Читать книгу Inspector Ghote Draws a Line - H. R. F Keating - Страница 7

As it turned out, Inspector Ghote was up from his high, wooden-ended bed, all dark swirls of heavy carving, well before the long afternoon stupor had ended. What jerked him abruptly into a sitting position on the hard wide mattress was a sound.

At first he had thought it was only some slight extra noise coming from the aged fan above him, a new continuous low groan added to the regular, maddeningly delayed, inexorable errr-bock, errr-bock that had kept him half awake all the long deadeningly hot afternoon. But in a minute or so he had realized that the noise was not coming from anything in the room at all. It was coming from outside. Somewhere in the sun-compressed stillness, where every least bird was stifled into silence, something was making a sound, a tiny unbroken buzzing.

He sat there on the bed and strained his ears. Was it only the generator down in the tin shed at the far end of the big overgrown gardens, by the ruin of the fort? He had understood from Raman, wide-eyed, scared-looking, shyly-grinning Raman, that the engine ran only when light was needed in the big house and that the stored power of a set of big old batteries was sufficient for such other needs as there were during daylight hours. But perhaps for some special reason the ancient engine had been started up early today. But no. He recalled the machine’s throbbing sound well enough from the evening before, deep and reluctant, like the fan grunting round above him still, or like the blood in the Judge’s old veins, feeble but formidably obstinate.

And the buzzing was getting minute by minute louder.

Suddenly he knew what it was. He slid from the tall bed, went over to the window and pushed apart the heavy time-bleached wooden shutters. The light of the sun, although it was not striking directly on to this side of the house, struck him like a blow on the nose. He blinked. But, far away across on the other side of the almost dried-up river, he saw what he had been expecting to see. There, under the jabbing glare, moving steadily onwards like an indefatigable beetle, was a little motor-scooter with crouched on it, as if it had a pair of filmy white wings, a man wearing a white kurta on his upper half and below a baggy white dhoti, its ends streaming out in the slight breeze created by the machine’s modest speed.

A visitor.

It could be nothing else. There was nowhere else to go other than this house along the dusty unmade-up road, once past the cluster of huts that was the village.

But the river? How would that determinedly advancing rider in the dhoti cope with the broken surface of the river bed?

Standing at the window, eyes screwed tight against the quivering whiteness of the sunlight, Ghote watched to see what this newcomer would do.

Who could he be? Someone arriving by scooter could not have come from very far away. In fact, could have come only from the town. There was nowhere else within range of such a little machine. Some municipal official? Perhaps. Yet the Judge had said nothing, when the conversation at dinner last evening had turned to how few people they saw, about expecting any visitor, and it was surely likely that if someone was being sent to see a person as important as Sir Asif Ibrahim, notice would have been sent to him by letter. And even if the Judge had decided to say nothing of an expected caller, Begum Roshan would hardly have kept silent on the subject. There had been several long awkward gaps in the talk at the dinner table which she had made painful efforts to fill. She was hardly likely to have let such a promising topic go unmentioned.

So who was this white-clad figure on the little buzzing scooter approaching with such steady certainty?

Was it someone with a typewritten note concealed somewhere about his person? A note containing the words ‘twelve days only remaining’?

But who could that be? And why should he be coming?

The scooter slowed at last as it reached the top of the gentle slope of the river bank. The rider weaved his way twistingly right down to the broad bed of the shrunken stream itself. Then the noise of the engine – it had become more of an angry whine than a buzz when it had got nearer – abruptly ceased. The rider, who Ghote could see now was wearing a white Congress cap as well as his white kurta and dhoti, dismounted. He seemed to be an individual in late middle age, weighty and deliberate in his movements, though he was still too far away for his features to be at all clear.

He watched him gather the falling pleats of the dhoti in a bunch in his left hand and then awkwardly grasp the handlebar of his machine with them. Then he began to make his way across the river bed, pushing the little machine onwards as implacably as when he had been riding smoothly towards the house. He seemed to know the broken, stony terrain well, changing his course from time to time without pausing to choose the best route and contriving never to have to go through water much deeper than the tops of his ankles.

In five minutes more he would be at the house itself. But who was he?

He decided abruptly that he would go down and keep watch over his arrival. Someone who so evidently knew his way to the house could well be the person responsible for delivering those notes threatening Sir Asif with death. Could well then be someone who in twelve days’ time would attempt to murder Sir Asif ‘by means of an explosive detonation’.

Hurriedly he scrambled into trousers and shirt and respectable socks and shoes, pushing away as he did so the niggling thought that he had brought with him too few clothes to keep up for another twelve days the standards he had discovered that the Judge expected at his dinner table. Why, he had only one necktie, and that was already looking decidedly creased. Yet perhaps his stay would not now, after all, run to the whole twelve days. Perhaps the new arrival – through his still open window he heard the brisk rattle of the scooter’s engine being started up again – would before very much longer in some way betray himself as the writer of those notes. And then …

He opened the door of his room with caution, remembering that its seldom-used hinges squealed out a brief protest every time it was swung back at all quickly. Then he set out along the wide corridor that would bring him eventually, unless he once more got the geography of the big house confused, to the ornately carved central staircase. There, with any luck, he might be able to lean over the banisters at the top and hear, or even see, what was going on in the entrance hall below.

Perhaps Raman, shyly grinning his quickly-come, quickly-chased-away, wide horseshoe smile, would come to the heavy house door and greet the visitor by name if he knew him, or ask him his business if he did not.

The corridor stretched ahead, wide, high, its walls damp-mottled, its marble floor echoing clackily to his steps, quiet though he tried to keep them. Rapidly as he could he went past its long row of identical, polished, dark-wood doors. How many bedrooms were there in the whole huge house? Was there perhaps, tucked away quietly in one of them, some other inhabitant whom he had not even been told about? Perhaps there was someone speaking good English and capable of using a typewriter whom no one else in the whole big pea-rattling place so much as knew existed.

He shook his head angrily. Fantasy. Fantasy.

Yet a thorough quiet search of the whole house would be worth carrying out as soon as there was a chance to do it.

He turned the corner, and, yes, there in front of him was the head of the staircase, dark and heavily carved. He advanced at a slithering half run. From below there came no sound, until just as he reached the top of the stairs there suddenly groaned out the noise of the wide double doors of the house being dragged open.

Just in time.

Then he heard Raman’s sing-song South Indian voice. ‘Good morning, Mr Dhebar, sir.’

He had noticed before that, irrespective of the time of day, the Orderly always greeted everybody with ‘Good morning.’

But ‘Mr Dhebar’. That name rang a bell. An urgent, strident bell. And, before the newcomer had had time to reply to Raman, the answer had come to him. One of the Madurai Conspirators had been named Dhebar. And it had been a decidedly special one. The sole member of the party who had succeeded in avoiding capture when the police had raided the house where they were hiding the dynamite intended to cause their ‘explosive detonation’. The man had, in fact, never been captured. ‘The missing conspirator’, he had been called throughout the trial, or ‘the man Dhebar’.

Could this be him? Could that rather squat, weighty, deliberate figure who had come beetle-buzzing to the house crouched over his little scooter be the very man Sir Asif had sentenced to death thirty years ago though he was not standing in the dock with his fellow conspirators? Thirty years ago, all but twelve days?

A single long stretching stride and he was leaning over the rail of the banisters. He craned down.

Below he saw Raman’s curly-haired black head, with at the crown a small round patch of grey where the hair-dye had grown out. And a foot or two in front of Raman there was the inverted boat-shape of a white Congress cap with beneath it the slopes of the white kurta tautly stretched over a solidly pudgy torso.

Yes, a man in full middle age. He clawed at his memory to recall the exact age of the missing conspirator. It must have been mentioned somewhere in those dusty, dragged-out, long-stored reports he had read back in Bombay. But he could not recall it. Not exactly. Yet the missing man had been young, he was sure of that. A man in his twenties. Which would mean a man now in his fifties. And the solid figure down below, standing on the veined marble flags of the hallway, looked very much as if he was just that age.

And he was named Dhebar.

Was the whole business he had been sent up here to tackle going to be after all quite simple?

‘My dear Dhebar, how pleasant to see you.’

It was the precise Englishman’s English voice of Sir Asif. In friendly greeting. In noticeably friendly greeting.

The old man must have approached without using the polished black, silver-headed cane which he always carried. Its distinctive tap-tap on the marble floors had been totally absent.

And now he had come into sight. A head swathed in the elaborate folds of a white pagri.

But that friendly greeting had in an instant stood the whole situation on its head. The Judge, of all people, must remember the names of the men in the Madurai Conspiracy Case, must know that the missing conspirator had been called Dhebar and would be now about fifty years of age. Yet he was evidently on the friendliest of terms with the newcomer.

Or was he?

Because Mr Dhebar seemed distinctly surprised, and even put out, by the warmth of his greeting.

‘Yes,’ he was saying. ‘Yes, Judge. Yes. That is – Very, very pleased to see you also, Judge. Most altogether.’

What was the relationship between the two of them then? Who was this Mr Dhebar who had been made so welcome by the customarily reserved Sir Asif?

He set off to creep, step by step, down the stairs till he could get to a position where he could see the newcomer’s face properly.

‘I trust,’ Sir Asif was continuing, ‘that you will be able to stay long enough to take tea with us, my dear fellow. I know that my daughter would particularly look forward to it.’

‘Begum Roshan is most kind, Judge sahib. Begum Roshan is indeed always and invariably most kind to my poor self.’

Now he was far enough down to be able to get a reasonable view of the fellow’s face, although at a sharp angle.

A jaw, heavy and pear-shaped. Above it a small mouth. And above that – he stooped so as to improve his line of vision – a drooping pendulous nose. Just visible to either side of that were two large brown eyes, looking at this moment, so far as he could tell, as if they were desperately searching round for some explanation.

And the Judge’s next remark seemed to do nothing to reassure those eyes, innocent though it sounded.

‘My dear Dhebar, you know that we both greatly welcome these weekly visits of yours. They are a high point in our somewhat restricted lives. A high point indeed.’

‘If I am giving the least pleasure at all to Begum Roshan it is altogether my honour. Oh, most certainly my honour. And to yourself, of course, also. To yourself especially, Judge sahib.’

His head was a-whirl with thoughts. Why, if this Mr Dhebar was in the habit of visiting the house once a week and apparently gave such pleasure by his visits, had neither the Judge nor his daughter mentioned him when the conversation at the dinner table had turned to the loneliness and isolation of their life here? Because – he was certain of this suddenly – those visits did not give either of them any pleasure. There had been, looking back, an undertone of irony in the Judge’s voice just now, an undertone which he had already begun to be able to recognize. Yet it was plain that Mr Dhebar, whoever he was, and it was clear that he was a person far below Sir Asif Ibrahim in the social scale, did indeed come here on those regular weekly visits. So what could be their purpose? And since, obviously, they gave every opportunity to leave in the house notes threatening the Judge’s life, was this the man he had been sent out here to apprehend? But if he was, what was his motive? Why did he want Sir Asif dead? And why was he giving him these warnings? Could he possibly be the missing conspirator after all?

One thing was certain. As soon as there was the least opportunity he must find out from the fellow his full name and as much else about him as he could, and then he must thoroughly check on him.

But already a mountainous difficulty presented itself. How to get in touch with Bombay to carry out that check? A house without a telephone, miles even from the nearest one. He would have to get to the town. But how to do that? Sir Asif, certainly, had a car. That much he had gathered from the talk last night. The vehicle was kept on the far side of the river and seldom used. Would Sir Asif allow him to borrow it? But he could hardly say to him, ‘Sir, I want to telephone Bombay to check on a regular visitor to your house, a person to whom you give your hospitality.’ And even if he found some pretext to give to Sir Asif for Inspector Ghote to make the trip to the town, he would then have to devise some other reason why Doctor Ghote should need to go there so soon after his arrival. What did Doctors of Philosophy suddenly need that would make a journey of twenty miles or more a matter of urgency? Extra notebooks? More pencils?

‘But, my dear Dhebar, you must meet our other visitor, Doctor Ghote, who has come to assist me with my Memoirs. Come and join us, Ghote.’

The old man had spotted him. Had known he was there listening all the time, most likely. It would be typical of him. And, no doubt, that warm welcome had been given to Mr Dhebar with the sole object of putting yet more confusion into his own mind.

He burned with rage. And fought to conceal it.

But the Judge’s last remark had, it seemed, caused Mr Dhebar much greater dismay even than the mysteriously warm welcome he had received.

Coming hurrying down the stairs, taking their wide flights much too quickly but unable to help himself, he saw that the newcomer had been plunged into a palpable state of agitation, rendered indeed temporarily speechless.

But only temporarily.

‘Judge. Sir Asif. Judge sahib, what – what are these Memoirs? You are not writing your Memoirs. Nothing at all has been said. You are not.’

He was hardly asking the Judge a question, even a blatantly impolite one. He was making an assertion. Declaring passionately that something was not happening.

Sir Asif smiled at him, a quick curling smile under his oddly squashed-down nose.

‘But of course I am writing my Memoirs, my dear fellow. I have been engaged upon the task for years. Are you sure that I have never chanced to mention them to you?’

‘Never,’ said Mr Dhebar. ‘Never, never, never.’

His eyes gleamed in a fury of denial.

‘Ah, well, if you say so, my dear chap. But it nevertheless remains that I have been steadily at work for, oh, a number of years. And what I have written will, I venture to think, be not without interest, even in these times when standards have been allowed so deplorably to degenerate.’

And the old man turned and began to walk slowly away, silver-headed cane tapping out on the hard marble of the floor with a steady insolent beat.

‘If you will excuse me,’ he murmured. ‘A little tiredness. The penalty of age. A short rest before teatime. You will find my daughter in the drawing-room. I am sure you both know the way.’

He disappeared into one of the four tall corridors leading off the hall.

Ghote and Mr Dhebar were left staring at each other like two castaways unexpectedly coming face to face at the crest of some empty pinpoint ocean island.