Читать книгу Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes - H. R. F Keating - Страница 9

The telephone on Inspector Ghote’s scratched and whorled little desk in his tiny office tucked into an out-of-the-way corner of Bombay CID Headquarters shrilled out alarmingly. Ghote swallowed once, squared his shoulders and picked up the receiver. Before he even had time to say his name a voice barked out at him from the earpiece. It was Deputy Superintendent Samant, sharp as a terrier dog and not to be argued with even if the truth were not on his side.

‘Ghote? I will not have my officers in their seats all day. Goondaism is getting worse and worse, and you are just sitting there. What is it you are doing now? Answer, man, answer.’

‘It is figures for you, DSP sahib,’ Ghote replied. ‘You were making most urgent request this morning. Correct figures for goondas arrested while committing violence in the second quarter of last year.’

‘Figures, figures,’ snapped the voice at the other end of the line. ‘What good are figures only? We want action, man, action.’

‘Very good, DSP sahib.’

‘Ghote?’

‘Yes, DSP? Here, DSP.’

‘There is a man in the building, an Englishman. He has some sort of complaint to make. I have told them to send him to you. You are to deal with it. Understood?’

‘Yes, DSP. And what is the nature–?’

‘And, Ghote, he has demanded to see the Commissioner himself.’

The phone clicked dead with total abruptness and at the next moment, after only the most perfunctory of knocks, the office door was thrust open by an extremely scared-looking peon. Then a big-bellied Englishman strode in, his bright-banded straw hat still jammed above a florid, sweating face.

‘You the Commissioner or whatever he’s called?’ he demanded at once in a voice so loud that it seemed to fill the little office from dusty floor to fly-haunted ceiling fan.

‘No,’ the Inspector said quickly. ‘Unfortunately I am not the Commissioner. My name is Ghote. It is spelt G-H-O-T-E, but it is pronounced Go-tay.’

‘To hell with spelling,’ the Englishman battered in. ‘What good did that ever do, I’d like to know? How about someone payin’ some attention to me for a change? I’m the one who’s been cheated out of every penny he’s got.’

Ghote could hardly have been paying more attention to the cataract of sound that swirled and eddied all round the room, but he made an effort to assume an expression of even greater interest and begged his visitor to take a chair.

‘If you will be so good as to supply full details,’ he said, rapidly zipping open the drawer on the right-hand side of his desk where he kept his paper for note-taking.

‘Right,’ said the Englishman, plumping down like a sack of coal on the stout chair in front of the desk. ‘Now get this. My name is Harper. Joe Harper to his friends, and they’re many. And I saw this advert stuck on a wall like. Back in Batley where I come from. You’ll have heard of Batley, I dare say.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, indeed,’ Ghote replied with an inaccuracy all the more sweeping for the qualms he could not help feeling in employing it.

‘Aye. Well, as I was sayin’, I saw this advert and I gave a ring-up to the number it said. And the moment the feller told me he’d call me back I knew I was on to something. That’s an old trick, you know. Ring back so as to make sure you aren’t gettin’ an inquiry from the police or any nasty, poke-nose lot of that sort.’

‘Oh, yes, that would be most regrettable,’ said Inspector Ghote.

‘It would,’ Joe Harper agreed with sledgehammer blitheness. ‘Aye. So, as I was tellin’ you, I fixed up with this feller. Golightly his name was, but he wasn’t proper English. More one of your Indian half-and-halves. And what–’

‘One moment, please,’ Ghote interrupted, looking up from his note-taking. ‘That name, Golightly. It seems to me extremely unusual. Would you be so kind as to spell it?’

‘First you want to spell your name to me, and now you want me to spell his to you. What do names matter? It’s catchin’ the feller I want.’

Nevertheless, in response to the Inspector’s mutely poised pen the Englishman did at last oblige with the spelling of Golightly. As soon as Ghote had finished writing the name he invited Joe Harper to go on.

‘Right. Then I joined this club, the Budleigh Regis Fly Fishermen’s and Deep Sea Anglers’ Association. And off we went. Well, when we got to Bombay we had to change planes to go to this place that begins with a K. You know, where all the filthy carvings are.’

‘Khajurao?’ Ghote suggested. ‘That is a great tourist attraction. K-H-A-J-U-R-A-O.’

‘Aye, that’d be it. Though why you want to go chanting out letters again is more than I can say.’

‘I was thinking it might be of assistance,’ Ghote explained. He committed this one name more to paper and looked up. ‘But there is not any fishing at Khajurao,’ he said.

‘I’ll say there isn’t,’ Joe Harper agreed with a heavy wink. ‘Not that I’ll ever see the place now, because when we got to Bombay I thought I’d drop off like and go later on my own. Joe Harper’s no one’s dogsbody. And then, when I went to collect my return ticket I found–’

‘You had to collect your return ticket in Bombay? Surely that was most peculiar?’

‘I’ll say peculiar. ’Specially when it turns out there’s no such address as 346 Taj Mahal Street.’

‘Ah,’ said Ghote, ‘now I am seeing. You have become the victim of that miscreant with the unusual name.’

‘Aye. Golightly. And you’d better set about gettin’ hold of him, pronto.’

‘Getting hold? But surely that is a question for the UK police. We will be in instant telegraphic communic—’

‘UK police? Don’t be daft. He’s here, in ruddy Bombay. I’ve told you that a hundred times. He came on the flight with us. That’s why I thought the whole deal was above board. Because, I tell you, I had my doubts from the first. There’s no flies on Joe Harper.’

Looking across at the belly-jutting, puce-faced Englishman, Ghote could not help registering that in fact there were flies on the Budleigh Regis fly fisherman. Half a dozen had been buzzing round him ever since he had settled down, and at this moment a couple were resting on his perspiring neck.

‘Mr Harper,’ he said, bringing his mind back to the matter in hand, ‘you are a fisherman and you—’

‘Fisherman? I’ve never so much as hooked a tiddler in my life.’

‘But the Budleigh Regis Fly Fishermen’s and Deep Sea Anglers’ Association?’ Ghote asked, consulting his notes.

‘Oh, that,’ said Joe Harper.

‘Yes. Well, what I was about to say was that, as a fisherman, you would understand how difficult it would be to catch one particular fish out of all the many in the sea, and that is precisely the problem you are setting us.’

‘Aye, I am,’ said Joe Harper uncompromisingly. ‘I’ve given you the feller’s name, I’ve told you he’s here, and I’ve said he’s cheated me. Now get after him. And if he’s not caught in less than no time I’ll be in to that Commissioner of yours wantin’ to know the reason why.’

A leaden chill welled up in Ghote. He could easily conceive that someone who appeared to be as utterly self-centred as this fat, sweating and aggressive Englishman might well force his way to the Commissioner himself, with fearful repercussions for anyone who had not succeeded in keeping him out.

‘Mr Harper,’ he said firmly, ‘if I am to find this one Anglo-Indian from among the thousands in this city, not to speak of the millions of Hindus, the hundreds of thousands of Muslims, the tens of thousands of Goans, the thousands of Parsis and the hundreds of Jews, then you must tell more than you have so far.’

‘I’ve told you the lot,’ Joe Harper replied in a fresh squall of aggressiveness.

‘No,’ said Ghote. ‘I think not.’

‘Not? What do you—’

Ghote cut into the sharply rising voice.

‘For example, you did not tell that you came here on a cut-price flight,’ he said.

‘Cut-price—’ The big Englishman suddenly sagged. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’

A hollowly anxious note had replaced the bluster.

‘A great deal of information comes into Headquarters here and is duly circulated,’ Ghote replied. ‘For some time we have been hearing about these false clubs that are set up to tempt people to pay only about half the fare Air India or BOAC charges. When someone is putting themselves outside the law in this way there is scope for many varieties of fraud, as you have found.’

‘Aye, that’s true enough,’ agreed Joe Harper mournfully. ‘I’ll have to ask the British Consul or somebody to stake me my fare home, and heaven knows where I’ll find the money to pay them back. I’m right cleaned out.’

‘Well, is there anything more you have to tell me now?’ Ghote asked more gently. ‘Let me assure you, the full truth can only be helpful to you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the big Englishman answered. ‘There’s not much more I can tell you, and that’s a fact. You were right about one thing, though. It wasn’t fishing I came here for. It was what the advert called a glimpse of the Erotic East, that place beginning with K. Blessed if I can get my tongue round it yet. Only when we got to Bombay, I found I’d somehow lost heart.’

He looked across at Ghote, his face wrinkled like a deflating balloon with this painful effort to get to the bottom of things.

‘You come to know it in the end,’ he went on. ‘That it won’t make all that much of a difference, even if you do go off where nobody knows who you are. Well, any road, that’s what I got to thinkin’ when I decided to follow that Golightly out of the airport.’ He brightened a little. ‘But you should have seen his face,’ he said, ‘when he realised I was going with him. A right crosspatch. And no wonder, I suppose.’

He gave a rueful grunt of a laugh, as if he had seen his situation clearly for perhaps the first time.

‘He told me he had to go and phone his old mother,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was just to get rid of me. What a reason.’

His eyes dropped to where the shirt stretched across his great floppy belly was patched with dark sweat.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I believed him at the time. He seemed sincere like. It made me think, what if my mother could see me now? Aye, I thought that. I did truly.’

He looked up at Ghote as if seeking, despite all odds, some sort of assurance that he had not been too foolish. But Ghote was busy with a large yellow and white volume that had on its front cover a purple advertisement for Nirodh family planning requisites.

In a moment he slammed its pages together, quickly picked up his telephone and dialled a number.

In the stuffy heat of the little office the sound of the distant ringing could be heard clearly. Joe Harper shifted his bulk on the hard chair.

‘Hello? Golightly here.’

Inspector Ghote put his hand on the mouthpiece.

‘It looks as if the news is good for you,’ he said to the erstwhile Budleigh Regis fly fisherman. ‘If there was only a single one of that unusual name in the Bombay Telephone Directory, it was certain to be your man’s mother.’

He gave the Englishman an almost timid smile.

‘You could be saying,’ he ventured, ‘that we have got your fish on the end of our line.’

1973