He forced his uneasy stomach into quiescence and paid fierce attention to the small, incisive voice speaking sharply into Manibhai Desai’s ear.
‘… not in the least necessary. Appearing to treat with these people is a step that it may become proper to take in due course, but at present there is no need, no need at all.’
Ghote felt the beginnings of a slow, spreading sorrow. A man like Superintendent Karandikar, however, could hardly be expected to return anything but the hard answer to the kidnappers’ demands.
‘Very well, Superintendent, I shall take that advice,’ Manibhai Desai said, in what seemed decidedly relieved tones.
But then he added a few words that marvellously halted Ghote’s fast-deepening misery.
‘Well, for the time being I shall do nothing, Superintendent. Nothing, for the time being.’
‘You must not think of doing anything else,’ Superintendent Karandikar’s voice laid down firmly. ‘Do not pay one anna’s worth of attention to what those people say. They are not going to kill that boy.’
‘Yes, but –’ Manibhai Desai began doubtfully.
‘I tell you, Mr Desai, so long as they go on thinking they may get money by threatening to kill the child they will go on keeping him so as to be able to threaten. Believe me, I know.’
Ghote, craning to hear that tinny tiger voice, found he could not totally agree with what it was saying.
He knew that the argument had been put forward before in kidnapping cases. And he could see that there was a great deal in it: if some evil men got hold of the child of a person of wealth, that child was more valuable to them alive than dead certainly. But, on the other hand, if they were at the start of a campaign of kidnapping, then they would have to convince all their potential payers that they were men of inflexible ruthlessness. And what better way could they have of doing so in this case than by brutally dispatching little Pidku and then making sure that his body was found? The outcry that would follow would make any rich man pay all he was asked before even thinking of calling in the police.
And, of course, this was something that Superintendent Karandikar would undoubtedly have in mind. A series of successful kidnappings would bring enormous public and political wrath down on the police, and without rapid cooperation from the people under pressure it would be an almost impossible task to find the perpetrators. No, the superintendent could hardly be an unbiased adviser.
But how to put the other point of view to Mr Desai in face of that authoritative voice on the far end of the telephone line?
‘Well, naturally, Superintendent, I shall give great weight to your views,’ the proprietor of Trust-X concluded after the superintendent had added a few more pithy observations.
And, listening, Ghote allowed himself to rejoice a little. He knew that tone. It was the voice unyielding businessmen employed when they meant to keep their options open. He had heard it in a score of astute Marwaris, he had heard it in humbler circumstances from bania moneylenders keeping some would-be borrower on the hook.
It was a voice inflexible in its way as Superintendent Karandikar’s own, and now that it had been used there was hope still of ransom for little Pidku.
‘But I have my case to follow,’ he heard the quick voice of the superintendent again. ‘Kindly be so good as to put me on to my Inspector Ghote.’
My Inspector Ghote. Under the claws. Would he be able, if he had to, to summon up an inflexibility of his own?
He took the white receiver.
‘Inspector Ghote here,’ he said, smartly as he could.
‘Karandikar,’ said the tiger voice at the far end.
‘Yes, Superintendent? You are wanting progress report?’
‘I am not. I am wanting to know why the hell the line was not kept open longer when that man was speaking. We missed him, you know. Missed him. And all because of your damned incompetence.’
‘Yes, Superintendent. Sorry, Superintendent. But the fellow would not stay on the line, Superintendent. He simply –’
‘I know just what he did, thank you, Inspector. I had a monitoring line set up just as soon as I was put in the picture. And I know the man ought to have been kept talking. By you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now then, I am told no effort has been made to pick up witnesses to the actual attempt.’
‘No, sir. I thought –’
‘On your advice, Inspector?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then let me tell you that I am in charge of this case now. From here on it is a Karandikar affair. And you know what that means?’
‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’
‘It means action. Action, Inspector. Not haverdavering about worrying whether looking for witnesses will cause trouble. It means going out after those witnesses and getting some good hard descriptions out of them. That boy was not taken by an army: at most they will be watching the block only. My team will be reaching the area in three minutes from now.’
‘Yes, sir. And do you want me to – ?’
‘I do not want you to do anything, Inspector. You have been allowed to get your dirty little fingers into this case for far too long already. What I want from you is this only: at fifteen-minutes intervals you will send out from that flat one by one each and every one of the servants there. Starting with the ayah, for whom I shall need a thirty-minute session. Right?’
‘Very good, Superintendent.’
‘They will proceed out of the block, turn left and walk down the road for two hundred metres. There they will see the shop of Rite-Wite Cleaners. I have taken over the premises, Inspector, and I will conduct interviews there myself.’
‘Yes, Superintendent.’
‘If after a lapse of thirty minutes precisely any servant has failed to return to the flat, you will pick up the phone and tell me. The number is 82 4835. I repeat 82 4835. Got it?’
‘Yes, Superintendent.’
Ghote said the number over three times in his head.
‘Then,’ Superintendent Karandikar barked on, ‘when all the servants have been dealt with you will request Mrs Desai also to visit me.’
Even before answering Ghote felt as if his stomach had been brutally hollowed away. He swallowed once.
‘Mrs Desai is no longer here, Superintendent.’
‘You let her go? You let go the most important witness we have?’
Ghote straightened his shoulders.
‘Sir, she can be located if necessary at the Shanmukhananda Hall where she is attending Beat Contest. For flood victims, sir.’
‘Very well, Inspector. We shall see. I will have a car over to King’s Circle inside ten minutes. If they do pick her up, if, then you can breathe again.’
‘Yes, Superintendent. And the boy, Haribhai, Superintendent? How are you going to arrange to interview him, Superintendent sahib?’
‘A boy of four years only is not a witness in whom any reliance can be placed, Inspector. And now, put me on to Mr Desai again, and then send that ayah down to the cleaners at the double.’
‘Yes, Superintendent. Right away, Superintendent.’
Ghote handed over the receiver of the white telephone with rapidity combined with deference, and waited while Superintendent Karandikar told Manibhai Desai that there was no need for him to take any immediate action over obtaining any money.
‘We will deal with all that if it becomes necessary,’ Ghote heard his incisive voice say.
Sickly he wondered what effect this final reinforcement of the superintendent’s view would have on Pidku’s fate. But the proprietor of Trust-X put down the telephone still preserving his rigidly non-committal attitude and Ghote breathed again.
Then he asked where the ayah was to be found, explaining Superintendent Karandikar’s well-thought-out plan for holding the vital interviews with the servants without sending a whole squad of heavy-footed policemen into the flat. But Manibhai Desai had other ideas.
‘Ayah cannot leave,’ he said at once, his mouth setting in a long line of
determination and his stallion nostrils widening in instant anger.
‘But, Mr Desai,’ Ghote urged, ‘of all your servants the ayah is most likely to have had contacts with these fellows. If you are wanting the threat to your son removed, then contact with these people is what it is vital to find.’
‘Ayah is guarding Haribhai,’ Mr Desai stated, with all the flatness with which he might impose a sharp increase in the price of the monthly consignments of Trust-X.
‘But you have other servants. Cannot somebody else look after the boy for a short time only?’
‘No.’
Ghote thought of Superintendent Karandikar waiting in the commandeered shop of Rite-Wite Cleaners. (How had he managed that? What a tiger.)
‘But it is police orders,’ he said. ‘And it is in your own interests also. Why cannot, say, the tailor look after Haribhai for this short time only? He is used to boys of that age. That would be a solution.’
Haribhai’s father gave a short laugh of contempt.
‘That old man,’ he said. ‘My son would twist him round his finger like wet string only. And all the others also. If he wanted he would make them take him down the servants’ stair to the gardens again. Only Ayah will resist him.’
‘No,’ Ghote said in abrupt contradiction, even somewhat surprising himself with his vigour.
Manibhai Desai’s deep-set eyes glittered with sharp and sudden rage.
‘No,’ Ghote repeated. ‘There is an answer. I myself will take charge of the boy during the absence of his ayah.’
He watched the answer hanging in Manibhai Desai’s prow-nosed face. Would he come down on the side of fury, with the Commissioner invoked and no explanations accepted? Or would he come down on the side of the solution that would get things done?
Then he seemed to make up his mind.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘you will take charge of my son. But I am warning you he is not to be allowed to do just what he likes.’
He turned and led the way towards the door that he had hammered on earlier with feverish demands about his son’s safety. And he added one other firm instruction.
‘And I will not have you bullying him. He is my son, remember. He must do what he wants.’
Haribhai’s room was a large and airy one looking out towards the sea, full and over-full of objects designed to keep the children of the wealthy in a state of contentment. But it was plain that for all their number, size and cost, none of them at this moment was doing what it was intended to do.
The radio-controlled helicopter, which Mrs Desai had called out earlier was being happily played with, was now resting upside-down on its rotor blades, totally abandoned. What had evidently been not long before an immaculately drawn-up line of expensive toy vehicles had, it seemed, fallen victim to a series of hearty kicks. Each car was skiddingly scattered on the floor and the long thin control-wires with their little driving-wheels at the end were hopelessly tangled together. From a well-filled and neatly-kept toy cupboard three or four boxes had been savagely jerked out and their contents, mostly soldiers of the ceremonial sort – red-coated British Guardsmen, a Gurkha Band with tiny shining instruments, the U.S. Cavalry with flags flying – lay scattered and intermingled.
The ayah, a dark-skinned hill-woman of perhaps sixty, dried-up but leather-strong, was tugging at an enormous rocking-horse that had been sent hurtling on to its side. They heard her expostulating as they entered.
‘No, no, little sahib, no garden, no garden. Burra sahib says. Here to stay. To stay here all day. Terrible men. No, no, little sahib.’
Regardless of the arrival of the burra sahib and unknown man, the little sahib responded with a glare of fury.
He was, Ghote saw, a plump child, even a stout one. But his father’s strongly marked features could clearly be seen beneath the layers of fat that had been cherishingly applied by indulgent ayah and equally indulgent servants and father. And Ghote recognized too, with a fleeting, odd sensation of clarity, exactly that glance of prancing rage which he himself had been subjected to by Manibhai Desai not half a minute earlier.
‘I will go out,’ the little Turk was shouting. ‘I will. I will. I will. Stupid horse. Stupid horse not to go fast. Stupid. Stupid.’
‘What is this, my Hari?’ said his father, striding towards him, dropping to his knees and putting a long encircling arm round his shoulders.
It did nothing to mollify the boy.
‘Ayah will not come down to garden,’ he declared. ‘Stupid, stupid Ayah.’
‘Yes, yes. She is stupid. But today is not a good day for garden. Today the bad men came and tried to take away my Hari.’
‘Stupid bad men, stupid, stupid. Stupid Ayah.’
‘Yes, yes. But Ayah is going now. Ayah is going straight away. She is to go out of the block, turn down the hill and go to Rite-Wite Cleaners. Now.’
It was an order of orders. The ayah began to ask why she was being sent on this unlikely errand. But the look of rage that father and son shared stopped her.
‘Ji, ji, sahib, I go, I go,’ she said.
And she scuttled from the room.
‘Daddy will stay,’ Haribhai announced, already looking happier.
‘No, no, my little fighting man. Daddy cannot stay now. Daddy has much important work to do. But instead you are going to be looked after by a detective, a real detective from C.I.D to look after my Hari.’
And, quick as a snake, the proprietor of Trust-X rose to his feet, slipped his arm away from his son and slid out of the room, shutting the door behind him with a speedy firmness.
‘Well,’ Ghote said to his suddenly handed-over charge, ‘what a lot of toys you have got. I too have a little boy, bigger than you – his name is Ved – but he has not got so many toys as this. Not at all.’
He knew he was talking with sickly falseness, but he felt ill at ease with this rich man’s child and could not speak to him as he would have done to his own boy.
Haribhai stood in front of him and looked him up and down. Once.
‘Garden,’ he said. ‘Garden. Now.’
‘No, no. You cannot go to the garden just yet. Perhaps those bad men who took you in the car are still there.’
‘They went away, you stupid,’ said Haribhai.
Ghote felt the justice of this. There was, he thought, no real reason why Haribhai should not play outside now, with some supervision. A kidnapping is not so easy to arrange that two can be carried out in one morning. But he had his loyalty to Mr Desai. He tried changing the subject.
‘Tell me about the bad men,’ he said. ‘What did they look like? How many of them were there?’
‘The one who talked with us was nice,’ said Haribhai. ‘He had sweetmeats.’
‘Good. And what did he look like?’
‘The one driving the car had no hands,’ Haribhai said.
Ghote gave up. He had not entirely agreed with Superintendent Karandikar in his sharp dismissal of the powers of observation of four-year-old boys. He would have thought his own Ved at that age might have been able to supply useful descriptive details, though it was a little difficult to pin down what he had been able to do when. However a car driver without hands was decidedly not helpful. Perhaps the superintendent was right after all. He would leave it to him to get what had to be got out of the ayah.
‘Let’s put this horse on his feet again,’ he suggested, going over to the big, gaily-painted, dapple-grey rocking-horse.
‘Stupid horse,’ Haribhai said.
‘Why is he stupid?’ Ghote asked, beginning to get on terms with the boy.
‘Stupid horse,’ Haribhai repeated, evidently not on terms with Ghote. ‘Stupid horse. Stupid man.’
‘Why am I a stupid man?’ Ghote asked, heaving the rocking-horse upright.
‘Dective,’ said Haribhai. ‘Dectives have round things.’
In a moment he was down on hands and knees, peering through a magnifying-glass – made of air, but plain as plain to see – at some particularly juicy clue on
the floor.
Ghote was impressed.
‘How did you know about magnifying-glasses?’ he asked, seizing an airy one himself, dropping on to all fours and inspecting the juicy clue in his turn.
‘From comics, stupid,’ Haribhai said.
‘Of course. You are quite right. Often I have seen, when my Ved has a comic.’
‘I have all the comics,’ Haribhai stated. ‘Stupid man.’
Ghote looked at the fat face so close to his own as they knelt together.
‘Why am I a stupid man now?’ he asked.
‘Not decting,’ Haribhai said.
Sadly Ghote reflected that Superintendent Karandikar had forbidden him to do any detecting. And then an idea broke open like a soft rose in his mind.
‘Would you like to be a detective with me?’ he asked Haribhai.
‘No,’ said Haribhai.
‘No?’
‘It is you who can dective with me.’
‘All right. Well, I will tell you what we have to find. A most important clue. When the bad men tried to take you away they left a letter for your daddy.’
‘That is not decting, stupid.’
‘Ah, no, the letter is not. But the letter was in envelope, and often you find very good clues from envelopes. So what we have to do is to find that envelope.’
Haribhai got to his feet. He gave Ghote a look of pitying scorn. He went over to a wastepaper basket decorated with a gay line of marching red elephants. He stooped. And he held up a coarse brown envelope, lightly crumpled.
5
Ghote took the envelope that little Haribhai was contemptuously presenting and, holding it carefully by one corner just in case at some future time there might be confirmatory fingerprints still to be lifted from it, he looked at it. There was not a lot to see. It was very much like any other envelope of its type, the sort used for the everyday purposes of commerce. It was made of the cheapest paper, coarse, dark brown in colour with small blotches of half-absorbed lighter stuff. It had been sealed and had been roughly torn open. On its front, in the same crude characters as the note it had held had been written in, there was scrawled in red MR DESAI. The only mildly remarkable thing was that, instead of being the usual oblong shape, it was completely square.
Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart Page 5
