Instead he said the first thing that came into his head.
‘You know, I am thinking that Motabhoy Sahib is not so much of a rotten fellow as I was believing.’
‘But you never told me you were believing that,’ Protima answered. ‘Why do you never tell anything about the Inquiry? Is S.M. Motabhoy full of bad thoughts towards you? Will he bring in guilty verdict despite the evidences?’
Ghote sighed.
‘There will not be any verdict whatsoever,’ he said. ‘I have explained. What will happen in the end is, if I am found to have been derelict in my duty, the Presiding Officer will issue a Show Cause notice stating what punishment is proposed. That is all.’
‘But you will not be found – what is that word? – derelict. You cannot be.’
‘But I can be,’ Ghote said. ‘I was. You know it.’
‘But no one but you only can know truly what you did for Kelkar Sahib that night. So unless you are telling, they cannot find you derelict. Except for S.M. Motabhoy not acting on what he has heard.’
‘Well,’ Ghote said peaceably, ‘you will not have much to fear then. I begin to think S.M. Motabhoy is a first-class chap after all. He acted very well at his flats block, insisting to get the current shut down. Just as Tiger would have done. And at the Inquiry also he is very much seeing fair play.’
But soon it was time for him to wrap himself again in his plastic cape, wriggle into his gumboots and go out and crouch over his scooter, hoping in a self-induced panic that the damp would not prevent it starting.
He made the return journey, with the moist air wetting his face although the rain itself had eased off, without mishap. To find, when the sitting was resumed, that R.K. was calling as his next witness the single remaining servant from Shivram Patel’s big, echoingly empty house at Vigatpore.
Would the ruse which Tiger had barked an order at him to adopt, there in the dark by the lake shore that night, prove to have worked? When, having crossed that neglected, perhaps snake-infested compound, he had woken the old servant, had the fellow been sleepy enough to have believed the time was ‘almost midnight’?
There must, in fact, be some uncertainty about it in his mind. Otherwise the person who had prepared R.K.’s case, whoever that was, would not have suggested calling him. But equally the old man – he came grouchily into the room at that moment, bent with his years of hard work, a silver grey stubble on his lean face – could not possibly have been sure of the real time that night or he would have contradicted his own statement there and then.
‘So on this night of June 24th,’ R.K. was soon asking, ‘or to be more correct in the early hours of June the 25th, you were woken from sleep by a knocking at the door of the house?’
‘A tapping and tapping with the door chain, yes, sahib. It was so.’
‘And you went and unbarred the door and there found Inspector Ghote?’
‘Yes, it was so.’
‘Now, can you tell us at what hour this was?’
The old man took his time over his answer.
‘Sahib, it was in the night. I do not have a clock.’
‘But you are able to tell the time from a clock?’
‘Oh, yes, sahib, that I am well able to do.’
‘But on your way to open the door, was there no clock you happened to see?’
‘Sahib, it was very dark. I am having to light a lantern before I could go down to the door. We are no more having electricity.’
‘Very well. And I presume you do not have a watch?’
‘That is so, sahib.’
‘But nevertheless if at night something should chance to wake you, if perhaps you suffered from some stomach pain, you would have some idea how much of the night had passed?’
‘Yes, sahib. When I catch the whistle of the night train or when in monsoon time there is much thunder and I sometimes wake, I know whether it is just only the start of the night or whether morning is not far away.’
‘Good. Excellent. So now can you tell us how much of the night had passed before you unbarred the door for Inspector Ghote?’
The old man shook his head from side to side in slow puzzlement.
‘Sahib, it is difficult. I had the feeling that much, much of the night had gone. But Inspector Sahib was saying it is only almost midnight.’
Ghote found he was holding his breath hard, and did his best to let it out in silence.
‘Inspector Ghote told you that the hour was “almost midnight”?’ R.K. asked, his voice quiet as a cat creeping towards a bird.
‘Yes, sahib. As I have said.’
‘But you, used to knowing without benefit of clock or watch how much of the night had passed, you believed that it was very much later.’
‘Sahib, I did.’
‘So perhaps it was that Inspector Ghote was endeavouring to trick you into believing something that was not the truth?’
But, before the slow speaking old man could begin to answer, Mrs Ahmed was on her feet, blazing anger in every inch of her sober sari-clad frame.
‘Mr Presiding Officer, such a question is grossly improper. Mr Sankar is attempting to elicit opinion from a witness with no technical competence whatever.’
‘Well, yes,’ S.M. Motabhoy said. ‘I think I must agree.’
He looked across at the witness table with a kindly air.
‘That is something you do not have to answer,’ he said.
R.K. was undismayed. Palpably.
‘Then there is nothing further I wish to ask,’ he said.
‘But there is a great deal I would like to ask,’ Mrs Ahmed retorted, still with anger crackling in her voice.
Ghote, despite his anxiety over what R.K. had got the old servant to say, wondered briefly how much of that anger was genuine. Certainly as an advocate Mrs Ahmed had a duty to appear angry when her client’s reputation was maligned. But was she only like a country actor making terrible faces in imitation of the rudra rasa, the furious temper? Only putting on a show? Yet her fury did really seem to be the true thing. Perhaps it was that her anger – the long-growing fruit of that first great injustice of her life, her little brother’s banishment – lay close to the surface. A similar anger had done with Tiger. And in her case the least hint of an injustice or an untruth brought it up, boiling and spilling over.
But now how was she going to put right what R.K. had contrived to put wrong? Only, R.K. had not put it wrong. He had extracted from the old man with his shreds of dignity what was after all nothing less than the simple truth. And Mrs Ahmed, fighter for truth, was there on his own behalf to reverse that declaration.
She looked at the old man in silence for some moments. Then she spoke, quietly and with evident seriousness.
‘Tell me, do you know how much depends for Inspector Ghote on what you say to the Inquiry?’
‘What is depending … ?’
‘I see that you do not. So let me explain before I ask you anything more. Then you will answer after giving your replies proper thought. Do you understand, then, that if what you have said is true beyond doubt and Inspector Ghote did not arrive at your master’s house until long after midnight, then the Inspector’s account of what he did that night will be seen as false? And that he will be in danger of being dismissed as a police officer, dismissed after many years of good service, of upholding the law, of securing justice for the victims of wrongdoers?’
As she delivered each of these hammer strokes – and as Ghote flinched internally at each one – it was plain that they were having their effect, one by one, on the old man. The look of burdened responsibility on his face grew and grew.
‘Do you understand that?’
‘Yes. Yes. Now I am understanding.’
The old servant looked across at Ghote as if he was seeing an object of fearful worth, the most precious possession his master had owned before the loss of his fortune which with the dusting cloth he habitually carried across his shoulder he might at any moment send crashing from its place.
‘N
ow,’ said Mrs Ahmed, ‘think carefully before you reply. At such times as you have woken in the night before, were you always without fail correct in your guessing what time it was?’
The old man’s hand went to the stubble at his chin and caressed it apprehensively.
‘Now, think,’ Mrs Ahmed repeated. ‘And answer.’
‘Perhaps not, not every single time. I cannot remember.’
‘Perhaps not every single time, I see. So, now will you tell us again what time you thought it was when you opened the house door to Inspector Ghote on the night of June the 24th last year?’
‘I do not know. He was saying it was before midnight. It may have been so. I am an old man. Sometimes I make mistakes.’
‘You have done well, very well, to admit as much before these sahibs,’ Mrs Ahmed concluded.
And down she sat.
R.K. did not appear to be put out by this defeat. If anything, Ghote thought with a shrilling of alarm, his features betrayed a gleam of unaccountable pleasure.
In a moment it began to become evident why this might be.
‘With your concurrence, Mr Presiding Officer,’ R.K. said, ‘I think there should still be time this afternoon to hear one more witness, one less subject to confusion than the last.’
S.M. Motabhoy consulted his watch.
‘Yes, Mr Sankar, unless you expect to be very long, we should have time enough.’
‘Oh, I do not think I shall require much time,’ R.K. said. ‘I may need in essence to ask my witness one question only.’
‘Very well then. Who is it you wish to call?’
‘It is Shri Shivram Patel, owner of the house we have just been concerned with.’
15
Why should R.K. be calling the boar-like, defeated former owner of the creamery near Vigatpore? Ghote asked himself with jabbing anxiety. Shivram Patel had, surely, been asleep at the far end of his big old house at the late hour he himself had summoned the servant to the door and tricked him, more or less, into thinking it was before midnight.
So why was R.K. producing his master as a witness?
The door was pushed open and Shivram Patel himself entered, heavy of tread, sullen looking, dressed in perhaps the last of the finery left to him since he had ceased being able to exploit the peasants who had brought milk to his creamery. On his head was a cap of embroidered velvet. His bulky frame was hidden by a silk Lucknow kurta in a shade of pale pink. In his hand he carried an ebony cane, topped with silver.
Guided by the orderly he moved with slow ponderousness to the witness table and R.K. put him through the preliminaries.
‘And now, Mr Patel, we come to the night of June the 24th last year, or, as I have said before, to the early hours of June the 25th.’
Mrs Ahmed was on her feet, taut with anger, in an instant.
‘Mr Presiding Officer, on the previous occasion Mr Sankar made that assumption, which is clean contrary to my client’s account of the events of that night, I let it pass. But I cannot do so a second time. Will you direct that both his remarks be taken off the record?’
S.M. Motabhoy gave the point a few moments’ consideration.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think we cannot in justice allow either remark.’
He turned to the shorthand clerk.
‘Can you find the previous instance Mrs Ahmed referred to? It must have been at the start of the evidence of the last witness.’
The clerk riffled wildly through his notebook and at last said he had found the words. S.M. Motabhoy watched him cross them out.
‘Now, Mr Sankar, you may resume.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
R.K. turned to Shivram Patel again.
‘We come now, shall we say, to the night in question. You understand to what I am referring?’
‘Oh, yes. To when the inspector from Bombay was so late out. To the first night of the monsoon last year.’
‘Exactly. Now, will you tell us what happened of your own knowledge that night?’
‘Yes.’
The boar-like owner of the house where on his prickly straw mattress Ghote had slept so badly took some moments to think. The eyes, deep-sunk in his well-fleshed face, shone with the malevolency Ghote well remembered from their acquaintance a year and more before.
‘That night the thunder was often waking me,’ he began at last. ‘But then a different noise woke me once more. Someone beating and knocking at the door of the house. I heard my servant, the only servant I have remaining from a house that was once full of servants, get up and go and see who was so shameless to be making so much of noise, and for some reason I also got up from my bed. By the time I had done so my man had lit a lamp and was going down to the door. By the last of its light I followed. But I did not go so far as the door itself. Instead I waited and watched from some distance. And at last I saw that the person who had made all the noise was the inspector, the inspector I had been forced to take into my home.’
Ghote listened to this unfolding tale with a growing sense of sick defeat. R.K. and his unknown investigator had tricked him and Mrs Ahmed with utter cunning. Shivram Patel’s servant had been allowed to say he believed the time he had been woken was before midnight and that this was because of what he himself had said. And all the while his actual arrival had been watched by the master of the house. No doubt in answer to the next question Shivram Patel would state he had noted the time his night’s sleep had been interrupted.
So now the alibi he had thought secure had not only been broken but had been shown to have been concocted deliberately and to have been persisted with since. Now R.K. would be able to show, with evidence, that it had been at about 3 a.m. that he had come in, and that therefore that whole account of his actions which till now had been only a guessed-at reconstruction was in all likelihood the actual truth.
As it was. As it was.
‘Now, Mr Patel, are you able to tell the Inquiry at what time this occurred?’
‘Yes, that I can do most definitely. To the minute even.’
‘Good. And why is that?’
‘Because when I was standing seeing my servant allow in the inspector I was also at the same time seeing a clock.’
‘Ah. There is a clock in your house somewhere near the door?’
‘Yes, yes. For many years it has been there. My father before me built the house and he was also buying the clock. A very fine timepiece.’
‘A clock, we can take it then, that keeps good time?’
‘Never does it lose, never does it gain.’
‘Excellent. So, now: at what time was it by this notable timepiece that Inspector Ghote entered your house?’
Shivram Patel turned and gave Ghote, upright on his hard chair, a glare of rich hatred.
‘The time the inspector was returning was at ten minutes before three o’clock in the morning,’ he said.
Ghote felt the words, expecting them though he had been, as a side-hand chop to the back of his neck.
But almost simultaneously with their impact there came into his head a clear visual memory of his first arrival at the old house. He saw the servant with his soot-smeared hurricane lamp held high. He saw the bare, empty rooms he had been led past. He saw the places on the plaster walls where evidently pieces of furniture had stood for years before they had been sold.
And he saw an unmistakable round shape high up on a wall near the entrance hall. The shape of a big old round clock.
He turned and whispered urgently to Mrs Ahmed.
She nodded, then rose for her cross-examination.
‘Mr Patel, I am interested in this clock which you have described with such loving care. It was bought by your father, you say?’
‘Yes. My father was buying it on a visit to Bombay, from Army and Navy Stores, a top-notch British shop. In those days there was nothing like that clock in the whole district.’
‘And it has always kept, you said, excellent time?’
‘Not one minute slow, not one minute fast. Never.’
<
br /> ‘Mr Patel, am I right in understanding that some years ago you suffered a financial reverse?’
Shivram Patel’s deep-sunk eyes glowed in fury.
‘The cobras and sons of cobras,’ he stormed. ‘Their dirty machinations were depriving me of everything. What for did they want dairy cooperative? Was I not always buying milk from those casteless swine? Was I not always giving them a good price?’
‘Perhaps you were, Mr Patel. But nevertheless a cooperative was established and very soon not a single peasant was bringing milk to your creamery. Am I right?’
‘It was a most vile injustice. Vile. Vile.’
‘But it occurred?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in consequence you have had to sell a great many of your possessions? Of your possessions and the possessions you inherited from your father?’
And at last Shivram Patel’s hatred for all the world and all around him was pierced by the realization of what the questions he had been asked were leading to. He looked wildly from side to side.
‘No. Yes. Some things I was selling, yes,’ he answered at last.
‘Among them the clock that had hung in its place so long that you were unable to imagine that wall without it being there?’
‘No.’
‘Mr Patel, let me remind you that this is a matter which we can easily find witnesses to prove. Now, did you or did you not sell that clock long before Inspector Ghote came to your house as a paying guest?’
A long silence.
Then, his face darkening, Shivram Patel answered.
‘It was sold.’
After that R.K. did not attempt to retrieve an impossible position.
Ghote, watching the dispossessed creamery owner shamble out, sat back in his hard chair as if in the greatest of cushioned ease. He had escaped. He had, thanks to that flash of memory, been delivered from Shivram Patel’s monstrous lie. A falsehood that would have been crushing.
Yet that lie – he jerked upright again, all feelings of cushioned comfort gone – had in fact backed up what was no less than the truth. It had been, in truth, at about three in the morning that he had arrived at the house that night, hastily traversing the snake-dangerous compound, and, yes, tapping rather than beating and knocking at the door.
Under a Monsoon Cloud: an Inspector Ghote Mystery Page 14
