Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

by H. R. F. Keating

  Deadline, indeed.

  But was he justified in what he was doing?

  ‘Shoot those lights ahead,’ he ordered the taxi-man.

  Justified or not, he was going to go on. He was going to act first, and find explanations afterwards if he could.

  The minutes ticked by and mounted up. Ghote forced himself not to let them blot out everything else in his mind. He clutched at the problem that would await him at his destination, a problem so impenetrable that he had not been able before to bring himself fully to contemplate it. But how among perhaps a hundred or more people employed by Trust-X Manufacturing was he to find the one – it might be one only – who had planned this appalling crime against the head of the firm?

  The envelope. He must work from that. How was it that this particular envelope had come to be used for the first note to Manibhai Desai? Plainly it had been a mistake on the kidnappers’ part, and they had been lucky not to have been tripped by the heels by it before this. Lucky for them that the proprietor of Trust-X was now so successful that he no longer had time to exercise the close supervision of his whole enterprise that had once, it seemed, been his pride. He had mentioned indeed, when making that offer of employment with the firm, that he had been unable for a long time to get round to visiting the Goods Outward department. So it might well be there that a search for the traitor within his gates would begin.

  Someone with access to the new brand of cheaper envelope. Well, it might be possible to do some eliminating there, if only there was time.

  Ghote looked at his watch yet again. Already quarter to nine. But at least they were getting near. They were getting near. This was the end of Globe Mill Road.

  ‘Keep it up, keep it up,’ he begged the taxi-man.

  There ought to be a foreman or somebody like that in the Goods Outward department, and a word from him might reveal in one second the presence – or, more significant, the absence – of some person with a grudge against Manibhai Desai. Then a check at top speed with the Wages department, an address, and he might still at least be on his way before that nine o’clock call was made.

  He might. He might. And surely even the kidnappers would not carry out their terrible threat within minutes of the situation requiring it finally arising.

  At last the taxi came to a halt at the gate in a high mesh fence that kept the brilliant white, sparkling new factory of Trust-X Manufacturing from contact with the dirt-encrusted outer world.

  ‘From Mr Desai. To see Mr Shah.’

  Ghote shouted the words at the tall Pathan gate-man, magnificent in a green turban, finding they came to him without his even having to think. The name of the greasy-suited accountant was the only one he knew among all the employees of the big factory, and so he had produced it. But it was likely that there had been occasions in the past when the proprietor had had reason to send an urgent messenger to the man who summed up in his single person the factory’s whole Accounts department.

  And it seemed that it was so.

  ‘Straight on, straight on,’ the stiff-turbaned Pathan called with a brisk wave of his thick staff.

  The taxi drove into the factory compound and drew up in front of the main entrance.

  ‘Wait for me,’ Ghote said with urgency to the driver.

  It was likely, he reckoned, that if he did succeed in winkling out one of the kidnappers – but how? How was he to find one among a hundred or more in just a few minutes? – he would need to go at speed over to the immediate area of the Holitints factory. So transport had to be assured, and damn the cost.

  He ran quickly up a wide flight of steps, through swinging blued glass doors and into the factory’s reception area.

  Another Pathan, equally lordly in a splendid violet turban, stood there. Ghote tackled him in a sheer overwhelming rush.

  ‘Police, C.I.D,’ he snapped the moment the glass doors had swung to behind him. ‘Your Goods Outward department, where is it? Quick.’

  ‘Through that door to your right, straight along the corridor, then you will see a sign at the far end.’

  Ghote, without stopping his onward rush, swung round and charged past a startled-looking girl at a reception desk and through the door the Pathan had indicated. Ahead, a long, wide corridor ran for perhaps fifty yards in a broad, straight path, its floor covered in soft, noise-deadening, squeaking green rubber. Plain wooden doors, painted white, with the names of the various departments on them in square red lettering giving a faintly hospital aspect, were blankly closed on either side. Ghote reached the far end in a little over five seconds.

  And there, to the left, was a pair of double doors marked in the same red ‘Goods Outward’. They clacked open with a satisfying noisiness as Ghote pushed at them with the palms of his extended arms.

  A large hall confronted him, two wide tables or benches running its whole length set about eight or nine feet apart. In the passageway which they formed there were some twenty or more women, busy dealing with supplies of Trust-X in various stages of packing, pushing them along until, at the end of one of the tables, baskets of envelopes awaited delivery to the post office, while, at the end of the other, neat wooden boxes of cards, bundled and tightly stacked, were ready to be taken to shops where the tonic was sold.

  Women, Ghote thought, looking down the two rows of industrious, stooping, sari-clad figures. It was a reasonable first bet that no woman was involved in as nasty and heartless a business as kidnapping.

  His look swept round the rest of the long, high-ceilinged room. On the outside of the two parallel packing tables various necessary supplies were being brought to the points where they would be used by some eight or nine coolies. One of these? It was likely enough. His eyes raced over the men with their baskets of unfilled envelopes and trays of monthly cards. Was there one with a red checked shirt?

  After all, men doing this sort of work did not change every day, or even every week, from a shirt of one colour to one of another. They were as likely as not to possess just the one garment, getting their wives to wash it one night and wearing it again next morning. So a red checked shirted man?

  But there was no one.

  Who was in charge? A brawny fellow of about fifty with a round, voluble, fat face, dressed in a colourful purple shirt above a bright red dhoti, was moving briskly here and there in the big room. Ghote went quickly up to him.

  ‘Are you the foreman of this department?’ he asked sharply.

  The big, wide-chested man laughed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I am in charge. In charge of a pack of girls and women who leave me no peace.’

  His eyes twinkled.

  ‘And the coolies?’ Ghote asked. ‘They leave you no peace either? They are discontented?’

  Again the foreman laughed, richly from the chest.

  ‘When they are my relatives only, all but one?’ he said. ‘No, they have good jobs here, my cousins and my cousins’ cousins. We are not having strikes always.’

  ‘And they are all related to you? All but one, you said? What about him? He is an odd man out?’

  ‘Ah ha,’ the foreman laughed, and gave himself a double-handed slap on either side of his dhoti-covered belly. ‘That one is going to marry my daughter. The last girl I have to marry, and he is going to take her. A good boy, too. A good boy.’

  ‘I see,’ Ghote said, with despondency.

  He was wondering whether perhaps he ought not after all to ask some questions about the female packers – had he been too simple to think that no woman could act as cruelly as the kidnappers? – when the foreman gave him a quick, acute look from a face still wreathed in smiles.

  ‘But what is all this about, sahib, if I may ask?’ he said. ‘You seem to think someone here has done something wrong.’

  Ghote decided to trust him, a sudden, instinctive plunge.

  ‘It may not be in this department,’ he said, ‘but someone in the firm has done something wrong indeed, unless I am much mistaken.’

  ‘You are police, sahib?’ t
he foreman asked.

  ‘C.I.D,’ Ghote answered.

  ‘Then it is this terrible thing that has happened to the tailor who worked for Mrs Desai,’ the foreman concluded.

  His eyes darkened with concern.

  ‘Exactly. And I have reason to believe that someone …’

  Ghote’s voice trailed into silence. A clear notion of who that someone was had floated abruptly into his head.

  The idea may have come from some hidden-away emotional reaction to the warmth of the foreman’s personality, or it may have come simply because his mind, having completed its consideration of the kidnapper in the factory as being one of the rough members of the gang, switched to asking whether the person he was seeking might not be the hypothetical master-mind behind the whole affair. But, whatever the reason, the idea had come into being in his head as clear and as definite as if it had been the result of a long chain of closely considered ratiocination.

  As, in a way, it was. The salient point in his picture of the supposed master-mind had always been one thing: that someone had fixed with such accuracy on the sum of twenty lakhs of rupees as the maximum possible amount the proprietor of Trust-X would be able to scrape together to ransom his own only son. Added to this there had been the skill shown in the drafting of the various plans the kidnappers had put forward for picking up the money without risking being arrested. But there had also been another element: a hint of indirectness in control. The main plans had been drawn up with skill, but details of their execution – things like the envelope and the occasional indecision shown by the man on the telephone – had indicated more than once a clear lack of close control from the top.

  Ghote thought now that he knew why this was. Plainly the kidnappers were operating from whatever place it was, near the colour-spreading Holitints factory, where they were hiding Pidku, but no doubt the master-mind was not able to be there at all times. Quite simply, he had to be at work.

  And if he was a senior employee of Trust-X Manufacturing, which of all the people at the factory would know most clearly about the proprietor’s exact financial state but the man who in himself constituted the whole Accounts department, the bullied and put-upon Mr Shah?

  Ghote, flinging out thanks to the genial foreman, left at a run. With every stride he took he became more and more convinced that the man he was about to tackle would be able to tell him exactly where Pidku, frightened, maimed, five-year-old Pidku, was being kept.

  In the brightly coloured, fresh-looking reception area he again demanded directions from the Pathan chaprassi with a sharpness that could not be denied. Yes, the Accounts department was easy to find. It was on the upper floor, just next to the proprietor’s own office, and that was directly above them now.

  ‘Through those doors there, sahib. Up the stairs and Accounts you would see on your right.’

  Ghote took the stairs two at a time. And with each bounding step he let the anger within himself leap higher.

  Then he saw the sign saying ‘Accounts’ painted on a narrow glass-panelled door ten yards along from the luxurious wood-veneer affair with a board bearing the legend ‘Chairman and Managing Director – Strictly Private’. He swerved towards it and, without knocking or giving a moment of warning, he flung it open.

  Mr Shah was sitting behind a cheap desk at the far end of a little, high-ceilinged corridor of a room, its walls shelved and heavy with great leather-bound account books. He looked exactly as he had done when Ghote had first seen him two days ago. That greasy suit seemed folded in exactly the same encrusted creases and the very threads at its cuffs appeared to dangle thickly at the very same angles. His large horn-rim spectacles sat in their same filmed-over state at a slightly crooked angle on the small, anonymous nose in the centre of that cross-lined, fleshless, anonymous face.

  He looked up, with a quick tree-rat dart of fear, when Ghote stepped into the narrow, book-walled room. But when he saw who it was who had come in his glance dropped again to the long, heavy ledger in front of him and he immediately made an entry in it with the fat old fountain-pen he was holding.

  ‘It is the police inspector who was with Mr Desai,’ he said, his mind already more than half fixed again on the columns of figures in front of him. ‘It is a message from Mr Desai?’

  ‘No,’ said Ghote, clearly and loudly.

  He marched up to the small desk and stood glaring down at the accountant across it.

  ‘No,’ he repeated, cracking the word down. ‘It is you I have come to see, Mr Shah.’

  The accountant looked up at him sharply, his eyes peering speculatively up through the grease-filmed glasses.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ he said. ‘It is Inspector – er – Ghote, isn’t it? Is there truly something that I can do for –’

  Ghote banged both his hands down flat on the little, cheap desk so that it shuddered and the telephone at its corner gave a tiny ping. He leant forward until his face was within inches of the lined, cross-furrowed, secretive face of the accountant.

  ‘Where is the boy?’ he shouted. ‘Where are you keeping him?’

  He was able to see, so close he was, the minute flicker of fear in the eyes behind the big, filmy spectacles. The minute flicker of fear, and – was it? – an even more minute flicker of calculation.

  ‘Inspector, is something wrong? I do not at all understand what it is that you are –’

  Ghote hit him.

  He had not in the least expected to. But the stream of bland words that had begun to slide out in answer to his question offended him like an exquisite insult. And he had swung upright above the little desk and, quick as a lion’s paw, his right hand had shot out and landed a heavy blow on the side of Mr Shah’s head.

  It sent him tumbling from the creaky bentwood chair on which he had been crouching over his long ledger. He fell sideways on to the floor, banging his shoulder against the wall of the narrow room. And he lay there.

  ‘Get up,’ Ghote said.

  Cautiously the accountant scrabbled on to his knees, his left hand sweeping round in a half-circle seeking the horn-rim spectacles which had flown off the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Where are you keeping the boy?’ Ghote demanded again.

  Mr Shah got fully to his feet. He had found the spectacles, but he made no attempt to put them on.

  ‘You are assaulting me,’ he said.

  His voice was steady, and Ghote realized with thankfulness that he had not done him any serious harm. It was not that he did not want to: he wanted to stand over the grimy-suited figure and batter him down time and again to the ground. But he knew that this would only give a defence lawyer ammunition, and besides he was not going to get any information out of his man if he himself was blind with red rage.

  So he took a long, deep breath before speaking.

  ‘Yes, Mr Shah,’ he said then, his tone as steady as his opponent’s now. ‘Yes, I am assaulting. You have heard tales of police brutality, I dare say. Well, would you like to find out if they are true?’

  ‘Oh no, you will not,’ the accountant answered, his eyes sparking ice. ‘I am not the sort you can do that to. I am protected. I work very closely with Mr Desai, Mr Desai who is a personal friend of the Commissioner of Police.’

  ‘Mr Desai,’ Ghote countered, still keeping his voice level, ‘whose only son you planned to kidnap.’

  The accountant’s unexpressive face went yet more stonily uncommunicative.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘I do not know what wild idea you have got into your head, but I would be very interested to hear what evidence you have for that claim.’

  Ghote saw, with a sudden pit of emptiness opening in front of him, that he had rushed impetuously into a very dangerous situation. He had accused a member of the public of a serious offence without a jot of hard evidence to back him up. He had behaved not like a police officer but like an unthinking fool.

  Should he try to climb out of it? Say he had not said what he plainly had? Mutter excuses? Cringe and apologize?

&nbs
p; But then he knew that he would not. Mr Shah was the person who had planned the kidnapping of Haribhai Desai and, worse, who, when that had gone wrong, had committed the double cruelty of demanding a huge sum against the life of the son of a hopelessly poor man. Evidence might be lacking at present, but he himself had seen the little look of speculation in those eyes behind the greased-over horn-rim glasses and was experiencing now the cold triumph the man was exuding.

  Shah was the master-mind. He was. And he was not going to get away with it.

  ‘Mr Shah,’ he said, ‘you have no need to play these sort of tricks with me. I have reason and good reason to know that you are the man who planned the kidnapping. It is your accomplices who are holding that boy even now. Where are they?’

  ‘Inspector, already I have warned –’

  Mr Shah stopped. The greying black telephone on the corner of his cheap little desk was ringing hard.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘you can see I am a busy man. I have the whole accounting system of this firm to keep running.’

  He gave a pointed glance at the door which Ghote had left swinging open behind him, and reached across the desk for the telephone receiver.

  Ghote stood his ground. But the accountant did not allow his presence to put him off. He brought the receiver to his ear and spoke in a clipped businesslike manner that was only a little exaggerated.

  ‘Trust-X Manufacturing Accounts department. It is Mr Shah speaking.’

  ‘He did not go to hotel.’

  16

  It had been only six words. But they were enough to change totally the situation for Ghote. Only six words coming distortedly through the earpiece of the greying telephone on the corner of Mr Shah’s desk, but Ghote had heard them clearly and had recognized beyond doubt the voice that had spoken them.