Ghote leant back in the soothing darkness of the interior of the car. In the front seat the driver bent forward to the starting-button. The engine purred smoothly into life at his touch. Ghote relaxed against the smooth, gently smelling leather of the seat. Now things were really going with the calm efficiency which he had been led to expect, and had wondered if he would find too good to be true.
“All right, sir?” said the driver.
“Yes, certainly.”
And, like a burst of wildcat machine-gun fire, a storm of violent tapping broke out on the dark window beside his ear.
“What? What’s that?”
“Think it’s someone wants to speak to you, sir,” the driver said impassively.
Ghote peered into the gloom outside. Stuck hard up against the other side of the glass was the solidly plump face of Cousin Vidur.
Furiously Ghote wound down the window.
“You did not take address,” Cousin Vidur said, with open reproachfulness.
Ghote felt a pang of guilt. How much intention had he had of ever visiting them?
“I think Protima gave it to me before I left,” he said.
“All the same,” Vidur said, with a touch of authority, “I will tell again. It is Tagore House Restaurant. You will find it in Hyde Park Terrace. That is quite close to Marble Arch. Anyone will give you directions.”
“Yes, yes,” Ghote said. “Thank you.”
He sank back again on the leather of the seat.
But another face had joined Vidur’s at the open window. It was the sergeant’s.
“Anything I can do to help?” he inquired cheerfully.
Ghote sat forward again.
“This is a relative of mine,” he explained, “distant relative. He was so kind as to meet me here. He wants me to visit him during the conference.”
But that did not satisfy Vidur. He thrust his Gandhi-capped head yet farther in at the narrow gap of the open window.
“You must come to-night,” he said urgently. “You must come to-night, and you must stay in the house. We are depending on you. No one else but you.”
Ghote felt a hot flush of embarrassment. Were they going to be treated to another outburst about the British police?
“Very well,” he said rapidly, “I will stay if I can.”
He turned and stared pointedly in front of him. Cousin Vidur withdrew with a final intense assessment of his good faith.
But now the sergeant thrust his tortoise neck farther in.
“If you want to cancel your hotel booking,” he said, “I’m sure that’ll be perfectly all right.”
“Oh, no. Please do not bother.”
“Well, it’d be a bit of a favour to us,” the sergeant said. “I understand they’re still looking for accommodation for one or two of the later delegates. I’ll get your driver to arrange it: he’ll have to take you there to collect your briefing documents.”
Ghote felt absolutely caught. He would have liked to have avoided spending all his free time in London in close contact with these cousins of his. But there seemed no way out.
“All right then,” he said, not very graciously.
The sergeant pulled his head out of the window and had a quick word with the driver. Ghote busied himself with the winding handle. And at last they were off. The driver eased the big car into gear and Ghote looked ahead of him with new interest.
But Vidur had not done. As they began to slip forward, he gave one last, echoing shout.
“Come to the back. At the back of the restaurant is the way into the house. Come to the back.”
THREE
Some two hours later Ghote, setting down his atrocious suitcase beside him on a narrow brick pathway, first tapped with his bunched knuckles and then loudly knocked on the back door of the tall terraced house not far from Marble Arch to which the police car had eventually brought him.
While he waited he made up his mind once again on the exact course of action he proposed to take. He would stay with his cousins since they insisted. But he would commit himself to no active steps whatever about finding their missing niece. What he could do to convince them that the local police were the right people to handle the affair, he would do. But beyond that nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Any other course would be ridiculous. He had his work to think about. Whatever happened he was going to carry out this assignment as well as it could be carried out. He was going to be a credit to Superintendent Ketkar. That came first. And afterwards he would see as much as possible of this huge and proud city, giving in the meanwhile what comfort he could to these distant—
The door in front of him opened swiftly.
In the sharp ray of light which cut out into the darkness behind him, illuminating a jumble of high-piled, rain-slimed crates and packing-cases, he blinked dazedly. He saw that a woman dressed in a harsh red sari was standing there. Her face was in deep shadow.
“It is Mrs. Datta?” he asked.
“Yes. Who is this?”
She sounded gratingly suspicious.
“It is Ganesh Ghote. Your cousin, Ganesh.”
“Ah. It is you. You have come.”
The high note of triumph was clear. Ghote redoubled his guard.
“But come in, come in, Cousin,” Mrs. Datta went on. “Do not be standing there in the darkness. Come in.”
She turned and led the way into a dingy stretch of passageway with at the end of it flights of stairs going up and down.
“Hang your coat on the pegs,” she said. “And leave that case down here. One of the waiters will bring it up later.”
By the light of the unshaded bulb which lit the narrow back hallway, Ghote could make out that his wife’s cousin was a woman of fifty or sixty, with an awkward, battling look to her, sharpened by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles worn so close to the face that the lenses appeared to be looking out at the world from two quite differing angles. She went up the steep flight of threadbarely carpeted stairs in front of him with her elbows jutting out from side to side as if they were jabbing back at anyone or anything that dared to threaten her independence.
Ghote noted that she did not look as if she would be easily persuaded that her best course over her niece would be to let the local police carry on with their work without interference.
He sighed resignedly.
The room at the head of the stairs into which he followed Mrs. Datta came as a surprise.
He stood in the doorway blinking at it a little.
For somewhere in the heart of London, it was extraordinarily Indian. More Indian by far than his own home back in Bombay. Here there was not a single chair. The bare floor was spread with some Numdah rugs and against two of the walls there were low couches covered in cheap Indian printed cotton counterpanes. On the walls hung pictures of the gods in brightly coloured reproductions with garlands of artificial flowers round them. In one corner was a heavy rosewood chest, intricately carved. The whole smelt strongly of spice and aromatics.
The sole concessions to the Western world, it seemed, were a popping little orange-flamed gas fire, the painted iron mantelpiece above it crammed with medicine bottles, and a battered old mahogany chest-of-drawers, its surface much cluttered with household goods, brass tumblers and tea-making apparatus including a heavy-looking gas-ring with a metal-covered pipe trailing from it down to a tap near the fire.
Mrs. Datta was already at this boiling water.
“Sit, sit, Cousin,” she said. “You will be wanting tea. You must be cold to be out on a night like this.”
Ghote noted that he was not in fact at all cold. Perhaps it was because the big dark blue police car had been well heated, or perhaps it was that the British winter was not quite so terrible as it might be.
He lowered himself cautiously down on to one of the extremely low couches and crouched on its edge a little uncomfortably.
“You have an excellent looking restaurant here,” he said experimentally.
The remark reflected something of the
surprise he had felt when the police driver had set him down, by request, just outside the restaurant. It had been a great deal more luxurious than he had expected. From the few remarks Protima had made about these distant cousins of hers he had got the impression that they were struggling to make ends meet. But the Tagore House Restaurant was no poor man’s enterprise. It occupied two shop fronts in a neat little row at one end of a small, quiet, decidedly prosperous street not far from the aggressively bright lights of Marble Arch and the huge blocks of flats he had glimpsed as the car had turned for a short way into Edgware Road.
The whole neighbourhood, though hardly seen, had impressed him considerably. The scrupulously bare, wide pavements, the faultlessly painted houses with their elegant black ironwork balconies and pretty illuminated fanlights over brightly coloured front doors, a small garden square protected only by a low railing yet still empty and well-kept beneath its tall, drooping, bare, elegant trees: all had proclaimed a quiet affluence that was entirely new to him.
And then had come the little row of shops—a wine merchant’s, its dark window full of discreet bottles, a tobacconist’s with a display of brightly opulent thick and heavy magazines, an undertaker’s, remote and calm, and finally the Tagore House, two well-lit windows, deeply rich curtaining hanging down for two-thirds of their height, with in one of them a single, time-weathered bronze of the Dancing Siva and in the other, scarcely less poised, a heavily gold-framed menu card. And in the night air all round the rich aroma of fine curries.
Mrs. Datta turned briefly away from her tea-making at his comment on the apparent excellence of the restaurant.
“It is an excellent restaurant,” she said.
Ghote, tired from the long, long flight and the rapid succession of new sights and sounds, found her answer totally daunting. There seemed to be no more possibly to be said.
He sat in silence.
In a few moments Mrs. Datta turned away from the scratched and battered old chest-of-drawers and came towards him holding a brass tumbler of tea with the edge of her sari. Ghote took it. The metal was extremely hot and made the tips of his fingers tingle piercingly. Quickly he set it down on the floor beside him.
Mrs. Datta took her own tumbler to the other couch and sat there, upright but at ease.
“Now,” she said briskly, “what is it you are going to do to find me my peacock?”
Ghote shook his head, his tired mind grappling hard but unsuccessfully.
“Peacock?” he said.
“My husband did not tell her name?”
Ghote looked at her.
“It is my niece, Ranee,” Mrs. Datta said vigorously. “When she went to school here that is what her friends called her. It is funny to call a girl by the name of a male bird, but it is a good name for her. She is like a peacock. A fine creature, always beautiful to watch.”
Quite suddenly she got to her feet, came over and sat on the couch beside him. He saw that her hands, which had a capable and highly efficient look to them, were clutching hard at the red material of her sari.
“She was fine, fine, my Peacock,” she said. “She had come here only half a year, and she knew everything. She could do everything. She spoke English so well, and she did well at her school too. In the school play they have made her the lead. You know what that is?”
“Yes. Yes, I know,” Ghote said.
“She was the leader of those English girls,” Mrs. Datta went on. “She was the boss of them. She knew more about things than they did, more about the ways of their own country. And she dressed always in Western clothes. You have seen the mini-skirt?”
“Not yet. But I have seen photographs in India.”
“She wore it. Not at school where it is forbidden, but after.”
Plain-faced, steel-spectacled Mrs. Datta gazed into the air in front of her.
Suddenly she twisted round and laid a knobby, toil-hardened hand for an instant on Ghote’s wrist.
“You must get her back, Cousin,” she said. “You must do it.”
Ghote bent forward and felt at the top edge of the tall brass tumbler on the floor beside him. It was still very hot.
“But it would not be easy,” he said.
“But you must do it,” Mrs. Datta replied, unmoved. “You are our only chance. My husband said?”
“Yes. Yes, he said,” Ghote agreed. “But you must remember I am here on business, important business.”
“We know it. We know. It told in the papers. It is a big conference called by Smart of the Yard. He is a very famous policeman. You will be able to ask him to help.”
Ghote’s heart sank. What a situation he had got himself into, already being expected to discuss all this with a person like Detective Superintendent Smart infinitely remote from himself. How could he explain that Smart would be busy running the whole great conference with delegates drawn from the top narcotics men all over the world, and that he himself, a mere inspector, a deputy of deputies, was attending that conference by only the skin of his teeth?
He decided he would have to make a concession, a small concession. He would discuss the case a little.
“Your husband said it was three weeks since Ranee left?” he asked.
At least he could get the circumstances of the business clear in his own mind. Perhaps then some explanation would occur to him which he could use to satisfy Mrs. Datta and her husband.
But Mrs. Datta’s reply to his tentative query led only to deeper mystery.
“Yes,” she said, “it is three weeks. Three whole weeks since he made her go to him.”
With a feeling of hoisting aside yet another unexpected burden, Ghote put the inevitable question.
“Since he made her go to him? Who is this ‘he’?”
Mrs. Datta set down her tumbler, which she had already succeeded in emptying, on the bare floor at her feet with a sharp tap.
“But my husband,” she said, “he did not tell?”
“Perhaps he said something. It was very noisy at the airport. There are loudspeakers everywhere, you know.”
Mrs. Datta drew a deep breath into her narrow jutting bosom.
“No,” she said, “I see you have heard half only. He told that the Peacock had disappeared, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But he did not say she had been abducted?”
Ghote felt a gust of sudden fury.
“You are saying the girl has been abducted now?” he stormed. “And who is it you are accusing? Have you informed the local police of this? I did not hear from your husband that they had taken any action in a matter such as this.”
“Oh, oh,” said Mrs. Datta, “the police have been told. But all they would say was that they were satisfied he did not do it. Satisfied. How easily they are satisfied, those policemen here.”
“But who? Who is it you are accusing?” Ghote shouted, his weariness dragging down all restraints.
“But it is Johnny Bull,” Mrs. Datta said, as though here was something self-evident if ever anything was.
And the name sent an abrupt streak of disquiet running through Ghote’s head. It was a name he seemed to know. And it somehow meant trouble, though he could not for the life of him connect it at this moment with anything at all.
“Johnny Bull?” he said with caution.
“But, yes, Johnny Bull, the great pop singer Johnny Bull. It is he who has stolen my Peacock.”
A cold gloom descended. Nothing could be worse. Johnny Bull was a national figure, an international figure even, a singer whose name had been a household word for almost ten years. And it was him Mrs. Datta was accusing of a sensational crime. There could not be anything more dangerous to get involved with just when he had his hands full, and more than full, with the Drugs Conference.
“What is it that makes you so certain he has actually abducted her?” he asked glumly.
“But she was in love with him,” Mrs. Datta replied in triumph. “In Calcutta she met him when he was making world tour. That is why she insisted to come to
England. And now he has taken her. Taken away my Peacock.”
“But a man like that must have thousands of young girls who believe they are in love with him,” Ghote said desperately.
“They do not know him,” Mrs. Datta replied. “Him my Peacock knew. Well she knew him. In Calcutta and again here. In his flat she was often visitor.”
“Yes, that does make a difference, certainly,” Ghote admitted. “But all the same you must have more evidence than that, you know.”
He picked up his tumbler of tea briskly. The brass was still good and hot but he could bear to grip it now. He took a long, careful drink.
“Evidence is it?” Mrs. Datta said.
She jumped up from the couch.
“Do not think we do not have evidence. Good evidence in plenty we have.”
She marched over to the battered old mahogany chest and smartly jerked open the top left-hand drawer to its full extent. She rummaged in it briefly and brought out a square package wrapped in an old silk shawl. She placed this in a comparatively clear part of the top of the chest and began decisively unfolding it.
“You do not believe she was in love with him?” she said challengingly.
“You have told me,” Ghote answered. “And I agree that girls often get these feelings for public figures like pop singers. It is a well-known thing.”
Mrs. Datta turned away from her unwrapping and darted him a burning glance through her close-clamped steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Photos she had,” she said. “Photos round her room of him she had, with the words of his songs under. All night she dreamt about him.”
A note of incongruous softness had entered her voice. Ghote realised suddenly that the Peacock’s adolescent yearnings must have meant a great deal to her plain-faced, hard-working aunt. Through them she had lived in imagination a life utterly different from her own in the days of her restricted youth. No wonder she had been struck to the heart by the girl’s disappearance.
He looked at her stooping back and sharply jutting elbows as she continued vigorously unwrapping her bundle.
But, no, he would not let any sympathy tug him from the decision he had made. If he was to do the work which he had come here to do properly, he could not allow himself to be distracted.
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock Page 3
