The tribute to Johnananda, if it was a tribute, surprised Ghote a little. But he was prevented from pursuing the subject.
There was a bellow from just behind him.
“I tell you I can spot a killer at fifty paces, and that guy—”
“You want another crack at him, Inspector?” Lieutenant Foster cut across the protestations.
“No,” Ghote said. “No, it is not Johnananda I am wishing to talk with. It is somebody else, and this is a matter I was wanting to ask you about, please.”
“Ask. Who is this?”
“It is Miss Nirmala Shahani.”
The lieutenant looked up sharply.
“Are you going to try and finger her for this?” he asked. “You’re not going home smelling of roses if you do.”
“No. No, I would not. But if it is the truth that she killed the swami, then I would be very glad to prove it.”
“And you think it is? You think it may be after all?”
“I do not know,” Ghote answered soberly. “But, Lieutenant, there are things I must ask her, and I must ask them in such circumstances that she will tell me more than she has told up to now.”
“What circumstances?”
The lieutenant’s grey eyes were suddenly curious.
“I am wishing to question Miss Shahani at the scene of the crime, inside Swami’s house.”
“I see.” The lieutenant remained silent for what seemed a long time.
“No reason, so far as I can see,” he said at last, “why I shouldn’t tell the deputies guarding the place that my Bombay colleague can go have another look-see if he wants.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Ghote turned to go.
“Hoskins,” the lieutenant’s cold voice came from behind him, “if one word of this gets out, I personally will tear your licence into little pieces.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fred Hoskins.
But Ghote was unable to prevent the hulking private eye going with him to the swami’s fantastically-roofed house with Nirmala Shahani when he had found the girl in her hut and contrived to get her to accompany him without saying what their destination was.
When they had reached the central circle of the ashram and it had become clear they were heading for the swami’s house, she had momentarily jibbed.
“Where—where are we going?”
Ghote had put a firm hand to her elbow. He was determined to test her in the way he thought necessary. If she really had quarrelled with the swami, had somehow come to snatch up his razor, had attacked him with it and had then spirited both the weapon and herself out of the big, bare room—but how? how?—then the best chance of breaking through the veneer of lies she must have told him earlier lay in tackling her on the very spot where that bloody deed had been done.
Yet, looking down at her pretty face now, with that absurd, soft puppy nose, he found it hard to press on with what he knew he had to do.
If he had had a daughter …
“We are going into Swami’s house. Do you mind that?”
Abruptly she straightened in his grasp.
“What is there to mind? I would be where Swamiji’s spirit is.”
Nevertheless, inside, looking at the empty room with its blank wooden walls, its yellow-covered cushion throne, its white telephone, still dismembered after Lieutenant Foster’s technicians’ work on it, its close-fitting boarded floor with almost at the centre a dark-pink chalk outline and a rust-brown stain next to it, he was aware that the girl had shrunk deeply into herself.
He could feel it through the fingers of the hand that still grasped her elbow.
For one violent instant he wished that Fred Hoskins had not come into the lobby behind them. Alone with the girl he could have reassured her. Then, as violently, he was glad for once of the big private eye’s hovering presence. Because the girl must not be reassured.
It could be—perhaps only just, but it could be—that she had lied to him before and had been lying again just a minute ago when she had said what she had about Swami’s spirit.
And supposing what he guessed might have happened had happened. Supposing there had been a quarrel, that the razor had been snatched up, that a wild sweeping blow had by chance been as effective as a slash deliberately inflicted by the man himself. Then, since she had not at once run out of the house weeping and screaming and shouting out for anybody there to hear about the terrible thing she had been unlucky enough to have done, then she must be prepared now still to lie. To lie and lie and lie again, and hope against hope that she would get away with it.
But, if that was the situation she was faced with, the strain on her—she was little more than a child after all—must be tremendous. A single jarring blow could snap her. Could snap her and reveal the truth. And provide an answer, an answer that must exist, to that absurd riddle of the vanished razor. That absurd and horribly demanding mystery.
Yet before he put his first question, before he delivered the jarring blow, he hesitated.
In the deepest part of his mind he did not expect that blow, however well delivered, was going to produce the answer. In the deepest part of his mind he was convinced that he already knew the answer and that it would not begin with a confession from Nirmala Shahani. It would begin with the fact that Swami had taken his own life. There, deep down, he knew this to be true, for all that, scrabble as he might, he could not tease to the surface the next step in the train of logic that must lie there. The train that would end by his being able to explain, in terms that would satisfy the scientists of the Sheriff’s Department, just what had happened.
SIXTEEN
Ghote, sure of his deep-down conviction that the swami had committed suicide and had, by purely mechanical means, got rid of the razor he had used with the object of making a gesture which the world would be unable to ignore, hesitated to bang down in front of Nirmala Shahani’s pretty, puppy-nose face a question brutal, enough to break her if his belief was unfounded and she herself had killed the Swami.
But he knew that the logic of the situation, the logic of the four only who had known where the swami was going to be at the time he had died, meant that the girl had to be tackled and tackled so toughly that she would come out with the truth whatever it was.
He hesitated. But he did no more than hesitate.
“Miss Shahani, when you came here, here to Swami’s house, at midnight, what was it that you quarrelled over?”
“No.”
The girl’s illogical shout was a protest, a wild outflung protest.
Yet what exactly had she been protesting against? Was it against his flat assertion that she had come to the swami when she had earlier told him she had not? Or was it against admitting to her mind once more a scene that must be appallingly horrible to her?
“Come, it is no use to say no and no. That tale you were telling before, it was ridiculous only. Swami going to call you to him by putting the thought into your head. What nonsense. What nonsense only.”
“No. No, I tell you. No. He said that to me. He did. He made me that promise.”
“Miss Shahani, the time for lies is past. Swami could not have called you to him in that way. You know that.”
“No.”
But this protest was much, much less vigorous. There was a clear sound of strain underneath it. A hint of a whimper.
“Why deny and deny?” Ghote pressed in. “Why go on like this? You know it is no use.”
“But he did say that to me. He could have called me by thought.”
He saw tears now in the big brown eyes on either side of that soft, absurd smudge of a nose. But tears were what he wanted to see. They were what he had to see if the girl was to break. And if the answer to that mystery, the answer to where that vanished razor was, did after all lie with her, then she must be made to weep and to howl. And to confess.
“More nonsense. More utter rubbish only. That man could never have called you from your sleep by the power of his mind. You decided to go to him, isn’t it?
You wanted to come, and you pretended he had called. So you came.”
“No, no, no. I never came. He never called.”
“But you believed that he could? What happened when you found he could not?”
If she was not yet going to confess to murder, or if in fact she had nothing to confess, then, now that she was near desperation, perhaps he could wring from her at least an admission that the swami was not all she had thought. Perhaps he could at least persuade her to come back to Bombay and her father.
Her breast was heaving under the loose-woven orange cotton of the shirt-like kameez she was wearing.
“I did believe he could call me,” she said. “He could have called me. He did not last night. He had to go instead. To go from us all first. But he could have called me to him if he had wished.”
“Why do you believe and believe in that rogue? He could not have called. When did he ever call you before?”
He saw Nirmala’s huge eyes full of despair.
“He had not done it before,” she answered in a voice so low that he had to strain to catch the words, close though they were standing to each other in the big, bare room. “He always had to send someone for me. But that was my fault. My fault. I was not ready. I was not pure enough to hear.”
Less and less was it credible now that Nirmala had quarrelled here with the swami, here on the bare boards of the floor under the bare wood of the high ceiling. But she had not yet been tested to the utmost. If she was a practised liar, she could be lying still. Just. She could just be keeping herself above the swirling flood havoc he was seeking to thrust her down into. And a girl as young as this, as soft-nosed and appealing as a puppy, could yet be a practised liar.
And, damn it, once again he was deprived of the sight of tell-tale toes, this time by a pair of ugly, wooden-soled, slip-on clogs.
“Yes,” he jabbed on. “You are not pure, Nirmala Shahani. There is blood on your hands. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? That blood.”
He pointed, suddenly and stiff-fingered, at the brownish stain not three yards away from them beside the dark-pink chalk outline that called back to his own mind vividly enough the body that had lain there, its luxuriant black locks outflung.
But Nirmala was slowly shaking her head in negative.
“No,” she said, more soberly now, “that did not happen. Swami was not killed by anybody but himself. The time had come for him to leave us, and he went.”
Ghote admitted defeat then.
There was not after all anything to break. He had tested the girl beyond any test that curled-up toes would have given an answer to, beyond any test that the electronic lie-detector would have given an answer to. And she had come through unscathed.
He could not believe, as deep-down he had never believed, that she had indeed come to this building in the middle of the night, had quarrelled with the man she worshipped and had killed him. That razor-slash had not been a million-to-one lucky stroke from her hand. It had been a cut deliberately inflicted by the victim himself. That is what it had looked like when he had first seen it, and that was what it was. He was certain of that now.
Certain of it. And certain too that he was now, beyond dodging, face to face with the mystery of how the man who had cut his own throat had made the weapon that he had done it with disappear.
He raised his head to tell Nirmala Shahani that she could go, but then the thought of the task he had been sent here to California to carry out came back to him again.
“Miss Shahani,” he said, “you may well be right that Swami took his own life. But you are not right when you say that that was anything but a coward’s escape from a confidence trickster’s self-made trap. He did not think the time had come for him to leave a wicked world. He was pressed by troubles, and he took the easiest way out.”
“No.”
Nirmala was back to protesting now. The sound of her angry shout rang and echoed in the big, bare room.
“No,” she repeated, “you are wrong, Inspector. Swamiji was a true great soul. I know it. I know it here.”
Her soft little fist thumped herself somewhere in the region of her heart.
Ghote was not greatly impressed. But she gave him no opportunity to point out that beliefs that were backed only by dim feelings somewhere inside needed to be confirmed by a few hard facts.
“No,” Nirmala tumbled on, all passion and trembling, “Swamiji had to leave this dirty world with its dirty money-grubbing and its dirty lies. But when he went he left behind proof of what he was, of how a great soul can fly above everything in this world. He took away with his spirit the blade that ended his life.”
Ghote clamped his teeth hard together in vexation. He had no answer to that. Or, damn and blast it, he had the answer. Only it was somewhere locked deep in his own head. Seemingly as little able to be confirmed by hard facts as was Nirmala’s declaration that Swami was a great soul.
Nevertheless he was not going to let her think she had had the best of the encounter.
“Miss Shahani,” he said, “I do not believe that Swami took away the razor with which he killed himself by any spiritual means. I know him to be a cheat only. He was cheating Mrs. Russell Walters to get a number-one quality motor car from her. He was bargaining with a person who wants to buy the ashram land just as if he was a Bombay housewife bargaining with a fisherwoman over a fat pomfret. He was perhaps also taking the worst advantage of girls who came here to the ashram believing in him. He could not have made that razor vanish by the power of his mind only.”
“Words,” said Nirmala. “Words, words. Words only.”
Ghote looked at her solemnly.
“Yes,” he said, “they are words only now. But I will prove them. Sooner or later I will prove them.”
It was as surprising to him as anything that he had met in surprising California when Nirmala, instead of turning away with a scornful if childish laugh, looked back at him as solemnly as he had looked at her.
“Inspector Ghote,” she said, “if you can prove that that razor left this room in some ordinary way, then I will know that, as you have said, Swami was not a great yogi. And if that is so, I will come back with you to my father as soon as a plane would take us.”
He stepped back a pace and looked at her, almost dazed.
So she did have doubts. She had doubts buried far inside her. She was not so absolutely sure about the swami as she had claimed to be. She had some tiny niggling suspicion that the man might be a charlatan.
And, if she had that, then his own belief that the razor had not been spirited away, however little supported it was at present by fact, was suddenly all the nearer to being justified.
“Well, Miss Shahani,” he said, conscious that too long a silence had gone by, “we would see. That is all. We would see.”
“You are no longer wanting me?” she asked, a docile girl once more.
“No, no. There is nothing more I am wanting to ask. Nothing.”
She left the bare, airy room straight away, not pausing to take even one last look round.
Was it because she was certain after all that she would have opportunities in plenty to come back here? When the place was a shrine visited daily by hundreds of disciples? Or was it because she could not, bring herself to look at the place that was the very source of her secret doubts?
There was no telling. But this was not the time to be wondering what a girl like Nirmala was or was not thinking. She was not the only one at the very source of doubts. Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote, of the Bombay C.I.D. (temporarily out of station) was also at the exact spot that enshrined the riddle he must find the answer to.
Or, rather, not so much find the answer to as reveal to himself the answer he was sure he had already found, lying where it was in that part of his mind which—blast it—there was no direct way down to.
He would just have to keep dropping random, hopeful fishing-lines into that deep, deep lake. And hope that one of them at last would untangle some thread, and that bit by bit he would then
be able to pull up a whole garment.
At least he was at the very place now where whatever had happened had occurred. That ought to be a help. If he could begin from this spot and slowly and carefully work things out.
“Gan boy, let me inform you I have been greatly interested to see an operative of the Bombay force at work in a hundred percent interrogation situation.”
Fred Hoskins had been quiet, mercifully quiet, not even fully inside Swamis big, bare room but standing at the door of the lobby almost counterpoising giant-like the statue of the lively little Dancing Nataraj on its tall stand. Evidently he was reluctant actually to set foot in a place where, according to his theory, Hindu magic had been performed. If only the fellow had believed that influence was so stong that it would be risky to set foot in the building anywhere. But probably plain ordinary curiosity had worked on him too.
So now that little stretch of promised peace and quiet had been blown to pieces.
“It will have struck you however,” the intolerably loud voice hammered on, “that the conclusion you have reached as a result of your interrogation was the one to which I myself had already come.”
“Yes, Fred,” Ghote said, “what Miss Shahani told did bring me to an inevitable conclusion.”
It was not the conclusion Fred Hoskins had reached, which no doubt was the conclusion he had held on to with teeth clamped hard like a great overgrown bear ever since the beginning of the business, namely that Johnananda being somehow Hindu must be the mysterious murderer. But perhaps the fellow would not ask to have everything spelt out.
“Very well then, Gan, I am going to ask you a question.”
“Yes, Fred?”
“Gan, will you now accompany me to the office occupied by that man John—John—by that man Whatsit and use on him those techniques of interrogation which will produce the confession of how he used his mystical powers to make the razor, together with his own body, transport themselves from the scene to a place of safety?”
Go West, Inspector Ghote Page 18
