Vidur Datta wrinkled his stubby nose in disgust.
“They came,” he said. “When we telephoned the police-station, they sent. But they sent woman policeman only.”
“And did she ask questions?”
“Questions she asked, and too many. Everything she wanted to know. Even private matters completely.”
“And she looked at the girl’s belongings?” Ghote asked.
“Into everything she poked and pried.”
“That is just what I would expect,” Ghote said with coldness. “And what happened after?”
“Nothing. She told she believed Ranee had run away only. She said she would enter on list of missing persons. And then nothing. For three weeks nothing.”
Suddenly the plump form in front of him doubled forward, and before Ghote realised exactly what was happening he found that his feet were being weepingly embraced.
“Help. You must help us, Cousin,” he heard the muffled voice coming up from the region of his shoes. “Cousin, it was like prayers answered when we saw in the papers that it was you who was coming to England. Like prayers answered.”
In spite of the ridiculousness of his position, Ghote could not restrain a thrill of pride at these words. In the papers. So his name had been there in the papers of this great city.
“Cousin,” the voice at his feet jabbered muffledly on, “I have waited for every flight from Bombay. My wife insisted … My restaurant. Such trouble. Those waiters they know nothing, and they cheat.”
The plump little hands were pawing away at the bottoms of his trousers.
“Get up, get up,” he said furiously.
The bullet head, with its Gandhi cap still jammed in place, twisted round. Two big, bloodshot eyes looked up at him.
“Cousin, will you help?”
In the distance, Ghote saw, the bobby had swung majestically round and was now slowly approaching them.
He drew in a sharp breath.
“If there is some small way …” he said.
Vidur Datta came shooting up to his feet like a fat cork released from the depths.
“Blessings on you, Cousin. Blessings on you. You have saved us. Saved.”
“Please,” said Ghote harshly, “how old is the girl in question?”
“Seventeen, Cousin, Seventeen.”
Ghote’s heart sank. The very worst age.
Vidur gazed up at him with a new earnestness.
“And, Cousin, she was beautiful. Beautiful. A creature of brightness.”
“And not a word of any sort has been heard?” Ghote asked.
“Not one word. And, Cousin, you do not know London. It is a dangerous place, an evil and wicked place.”
“All cities are dangerous places for young girls,” Ghote replied.
He did not like to hear London, the distant source of so much of what he had cherished, the proud city he had at last set foot in, talked of in such terms.
Vidur looked at him with solemnity.
“Girls like Ranee can be killed by evil and sex-obsessed men,” he declared.
“And they can also leave home for the very slightest of reasons,” Ghote answered. “I tell you I do not really see that there is anything I can do which the police here cannot do much better.”
“The police,” Vidur exclaimed with a new access of loudness.
He drew breath to launch into a redoubled tirade.
Ghote cursed himself. The police were the one subject he should have avoided. The bobby seemed to be heading straight towards them at this very moment. Was he coming to quell the disturbance? What a difference from the conversation he had imagined only a minute or two earlier.
“Look,” he said rapidly, before Vidur could take wing. “Look, I will come and see you.”
“Cousin, you must stay. My wife insists. You must stay with us while you are here. You must be our guest.”
“Well, I will come and hear more about it. I will come this evening, if I can.”
The constable was almost on them, and Vidur was still half-pawing at his front and looking completely bereft of any sort of dignity.
Ghote twisted away.
“However at this moment I have other business,” he said. “Important business.”
But Vidur was not so easily disposed of. He made a lunge at Ghote’s arm.
“Excuse me, sir.”
It was the bobby.
TWO
Ghote stared up at the aloof, distantly inclined face of the bobby, with every coherent thought suddenly expelled from his mind. That this should happen. Within minutes of his arrival in the England he had so long dreamt of, to find himself embroiled in an unseemly fracas and attracting the attention of a passing police constable, it was more than he could grapple with.
“Excuse me, sir. Are you by any chance Inspector Ghote of the Bombay Police?”
The words, sounding far off amid the whirl of his thoughts, brought a sudden cool floodlight of illumination.
Of course. How ridiculous. The bobby had been sent to find him. He must be attached to the reception party.
But why, oh why, had Cousin Vidur chosen just the very moment when he was being sought out to make that ridiculous, undignified, over-emotional, un-British scene? The constable could not but have heard and seen. At the very outset of the visit he had become a figure of fun.
He shook his head angrily.
In the meanwhile the constable had been saying something. And, what with this turmoil of thought and the noise above him from a sudden loudspeaker announcement in some language which sounded like Portuguese or Spanish, he had not properly heard. It had been something about someone waiting outside to meet him officially, and that there were cars there. But who it was and what his standing was, he had entirely failed to grasp.
He frowned in bewilderment.
“So if you’ll excuse me, sir,” the constable added, with a trace of patient emphasis in his voice, “I have one or two other gentlemen to look out for. The cars are straight through that door there, sir.”
And with a respectful nod he turned gravely round and marched off, solemnly looking from one group of travellers to another.
Ghote decided to head for the door the constable had pointed out while at least that was clear in his mind. In his present state of confusion, he thought bitterly, he would end up by picking on the wrong exit if he let things go any longer.
He hefted up his hideous, bulging case and darted a brief look at his encumbrance of a family connection.
“Good-bye then, Cousin,” he said hastily. “I will see you this evening. Or later. But soon, quite soon.”
And, as fast as the weight of the case would let him, he made off in a beeline for the swinging glass double-doors he had kept his eyes fixed on.
But who was it that he was going to meet? He wished to goodness he had caught the name. Or the rank. The name or the rank. What sort of a person was it likely to be?
Beyond the doors, Ghote found that it was already beginning to get dark. It was the slow northern twilight he had read so much about. Tall lamps on high, elegant concrete standards had been lit, and under their orangey glare he saw three dark blue, well-bred police cars drawn up at the kerb of the broad pavement, each with an impassive uniformed driver at the wheel.
In front of the row of cars stood an elderly-looking, thin-faced man, emerging with something of the doubting aspect of the tortoise from a very stiff fawn-coloured trench-coat. He was standing vigorously rubbing his woollen-gloved hands together, as if only by the most violent action could he hope to keep their circulation going in even a rudimentary manner.
There was no one else at all on that particular stretch of pavement, and Ghote did not doubt that this was the person who had come to greet him. But who was he? That was the question. Vague hopes that he might have been in uniform, and could then safely have been called “Inspector” or even “Superintendent” had died the moment he saw him. In fact, he looked more like a sergeant, a detective-sergeant at the fag-end of
a hard-working career, mostly concerned with some sort of laborious research work.
Ghote decided there was nothing for it but to confront him. He marched up, let his heavy case drop on the ground beside him, and thrust out his hand to be shaken.
“Good evening,” he said, “I am Inspector Ghote, from Bombay.”
The thin, elderly-looking face lit up with a smile of notable sweetness.
“Ah, good. Good. The constable found you all right then?”
But never a word of self-introduction.
“Yes, yes,” Ghote agreed heartily, still shaking the rapidly ungloved hand. “Yes, he picked me out without much trouble, I think.”
“Splendid.”
The tortoisy-looking man drew himself up a little inside the creaking, stiff trench-coat.
“May I,” he pronounced, “offer you a most hearty welcome, on behalf of the organising committee of the Emergency Conference on the Smuggling of Dangerous Drugs, to that conference.”
He let his shoulders droop a little once more, and busied himself in forcing his long fleshless fingers back into their knitted glove.
“And, of course, on my own behalf,” he added.
“Thank you, thank you,” Ghote said formally.
Then, warming suddenly to the friendly twinkle in the elderly man’s eyes, for the first time since setting foot on English soil he relaxed into a full grinning smile.
“Yes,” said his host, whom he had almost definitely pigeon-holed now as a long-service detective-sergeant, “the powers-that-be are more than a little worried about drug smuggling, what with the Press making a great to-do every day and questions down in Parliament and all that.”
The words gave Ghote another thrill of excitement. Questions in Parliament. There in the Mother of Parliaments they would actually be debating the very business that had brought him hurrying so suddenly across ocean and continent to this legendary city.
He summoned up his gravest expression.
The sergeant rubbed his gloved hands together with an even more anxious vigour.
“So there was only one thing for it they decided,” he said. “To call together everybody who could possibly help in the matter, and to try and get the whole business sorted out from top to bottom.”
“It was a very urgent decision then?” Ghote asked, out of a sense of politeness.
“Oh, yes. Good gracious me, it was. That’s why you’ll find yourself going to meetings at a number of rather out-of-the-way places. But nobody can get conference halls just for the asking in London. Too many other people got their claims in.”
The vision of all the different meetings attracted to this great metropolis for their different purposes swelled up in Ghote’s mind. He squared his shoulders under the bulky tweed of his new coat. He was one of these multifarious delegates, playing his appointed part alongside the thousands of others.
“It will not matter at all where we meet,” he said. “The meetings themselves are the thing. It is the people there who will get the work done.”
“Quite so,” the sergeant said, a little tersely. “And at least everybody asked is coming—except your Number One, of course.”
The sudden reminder that he himself was the merest of substitutes at the Conference abruptly sobered Ghote. His mind went back to the moment, a bare four days ago, when he had been summoned out of the blue to report to the huge J.J. Hospital where Superintendent Ketkar, Director of the Narcotics Branch, under whom he had been serving for a short while past, was lying disabled by a broken hip.
He remembered feeling a good deal of perplexity as an Anglo-Indian nurse trotted on clicking heels in front of him to the door of the white-walled, bright private ward. Why should he be ordered to report to the superintendent when there were two perfectly good deputy superintendents busy running the branch? It was highly mystifying.
Superintendent Ketkar was lying on a very high bed propped up on a dozen pillows arranged in a great plump fan behind him. His body protruded from a thick cylinder of plaster covered by a heavy cotton-weave white counterpane, neatly folded back. He looked utterly helpless.
The sight was a decidedly unexpected one for Ghote. Superintendent Ketkar was in the ordinary way one of the least helpless men he had ever encountered. He had had a career in the police like the massively inevitable rise of a space-rocket from its pad. It had brought him now to the head of a recently established branch set up to deal with the growing international problem of narcotics, in which in a short time he had earned himself world-wide acclaim. All this blazoned itself out of a striking, hawk-like face set on a formidably erect body—in the ordinary way.
But Superintendent Ketkar had slipped on a strip of mango peel. And now in this high hospital bed he resembled nothing so much as a wooden puppet with a vital string snapped.
But he still wasted no time.
“Inspector,” he had said, without asking Ghote to sit down on the high-backed, cane-seated chair beside the bed, “I want you to go to England.”
“Very good, Superintendent.”
Long training helped Ghote to produce the words. But internally he could do nothing but ask himself in a chaotic whirl whether the superintendent had actually said what he seemed to have done.
“My friend Detective Superintendent Smart of Scotland Yard has specially requested me to go to an emergency conference in London on the problem of drug smuggling into the U.K. The doctors tell me it will be quite impossible for me to move. I am sending you.”
So it was true. Ghote’s heart began thumping. To be selected to take the place of the great Superintendent Ketkar, and after only a few months under his command. He must have made more of an impression than the occasional biting remark the superintendent had addressed to him had indicated.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you,” he said.
A shimmer of puzzlement entered his scheme of things.
“But D.S.P. Jivan or D.S.P. Hiralal,” he said, mentioning the superintendent’s two deputies, “is one of them not available to go?”
The superintendent’s jutting eyebrows darted together with a momentary return of his customary fire.
“Do you think I could send Jivan on a plum job like this and not send Hiralal?” he asked. “Or send Hiralal and not Jivan? Don’t be a fool, man.”
“No, sir.”
Glumly Ghote considered the superintendent’s statement. And it was quite true. Both D.S.P. Hiralal and D.S.P. Jivan were men justly proud of their records and service. To give one the unexpected reward of a trip abroad and not the other would have been a public mortification for the unselected one which he could not have been expected to endure.
So the choice had fallen on a mere inspector. And on him in particular because he was, it came to him now, the most easily spared officer in the whole branch.
All right then. But he would do his damnedest to make a go of it away there in distant, mighty, formidable London.
“Inspector.”
Superintendent Ketkar was glaring at him and holding out a neatly clipped sheaf of paper which he had taken up from the round basket-weave table, cluttered with stacked piles of battered cardboard files, beside the high bed.
“Sir?”
“This is the text of the speech you will make to the conference. You will read it word for word as it is written.”
“Very good, sir.”
After all, that much was to be expected. What a great conference like that wanted to hear was the fruit of the immensely successful Superintendent Ketkar’s experiences, not what a man three months in the branch happened to think. But all the same it would be the man three months in the branch who would actually be there, taking his rightful place among the top representatives of police forces from all over the world and making one in their proud counsels. His time would come.
“And, Inspector. You will go over my paper carefully this evening and report here at this time to-morrow to read it to me aloud.”
Ghote quailed inwardly. His voice, to put it simply,
lacked the incisiveness and ready note of command which Superintendent Ketkar’s all too plainly possessed. A decidedly unpleasant time lay between him and his days of triumphant exchanges of view in London.
“And one other thing, Inspector.”
“Sir?”
“You will confine yourself at the conference to answering plain questions of fact arising from my paper, and not one thing more. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
Ghote blinked.
The elderly-looking detective-sergeant was looking at him inquiringly, head to one side.
“Did you say something?” Ghote asked.
“I wondered whether that case was all you had in the way of baggage,” the sergeant said.
He looked down at the bulky, hideous object.
“Well, yes. Yes, it is,” Ghote replied, shamefacedly.
“Quite right, quite right,” the sergeant chirped. “Don’t want to load yourself up with a lot of useless kit.”
Ghote smiled a little.
“No, no,” he agreed.
“Just pop it in the boot of your car, shall we?”
And, before Ghote could get at the bulging case, the sergeant had seized it and was lugging it off, leaning alarmingly to one side from the weight.
Ghote would have liked to have taken it from him. After all, the sergeant—if sergeant he was—was clearly much the elder man. He looked as if he might even have been called back from retirement to help with the emergency of the conference. It was hardly right for him to be carrying such a burden, but taking it off him might start an undignified tussle. In any case it was only a few yards to the car and the driver was already getting out to help.
Ghote stood and watched as the abominable orange-brown object, looking even more hideous in colour under the light of the sodium lamps above, was finally and decently shut up in the police car’s capacious luggage-compartment.
As soon as this was safely locked again, the sergeant trotted round and held the back door of the car open for Ghote. Ghote dived in, gathered the folds of his enormous coat into his lap, and leant out with a parting smile.
“Thank you. Thank you, Sergeant,” he said.
The sergeant closed the door with a sharp tap.
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 2
