Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery

by H. R. F. Keating

  On they went, faint ripples spreading out to either side of the boat’s prow.

  Then at last Tiger called a halt.

  ‘All right, we’ll risk it here. Now, be careful how you tip him out or you’ll have us both swimming for it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  With much painful rocking of the little boat and with water more than once slopping in, they manoeuvred the inert mass between them until at last they had it balanced on the craft’s side while they each leant precariously in the other direction. Then, inch by inch, they toppled it into the water.

  The great rubbery body did not, as Ghote had for some reason expected, sink at once out of sight. Instead it floated face down beside them.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, panic-touched for an instant, ‘it is not sinking. It will not sink.’

  ‘Of course it won’t, you fool. Not for five days or more. Don’t you remember what you learnt at police college? But unless we’re very unlucky it should be decently decomposed before it’s found.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Then once more they set off paddling. But now, with the boat riding higher in the water, it did not take anything like as long before they felt the prow nudge its way into the mud of the bank.

  Ghote, sploshing ashore, let the thought of oblivion-bringing sleep invade his mind. But Tiger’s voice ripped into the night air again.

  ‘Get this boat back where it belongs, man, and then you’d better return the bicycle. I’m going to make my way to the Inspection Bungalow and see if I can get in without drawing attention. I advise you to do the same wherever your quarter is. But if you do disturb anyone tell them, in a way they won’t dare contradict, that it’s not midnight yet.’

  Ghote’s spirits sank. So much still between him and the blotting-out of sleep. But, impelled once more by Tiger’s vigour, he set out dragging the boat by its rope towards the place where he had found it.

  Behind him he heard Tiger briskly squelching his way up the muddy bank.

  He found the tree root to which the boat had been tied in the dark by tripping full-length over it. But even lying flat on his face with the rotting smell of mud sharp in his nostrils, he felt nothing but relief that at least the first of the remaining complications had been dealt with. If only the others went with no more trouble, his gift to Tiger would be complete.

  The gift of liberty to go on acting with as much vigour as he had just been showing, with as much effective anger, to the benefit of all.

  It would have been worth it then.

  He rose to his feet, got the boat tied up and hurried back to where they had left the bicycle.

  There he came upon Desai’s clothes, strewn where they had let them drop as one by one they had peeled them from the slobbery body.

  What should he do with them? Even someone as idiotic as Desai would not have left them here while he swum the lake for his bet in the middle of such a downpour as there had been earlier on. Best to take them with him and perhaps tomorrow spot out a likely place where Desai might have put them in the dry. Or perhaps it would be best just to destroy them, with that tell-tale dark splodge of blood on the jacket.

  He bundled them together and went to heave up the bicycle.

  Then he remembered the pump.

  He found it after a few minutes’ frantic search among the foot-pocks in the mud and clipped it back in its proper place, allowing a small warm feeling to lodge in his head that things might at last be going to go wholly right.

  And it seemed as if this optimism was justified. It took him only minutes to speed back on the bicycle down the lane that had taken them so long to tramp along wheeling the body. At the bicycle stable he was able to put the machine back into its rack with little sign that it had ever been away. Then he hurried in at the station’s rear entrance hugging the bundle of Desai’s clothes to his chest.

  How long had it been since he and Tiger had staggered out this way with the lolling body between them? He looked at his watch. Past 2.30. No wonder he felt bone-weary.

  Cautiously he made his way along the passage. The warm night air, now that the rain had ceased, had dried his dripping uniform and even his shoes as he had swept along on the bicycle enough for him not to be making too many give-away marks on the floor. And, thank goodness, he had even managed to scrape off a lot of the mud. He turned the corner.

  And there, patiently dozing on his bench, was the faithful Shinde.

  He had forgotten entirely that the fellow would have returned. And, yes, carefully placed on the bench beside him was the single cigarette Desai had sent him out to buy.

  He sidled back round the corner. Had he woken Shinde? Would the fellow come looking for him?

  Too anxious to be angry with himself, he stood, clutching the bundle of blood-marked clothes, and waited for the sound of footsteps.

  Nothing happened.

  He let out a great sigh of held breath.

  But the clothes. He would have to go past Shinde’s bench to put the bicycle stable key back – Why, oh why, had he been so insistent that every key should be returned immediately after use? – and he could not do that clutching this bundle.

  What to do? What to do?

  And the answer came.

  The Muddamal Room. Its door was just behind him, and in it there were stacks and piles of lost and detained property. There would be dozens of articles of clothing among them. Had it not been Desai himself who earlier in this long, long night had said there were plenty of hangers in the place? Where better to hide clothes than among other clothes? And then he could rescue them at some convenient time in the next day or two and finally get rid of them.

  He opened the door, slipped in, stuffed the bundle at the back of one of the slatted wooden shelves behind the boxy shape of a public-address loudspeaker, doubtless confiscated, and quickly left.

  He paused for a moment outside deciding how he should act.

  Then, banging his shoes down noisily as he could, he went back down the passage and round the corner.

  ‘Shinde,’ he exclaimed. ‘You are here still?’

  The peon jumped to his feet.

  ‘Sahib, so sorry, sahib,’ he stammered. ‘I am getting for Sergeant Desai one cigarette. But something you are wanting?’

  ‘No, there is nothing. Sergeant Desai went long ago. Here, I’ll pay for the cigarette. You smoke it.’

  Shinde’s eyes glowed with absurd gratitude.

  Now is the time, Ghote thought. If I am to gain his collaboration, as I must, then this is the moment to do it.

  ‘Shinde,’ he said, ‘you have not seen me just now. Understand? If anyone is asking, at any time, say I left with the A.D.I.G. Sahib before midnight. Before midnight, understand?’

  ‘Oh yes, Inspector Sahib,’ Shinde said, straightening himself up and giving his best splay-fingered salute.

  Quite plainly he was not going to question whatever it was this cigarette-donating god chose to tell him.

  ‘So go home now,’ Ghote said. ‘And I left before midnight, remember.’

  He got a second terrific, fingers-wide salute, and then the peon scuttled happily away, carefully stowing Desai’s cigarette into his shirt pocket.

  Ghote stood for a moment in thought. Had he done everything necessary now?

  No. No, there was one tiny thing that had to be looked to yet.

  He turned, opened Inspector Khan’s door and from the floor picked up the button from his own uniform which had burst off at the moment he had first strained to lift the dead weight of Desai.

  It could hardly have been a possible clue to what had happened. But with it safely in his pocket he felt he could finally relax.

  5

  It was not long before Ghote was able to flop down on to his straw mattress, prickly as ever, in Shivram Patel’s house. He had made his way there wearily tramping, crossing the big neglected compound suddenly prey to fears that it must, muddy and soaked now like the lake shore, be a playground for snakes, but coming at last to the tall old doo
r of the house. There he had tapped and tapped again with the padlock chain till the solitary old servant had heard and come and lifted the door-bar.

  He had not forgotten then Tiger’s instructions, and had at once complained of being kept waiting ‘at almost midnight’. The bleary-eyed old servant had made no objection to the claim, and Ghote had gone up to his isolated room, pleased in so far as he was capable of feeling anything at all that this one last piece had been put into place in Tiger’s alibi.

  As at last he had sunk into sleep a curious thought, or even vision, had hovered for a moment in his mind. He had seen himself as God Krishna, no less, blue-bodied and beautiful of limb as in the calendar pictures, holding aloft, umbrella-like, steep Mount Godharvan so as to protect from the fury of the terrible storm above, not all the people of the village of Braj, but simply Tiger, a harassed and momentarily anger-deprived Tiger.

  Next morning he managed to get up and get himself down to the station well on time. Much as he had expected, however, Tiger was there before him, spruce and vigorous as always in a uniform that showed no sign of any black ink-stain.

  But, something he had not at all expected, he found, when on his way to the office he made his customary first-thing check of the Daily Disposition Chart, that Sergeant Desai’s name figured in the list of those due for their weekly ‘off’.

  So, he reflected, in all probability he himself, and Tiger, would have a 24-hour respite before questions began to be asked and Desai’s disappearance would come to light, with all the consequences that would follow.

  He was not sorry. After the nightmare events he had endured he hardly felt capable of another bout of lying and evasion, frequently though he told himself that the first one had had to be gone through. Those lies and deceitful actions, however horrible, had all been worthwhile for Tiger’s sake. But a respite was more than welcome. The umbrella of Mount Godharvan was in danger of tilting in Krishna’s hands.

  Tiger he had found not only spruce but already hard at work at Inspector Khan’s desk, the brass inkpot in its place in front of him as if it had never left it.

  ‘Ah, Inspector, good morning. I’ve finished with this F.I.R. book now. Tell your peon he can come in and collect it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ghote said.

  So this was how it was to be. As if what had happened had not happened. Surely no one but Tiger would dare to impose his will on events quite so fiercely. What a man. Yes, it really had been worth it all to keep him at work. And he, too, would play out the rest of his part. However many doubts came upon him, he would fight them off. Turn time back. Make what had happened in this very room not eight hours before cease to have been. Yes. He would do it. For Tiger.

  ‘You’ll see some ink got spilt on the book, but the F.I.R. itself escaped.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh, and Ghote.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I shall finish Inspection by 1800 hours and be leaving for Pune straight away.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’

  ‘And, Ghote, I see no reason why I should not tell you. I shall be giving you a reasonably good chit. The station is in good order, on the whole. Some deficiencies. But I understand most of them are Inspector Khan’s responsibility, not yours.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  And, beyond being present, stiffly at attention and saluting, when the A.D.I.G. took his departure – on the stroke of 1800 hours – Ghote hardly saw Tiger Kelkar again.

  Almost as soon as the jeep with Tiger’s erect figure in the back had disappeared into the evening’s wind-swirled rain he put himself off duty, consumed a hasty meal of soggy parathas at a tumbledown eating-stall called the Elite Hotel and headed back to Shivram Patel’s prickly mattress. He was weary in every limb, incapable of any thought. He had a lot of sleep to catch up on.

  By the following day, however, he felt completely recovered. The aches in the muscles of his back and arms, jabbing reminders during the last hours of Tiger’s Inspection of what had happened the night before, had eased away. He found himself even looking forward to the weeks ahead. Tiger had decreed that the ordeal they had shared should be blotted out of existence. So be it. There was work to be done and he would need his best energies. Better to tackle it unencumbered.

  First of all, of course, but perhaps not for an hour or so yet, there would be the business of Desai’s disappearance. But now, he felt, he could deal even with that. He would bark out orders in true Tiger style that the man had to be found. He would see that the investigation was pressed forward hard as it would go. The full-scale bandobust he would set in motion would be a model of sharp efficiency.

  He entered the station, acknowledging smartly the sentry’s salute, and made his way to his office. His office once again. He opened the door briskly, thinking only about which routine task he would get down to first.

  And there at the desk was someone he had never seen before, in uniform with an inspector’s three stars on the shoulder tabs of his shirt. He looked at the black plastic name-tag above the top pocket. M. A. Khan.

  ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘it is Inspector Khan. I thought you were ill itself.’

  ‘It must be Inspector Ghote. Heard it was you who had taken over. Was ill, of course. But fit as a fiddle again now. Fit as a fiddle.’

  Ghote stood there in the doorway, blinking.

  Had the fellow weeks ago got wind somehow that an Inspection was coming? And had he craftily contrived to get a certificate from the local Medical Officer that he was unfit for duty? It was possible, definitely possible. But this sudden return when the storm had blown over must mean, good heavens, that his own stay in the Town of Difficulties was at an end.

  It was fine news. If hard to take in. No longer would he have to battle with the errors and omissions that still remained from Khan’s earlier days. No longer would he have to suffer the misery of life in Shivram Patel’s empty echoing house. And he had eaten the last greasy paratha from the Elite Hotel stall.

  That other thing, too, what had happened two nights ago, the burden of that and its consequences had, surely, been lifted altogether now from his shoulders.

  He had in one instant been relieved of all the charade of finding Desai missing and setting up an Inquiry. Desai, that poor idiotic fool whose dignity in death he had sacrificed for the continuing existence as a senior police officer of Tiger Kelkar was now a problem for Inspector Khan, with his by no means formidable powers.

  And that, after all, was probably a very good thing. An extra piece of luck. For himself. For Tiger.

  ‘Well,’ he said, slowly coming to, ‘I will be off back to Bombay then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Inspector Khan answered cheerfully. ‘Yes, goodbye then, Inspector. And thanks, man, for holding the fort. ’Bye.’

  So, before noon that day Ghote was on a train taking him back to his old life, his proper life.

  Now once more he would be doing the work for which he felt he was especially fitted. Now he would not be battling with the petty daily tasks of a backwood police station. Instead he would be tackling real crime. There would be put in front of him – often in all too great abundance – the results of wrongdoing. A murdered body sometimes, sometimes a person of influence robbed of jewels or money, perhaps a case under Indian Penal Code Section 232, counterfeiting. Any sort of serious wrongdoing. And then, by God, he would find the criminals, and he would get up cases against them that no clever defence counsel, no do-gooder from the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, could find one hole in.

  At home, too, his life would settle down on its proper track. He would return after a busy day and Protima would be there with food for him, not the greasy parathas and poor tea of the Elite Hotel but the food he liked, cooked the way he liked it, cooked as only Protima, his loved, elegant and – yes, all right – sometimes spikily determined wife, could prepare and cook it.

  There would be Ved, too, to watch over and guide as a father should, and, with bated breath, to let find his own wa
y a little in the dangerous world. A boy learning and grasping the facts of things, the facts sometimes prickly and producing their pinpoints of blood, sometimes seemingly stiff and unbending, but, once mastered, able to be turned to good account. Ved, his son, his heir. Perhaps one day like himself to become a police officer. Even to become a better police officer than he himself was. The boy was clever enough, and he had enough energy. Perhaps if he could instil in him bit by bit that ferocity that Tiger possessed, that long-lasting cleansing anger, his son might at the last become the Commissioner of Bombay Police. His son.

  The train clattered onwards.

  Vigatpore and everything that had happened there began to seem only a sort of dream. The whole time of his stay was something he could forget about. He would forget about it.

  And so he did. Within days of coming back to Bombay the place seemed to recede into a far distance. His stay there became on a par with the period he had spent at police college when he had first joined the service, a block of time out of his life, not altogether pleasant and entirely different from anything that had gone before it or had come after it. It was a period he seldom thought about at all, and then only as if the things that had happened then had happened to somebody else.

  Back at home now, he hardly mentioned Vigatpore. He had written regular letters to Protima, and there was nothing to add to them. Except of course what had taken place on the night of June 24, and he had no intention of even hinting at that. Nor was there anything at Headquarters to bring that night back to his mind. He found on his desk tag-ends of work from before he had been transferred. Soon other inquiries, too many of them, landed in front of him. They kept him busy from first thing in the morning till late at night.

  And from Vigatpore he heard nothing.

  Now and again the absence of any news crossed his mind as faintly worrying. He would have liked to have known, especially in the first week or two after his return, what had happened. But there was no particular reason why he should have been informed of Desai’s disappearance. It had, to all intents and purposes, taken place after his term of duty there. And what, of course, he must never do was to ask any questions himself.