Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Take your hands off,’ he snapped. ‘I have important work.’

  ‘Inspector Ghote, I am wishing to tell you his secret. The Municipal Chairman’s secret.’

  He unpicked the other arm, only to find the first hand was gripping his trouser leg with skinny tenacity.

  And then what the crone was saying properly entered his head. He thought for a moment. Could she … ? What would she … ? No, it must only be some nonsense.

  ‘You must tell the constables,’ he said.

  ‘Inspector Ghote, why did I have his picture?’

  His mind flipped back to those disastrous first few minutes in the town. The collision with this frail collection of bones in his determined hurry to get down to work, and the ridiculous yet appalling coincidence of such a creature clutching a copy of Time magazine that contained his own name and the Chairman’s photograph.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, dropping his voice to little more than a whisper.

  ‘You will hear?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will hear.’

  He glanced quickly round. The constable on duty at the desk was too far away to overhear if he kept his voice down. No one else was near.

  ‘What is it then?’ he asked.

  ‘Inspector Ghote, he is my son.’

  Ghote stared down at her in blank amazement.

  This old creature? This woman of the outcaste community? But the Municipal Chairman was not only a flourishing figure – he was a Brahmin. That had been a major factor in his request to have his first wife’s body burned at the ghats.

  She must be mad.

  He looked across to the constable at the desk with the intention of beckoning him over to lead her away. But the man was for the moment busy completing an entry in the big leather-bound book in front of him.

  ‘After all these years I saw that picture,’ the old woman went patteringly on. ‘After so many years. But I knew that birthmark, like a hen it was. How could a mother forget?’

  Was it possible? Was it just possible?

  ‘You saw the picture in that American paper?’ he asked. ‘And you recognized that mark? I had thought it was in the shape of a boat.’

  ‘A hen, Inspector Ghote, a hen. From the moment I first saw him I said “hen”. And “hen” it stayed till he ran away from his widowed mother and I thought he was lost to me for ever.’

  ‘But he is a Brahmin,’ Ghote said in complete dismissal.

  ‘No. No, he is not. He was born to me. Whatever he may say he is my son.’

  Ghote remembered then what Superintendent Chavan had told him of the Chairman’s origins, of how he had come to the town with nothing and of his story of having lost his parents and all the family possessions in some outbreak of violence between Hindu and Moslem. He had accepted it as unchallenged truth when the superintendent had told it to him, but so apparently had everyone else all along. Yet it was possible that it was a complete fabrication. Why not? It would be utterly typical of the man with whom he had come face to face if it was so. If ever anyone could break the barriers of caste, as people did from time to time even in old traditional places like this, if ever anyone could it was the Municipal Chairman.

  He looked down at the piece of flotsam of humanity who claimed to be the man’s mother.

  ‘You have seen him?’ he asked.

  ‘Inspector Ghote, I did not dare.’

  ‘But you have dared to see me and tell me this.’

  ‘You are the police, Inspector Ghote. He is a badmash, from the time he was a child he was wicked in his heart. Would he have taken his old mother into his arms?’

  For Ghote this was the final seal. She knew the man she had claimed was her son.

  ‘You did right to tell me,’ he said. ‘I do not know what will happen in this town. But come back here once every day and ask for me, I will see you are not forgotten.’

  ‘Inspector Ghote. Inspector Ghote.’

  The toothless gums seemed to mutter the words like an invocation. The scrawny figure wrapped in the once gaudy sari now faded to utter drabness turned and scraped her way across the stone-floored entrance hall of the police-station and out into the heavy damp heat.

  And she gave birth to that man, Ghote thought.

  *

  So it was some while – even longer than the interview with the old crone had taken – before Ghote went to the cell where the constables had put Hemu Adhikari and began doing what he could to get his story out of him.

  He had found it necessary first to go quietly into Inspector Popatkar’s office and think about what he had heard.

  Vinayak Savarkar was not Vinayak Savarkar at all but the hardy child of an outcaste mother and heaven knows what father. It was a startling enough fact. But the more he considered it, the more he became convinced that it was no more than that.

  It was a fact. It gave him a powerful glimpse inside the man he was here to pin down on a murder charge. But it did not otherwise affect the issue in the least.

  He could hardly use his luckily acquired piece of secret knowledge as a hold over the Chairman. No one was going to let themselves be blackmailed into allowing a murder investigation against themselves when the means to hinder it was at their hand.

  And so there it was. The heir to the old Chairman’s power and money had not been really in a position to claim it. In Bombay perhaps a self-made man from nowhere could end by marrying the daughter of a Brahmin family who had moved out of their religion-directed sphere, but in a small town like this it was unthinkable. Yet it was no more than this, a fraud that hardly came within the ambit of the secular law. Just that.

  Ghote got up from his unseeing contemplation of Inspector Popatkar’s pick-pocketing chart and made his way along to the cells.

  He found the former pathologist sitting on the ground against the wall of the cell that he had been put into, and apparently relapsed quite quickly into a state of somnolence after the sudden starts and sharp cries he had given during the time he had been got into the tonga outside his father’s house and on the journey to the police-station.

  Ghote crouched down beside him.

  ‘Mr Adhikari,’ he said quietly, ‘you have much to tell me.’

  The slumped and bloated figure by his side – Ghote had learnt from the father that his actual age was only forty-nine but even as close as this he looked sixty – did not acknowledge in any way that he was being spoken to.

  ‘Mr Adhikari,’ Ghote said a little more loudly.

  There was still no sign of response.

  Ghote put his mouth not far from the right ear of the sparsely-bearded owlish-looking face.

  ‘Mr Adhikari!’

  A tremor ran all the way across the slack-skinned cheek near him. But it was clearly an involuntary movement. There was not the least other sign that he had been heard.

  So, Ghote thought, he is going to try that, is he?

  Clearly it was no time for the method of violence. He moved round a little till he was able to sit beside the pathologist on the floor with his back, too, comfortably against the cell wall. This was going to be a long job.

  When he felt himself to be quite physically comfortable he began. In a voice which he calculated was bound to be heard however fuzzy the head beside him, but in no way in loud tones, he started talking. He recounted first the immediate circumstances that had made it important for him to hear Hemu Adhikari’s evidence. He took his time. He did not hesitate to go back over the same ground, if it was likely that he could improve the clarity of what he was saying. And gradually he came round to formulating a statement of why it was vital that the pathologist should tell him all he knew.

  He kept a watch out of the corner of his eye on the telltale cheek of the bloated figure next to him, but he was not really disappointed during this opening half-hour’s session to get no response at all, and when he had thoroughly gone into every aspect of the immediate circumstances he heaved a long sigh and began again with a larger account, going back this time to his own arrival in t
he town.

  He told, over and over again, how Vinayak Savarkar was suspected of the murder of his first wife, Sarojini. He recounted how he himself had arrived in the town – no mention of the egg-box and the humiliation he had suffered through it – and how he had gone through all the papers in connection with the previous investigation fifteen years before. He forbore, not without difficulty, from any mention at this stage of the town’s pathologist of those distant days.

  He accounted carefully and minutely for what he had found in those piles of papers, leaving aside for the time being the mystery that appeared to surround the organs removed from the deceased woman’s body, and concentrating instead on the suspicious circumstances that the Coroner’s Committee gave rise to. He was in the middle of telling the story of his first failure to find Ram Dhulup, the Chairman’s crippled pensioner, when he heard a low droning snore from beside him.

  Sharply he dug his elbow into the heavy form slouched so near him.

  ‘Vomiting, violent thirst, burning sensation in the throat,’ Hemu Adhikari jerked out loudly. ‘Pains in the stomach, cramp in the calves is occasionally experienced.’

  For a moment Ghote had thought he was complaining of symptoms himself, but then he recollected what old Mr Adhikari had told him. The drink-sodden mind beside him was going back again to its old preoccupation, this time running over distractedly the main symptoms of arsenical poisoning.

  Ghote took fresh heart.

  If the man was so weighed down by the thought of a poisoning by arsenic, then there must be something on his conscience. And that something could only be another brick to add to his own case.

  ‘I was telling how in the course of my first investigation I attempted to learn from one Ram Dhulup, formerly a dhobi in this town …’

  The narrative went on and on. He left Ram Dhulup and moved to his more successful encounter with Bhatu the basket-maker from which it had emerged that the late Mrs Savarkar had certainly experienced the symptoms of arsenical poisoning.

  And here Ghote decided that he would risk pressuring a little.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Bhatu described these symptoms to me. First he told me she had much vomiting and great thirst, and soon it seems she was suffering severe pains in the stomach. This shortly was followed –’

  From the corner of his eyes Ghote saw that Hemu Adhikari was reacting. He was scrabbling at the floor beside him with a practically nerveless hand. For a moment Ghote wondered what he was trying to do. Then the hopeless hulk succeeded. He pushed himself sideways, rolled suddenly and ended up curled in a great fat ball a yard or so away along the wall of the cell.

  Wearily Ghote pushed himself to his feet, bent over the soft-fleshed hulk and righted it. He made sure it would not easily topple over again and that beneath the drooping, twitching eyelids the blurry eyes were actually open. And then he began again.

  ‘As I was saying, from my inquiries with this Bhatu – he was a basketmaker, you remember – I came to the conclusion that that Coroner’s Committee had not been conducted strictly in accordance with the correct principles.’

  It was early in the afternoon when Ghote, who had started his day before dawn in order to catch Ram Dhulup at the Chairman’s house and had gone without any midday meal so as to keep up his light but steady pressure on the wrecked pathologist and who was beginning to feel extremely nervy in consequence, realized that Hemu Adhikari’s physical condition was changing.

  The slobbering cheek beside him was becoming convulsed with twitches more frequently. Twice he had alerted himself because the hand nearest him had scrabbled a little at the floor, but on each occasion it seemed that the bloated figure was not really making an attempt to roll away and he had done nothing about it. But now he had to acknowledge that a definite restlessness had set in and that this was accompanied by the withdrawal of even that passive attention his story had been receiving.

  There had been more muttering, too. Ghote had had scraps of the symptoms of arsenical poisoning twice, and once he had had a version of that extraordinary rigmarole about the preparation of albumin-water that had alerted him to Hemu Adhikari’s presence at his father’s house in the first place.

  He had had some experience of alcoholics in the slums of Bombay, and, unless he was very much mistaken, he thought he now detected the onset of an attack of delirium tremens in consequence of the withdrawal of alcohol.

  He let his recital lapse for a few moments. There was now no chance of the hulk beside him going to sleep. And he thought about what his course of action should be.

  Really he knew he ought to summon a doctor. Hemu Adhikari was almost certainly going to need treatment. But treatment would take a long time, and time was precious. At present, certainly, as far as he knew the town was quiet and the fasting Swami up there at the ruined temple was apparently no longer succeeding, after the revelation of his family link with the Chairman, in stirring up the passions of the town. But the Sikh doctor had made it plain that the old holy man could at any moment enter the borders of death, and if that happened it was more than likely that the agitation would start up again. And in those conditions what chance would there be of pursuing investigations?

  Yet there was one way in which the onset of DTs could probably be averted. The wrecked man beside him could be given a drink.

  Ghote had seen the wonderful effect this often had on a figure trembling and afraid, talking of pink monkeys and every form of animal life, vomiting and broken. The swift flow of alcohol in the bloodstream could within minutes put that man back into a semblance of humanity again.

  He pushed himself sharply to his feet.

  ‘Constable,’ he called, ‘there must be rum in the station first-aid box, bring it quickly if you please.’

  *

  Half an hour later Hemu Adhikari was sitting, not on the floor of the cell he had been put into, but on the wooden bench. Ghote, who while the revival process was taking place, had snatched a hasty meal, came back with his hopes once more high.

  ‘Mr Adhikari,’ he said to the still owlish-looking drunk, ‘with your help I am going to see justice done.’

  ‘Justice?’

  Ghote’s spirits shot further up. His man was talking.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘For too long justice has been thwarted here.’

  ‘Very true.’

  The man’s speech was slurred, but it was clear enough. And it showed signs of a clear enough mind. Perhaps it would not be long before that evidence was pouring out.

  Hemu Adhikari raised an only slightly trembling hand and put it on his forearm as he bent towards him. Then the fingers curled in a surprisingly hard grip.

  ‘It your fault,’ he slurred out.

  ‘My fault?’ Ghote said.

  ‘It was you who kept it away from me so long.’

  ‘Kept what away?’

  ‘Kept what away? Kept what away?’ Hemu Adhikari mimicked.

  He giggled a little.

  ‘Kept drink away,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Kept drink away from me. Where justice in that?’

  It had been too good to be true. Of course drink was likely to have had this effect on him.

  Patiently Ghote settled down to wheedle, cajole and explain away, putting off till a time he refused even to contemplate any further talk of the real object of his being there.

  And Hemu Adhikari’s new cockiness lasted every bit as long as Ghote had feared. The old drunk wandered round the cell. He was abusive. He was incontinent. He never even so much as once muttered a single word on the subject of arsenic and arsenical poisoning.

  It was only, in fact, shortly after dusk that the effects of that one administration of rum began to wear off. But then at last the young-old man came home to the bench beside Ghote and folded his arms across his big belly in a curling-up attitude that harked back to his demeanour when they had first brought him in.

  ‘Not feeling so good?’ Ghote asked him.

  He grunted miserably in answer.

  ‘I think
I can tell you what was the beginning of all your troubles,’ Ghote suggested.

  He detected a glint of response in the drunk’s half-closed eyes.

  ‘I think,’ he said cautiously, ‘that your troubles began when you were sent far away from this pleasant place to Nagaland where everything is different.’

  ‘Nothing the same.’

  Ghote was unable to repress a little flicker of excitement at this new acquiescence. Surely now the hunt was on.

  He spent some little time musing aloud about how unpleasant it must be to be sent away from the familiar surroundings of a lifetime. And then, when this met with hums-and-haws of vague approval, he ventured a stage further.

  ‘It is no secret too why you were posted away to that place,’ he said.

  The figure beside him was still, but listening.

  ‘It was because the Municipal Chairman did not like you to be here,’ Ghote said.

  ‘No. No, no, no.’

  The denial was not vigorous, but it depressed Ghote. Had all the hours of patient friendliness been worth nothing?

  Hemu Adhikari slowly turned his flabby-skinned face towards him.

  ‘No,’ he said slurringly, ‘not Municipal Chairman. Municipal Chairman is dead, been dead a long time. I heard that I heard that there.’

  Light dawned on Ghote. Damn it, Adhikari had left the town when the old Chairman was still alive, even probably before Vinayak Savarkar had married the old man’s jaw-crackingly ugly daughter.

  He set to patiently to straighten out the misunderstanding. And patience was necessary. But eventually he had it established that it was the present Chairman who was to be blamed for Hemu Adhikari’s woes.

  The old drunk turned and looked at him with bleary and bloodshot eyes.

  ‘I could tell you something about that man, about that Savarkar,’ he said.

  Ghote leaned forward. He hardly dared breathe.

  ‘But no. No, I will not. Not a word.’