Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘To find out what you are doing, Inspector sahib,’ he said.

  He grinned.

  ‘Inspector sahib,’ Ghote answered. ‘So you have discovered that I am inspector. You have been listening at the window, have you?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ the boy said, hanging his head a little.

  Ghote tightened his hold on the thin arm. The boy winced and looked up at him.

  ‘Dr Diana give you hell all right,’ he said.

  Ghote let the arm go.

  ‘But she spoke truth, Inspector,’ the boy said.

  ‘Truth? Why shouldn’t she?’

  ‘When you were lying, Inspector sahib, she could lie also.’

  ‘Me lying?’

  But no sooner had he spoken than he remembered how he had denied that he had ever said anything to the gang outside the house.

  He put his arms on his hips and faced the boy.

  ‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘I am investigating the death of Mr Masters. This is a very important case: there are a lot of things I have got to do, and quickly. You will not watch over me while I do them. You understand that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector sahib.’

  ‘Very well. And if I catch you at it again I would make sure you are locked up where you would not trouble me any more. Do you understand again?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. Understand very good.’

  Ghote stepped back. The boy slid gratefully towards the door. In the open doorway he paused for a moment.

  ‘Understand okay,’ he said. ‘You don’t worry. When Dr Diana make it hot for you, you don’t want nobody to hear.’

  Ghote raced out into the garden after him. He caught one glimpse of a swiftly moving shape beyond the wistaria of the trellis and set out in hot pursuit.

  The roots of a tree caught his toe and an instant later he was flat on his face with the smell of dusty earth in his nostrils.

  It was some three hours after this that he came to deal with the Foundation cook and got his next glimpse of real progress. Not that the intervening time had been idle. During it he worked his way steadily over the whole bungalow, finding out just who lived there and exactly where they had been earlier in the evening. With all the boys in the dormitories it was a formidable undertaking, but, aided by reinforcements from headquarters, Ghote got through it with speed.

  He poked and pried into every cranny of the big, spartanly furnished house. He set the team with the ink-pad to work taking fingerprints wholesale; he supervised the departure of the body on its way to the laboratory; he directed the obedient but unimaginative police photographer in taking shots of every possible relevant scene.

  He even went so far as to eliminate the possibility, suggested by the boy in the black jacket, that Frank Masters’s death had anything to do with ‘gay girls’. Certainly no one approaching that description had ever been seen at the Foundation.

  When he had been at work for about two hours the reporters arrived. The pear-shaped bearer, looking somewhat crinkled at this late hour, came to tell him. He went and met them at the front door.

  ‘No statement,’ he said stiffly.

  There were excited cries of protest.

  ‘I have no time to be hobnobbing with pressmen,’ he said sternly. ‘I have investigation to carry out.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said one of the reporters, a tall, beaky-nosed man wearing a brightly-coloured picture tie. ‘We got investigation to carry out too, you know.’

  Ghote turned away.

  But just as the bearer, with evident pleasure, was pushing the heavy front door closed he relented. After all, though there was something rather shocking about wearing such a tie, the man was right: he had his job to do.

  Patiently Ghote allowed himself to be questioned. But when it came down to it he did not have much to tell. In spite of all he had done up to that point, he knew very little.

  The reporters left, looking upset. And Ghote went back to see how the police surgeon was getting on. He conducted a casual conversation with him and succeeded in gathering that the arsenic had in all probability been taken about an hour and a half before Frank Masters had complained about feeling ill. He checked and cross-checked on the time this had happened and came once again to the question of the evening meal and its cooking and to the big gas-stove with its heavy butane cylinders, the gleaming refrigerator and the formidable array of pots and pans of the Foundation kitchen.

  And there he tackled for the second time the Foundation cook.

  ‘You cook all the meals in the house?’ he asked once again.

  The cook, a plumpish, short little man whose skin gleamed and glistened under the light of the single bulb hanging from the middle of the low ceiling, nodded silent acquiescence.

  ‘Did Mr Masters eat the same food as everybody else?’ Ghote asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Masters sahib very kind man. He say what good enough for boys from street good enough for him.’

  ‘Was it good food?’ Ghote asked.

  The podgy little cook looked downwards.

  ‘Not very good food, sahib,’ he said. ‘Not very good cook.’

  For a moment Ghote thought about the picture of Frank Masters this evoked. The millionaire from America who was prepared to eat day in day out the indifferently cooked food he himself had provided for the vagrants he had rescued from the pavements of Bombay. The thought of the care and skill Protima, his wife, brought to his own meals rose up in his mind.

  ‘What did you cook this evening?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, very bad food this evening, sahib.’

  Ghote felt a stab of impatience.

  ‘I asked what food it was,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Very sorry, sahib.’

  The cook bowed his head. Ghote could see the plump roll of fat on his neck shining as though it were polished.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘This evening mixed vegetable and puris, sahib.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ghote.

  Even with a meal sent in at the office, he reflected, he had eaten far better food than the wheat cakes and vegetables that this American millionaire had allowed himself.

  ‘Did Masters sahib eat with the boys?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, no, sahib. He eat own meal as per usual, sahib. In staff tiffin room, sahib.’

  ‘His own meal? Then that was something different?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. It would not be right for the sahibs and memsahibs to eat vegetable only.’

  ‘Then what did Masters sahib eat as well?’ said Ghote.

  ‘Beef curry, sahib, and fish curry. Good curry, sahib.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ghote, ‘so you can cook well enough when you want, eh?’

  He looked down in triumph at the little cook, whose cringing attitude irritated him more and more from one moment to the next.

  ‘Oh, no, sahib,’ the little man replied promptly. ‘Not good cook.’

  ‘Then why do you say it was good curry?’

  ‘Dr Diana come and watch me make, sahib.’

  Ghote’s ears pricked up.

  ‘Does Dr Upleigh always do this?’

  ‘Oh, no, sahib. Dr Diana got much more important things to do than make sure how I cook.’

  Ghote’s interest was totally gripped.

  ‘So this was an unusual occasion, was it?’ he said.

  The podgy little cook looked up bewilderedly.

  Ghote tried again.

  ‘So it was special for her to come?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Most special. Most extra special. Very kind. Very kind.’

  He rubbed his hands together in writhing gratitude.

  Ghote kept the pressure up. This was a piece of luck indeed. The unusual incident, the little difference in behaviour, this was what he had taught himself always to look out for. And now he had really got hold of something.

  ‘Was this perhaps the only time Dr Diana had ever come to see you cooking?’ he asked.

  The cook looked up at him anxiously.

  �
��Well, was it the only time?’ Ghote said with a jet of impatience.

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Only time she come.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Indeed, yes, sahib. Only time. Most sure.’

  Ghote breathed a sigh of relief. When the meal Frank Masters had eaten was being prepared, the doctor had been for the first time ever down in the kitchen pretending to be supervising the cook. And he had got firmly on to it.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me exactly what happened to the food when it had been prepared. What sort of dishes was it put in? Are they still here? Have they been washed?’

  ‘Oh, sahib, sahib,’ the cook protested. ‘Am only poor man, sahib. Not very much brain, sahib.’

  He looked up at Ghote beseechingly.

  Ghote took control of himself. The man’s attitude filled him with a desire to march him off to the privacy of C.I.D. headquarters and there to get what he wanted out of him in the most unpleasant way he could. But he was not going to allow himself to think in such a way. The man was a man like any other and he would treat him reasonably, however creepingly obsequious he got.

  ‘The dishes,’ he said, ‘they have been washed?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Most thoroughly washed. Oh, yes, indeed. I know that I must see to that.’

  Ghote felt a twinge of disappointment.

  ‘That is a pity,’ he sighed. ‘However we cannot expect –’

  ‘Sahib, sahib, you want see dishes before they wash?’ the cook asked eagerly.

  He turned and suddenly scuttled off by the door leading out of the house.

  Ghote was after him in an instant.

  And, just as he had expected, there outside the door he found the little cook busy picking morsels out of an open-ended oil drum that served as an extra dustbin. With delicate artistry he was placing them one by one in a clean dish.

  Ghote felt near to tears. So much for getting hold of the unusual incident, the little difference in behaviour. He had slipped into the oldest pitfall of all: he had virtually told the cook what he had wanted him to say and the squirming creature had promptly obliged with a stream of pure invention.

  Ghote stepped forward and with a well-aimed kick sent the half-filled dish spinning away into the darkness.

  ‘Come back inside,’ he shouted.

  The little cook trotted meekly into the kitchen in front of him.

  And immediately Ghote regretted his violence. Just because he had been so pleased with himself over his discovery, he had taken out the subsequent disappointment on the person who happened to have provoked it. He made a resolution not to let this happen again, ever.

  ‘The dishes were all cleaned already?’ he asked the cook quietly.

  ‘Yes, sahib.’

  ‘And was this, or was this not, the only time Dr Diana had ever come and watched you cook?’

  ‘She had come before, sahib,’ said the cook.

  He spoke humbly as ever, but without any sign of regret at having said exactly the opposite hardly two minutes earlier.

  ‘When did she come?’ Ghote said patiently.

  ‘Oh, when Masters sahib was away, sahib.’

  ‘When he was away? He has been away?’

  ‘He has been back three weeks only, sahib,’ the shiny-skinned cook said eagerly. ‘He was away for three months, sahib. He was in the Punjab, sahib. He was very interested in refugees from Tibet, sahib. Very holy men, sahib.’

  ‘Stop. Stop.’

  By now, Ghote thought, the wretch had undoubtedly entered the realm of embroidery again, adding to his information piece by piece as it seemed to please or not.

  ‘And it was while Masters sahib was away that Dr Diana came to see you cooking?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib. Came to make sure I cook a little better. She say I was most appalling cook in whole of Bombay, sahib.’

  The man looked up with something like pride on his plump features.

  Ghote’s toe itched. But he kept himself calm.

  ‘Why did she not come at other times?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, she was not in charge then, sahib. When Masters sahib go he put Dr Diana in full charge. She say at least she get some decent meals now, sahib. So she –’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Yes, sahib. Certainly, sahib. I stay quite quiet, sahib. You want to think, sahib?’

  ‘No, I do not,’ Ghote snapped.

  He seized on another question before his temper burst the limits he had set on it.

  ‘So why did Dr Diana come to supervise you tonight? Mr Masters was here, wasn’t he? Why did she come tonight?’

  He waited anxiously for the answer. If there was nothing the fertilely anxious-to-please cook could suggest, this was perhaps after all a piece of behaviour well out of the ordinary.

  ‘Oh, sahib,’ the cook replied, giving him a sideways glance, ‘that is easy to answer.’

  He waited, hoping no doubt that Ghote would give him a clue about the reply he would prefer.

  Ghote stayed silent, but decided he could let one shaft of angry impatience dart out.

  ‘Well, sahib,’ the cook said, ‘it was like –’

  Suddenly he stopped short and looked round Ghote as if he had at that moment seen the whole doorway behind the inspector turn into a sheet of flame or a roaring cascade of flood-water.

  ‘Will you tell?’ Ghote snapped without taking his eyes off him. ‘Why did Dr Diana choose tonight of all nights to come and watch you cooking?’

  ‘I can answer that.’

  Now Ghote did swing round.

  He found himself face to face with a woman about sixty years old, dressed in an orange-toned sari, thin-faced with white hair drawn up on her head and the little mouth and quick eyes of a bird.

  ‘I am Inspector Ghote, C.I.D.,’ he said. ‘May I ask what you are doing here?’

  ‘It is rather I who should be asking what you are doing,’ she replied.

  She spoke English with an accent the like of which Inspector Ghote had never heard before. He realized that in spite of her tanned complexion and workaday sari she was some sort of European.

  ‘I am investigating the death of Mr Frank Masters,’ he said cautiously.

  There could be little doubt that his announcement came as a surprise to her. Of course it was strictly possible that she might have prepared the look of incomprehension and the quick flood of understanding which followed it. He did not know enough about her to tell. But if it was a performance, it was a faultless one.

  ‘Herr Frank. Herr Frank,’ she babbled now.

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘I regret to have to inform that he is dead, and that a police investigation is being carried out.’

  ‘But Herr Frank. But what happened?’

  Ghote kept watching her closely. He detected not a sign of calculation in the rapidly blinking bird-eyes.

  ‘Mr Masters was poisoned,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Poisoned? But how? But what happened?’

  She darted looks all round the kitchen. At the refrigerator, at the grimy burners of the gas-stove, at the ranks of pallid aluminium dekchis.

  ‘There is no poison here,’ she said.

  It was a statement of fact.

  She drew herself up.

  ‘But that is a matter which I am bound to investigate,’ Ghote answered.

  ‘Then tell me how he came to take this poison.’

  ‘You had better tell first who you are,’ Ghote said.

  She looked at him.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. You would not know. My name is Glucklich. Fraulein Glucklich, citizen of the Republic of India.’

  She gave a proud glance round. The cook at least seemed impressed. He salaamed deeply.

  ‘Ah, Fraulein Glucklich,’ Ghote said. ‘Then you are the housekeeper, are you not?’

  He mentally filled in a blank on a list.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fraulein Glucklich. ‘And that is why I am able to answer your question. Why did Dr Diana come into
this kitchen tonight? Quite simple. Because she knew I would not be here. She knew I would be with the new swami.’

  ‘The new swami?’ Ghote said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fraulein Glucklich with a little toss of her crown of white hair, ‘you do not need to think that only Indians can benefit from the words of a wise man. I am happy to call myself a sannysini of Swami Dnyaneshwar.’

  ‘And he was holding a meeting this evening?’ Ghote asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Fraulein Glucklich answered. ‘From five o’clock to midnight. It was advertised.’

  ‘It was public meeting then?’

  ‘Swami Dnyaneshwar would turn away no one, however unenlightened.’

  Suspecting that he was himself one of the unenlightened Fraulein Glucklich had in mind, Ghote persisted.

  ‘And there were a number of people present at the meeting this evening?’

  ‘A number of people? I am happy to state that there must have been at least thirty. And great enthusiasm. We went long past the advertised time.’

  ‘And you yourself were there from start to finish?’

  Fraulein Glucklich looked at him sadly.

  ‘Do you think I would miss one moment at the feet of such a swami?’

  ‘You were at his feet the whole time?’

  A faint blush came up in her withered cheeks.

  ‘I think you misunderstand,’ she said. ‘I spoke of course metaphorically. I was not in fact kneeling at the swami’s feet the whole evening.’

  ‘You left for a little time?’ Ghote said.

  ‘No, no. I could not leave. I sat close to the swami every minute. On the ground, naturally.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ghote said.

  He supposed he would have to check with Swami Dnyaneshwar. It would not in all probability be an easy task. Religious figures were apt to show little concern for things of this world. Which was excellent in its way: but difficult for a police officer.

  In the meantime he could regard Fraulein Glucklich as having a total alibi as regarded putting arsenic that evening into anything Frank Masters had eaten.

  ‘You were explaining that Dr Diana had perhaps come down to the kitchen for a particular reason,’ he resumed.

  ‘Certainly,’ Fraulein Glucklich replied. ‘She had come down to meddle. If I had been here, she would not have dared.’

  Ghote reflected that seven hours and more with the swami did not seem to have made Fraulein Glucklich regard all her fellow human beings with unmixed love. Though it was certainly true, from what he had seen of Dr Diana, that she would indeed meddle whatever chance she got.