Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ghote never for half a second took his eyes off him.

  At last the little Bengali managed to stutter out a reply.

  ‘Inspector, you must understand this. I am not telling you any lies. Perhaps it would have been altogether less distressing if I had. But I have a constitutional objection to falsehood. So, when because of Frank Masters I am obliged not to inform you of certain matters, there is nothing I can do but fall back on silence.’

  He twisted round even farther in the squat, heavy chair. His eyes shone with trepidation.

  ‘Inspector, spare me,’ he murmured in a voice that could be scarcely heard.

  Ghote knew that this was the moment he should act. Even the reference to never telling lies alerted him. That way lay thoughts of doing evil that good might come. Now was the moment to leap up and stand over the fundamentally timid Bengali and shout and shout until he got a confession.

  But something else Mr Chatterjee had said had set up a sudden long echo in his mind.

  He leant a little more forward.

  ‘For Frank Masters?’ he asked. ‘You are keeping silence for him? Tell me what it is about him that makes you do that?’

  Mr Chatterjee looked up. His big eyes had a faint gleam of hope in them. Reprieved.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it would have been more satisfactory perhaps not to have referred to this. But it is the strict truth.’

  Ghote pressed the palms of his hands down on the blotched surface of his desk.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but what was it about Frank Masters that made you do that? What was his secret?’

  A look of staring dismay suddenly appeared on Mr Chatterjee’s face.

  ‘His secret –’ he stammered.

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said, his voice almost at a shout, ‘what is this secret of his personality that made him so different from all of us?’

  The dismayed look faded from the Bengali’s round face. He coughed a little primly.

  ‘Oh yes, that,’ he said. ‘Well, you might put it that it existed only to a certain extent. Frank Masters was unlike us, certainly. We are not all immensely wealthy men, and we do not give up all that wealth in a crusade in a foreign country. That is true. But on the other hand, Frank Masters was in many ways all too like us. That is to say, all too human.’

  He came to an end and sat contemplating the humanness of Frank Masters with a woebegone expression.

  ‘All too human?’ Ghote said at last. ‘Please explain that a little more.’

  Mr Chatterjee looked up.

  ‘In certain ways his very wealth was a disadvantage,’ he said. ‘He was apt to prefer to be kind rather than to be strictly useful, and his money frequently gave him the opportunity to smother up any unfortunate results of too much kindness by the exercise of further acts of generosity. And at this stage on many occasions a certain lack of interest would manifest itself. He failed to follow through.’

  Mr Chatterjee pronounced these last words with great sadness. Ghote nodded sagely.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you can often do more harm than good that way. People like that should not really be allowed to interfere in other people’s lives.’

  ‘No. You are wrong. Quite wrong.’

  Ghote jerked back in astonishment. In the big, almond eyes of the little Bengali there shone fire.

  ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘you are quite wrong. Frank Masters did good. That we must never forget. He set out to use his wealth to do good to others, and this he did. Whatever else we reproach him for, this blots out everything.’

  He breathed rapidly.

  ‘After all,’ he went on, ‘he had no need to spend his money on us, and live a life that was relatively austere. Decidedly a life that was relatively austere.’

  He sat looking straight forward at the wall to Ghote’s side. His big eyes were moist.

  Ghote puffed out a long breath.

  ‘I dare say there is something in all that,’ he conceded.

  He pulled himself together.

  ‘However that is not the point. We are not here to discuss the charitable activities of Mr Masters. We are here to discuss his sudden death.’

  He glared fiercely at Mr Chatterjee.

  ‘His sudden death and the part you played in it.’

  Mr Chatterjee slid round again to the uncomfortable position in which he could look Ghote straight in the eye.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘I must repeat that I played no part at all in Mr Masters’s death. It was the last thing in the world I would have wished to have occurred. The absolutely last thing.’

  ‘That will not do,’ Ghote shouted.

  But it was too late.

  Mr Chatterjee sat serenely now on the heavy chair. During his summoning up of the spirit of his former chief Ghote’s threats had lost their power over him.

  ‘That will not do at all,’ Ghote repeated. ‘I must have answer.’

  ‘I regret that you have had such answer as in my power to provide.’

  The little social worker looked modestly down.

  And Ghote let him go.

  When the door had been softly shut he sat there contemplating bitterly the course of the interview. To begin with, he had puffed himself up with all those thoughts about being tough. And little Krishna Chatterjee had shown him what real mental toughness was.

  For a moment he speculated on whether this display of inner unshakeable resolution put the little Bengali more definitely into the murderer class. He decided that it did not. Certainly, this was the sort of force that could have led him to an altogether unlikely ruthlessness. But the mere possession of it did not necessarily mean that he was bound to have killed Frank Masters. Amrit Singh, if it came to that, possessed beyond question the ability to kill.

  The scales were still level.

  The thought of Frank Masters plunged Ghote into deeper gloom. He had actually been so foolish as to abuse him, to sit there and utter statements about preventing people like him interfering in other people’s lives. How could he have done it? In face of an example of real goodness like that? Mr Chatterjee was right to have snubbed him.

  He bunched up his fist and banged it down on the pile of untouched white paper in front of him. The dull, padded sound of the blow reverberated quietly through the small room. Down in the glass-fronted bookcase the lizard was stirred to a fresh frenzy of ineffectual scuttling.

  Wearily Ghote got up, took a piece of the paper, went over to the corner and hoicked the little beast to freedom once more.

  Shortly afterwards he went home. There was no point in staying in the office. At any moment D.S.P. Naik might come in and start asking awkward questions. Home was safe.

  Home was delightful. He found Protima in a very good humour. His son was being extremely serious and well-behaved, which in a replica of a man only a quarter lifesize he found always so absorbing that for a time nothing else seemed to matter.

  He relaxed. Frank Masters might have been murdered in circumstances which were still almost as mysterious as when he had been assigned to the case, but that could wait. The impression he had at last begun to gain of the murdered American as a human being, and one whose very existence posed problems in behaviour almost too big to deal with, might be still heavily present in his mind, but at least it could for a few minutes be pushed into the background. To be a father and a husband and nothing else was important and right. Ghote watched his son and talked in a low voice to Protima about the events of her day at home.

  ‘But you,’ she said at last, ‘what have you been doing? Your clothes? How did you get them into that terrible state? When you came in they looked as if you had been wading through the sea in them.’

  So Ghote was gently urged back into being a policeman. He told Protima, in brief outline, about how he had hoped to catch Amrit Singh as a smuggler and about how he had failed, leaving himself faced as inexorably as ever with his dilemma about Amrit Singh and Krishna Chatterjee and the D.S.P.’s almost inescapable order.

  Protima promp
tly justified his former reluctance to tell her about his work by getting the situation typically wrong.

  ‘But why cannot you arrest Amrit Singh?’ she said. ‘He was the one who poisoned your Frank Masters.’

  ‘But he did not,’ Ghote replied. ‘Not necessarily. I explained to you. Both he and Krishna Chatteijee admit going into the dispensary where the poison was. Both swear they did not take it. Either could be telling the truth. And while I know for a fact that Amrit Singh has killed three people himself at least, I am also sure that someone like Krishna Chatterjee could push himself to the extreme of murder. It balances up.’

  ‘Then you do not want to believe Amrit Singh killed Frank Masters?’

  ‘It is not a question of what I want to believe. It is question of simple logic.’

  An unexpected stain of dark anger appeared momentarily on the smooth stream of his tranquillity.

  ‘Logic,’ Protima laughed. ‘It is no good talking your logic this and your logic that. You know I never understand such things.’

  She made them sound as if they were all right for little Ved, solemnly bringing dishes of pickle in from the kitchen for their evening meal, but not really worth considering above that level.

  ‘But you cannot escape logic,’ Ghote said, his voice suddenly rising.

  Ved looked up but said nothing.

  ‘Oh, I can escape it very well,’ said Protima, undisturbed. ‘You must not let such things worry you.’

  ‘But I have failed to find who killed Frank Masters.’

  ‘All right. You must ask yourself who killed him. Was it Amrit Singh, was it Krishna Chatterjee, was it that Dr Diana?’

  Ghote’s fury boiled over.

  ‘How can you be so stupid?’ he shouted. ‘I tell you it could not possibly be Dr Diana. She does not come into it at all.’

  Protima gave a little toss of her fine, long head.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘from what I have heard about the way she talks to you, I think it must be her. But enough of this nonsense. If I do not go to kitchen now, we will have no food tonight.’

  And she went.

  Ghote stood in the living-room looking at the empty doorway, oblivious of Ved arranging the pickle dishes with great exactitude.

  ‘Dr Diana has absolute alibi,’ he said into space. ‘For all the time when the poison was stolen she did not have a key to the dispensary. That is a fact.’

  From the kitchen came the sound of a pan being put on the gasring and its contents being stirred briskly. Ved went back in to fetch another pickle dish to complete his display.

  Ghote marched up and down. He began to feel hot and uncomfortable even in his fresh clothes. He slumped down on a rattan stool in the corner and fanned at himself furiously.

  Protima came back in calmly carrying the food with Ved and his final pickle dish in the rear. Ghote glowered at them and stayed where he was.

  ‘Well,’ Protima said, ‘the meal is ready. Are you going to eat?’

  Ghote did not reply.

  ‘Come, why are you sitting like that?’

  ‘It is hot.’

  ‘Then take some water to drink. It has been standing in the big clay jar. It is quite cool.’

  Ghote got up and helped himself, dipping a brass tumbler into the big pot. He drank.

  ‘Cool,’ he said contemptuously.

  ‘Well, it is cool as water can be kept without refrigerator.’

  ‘Refrigerator. Refrigerator. There you go again. Always dragging it in. Always nagging about it. Always hinting.’

  It was the signal for battle.

  But Protima, with that contrariness that was both the bane and delight of her make-up, refused to fight. Instead she was all sweetness.

  ‘No, you are wrong,’ she said. ‘Really, I do not always go on about the refrigerator. Or if I do, it is joking only. Yes, I would like, I admit. But if we have not got the money, then we cannot have one. I know that.’

  And, as was almost always the case, she melted Ghote completely.

  ‘But you will get one one day, soon even,’ he burst out. ‘I meant to keep it secret. I have been saving.’

  It was true. He had been saving in secret. Whenever Protima had talked about how wonderful it would be to have a refrigerator he had taken good care to laugh at her, to ask how Indian women had survived so many centuries without such objects, to say that at his present rate of pay such luxuries were unthinkable. But some time before he had been unable to resist setting aside a lump sum in back Dearness Allowance that had unexpectedly been paid him. It had made a start and bit by bit he had added to it. Now, although the refrigerator was still a good distance away, the sum in the Post Office account he kept for it, his refrigerator fund, was of a respectable size.

  Protima came running up.

  ‘You have been saving? In secret? Oh, my husband, such a deceiver he is. Oh, you funny man, you good man. How much have you saved?’

  ‘Nearly five hundred rupees.’

  ‘Five hundred rupees. Five hundred rupees. But that is wonderful. How clever to get so much together and never hint at it to me.’

  Never, thought Ghote a little wryly.

  Protima laughed tenderly.

  ‘And you are so silly, too,’ she said. ‘When you have saved that much money there is no need to go any longer without refrigerator. It can be bought on easy terms.’

  She came up to him and stroked the back of his head with a long, slim, fine-boned hand.

  ‘Oh, Mr Practical,’ she said. ‘With his logic here and his logic there. Sometimes you must think of how things really are in the world. Tomorrow you can get the money and we will go to the Hiro Music House shop and make the arrangements. We can have proper cold drinks tomorrow night even.’

  ‘I will see,’ Ghote said.

  He felt suddenly shy about the whole transaction.

  ‘But the next day is Holi. It would be nice to have cold drinks for the holiday.’

  ‘I may be too busy,’ Ghote said with a trace of irritation.

  ‘Then we will wait. We have waited so long, two days more will not matter. Straight after Holi we will go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  FOURTEEN

  Next morning as soon as the big Post Office in Frere Road was open Ghote drew out the whole sum in his refrigerator fund. He found that it actually just exceeded the five hundred rupee mark.

  ‘With accrued interest,’ the elderly, delicately-spectacled clerk explained gravely.

  Ghote waited while his pass-book was ceremoniously ruled up.

  He sighed. He had wanted to let the money grow and grow till he had accumulated every one of the 1,090 rupees which the refrigerator he had his eye on would cost, excise duty and taxes apart. But these he generally contrived to leave out of his calculations.

  Carefully he fitted the crisp new notes away in an inner pocket. And as he did so an alarming diminuendo of thoughts spiralled through his head. That it was wonderful to have actually got hold of so much money; that life with a refrigerator in the house would be like them having a whole series of gifts; that there were many people much less lucky than this, like the gang over at the Masters Foundation, saved from the misery of the gutters only by chance, or the people of the fishing village, always on the edge of disaster. Then the thought came that Frank Masters would have gone to the aid of the village if it had happened to come to his notice; and then that to a villager five hundred rupees would seem unattainable wealth; then that Protima did not know exactly how much he had saved; and next that he ought to devote at least some of this wealth to helping the wretchedly poor people he had been brought into contact with; and finally that he should go out to the village as soon as possible and give Tarzan’s family a generous present.

  He had meant to decide on the way exactly what the appropriate sum was, whether it should be as much as fifty rupees or whether less would be fair. But instead he found he could think of nothing but that by going off on this jaunt he was avoiding doing his duty over Amrit Singh. />
  All the way through the flat, dreary, crowded stretches of North Bombay, past the tall mill chimneys and the squalid shacks between them, he cursed himself for not simply arresting the big Sikh. He might not be the toughest man in the force, or the cleverest, or the biggest pusher, but at least he did his duty. Always. As laid down. Until this business.

  It was the thought of Frank Masters, the good man, that had done it, he reflected. If this investigation had been into anybody else’s death, perhaps he would have felt able to accept his orders and carry them out to the end. Afterwards someone else, someone senior, could take the responsibility if the orders had created more harm than good. And if improving the evidence like that put Amrit Singh in a cell for a really long time, well, that was where Amrit Singh ought to be, and everybody knew it.

  The stations along the way were slowly ticked off – Matunga Road, Santa Cruz, Ville Parle, Andheri, Goregan, Malad, Kandivlee, Borivli. He found the same old tonga and weary horse as he had used the day before and made the same uncomfortable trip to the point where the road to the sea became a mere path. Blackly he ploughed along the muddy strip of sand towards the village, keeping just in the shade of the matted tangle of vegetation springing from the marshy land at the highest point the tide reached.

  Because there could be no doubt about one thing. If ever anybody was a bad person, a man content to live well at the expense of anyone he could bully or bang money out of, it was Amrit Singh. And he was a proven killer, too.

  Ghote stopped.

  Ahead of him, standing casually behind a thick sprout of growth at the foot of an old, leaning, battered palm, there was a figure in a heavy red and blue turban with a white shirt and tight whitish trousers kept up by a broad sash. A Sikh. You could tell a mile off. But more than any Sikh, surely.

  Over the soft, grey sand Ghote advanced carefully, noiselessly.

  Yes, there in front of him, spying over the village in much the same way that he himself had done the day before, was Amrit Singh. In the flesh.

  Ghote glanced round. There ought to be a police shadow somewhere in sight.

  He could see no one. He decided to plunge into the dank vegetation behind and try to work round Amrit Singh in a half-circle to see whether he had been properly followed or not. If he had been let off the hook, someone ought to pay for it. It was not so often that they had the big Sikh where they wanted him, and after that long afternoon tracking him down in Morton Road no one should have let him get away.