employer?’
‘Why, yes, of course,’ Mrs Patel replied, with a note of sharpness. ‘I can tell you that out of my head. John was recommended to me by my friends, the Dutt-Dastars.’
And, mercifully, she came straight out with the address – it was somewhat south of the Racecourse – and Ghote was even able to prevent her giving them a detailed account of the posh-sounding Dutt-Dastars.
Since their route took them back past Crime Branch HQ, Ghote decided to risk the Noted British Author re-attaching himself to Inspector Dandekar and to report progress. Besides, if he could install Mr Reymond in his own office for ten minutes only, it would give him a marvellous respite from relentlessly pursued questions.
So, a peon summoned and Coca-Cola thrust on the distinguished visitor, Ghote went down to Dandekar.
‘Well, Inspector,’ he asked, ‘did the son have more to tell?’
‘More to tell he has,’ Dandekar answered, sipping tea and dabbing his face with a towel. ‘But speak he will not.’
‘He is not one hundred per cent above board then?’
‘He is not. I was up there at Shivaji Park within half an hour of the time he freed himself from those ropes, and I could see at a glance the marks were not right at all.’
‘Too high up the wrists, was it?’
‘Exactly, Inspector. That young man tied himself up. And that must mean he was in collusion with the fellows who killed the old couple. How else did they get in, if he did not open to them? No, three of them were in it together and the Goan and a notorious bad hat from the vicinity called Budhoo have gone off with the jewellery. You can bet your boots on that.’
‘But the young man will not talk?’ Ghote asked.
‘He will not talk. College-educated, you know, and thinks he has all the answers.’
Ghote nodded agreement. It was a common type and the bane of a police officer’s life. His determination to push forward the case by getting hold of John Louzado’s address redoubled.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be getting back to Mr Reymond, or he will come looking for us.’
In answer Dandekar grinned at him like an exulting film villain.
But, back in his office, Ghote found the Noted British Author doing something more ominous than looking for Dandekar. He was furiously making notes on a little pad.
‘Ah,’ he said the moment Ghote came in, ‘just one or two points that occurred to me in connection with the case.’
Ghote felt this last straw thump down.
‘Oh yes,’ he answered, waggishly as he could. ‘We would be very delighted to have the assistance of the greaf Mr Peduncle and his magical shell collection.’
‘No, no,’ the noted author said quickly. ‘Mr Peduncle’s shells are by no means magical. There’s a slight discrepancy there. You see, Mr Peduncle examines shells to detect their little variations and equally he examines the facts of the case and hits on significant variations there.’
‘The significant variation in which are lying all secrets,’ Ghote quoted.
Mr Reymond laughed with great heartiness. But in the car, heading north up Sir J. J. Road, he nevertheless explained in detail every single discrepancy he had noted in his little pad.
It seemed that, in the comparatively short time between the apparently distraught son coming to say he had been set upon and Inspector Dandekar bringing him to Crime Branch HQ, he had accumulated a great many facts and bits of hearsay. All of them must have been boiling away in his fertile mind. Now to spume out.
Most were trivialities arising from the domestic routine of the dead couple, or of his own flat or the flats nearby. To them Ghote succeeded in finding answers. But what he could not always sort out were the queries these answers produced. ‘Significant variations’ seemed to spring up like buzzing whining insects in the first flush of the monsoon.
Only one point, to Ghote’s mind, could be said to have any real connection with the killing, and that was so slight in any other circumstances he would have thrust it off.
But it was a fact, apparently, that Mr Reymond’s servant, an old Muslim called Fariqua – or more precisely the servant of the absent Indian author of some short stories – had been discovered on the morning of the murder asleep inside the flat when he ought to have been in the distant suburb of Andheri where since the British author’s arrival he had been boarded out – ‘Well, I mean, the chap actually seemed to sleep on the couch in the sitting-room, and I thought that was a bit much really’ – and had provided no explanation.
‘Now,’ Mr Reymond said, turning in his seat and wagging his finger very close to Ghote’s face, ‘he must have hidden himself away in the kitchen till I’d gone to bed. And isn’t that just exactly the sort of variation from the normal which my Mr Peduncle would seize upon, and which my Inspector Sugden would try to shrug off? Eh, Inspector?’
Ghote felt the honour of the Bombay force at stake.
‘Certainly I do not shrug off this at all, Mr Reymond,’ he said. ‘After we have seen the Dutt-Dastars I will have a word with Fariqua. But then, since you would be at home, perhaps you would care to rest yourself for the afternoon. I know this humid weather makes visitors most extremely fatigued.’
He held his breath in anxiety. To his delight Mr Reymond, after consideration, acquiesced.
And if at the Dutt-Dastars’ he got Louzado’s address …
The Dutt-Dastars, it appeared, were a couple entirely devoted to art. Their house was crammed with Mrs Dutt-Dastar’s oil-paintings, sprawling shapes in bus-red and sky-blue, and Mr Dutt-Dastar’s metal sculptures, jagged iron masses inclined to rust and a considerable menace, Ghote found, to trouser bottom and shirtsleeve. And in the Bengali way their devotion was expressed as much in words as in acts.
Mr Reymond they seized on as a fellow artist, blithely ignoring any occasion when he tried to point out a discrepancy, hiatus or ‘significant variation’. And equally ignored, time and again, were Ghote’s attempts to get an answer to the one question he still saw, despite the somewhat odd behaviour of Mr Reymond’s Fariqua, as the plain and simple way to break the case. ‘Do you have the address in Goa of your former servant John Louzado?’
At last, when he had established to his complete satisfaction that a couple as utterly vague could not possibly have recorded, much less retained, a servant’s address, he planted himself abruptly full in front of Mrs Dutt-Dastar just as she was explaining the full similarity between her painting ‘Eagle Figure with Two Blue Shapes’ and Mr Reymond’s book Mr Peduncle Caught in Meshes, which she had yet actually to read.
‘Madam, kindly to tell, who was the previous employer of John Louzado?’
‘John Louzado?’ Mrs Dutt-Dastar asked, seemingly totally mystified.
‘The servant you recommended to Mrs Patel, of Second Pasta Lane.’
‘Ah, John. Yes, what to do about John? He did not suit, not at all – it was sheer madness to have taken him on from someone like Shirin Kothawala, a dear person but with no understanding of the artist, but I could not sack the fellow just like that. And then I remembered that funny Mrs Patel. Well, she would never notice what a servant was like, would she?’
‘Madam, if you do not have John’s address, are you having at least the address of Mrs Shirin Kothawala?’
‘Well, but of course. In one of those divine but madly expensive flats in Nepean Sea Road. A block called Gulmarg. Anybody will tell you.’
‘Mr Reymond, I am departing to proceed with inquiries.’
‘Oh, yes, my dear fellow. Coming, coming.’
On the way back, thanks to Ghote’s unequivocal assurance that he would immediately interrogate Fariqua, for all that he privately knew nothing would come of it, the author’s questions were at least confined to the sociological. But before they arrived Ghote decided to issue a warning.
‘Mr Reymond, in India – I do not know how it is in UK – servants often have matters they are wishing to conceal from their masters, like for instance the true cost of vegetables in the bazaar. So, you see, it would perhaps be better if you yourself were not present when I question Fariqua.’
He regarded the author with apprehension. But it seemed he need not have worried.
‘Excellent idea, Inspector,’ Mr Reymond surprisingly replied. But then he as if in explanation added: ‘We don’t have servants in England now, so I find it difficult to know how to behave with them.’
So Ghote had the pleasure of tackling the Muslim unimpeded by any bulky British shadow. It was a good thing too, because Fariqua proved every bit as evasive as he had told Mr Reymond servants could be. He needed, when it came down to it, to use a little tough treatment. And he had a notion that cuffs and threatened kicks would not be the way Mr Peduncle conducted an interrogation.
But, after ten minutes in which Fariqua noisily maintained he had not been in the author’s flat at all the previous night, he caved in quite satisfactorily and produced a story that might well be true. He had been playing cards with ‘some friends’ and it had got too late to catch a train to Andheri. So he had bided his time, sneaked back into the author’s flat before the door was locked and had hidden down between the stove and the wall till he had been able to take what, he implied, was his rightful place on the sitting-room couch.
Ghote gave him another couple of slaps for impudence.
‘Now, what are the names of your card-playing friends?’
‘Inspector, I do not know.’
But this time Ghote had hardly so much as to growl to get a better answer.
‘Oh, Inspector, Inspector. One only I am knowing. It is Jagdev Singh, sir, the driver of Rajinder Sahib at Flat No. 6, Building No. 2.’
‘Achchha.’
Ghote let him go. He ought to walk round to Building No. 2 of the flats and check with the Punjabi gentleman’s driver, but that must wait. The Noted British Author might change his mind and want to come with him. And he would get that address, the simple key to having a solid case against the three of them, much more quickly unencumbered.
It turned out, however, that the Parsi lady’s ‘divine but madly expensive’ flat was not, as Mrs Dutt-Dastar had said, in a block called Gulmarg in Nepean Sea Road but in a block of that name in Warden Road on the twin-prominence of Cumballa Hill. But at least Mrs Kothawala, sixty, exquisitely dressed, precise as a crane-bird, was helpful. She knew to a week just how long she had employed Louzado. She knew to an anna just how much he had cheated her by. She remembered having warned Mrs Dutt-Dastar about him, and that Mrs Dutt-Dastar had clearly forgotten before the telephone conversation was half-way through. And she knew for a fact that she had never had John’s address in Goa. But, of course, she was able to tell Ghote where he had worked before he had come to her …
Sorting out Mrs Dutt-Dastar’s error had taken some hours, so Ghote found that having dutifully telephoned Inspector Dandekar and made sure there was no sign of the Noted British Author – their suspect was still unshaken too, he heard – he had time that evening to make only this one inquiry. And that proved as exasperating as the others – worse even since instead of getting at least the name of Louzado’s next earlier employer he had to be content with the name only of a lady who would be ‘sure to remember’.
Before trying her next morning he gritted his teeth and put in a call to Mr Reymond who, of course, was only too keen to come with him – ‘I had been thinking of looking in on Inspector Dandekar actually’ – and only by wantonly altering the geography of Bombay did he persuade him it would be more economical for him to stay at Shivaji Park until after he had made this one inquiry, which he promised would be rapid. But in fact the task proved immensely troublesome since the possibly helpful lady had moved house and no one nearby seemed to know where to. Application to the postalwallahs met with a certain amount of bureaucratic delay and it was not until the very end of the morning that he had an address to go to. So he telephoned Mr Reymond once more and dolefully arranged to collect him after lunch.
‘No sleep for me this afternoon, Inspector,’ the cheerful voice had assured him. ‘I’ve a lot I want to ask you.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote.
The first thing the Noted British Author wanted to know was why Fariqua had not been arrested. Ghote produced the fellow’s explanation for the ‘significant variation’ in his behaviour.
‘Ah, so that accounts for it,’ Mr Reymond said, for once apparently happy. ‘I’m glad to hear it. I wouldn’t like to think I was getting my breakfast scrambled eggs from the hands of a murderer.’
Ghote gave a jolly laugh. It came to him all the more easily because he had felt sure there would be some hiatus or discrepancy to pursue. But the journey passed with no more than questions about the peculiarities of passers-by – until they were almost at their destination, a flat just inland from Back Bay in Marine Lines.
Then the author, after a long silence that had prolonged itself wonderfully, suddenly spoke.
‘Inspector Ghote, I can no longer conceal it from myself. There is a small hiatus.’
‘Yes?’ Ghote asked, misery swiftly descending.
‘Inspector, you did not, did you, check Fariqua’s alibi with Mr Rajinder’s chauffeur? And I think – I am almost sure – Mr Rajinder is the man who left on holiday by car three days ago.’
‘Then I will have to make further inquiries,’ Ghote said glumly.
But he forced himself to be a little more optimistic.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘perhaps we shall learn here just where John Louzado is to be found in Goa and then, who knows, a single telephone call to the police there and they would have the fellow behind bars and we will have evidence in plenty, even some of the stolen jewellery, if we are lucky.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Reymond said, ‘but Fariqua’s invented story still leaves a loose end.’
Yet the interview at the Marine Lines flat looked from the start as if it was going to be all that Ghote and Inspector Dandekar had been counting on.
‘Oh, John, yes,’ said the deliciously beautiful occupier, Mrs Akhtar Hazari. ‘Yes, we should have an address for Goa. Not for John himself but for a priest – John was a Christian – who was to provide a reference. In fact, it was when we heard that John had a criminal record that we decided he must go. My husband imports watches and we often have valuable stock in the flat.’
Ghote was possessed of a sudden feeling that everything in the world was simple. Confidence bubbled in his veins. It would not be as direct a way of wrapping up the case as he had spoken of to Mr Reymond, but the whole business might still be dealt with inside a few days.
‘Of course it was two or three years ago now,’ Mrs Hazari said. ‘But I always seem to keep letters. I will look. Will you take tea?’
So they sat in her big cool sitting-room, Ghote on a fat pile of cushions, the Noted British Author swinging rather apprehensively in a basket chair suspended by a chain from the ceiling.
Time passed.
The servant came back and inquired whether they would like more tea. Mr Reymond hurriedly refused for both of them. Ghote would in fact have liked more tea, but even better he would have liked to see that letter. He asked Mr Reymond – who seemed to feel it necessary to speak in swift hushed tones – a few questions about his books. But the answers were not very satisfactory.
And then at last Mrs Hazari returned.
‘Inspector,’ she said, ‘I must tell you that after all I have not got that letter. I had thought it was in an almirah where I put old papers like that. I even knew exactly the box it should be in. But my memory played me false. I threw out a lot of junk about a year ago, and it must have been in that.’
Ghote felt like a child robbed of a sweetmeat. And now, he realised with gritty dismay, he would solemnly have to pursue Mr Reymond’s theory about Fariqua.
‘And John came straight to you from Goa?’ he asked Mrs Hazari desolately.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He did have one short job first. He went to a family where at once the wife died and the man no longer needed so many servants. That was why we took him without a reference. It was a business aquaintance of my husband, I think. And unfortunately he’s in Delhi. But if you would give me a ring tonight, I could perhaps tell you then.’
With that Ghote had to be content. That, and the dubious gain to be had from dealing with Fariqua’s final lie.
Happily by the time they got back to Shivaji Park Fariqua had left for Andheri, earlier than he should have done but not so much so that there was any reason to suppose he had run off like John Louzado. To placate Mr Reymond, Ghote sadly confirmed that the Jagdev Singh with whom Fariqua had claimed to be playing cards on the night of the murders had indeed already left Bombay by then.
Perhaps, Ghote thought as he turned from saying a last goodnight, down at HQ the boy would have broken his obstinate silence and admitted the truth and then there would be no need to pursue next morning this surely – surely? – unsatisfactory discrepancy. Or was it a hiatus?
But Inspector Dandekar had no good news. Indeed he seemed considerably worried.
‘I had the damned boy in the interrogation room today for eight solid hours,’ he said. ‘I have kept him standing up. I have been drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in front of him. I have had a trestle set up and Head Constable Kadam standing there swinging a lathi. But nothing has moved him one inch.’
‘Inspector,’ Ghote said with some hesitation, ‘is it possible that those ropes on his wrists had been altogether badly tied by the real miscreants and not faked only?’
Dandekar sat in silence glaring down hook-nosed at his desk.
‘Well, anything is possible,’ he said at last. ‘But, damn it, I cannot believe it, I just cannot believe it.’
So Ghote was up at Shivaji Park before eight next morning, waiting for the tricky Fariqua and telling himself that there was no reason why the fellow would not come to work as usual.
But the surge of relief he felt when the Muslim did appear made him realise how he was now expecting everything about the affair to go wrong. He pounced like a kite dropping down on a tree-rat.
It did not take long to reduce the fellow to a state of abject fear. And then he talked.
‘Aiee, Inspector. No. No, Inspector sahib. I swear to God I had nothing to do with it. Inspector, I just got to know those fellows. We used to sit and talk when I was sleeping here. Inspector, I did not know they were badmash fellows. Inspector, I am swearing to you. And then that night, that one Budhoo – Inspector, he is a really bad one that one, a devil, Inspector – Inspector, he said more than he was meaning. He said something was going to happen that night. We were in the kitchen of their flat, Inspector. All of them were out, Sahib, Memsahib and the boy. I did not know it was going to be murder, Inspector. I thought they had a plan only to take the jewellery, Inspector. They were saying she had jewellery worth one lakh, Inspector. They would hide under a bed. But no more were they telling me. And then they threatened that I should stay with them. But after they said I could go, Inspector. Then it was too late to go to Andheri. But Reymond Sahib had his door open still and I was able to creep in. I swear to you, honest to God, Inspector, I am never knowing anything about killing. But they said also that they would kill me if I spoke. Inspector, will you be saving me, is it? Is it, Inspector? Is it?’
Ghote stood looking down at the shrunken cringing figure. Was he letting the fellow trick him again? It did not really seem likely. What he had said this time had been more than simply logical, like the story of card-playing with the Punjabi’s driver. This account of inconclusive talk with two of the murderers in the kitchen of the dead couple’s flat had rung true through and through. No wonder the fellow had tried to set up an alibi if that had happened.
Of course, there had been no mention of any involvement by the son. But then the other two would have kept quiet about that. Yes, what he had learnt would scarcely help Dandekar.
‘You will be safe enough from your friends,’ he growled at Fariqua. ‘In the lock-up.’
Without the rest of them there would not be a case worth bringing as an accessory before the fact. But no harm to have the fellow to hand.
He marched him off.
He gave the Noted British Author the news by telephone. A witness who had heard and not properly heard the criminals’ plans, hardly the sort of thing for the pages of Mr Peduncle Plays a Joker. A man induced by threats to join a robbery and then let go before it had begun: not exactly the sort of event for Mr Peduncle Hunts the Peacock.
And indeed questions and doubts poured out so fast that he was reduced at last to pointing out sharply that Mr Reymond was now without a servant. At that the Noted British Author betrayed signs of disquiet. So Ghote explained he could get a replacement by talking to his neighbours and was rewarded by the author quite hastily ringing off.
Encouraged by this, he hurriedly set out for the address he had got from Mrs Hazari late the night before. It was, her husband had said, a Mr Dass whose wife, now dead, had first briefly employed John when he had come to Bombay. He lived in a block of flats in B Road behind Churchgate.
Climbing up the tiled stairway of the building, Ghote found he was retaining – despite the rather shabby air of the place – all his optimism. Louzado’s trail had been long, but now it must be near its end. This was, after all, where the fellow had had his first Bombay job. They could go no further back. But it was equally the most likely place for an employer to have noted that Goa address.
On the door of the flat a small tree-slice name-board had painted on it in much-faded script ‘Mr and Mrs Gopal Dass’. It must, Ghote reflected, have been a long while since there had been a Mrs Dass if it was her demise that had brought Louzado’s first Bombay job to its abrupt end. And certainly the little irregularly-shaped board had a strong look of dusty neglect.
He rang the door bell.
There was such a long silence that he almost became convinced he was to experience yet another defeat. He was even turning towards the next-door flat to make inquiries when the door opened by just a crack.
He swung round.
‘It is Mr Gopal Dass?’
The door opened a little more. Ghote saw in the bright light from the room beyond a man who had once been fat.
Afterwards he was able to account in detail for the instantly stamped impression. It had come in part from the old European-style suit, its jacket drooping from the shoulders in deep encrusted folds, the trousers hanging in baggy rucks from the hips. But even the face had shown the same signs: flesh seemed to sag from it.
‘What is it you are wanting?’
The voice, too, appeared to be coming from someone no longer there, hollow and without force.
Rapidly Ghote introduced himself and stated his problem. He felt that the slightest chance might cause the tall empty man to close the door so barely opened.
Mr Dass heard him out however. Then he sighed, driftingly like a puff of night breeze with hardly the strength to ruffle lonely waters.
‘Oh, no, no,’ he said. ‘No addresses. Everything like that went when my wife left me for another life. Everything.’
He turned slowly and looked into the room behind him. Ghote saw over his shoulder that it was almost completely bare. No curtains, no carpet, no pictures of the gods. Just a small table with a brass bowl, a brass tumbler and a packet of Mohun’s cornflakes on it, and in a corner a bed-roll.
‘Yes,’ Mr Dass said. ‘I got rid of everything. My life is at an end, you know. At an end.’
Very slowly, and without any sense of discourtesy, he turned and closed the door.
And I too, Ghote thought in the thick sadness he felt billowing from the shut door with its once gay tree-slice name-board, I too have reached an end. The end of my hunt for John Louzado.
But one part of the affair certainly was not over. The Noted British Author would undoubtedly be out pursuing his hiatuses before much longer. He might be doing so already. One conversation with a neighbour could well have found him a new servant.
He ran clatteringly down the empty echoing stairway, drove full-out back to HQ, glancing wildly at Dandekar’s office as he came to a gravel-squirting halt, and ran for his telephone to stop the Noted British Author descending on HQ alone.
‘Ah, Inspector Ghote.’
The British author’s enveloping smile seemed to come all the way down the line. ‘Ah, good. I was just setting out to see you. You’re speaking from your office?’
‘Yes,’ Ghote answered. ‘That is – no. That is …’
‘There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy,’ the plummy voice said.
‘Not at all,’ Ghote answered with sharpness. ‘I am at office and I shall be here all morning.’
But when the Noted British Author arrived he was magnificently insulated from him. Within two minutes of his call Inspector Dandekar had asked him to take over his interrogation. It had been something of an admission of defeat for Dandekar. He had told Ghote he felt he dared no longer leave unexplored the possible trails in the Bombay underworld. If the boy was innocent despite everything, then inquiries through the usual network of touts and informers must be pursued now with extra vigour.
‘Mind you,’ he had concluded, ‘I still swear young Raju is guilty as hell. I hope you can break him.’
So, with Dandekar gossiping to thief acquaintances in such places as the stolen goods mart of the Chor Bazaar and thus safe from any British botheration, Ghote felt perfectly justified in leaving the author to cool his heels.
And in the meanwhile he faced young Raju, cocksure graduate of Bombay University, adopted son of the murdered ice-cream manufacturer and, as Dandekar had discovered at Shivaji Park, openly mutinous at having been assigned the fairly humble job in his new father’s firm of going round to shops and restaurants instead of having a fat sum given him to start up on his own.
It was with this point that Ghote began.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. ‘I have been going over your answers to Inspector Dandekar, and there is one small thing I cannot understand., You wanted a sum to start up a business. But it is not at all clear what is the business.’
The boy sat down on the hard chair in front of Ghote’s table and with deliberate casualness put one leg over the other.
‘You are not catching me that way, bhai,’ he said. ‘All along I am denying and denying I asked for money.’
Ghote sighed.
‘But we have a statement from a neighbour to whom you yourself complained,’ he said. ‘Two others also heard loud quarrelling.’
‘Lies,’ Raju answered contemptuously.
Ghote did not let himself be discomposed. But for all the calmness with which he went back to the point and for all the reasonableness of every other question he asked in the next two hours, he got, it seemed nowhere. Some of the hard and shiny contempt left the boy’s voice, and the two of them eventually might have been friendly acquaintances, but the answers, though different in tone, were never one whit helpful.
So when a constable came in with a chit saying Inspector Dandekar had returned Ghote felt decidedly relieved. He had not really hoped for success where Dandekar had failed, but a small gleam in him had licked at the possibility. And now he knew it would not be.
Dandekar he found equally gloomy.
‘Nothing,’ he said in answer to a query about his luck with the informers. ‘Not a whisper. Of course there may be something still, you know. When the newspapers get on to a case people hold out. But I did not get one word.’
And if you did not, Ghote thought, no one else could.
‘The boy is also the same as ever,’ he said, ‘I talked and cajoled and urged but he did not give one thing, except to stop back-answering.’
‘That little rat. I am going to have him, Ghote. I am going to get him talking if it is the last thing I do. I am going now.’
And, all solidly compact determination, he marched out.
Ghote sat where he was on the small chair beside Dandekar’s desk. He felt he could not face the waiting British author; he had used every atom of his patience with young Raju. He leant forward, banged the brass bell on the desk and when the peon came ordered tea.
He took his time sipping at the hot milky liquid and had not quite finished when suddenly the bat-wing doors clapped back with a noise like a pair of quick following pistol shots and Dandekar came striding in again.
But now his face was alight with a dark joy.
‘Got him,’ he said. ‘Got him. I knew I would, and by God I did.’
Ghote’s first feeling – he tried to overcome it – was chagrin. He had had Raju all morning and had ended up where he began; Dandekar had had him for scarcely twenty minutes and had broken him. But never mind who had done it, the boy had talked.
‘He confessed everything?’ he asked Dandekar. ‘Faking the ropes, planning it all with Louzado and that Budhoo?’
‘Everything. Thanks to you, Ghote.’
‘To me?’
‘Oh yes. When I heard you had taken that soft line I thought that perhaps how one good hard push would do it. And it did. They did not set out to murder, of course. But when that Budhoo found not one lakh of jewellery but four or five rings only, he went mad. That accounts for all those wounds.’
‘Shabash, Inspector, shabash,’ Ghote said, a rush of warmth swirling through him.
But Dandekar, slumping down into his chair, opening a drawer and pulling out a towel to dab his sweaty face, had begun to look less triumphant.
‘It is all right, Ghote,’ he said. ‘But you know as well as I do that when it comes to court, as likely as not young Raju will shamelessly deny every word.’
‘Yes,’ Ghote said. ‘We need Budhoo, though we would be lucky ever to find that one. Or we need John Louzado.’
He began recounting how that trail had ended. But in a minute a look of wide-eyed staring came on Dandekar’s hook-nosed face. Slowly Ghote turned, though he knew almost for a certainty what he would see.
And there it was, looming over the top of the doors like a bristling hairy moon, the face of the Noted British Author.
Resignedly Ghote pushed himself to his feet.
‘Mr Reymond,’ he said, his voice ringing with brightness. ‘I was just coming to tell you. We have broken the case.’
But congratulations did not come as freely as he felt they should. Indeed, as out in the sunshine his story progressed, the bushy beard gaped wide more than once with hardly restrained interjections.
Discrepancies, Ghote thought. Hiatuses. ‘Significant variations.’ Surely there could not be more.
And at last he ran out of words and had to face the author’s objections.
‘Inspector, I feel bound to point out a few things. You and Inspector Dandekar have been most kind to me. I can see that as soon as I get home I shall write a story called Mr Peduncle and the Indian Inspector. And it would be nothing short of a betrayal if I kept silent.’
‘Most kind. But I assure—’
‘No, Inspector, it is the least I can do. First then, let me say that I know young Raju well. He and I often had long, long talks when he came to phone friends in Delhi and other places. And I promise you, Inspector, he is not the chap to set criminals on to rob his own benefactors. There’s a simple discrepancy between what the boy is and what you say he did. But that’s not all.’
‘No?’ Ghote said.
‘No. You see, there’s one piece of the puzzle which still doesn’t fit. And time and again my Mr Peduncle has said to Inspector Sugden, “You’ve got to fit in every bit, my dear fellow, every bit of the puzzle.”’
‘But—’
‘No, Inspector, hear me out. I know this can’t be easy to take, but you can’t get away from pure logic. What you heard from Fariqua this morning simply didn’t add up. You’ve only to think about it. And if he’s lying there can be only one reason. Young Raju wasn’t the third man – Fariqua was.’
Ghote stood there fuming. Who was this detective-story writer to come telling them what was and was not so? Him and his logic and his hiatuses.
But, even as he encouraged the rage to squirt and bubble inside him, he also felt a streak of cold doubt.
Logic. Well, logic was logic. And suspects – even college-eduated – had been known to confess under pressure to crimes they have not committed, right up to murder. And Dandekar, first-class though he was, certainly could put pressure on.
Was it possible that, despite what seemed plain facts, that story of Fariqua’s – seemingly unlikely but perfectly in accord with the way things happened – was just a story?
One thing was certain. The shame, the ridiculousness, of having an author of detective books get to the right answer first must not make them ignore that answer. If only they were not relying wholly on that confession but had Louzado or Budhoo in a cell too. If only the trail of addresses had not …
And then, like a last monsoon storm coming winding rapidly in across the sea long after the monsoon ought to have ended, bringing a last welcome sudden coolness, an idea came winding and leaping into his mind.
‘Sir, sir,’ he said. ‘Come with me straight away, sir, if you please.’
And without giving the author a chance to reply he bundled him into the car and set off into the darting traffic.
They made it to the Shivaji Park flat in record time. There, still begging for patience, Ghote took one fast look round the sitting-room – couches spread with cotton counterpanes, bookshelves, two tables and, yes, the telephone.
And next to it ‘the little book’ in which, so the Noted British Author had told him soon after they met, people from nearby looked things up. His mention just now of Raju telephoning distant friends had at last brought it to the front of his mind. He flicked at the indexed pages with sweat-slippery fingers. L for Louzado. And yes. Yes, yes, yes. There it was. The address.
He seized the phone, dialled furiously, shouted instructions for a Lightning Call and miraculously was speaking to the Goa police in Panjim in minutes. And got splendid cooperation. They knew the place, they would find the man, no doubt they would find his share of the missing rings. The fellow would be behind bars in half an hour.
It was almost as if he was putting a hand on his shoulder himself.
He turned from the telephone and looked the bursting-bearded British author full in the face.
‘Let me tell one thing, sir,’ he said, savouring the irony to the last drop. ‘Let me tell one thing: never to neglect a hiatus.’
1975