Emerging into the sunlight, Ghote made his way along to Dandekar’s office which gave directly on to the tree-shaded compound. He pushed open one half of its batwing doors. And there, looking just like his photograph, large as life, or even larger, was the Noted British Author. He was crouching on a small chair in front of Dandekar’s green leather-covered desk, covering it much like a big fluffed-up hen on one small precious egg. His hips, clad in trousers already the worse for the dust and stains of Bombay life, drooped on either side while a considerable belly projected equally far forward. Above was a beard, big and sprawling as the body beneath, and above the beard was hair, plentiful and inclined to shoot in all directions. Somewhere between beard and hair a pale British face wore a look of acute curiosity.
“Ah, Ghote, thank God,” Dandekar, stocky, muscular, hook-nosed, greeted him immediately in sharp, T-spitting Marathi. “Listen, take this curd-face out of my sight. Fast.”
Ghote felt a terrible abrupt inward sinking. So this was how he was to assist Dandekar, by keeping from under his feet a, no doubt, notable British nuisance. Even bandobast duties would be better.
But Dandekar could hardly produce that expected rapid result with such a burden. He squared his bony shoulders.
Dandekar had jumped up.
“Mr. Peduncle,” he said, in English now, “I would like you to—”
“It’s not Peduncle actually,” the Noted British Author broke in. “Important to get the little details right, you know. That’s what the old shell-collector in my books – he’s Mr. Peduncle – is always telling his friend, Inspector Sugden. No, my name’s Reymond, Henry Reymond, author of the Peduncle books.”
The multitudinous beard split with a wide, clamorously ingratiating grin.
“Yes, yes,” said Dandekar briskly. “But this is Inspector Ghote. He will be assisting me. Ghote, the domestic servant of the place has disappeared – a Goan known as John Louzado. They had no address at his native-place, but we might get it from a former employer. Will you see to that? And Mr. Ped – Mr. Reymond, who is expressing most keen interest in our methods, can attach himself to you while I talk with the young man who was tied up, the son, or rather adopted son. I think somehow he could tell a good deal more.”
Ghote put out his hand for Mr. Reymond to shake. He did not look forward to dealing with the numerous questions likely to arise from that keen interest in Bombay CID methods.
As Ghote drove the Noted British Author in one of the branch’s big battered cars down Dr. D.N. Road towards Colaba where the fleeing servant’s former employer lived, he found his worst forebodings justified. His companion wanted to know everything – what was that building, what this, was that man happy lying on the pavement, where else could he go?
Jockeying for place in the traffic, swerving for cyclists, nipping past great lumbering red articulated buses, Ghote did his best to provide pleasing answers. But the fellow was never content. Nothing seemed to delight him more than hitting on some small discrepancy and relentlessly pursuing it, comparing himself all the while to his Mr. Peduncle and his “The significant variation: in that lies all secrets”. If Ghote heard the phrase once in the course of their twenty-minute drive, he seemed to hear it a dozen times.
At last, when they were waiting at the lights to get into Colaba Road, he was reduced to putting a question of his own. How did it come about, he interrupted, that Mr. Reymond was living in a flat up at Shivaji Park? Would not the Taj Hotel just down there be more suitable for a distinguished visitor?
“Ah yes, I know what you mean,” the author answered with an enthusiasm that gave Ghote considerable inward pleasure. “But, you see, I am here by courtesy of Air India, on their new Swap-a-Country Plan. They match various people with their Indian equivalents and exchange homes. Most far-sighted. So I am at Shivaji Park and the writer who lives there – well, he has written some short stories, though I gather he’s actually a Deputy Inspector of Smoke Nuisances and a relation of your State Minister for Police Affairs and the Arts, as it happens – well, he at the present moment is installed in my cottage in Wiltshire, and no doubt getting as much out of going down to the pub as I get from being in a flat lucky enough to have a telephone so that people are always popping in and, while they’re looking up a number in the little red book, talking away like one o’clock.”
The Noted British Author’s eyes shone.
“Yes,” Ghote said.
Certain queries had occurred to him. Could there, for instance, be an exchange between a police inspector in Bombay and one in, say, New York? But somehow he could not see himself getting several months’ Casual Leave, and he doubted whether many other similar Bombayites would find it easy.
But he felt that to voice such doubts aloud would be impolite. And his hesitation was fatal.
“Tell me,” Mr. Reymond said, “that sign saying ‘De Luxe Ding Dong Nylon Suiting’…” And, in a moment, they had struck full on another “significant variation”.
Desperately Ghote pulled one more question out of the small stock he had put together.
“Please, what is your opinion of the books of Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner? To me Perry Mason is seeming an extremely clever individual altogether.”
“Yes,” said the Noted British Author, and he was silent right until they reached their destination in Second Pasta Lane.
Mrs. Patel, wife of a civil servant and former employer of John Louzado, was a lady of forty or so dressed in a cotton sari of a reddish pattern at once assertive and entirely without grace.
“You are lucky to find me, Inspector,” she said when Ghote had explained their business. “At the Family Planning office where I undertake voluntary work, Clinic begins at ten sharp.”
Ghote could not stop himself glancing at his watch, though he well knew it was at least half-past ten already.
“Well, well,” Mrs. Patel said sharply, “already I am behind schedule. But there is so much to be done. So much to be done.”
She darted across the sitting-room, a place almost as littered with piles of papers as any office at Crime Branch, and plumped up a cushion.
“Just if you have the address of John’s native-place,” Ghote said.
“Of course, of course. I am bound to have it. I always inquire most particularly after a servant’s personal affairs. You are getting an altogether better loyalty factor then. Don’t you find·that, Mr. – I’m afraid I am not hearing your name?”
She had turned her by no means negligible gaze full on the Noted British Author. Ghote, who had hoped not to explain his companion, introduced him with a brief “Mr. Reymond, from UK.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Patel. “Well, don’t you find – Ah, but you are the Mr. Reymond, the noted British author, isn’t it? Most pleased to meet you, my dear sir. Most pleased. What I always find with criminological works is the basic fact emerging, common to many sociological studies, a pattern of fundamental human carelessness, isn’t it? You see—”
But, river-spate rapid though she was, she had met her match.
“One moment – I am sorry to interrupt – but there is a slight discrepancy here. You see, there are two different sorts of crime books involved. You are talking about sociological works, but what I write are more crime novels. Indeed, it’s just the sort of mistake my detective, Mr. Peduncle, the old collector of sea shells, is always pointing out. ‘The significant variation: in that lies all secrets.’”
“Ah, most interesting,” Mrs. Patel came back, recovering fast. “Of course I have read a good deal of Erle Stanley Gardner and so forth, and I must say…”
She gave them her views at such length that Ghote at last, politeness or not, felt forced to break in.
“Madam, madam. If you will excuse. There is the matter of John’s native-place address.”
“Yes, yes. I am getting it.”
Mrs. Patel plunged towards a bureau and opened its flap-
down front. A considerable confusion of documents was revealed, together with what looked like the wrappings for a present bought but never handed to its intended recipient.
Prolonged searching located, first, an address-book, then “a list of things like this which I jot down” and finally the back of a notebook devoted to household hints clipped from magazines. But no address.
“Madam,” Ghote ventured at last, “is it possible you did not in fact take it down?”
“Well, well, one cannot make a note of everything. That is one of my principles: keep the paperwork down to the minimum.”
She gave the British author some examples of Indian bureaucracy. Once or twice Ghote tried to edge him away, but even a tug at the distinguished shirtsleeve was unsuccessful. Only when he himself began explaining how British bureaucracy was a crutch that fatally hampered people like Inspector Sugden in his own books, did Ghote act.
“Madam, I regret. Mr. Reymond, sir. We are conducting investigation. It is a matter of urgency.”
And with that he did get the author out on to the landing outside. But as Mrs. Patel was shutting the door with many “Goodbye then” and “So interesting, and I must try to find one of your books,” Mr. Reymond broke in in his turn:
“Inspector, there is a small lacuna.”
Ghote stared.
“Please, what is lacuna?”
“Something missing, a loose end. You haven’t asked where Louzado worked before he came here. Mr. Peduncle would have a word to say to you. If there’s one thing he always seizes on it is the little lacuna.”
The bursting-out beard parted to reveal a roguish smile.
“Yes,” said Ghote. “You are perfectly correct. Madam, do you have the address of John’s former employer?”
“Why, yes, of course,” Mrs. Patel replied, with a note of sharpness. “I can tell you that out of my head. John was recommended to me by my friends, the Dutt-Dastars.”
And, mercifully, she came straight out with the address – it was somewhat south of the Racecourse – and Ghote was even able to prevent her giving them a detailed account of the posh-sounding Dutt-Dastars.
* * *
Since their route took them past Crime Branch HQ, Ghote decided to risk the Noted British Author re-attaching himself to Inspector Dandekar and to report progress. Besides, if he could install Mr. Reymond in his own office for ten minutes only it would give him a marvellous respite from relentlessly pursued questions.
So, a peon summoned and Coca-Cola thrust on the distinguished visitor, Ghote went down to Dandekar.
“Well, Inspector,” he asked, “did the son have more to tell?”
“More to tell he has,” Dandekar answered, sipping tea and dabbing his face with a towel. “But speak he will not.”
“He is not one hundred per cent above-board then?”
“He is not. I was up there at Shivaji Park within half an hour of the time he freed himself from those ropes, and I could see at a glance the marks were not right at all.”
“Too high up the wrists, was it?”
“Exactly, Inspector. That young man tied himself up. And that must mean he was in collusion with the fellows who killed the old couple. How else did they get in, if he did not open the door to them? No, three of them were in it together and the Goan and a notorious bad hat from the vicinity called Budhoo have gone off with the jewellery. You can bet your boots on that.”
“But the young man will not talk?” Ghote asked.
“He will not talk. College-educated, you know, and thinks he has all the answers.”
Ghote nodded agreement. It was a common type and the bane of a police officer’s life. His determination to push forward the case by getting hold of John Louzado’s address redoubled.
“Well,” he said, “I must be getting back to Mr. Reymond, or he will come looking for us.”
In answer Dandekar grinned at him like an exulting film villain.
But, when he got back to his office, he found the Noted British Author doing something more ominous than looking for Dandekar. He was furiously making notes on a little pad.
“Ah,” he said the moment Ghote came in, “just one or two points that occurred to me in connection with the case.”
Ghote felt this last straw thump down.
“Oh yes,” he answered, as waggishly as he could. “We would be very delighted to have the assistance of the great Mr. Peduncle and his magical shell collection.”
“No, no,” the noted author said quickly. “Mr. Peduncle’s shells are by no means magical. There’s a slight discrepancy there. You see, Mr. Peduncle examines shells to detect their little variations and equally he examines the facts of a case and hits on significant variations there.”
“The significant variation in which are lying all secrets,” Ghote quoted.
Mr. Reymond laughed with great heartiness. But in the car, heading north up Sir J.J. Road, he nevertheless explained in detail every single discrepancy he had noted in his little pad.
It seemed that, in the comparatively short time between the apparently distraught son coming to say he had been set upon and Inspector Dandekar bringing him to Crime Branch HQ, he had accumulated a great many facts and bits of hearsay. All of them must have been boiling away in his fertile mind. Now to spume out.
Most were trivialities arising from the domestic routine of the dead couple, or of his own flat or the flats nearby. To them Ghote succeeded in finding answers. But what he could not always sort out were the queries these answers produced. “Significant variations” seemed to spring up like buzzing whining insects in the first flush of the monsoon.
Only one point, to Ghote’s mind, could be said to have any real connection with the killing, and that was so slight that in any other circumstances he would have thrust it off.
But it was a fact, apparently, that Mr. Reymond’s servant, an old Muslim called Fariqua, or more precisely the servant of the absent Indian author of some short stories, had been discovered on the morning of the murder asleep inside the flat when he ought to have been in the distant suburb of Andheri, where since the author’s arrival he had been boarded out – “Well, I mean, the chap actually seemed to sleep on the couch in the sitting-room, and I thought that was a bit much really” – and he had provided no explanation.
“Now,” Mr. Reymond said, turning in his seat and wagging his finger very close to Ghote’s face, “he must have hidden himself away in the kitchen till I’d gone to bed. And isn’t that just exactly the sort of variation from the normal which my Mr. Peduncle would seize upon, and which my Inspector Sugden would try to shrug off. Eh, Inspector?”
Ghote felt the honour of the Bombay force at stake.
“Certainly I do not shrug off this at all, Mr. Reymond,” he said. “After we have seen the Dutt-Dastars I will have a word with Fariqua. But then, since you would be at home, perhaps you would care to rest yourself for the afternoon. I know this humid weather makes visitors most extremely fatigued.”
He held his breath in anxiety. To his delight Mr. Reymond, after consideration, acquiesced.
And if at the Dutt-Dastars’ he got Louzado’s address…
The Dutt-Dastars, it appeared, were a couple entirely devoted to art. Their house was crammed with Mrs. Dutt-Dastar’s oil-paintings, sprawling shapes in bus-red and sky-blue, and Mr. Dutt-Dastar’s metal sculptures, jagged iron masses, inclined to rust and a considerable menace, Ghote found, to trouser bottom and shirtsleeve. And in the Bengali way their devotion was expressed as much in words as in acts.
Mr. Reymond they seized on as a fellow artist, blithely ignoring any occasion when he tried to point out a discrepancy, lacuna or significant variation. And equally ignored, time and again, were Ghote’s attempts to get an answer to the one question he still saw, despite the somewhat odd behaviour of Mr. Reymond’s Fariqua, as the plain and simple way to get their evidence
: “Do you have the address in Goa of your former servant John Louzado?”
At last, when he had established to his complete satisfaction that a couple as utterly vague could not possibly have recorded, much less retained, a servant’s address, he planted himself abruptly full in front of Mrs. Dutt-Dastar just as she was explaining the full similarity between her painting Eagle Figure with Two Blue Shapes and Mr. Reymond’s book Mr. Peduncle Caught in Meshes, which she had yet actually to read.
“Madam, kindly to tell: who was the previous employer of John Louzado?”
“John Louzado?” Mrs. Dutt-Dastar asked, seemingly totally mystified.
“The servant you recommended to Mrs. Patel, of Second Pasta Lane.”
“Ah, John. Yes, what to do about John? He did not suit, not at all – it was sheer madness to have taken him on from someone like Shirin Kothawala, a dear person but with no understanding of the artist – but I could not sack the fellow just like that. And then I remembered that funny Mrs. Patel. Well, she would never notice what a servant was like, would she?”
“Madam, the address of Mrs. Shirin Kothawala?”
“Well, but of course. In one of those divine but madly expensive flats in Nepean Sea Road. A block called Gulmarg. Anybody will tell you.”
“Mr. Reymond, I am departing to proceed with inquiries.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. My dear fellow. Coming, coming.”
On the way back, thanks to Ghote’s unequivocal assurance that he would immediately interrogate Fariqua, for all that he privately knew nothing would come of it, the author’s questions were at least confined to the sociological. But before they arrived Ghote decided to issue a warning.
“Mr. Reymond, in India – I do not know how it is in UK – servants often have matters they are wishing to conceal from their masters, like for instance the true cost of vegetables in the bazaar. So, you see, it would perhaps be better if you yourself were not present when I question Fariqua.”
Vintage Crime Page 12
