‘And you found this out when he left you in charge and went to the Punjab?’ Ghote asked.
‘I’d suspected it for years. But, yes, when he went sidling off to his mystics I realized just what a mess he had made. He was a poor judge of character for one thing. The way he let himself be deceived by that rogue Amrit Singh was a positive scandal.’
‘Amrit Singh?’ Ghote said.
Dr Diana looked at him.
‘Oh, don’t get so excited,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows you’d like to pull in Amrit Singh for this. But if you do his lawyers will have him out in no time. And well you know it. After all, you haven’t got cast-iron proof, have you?’
‘Where did you hear this?’ Ghote snapped.
Minute by minute he felt himself being pushed back on to the defensive, and he resented it.
‘My dear man, surely you realize everything you’ve done and said here has been watched over and talked over till we’re sick of it?’
Ghote knew it only too well. With the eyes and ears of the clients everywhere he could expect nothing less.
‘Whether we shall take action against Amrit Singh is a matter for us,’ he said. ‘What I want to know is what were Mr Masters’s relations with him.’
‘Practically non-existent,’ Dr Diana answered. ‘What could they be? Amrit Singh hung around here because he had dealings with some of the boys, as you’d expect. And Frank saw him, and let himself be charmed. Typical of him. But I put all that right when I found out what was happening.’
‘So,’ Ghote said, ‘this is a very different Frank Masters I am hearing about.’
Dr Diana gave him a still scornful look.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you didn’t think I was going to let Frank down if I could help it, did you?’
‘No, perhaps not,’ Ghote replied. ‘But now you cannot help it.’
‘No. Very well then. What else can I say to blacken him? That he was selfish? Well, that’s certainly true.’
‘Are you saying that he did all this just for his own sake?’
Ghote gestured round at the walls of the hut in their dazzling white paint, the medicines in the cupboard, the boy quietly lying on the hard couch.
Dr Diana puffed out a sigh.
‘To tell you the truth,’ she said, ‘I honestly don’t know. Who does? About someone else? On the whole I think his motives were mixed. Some days whatever he did was to make Frank Masters feel good. At other times, well, I can’t say.’
She treated Ghote to a sort of grin.
‘It made life pretty difficult, you know,’ she said.
Ghote hardly heard. A terrible thought had struck him. He had been building up in his mind an ideal of Frank Masters. Dr Diana’s words had shown him that it was not at all like the truth. And yet, on the strength of this ideal, he had been so stupid as to give away five hundred precious rupees. How could he have been so utterly foolish? Krishna Chatterjee had spoken of Frank Masters as a man who did good, certainly, but he had at the same time painted him as human. It was only hearing him abused by someone as calmly unscrupulous as Amrit Singh that had turned the balance in the end.
Ghote saw now that it had been a gesture of sudden revulsion to thrust all that money into the podgy hand of the Paramour, a silly and impulsive gesture. And in making it he had given away every anna he had scraped together to get his own wife something she had wanted for years.
‘I – I have to go,’ he said abruptly. ‘Yes, I must go now. Thank you for your help. But I must go.’
Dr Diana was looking at him wonderingly as he hurried out.
‘You could have had some of the coffee I was making for the boy,’ she said.
SIXTEEN
One thought tapped away inside Inspector Ghote’s head as he ran off through the big garden of the Masters Foundation. Perhaps it was not too late. He had given the Paramour the five hundred rupees only that morning. She would hardly go hurrying round to the money-lender to pay off the debt on the boat right away. Money-lenders were not that popular.
So she would still have the rupees.
And from the way she had taken them, he would have every right to demand them back. She had shown no gratitude. All right, she would lose the money.
It was with this idea lodged solidly in his mind that he arrived in the hurly-burly of Churchgate Station again and set about finding a train to take him back. As he scanned the timetable and ran to make inquiries here and there the same thought kept hammering away in his head. It is not too late: she deserves to have to pay the money back.
And there was no train.
He could hardly believe it. He repeated his round of inquiries but had no more success. While he had been talking to the boys outside the Foundation and seeing Dr Diana in the dispensary time had passed. Then the trip across the city, though short, had been more than usually bedevilled with traffic hold-ups. And there it was. No train going out that far till early next day.
He thought of hiring a car but then remembered that after all the following day was Holi. There was even less chance of the Paramour handing the five hundred rupees over to a money-lender in the middle of all the festivities. He decided to get out to the village as early as possible next morning.
He spent a miserable evening. He did not dare go home till late in case there was talk about the refrigerator. He dared even less go to the office in case orders were waiting for him to get in touch with D.S.P. Naik. In the end he went to a cinema. The amorous intrigues of the film failed to grip. The music grated on his nerves. He left before it was over.
Next morning when he arrived, hot, sweaty and unoptimistic, at the village he found it looking very different from his previous visits. The overlying atmosphere of poverty had been temporarily swamped in an uprush of holiday gaiety. On the greenish, decaying walls of the huts bright, crudely coloured banners reflected the equal brightness of the sunshine and rippled happily in a strong breeze coming saltily off the sea. From the masts of the village boats, beached high and dry today on the soft sand, fluttered gay pennants, long and twisting, or stubby and forcefully patterned. More streamers and banners decorated the tall net-drying poles.
On the beach in front of the huts a positively enormous bonfire had been built. Ghote wondered for a moment how a community of such poverty could have gathered together the great pile of broken wood, discarded household objects, substantial pieces of furniture and even boat oars that made up the bulk of the merrily crackling blaze with its attendant circle of children, now excitedly jigging up and down, now suddenly solemn in front of the glowing heart of the fire.
But he had no time for idle speculation.
In all the stirring jubilation he was faced with the awkward business of broaching the reason for his visit to Tarzan’s family. The evening before, during the slow unwinding of the colourful love epic in the cinema, the notion that the Paramour had somehow forfeited any rights to the five hundred rupees had finally faded away in the harsh light of reality. He had handed the money over: he wanted it back. That was what it amounted to. He wanted it back because he had parted with it under a false impression. Frank Masters was not the person he had thought. The family had not been entitled to the money.
Even the very altered atmosphere of the village could not rob him of this cast-iron resolution. Even the sight of the family themselves standing outside their hut, on the verge of entering into the general jubilation, could not kill this.
One glance at the Paramour however was enough to make Ghote dismiss her as the best one to approach straight away. Her natural jollity had already so blended with the gaiety all around her that he doubted whether it would be possible to communicate at all. Tarzan’s brother, standing jigging a little in time to the rhythmical drumming coming from the far side of the great fire as if he knew his duty in times of merriment, he reserved as a last hope.
He concentrated on the father. Certainly the old man seemed impervious to the increasing noise and excitement. His face was as absolutely impassive as eve
r. His arms were folded indomitably across his ribby chest and he stood, legs just a little apart, still as a statue.
Ghote went up to him.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ he said cheerfully.
He looked back over his shoulder at the revelry behind him.
‘Happy holiday,’ he added.
Tarzan’s father moved his eyes. He looked at Ghote. But his expression did not alter.
‘Well,’ Ghote said, ‘how are things with you today? The village seems to be very happy. I hope you feel your troubles are a little less?’
He thought he had succeeded in bringing the subject of the five hundred rupees neatly to the fore.
Tarzan’s father looked away.
Ghote tried again.
‘This is not a day for the money-lender to come round, is it?’ he said.
He laughed.
The laugh ended up on a cracked note he did not like. And Tarzan’s father ignored it all.
‘So you have not had to pay off your debt yet?’ Ghote said, feeling the time for delicacy had come to an abrupt end.
‘Our debt?’
The Paramour had evidently been more attentive to the conversation than her lolloping half-dance to the drumming rhythm had indicated. She turned round now to Ghote, still dancing and still smiling with as much all-embracing benevolence as ever, and put out a podgy finger to dig him in the ribs.
‘You have come to see us paying our debt with that money?’ she asked.
‘Yes. No.’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Perhaps later. This is no day for debt paying. Holi hai.’
Ghote felt obliged to smile and even essay a slight dance step. And, in fact, he did already feel suddenly much more light-hearted.
So the debt was unpaid. Then the five hundred rupees were still safely tucked away somewhere. Though it was not going to be easy in the middle of dancing, smiling and shouting ‘Holi hai’ to broach the delicate core of the problem.
Ghote tried.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I did not come to watch such a thing. I would not do that.’
‘You came for Holi?’
The Paramour seized him with two solid, chunky hands and swung him three times round to the beat of the drums.
‘No, no, no.’
Ghote managed to break free. He thrust his face close to the Paramour’s bouncing, jiggling fat orb. He spoke sharply and clearly, and with a touch of desperation.
‘I came to take back the money, some of the money,’ he said. ‘For a little while. I find I need – I must have it. I must have the money back. Now.’
The grin across the Paramour’s huge face split into an enormous crease, deep pink, dotted and littered with stumps of white tooth, wide as a crater.
‘You want the money back now?’
‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. I do. It is most urgent. I will talk about it later. After this …’
He looked past the great wobbling bulk of the Paramour at the festivities on the sand in front of the village. They were really beginning to warm up now. The drums were beating madly and almost everybody had joined in the dance.
‘It is gone. All gone. Gone.’
‘Gone?’
Ghote felt a great cold wedge of ice descending crushingly down on to him.
‘What do you mean gone?’ he said. ‘Where has it gone?’
It was the Paramour’s turn to wave at the rising tide of celebration on the sands. The high-piled blazing fire, the teams of musicians, the flags and banners everywhere, the fireworks screaming up into the blue sky, the food clutched in happy hands, the bottles waving high above heads.
‘It has gone for Holi,’ she said. ‘Such a Holi the village has never known. It has gone to honour the great Krishna. Every anna.’
Ghote turned slowly away.
The sight of that huge face, stupidly happy, reasonlessly gay, maddened him. She had spent every anna of his five hundred rupees in treating the whole village to a wildly extravagant fiesta. Every one of the rupees that at least ought to have gone to make the family’s whole life easier by lifting the crushing burden of their debt. Gone. Spent. Going up in smoke.
No wonder the big fire had been blazing so merry on such a fine assortment of rubbish. When money was being thrown about in that way, anyone would be willing to sacrifice a dilapidated piece of furniture or even an oar past its prime.
Waves of pure rage swept through and through him as he marched away.
And quite suddenly, approaching the swirling crowd of merry-makers on the sand, his mood changed. The rage fell apart to leave a hard residue of bitter determination. Never again was he going to set himself up to help or judge other people. They had their lives to lead: he had his. And he knew too what the life he had to lead was. The life of a policeman. Doing his duty as he should. All right, so D.S.P. Naik was prepared to tell plain lies to improve the case against Amrit Singh. Well, he was probably correct. After all, this was the formed opinion of a respected and senior police officer. Who was Ganesh Ghote to go getting himself up against that? No, from now on he would do his duty as it was put to him. And first of all he would go and pull in Amrit Singh. On the murder charge. And the moment he had seen him safely behind bars he would go out to the Masters Foundation, get hold of those damned boys and see that they came into line. He would get up such a case against Amrit Singh that the D.S.P. himself would not be able to better it.
Round him the excited holidaymakers suddenly whirled.
He found himself in an instant surrounded by smiling, smiling faces. Everywhere bodies jerked and swayed in dance. In his ears shout after shout, ‘Holi hai, Holi hai, Holi hai’ rang and echoed. Fireworks fizzed and banged right, left and centre. Their smell mingled dramatically with that of a hundred sweaty bodies. For a few moments a broad-shouldered fisherman stood pressed close to him, his head thrown back and his mouth opening and shutting rhythmically in the words of a song of consistent and remarkable lewdness.
Krishna and the milkmaids, Ghote thought sourly, hemmed in and pressed upon from every side.
And then the real business of the day began. With a multitude of high, screaming whoops the saturnalian colour throwers came roaring into the fray. With big, crude syringes they sprayed long, drenching streams of coloured water, red, yellow, blue, high into the air and down on to one and all. Other swooping troops puffed huge clouds of pink and purple powder at anyone and everyone, but especially at anybody in the least way high and mighty.
And in all the simple village throng, who looked higher or mightier or more worthy of drenching and powdering than Inspector Ganesh Ghote, C.I.D.? Tossing powder by the handful, squirting ink by the bicycle pumpful, they came at him from every side. In seconds he was wet through, red wet, blue wet, yellow wet. And on to the wetness the coloured powders, pink, turquoise and orange, clung and smeared. He put his head glumly down and pushed forward. Dancing bodies bumped him, hands seized him and whirled him bouncing round. The drums beat in his ears, and everywhere the faces were smiling, smiling like maniacs.
I have deserved this, he thought. This is a fit punishment for coming here with my money and telling people how to live their lives. Exactly fit. They have taken my money and used it to buy all these pots of powder and buckets of dye and they have jumped on me and put me down to the lowest level of the low. Well, there it is.
Buffeted and banged, swung and tossed, he endured it till at last he found himself quite suddenly ejected from the whirling crowd.
He staggered a few paces clear and stopped to draw breath. He flapped at his multi-coloured clothes in an ineffectual attempt to get them looking a little more presentable. Then he gave up. He would have to go home looking like this, and that would be the crowning blow of his punishment. He looked round to see where he was and how he could get to the inland path without going through the crowd again.
And just twenty yards away he saw Amrit Singh.
This time the big Sikh was doing more than spy over the village. He was down on his hands and k
nees round at the back of the palisaded curing yard scraping up the soft muddy earth with his bare hands like a dog.
An energetic and extremely purposeful dog.
At once Ghote realized what it was that he must be doing. The patch of earth he was working at was clearly marked out by lying in the exact centre of a triangle formed by three singularly ugly, stunted and battered banana palms. If ever there was a place to bury something in the sure hope of digging it up again, this was it. And what had anyone here to bury that Amrit Singh would want to dig up but gold?
He had caught him in the very act.
Ghote stood where he was, poised. Surely this must be it? He would get Amrit Singh now, get him for smuggling. Fair and square. And after that he could see once more what he could make of the mystery of Krishna Chatterjee.
The big Sikh’s broad back lifted and from behind the heap of dark earth he picked up a small but heavy bundle wrapped in a piece of dirty coarse gunny. This was the moment.
Ghote ran forward silently across the soft, dry sand.
And something – a scatter of little sharp-beaked paddy birds, a fleeting shadow – warned the Sikh. With half a glance behind he was up and off, his long legs striding out, heading down the gentle slope of the seashore, out and away by the quickest route that came.
Ghote ran. He felt his legs moving swiftly under him. He would do it. In spite of whatever unlucky accident had warned the Sikh he would catch him.
But one thing he had forgotten.
His own appearance. The multi-coloured fool. Flashing down towards the distant sea, covered from head to foot in a dazzling array of the brightest shades, with the strong sun catching every colour and the breeze sending every loose end flying, he was a sight to catch the eye of even the most absorbed Holi reveller.
There was a sudden, sharp, directed roar of laughter, and then the crowd closed in on him again.
He was caught by both hands, flung round in circles, jumped high, swung low, sluiced once more from chunky syringe and venomous bicycle pump, sloshed and soaked from bucket and jug, puffed and dusted again, green, blue, yellow and above all red. The very air he breathed was smoking with colour.
Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade Page 20
