The D.S.P. looked at Ghote with an unexpected twinkle of kindness in his eyes.
‘Listen, my good fellow,’ he said, ‘just because everything points to Amrit Singh don’t start trying to convince yourself he is somehow or other not the man you are looking for. It is a terrible temptation to be too clever, you know. In time you will learn that.’
Ghote suddenly saw how it was that a man like the D.S.P. had got to where he was in the force. He was right. The obvious answer did often somehow look too easy.
‘Come on now, man,’ the D.S.P. said. ‘Get down to that cell and beat it out of him.’
Ghote sat upright in his desk chair.
‘D.S.P.,’ he said, ‘Amrit Singh is not in a cell.’
For three wheezes out and two wheezes in D.S.P. Naik was silent. But under his cheeks the colour gradually spread and darkened.
And at last the pent-up feelings splurged out.
‘Inspector Ghote. I have just been sitting here reading your account of this most important case. You have summed up the situation with admirable clarity. Every word you have written points to only one thing. For the first time in the history of this department we have got that bastard Amrit Singh just exactly where we want him. And now I hear from your own lips, from your own bloody lips, that you have let him go.’
His tautly spread right hand swept round and clutched in agony at his solar plexus.
‘Let him go. Let him go.’
He moaned the words over again as if they were too completely awful to be assimilated at one swallow.
Slowly he crossed to the door and held it open.
‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘you will go out now and first of all get hold of those damned urchins at the Foundation. Then you will drill into each and every one of them such facts as we need to make sure that Amrit Singh hangs. And when you have done that you will stay out of this office until you have brought that unutterable Sikh back here on the end of a pair of handcuffs. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes, D.S.P.,’ said Inspector Ghote.
NINE
Inspector Ghote was too sensible to defy D.S.P. Naik’s orders then and there where he had been given them. He at once grabbed his telephone and with a great deal of shouting ordered a truck to take him round to Wodehouse Road.
The D.S.P. stood beside the open door, still wheezing hard, and stared at him in silence.
Ghote wished he would go.
He wanted a few moments to think. He had had to say he would obey orders, but there must still be a way round. Only, unless he had a little time to himself, he would not be able to sort things out. And now he had been pressured into calling for transport to take him to the Foundation. He could always stop the truck outside and sit and think on the spot, but if he did the driver would begin to wonder why he had been sent out at a moment’s notice and now was being made to hang about at the kerbside. And nothing must distract him from thinking this through properly.
There must be a way out.
Ghote collected a notebook and put it in his pocket. Still the D.S.P. said nothing, and still he remained exactly where he was, leaning a little bit forward and wheezing ever more slowly with each breath.
Ghote turned towards the doorway.
And down in the corner where he kept his filed information sheets he saw that the same little lizard had contrived once again to imprison itself in the glass-fronted bookshelf. If he left it in there in the shut-up office it might die. He might be away all the rest of the day if he did have to try and pull in Amrit Singh.
He hesitated.
And then he quickly picked up one of the sheets of paper on which he had so painfully written out his account of the case and rolled it into a cylinder.
As he did so, his eye fell on the words he had written at the top of the page. ‘From information received from Dr Diana Upleigh, resident medical. …’ And suddenly he knew that there was after all something that he had left undone in his investigation. He had not got all that he should have done out of Dr Diana. She, more than anyone in the Foundation, knew Frank Masters. And it was in the character of the young American that the reason for his death must lie. Once he had a firm idea of what that was, then it should surely be obvious whether he had died at the hands of a stop-at-nothing thug or at those of a talkative, pedantic, over-the-edge little Bengali intellectual.
Ignoring the still expectant figure of D.S.P. Naik, Ghote stepped swiftly over to the glass-fronted bookcase, opened it, flicked up the little lizard with his paper cylinder, slid it off near to the crack at the edge of the floor and tossed the paper into the wastepaper basket.
‘I am going now, D.S.P.,’ he said.
The D.S.P. made no reply. He was staring at the empty patch of floor where an instant before a tiny lizard had blinked its two beads of eyes twice and had darted incredulously to safety once again.
The stately, pear-shaped bearer at the Masters Foundation showed Ghote, when he asked for Dr Diana, into the doctor’s private sitting-room. Ghote had glanced into the room when he had made his first tour of the bungalow just after the crime, but now he stood in the doorway and looked with care.
It was cool and quiet for all the unrelenting brightness of the sun outside. At each of the windows a heavy split cane blind hung, letting in only broken and jumbled bars of light. They caught the flowered pattern on the material of the soft armchair in which Dr Diana sat. They caught too the real flowers in a blue pottery bowl on a low table of dark wood, carved with heavy scoops in a curious rough pattern. Ghote had seen such work in the homes of other Britons: it always made him feel it came from somewhere very distant, where the people were as brutally decided as the thick strokes of the carving.
He looked up from the low table with its bowl of soft-bloomed flowers. On the walls there were a mirror and two photographs. Each was in a dark frame carved in the same fierce style. He looked away.
Dr Diana, who had been reading an illustrated magazine sent from England, laid it down. Ghote registered the smell of the thick, shiny paper and the sepia brown squares of the photographs of clumps of Englishmen and women standing about in ungainly but determined poses.
‘Well,’ Dr Diana said, ‘and what can I do for you?’
She looked up at him from the billowing mass of her flower-covered armchair. She was wearing a frock in much the same pattern as the chair material though the flowers were smaller and more tightly bunched. Her face was aggressively pink and white. The rather coarse eyebrows were raised in an attitude of direct inquiry.
Ghote braced himself.
‘I have come to you,’ he said, ‘because I think you are the one who can most help me in the next stage of my investigation.’
‘Oh,’ said Dr Diana, ‘then your investigation has got past one stage, has it? I’m glad to hear that.’
‘My inquiries have revealed a great deal,’ Ghote said.
‘But not anything on which you can actually take action?’
Ghote made himself ignore the rebuke.
‘My problem is otherwise,’ he said. ‘I have discovered too much in many ways. Too much about what has been going on at the Foundation here, and too little about the person who suffered from it.’
Dr Diana sat up straighter in the billowing, flower-covered armchair.
‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘If you’ve discovered anything that’s been going on here, it can’t have any bearing on Frank’s death. And you don’t need to go poking your nose into his whole life history to find out who killed him either.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Ghote, ‘but I think the opposite is the case. I have found that there were people in a position to obtain the arsenic trioxide, but until I know more of their relations with Mr Masters, I cannot decide whether they would want to administer.’
‘Well, there isn’t any mystery about Frank’s relations with anybody,’ Dr Diana declared, flopping back in the big chair. ‘Frank was as open and straight as anyone in this world.’
‘That is something to hav
e learnt,’ Ghote replied. ‘But I would like to learn more.’
‘All right, learn more if you want to. But don’t come bothering me for it. I’ve got the whole of this place to run now, and I really haven’t got time to attend to inessentials.’
‘Of course I understand that you are very busy, but –’
‘I’m more than very busy. If the Foundation’s to go on without Frank it’s absolutely essential that I should take hold of the reins firmly right from the start. Otherwise the whole place’ll go to pot. I know, I’ve seen it happen to other places before.’
‘Then you are taking over permanently?’ Ghote asked, seeing how he could discuss what Frank Masters had done in a way acceptable to Dr Diana.
‘Yes, yes, of course. That was always understood,’ she said brusquely.
‘And you are to carry on with the same policy?’
‘Naturally. Frank Masters set the pattern. We shall always honour his memory. His plans will be carried through to the last detail. Except where circumstances alter, needless to say.’
‘Of course,’ Ghote agreed. ‘And how would you describe these principles?’
‘My dear man, I should have thought they would have been obvious to anybody.’
Ghote said nothing. And, as he had hoped, Dr Diana after a short pause did go on to explain the self-explanatory principles on which the Masters Foundation had run during the lifetime of Frank Masters himself.
‘Frank was a very rich man,’ she said. ‘He had had great advantages. But he knew that he must share them with those less fortunate than himself. You’ve got to give sometimes in this world, you know.’
She looked at Ghote challengingly.
The thought came into his head that he himself gave very little. He remembered the beggar on the office steps. The last time he had given him anything was when he had wanted a few moments to think about the Masters case the night he had come out here for the first time.
But Dr Diana was continuing with her exposition of the principles behind the Foundation. She rose like a lioness from the big chintz-covered armchair and strode up and down the cool, dark room.
‘We in the West have got to give to those countries that need help,’ she said. ‘We have all the advantages: we have got to share them.’
She swung round.
‘Of course, you have your own way of life,’ she went on. ‘We respect that. Frank respected that. He went up to the Punjab, you know, a month or two ago and did a lot of work studying the religious outlook of the Tibetans, and all that sort of thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote, ‘I had heard.’
Dr Diana looked at him briefly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, that was all very well, but of course there were a great many practical things that needed doing here too.’
‘It was then that you discovered that Amrit Singh was making a nuisance of himself in the Foundation?’ Ghote put in quickly.
He was delighted that a chance to introduce the Sikh’s name had come up so easily. Perhaps he could get on to mentioning his possible links with Frank Masters.
‘Oh, him,’ Dr Diana said shortly. ‘Yes, I dealt with him. But, as I was saying, Frank did more than simply give money. He could have stayed at home in America and done that. Or, I could have stayed back in the UK and organized a few raffles and things for the Church Missionary Society. But Frank was not just a giver: he was a doer. He came out here and got down to a spot of good hard work.’
Ghote bowed his head slightly.
‘That’s the trouble out here,’ Dr Diana went on.
Her pacing of the cool darkness of the room had grown swifter now. She covered its length in a few long strides, came up against a wall, halted as if affronted, swung round, and set off again.
‘That’s the trouble with so many of you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got the simple bloody guts to get on with the job. That’s all that’s needed, you know. Roll up your sleeves and get down to it.’
She came to a full halt again in front of the mirror in its dark coarsely carved frame. She looked at her reflection in it for a few seconds. Her muscular pinky white arms were bare to the elbow.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘people out here are mostly in a damned appalling muddle. What they need is a swift leg-up. Over the stile.’
She swung round sharply and marched up to the inspector.
‘But don’t you go thinking that we aim to help them every inch of the way,’ she said. ‘That’s not it at all. Help them to help themselves. That’s what Frank believed in.’
‘A most excellent principle,’ Ghote observed.
He felt he was at last beginning to get a grasp of the hitherto totally enigmatic figure of Frank Masters. It was not helping him to see why he had been killed yet. But it was filling him with a certain awe. He himself was so much below this.
‘Well, there it is,’ Dr Diana said tersely. ‘That’s what Frank believed. Heaven knows, I don’t want to be a nursemaid to anybody myself. It just so happens I’ve a good clear mind, and I can see what has to be done. And when I do, I go ahead and do it.’
She had come up against the mirror again. She swung away from it after a few instants.
‘And that was what Frank was like too,’ she said. ‘He had a clear mind. He saw what was to be done and did it. And this city has a lot to be thankful for because of that.’
Ghote could only agree.
‘That is most true,’ he said. ‘Most true.’
A niggling thought reared up.
‘But Amrit Singh,’ he added. ‘Mr Masters did not realize that Amrit Singh was bad influence?’
Dr Diana looked shocked.
‘Now, just you listen to me,’ she said. ‘Frank Masters had the widest open eyes of anybody I ever met. He was no sloppy, sentimental fool, all think beautiful thoughts and do nothing. When he saw that something was wrong he got up on his two feet and darn well did something about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Ghote.
He left Dr Diana seated once more in her billowing chair turning over again the thick, odoriferous leaves of the English magazine. He felt doubly oppressed now. To begin with nothing that she had said seemed to indicate clearly one way or the other whether Krishna Chatterjee or Amrit Singh was most likely to have poisoned Frank Masters.
But, more than this, the thought of Frank Masters himself was oppressive. The picture of someone with so much, not only giving and giving abundantly of what he had, but getting up, in Dr Diana’s expressive phrase, ‘on his own two feet’ and doing what needed to be done in this world, made him feel simply inadequate.
He decided, in spite of D.S.P. Naik, to seek refuge in his office and try to pull himself together and decide what to do. As the truck approached the headquarters building he leant forward and told the driver he would get out where they were. The man shrugged and stopped for him. Ghote waited on the pavement till the Dodge was well out of sight and then set off towards the office on foot. It had occurred to him that he stood a much better chance of reaching the sanctuary of his own little room if he went in by the back way.
He made his way through the jostling crowds on the pavements thinking over and over the details of Frank Masters’s life as Dr Diana had recounted them to him. And suddenly he stopped in his tracks.
A thought had struck him. By going round this back way he was once more avoiding the beggar on the front steps.
He turned and marched back the way he had come and round to the front of the building. At the steps he stopped, took out all the coins in his pocket and selected the largest. He went up to the monotonously whining figure crouched at the edge of the wide steps. And then he stopped again. He plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a second coin. Quickly he thrust them both into the beggar’s grimy paw. The man swept them away out of sight even more quickly.
He did not look at the inspector. His begging whine continued unchanged and unabated.
Ghote crept into the building and up to his room. Although the D.S.P. was nowhe
re to be seen, he still did not feel very happy. He sat at his desk, but he could not bring himself even to contemplate the complications of his life. He knew that in fact once he did begin to think there was only one thing to work out. D.S.P. Naik had ordered him in the clearest possible terms to prepare a number of witnesses with false statements as a preliminary to getting up the case against Amrit Singh. Well, Amrit Singh might well be guilty. He probably was. But equally –
He stopped himself going on. He must not think about the dilemma. The two equal blank walls would oppress him to desperation.
Almost stealthily he fished the newspaper out from behind his desk. It was at least a way of preventing himself thinking of anything else.
West Silent on Pak Guilt. Many members of the Lok Sabha referred today to the sad fact that the world had displayed an incredible indifference to the sufferings of the East Pakistan minorities. There had been some stirrings only when it became known that Christians were also being persecuted by the Pakistanis.
He lowered the paper.
This did not seem to be in the spirit of Frank Masters. On anybody’s part. He wondered what he would do about it if he was actually faced with the problem. Ought he perhaps to face himself with it? He could give up his job, give up everything, go to the Pakistan border and by example and exhortation …
He thought of Protima and little Ved at home. How would they live if he went off? And were there not problems enough in Bombay? Perhaps having a proper police force in the city was a help even.
Except that the police force was not being at all successful in the case of the wanton murder of Frank Masters.
He tried the paper again.
Guerrillas Active in China. Reports reaching Western capitals speak of serious anti-Government unrest in China. Trouble has broken out in various parts of the country.
If only it was as easy as that. If only your problems really did solve themselves. If only something would happen in the mysterious land on the far side of the Masters case which would solve his problem.
But that was not the way things went.
He skimmed indifferently down the rest of the column.
Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade Page 11
