Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ghote found he was leaning forward with quivering anxiety.

  “What?” he barked out.

  “I think I know who you must have in mind.”

  “Have in mind?”

  “Yes. The fellow you think I should be giving an alibi to. I think it must be Rustomjee.”

  He cocked an eye at Ghote. Ghote sat keeping his face rigidly uninformative.

  “Hah,” said Homi, “I see it is. Must be. Otherwise you’d have been bound to say ‘No’.”

  He drew in a deep breath.

  “Well,” he said, “let me tell you I think you’ve hardly been playing cricket. I mean, to try and trap a fellow into betraying his own brother. Not good enough, you know. Simply not good enough.”

  “I am not playing cricket,” Ghote burst out. “I am investigating a murder. Where were you on the night of the seventh last?”

  The big billiard room was very quiet. The light beat down from the long fringed shade over the green, green table. The three balls that Homi had been playing with lay poised where he had left them, the two white and the startling red.

  “I spent the whole evening at the house,” Homi said. “I’ve worked out that it must be so, because that was the night of the Cricket Club of India dinner, and at the last minute I couldn't go because I had a beastly attack of biliousness.”

  “And so you stayed in?”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  “Do?”

  Homi thought.

  “Well,” he said, “I pottered about.”

  “You pottered about? Does that mean you went here and there about the house?”

  Homi lifted his head in a slight gesture of disapproval. “Well, really,” he said. “I mean ‘pottered about' means ‘pottered about’. I don’t know exactly what it means. Why do you have to ask such extraordinary questions?”

  Ghote tried again.

  “But it would not mean you spent the whole time in one place, one particular part of the house?” he said.

  “Oh, good gracious me, no. Whatever made you think I would do that? You can’t know me very well, if you say that. No, I’m famous for never sticking at things. Always leaving one thing off and starting another. Might have been a much better cricketer if I’d just kept at it, you know. But there was always so much else to do— shikar, tennis. And I used to ride a good deal. Pity I was like that in a way. Still I enjoyed myself, and that’s more than a lot of people can say. Look at old Rustomjee, for instance.”

  Ghote grabbed at the invitation. Every scrap of information he could collect about the man whose alibi for murder had just been so casually knocked to pieces might help him now when it came to bringing the case to court.

  “Your brother is very different from you?” he prompted.

  “Oh, good lord, yes. Chalk and cheese, you know. Chalk and cheese.”

  Homi Currimbhoy pushed himself up from the cane-seated sofa.

  “But of course,” he said, “when I say that Rustomjee was unhappy and I was happy that isn’t altogether the truth. I mean, Rustomjee was happy too, in a way. In his way. Rather a sort of unhappy way, if you take my meaning.”

  “Yes?” Ghote said.

  “Yes. Well, I mean, he enjoyed working away night and day on his infernal machine. That’s what I used to call it, you know. His infernal machine. Sort of joke.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Good, good. Well now, I’ll tell you a funny thing.”

  “Yes?”

  Homi had padded across and fetched himself a billiard cue, a short light-coloured one this time. But now he came back and leaning on the cue with its butt by his feet, he addressed Ghote squarely.

  “I’ll tell you a funny thing: you might have thought that Rustomjee would really be unhappy when he had his work taken away from him by that wretched Bunny Baindur. He told me that you’d found out about that, by the way. Good work.”

  Ghote frowned a little. It was not easy to follow Homi’s thought processes.

  “You were saying?” he asked.

  “Saying? Was I? Oh, yes. ’Course I was. About Rustomjee. Well, you might have thought- Hey, wait a

  minute.”

  Homi grasped the thin end of the stubby billiard cue with both hands and gripped at it as if he could squeeze in a fine jet from its tip a thought that eluded him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see it all now.”

  He smiled.

  “I see what you’ve been after, Inspector. You thought that I- No, wait a moment. Yes. You either expected, or did not expect, me to give Rustomjee an alibi. To say I spent the evening with him shut up in his room, the way he often is with that infernal gramophone of his. You expected that, or you did not, and when I said I hadn’t, you thought old Rustomjee was the murderer. But, you see, he isn’t. He only said I was with him because the dear old chap had taken it into his head that I had killed young Bunny because of the awful thing that Bunny had done to him.”

  Suddenly he swung the billiard cue round till it was parallel with the floor and grasped it at either end. Then he began swinging it violently up and down horizontally in the agitation of trying to express himself.

  “And that’s just where I’d got to,” he said. “About Rustomjee. You see, the odd thing is: he wasn’t really all that unhappy about his work coming to an end. He was deeply hurt by it all at first, of course. But, really, that only lasted about a day. I could tell, you know, because after about a day he started to play his gramophone, and I knew that he wouldn’t do that if he was unhappy. He loves music too much, you see?”

  His eyes positively shone with the effort of putting his point across.

  “And now we come to it,” he went on. “You see, if I knew he hadn’t really been made deeply unhappy by what Bunny had done, I wouldn’t have any reason to kill Bunny, would I? And neither, of course, would Rustomjee. He was a bit sad, you know, because I think all that business sort of made him admit what he must have in a way realised years ago: that his research was never going to get him anywhere. He’d been frightfully brilliant, you know, at Cambridge and so forth. But he’d just gone off on a wrong track somewhere years and years ago, and had never been able to admit it. Much too old to start something new now, you see. Lacked the energy. Oh, dear me, yes.”

  Slowly the billiard cue was lowered till it came to rest against the front of Homi’s thighs. The explanation was over.

  Weighed leadenly down, Ghote plodded back to the truck. This was the end. All his fine phrases about the Rajah being too much a free agent to have enemies and consequently having to be the victim of one of those he had so outrageously tricked had fallen to fragments around him. None of those he had tricked had wanted to revenge themselves.

  He had frittered about with absurd notions and a murderer had got away with it.

  Suddenly, as he neared the truck parked at a kerb behind Homi Currimbhoy’s club, he stopped short.

  No, it was too much.

  Sgt. Desai was there. He was sitting happily on the truck’s running board and beside him there was as ugly and dirty a street boy as could be seen in all Bombay. And the two of them were contentedly playing cards together. A greasy, battered-edged pack was laid out on the pavement between them and they were immersed in a game.

  The bloody cheek.

  Ghote strode forward. His shadow, cast by a nearby street lamp, shot out ahead of him like an avenging spirit. Its top passed over the array of cards. Desai looked up. Ghote fixed his features in a glare of blasting fury. Desai blinked dazedly, plainly failed to recognise him, lowered his head and returned in complete absorption to the game.

  Ghote stood there, about three yards away, petrified in sheer amazement. The boy, who had looked up at the same moment as the sergeant and had clearly been ready to dart off the second this stranger looked as if he was going to act, now, in face of this immobility, also went back to the cards.

  Ghote simply watched them play. He was too astonished to do anything else.
>
  And slowly he began to take in details of the game. From his position above the two squatting players he was able to see both their hands as well as the cards laid out on the grimy surface of the pavement. And quite soon he was able to appreciate the state of play.

  Poor Desai, as was only to be expected, had got himself into a really tight corner. He was well down, and had but one hope in his hand of getting out of trouble. This was to find a fourth for the three jacks, which were the only cards of any merit he held. And the fourth jack was securely in the boy’s hand. Ghote stood and waited for the inevitable.

  And then Desai drew another card from the small remaining face-down stack. Ghote leant forward, blinking, to peer at it in the pale light of the street-lamp. What on earth- Suddenly he realised. It was a joker. They were playing with a pack with a joker in it.

  Desai rapidly laid down his three jacks with the joker making the fourth. The urchin gave a wry grin of disgust and the few tiny coins lying beside the cards on the pavement were divided almost equally.

  “And I think that will do, Sergeant,” Ghote said loudly.

  Desai leapt into the air, his features pathetically ready for the stinging reprimand. But Ghote simply grinned at him. After all, he had solved his mystery.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Looking back at it all afterwards,. Ghote did not like to admit even to himself just how curious the mental process had been which had led him so abruptly to the one inevitable conclusion. But the process had really been simple enough. He had seen a joker in a pack of cards. His mind had given a sort of convulsive, twisted leap and he had started to look for a joker in his own particular blocked situation. And of course there had been one there, staring at him in the face.

  He had gone round and got into the truck. The silent, abashed Desai had scrambled in on the other side. The street boy had vanished into the night. And Ghote had sat for a few minutes, ten at the most, working out details of times and circumstances.

  Then he had been ready.

  “Where are we going, Inspector ?” Desai had asked in a scared voice as Ghote abruptlv started the engine.

  “Back to the office for two minutes first," Ghote had answered with deliberate mystification.

  So back to the office and a hasty search through the drawer in his desk where he “filed” all those odd pieces of paper and information which he felt a vague obligation to keep but could never really think what to do with.

  After a little he found what he had been looking for. It was a smart, printed sheet from the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Arts. It announced a new appointment at the Ministry. It had been decided, it said, that the Minister should have a Public Relations Officer. And at the bottom of the sheet it had mentioned that this officer would be on call day and night out of office hours at a certain address. The document was signed by the new appointee himself. Ram Kamdar.

  Ghote noted the address.

  It was a flat in Cumballa Hill, a new block from the sound of it. Ghote drove there at top speed. There was a niggle of irrational fear somewhere inside him mockingly repeating that for some unaccountable reason, now that he at last knew what it was all about, he would somehow be too late.

  With open-mouthed Desai trailing along behind him, he rang at the bell of the flat’s newly-painted front door and was admitted by Ram Kamdar himself, sleek-suited and heavy-spectacled.

  “My dear Satish,” the P.R.O. said, producing a wide smile, “what can I do for you?”

  “A few quick questions,” Ghote answered.

  He decided not to attempt to correct the error over his first name.

  “But, yes, old boy. That’s what I say: a P.R.O. is on duty twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Yes,” said Ghote. “That is a point I wished to mention.” Ram Kamdar’s plumpish, shave-needing face looked blank.

  “But come in, come in. I’m all alone,” he said. “Company is welcome.”

  He retreated in front of Ghote and Desai into the living-room of the flat. Ghote gave it a quick, half-curious glance. It was very new-looking and very up-to-date from the ebony-black hi-fi gramophone in one corner to the neatly recessed coloured book-shelves, empty of books, facing it.

  Ghote at once began to feel that he had somehow stepped into a magazine advertisement. He brushed at the front of his trousers, which in the course of the long, long day had become considerably creased.

  Ram Kamdar gestured towards two of the light-wood, colourful latex-foam cushioned chairs.

  “Sit down, gentlemen, sit down,” he said.

  He moved to pick up a heavy square-cut smoked-glass decanter from a big, low, round table in the same light wood as the chairs.

  “I do not think it will be necessary to sit,” Ghote said. “This should not take many minutes.”

  Ram Kamdar darted him a look of sharp curiosity. “Well, what’s it all about?” he said.

  “You were saying you were on duty twenty-four hours a day,” Ghote answered.

  “Yes, yes. I am at your service.”

  “No, it is not that. It is just that I do truly believe you think and sleep and eat your job every hour that there is.”

  Ram Kamdar shrugged his well-padded shoulders a little. “We’ve got to create a climate of acceptance for the P.R.O. in to-day’s India,” he said. “It’s a one hundred per cent task.”

  “No,” said Ghote.

  “No? What the hell do you mean?”

  A harsh flush rose up on the heavy cheeks.

  “That is where you are wrong,” Ghote said. “That is where you went wrong altogether. No man must ever devote every bit of himself and his time to one thing. If he does so he becomes totally serious.”

  “And what’s wrong with that, my friend?” Ram Kamdar demanded on a plain note of aggression.

  “Just that I am looking for a totally serious man when I am looking for a murderer,” Ghote replied. “The murderer, unless he kills almost by accident, is someone who had gone past the ordinary human restraints. He is totally devoted to something. Just as you, Mr. Kamdar, are so totally devoted to your P.R.O. mission that, when the Ministry it was your job to give a good image to was in danger of becoming a laughing-stock with your new Minister’s pet flamingoes being shot dead one by one, it was too much for you, especially with your family connection with the former Minister. So when you found out who that joker was and saw he had not been arrested, you decided to stop him at all costs yourself.”

  Ram Kamdar grinned frenziedly.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, my friend,” he said. “I never learnt the Rajah was the joker in question till after he was dead. You yourself told me in my office. You must remember.”

  “I remember most clearly,” Ghote answered. “And I remembered also most clearly a few minutes ago that you went to great lengths to hammer home the point that you did not know about the Rajah. I ought to have deduced something from it at the time.”

  “And what was that?” Kamdar said with truculence. “That you knew the Rajah was the joker much earlier.” “What nonsense. How could I have known earlier?”

  “It is quite simple,” Ghote said. “You were with me when the Rajah telephoned and I indicated to him I knew he was the joker. You must have heard enough though you did not say a word about it.”

  It was then that the almost lunatic Kamdar made his spring for freedom. Ghote was ready for some such move, but the sheer ferocity of the leap took him by surprise and he was flung to the ground, his fingers clutching scrabblingly at the sleek silkiness of Kamdar’s jacket.

  And so it was Desai who eventually sat, hard and firmly, on the Rajah of Bhedwar’s murderer, just as he had sat on the squinting man in Anil Bedekar’s stables, and brought the matter to a conclusion.

  : : : :

  Later that night, however, as Ghote wearily made his way out of the Headquarters building after seeing to all the trail of formalities that came dragging after Kamdar’s arrest, something more did happen.

  “Ah, Inspector Ghote. Just
the man.”

  It was D.S.P. Naik, calling from behind him. He turned round resignedly.

  “Yes, D.S.P.?”

  “I wanted to see you earlier but you were out, and then I have had to go to this damned dinner.”

  D.S.P. Naik passed a hand across his lips which seemed to be a little greasy.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Just a small thing. I was talking earlier to-day to that excellent chappie, Ram Kamdar, the Minister’s P.R.O., you know. Going to go far, mark my words.”

  Complete icy numbness entered Ghote. He was too tired, too utterly exhausted to find any tactful way round. And the D.S.P. was going happily on.

  “Yes, Ram Kamdar. Hm. Well, he told me the Ministry needed a Security Officer. Important job, in its way. And straightaway I thought of that fellow of yours.”

  “Fellow of mine, D.S.P.?”

  Ghote’s brain was numb.

  “Yes, your sergeant. What’s his name—er—Desai.”

  “Oh, Desai, yes.”

  And a sudden shaft of bright illumination.

  “Why, yes, D.S.P. You are perfectly right, sir. Desai would be just the man for a job like that.”

  “Thought so. Thought so.”

  Stumbling out of the building, Ghote dazedly asked himself two bewildering questions. Had D.S.P. Naik winked at him, actually winked ? And, worse, had he winked back ?

  H.R.F. KEATING was born in England ; and lives there now with his wife and four children. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, and received first class honors in Modern Literature. He is now the regular crime reviewer for The Times of London. He is the author of The Perfect Murder, Is Skin-Deep, Is Fatal, Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade, Death of a Fat God, Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes, and Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock.