Ghote faltered.
‘But Bhatu,’ he stammered. ‘But Bhatu the basketmaker. Did I tell you about him? He too will be happy here in this town. The threat that has hung over him, little though he knew it, will be gone. He will live to a contented old age.’
‘Inspector, you are telling tales and no more.’
‘No. You too will end your days in peace. No need to hide in the fumes of alcohol when there is nothing to hide from. Once more your old father will be able to be proud of his son. You will work again even.’
‘No, Inspector Ghote.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, I tell you.’
But all Ghote’s conviction could not penetrate the hard layer of caution that the years had grown on to Hemu Adhikari. And at last he realized that he had tried everything there was to get the tiniest leverage into the minutest crack somewhere.
The time had come for the method of last resort. Probing and patience had failed: it was the hour for violence.
He leapt suddenly and sharply to his feet. He swirled round and glared down with red ferocity at the fat man.
‘Shall I tell you what you are?’ he shouted, leaning deliberately forward so that the spittle from his mouth sprayed on to the grey-stubbled face in front of him.
He watched it land, watched it with pleasure. And he saw too that in the man’s eyes – so much less bloodshot after Dr Patil’s ministrations – a look of sudden fear had appeared.
‘No? No?’ he shouted at him. ‘You do not want to hear what you are? I know very well that you do not. Because you could not bear it.’
He felt the rage he had allowed himself at last to release sweeping through his head like a scouring tide.
‘But I am telling you what you are. You are murderer.’
The old face in front of him had begun to tremble again as it had trembled when he had first put questions to it. Then he had tried to stop that shivering: now he rejoiced in it.
‘Yes, murderer, murderer, murderer,’ he yelled. ‘You are refusing to bring to justice a man who has killed, who has poisoned. You and you alone could do it. And you refuse. I am telling you what you are: you are a murderer just as much as if you had given that arsenic with your own hand.’
He put such venom into the word ‘arsenic’ that it might have been a whip he was cracking down across the trembling face in front of him. And he saw the blow land. He watched the word sinking in, going deep into the brain. He saw the fight not to let it hurt, the struggle to achieve stoniness.
There was a time – a space of seconds that could be counted – when it looked as though the fight to maintain indifference was going to be won. Things hung in the balance.
And then tipped.
One great, gulping, wrenching sob shook the heavy frame of the man cowering on the bench. It was like the breaking of a dam.
‘Yes. Yes. I will tell.’
It was definite, irrevocable.
Ghote knew there was no hurry now. The break had come, and it had been a decision taken in sober blood. It would not be gone back on as the other had been.
He stepped a pace away and stretched himself luxuriously.
‘I think we will go somewhere else,’ he said. ‘We will go to the office I have been lent here. It would be more convenient for the taking down of the statement.’
The old man on the bench was crying quietly now, a long stream of tears slowly being released after the pent years. Ghote raised him up by the elbow and led him out of the cell.
He looked about for the night sergeant or someone equally competent to witness the recording of the statement. And he spotted somebody even better than he had hoped. Superintendent Chavan was sitting at the end of the corridor from the solitary confinement cell, talking to the indefatigable Dr Patil who had been stretching his legs on a hard chair waiting in case his patient was not able to stand the strain of a long interrogation.
He jumped up with an anxious look when he saw Ghote solicitously helping the broken-bodied pathologist along towards them. But Ghote got in first.
‘Superintendent,’ he said briskly to Chavan, ‘I am just going to take statement. Would you be good enough to act as witness?’
The superintendent, uniform with every crease in place even at this late hour of night, looked suddenly delighted. Ghote realized that, for all the man’s allegiance to the Chairman, what counted with him first was the routines of his calling and here he was being offered one of the most satisfying moments of such routines, the achievement of confession to a criminal act. And, Ghote thought with pleasure, perhaps in the years to come fewer pressures would be put on this colleague of his and he would be able to do his duty unmolested.
So it was a small triumphal procession that went along, not to Inspector Popatkar’s office but to that of the superintendent himself to hear in full the confession of Hemu Adhikari.
And it turned out that the supposition that Ghote had put to the pathologist as a means of extracting perhaps a denial, perhaps a part-admission, was the exact truth. The man who had written letters of complaint to drug-manufacturers by the score and had yet lacked the final impetus to send them had done just exactly the same thing with the organs he had removed from the body of Sarojini Savarkar. Her husband had sent his men to frighten him into destroying them, but he had been frightened of doing that too. So he had compromised: he had put them in a jar of preservative and he had filled the jar with a number only on the label.
At this point the superintendent, solicitous still perhaps for his friend and patron, broke in.
‘You put number only on the jar? Then how after all this time can you remember what number that was?’
‘Sir, it was the figures of my birth date. How shall I forget that?’
It was then that Ghote picked up the telephone and got through to the hospital. A voice he thought he knew answered boomingly.
‘Night-duty doctor. Hello.’
‘It is you, Doctor – Doctor –’
He realized he had never known the cheerful Sikh’s name. But Dr Patil had recognized the loud tones.
‘It is Dr Surinder Singh,’ he supplied tactfully.
‘Dr Surinder Singh? Inspector Ghote here.’
‘My friend. What can I do for you, old boy?’
Ghote told him as concisely as he could exactly what he wanted. There was a pause while the doctor went away and made his investigations. It was not a very long pause. Then came the breezy voice on the other end of the line.
‘Ghote?’
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘You’re quite right, old boy. Bottle there, just where you said. Label still firmly adhering. Figures exact. And the contents appear to be … Just a minute. Ah, yes. One stomach, one duodenum and the best part of one jejunum. Very neatly dealt with, too.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. Would you be kind enough to impound the bottle until I can fetch it in the morning?’
‘Certainly, old boy. I’ll pop it in the poisons-cupboard. No one goes there except under my personal eye at this time of night.’
‘That sounds excellent, Doctor. Good night then.’
‘Good night.’
Ghote put down the receiver and turned to the others.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is there. Intact.’
‘Very good, very good indeed, Inspector,’ Superintendent Chavan said, his eyes shining with sheer policemanly pride.
And then, visible to see, another side of him took over.
He coughed.
‘However,’ he added, ‘I feel it is necessary to point out that the mere discovery of organs which we cannot doubt were removed from the body of the late Mrs Sarojini Savarkar, and which we can even concede are certain to be found to contain arsenic, that these do not constitute a sure and certain case against any person. Or persons.’
‘No,’ Ghote admitted, ‘they do not. I have shown that the victim died of arsenical poisoning. I think anyone would be prepared to admit that the Municipal Chairman of this town was a man who had a strong motive f
or murdering his then wife, but –’
‘But,’ Superintendent Chavan burst in, ‘you have still to show that the Chairman ever obtained such arsenic.’
‘He obtained it in Bombay.’
It was the voice of the pathologist, an almost forgotten figure since he had made his confession. But now, all shaking and bright-eyed, he was plainly intent on hammering every nail that could be got hold of into the coffin of the man he had at last dared to betray.
The superintendent bent on him a glance compounded of shock and distaste. It was no proper thing for an accomplice-after-the-fact to attempt to take part in the investigation.
Ghote hurriedly intervened.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The arsenic was obtained in Bombay.’
‘But you must prove it,’ Superintendent Chavan said. ‘You must prove your accused actually made the purchase in question.’
‘I can,’ Ghote said.
The superintendent looked at him with his mouth positively falling open.
‘You can prove?’
‘Yes. I knew always that the best place for such a man as the Chairman to obtain arsenic was at some small run-down dispensary in some suburb of Bombay, and when I learnt that very shortly after the crime was committed a Gujarati was appointed from nowhere to be Medical Superintendent in a town so distant from his native place as this, and having heard the Chairman boast that every post including that of a boss at the hospital was in his giving, I did not have far to look.’
He swung round and confronted the bland, dignified Dr Patil.
‘You told me yourself that you came from the Bombay Gujarati suburb of Walkeshwar, Doctor,’ he said. ‘That was where I requested investigations to be made. I had a telephone message from Bombay this afternoon saying that they had been successful.’
They had only to see the visible collapse on the Medical Superintendent’s habitually egg-smooth face to know that the case against the Municipal Chairman was complete. Savarkar had obtained the arsenic, he had had clear opportunity to administer it and it could be proved beyond shadow of doubt that it was arsenic that had been administered.
Inspector Ghote had broken through.
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg Page 21
