Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘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 Reymo
nd – 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.