The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  He trudged up the wide stairway behind the weighty but indefatigable form of Lala Varde.

  At the top Lala Varde turned to him.

  ‘They will have put him in one of the guest bedrooms,’ he said. ‘He did not live in the house at all. Round the corner he had a room only.’

  From a doorway off the far end of the corridor came the sound of muted voices.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lala Varde, ‘that will be it. Well, Inspector, I will not detain you. There is much to be done.’

  With a suddenness unexpected in so big a person he ducked round the corner leaving Inspector Ghote stranded.

  But not for long.

  Instead of moving towards the room where the unmurdered Mr Perfect lay, the inspector tiptoed rapidly back in the direction Lala Varde had taken.

  He was just in time, as he put his head cautiously round the corner, to see the great fat man take from the folds of his dhoti an ancient rusty-looking iron key.

  The inspector permitted himself a little smile of triumph as Lala Varde hurried away in the direction of the gate behind which his servants had so mysteriously got locked.

  Then he turned back to Mr Perfect.

  The room he had been put in was small and bare of furniture except for a rope bed. A naked electric light bulb and a small fan hung from the ceiling. The sluggishly revolving blades of the fan scarcely stirred the warm night air. A dozen agitated flies buzzing round the light were completely unalarmed by the ineffectual air currents generated less than a yard away.

  The familiar police surgeon was standing rigidly upright at the foot of the bed listening with great intentness to a short, tubby little man with his wide mouth curved in a perpetual grin. A stethoscope bounced and jiggled on his chest as he jabbered away, and Inspector Ghote guessed he was the doctor Lala Varde had summoned. He was so busy making his points to the hawk-eyed, silent police surgeon that he completely failed to see the inspector standing quietly in the doorway.

  Ghote decided to take advantage of the fact that the police surgeon was also not looking in his direction to acquire a little unedited information. The police surgeon he knew of old: he had never yet been induced to commit himself on a single subject no matter how insistent or direct his questioner. Even D.S.P. Samant, on the rare occasions he had come into contact with him, had never succeeded in banging one entirely definite answer out of him.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s a pretty clear case all in all,’ the little frog-grinning doctor said. ‘Pretty clear case, wouldn’t you say?’

  The police surgeon moved his head in an ingenious elliptical arc which could be held to signify either agreement or disagreement.

  ‘Yes, exactly, exactly,’ the frog doctor said. ‘You have all the symptoms there. Weak pulse, but quite distinct at the brachial artery, and rapid and irregular. Wasn’t that so?’

  The police surgeon pursed his lips intently.

  ‘Then we have pupillary reaction. A classical example. Reacting to light just like that. And no sign of inequality, no sign at all.’

  He looked up at his tall and silent colleague in sudden anxiety.

  ‘You didn’t detect any irregularity, did you?’ he asked.

  The police surgeon grunted with razor-poised ambiguity.

  ‘No, exactly. Not a sign. And no bleeding at the ears, no bleeding at the ears. No fluid either. Thankful for that, eh?’

  The police surgeon lowered his eyelids till his eyes were almost shut and then opened them sharply.

  ‘Ah, yes, yes, yes. Quite so. And respiration? What did you think of that?’

  The police surgeon let a stern smile move the corners of his lips.

  ‘Yes, just as one might expect. Slow and shallow. Very shallow, sighing almost. Would you say sighing?’

  A barked cough.

  ‘Yes. Classical case. Concussion, linear fracture of the back of the skull, no immediate sign of brain compression. I think that about sums it up. Hm?’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘So, I tell you this as colleague to colleague: I intend to recommend home nursing. Day and night, of course, day and night. I can put Mr Varde on to a thoroughly reliable team. They know me, I know them. We’ve worked –’

  Inspector Ghote, deciding he had learnt a reasonable amount, coughed delicately.

  The little frog-faced doctor wheeled round.

  ‘Good gracious,’ he said. ‘Policeman.’

  He looked discountenanced.

  ‘Good evening,’ the inspector said. ‘My name is Ghote, Inspector C.I.D. I do not think we have met before.’

  ‘Doctor Das, personal medical adviser to Mr Varde.’

  A hand shot out to be shaken.

  ‘It would be a great help,’ Inspector Ghote said, ‘to know whether the patient is likely to regain consciousness in the immediate future or not. In the case of the former eventuality a full and complete statement might be obtained.’

  He looked at the police surgeon.

  ‘That would undoubtedly be most valuable,’ the answer came.

  Luckily Doctor Das was prepared to embroider on the theme.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘a difficulty indeed. You decide that the attack was carried out by, let us say, X. And promptly the victim regains consciousness and announces that he was attacked by Y. Most unfortunate, most unfortunate.’

  He giggled happily.

  ‘He may regain consciousness at any minute,’ the police surgeon said abruptly.

  Inspector Ghote looked at him as if he was a wild, matted-haired, dust-streaked sadhu who had suddenly offered him a cocktail.

  The police surgeon coughed.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘unconsciousness may persist for some considerable time. Either is equally likely.’

  Doctor Das clasped his little frog-paws together and popped in a new contribution.

  ‘There’s the nature of the wound, you know,’ he said. ‘At the very back of the cranium. He may recover completely and be quite unable to tell you who hit him. They may have come at him right from behind. Ah, yes, indeed.’

  The police surgeon turned his stern face towards the inspector.

  ‘We have also to take into account the possibility of amnesia,’ he said. ‘The victim may remember absolutely nothing of any events leading up to the attack. On the other hand, he may.’

  Inspector Ghote felt that this line of inquiry had definitely come to an end. He tried something else.

  ‘The nature of the wound,’ he said, ‘was it such that it could have been inflicted by a strong man only?’

  ‘Difficult to say,’ replied the police surgeon as promptly as a clock.

  The inspector looked at Doctor Das. But this time he was to get no help.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘May I look at the patient myself, Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I see no reasonable objection to that,’ Doctor Das said. ‘After all, the poor chap is deeply unconscious. A careful examination, conducted with discretion, mind, is hardly likely to have any deleterious effect. Wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?’

  ‘Ha.’

  Doctor Das evidently decided to interpret this as agreement. He beckoned Inspector Ghote towards the string bed.

  Mr Perfect lay, it would appear, much as he had been found by Lala Varde. The high collar of the atchkan he wore had been opened, but nothing else had been disturbed. Three ball-point pens were neatly clipped on to one of his pockets. The red one had leaked and a small pinkish stain was spreading over the white cotton of the atchkan. Neatly folded on the floor beside the bed were the injured man’s metal-framed spectacles. One of the lenses was cracked and had been mended with transparent tape.

  Doctor Das lifted the great pad of white bandages gently away from the back of the grey-haired skull.

  The wound was curious in shape. It looked as if it had been inflicted, not with the traditional rounded blunt instrument, but with something long and knobby.

  ‘Would a stick only inflict such injury?’ the inspector asked.r />
  ‘I shall bear the point in mind in my report to the D.S.P.,’ the police surgeon said.

  It was a victory. Of a sort.

  The inspector stayed standing at the head of the tattered charpoy looking down at the elongated form of Mr Perfect. He could just detect eventually the faint irregular movement of the white atchkan which was evidence of the unconscious man’s light, shallow breathing.

  He felt that every tremulous, sighing breath might be the last. The life before him hung on so slender a thread.

  On one fitful exhalation hung the difference between murder and not-murder. If that breath ceased, then Mr Perfect would have been killed. The Perfect Murder would have truly taken place.

  The inspector’s mouth went suddenly dry and his heart began to beat thumpingly. He was possessed by an uncontrollable conviction that, if he found himself handling the Perfect Murder in actual fact, it would be exactly a perfect murder. Perfect, motiveless, never to be solved.

  ‘Well, there he is,’ Doctor Das broke in cheerfully. ‘Not a sign of change as you can see for yourself. I dare say he’ll be lying there just as he is this time three weeks; or three months.’

  He began replacing the pad of bandages with neat, indifferent fingers.

  ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘regular attention is indispensable, cost what it may.’

  Inspector Ghote thought of the beggars lying day and night, fine or wet, on the pavements of the city in their hundreds.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have to attend to the course of the investigation.’

  He marched stiffly out of the room and went downstairs.

  The house was much more animated now. The servants, freed from their unusual captivity, were scuttling to and fro ostensibly to see to Lala Varde’s comfort, in reality to gossip and speculate over the dramatic event that had entered into the pattern of their lives.

  The inspector caught one glimpse of Lala Varde himself, sitting in a big cane chair near a pair of french windows opened on to the cool of the inner courtyard of the big house. A large whisky stood by his side. His feet were being assiduously pressed by a kneeling woman servant. A tiny, erect little stick of a bearer was busy adding clove, cardamom and coconut to the chips of nut lying in a betel leaf, ready to present his master at the first sign of need with a neatly folded, deliciously luscious paan.

  Inspector Ghote decided there was everything to be said for not disturbing the master of the house for the time being.

  He made his way to the room where Mr Perfect had been found and shut the door behind him. Then in accordance with the rules as laid down in Gross he took out his notebook and starting at the door listed each object in a sweep following the same direction as the hands of a clock.

  The very thought that he was carrying out a procedure in exactly the fashion recommended came as a considerable comfort to him. He did not hurry. And even this, he remembered, was to his credit. Doctor Hans Gross has some very scathing things to say about the ‘expeditious investigator’.

  There were a good many objects to describe although the room was small. Evidently it formed a convenient place near the door to the house for putting things for which no home could be found. There was a bookshelf, mostly filled with ageing newspapers, but containing on its top a tattered row of miscellaneous volumes. Inspector Ghote wrote down the name of each one.

  Next to the bookcase was a small table on which there rested a bunch of long brass keys, evidently disused, an electric torch (without battery), a black umbrella with a brightly coloured plastic handle, and four empty match-boxes. Next in the circular tour came a tall display cabinet on the top of which, side by side, were an oil lamp in enamelled Benares work and a brass candlestick of European manufacture. On the other shelves were an assortment of glassware, a golf club and an air cushion, punctured.

  On the floor up against the wall there was a clock without hands, a painting in the Moghul style, and a brass plate inscribed Varde Building Enterprises (Private) Ltd.

  Inspector Ghote called a constable and instructed him in the method of storing large objects to avoid smudging finger-prints as recommended in Gross. Then he told him to apply it to the golf club.

  He had the foresight to return to the room almost at once and was able to prevent the constable picking up the golf club in his bare hands.

  Taking a careful note of the exact position of the small streak of blood on the floor, the sole evidence of the attack, the inspector went back to the courtyard to question Lala Varde again.

  He found him fast asleep.

  In repose his face bore a strong resemblance to that of a baby. Magnified.

  The inspector looked at him. What should he do? There were a lot more things he ought to get to know. He had not even managed to learn what the old man’s own movements had been during the hours before the attack was reported.

  A spurt of honest anger swept through him. Lala Varde or no Lala Varde, no one had any right to fall fast asleep in the middle of a murder investigation.

  He put out his hand towards the enormous, rounded, fat-padded shoulder in front of him.

  And hesitated.

  Behind him the noise of the servants chattering together rose to a sudden unexplained height. He wheeled round.

  ‘Head Constable, Head Constable,’ he shouted. ‘Get those damned noisy servants together in their quarters. It is high time they answered a few questions.’

  There were, certainly, matters which would be made a good deal clearer by finding out from the servants what they knew of events in the house during the evening before. But gathering everyone together for interrogation proved unexpectedly difficult.

  No one was perfectly clear about how many servants there were meant to be. Even when the inspector had made it plain that wives and children who had reached the age of reason were to be included still new names were remembered and loud outcries started until the missing person had been found and stood in their proper place in the hierarchy of Lala Varde’s domestic staff.

  But at last everything was ready. At the head of the long vague queue – here thickly knotted where a large family clustered, there thin where enemies did their best to keep their distance – a small table was ceremoniously placed.

  Before Inspector Ghote took his place at it he beckoned to Head Constable Sen.

  ‘What we have got to find out,’ he said, ‘is when Mr Perfect was last seen alive. That is, was last seen before the attack.’

  He frowned at himself angrily over his mistake.

  ‘The servants were all meant to be in their quarters and that old gate had been shut and locked,’ he went on. ‘But we had better keep a sharp eye open for anybody who was not seen during the night. One of them may have hidden away somewhere. Make a note of every name and mark anything that you think suspicious.’

  ‘Very good, Inspector,’ said the big head constable.

  He flourished his pencil two or three times in an impressive manner. The servants looked at each other apprehensively.

  And then the questioning began.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘What are your duties?’

  ‘Where were you earlier in the evening?’

  ‘Did you see Mr Perfect?’

  ‘When did you go to your quarters?’

  And the answers were never as simple as they ought to have been. The timid ones refused to give their names, the sly ones gave false names and had to be recalled and shouted at when a member of their family accidentally betrayed the relationship or a jealous rival gave them blandly away. There were quarrels about whose task it was to do what, and age-old grievances were lengthily aired. Not one single person, it seemed at first, could say how they had spent the earlier part of the evening. Tirelessly Inspector Ghote sorted out the genuinely vague from the deliberately obscure, and applied the precepts of Doctor Gross to each of them.

  Only on one point was everybody crystal clear: they had not seen Mr Perfect.

  ‘I had not see Mr Perfect, sahib
.’

  Inspector Ghote slapped the table in front of him so sharply that a little cloud of dust rose up from it.

  ‘When did you last see Mr Perfect? When did you last see him at all? If it wasn’t today, when was it? Answer me that.’

  ‘I had not see Mr Perfect, Inspector sahib.’

  ‘Never? Have you never seen him?’

  A frightened shake of the head. But still negative.

  The inspector sighed.

  ‘Next one.’

  And patiently he plodded through them. He felt as if he could have filled in the comment against each name in his notebook in advance. ‘Did not see victim.’ It was as if Mr Perfect had never existed.

  Twice even he left the little table and made his way alone to the small upstairs room where Mr Perfect, guarded now by a contemptuously wakeful Anglo-Indian nurse, lay with his grey head swathed in the white bandages. Each time he stayed by the tattered string bed until he could make out the sighing, wavering noise of the patient’s breathing. Only then did he turn abruptly and go back to the endless questioning.

  And at last there was only one left in the queue.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Satyamurti.’

  The head constable guffawed.

  ‘Satyamurti, teller of truth,’ he said. ‘That will be a change.’

  Inspector Ghote frowned. This was hardly the tact recommended by Doctor Gross. Insults of this sort were likely to produce awkward situations rather than to dissipate them.

  The head constable, his heavy chin still wagging from enjoyment of his joke, caught the inspector’s eye. The chin froze.

  The inspector leant forward across the table and smiled at Satyamurti, who was a boy of about sixteen, wearing only a dhoti, and so thin that each of his ribs was clearly visible.