Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Well,’ Ghote replied, ‘you have helped me a great deal at a bad time for me. Thank you.’

  The boy looked up at him in silence.

  He decided that it was time to go. The information he had learnt was boiling up inside him waiting to be used.

  He retrieved the bright orange egg-box, dodged his way out of the kika-thorn patch and strapped it on to his bicycle. Then, pressing his feet on the thick pedals for all he was worth, he started off for the river road. He was going to have a very different sort of interview this time with the irascible holy man.

  He drove the ironclad machine along the road, careless of whether he was sending up great shoots of water from the puddles or not. And as he rode he rearranged in his mind all the events of his stay in the town in the light of his new knowledge.

  He was definitely on top once again. The Chairman might have managed to overcome the disadvantage of his goondas’ failure, he might have managed to get out to his house so quickly that he had stopped any line of investig –

  Abruptly Ghote’s thoughts came to a full stop. His feet ceased to turn the bicycle pedals. How had the Chairman got out there so quickly? There had not been time for anyone to have gone to give him a warning, since even the fastest cyclist would not have succeeded in getting all the way into the town centre in between his own arrival and that of the Chairman barely ten minutes later. And no warning could have been given by telephone either. As it happened Moti had told him on his previous visit that there was only one instrument in the house, and he himself had been within sight of it the whole time of his visit. So how … ?

  And he knew the answer almost before he had formulated the question.

  He had told one person and one person only where he was going. He had even stressed the importance of not spreading the information. So that one person must have got straight on to the Chairman to warn him that the Bombay inspector was going out to his house on a promising line of investigation. No doubt this person would have asked the Chairman to be discreet about how he dealt with matters, but the Chairman, scorning anything cautious, had simply jumped into his big car and had driven out to the house as fast as he could.

  And that person was, of course, Superintendent Chavan.

  The bicycle had meanwhile drifted almost to a halt on the muddy surface of the road. Ghote swung it round by main force and set out again as fast as he could go, in the direction of the police-station.

  But he was not to get there without trouble. As he entered the broad main street he saw that a crowd was gathered in front of the station itself. And from the shouts that arose occasionally it was only too plain that it was an angry crowd.

  Cautiously Ghote brought his lumbering bicycle to a halt and advanced on foot, wheeling it beside him. Before he had gone many yards he saw that between the smartly whitewashed exterior of the police-station and the crowd a line of half a dozen police constables was drawn up. Each was armed with a long bamboo lathi and was waving it threateningly.

  Ghote squished through the slush of the street till he had got even nearer. Then he was able to confirm something he had seen at a distance, and had not at all liked. The expressions on the faces of the constables were all similar: they looked like men who were decidedly scared.

  At any moment, Ghote realized, the crowd was likely to launch itself forward. Men as experienced in local trouble-making as the constables would know from the signs that this was no holiday bust-up. These particular trouble-makers meant business.

  And it did not need the sudden hoisting of the mud-spattered banner on its two long poles to tell him what the anger, rising up from the crowd like steam from a boiling pot, was directed against. As clearly as the smeared letters on the banner, it spelt ‘Ghote Go’.

  The Chairman was certainly a fast worker.

  No sooner had he himself left the compound of the man’s house than he must have been on the telephone sending some trusted hireling from his office out into the streets to stir up trouble.

  For a little Ghote was tempted to get on his bicycle and quietly pedal off, round the edge of the town, back on to the river road and out to the ruined temple and the Swami. But he realized that nothing he could do immediately would cause the trouble to calm down. The Chairman had had it stirred up: it would be with them all the rest of the day.

  In the meantime would it still be possible to get into the police-station by the back way?

  He remounted and set off cautiously down a narrow lane between the Krishna Bhavan Restaurant and the Co-operative Bank, the sound of the crowd’s rising and falling shouts of protest fading as he penetrated farther along the lane with its squawking scrawny chickens (how much they would benefit from Grofat chicken-feed) and its scratching mangy dogs. Soon he found himself in the ordure-smelling area at the back of the police-station compound where there was still no sign of an angry crowd.

  He dismounted thankfully from his weighty steed and rattled at the narrow rusty gate.

  A constable came across the compound at a run, waving a lathi and all set to repel boarders. But as soon as he recognized Ghote he produced the long key to the gate and let him in, preceding him afterwards to Superintendent Chavan’s office with all the pride of a drum major.

  As they went, the excitements of avoiding the angry crowd, whose shouts could hardly be heard here at the back of the police-station building, swirled away out of Ghote’s mind and left in their place only the residue of his discovery about the superintendent.

  A prickle of anger went through him.

  How completely he had been cheated. All the plans he had so eagerly discussed with this colleague of colleagues. All the help he had so gratefully accepted as from one policeman to another. All the trust he had put in the man’s so evident pride in his uniform and his calling. And the whole time his own every move, his every thought no doubt, had been relayed as quickly as possible to the grinning figure of the Municipal Chairman.

  And how diabolically he had been encouraged to go here and there about the town when it had been well known in advance that his errands were bound to be fruitless. Look at the way he had been allowed to learn that pensioned Ram Dhulup was a creature of the Chairman’s. Of course he could be told that: Ram Dhulup had already been spirited away.

  And no wonder that on that very first day of inquiries a man had been walking in the direction of Bhatu the basket-maker’s hut with a copy of the newspaper containing a story about the Swami. No doubt that paper had been shown to each one of the members of the Coroner’s Committee to remind them where their interests lay. There had certainly been a copy on chubby little Mr Pendharkar’s desk.

  He should have worked out from that that there had been a spy signalling his every move.

  To the bewildered surprise of the police constable he pushed swiftly past him and burst into the superintendent’s office unannounced.

  The superintendent was standing by the window smoking a cigarette and looking out on to the compound, smoothing down the front of his already smooth uniform in his reflection in the window glass.

  ‘Superintendent Chavan,’ Ghote said in loud accusing tones, ‘you have been telling my every plan to the Chairman.’

  Superintendent Chavan looked just for a moment as if he had been struck in the face. But very quickly any such violent reaction was stifled. He turned back to the window again, leaning forward and peering as if in the poor reflection of the glass he was not able to see as much detail on his uniform as he would have liked.

  Ghote drew himself up.

  ‘It is of no use to deny,’ he said. ‘I told you and you only that I was going to the Chairman’s house this morning, and hardly had I arrived than he was there saying he knew I had come.’

  He glared so hard, and left such a pause in the air that the superintendent had no option but to turn round.

  ‘My dear chap,’ he said, brushing the air away in front of him as if it was somehow distorting a plain situation, ‘my dear chap, there must be some error.’

>   ‘Can you suggest how error occurred?’ Ghote demanded. ‘I most emphatically requested you to keep the information to yourself. Did you spread it round the station?’

  ‘My dear fellow, of course not. Confidential information is confidential information.’

  The superintendent looked shocked. The basis of his official life had been attacked.

  ‘Very good,’ Ghote said. ‘Then if the information was not spread round the station, how does it happen that it came to the ears of the Chairman within minutes of my departure?’

  ‘I can offer no suggestion,’ said the superintendent.

  He went and sat at his desk in a deflated way.

  ‘Well, I can offer suggestion,’ Ghote said brutally. ‘The only possible explanation is that you have been in the Chairman’s pay all along.’

  ‘It is not a question of pay,’ the superintendent said.

  ‘Very well, I withdraw that. It is not a question of pay. But it is a question of friendship. You have put your friendship with a man of so much influence in the town before your duty as a police officer.’

  ‘No, no, it is not so.’

  The superintendent’s denial was pathetic rather than vigorous. His hand went out to the braided cap resting in its usual position on the right hand side of the desk by the big brass ashtray.

  ‘But you cannot deny facts,’ Ghote banged out. ‘I told you where I was going in confidence, and in no time at all the Chairman is there denouncing.’

  He went and stood in front of the desk. Glaring down, demanding an answer.

  ‘It is possible, I suppose,’ the superintendent said glumly.

  ‘Possible,’ Ghote stormed. ‘Nothing else is possible. I have been betrayed by the colleague I counted on.’

  The superintendent positively clutched at his cap.

  ‘Not betrayed,’ he said.

  ‘What other word is there?’ Ghote shouted. ‘What possible explanation can you offer?’

  The superintendent looked up out of the corner of his heavy face.

  ‘There is one possibility,’ he suggested.

  ‘What possibility is that?’

  The superintendent got to his feet. He straightened his large, rather pudgy shoulders.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said. ‘The Chairman was never guilty of the murder of his wife.’

  12

  Ghote felt as if his whole frame of reference was being held high, about to be smashed to pieces.

  Could this be so? What had Superintendent Chavan got hold of?

  ‘But the missing organs from the body?’ he stammered. ‘Why if he is not guilty were these concealed?’

  The superintendent drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Who is to say that it was poor Savarkar who was responsible for their disappearance?’ he said. ‘It may have been some error only.’

  Ghote had to agree that it was not strictly proven that it had been the Chairman who had made away with the organs. He searched round in his mind for more conclusive proof.

  ‘But his visit to Bombay as soon as he had heard the old Chairman say he wished he could have been his son-in-law?’ he questioned. ‘It seems to me this was most likely for the purposes of obtaining arsenic from some dispensary somewhere in the suburbs, some rundown place he must have known about. There are quite a few of those, I assure you, and I am seeing that investigations are made.’

  But the superintendent nodded his head in bland negative.

  ‘Again, what could be more of a supposition than that this Bombay visit was for such purposes?’ he asked.

  But Ghote was by no means done yet.

  ‘Very well,’ he replied, ‘if the missing organs are the result of a mistake, and if that visit to Bombay was even as he said to purchase a sari as a gift, why all the same did he see that the pathologist who carried out post-mortem – what is his name, Adhikari – why did he see Adhikari was sent away to Nagaland? Because he knew that he might speak.’

  He challenged the superintendent with it.

  The superintendent spread his hands in a broad explanatory gesture.

  ‘Of course he must take every precaution to see that if possible nothing was ever made public about the death being from poison,’ he replied. ‘If it was known that it was so, who else but he as her husband would be accused? Even if he was found Not Guilty at a trial, all would say it was he who had killed her.’

  Ghote considered it. It was an answer. He had to admit.

  ‘And it was for that reason all the agitation against me has been going on?’ he felt obliged to ask.

  ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ the superintendent conceded.

  ‘And for the same reason the Chairman hid away Ram Dhulup, the person on the Coroner’s Committee who was representing his interests?’

  ‘I am not in his confidence,’ Superintendent Chavan replied magnanimously.

  ‘But why then did you tell him where I was this morning?’ Ghote burst out, a spark of indignation flying up from the ashes of his despair.

  The superintendent leaned forward across his wide desk.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said. ‘Understand my position. When you leave the town, he will still be here.’

  ‘But no,’ Ghote began to protest.

  And then the thought struck at him that in all probability that would be the position. The Chairman would leave the town only if he was arraigned on a murder charge, and successfully. Nothing less would shift him. And, how likely was it that he could be outmanoeuvred? Every time it had looked as if he was being so he had proved to possess a longer arm by far than a mere visiting inspector of police. So who was the more likely to be beaten in the end?

  ‘Yet if he is murderer all the same,’ he advanced, ‘it is your duty to assist in bringing him to trial.’

  Superintendent Chavan sat bolt upright and squared his puffy shoulders.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, outrage billowing out from him in clouds. ‘Inspector, do you think if I truly suspected that he had done this crime I would not in every way assist? No Inspector, it has all along been clear to me that Mr Savarkar is a much wronged man. Can you blame me for not wishing to incur his displeasure?’

  ‘But,’ said Ghote, ‘if he did not kill his wife, and it is certain that she was poisoned, then who did kill her?’

  ‘As to that, Inspector, it is for you to find out.’

  *

  Ghote retired to the sanctuary of Inspector Popatkar’s office to consider his brush with Superintendent Chavan. He tried to envisage other possible people who might have wanted fifteen years before to have murdered the first Mrs Savarkar, but nothing but the vaguest and most unlikely of suppositions entered his head, ferret here and there among the papers on the case though he would.

  In front of him Inspector Popatkar’s chart of pickpocketing offences, with its graph-line curving steadily downwards, rebuked his own lack of success, and at last he jumped up from the small, file-cluttered desk determined at least to go and see the Swami again and gain himself some even more needed breathing-space.

  But outside his door he found that all attempts to maintain an atmosphere of ‘Business as usual’ in the police-station had been abandoned. The constables were all wearing khaki-coloured steel helmets, looking a little ridiculous indoors but nevertheless unpleasant portents of what must be going on in the streets. The main doors of the building had been firmly locked and the windows of the outer office had had tall wooden shutters put up in front of them. Through these the noise of the crowd outside could be heard with ominous distinctness.

  Ghote put an eye to one of the small holes that were bored in the centre of the shutters. Just a yard away from him he saw a great naked hair-covered chest. It was working in and out with the violence of the words it was rhythmically shouting.

  But the ‘Ghote go’ the chant had started with had long ago been absorbed. And now the sound that battered on his ears was a meaningless, tirelessly repeated ‘O ay o, o ay o.’

  On and on it went.

  O ay o. O ay
o.

  Ghote turned away from his spy-hole. He sought out the duty sergeant.

  ‘I am going to leave by the back way,’ he said. ‘I am going to visit the Swami.’

  The steady veteran sergeant considered gravely.

  ‘It is certainly all right to go out at the back, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Those fools outside there are still content to be shouting only, so they are not thinking of going anywhere but in the street there. But it might be dangerous to show yourself near the Swami.’

  ‘Do you think I will be recognized?’ Ghote said, glancing down at his anonymous white shirt and trousers.

  The sergeant took his time to think about it.

  ‘Inspector, they are still looking for a man in uniform,’ he said. ‘From some of the shouts we heard before, when they had not started the chanting, we know that. So if you take that box you have, the one for the chicken-feed with the eggs in it, then you would be safer.’

  ‘All right,’ Ghote said wearily.

  He was beginning to hate that box with a wild unreasoning hatred as if it was a stone roped round his neck.

  ‘Inspector,’ the sergeant called out after him as he began to go.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are there real eggs in the box? Perhaps if so it would be better to remove. You may have to undertake avoiding action.’

  ‘No,’ Ghote said with sudden stubbornness. ‘If I have to take the box I take the whole box.’

  The brightly-coloured box, however, seemed to bring him good luck. He had no difficulty in leaving the police-station compound and armed with clear directions he made his way easily towards the river through a network of narrow lanes. Comforting numbers of townspeople unaffected by the noise in the main street looked up at him with only mild curiosity. He passed a street of wheelwrights all busy thumping and banging at the gigantic heavy wooden wheels of the bullock carts and not at him. He threaded his way along a street of ropemakers, with the long half-finished ropes in process of being plaited constituting obstacles in plenty strung out as they were, but obstacles that had no evil intent about them.