Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

  H.R.F KEATING

  How do you guard a man who passes off anonymous threats on his life as mere foolishness? In this new novel about the charming Inspector from the Bombay CID, Ganesh Ghote is faced with just such a perplexing situation.

  Sent to a remote part of India on the pretense of helping Judge Asif with his memoirs, the Inspector’s actual mission is to find out who would benefit from sending these unsavory warnings. But when the shrewd Judge discovers the real reason for the Inspector’s presence he refuses to cooperate in the investigation. Ghote’s hands are tied until it becomes evident that the threats are coming from someone within the Judge’s household —perhaps his beautiful, high-strung daughter or his lunatic son; a militant American priest or the editor of a leftist newspaper who has a crush on the Judge’s daughter ... a classic whodunit with a new twist, by a master of the genre.

  1

  Half an egg. Inspector Ghote, flat on his back on the high hard bed, his whole body gently exuding sweat despite the churning of the fan directly above him, found his tired mind repeating and repeating the phrase. Each time it seemed to sound more absurd.

  Half an egg.

  The judge, Sir Asif, had used it the evening before down in the tall, book-lined, book-smelling library below. Half an egg. Something about “If the King ...” If the King permitted the something of but half an egg. The illicit demand. Yes. If the King permitted the illicit demand of but half an egg . . .

  Those must be almost exactly the words the old man had quoted in that precise Englishman’s English of his. If the King permitted the illicit demand of but half an egg . . . What?

  Above, hanging evidently unsafe from the mazy cracked ceiling, the ancient broad-bladed fan heaved its way round once more. Each time it seemed as if, always at exactly the same point, it was going to come at last to a halt. It would slow, all but stop, and then, barely moving over whatever small obstacle there was in its works— a grain of heavy red dust? a flake of old yellowed plaster?—and with a little “bock” continue its weary revolution.

  The sound was maddening. Errr-bock. Long pause. Then again: errr-bock.

  Its dull-white lazily twisted blades were hardly stirring the thick air. The thermometer must be at the hundred-degree mark. At least. And nothing here in the wide countryside to fend off the relentless sun.

  Half an egg. If the King permits the illicit demand of but half an egg, his soldiers will extort a thousand capons. Yes, that was it. A thousand capons, that precise dry voice had articulated. A capon was an out-of-date English word for a cockerel that had been castrated so as to make it fatten better. Somewhere once he had learnt that.

  A thousand capons and . . . And then what?

  Ah, yes. Yes, got it ". . . and roast them on the spit.” The old man—that leathery face, those sunken eyes on either side of his curious squashed beak of a nose—had been quoting in English, but the words were those of a Muslim poet. The ranked shelves in that long, high-ceilinged room were crammed with books in Urdu, old and leather-bound. Mostly poetry, the judge had said. But a good many law books in English, too.

  “Poetry is the solace of my retirement, Inspector.”

  What did “solace” mean exactly? If only he could be certain he was understanding everything the old man said. It would be one obstacle out of the way in trying to offer him the protection he had been sent all this way to provide. But then those elaborate English words were, quite likely, being used with the object of making his own task more difficult. Because if any one thing was plain it was that the judge did not want his help.

  “I am at a loss really to understand, Inspector—or ought I to call you ‘Doctor? You are, after all, Dr. Ghote, the research assistant, are you not? I am at a loss to understand why your presence here is necessary.”

  “Well, sir, you have, isn’t it, received a number of threats to your life.”

  “Doctor.” Why had the deputy commissioner insisted on his being called “Doctor”? It was ridiculous. He had no idea of the way a Doctor of Philosophy should behave. The deputy commissioner had got carried away. There was no denying that. Giving him some sort of cover story was sensible enough, since the judge had apparently made it a condition that he should not have anyone known to be a police wallah in his house, and making him out to be a research assistant come to help with the old man’s memoirs was as good a disguise as any. But a Doctor of Philosophy. No, that really passed the limit.

  Then Sir Asif had laughed. A dry cackle in the dry air of the high, faded room.

  “Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person’s life is a criminal offence.”

  And then the eyes on either side of that flattened beak of a nose had momentarily flashed.

  “I do not need any inspector from the Bombay C.I.D. to tell me the law. May I remind you that I was a judge of the Madras High Court for five years before my enforced retirement. And a sessions judge before that. And an assistant judge before that. And a subjudge before that.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I did not mean . ."

  It was difficult enough to protect a person determined to object to any form of protection. And more difficult still to have to supply that protection while pretending all the time to be simply here to help with the judge’s memoirs, memoirs that until now had never been so much as mentioned. But doubly and trebly difficult to have to do all that and to battle against that persons apparent resolve to make life as awkward for you as possible.

  Errr-bock. Pause, long pause. Then again at last: errr-bock.

  And the damned thing really did almost nothing to relieve the heat. Back in Bombay, even if you seldom found yourself anywhere with first-class air-conditioning, at least fans usually revolved at a reasonable speed. But here, out in the furthest mofussil, the generator in the tin shed under the big tamarind tree down at the far end of the gardens near the ruined fort must be almost as old as the dawning of the age of electricity, jerking out its feeble power like the slow pulsing of the blood in the old judge’s veins.

  It was too swelteringly hot even to think.

  Errr-bock.

  And what had he succeeded in achieving in the time he had been at the old house? Nothing. Nothing, except get his one interview with the judge. And a lot of good that had been. A blank refusal to assist him in any way.

  “No, Doctor—it is ‘Doctor’ you are to be called, isn’t it?—no, Doctor, I do not think it lies within the confines of my duty to fill your head with a lot of idle suppositions.”

  If the old man had asked him once whether he was “to be called Doctor” he had asked him it a dozen times in the course of that extremely unpleasant half-hour.

  And almost every minute of the thirty a sheer waste. Hardly a thing learnt.

  “Oh, I realise, Insp— I realise, Doctor, that you had no option but to come here on that absurd pretext of yours. My cousin in Bombay is after all a respected M.L.A. and members of the Legislative Assembly, especially if in their day they have been ministers, have a way of making life very difficult for senior police officials if their requests are not acceded to. And, yes, my daughter was so foolish as to tell Cousin Iftikhar that these ridiculous notes had been found about the house here purporting to threaten my life. But none of that means that I am bound, as you put it, to assist in your inquiries. Far from it.”

  For a few sullen moments there in the room permeated with the faintly rotten smell of old leather bindings mildewed in monsoon after monsoon he had thought darkly that surely he did have the right to get answers. After all, there was su
ch a thing as Indian Penal Code Section 179, and he himself was a public servant authorised to question. But all too soon he had, with a sigh, abandoned the notion. Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim would with laughable ease, and at interminable length, argue out the case against and somehow win it hands down. No, the only thing had been to hang on with a muttered “if you say so, sir” and then to listen once more to the blank refusal. In that bloody precise English.

  “Sir, could you at least let me examine one or more of these threatening letters?”

  “Certainly not. Doctor. Of their nature they were private communications addressed exclusively to myself.”

  “But, sir, it might be possible to tell from the handwriting what is the community of the individual who wrote them.”

  “Hardly, I think. The notes were typewritten.”

  “Typewritten? But, sir, in such a place as this, remote from civilisation, there cannot be—”

  “Remote from civilisation? Inspector?”

  The old mans eyes had slowly surveyed then the fine proportions of the long dim room. They had ranged over the ranks of leather-bound books in the shelves all round it. They had rested as deliberately here and there on a finely carved chair or table, on the pair of tall beautifully shaped blue vases standing on either side of the wide doorway. They had finally glanced at the fine Bokhara rugs covering the ancient crack criss-crossed marble floor.

  Ghote had felt the dark blush coming up from the moment his thoughtless words had been so sharply interrupted. And he had been unable to prevent it at last flushing his whole face.

  “I mean, sir, in such a remote locality.”

  He had actually had to make the last part of the journey by bullock cart. In this day and age. The plane, the train to the nearest town and a call on the District Superintendent of Police to be assured that no suspicious strangers had been observed in the neighbourhood, then the ride in a battered old hired car, and, in the end, when at the village a mile or so from the house they had come to a halt outside the building of the Rural Co-operative and his driver had announced “All change, sahib,” the bullock cart. In it he had groaned and creaked under the deadening sun as far as the almost dried-up river that marked the boundary of the gardens of the house, had bounced and jolted while the cart’s owner had, with much twisting of his animal’s thick tail, got them across the river’s wide stony bed and at last had reached the big old place itself. Which had been solidly asleep in the beating heat. As it was now.

  He had had the devil of a time, too, to rouse anyone. Only at last by shouting in the thick, sun-jellied air had he wakened Raman, the judge’s long-serving orderly. Poor Raman had received a terrible shelling from Sir Asif afterwards for not having been there up and about waiting to let him in, even though Raman could not possibly have been expected to know when this rare guest would reach the house. The old man’s anger had raged on so long that he himself had at last felt obliged to intervene—only to be given a look of cold silence which had been his first hint of what relations between himself and the man he had been sent to protect were going to be.

  Well, at least in his private interview later he had discovered one new fact. That the threatening notes had been typed. And it was a fact that might well be useful to him. Remote from civilisation as they were here, it should be possible to track down whatever typewriters were in existence. The notes, after all, if what Sir Asifs cousin, that influential M.L.A., had told the deputy commissioner was correct, had not been delivered at the old house by post but had simply appeared mysteriously in places where it was likely that the judge would see them. Where, just once, the judge’s daughter had seen one.

  Or . . .

  Despite the stifling blanket of the afternoon heat Ghote’s mind began to work a little.

  Or where perhaps Begum Roshan herself had deliberately placed a note so that she could pretend to find it and thus by bringing in some official police pressure persuade her father to do something— but what? what?—that earlier anonymous threats had failed to induce him to do.

  But no—the heat must be making him stupid—it had been clear from the wording of the note that its thread had been connected with men Sir Asif had sentenced to death long ago in the famous Madrai Conspiracy Case, and Begum Roshan could not possibly have any connection with them.

  17 days only remaining. Sentence of death will be carried out in connection with the law by means of an explosive detonation, justice must be seen to be done.

  That, so far as Begum Roshan had been able to remember and her influential cousin to repeat, had been the precise wording of the one note—why had Begum Roshan not thought to mention that it had been typed—that anyone other than Sir Asif had seen, though he had admitted to his daughter that he had received others. And its message had seemed clear enough. Seventeen days from when the note had been found came exactly to the thirtieth anniversary of the day on which Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim had pronounced sentence of death on the group of patriots who had become known far and wide as the Madurai Conspirators. It had been a sentence imposed in accordance with the strictest legality. But, with the end of the British Raj then clearly in sight, it had been a piece of judicial in-transigeance that had brought a tempest of abuse onto Sir Asif's head. It was still remembered by people such as the deputy commissioner, and had led as soon as independence had been achieved to his rapid retirement.

  What had made it clear beyond doubt that the note Begum Roshan had seen referred to the Madurai Conspirators was the expression “by means of an explosive detonation.” Ghote in his hurried reading back in Bombay of the yellow-dried reports of the case had found that exact phrase running through them from start to finish. It had been “by means of an explosive detonation” that the conspirators had intended to assassinate the governor of Madras, and it had been because of that intention that Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim had sentenced the prisoners to death. For all that they had been arrested before they could carry out their plan.

  But of those “17 days only remaining” now just twelve were left.

  By the time Begum Roshan had made up her mind that with her father blankly refusing to have the local police informed, though they had since at a request from Bombay discreetly checked any strangers in the locality, she must seek the help of her influential cousin, the M.L.A., and by the time the latter had contacted the deputy commissioner a good many precious hours had been lost.

  Not that, once his own long journey culminating in the slow progress through the baking heat of the lumbering bullock cart had been completed, he had been able to make anything approaching rapid progress.

  He stirred angrily on the hard surface of the sheet-covered mattress. He must do something more. He must take more decisive steps than conduct almost furtive conversations with the other inhabitants of the old, slowly decaying house, trying all the time to avoid the judge’s coldly caustic eye.

  And trying equally to keep up the ridiculous pretence of being “Dr. Ghote.” Dr. Ghote helping old Sir Asif with his suddenly appearing from nowhere memoirs. As if anyone anywhere in India would dare, surely even now, to publish the autobiography of the man who had sentenced the Madurai Conspirators.

  At least the people he had to investigate in this doubly clumsy manner were few in number. The fact that the threatening notes had been written in English, and good English too, and had been typed had put out of reckoning at one stroke all the servants. Not that there were so many of them now. And he had as well been able to discount such villagers who had occasion to come up to the house, individuals like the milkman appearing just after dawn with his heavy-uddered cow, a bleating calf at her side, its head halfcovered in a muslin muzzle to prevent it getting at the milk its noise was helping to make flow, or, from further away, the postman on his bicycle, white Gandhi cap hardly fending off the oppressive sun, making his rare calls.

  So there had remained really only three possibilities. A curious collection, and each in a different way unlikely.

  First, and unlikeliest of all—t
hough not, he felt, totally to be dismissed—was Begum Roshan herself. Clearly she had no connection with the Madurai Conspirators. But, from what he had been able to gather, in those distant days, when she would have been in her early twenties at most, she had not been cooped up in a house in the mofussil as housekeeper to her father but had been out in the world, aware of events around her.

  Next, there was the Saint. And how could you really suspect such a figure, a man devoted to walking the length and breadth of India with the mission of making all men brothers? But it was true nevertheless, a well-known fact, that in those distant days of the freedom struggle he had been one of the foremost in the fight. Yet that was long ago. And he had since beyond doubt “changed his garb,” as they said, put on the saffron garments of the holy man, and adopted the name of Anand Baba, father of bliss. He might be an unapproachable figure—as yet there had been no opportunity of speaking to him—but he was not a figure to suspect. Never.

  Still, what was he doing here, in the house of a well-known Muslim landlord family? It seemed that he stayed here whenever his wanderings brought him anywhere near the district. Yet he and the judge appeared to have nothing in common. Certainly they were less fiercely opposed than when one had been a leader in the Quit India movement and the other an inflexible upholder of the law of the British Raj. But they were still poles apart. The Hindu ascetic and the Muslim lover of fine things; the preacher of an all- embracing love and the fierce believer in a limiting and restrictive legal code.

  It was a puzzle.

  But hardly more of a puzzle than the third English speaker, possible typewriter-user, in the house. The American. The priest (if he was a priest), Father Adam.

  When he had first met him, on the evening of his own arrival, he thought he had misheard the judges introduction. As if, with that precise English, that was possible. But “Father Adam.” And the lean, pale, young American, with his tangle of dark eyebrows meeting above intense hollow eyes, wearing not one of the billowing white robes tied at the waist with white rope that a Christian priest ought to wear but a check shirt in bold red and blue and informal khaki pants with only a plain black necktie loosely tied as an evident concession to the judges views on the dress appropriate for dinner.