Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  Yet on the other hand the black burqa-clad figure was to carry a large orange bundle. And that bundle was to conceal a two-way radio. So the superintendent could be informed of this sudden switch in the kidnappers’ plan, a deliberate device no doubt to avoid just the sort of ambush he had set up. He could be informed. But only at the cost of some delay. And the kidnappers had said ‘Leave at once’.

  So to do what Mr Desai, with a gleam of freedom in his eyes, had just proposed and to leave this very moment would not be altogether acting in an unreasonable way.

  The notion hovered. And then into his mind there came again the vision of that long, jagged-edged butcher’s knife and the milky soft flesh of a five-year-old’s throat beneath it.

  He ran across to the long, low-slung radiogram, gave Manibhai Desai a swift grin of complicity and snatched up the money-filled Gladstone bag.

  *

  Darkness came just as Ghote brought Manibhai Desai’s big Buick up to the massive pile of the General Post Office building, approaching it from the south after a wide and hurried sweep down from Cumballa Hill and round through the Fort area of the city so as to start the itinerary the kidnappers had set from its very beginning. It was possible, he reasoned, that they intended to make their bid for the Gladstone bag here at the very start where there was plenty of traffic and the chances of a jam holding up the Buick were about 100-to-1 in favour.

  Indeed, as he took the big car round to the left so as to pass the ornate, palm-blotted faÇade of the VT Station, there were three separate occasions when he was forced to a halt. At each one he delayed as long as he could – once in fact till the irate man at the wheel of an Ambassador behind him blared hard on the forbidden horn – but no one slipped out of the jostling crowds on the pavements, as he had half-expected, jerked open the car’s rear door and grabbed the stout brown leather bag.

  Up along to Crawford Market, past the tall office buildings, darkened now, and past all the hectoring billboards with their clamorous messages in English, Marathi and Gujarati, there was no opportunity to stop. But in the gloom of one of the long arcades here would one of the kidnappers perhaps be waiting to check that the Buick had gone by in accordance with their orders? Perhaps they would.

  At the gap in the opened glass panel behind his head Manibhai Desai’s face loomed forwards.

  ‘What if they had wanted to make their attempt just now?’ he asked.

  Ghote shrugged his shoulders in their white uniform coat.

  ‘I do not think they will risk the car having to stop by chance,’ he answered. ‘What we have to look for is something done deliberately to cause a stoppage.’

  ‘Yes, but what could that be?’ Mr Desai asked, anxious as a child about to get a mysterious treat.

  ‘It would be easy enough to arrange,’ Ghote said. ‘They could half-block the road somewhere ahead where it is narrower with someone carrying out unauthorized automotive repairs. Or even easier, they could arrange a false breakdown. Every day my colleagues in the Traffic Department are complaining: one breakdown and there is a jam that can last half an hour or more. And you know how often cars go wrong.’

  Behind him he detected Manibhai Desai wagging his head in serious agreement.

  ‘That is why I am always buying foreign,’ he explained. ‘It is difficult sometimes over spare parts, and expensive, but …’

  Ghote hardened his face into a proper chauffeur’s impassivity at this and concentrated on the traffic snarl ahead where the flow of vehicles both ways along Carnac Road crossed their path.

  Would it be here that the kidnappers could rely on a car that was making its way northwards having to stop? But no. Irritatingly the lights ahead turned green and they got across and into Abdul Rahman Street without actually having to come to a halt.

  Well, Ghote reasoned, with the thicker masses of people spilling on to the roadway from here on, in the way they always do in the living quarters of the city, there would be plenty of opportunities for a forced stop. A vendor’s barrow pushed out in the road and deliberately overturned, some sort of false procession got up at a cost of a handful of rupees, anything.

  He sent the big Buick pushing slowly forward past the crowds emerging from the open-fronted shops and spilling out on to the roadway. Cyclists swerved and swayed in front of them. Handcarts piled high with sacks or bales of cloth impeded the already jerky traffic-crawl. It would be easy enough for someone to break into a run and jump up on to the car here.

  But no one did.

  Bhendi Bazar and the intersection with the wide, cross-city thoroughfare of Sardel Patel Road. People were even thicker here, milling this way and that, some hurrying, others dawdling, pairs of men hand in hand slowly loitering. The stream of cars, lorries, buses crossing their path was more thrusting than anything they had yet encountered.

  Is this where I would do it, Ghote asked himself. It was about one-third of the way along the route the kidnappers had laid down. They would have had time enough, if they had wanted to, to check that their rules were being obeyed, to see that there were no obvious signs of a police escort and then perhaps to telephone to a point ahead and give the all-clear. But, on the other hand, in the stretch yet to come conditions would be perhaps even more favourable for stopping a car.

  And it seemed that this must be the kidnappers’ reasoning. Although the Buick was held up for almost five minutes waiting to get across into what Ghote still thought of as Parel Road though it had been officially re-named Victoria Garden Road, there was no attempt to make contact.

  They made slow progress forwards. Ghote felt obliged to drive with the window beside him fully down so that if anyone wanted to give him an order to pull in, or even to turn off, there would be no difficulties placed in their way. So he caught the full force now of the dust and the odours impregnating the air all around, drains stench, sweat smell, dung-fire reek. In his ears there racketed the noise of a thousand jabbering, shouting voices, the grinding roar of low-gear car engines, the bang and batter of carts and handcarts and of horses’ hooves and bullocks’. But he forced himself to keep alert, glanced continually from side to side, waited for the sign to come, whatever it would be.

  They had entered the Muslim quarter and left it behind them, and now they had reached an area of taller, more fearsomely leaning houses. It seemed there were even more people to the square yard than before, and more noise and sharper smells of dung, filth, garlic, spices.

  They were going at a snail’s pace, actually pushing aside with the big car’s front fender people in the roadway and the occasional mooning, rubbish-chewing cow. It was the perfect place. There would be no trouble at all here in opening the rear door beside Manibhai Desai and telling him to push out the Gladstone bag. There would be no difficulty in melting into the mass of humanity all around, once it had been taken. Pursuit by anybody would be almost out of the question.

  And nothing happened.

  The tall shape of the Parsi Statue. And the point where they had to snake right into the part of the old Parel Road now called Dr Ambedkar Road. Once again a tangle of traffic brought them to a complete halt. And once again there was no attempt at taking delivery.

  Had the kidnappers bungled it? Had they meant to make contact earlier and by some sheer chance been foiled? Were they even now trying to pursue the slowly moving Buick?

  Ghote peered and peered into the rear mirror. But all he could see was a confusion of bodies and faces, of vehicles and barrows in the jangle-lit darkness.

  Victoria Gardens passed by on their right, Byculla Station and the bulk of the Railway Hospital on their left. They came to an area where the houses were bigger but old, battered and past all their glory. From their entrances people by the hundred seemed to be pouring. The soft masses of old banyan and pipal trees blotted out the lights.

  Suddenly Ghote became convinced of the way it would be done. There was bound to be a tree sooner or later that jutted out over the roadway. Say someone was lurking in its branches, ready to drop down o
n the car’s roof?

  He awaited the heavy thud above him.

  But it seemed that it was not going to come.

  He twisted round for a moment and spoke to Manibhai Desai.

  ‘Sahib, perhaps it would be better if you were to lift up the case and put it on your knees. So that it can be seen by anybody.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I will do that.’

  The manufacturer of Trust-X was as pathetically willing to please as any one of his most debt-ridden minor suppliers.

  Slowly the big Buick forged its way onwards. The fork to the right at Chinchpokli Road passed by. More than two-thirds of the journey had gone now.

  What if they had made some mistake, failed to see a signal? Would the kidnappers take that for a brutal gesture of refusal? And would they make their own infinitely more brutal reply? Again Ghote saw the jagged edge of that imagined butcher’s knife and the pipe-thin neck it menaced.

  Ought he to have persuaded Mr Desai to make his offer bigger? Would he have come up with three lakhs if a really forceful case had been presented to him? Or two and a half lakhs? Surely that little more the manufacturer of Trust-X would have granted easily enough? And it might make all the difference.

  If it got to them.

  Half a lakh. That little more, though a whole year’s earnings, even for someone doing well in the commercial world. And in the other tray of the scales, a life.

  Into the area illuminated by the big car’s sidelights an old woman, bent almost double, with a sari faded to colourlessness wrapped round her gnarled and fleshless limbs, almost failed to move herself out of the way. A life? What was one life in the middle of all the dying round them now?

  Yet Pidku had to be saved. That he knew. Knew in the region where the analyses and comparisons of the brain were at total discount.

  And now the very last stage of their journey. Ghote took the big Buick across the traffic system for the fork right into Government House Gate Road. Some half-mile more and they would be there.

  When were the kidnappers going to claim those two lakhs that waited for them? And it could never have been more than two lakhs. There had not been time to have added even a thousand rupees more since he and Manibhai Desai had become allies on little Pidku’s behalf once again.

  A straight stretch of road now, with the going better than at any stage before. Perhaps, though, the appointed place would be the very end of their journey?

  Yet he dropped down into first and kept the big car at a silly, steady, chugging crawl.

  Ahead, a little to the left, the huge shape of their destination could be seen now. Was someone waiting in hiding under the shadow of the big hospital’s outer wall? Was there a motorscooter, say, with its engine already running ready to weave in and out of the traffic and the crowds in a fast getaway? Would next the Gladstone bag on its rear carrier be snatched off at the end of its run with shaking, joyful, hardly-daring-to-believe hands? Would it be jerked open? The money counted? Manibhai Desai’s new note read? A council of war held? And at last the decision be made to accept that already vast sum and let Pidku go?

  At the gap in the dividing panel the proprietor of Trust-X spoke.

  ‘Can you go slower?’

  ‘Sahib, already I am down to five miles an hour only.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I saw.’

  With the echoes of that sad voice in his head, Ghote completed at this creeping pace their long journey. He pulled the big car up against the kerb beside the towering bulk of the window-glowing King Edward Memorial Hospital. In silence they waited.

  13

  It was, as Ghote had finally been sure it was going to be, a fruitless wait in the shadow of the K.E.M. Hospital. After twenty minutes he had proposed that they give it up. After thirty minutes Manibhai Desai had consented, begging only to stay on alone in the car while Ghote went into the hospital and from there belatedly reported to Superintendent Karandikar.

  It had not been a pleasant ten minutes at all, standing there in the antiseptic-pervaded hospital entrance hall endeavouring to speak quietly into the telephone with white-uniformed nurses clicking by on sharp heels and occasional doctors giving disdainful, suspicious glances at this impertinent uniformed chauffeur in their midst. Superintendent Karandikar had been every bit as hostile as Ghote had expected, and it had been a considerable time before Ghote had been able to convince him that only the extreme urgency of their departure from Mount Greatest had prevented him reporting the change in the kidnappers’ plan. Eventually, after listening to a long and forceful account of the penalties that awaited anyone who failed even in the spirit of their duties when they came under Karandikar, Ghote had managed to secure a grudging acknowledgement that this time he had not apparently betrayed the letter of his orders. But the whole experience had left him feeling drained to the core.

  And then they had set out for home again, cutting across south and west as quickly as they could towards Cumballa Hill. It had been almost entirely a time of depressed silence. Only once had Manibhai Desai spoken.

  ‘What do you think they will do now?’

  A plaintive question. Ghote’s answer had been as cheerless.

  ‘I suppose they will get in contact again, probably by telephone. It is the only thing they can do.’

  Nor was their reception at the penthouse any more encouraging. Mrs Desai came out into the hall to greet them. And she would not even listen to her husband’s feverish inquiries about whether there had been any calls.

  ‘So you are back?’ she said to him. ‘Back after leaving me with no explantion to give for you not being here.’

  Manibhai Desai’s boldly handsome features took on them a look of offended anger.

  ‘And am I having to say where I am going always?’ he demanded. ‘Am I a child only that I have to tell I am going here, I am going there?’

  ‘And when it is the wife of the Commissioner of Police himself who is inquiring?’ Mrs Desai retorted, her long, red fingernails flicking in a gesture of contemptuous triumph.

  The proprietor of Trust-X assumed an expression of instant wariness. His wife was quick to see she had the advantage.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was Meena who rang and asked what you were feeling about the matter. And what could I reply? I found that you had gone. And then, when she asked to speak to the C.I.D man the Commissioner had sent to keep a guard on your little Haribhai, I found he also had gone.’

  She darted a look of knock-down reproach at Ghote. But she was not going to waste time on recrimination at such a lowly level. Her anger-engorged eyes flickered quickly back to her husband.

  ‘And what was it you were doing?’ she said. ‘You were trying to pay those men our money.’

  There could be no denying that: Ghote was holding the heavy leather Gladstone bag with its stuffed bundles of notes. Manibhai Desai stood looking, for all the boldness of his features, hang-dog. The expression did not placate his wife. Rather the reverse.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘always it is you who are thinking you know best. Never are you taking my ideas for publicity for the business. “That is charity only” you are always saying. And it is the same here. You are thinking that you know best how to deal with these men. Pay, pay, pay, it is all you are saying. And all the time it is quite unnecessary.’

  ‘Unnecessary? Unnecessary? They have telephoned? What has happened?’

  The proprietor of Trust-X wanted to know. The desire was stamped on deep-set eyes, big pointed nose, wide taut mouth.

  ‘Telephoned? Why should such men telephone?’ his wife replied.

  ‘But to make a new appointment. To say what they want. To agree to accept a reasonable sum.’

  ‘Not at all. Not at all. That is not the way to deal with such people. I have told you all along.’

  Ghote, standing quietly witnessing this marital combat, noted soberly that this was not strictly true. But Manibhai Desai was too concerned to know what the kidnappers were doing for sober noting.

  ‘What new thing has happ
ened?’ he demanded in an infuriated shout. ‘What new thing? Tell me. Tell me.’

  Mrs Desai smiled a smile of panther sweetness.

  ‘But if you had stayed at home you would have heard from Meena herself,’ she replied.

  ‘What would I have heard?’

  Each syllable was ground out.

  ‘Why, that they have tracked down these men only.’

  ‘Tracked them down? Captured them? Pidku is safe? Is he safe?’

  Ghote found, to his burning inner joy, that the proprietor of Trust-X was voicing all the questions he himself longed to pound out.

  Mrs Desai turned and walked languidly back into the rich, red-carpeted drawing-room. Her husband, his big teeth clenched in fury at this provocation, followed her.

  ‘Well, answer,’ he said. ‘Answer.’

  ‘They are closing in on them,’ Mrs Desai replied with maddening calm.

  ‘Closing in? Where? How? Are they thinking of the boy?’

  Mrs Desai shrugged her elegant shoulders.

  ‘Do you think Meena and I are concerned with the details?’ she asked. ‘I tell you they have found out somehow where these men are hiding, and the Commissioner has ordered a massive sweep. Thank goodness there is someone to see that a citizen is not treated in this manner.’

  For a puzzled moment Ghote could not think which citizen was being treated in what manner. Then he realized: Mrs Desai had been insulted and upset by the attempt on her stepson. And it was she who was being avenged.

  And Pidku he found himself thinking savagely. Was he to be sacrificed to placate Mrs Desai?

  But the about-to-be-avenged lady had not yet finished with her erring husband.

  ‘In any case,’ she said with loftiness, ‘you can find out everything for yourself, man-to-man.’

  ‘What do you mean “man-to-man”?’