Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  In between sending out fresh parties to new locations, and to old locations yet once more, Sir Asif listened with exhausted patience to Ghote’s explanations.

  “Sir, all along I ought to have seen it. Damn it, sir, I found him just outside this very room at the time you had been left the note saying '12 days only remaining,’ and, sir, there was the fact of that '12' being written in figures only, that should have been a clue to me. And then when I heard someone typing in one of the rooms in the passage leading to the kitchen quarters I actually found him lying there in the kitchen, only I believed he was sleeping. Because I did not think of him at all, sir, as being possible. I had drawn that line, sir, under the typewriter-using individuals. That appalling line.”

  “As I had, too, Inspector. As I had, too. It was a reasonable assumption to make. Perfectly reasonable.”

  “Well, sir, I do not know. Certainly Raman seldom used any words of English, and when he did he got them altogether muddled.”

  “Yes, there was every reason to put him out of account, my dear fellow. And I still do not understand why he should have chosen the thirtieth anniversary of my sentences in the Madurai Case as his terminus ad quem. What interest was that to him?”

  *Terminus ad quem” was what Ghote did not understand, though he could make a guess at what it meant. The final hour. For the judge.

  “Sir, I think it was like this,” he replied. “Raman was not, as you said, particularly concerned about the Madurai Trial. He was concerned about his own trial shortly before that. When you freed him on the ground of—what was it, sir?—falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. He thought always, you know, sir, that you had released him simply in order to be your orderly. And you told him then that if you had had to sentence him you would have given him thirty years. So he got it into his head that he had to serve just thirty years in your employ.”

  “Good God, man, you’re perfectly right. The wretch tried to give me his notice just a few weeks ago, told me in so many words that he had served his thirty years and wanted to go home, to the South. I couldn’t make out what the thirty years nonsense was all about, and I told him that in any case he would be a fool to give up a job in which he was perfectly happy. And he was happy, you know, he was. Of course, I slanged him from time to time, but he never took any notice of that.”

  “Yes, sir, I agree. Whatever you said to him, sir, did not at all disturb him. He was a most extraordinarily patient fellow. Except for his one sticking point, sir: that he thought that at the end of thirty years he would be allowed to go home, to a home, I expect, that he believed would be just as it had been thirty years ago.”

  “Yes, he certainly believed that. Told me as much on many occasions. And nothing I could say would persuade him that it would not be so.”

  The judge sighed deeply.

  “But none of this alters the fact that the fellow has got hold of this dangerous explosive of yours, Inspector. And that must be found. If we have to stay up all night to find it, we must get hold of it before it kills someone else.”

  And they did stay up all night. But they did not find the gelignite. And they did not find Raman.

  But they found his traces.

  It was at a very late stage of the night. The big old house was still busy. Servants carrying lanterns were hurrying here and there, quite pointlessly for the most part. Lights in the rooms where they were installed were being flicked on and off. And then, for no particular reason, it came into Ghote s head where Raman would have hidden his stolen explosive.

  He had left the library then without a word to Sir Asif, had run all the way up the wide stairs, had hurried fast as he could to the long-deserted bedroom that Sir Asif had once shared with Lady Ibrahim. Without ceremony he had burst in, run round to where on the far side of the big high bed with its stiffly folded bedcover there was that pile of light wooden crates containing the objects ordered from distant Bombay by Lady Ibrahim before she had died and which had been scarcely opened on their arrival.

  He had carefully lifted the thin wooden lid of the top crate. And had found what he had guessed would be there.

  Or nearly so. Because there were not the half-dozen oozing sticks of explosive he had hoped for nestling among the wood shavings that had for so many years protected a lamp, only the wrapper from one of them, stained and unmistakable, and a faint whiff of a rich, unpleasant odour.

  “Well, sir,” he said when he reported his discovery to Sir Asif, “it means one thing for certain. He is definitely somewhere near, waiting for his chance to use the stuff.”

  “Yes, my dear chap, I think we must accept that conclusively now. But you know this house. He could hide in it for a week and evade capture.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The judge looked, with eyes suddenly stiff with tiredness, at his watch.

  “Well, sir, it must be getting on for first light now. We can expect something at any time.”

  “I dare say the fellow will wait until it is fully light,” Sir Asif said. “Official time means little to him. As far as he’s concerned a day begins with the daylight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So, Inspector, as soon as the day does begin I wish to be left alone in here. Quite alone. Is that understood?”

  He understood at once. The old man saw it as his duty to isolate himself completely, so that if Raman did succeed in setting off the gelignite it would kill no one but himself.

  It was a brave decision.

  But, Ghote realised, he would have been disappointed if the judge had said anything else.

  “Yes, sir. I do understand.”

  “Good.”

  The old man looked up at him then.

  “But, Inspector.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Find him if you can. Find him and tell the foolish fellow that if he wants to go and live in the South, well, of course he can go. And that when he realises things are not quite as he had expected them, I'll have him back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He went then to try to get some more order into the bleating chaos of the search. But he knew that if they did hit on Raman’s hiding place it would be no more than by luck. The house was too big. It was too old. It had too many never-visited nooks and crannies. A search for signs of occupation in one of its many rooms, like his own in the early days of the affair, was a reasonably practical proposition. If someone had been living in some particular part of the house it had been reasonable to hope to find signs of that. But to dig out anyone playing hide-and-seek amid all its many possibilities was quite another matter.

  And there were the gardens, too.

  So, when at last the night, such a night as the old house had not known for years, perhaps for a century, came to an end, nothing more had been discovered. The traceried windows showed the first diin white light of the new day. From across the river came the frenzied sound of the milkmans muzzled calf as he drove his cow up to the kitchen quarters. And the situation was just as it had been when they had first realised that Raman was missing.

  Ghote went down to see Sir Asif again. The old man was sitting in his chair where he had been almost all the night. His eyes looked as if they were closed.

  Ghote coughed.

  The judge jerked more upright.

  “Ah. Ah, it’s you, my dear chap. And daylight. Daylight, too. Would you be good enough to put out that lamp? And then if you’ll leave me.”

  “Yes, sir. Yes. But . . ”

  “But what, my dear fellow?”

  “But, sir, is there nothing that I can do for you?”

  “No, no. Just make sure no idiot of a servant comes trying to bring me anything. I shan’t need it, whatever it is.”

  The deep-sunk eyes in the leathery face looked at him with a sudden sharp twinkle.

  “I dare say I shall never need anything any more.”

  “Well, sir, I hope we can catch him before he gets to you.”

  “Before he sets that damned stuff off by accident and kills someone
else, Inspector.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ghote left him for the last time then. There was nothing else to do.

  And the slow morning went slowly by. Ghote superintended a new and better search of the gardens. He even took it on himself to carry Sikander’s tray out to the fort, nurturing a tiny hope that his own hunt there the night before had not been thorough enough. But it was a vain hope.

  He prowled round the area of the house which he had ordered to be evacuated, hoping somehow to intercept Raman on his way with the gelignite. But he knew that it was not practical to guard every access, and he was not sure that he altogether wanted to. If Raman could be attracted by Sir Asif sitting alone there in the library and came out into the open, perhaps that would be the best way of dealing with the situation.

  The cook produced breakfast, as always. There was porridge for Sir Asif that stood all the while cooling in his empty place. But no one ate very much of anything.

  And lunch, too, appeared as usual. The same oily brown soup, the same roasted chicken. Begum Roshan wanted to take a tray to her father. But Ghote managed to persuade her that the gesture would not be appreciated.

  But, just as the meal was over, the old man emerged from his seclusion.

  “I am going upstairs to sleep,” he said. “Someone as old as I am needs his rest, and I cannot get mine in that chair there. So, Ghote, my good fellow, will you see that no one goes anywhere near my room?”

  “Yes, of course, Sir Asif. And, sir, since he has made no attempt up to now, do you think that after all he means not to? That he has changed his mind, sir?”

  “No,” the judge answered, his voice level and elaborately articulate as ever. “No, I think that he still intends to murder me. I am, you know, the man who did not release him at the end of his thirty-year term for another murder.”

  Ghote watched the judge turn and leave. Slow steps, but steady ones, cane tapping in front of him.

  He felt a gush of admiration for the man. To face his end like that, with so much calm. To see his duty and simply to do it. He imagined him, after he had made his way step by step up the stairs, going slowly into his room, the room he had occupied for so many years, and there taking his afternoon sleep as it was his custom to do. His bed would be awaiting him, if for once without its cover turned down by his orderly of thirty years. And neither would the fan above the bed have been switched on. Did that one too go maddeningly “errr-bock, errr-bock” all afternoon? Probably it did. From what he had seen of it when he had gone into the room during his search of the house all those days ago it had been—

  The thought came to his mind like a hammer blow.

  In an instant he had pelted along the passage in the judge’s wake. Not in the hall. Not on the stairs. He tore up those in his turn, straining leg muscles, arms extended in front of him.

  He reached the stairhead. He flung himself round.

  Not there. Not in the passage.

  But the door of the judge’s room was still open, a flood of white light pouring into the shadowy passage.

  “Stop,” he shouted.

  He ran forward, slithered on the veiny marble of the floor, reached the doorway.

  The judge was standing there, leaning on his stick. His hand was reaching out to the bakelite switch for the fan.

  Ghote dived forward, arm thrust out. He knocked the frail, high-veined hand down just one moment before it would have flicked on the switch.

  And, sure enough, after many apologies and explanations, when he clambered up onto the judge’s high, hard bed, without even removing his shoes, and peered at the untuming fan hanging there, it was quite plain that the bowl-shaped motor casing had recently been removed and replaced. The gap between its upper rim and the cracked plaster of the ceiling was a good deal wider than it had been and, just visible in it, there was a comer of greasily stained paper like the piece he had found in the crate in Lady Ibrahim’s long-preserved room next door.

  “Yes,” he said to the judge, backing up half a step on the hard cushiony surface of the bed. “Yes, it is here. We have found it. All is well.”

  He saw Sir Asif peer up at him, marked by a clear anxiety.

  “My dear fellow, that is excellent. Excellent. But you aren’t going to attempt to remove the stuff, are you?”

  Ghote looked down at him.

  “Oh no, sir,” he answered. “No, no. There are some things where I altogether draw the line.”