Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘No, sir. It is the pathologist here that I shall have to question. One by name Hemu Adhikari.’

  ‘No longer with us then,’ the superintendent said ruefully. ‘Quite a different chap up at the hospital now.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I have already taken the liberty of asking your night sergeant who the pathologist was, and he told me that it is some years since Adhikari was here. He is understood to have taken a post in a hospital in Nagaland. But his father, a retired schoolmaster, still resides in the town. He will be one of my first visits.’

  ‘One of your first, Inspector? You have others?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It struck me as altogether extraordinary in view of the suddenness with which deceased died and of the nature of her fatal illness that the body was permitted to be burned and not preserved by burial. Now it is the Coroner’s Committee that would grant such permission and it would not be a difficult matter, as you know, sir, for a person in a position of influence to have a say in the selection of such a committee.’

  ‘No. No, you are right, Inspector. Quite right. Damned fine work, if I may say so.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And this is where I would like some help from your men. It is a matter of finding the present addresses of the five individuals listed as serving on the Coroner’s Committee. I have written them out for you, sir. There is the foreman, Janardan Pendharkar, a Ram Dhulup, an individual called Bhatu – there will be a good many of them I regret – a Ram Phalke and a Govind Gokhale.’

  The superintendent compressed his well-fleshed lips.

  ‘It would not be easy, Inspector,’ he said. ‘None of them are uncommon names. But my men know the town inside out, I am happy to say. I will get on to it right away.’

  A respectful knock came at the door.

  ‘Come, come,’ the superintendent barked out.

  The door opened. It was one of the outer office constables. Under his arm he carried a newspaper, folded with geometrical neatness.

  ‘Your paper has just arrived, Superintendent sahib,’ he said. ‘You gave orders it was to be brought to you at once.’

  The superintendent took the paper eagerly. He turned to Ghote.

  ‘You will excuse me one moment, my dear fellow. We are having serious flooding in the area and I need to find out what course events are expected to take.’

  He began rapidly scanning the front page of the paper, uttering occasional quick grunts. Ghote had to concede that to him local flooding with all the policing problems it could bring was properly a more serious matter than a crime that had been committed fifteen years before. But he nevertheless began increasingly to boil with impatience at the superintendent’s failure to issue a quick order for a search for the addresses of the members of the Coroner’s Committee. The sooner they were found the sooner he could get at the Municipal Chairman where, after all, he might be vulnerable. He longed to see files and records being attacked with all the vigour in the world until the facts he wanted had been torn out of them.

  ‘Bad, bad,’ murmured the superintendent, still deeply engrossed.

  He began sorting through the eight or so pages of the paper in search of some extra item inside. And then, as he found the page he wanted and flattened the puffed-up sheets on Inspector Popatkar’s desk, both he and Ghote saw simultaneously a single bold heading that dominated the page.

  HOLY MAN’S

  FAST

  AGAINST

  PROBE

  GOES ON

  For a moment the superintendent seemed to be considering flapping the page over and pretending that nothing that concerned either of them was there. But the bold letters were too obvious. They were both staring at them, and each knew the other had seen them.

  ‘Superintendent,’ Ghote said, ‘I notice there is an item there about this fast against my investigation. Is there something fresh?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no.’

  ‘You are certain, Superintendent?’

  The superintendent puffed out his fleshy lips like a man making up his mind to plunge his hands into some unsavoury substance. He put a forefinger at the top of the column and scrupulously drew it down until the very end of the story had been reached.

  Then he looked up with a happier expression.

  ‘No, it says only that he is going on,’ he announced. ‘This will be the sixty-first day.’

  ‘The sixty-first,’ Ghote echoed.

  It had been going on longer than he realized then. That copy of Time magazine must have been older than he had thought.

  ‘Yes, it is sixty-one days,’ the superintendent said briskly. ‘But as you will know, often such fasts go on for seventy days or eighty.’

  Ghote drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Superintendent,’ he said. ‘This is a matter I had been meaning to ask your advice upon. Please, what effect is it having in the town?’

  Superintendent Chavan straightened his brilliantly polished belt.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘I will be totally frank.’

  ‘Yes?’ Ghote said, feeling black lines of despair zig-zagging down into his inmost being.

  ‘It is bad, Inspector. It is undoubtedly bad. The Swami in question is an important figure in the town. He established himself in a disused temple down by the river more than two years ago, and he has gained very great influence over the people.’

  ‘He has taken up public matters before?’ Ghote asked, throwing in whatever came to hand in the hope it might stave off the knowledge that this obstacle to his mission was as overwhelming as it now seemed to be.

  ‘Oh, indeed, yes,’ the superintendent answered remorselessly. ‘This time last year when the monsoon had partially failed and the grain merchants were already beginning to put up their prices he went on a fast-unto-death also.’

  Ghote took in the significance of that ‘also’. Nefarious grain merchants and over-inquisitive police inspectors were firmly bracketed together.

  ‘And what happened with that fast?’ he asked dolefully.

  ‘The prices came down,’ the superintendent replied. ‘One of the merchants was attacked by a mob.’

  Ghote swallowed.

  ‘He was killed?’

  ‘No, no,’ said the superintendent.

  And then, as Ghote relaxed a little, he gave him a hard look.

  ‘But he came out of hospital last month only,’ he said.

  Ghote inwardly shouldered the burden.

  ‘I had intended always to work fast,’ he said. ‘Now I see I shall have to work even faster.’

  A glimmer of consoling thought came to him as he spoke. He gave the bright orange egg-box resting on a corner of Inspector Popatkar’s desk a little tap.

  ‘At least I have this as a disguise,’ he said. ‘Luckily when I encountered the Chairman outside the station here he did not catch a glimpse of it.’

  ‘You have spoken with the Chairman already?’ the superintendent asked in some surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ghote tersely. ‘And now, if you please, can arrangements be made to find those addresses with the utmost dispatch?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  *

  Ghote did more than arrange for a search for the present whereabouts of the five members of that Coroner’s Committee he felt might well provide him with a lead into his warmed-up case. He also asked the superintendent to get one of his men to hire him a bicycle, and he found out that there was, as he had hoped there might be, a back way out of the police-station.

  If he was going to succeed in carrying on his investigation in the town with this Swami radiating opposition to him from the riverside temple, then it was plainly vital that he should be able to go about unknown until he wished to reveal himself to anybody he wanted to question.

  Yet, as he left to visit the pathologist’s old father, following a constable across the spacious compound of the police-station to a narrow and rusted iron gate in the high back wall, he could not help wishing that his disguise had taken some other form than the commercial vulgarity of
the vibrantly orange box with its jarring blue letters.

  He waited while the constable pushed and wriggled a heavy key into the lock on the barred gate and, with some hideous squeals from the rusty mechanism, succeeded in unlocking it. The man held the gate wide for him and he went through.

  In the narrow, muddy and appallingly stench-ridden lane outside another constable stood. He was holding, in a very military manner, a bicycle.

  It was not the machine Ghote had envisaged when he had made his request for one. He had conceived of himself astride a speedy roadster, darting like a fury here and there about the town snatching up the nuggets of information he needed. The machine the constable held must have dated from well before the Chairman’s first wife had died and it looked it, every inch.

  It was of immensely sturdy construction. Its handlebars were curved high and faced the world ahead with all the squareness of a battleship. Its saddle was broad, it seemed, as a bench, its leather polished by generations of well-breached British sahibs of the past, for undoubtedly this machine had belonged to them in days gone by. It had a thin but still tough canvas hood on the rear wheel to protect the legs of its ever-respectable owners from the mud and dirt of life. A neat little leather tool-bag dangled from the back of the saddle and under this there was a wide metal carrier complete with thin holding-straps.

  Ghote approached, and while the constable still held the machine entirely upright, he fastened the garish egg-box on to this substantial platform. It looked as out of place there as a film-poster on a bank. But at least it was an inescapable announcement that here was anybody but the hated Inspector Ghote.

  Taking the handlebars from the constable, Ghote threw his leg across the bicycle’s broad saddle and settled himself comfortably. He put a foot on one of the thick rubber-blocked pedals. He pushed.

  Nothing happened.

  In the slimy mud of the malodorous lane the heavy back-wheel of the machine simply turned slowly round without imparting any forward motion whatsoever.

  And this was darting off to snatch information out of the reluctant mass of the town.

  ‘Push,’ Ghote yelled at the two watching constables. ‘Push, push, push.’

  *

  When at last Ghote had brought his well-constructed steed to the house where Hemu Adhikari, former pathologist at the town’s hospital, had once lived he found it was distinguished by the possession of a particularly long frontage from the equally modest establishments of its neighbours. It lay in a district near the edge of the town occupied largely by minor professional men and the owners of small businesses – schoolmasters, lower rank civil servants, the keepers of the larger shops, Dr R. Rao, proprietor of the Rao Dispensary next to the police-station, among them. All this Ghote had learnt from the night sergeant, whose encyclopedic knowledge had confirmed in advance Superintendent Chavan’s claim that his men knew their area inside-out.

  Now Ghote rested his battleship-heavy bicycle against a convenient wall a fair distance from the Adhikari house and fastened it up securely with a substantial padlock which the constable who had hired it for him had said he would find, with two tyre-levers, in the tool-bag.

  He stepped back and gave the machine a final survey.

  Yes, it would not connect him, once he had walked away from it, with the Inspector Ghote he intended to announce himself as to the pathologist’s father.

  He walked down to the house and knocked briskly at the narrow door at one end of its long blank outer wall.

  No one answered, and after an interval he knocked again more loudly.

  A patch of blue had appeared in the solid leaden sky that had hung over the town ever since his arrival and the sun was shining. Heavy steam began rising from everything in sight. It drifted up from the thatched roofs, from the puddle-splotched lane and the gurgling drain running along its length. It mounted from the tops of the trees that could be seen rising from inside the courtyards of the houses. It even came up from the back of a donkey, which stood energetically chewing at a piece of newspaper at the end of the lane, and equally from the hunched shoulders of a wreck of a beggar propped against the far corner of Mr Adhikari’s house, soundly sleeping in the confident knowledge that in this quiet district no one was going to require his professional attentions.

  But the sunshine, though at once making it unpleasantly hot to be standing in the glare, did at least make the outlook more cheerful. And Ghote reflected with pleasure that his departure from the rear of the police-station had not been observed at all and that he had succeeded in pushing his sturdy machine a good way through the town, a diligent salesman for chicken-feed, without causing the least outcry.

  Then the door behind him opened abruptly and he turned to see a very small old man – he could not have been an inch more than five feet – standing there looking at him. He was wearing only a white dhoti, its folds falling with severe neatness from an extremely thin waist. But in spite of the scantiness of his attire and of his lack of stature he was a figure of unshakable dignity, his back kept ramrod upright and a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez set on his nose straight as the horizon.

  In one second, it seemed, he had summed up his visitor.

  ‘If,’ he said sternly, ‘you have come to sell, it would be only fair to let you know I have no intention to buy.’

  4

  For one nasty moment Ghote saw all his ingenious plans for slipping out of the appearance of a chicken-feed salesman and into that of a police inspector and vice-versa crumbling to nothing. He had been spotted at a glance.

  Then he realized, with a disproportionate feeling of relief that brought the sweat up all over his body, that the little old upright gentleman in front of him had done no more than to suppose any caller in anonymous white shirt and trousers must be some sort of salesman.

  ‘No, no,’ he explained quickly. ‘I am a police officer. My name is Ghote, Inspector Ghote. Am I correct in thinking I am speaking to Mr Adhikari senior?’

  ‘You are speaking to Mr Adhikari. There is no Mr Adhikari junior.’

  Ghote could not keep the surprise quite off his face.

  ‘But you have a son?’ he asked. ‘Mr Hemu Adhikari?’

  The old man’s straight mouth, which had not in any case shown anything of a smile, became a degree sterner.

  ‘I had a son,’ he said. ‘He no longer exists.’

  Ghote experienced the faint thud of disappointment which always came to him was a trail petered out.

  ‘He died then in Nagaland?’ he inquired, unwilling to let the thread tail quite away.

  An expression of sharp annoyance planted itself on the old gentleman’s face.

  ‘What is it about my son that is suddenly so important today?’ he demanded. ‘First one and then the other, they come knocking at my door. Is your son here? Where is your son now? I tell you my son has ceased to exist.’

  Ghote put out some muttered apologies and retreated. He had learnt more than he had bargained for. Although he had been out on his trail early, someone else had been even earlier. Doubtless someone sent by the Municipal Chairman to make perfectly sure that the former town pathologist was still well out of the way.

  Well, he was as far out of the way as could be, it seemed.

  ‘Most sorry for disturbing you,’ he called out one last time.

  The old schoolmaster gave a general glare round the street, concentrated its last furies on the huddled form of the beggar against his house wall, as if the sight of such heaped degradation was especially displeasing to his ramrod self, and then retreated stumpily inside.

  Above, the leaden sky had closed sullenly together again and Ghote, rejoining his egg-box and bicycle, felt the first stirrings of what was doubtless to be another downpour. He mounted and began heaving round the heavy pedals of the machine with all his might.

  But one flickering tongue of comfort did leap out of the ashes of his disappointment. If the Chairman had been so concerned to make sure Hemu Adhikari was still in Nagaland, then Hemu Adhikari m
ust indeed have known something to the Chairman’s discredit. And despite every move that was being made it might yet be possible to learn what that something was.

  Ghote brought the machine under him to a slithering halt in the muddy street, tugged out the notebook in which he had jotted down information the night sergeant had given him, found exactly where the town hospital lay and, bodily tugging round the battleship bicycle and aiming it in a new direction, set off again at a doubly determined rate.

  *

  Dr Dahabhai Patil, the Medical Superintendent at the hospital, kept Ghote waiting for almost an hour before giving him the interview he had requested in a carefully sealed note written after he had heaved the heavy bicycle into a rack at the hospital and had thus shed once again his salesman disguise.

  During all the waiting time he sat on a slatted wooden bench in the anteroom which he shared for short periods with no fewer than five other visitors to the Medical Superintendent, each bearing odd similarities of appearance in the shape of heavy horn-rim spectacles and much-flourished briefcases – Ghote decided eventually that they must be the representatives of drug firms.

  Perhaps, he thought, this was the day and the hour in all the month that Dr Patil set aside for such visits. But, even if they did provide a reason for his own long wait, it was still true that in the intervals of negotiation over drug supplies Dr Patil would have had plenty of time to take advice from his near acquaintance, no doubt, the Municipal Chairman.

  So by the time a peon at last came in and, salaaming perfunctorily, led him away to the Medical Superintendent he was full to the brim with seething black suspicions.

  He found Dr Patil an impressive enough figure behind his large glass-topped desk. He was tall, balding, with lightly curling hair touched with silvery grey above a blandly smooth large oval face broken by a sharp nose. In spite of the oppressively damp heat he wore a tie with his white shirt. His appearance, coupled with his name and the accent in which Ghote heard him speak a few words, marked him not as a native of the place but as a Gujarati.