Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  For a moment this puzzled Ghote. He felt it ought to mean something to him. But he had only a moment to brush against the thought: Haribhai was making his comment.

  ‘What is a clue?’

  Ghote took a long breath.

  ‘A clue is something that helps you to know who has done something,’ he offered cautiously.

  ‘Like who pushed me out of that car?’

  ‘Yes. That would be one thing.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘We have to find that out still.’

  ‘But you said envelope would be clue. Why are you not knowing now?’

  Haribhai eyed the square brown envelope with accusation plain in his over-fat face.

  ‘Well,’ Ghote said, ‘I am sorry to tell that this envelope does not seem after all to provide any clue.’

  ‘Garden,’ Haribhai commanded. ‘Ek dum.’

  Argument continued for some while. Ghote was even a minute or so late sending out the second servant for Superintendent Karandikar to interview. And he was still fighting a sporadic rearguard action when the ayah returned, happily well within the superintendent’s thirty-minute limit. But she looked by no means the merely harassed, leathery figure who had left. Now tear stains were easy to see on her cheeks. Her sari was over her head and its corner was visibly wet with earlier sobbings. Her lips were twitching still. There could be no doubt that down at the Rite-Wite Cleaners’ shop she had endured a formidable inquisition.

  But she was back. She had not been arrested. So it was almost certain that it was not she who had given away any details of the Desai household routine.

  Would it be one of the other servants? Or would it after all prove to be only persistent observation that had helped the kidnappers to plan their snatch?

  Ghote realized that these would be questions now to which Superintendent Karandikar alone would eventually learn the full answers. All he himself had to do was to go on organizing the flow of witnesses that might or might not provide the answers. And secretly he began to wish that somehow he might still be in charge of the whole affair.

  But then he admitted a distinct relief that that terrible responsibility had been taken away from him. A life was at stake. Thank God, it was not in his hands.

  *

  He was to find soon enough, however, that the cup was not so easily to be passed on.

  It was a little after midday and he was sharing, without much appetite, an enormous lunch that was being served to Mr Desai on the big, round, highly polished Burma teak table of the penthouse dining-room. He had sent off the last of the servants to Rite-Wite Cleaners and was wondering what, if anything, Superintendent Karandikar would find for him to do next.

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Take, take,’ said Mr Desai, his mouth full of yellow-sauced chicken biryani. ‘It would be for you.’

  He waved sauce-drippy fingers towards a corner table and another of his boasted telephones. It too was white.

  Ghote went across and answered it. Superintendent Karandikar’s voice sprang out at him.

  ‘Ghote?’

  ‘Speaking, Superintendent. Here, Superintendent.’

  ‘You will be glad to know, Inspector, that, thanks to your delay in getting out after witnesses to the snatch, the reports I have had have been thoroughly bad. The getaway car was seen by five separate people. It is a Ford. It is an Ambassador. It is a Chevrolet. It is a Fiat. It is a Herald.’

  ‘I am sorr –’

  ‘The driver had a beard. At least we have established that. According to a Sikh fortune-teller, who works on the corner of the back lane, the man is a Muslim. According to a Muslim female witness, the man is undoubtedly Sikh. And the other person involved in the snatch was wearing white trousers, or khaki. Either with a red check shirt, or perhaps a blue one, checked, or possibly striped. He was either 180 centimetres tall, or definitely 150. So what is to be done, Inspector?’

  Ghote, schooled in the British days of feet and inches, was having to do some swift arithmetic to convert to the now mandatory metric scale – how typical of Superintendent Karandikar, he thought, to be able to use it automatically – and he took a moment or two to reply. But hardly had he begun to utter something than the Superintendent broke in.

  ‘Nothing to be done? I thought as much, Inspector. Well, let me tell you what I am doing. I am going like hell for our only chance remaining.’

  ‘Yes, Superintendent,’ Ghote answered, pumping enthusiasm into his voice.

  ‘And what is that? It is the white box they are leaving down on the shore for the money. They made a couple of bad mistakes in talking about that.’

  ‘Yes, sir. A place near where the road comes down to the sea, and then the mention of rocks.’

  ‘They spoke about rocks, Inspector. Well now, it may not have occurred to you, but that means some shore areas and not others. And there is the matter of access also. Another limiting factor there, you know. I have had men working on the maps from the moment that call ended. There are plenty of possible places, of course. But if those fellows intend to keep within a reasonable distance of Cumballa Hill, then there are not so many that they cannot all be thoroughly dealt with.’

  Ghote made no comment. Without maps he had been able to think during the course of the morning of too many possible places for the drop for it to be worthwhile speculating about any of them.

  ‘Inspector, you are there?’

  ‘Yes, Superintendent. Listening, Superintendent.’

  ‘So you had better join one of my search parties, Inspector. There are forty of them, one is bound to need you. Searchers are divided into three groups, those dressed as dhobis, those dressed as fishermen, those dressed as scavengers. At the last count the dhobis were fewest, so get up to your home straightaway, get your wife to make up a good bundle of washing, get stripped down to an old dhoti and report to me by telephone for further instructions.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’

  A small rôle, Ghote thought. One unlikely to help find little Pidku, but something that had to be done. Because Superintendent Karandikar was certainly right about the possibilities of identifying the kidnappers having been reduced to making contact with them at the time they hoped to secure the ransom money. With reports from witnesses as contradictory as those he had spoken of, and with the Desai servants almost certainly not having been accomplices to the business, this was now their last chance.

  Or was there one more tiny lead?

  One other thing had struck him as he had thought about the affair after his spell as temporary ayah. It was something so small as hardly to exist, but should he nevertheless mention it to Superintendent Karandikar? Or would that be taken as an attempt to retain for himself the major part in the case that the superintendent so plainly thought him unfitted for?

  He wanted to leave it. The notion of that tiger tongue flicking out, laceratingly, was terribly intimidating. And it was only the matter of an impression. But then it was something the superintendent could not know about. And it was quite probable that, however big the search for the waiting white box, it would fail. And then this one faint lead might be all that lay between a five-year-old boy and brutal death.

  ‘Superintendent Karandikar, sir. There is one thing.’

  ‘Ghote, I want to speak to Mr Desai. Now.’

  ‘Sir, in a conversation I noted this morning I gained the impression that the sum demanded –’

  ‘Inspector, I do not want your impressions.’

  Ghote longed to stop. What he had to say concerned, there could be no getting round it, an intimate discussion between Mr and Mrs Desai, and Mr Desai was sitting there just behind him. He would by no means care to think that a mere lowly policeman had been pondering over such intimacies. And yet it might be significant.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Mr Desai was fishing in a large silver bowl for a round, orangey-brown gulab jamun from the syrup in which it floated. He would hear every word. But the image of the old tailor, battered by d
efeat, was in Ghote’s mind and would not be exorcised.

  He turned back to the telephone, lowered his voice and spoke with rapidity and determination.

  ‘Sir, I heard some talk between Mr Desai and his wife. It made me think that the sum of twenty lakhs is the very utmost that he could pay, and I am asking, “How did the kidnappers know that?” Sir, it may be that –’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector. And I have said I wish to talk to Mr Desai.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, Superintendent.’

  Ghote turned away from the telephone. The manufacturer of Trust-X had got the fat, round gulab jamun into his mouth. He was chewing heartily and at the same time wiping the tips of his fingers on his working lips.

  ‘Superintendent Karandikar would like to speak with you, sahib,’ Ghote said.

  Manibhai Desai concentratedly pushed himself up from the shining teak table and came over. He took the receiver.

  ‘Desai.’

  Ghote wondered whether to leave the penthouse there and then. He had been given his orders, after all. But nevertheless he felt he wanted to say something in parting to the manufacturer of Trust-X. Quite what it was he was uncertain of. He could not beg him to find as generous a ransom sum as possible for Pidku. Indeed, it was perhaps his duty really to back up Superintendent Karandikar in his forceful advice not to pay the kidnappers anything. And yet he wanted to say something to stiffen the rich man’s once-made resolution to provide at least some money to save the boy.

  If it would save him … If kidnappers could ever be relied on …

  Ghote waited, trying to sort out in his mind the contrary phantoms that rose shrieking there.

  ‘Very well, Superintendent,’ he heard Mr Desai say after a while. ‘I will arrange for a sum in old notes as they suggested. But I will see to it that every number is recorded in case this second-line plan of yours goes wrong.’

  There was a sharp interjection.

  ‘But Inspector Ghote seemed to think –’ Mr Desai said in answer.

  Again Superintendent Karandikar spluttered angrily at the far end. And then the manufacturer of Trust-X abruptly straightened himself to his full height.

  ‘Mr Karandikar,’ he said, with a coldly biting edge to his voice that Ghote had known must exist though he had yet fully to hear it. ‘Mr Karandikar, you will allow me to make my own judgements.’

  A swift interposed splutter. And then the manufacturer of Trust-X spoke again at his coldest and most decisive.

  ‘Superintendent, I insist to have Inspector Ghote by me here until this whole business is cleared up. Do I have to ring the Commissioner to get my way?’

  A different-sounding voice at the far end. After it had finished Mr Desai said briefly, ‘Then we will carry on from here, good-bye.’ And then he replaced the white receiver with a distinct flourish of triumph.

  ‘Inspector Ghote,’ he added, ‘your Superintendent Karandikar requests me to say that he has changed your orders. You are to stay here and act as my contact with your colleagues in all things so long as I wish. I shall be relying upon your advice.’

  He gave Ghote a long, penetrating look from his deep-set eyes. Ghote felt the judgement proceeding. Would the advice he would be asked for prove correct? What an intolerably weighty affair he was being asked to consider.

  The responsibility settled across his shoulders like leaden sacks at the end of his yoke.

  And it was immediately brought into play.

  ‘Superintendent Karandikar intends in the event of the search for the white box not being successful that I should keep the rendezvous those men give,’ Mr Desai said. ‘He tells me he will provide a quantity of paper to look like the ransom sum, but asks that I should supply some real notes also. I tell you I do not altogether rely on even this plan working. So how much money should I offer so that if these men get away with their white box they would be appeased?’

  Ghote’s first thought at what he heard was to rejoice; the mute appeal that the tailor had made at the start of the day was still having its effect. Mr Desai was prepared to risk some considerable sum to save Pidku. Then came anxiety, gnawing like a rat. What if in fact Superintendent Karandikar’s second-line plan should go wrong, as Mr Desai had thought it might? What if the kidnappers, who must be prepared to find an attempt was being made to catch them as they lifted the ransom, did get away with the white box and found in it not the twenty lakhs they expected but some smaller sum? Would they at once decide to issue their dreadful warning to any future victims? The warning that would take the form of five-year-old Pidku’s rejected body?

  But if he advised the proprietor of Trust-X to substitute for Superintendent Karandikar’s paper a really large sum of money and if that sum was somehow spirited away, what personal retribution would await him then? And it might not only come from the superintendent. It might come from Mr Desai as well, Mr Desai with the Commissioner’s ear, feeling suddenly that he had been over-persuaded into parting with a sum that his young and loved wife would disapprove of.

  And even if the kidnappers were given every anna they asked, they might still simply present a new demand.

  The thoughts rose up, struck their lances, disappeared, streaming this way, streaming that.

  Manibhai Desai awaited his answer.

  ‘It would not be right for me to tell,’ Ghote said at last. ‘Truly there are good arguments for every course. We know nothing of these men: we cannot say what would be for the best.’

  ‘Then what shall I do?’ Mr Desai asked.

  His deep eyes looked luminous with a hunger.

  ‘You must do as the heart says,’ Ghote replied, finding the words came.

  For almost a whole silent minute the manufacturer of Trust-X stood where he was.

  Was he consulting his heart, Ghote wondered. It looked as if he was. But what heart was there to consult?

  The door of the dining-room opened quietly and a barefooted bearer entered. Immediate and brilliant anger flashed up into Manibhai Desai’s eyes.

  ‘Get out, get out, get out,’ he yelled.

  The door shut more noisily than it had opened. Mr Desai strode like a whirlwind across to the telephone, seized the receiver and dialled a number. Ghote saw that the finger that sought the dialling holes trembled.

  The phone was answered.

  ‘It is Mr Desai. Put me through to Mr Shah. At once.’

  A voice, flustered to pieces it was easy to tell, asked a question.

  ‘To Mr Shah, Head of Accounts, you fool. What other Mr Shah is there? Do you know nothing?’

  Ghote waited. Plainly the proprietor of Trust-X had made his decision. What sum would he ask to be gathered together now in old notes of fifty and one hundred rupees value? How many would he order to have their numbers carefully listed, to be bundled neatly together, to be brought up in haste to the penthouse on Cumballa Hill ready to be taken, if necessary, to the rendezvous when he was given it at six o’clock? Just what sum would be paid for Pidku, the tailor’s son?

  6

  The delay at the far end of the telephone line, at what Ghote realized must be the factory of Trust-X Manufacturing (Private) Ltd, extended nerve-stretchingly. Manibhai Desai fumed. Every three or four seconds he would begin some fierce command to whoever was on the other end, and then he would fretfully abandon it. Ghote felt himself almost as tense.

  ‘Shah? Is that you, Shah?’

  Mr Desai’s words smacked out at last like a volley of gunshots.

  ‘Now listen to me. I need a large sum of money in old notes. In old fifty- and hundred-rupee notes, and I need it quickly. You will go to the bank yourself and –’

  A voice at the far end said something.

  ‘You will not talk when I am talking,’ Manibhai Desai said.

  The words sent an ice-dagger of despair into Ghote. He could hardly imagine anything more abrupt and overbearing being said to a man who after all must rank as a senior executive at Trust-X Manufacturing. Would the person capable of uttering such words ever
spend as much as ten rupees only on helping someone like the old tailor?

  ‘You will go to the bank yourself,’ Mr Desai resumed harshly. ‘Anything else can be done afterwards. And you will take away on my instructions in old notes the sum of one lakh. One lakh.’

  Ghote hardly heard Mr Desai’s abrupt and precise directions about having the numbers of the notes recorded, about having them bundled up and about how they should be brought up to the penthouse by Mr Shah in person. Instead he stood and marvelled at the size of the sum that Mr Desai had decided on.

  It was, of course, only one twentieth of that demanded.

  But it was nevertheless in itself a very considerable amount, equal to his own skimpy pay for as much as twenty years to come.

  And surely it would be enough for these men? The one who had talked on the telephone, who was likely to be the leader, was beyond doubt a rough individual. Such a man would find a whole lakh of rupees a fortune. Surely they would settle for it? And if their wilder hopes had been dashed, would they not still calculate that to release little Pidku in exchange for this comparatively moderate sum would serve only to improve any future market they might try?

  Yet difficulties without number still lay ahead. Superintendent Karandikar’s searchers might yet come across the white box and the superintendent mount a huge, military-scale, extra-efficient ambush during which the kidnappers might kill Pidku at the very moment they were arrested. Or, if the box were not found, the same thing might occur when the manufacturer of Trust-X kept the kidnappers’ rendezvous. And there was the whole question behind that of how much trust it was ever possible to put in such men.

  But in any case there was nothing to do now but wait. Wait for how long? And, if he was going to have to stay in the penthouse till perhaps a very late hour of night, then one thing he would have to do would be to telephone his wife.

  She would not like his news. He had been busy with purely routine work before the moment of that fateful meeting with the Commissioner by the steps of Headquarters, and he had thus felt it safe to allow Protima to believe that on this occasion he would certainly come home at the end of office hours.