Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘I am here, I am here,’ he called, and raced inside.

  It was the proprietor of Trust-X.

  ‘Ah, it is you? It is you, Inspector Ghote, at last? Please to come. I have asked also for Superintendent Karandikar, but you I want especially. Something terrible has happened.’

  *

  The proprietor of Trust-X had refused point-blank to say what the terrible thing was, though Ghote had been able to get out of him that at least there had not been a successful attempt to snatch the plump and fierce little Haribhai. When he had said that it would take him some time to get to Mount Greatest, since he had no car, he had been commanded immediately to ‘take at once taxi, at my expense, my personal expense’. He had done as he had been asked and he had sat in the back of the taxi anxiously gulping a few hastily grabbed bananas.

  So it was not long before once again he was shooting up the whole height of that luxurious block in the silver-walled lift and ringing again at the bell in the wide teak door of the penthouse.

  A servant opened to him, recognized him and said that his master was waiting in the drawing-room. He swiftly ushered Ghote through.

  Superintendent Karandikar, stiffly upright and grey-faced as ever, was already present, though it looked as if he had arrived only moments before. But when Ghote entered the big, airy room with its blue raw-silk-covered sofas, its wide shaded picture window, its rich red wall-to-wall carpeting, its radiogram and discreet refrigerator, the tall proprietor of Trust-X abruptly turned away from the superintendent and came towards him almost at a run.

  ‘Inspector Ghote,’ he said. ‘Inspector, thank God you have come.’

  ‘What is it?’ Ghote asked, his heart pounding at the look of transfixed misery on Manibhai Desai’s boldly-marked features.

  ‘They have sent –’

  The manufacturer of Trust-X stopped. He shut his deep-set eyes for an instant, screwing them up as if to prevent himself getting the least glimpse of something. Then he made an awkward, badly-aimed gesture in the direction of a low, round, glass-topped table not far from where Superintendent Karandikar was standing.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘There.’

  Ghote, unable to think what to expect, went over.

  He saw a small package, roughly torn open. Its stiff brown paper lay like a big, open, brown-tinted lotus flower on the pool that was the table’s surface. At the centre of the paper was a small collection of straw, matted, dirty and broken, looking like the nest of a small and inefficient bird. And on that there was a sheet of white writing-paper with that familiar scrawl of red crayon capitals on it. But this Ghote only half saw. What seized and gripped his attention the moment he realized what he was looking at was a little, worm-like darkish thing lying on the white writing-paper.

  It was, slightly crooked, the little finger of a boy of about five years of age.

  ‘I telephoned just now to a surgeon at Grant College who is a very great friend of mine,’ said the proprietor of Trust-X in a voice that sounded hollow and small. ‘He promised me that it would not be a matter involving great pain.’

  Ghote passed his tongue over his dry lips.

  ‘It is what it looks like?’ he asked. ‘The little finger?’

  ‘There cannot be any doubt about that, man,’ Superintendent Karandikar said with a sharpness that Ghote welcomed as if it were an acid lime he had thrust into his mouth on a day of tense thundery heat.

  ‘In any case,’ said Manibhai Desai, ‘the father is coming. There is –’

  He pulled out a large white silk handkerchief and wiped his long sloping brow.

  ‘There is a scar, just higher than the knuckle,’ he said. ‘He would be able to confirm.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ghote.

  He forced himself into rational thought. The note? What did it say? He stooped and, avoiding looking too closely at the worm-like finger, read.

  SO AGEN YOU CONTAK PELICE – THIS IS TO MAK YOU BELEEF – EF YOU WANT PAY NOW PUT YELO CLOTHE OUT OF WINDO AT FRONT

  The proprietor of Trust-X saw what he was doing.

  ‘Already I have hung one of the yellow curtains from the hall out of the window there,’ he said. ‘I suppose they would have a watcher somewhere below. He could be anywhere.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Superintendent Karandikar, pouncing. ‘You mean to say you have done that already? You have given in to these people?’

  ‘When I have seen that,’ Manibhai Desai replied with dignity, gesturing with his large right hand towards, but refusing to regard, the thin brown crooked tube of flesh on the thick, soft writing-paper.

  ‘My good man,’ the superintendent said, perhaps smarting under the patronage he had received earlier, ‘you must not think that a mere show like this means our friends intend any real mischief. They could get a good stiff term of RI for this certainly, but for men of that type rigorous imprisonment is not so very rigorous. But they know well that if they kill that lad we shall find them, and then one Thursday morning up at Thana Gaol it will be the rope for the lot of them.’

  Ghote knew that, in a way, what the superintendent had said was plain good sense. There existed a strong deterrent to a cold-blooded killing such as the kidnappers threatened in sending that tiny, pathetic little piece of human body there in the packet. But such cold reasoning seemed wrong to him in face of the picture lodged in his heart of a small boy, aged only five, with little pudgy baby-hands still, on one of which now there would be a tiny bloody stump.

  But he realized that to make any sort of appeal to the superintendent would be hopeless, and even exceeding his duty. So instead he endeavoured to find something to say that would establish in the superintendent’s mind an image of himself as a calmly efficient officer. Then perhaps he could suggest in some way that they should go through with the process that Manibhai Desai had begun when he had hung one of his golden-yellow hall curtains out of a window.

  ‘This package,’ he said, with as much briskness as he could muster, ‘we must send it as fast as possible to the lab people. There is a good deal of material involved. There may well be something for microscopic examination to show.’

  ‘I suggest, Inspector,’ Superintendent Karandikar said drily, ‘that the messenger who brought the packet is a damn’ sight more likely to provide us with some answers than any up-in-the-air scientists.’

  ‘He is here? You have caught him?’ Ghote said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Desai was telling me when you arrived. It was a boy, and he had the good sense to refuse to let him go. I am going to carry out an immediate interrogation.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Ghote said. ‘But, all the same, may I send for transport to take the packing materials to the lab?’

  ‘Oh, do what you like, Inspector,’ said the superintendent. ‘But I think you would find that, when I have finished with this messenger, there will be no need of laboratories. Or of treating with criminal elements.’

  And he gave the proprietor of Trust-X a look of cold hostility.

  11

  Manibhai Desai had detained his captive in a built-in store cupboard near the kitchen of the big penthouse. On the way to this temporary prison he explained the circumstances of the boy’s arrival.

  ‘He is young only,’ he said. ‘About twelve years, I should say. And just a street boy. But he had the cheek to come up in the residents’ lift – how he dodged past the chaprassi I cannot say – and then when he rang at the door he insisted to see me myself.’

  ‘You did well to detain him,’ Superintendent Karandikar admitted. ‘It sounds as if he may indeed be an active accomplice. However, soon we shall see.’

  He rubbed his hands briskly together.

  ‘He told me he had been given money to put the package into my hands only,’ Manibhai Desai said. ‘So, as soon as I heard that, I guessed who it might come from straightaway, and I put the little blighter under lock and key.’

  Standing now in front of the blank door of the cupboard, he took the very key from his pocket.

  ‘
Are you ready then?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the superintendent. ‘It will not take long to deal with his sort of nonsense.’

  Manibhai Desai inserted the key. Ghote took a pace backwards and prepared himself to counter any attempt to escape.

  The proprietor of Trust-X turned the key with a snap and flung the cupboard door wide.

  There was no rush to break out. Instead Ghote and the superintendent were confronted with the startling sight of a boy of twelve clad only in a pair of torn shorts who was bright blue in colour from head to foot.

  ‘Come out,’ said Manibhai Desai, evidently not at all as amazed as Ghote by this extraordinary colour.

  The boy stepped lightly forward. And, in the better light, it was plain to see that hair, face, naked ribby torso, tattered shorts, legs and bare feet were all a shining and exuberant blue.

  And it seemed that Superintendent Karandikar, for all his tigerish efficiency, was as much disconcerted as Ghote. Because instead of sharply launching into his promised lightning-speed interrogation, he jabbered out a series of almost incoherent questions.

  ‘That colour? That blue? Why is it? What do you mean by it?’

  The blue boy answered with a grin.

  It was a grin of clear simplicity, softly lighting up his whole blue face. And suddenly Ghote, no doubt because the colour reminded him of that used in pictures of the gods, saw the boy as a young Krishna, the embodiment of prodigal, unthinking love. But the answer he gave was as ordinary as could be.

  ‘It is the factory,’ he said. ‘We are living next to the factory where they are making powder for sprinkling on people when it is the day of Holi. Whatever colour they are making all the people near get on them. This month was blue.’

  ‘Where is this factory?’ Superintendent Karandikar barked, safely back to being the unerring interrogator.

  Unhesitatingly the boy gave him the name of the factory and of a street in the Bhuleshwar area where it was situated. And in answer to the next question he described where his home was and how he lived there with his four sisters and widowed mother.

  ‘Get on to a telephone,’ the superintendent snapped at Ghote. ‘Ring this Holitints place first. Check everything. Then get a car over there as fast as you can and have the mother brought in to Headquarters – if she exists.’

  He gave the blue boy a look of unrelenting suspicion, but in return received only a smile of dazzling purity. And, during the half hour following Ghote’s telephone calls, he was not able once to shake the boy from the simple story he had to tell.

  A man had come up to him, a man wearing a red checked shirt, aged between twenty and thirty, of medium height, with no distinguishing marks. He had given him the packet and precise instructions about how to deliver it. But he had not taken long to say what he had to say, and he had chosen to carry out the transaction in the deep shadow of the narrow lane next to the colour-powder factory. So it had not been possible to see much of his face. He had spoken Marathi, the boy’s own tongue. And finally he had given him one 50-paise piece and had said that when he got back there would be another for him.

  ‘Where are you to meet him?’ Superintendent Karandikar pounced, all claws.

  ‘Nowhere, sahib,’ the boy said, giving his sun-shining smile again. ‘He said he would find me.’

  ‘Hm,’ grunted the superintendent.

  A look of quick guile flashed into his eyes.

  ‘The coin,’ he snapped, ‘where is it? Produce it.’

  The boy dipped two thin blue fingers inside the cotton strap at the top of his blued-over shorts and a moment later drew out a glinting, silvery 50-paise piece. He looked at it with glowing eyes.

  Wealth.

  The telephone rang and Ghote, at a quick word from the superintendent, went to answer. It was from Headquarters. They had picked up the boy’s mother. She confirmed his existence and said that, as far as she was concerned, he was playing with his friends somewhere.

  ‘Tell me something,’ Ghote said to the C.I.D sergeant he was talking to. ‘This woman, is there anything strange about her?’

  ‘Strange? No. Unless that she is a shade of blue from head to foot. But that is from a colour-powder factory there. The whole place is blue.’

  So they let the blue boy go.

  He went, plunging unconcernedly down into the dark shaft of the servants’ stairway, a rubber-bouncing, joy-scattering element to the last. And, as the three of them stood on the landing after he had disappeared waiting for the lift to come up and take Superintendent Karandikar down, something perhaps of the urchin’s unclouded touch-stone happiness must have penetrated deep into even the sparely upright tiger-figure of the superintendent himself. Because, without any preamble, he abruptly favoured the proprietor of Trust-X with an observation.

  ‘It is the other fathers,’ he said. ‘It is them I have to keep in mind the whole time.’

  He seemed to think the remark, enigmatic though it was, needed no amplification.

  But, to Ghote’s relief, Manibhai Desai quite quickly broke the grimly imposed silence that followed it.

  ‘Other fathers, Superintendent?’ he said. ‘I am afraid I am not following.’

  The superintendent shot him an iron-grey, unyielding glance.

  ‘Fathers whose children may be kidnapped in the future,’ he explained brusquely. ‘May be kidnapped, or rather, I say, will be. Will be kidnapped, Mr Desai. If anybody in Bombay city is allowed to get it into his head that here is something they can get away with.’

  ‘So the tailor must, if necessary, suffer?’ Manibhai Desai asked, after a pause.

  But the superintendent gave him no answer.

  They waited, a silent trio, for perhaps a minute longer, until at last the steel doors in front of them parted with oiled smoothness and the silver-walled waiting lift was revealed.

  Manibhai Desai made no comment either as he and Ghote re-entered the penthouse and established themselves in the big, airy drawing-room under the golden gazes of its two sunburst clocks. But barely had they done so when a servant came in.

  ‘It is the tailor, sahib,’ he said to the proprietor of Trust-X. ‘He is saying that it is you he must see and not this time the Memsahib.’

  Mr Desai jumped up with a sharp decision from the plump and deep silk-covered sofa where he had just flung himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is I he must see. Bring him. Bring him now.’

  Ghote found himself filled with a sense of almost unbelieving wonder. Was this the man who only a few hours before had refused ever again to offer even a single rupee to ransom Pidku? Was this the man who earlier had been so unwilling to allow his heart to respond to the call made on it that he had passed on to someone else the task of telling the father a huge sum had been demanded for his son? Was this the man? The man who was now insisting on himself breaking the news to the tailor that his only son had been, in all probability, brutally mutilated?

  Ghote glanced over towards the glass-topped table where that terrible, straw-packed little parcel still rested, opened up like the nest of some ugly disruptive bird. So unlikely were the words he had heard that he almost expected to see on the glass surface only a big jade ashtray or some other luxurious knick-knack. But no, there, stark with all its blood-cruel message, the packet lay. And Manibhai Desai was proposing to tell the victim’s father what it contained, and to ask him to verify that the atrocious act was exactly what it seemed.

  ‘Sahib?’

  It was the tailor. He was standing as he had done the day before only just inside the door, and he was looking too quite unchanged by disaster, even to the enormous and minutely neat darn at the very centre of his singlet. And again he was asking, in a voice of the most gentle respect, what it was that he had been summoned for.

  ‘It is you,’ the manufacturer of Trust-X said, looking him slowly up and down.

  There were tears in his rich voice.

  ‘Ji, sahib.’

  ‘There is – there is a terrible th
ing I have to tell you.’

  Manibhai Desai’s bold features seemed actually to be less well layered with flesh than they had been when he had dismissed Ghote not many hours earlier. Would he be able to carry out his self-imposed vow, Ghote wondered. Or would it once more fall to his own lot to tell the father what had happened to his son?

  But the proprietor of Trust-X was clearing his throat to speak again.

  ‘It is your son. It is Pidku. He is well. He is alive. But they have –’

  Again a terrible check. And again the proprietor of Trust-X forced himself to go on.

  ‘What I must tell you is that those men have – They have cut off a finger.’

  And then, now that it was out, the almost incoherent babble of assuagement.

  ‘It may not be him. There may be another child, a dead child perhaps. I do not know. But if it – If it was, then already I have asked a doctor – consulted – most eminent – met at charity function. It would not have hurt much. It would not have hurt him much.’

  Manibhai Desai’s right arm shot out in a stiffened gesture, as if he were a stern schoolmaster pointing to a pool of ink on the floor.

  But the rigid forefinger was directed, like a held-out stick, at the untidy little nest on the round, glass-topped table.

  And, slowly, without a word, almost circuitously, the tailor made his way across the red wall-to-wall carpeting towards it. His progress, on lined and cracked bare feet, was quite silent. But it nevertheless made as much effect in the big, airy room as if a shouting, demonstrating morcha was parading and protesting down its length.

  And then the tailor was there, at the table. He bent forward from the waist. His hand came up as if he was going to stretch out and pick up that little brown crooked worm of flesh lying in the centre of the ragged nest. And then his arm dropped dully to his side. He leant an inch further forward.

  For a long ticking-out of time he peered, and then slowly he straightened his back and turned towards the manufacturer of Trust-X and Inspector Ghote.

  Ghote saw that from underneath the tape-mended lens of his spectacles a single tear was trickling down the side of that parched, aged-before-its-time face as, wordlessly still, the old man left them.