Ghote waited in some apprehension for Dr Diana’s answer to this. But the reply when it came arrived from elsewhere. From the unexpected voice of Sonny Carstairs.
‘I think Dr Diana’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s all very well remembering Mr Frank and all that. But we know who’s in charge now, and a jolly good job she’s making of it.’
Now it was that Dr Diana spoke.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s obvious some people know who’s in charge now. But don’t think fulsome praise is going to do you any good, Sonny, my lad. One slip in the dispensary, and you’re out. I promise you that.’
Sonny Carstairs laughed.
In spite of everything Ghote felt sorry for him.
But Dr Diana had not finished.
‘Come on,’ she said to the still silent cook, ‘I asked you for an explanation of what went wrong with your vindaloo tonight. I am still waiting for it. And I warn you that I shall not wait long.’
Ghote decided that the moment had come. He stepped into the open doorway.
‘But I must ask you to wait at least a little, Doctor,’ he said.
His entrance certainly created its sensation. The podgy, glistening cook, crouching hypnotized almost under Dr Diana’s wrath, positively jumped. Sonny and Krishna Chatterjee sent their chairs scraping back. Fraulein Glucklich violated her studious sannysini’s calm with a little squeak. And even Dr Diana looked distinctly surprised.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said abruptly. ‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of a meal. Really, we must be given a bit of peace sometimes, you know.’
‘I regret,’ Ghote said quietly. ‘But I have come on very important business.’
‘That’s as may be,’ Dr Diana replied. ‘But I can’t see that any business of yours can be so important that you have to come barging in here without so much as being announced.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Ghote said. ‘But my business is important. You see, I know now who killed Frank Masters.’
‘Do you indeed?’ Dr Diana said. ‘Well, you’d better get on and arrest them.’
She turned her chair slightly so that she was facing squarely in the direction of Krishna Chatterjee.
Ghote did not pretend to be ignorant of what she meant by the move.
‘You think I have come to arrest Mr Chatterjee?’ he said.
‘Well, you’d hardly come to our tiffin room to arrest Amrit Singh,’ Dr Diana replied.
‘And supposing I want to arrest neither of the gentlemen?’
‘Don’t be a fool, man. We all know what the situation is. Vague threats like that will get you nowhere. The poison that killed Frank was put into the curry he ate in this very room. It was stolen from the dispensary not an hour before. Two unauthorized persons entered the dispensary, Amrit Singh and Chatterjee here. You have come to us, so I suppose it’s for Chatterjee.’
‘Certainly I have succeeded in working out why Mr Chatterjee went into the dispensary,’ Ghote said.
Sitting in front of his neglected plate, Krishna Chatterjee stirred uneasily.
‘If I had listened to everything I had heard with an open mind,’ Ghote went on, ‘I would have known long ago.’
Dr Diana glared at him. He hastily continued.
‘It was just a matter of connecting three things. That Mr Chatterjee greatly respected the late Mr Masters in spite of what he knew were faults in his character, that the boy Edward G. Robinson boasted to me that he could tell a good story about why Mr Masters was supposed to have hidden some gold in the dispensary, and thirdly that he cheekily referred to Shri Chatterjee as a “sucker”.’
The little Bengali’s big eyes looked up at Ghote with dawning realization, and a sudden tinge of laughter.
‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘I believe Edward G. must have told you Frank Masters had lost his money and was smuggling gold, and you believed it and tried to hide the fact from the world.’
‘My dear sir,’ said Mr Chatterjee. ‘And you are telling me that the whole business was a pure fabrication? I am most extremely relieved. Something like that could do incalculable harm.’
He blinked two or three times.
‘Of course, I very much doubt whether I would have gone through with it,’ he added. ‘To the bitter end, you know.’
‘Well, Inspector, what are you doing here, then?’ Dr Diana said abruptly. ‘Why aren’t you rounding up Amrit Singh?’
‘We have him in prison awaiting trial already,’ Ghoteanswered.
‘Then it was him?’
‘No.’
‘But –’
‘Dr Diana, you said just now that the poison that killed Mr Masters was put in the curry he ate. How can you be sure of that, may I ask?’
‘Because on your own admission he was proved scientifically to have eaten that curry shortly before he died,’ Dr Diana answered carefully. ‘Because he was full of arsenic trioxide. Because the symptoms set in at just the right time.’
She looked at Ghote with all the certainties of science itself behind her.
‘The symptoms appeared,’ Ghote answered calmly. ‘But what caused them? Was it arsenic trioxide? Or was it just an ordinary emetic, Doctor?’
Dr Diana’s eyes went wide.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I mean that, if the curry had contained not poison but a simple emetic which anyone could obtain, then Mr Masters need not have been poisoned at dinner when he had the beef curry you ordered for him. He could have been poisoned afterwards. At a time when there was nothing to stop you getting hold of the arsenic, Doctor. When you had sent Mr Carstairs here away to call the police. Then it was quite simple to take the powder from the dispensing room next door and to offer poor Mr Masters a drink. From a doctor’s hands.’
Ghote kept his eyes firmly on her. There could be no doubt she was hearing the truth.
She stood up slowly.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it seems I wasn’t as clever as I thought. My congratulations, Inspector. But you do see that I had to do it, don’t you? He was going to take his money, lock, stock and barrel, and spend it on a pack of mystical Tibetans. All this was going to be allowed to drop. Just like that.’
She looked round, seeing through tear-blotched eyes the workings of the big house beyond the four walls of the tiffin room, the steady rescuing of the almost hopeless flotsam of the big city’s pavements, the doing good.
‘I could have made something of this place,’ she said.
Just as the blue Dodge truck took Dr Diana off to headquarters dusk fell. Ghote stood on the Foundation steps enjoying for a few moments the ending of the day’s glare. He breathed deeply. There was nothing to stop him relaxing now. The rest was routine.
‘So you finally got her,’ a familiar voice said in his ear.
He noticed the shapes of the thin, wiry bodies emerging once more from the darkness.
‘Yes,’ he said, without looking round, ‘she has been arrested.’
‘Just the sort of dirty trick you get with a policeman,’ Edward G. said.
‘Dirty trick?’
Ghote wheeled round and glared furiously into the upturned, crinkled face.
‘She fought to keep all that money from going to those stinking holy men,’ Edward G. explained.
Ghote looked at him in astonishment.
‘You knew that?’ he said.
The boy sighed in the darkness like an exasperated schoolmaster.
‘I told you,’ he said, ‘we need to know what goes on. We need to.’
‘And you knew that she was the one who sent the message to bring Amrit Singh down to the dispensary at the right time?’
Edward G. laughed.
‘She reckoned he was safe to get off at the trial,’ he said. ‘She reckoned all those lawyers would do it.’
‘She was probably right,’ Ghote said.
The boy grunted contemptuously.
‘Just like a social worker that idea,’ he said. ‘You ever think what would have happened i
f we’d said we did see him steal the poison?’
Ghote peered down at him. In the gloom it was difficult to make out the expression on the wrinkled, wry, old man’s face.
‘Still,’ the boy added, ‘you were pretty clever to catch her.’
Ghote felt a ridiculous sense of having received an accolade.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But you should never forget that the police are not always stupid. Sometimes by sheer hard –’
He pulled himself up sharp.
‘Or at least,’ he said, ‘we have wives who cannot be tricked.’
Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade Page 22
