Читать книгу The Sheriff of Bombay - H. R. F Keating - Страница 10

As Ghote stood in the doorway of the murder room staring unseeingly at the huge bulk of the gharwali blocking the narrow passage further along — and no doubt busily working out where her own best advantage would lie now that she had failed to get rid of her unwelcome visitors — a sudden thought came into his head.

Looking at that brutalized body he had seen, without in that first moment taking full note of it, something else.

He had seen the weapon.

He had seen the very whip which the killer must have used, first to flog his victim, then to strangle her. It had been flung carelessly back where perhaps it usually rested, a luxury item of the cheap brothel’s equipment, across a pair of long nails crudely driven into the wall beside the door next to a garishly coloured calendar depicting the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, the pair of them almost as amorously bent as when Shiva had in legend ignored the greeting of the sage Bhrieu and had been transformed into a stone-pillar lingam for the insult.

And on the handle of the whip — there could be little doubt about it — would be what must link the killer to his deed. With scientific certainty.

Fingerprints.

True, they might be smudged. True, they might not be the only ones there. But the Fingerprint Bureau were extraordinarily skilled in deciphering smudges, in allocating overlays. If they had the prints of a suspect to check against, it was a very good bet that they would be able to produce proof. Proof that would stand up at a trial against even the wiles of the cleverest Defence advocate — perhaps one day in the Quarterly Court of Sessions when someone other than the present Sheriff of Bombay rose to read out the charge.

Yes, as soon as the investigating officer arrived from the Nagpada station, and that could not be long now, he would draw his attention to the whip. Perhaps it would be best even to make sure, with an officer possibly not as experienced as might be in murder inquiries, that the fellow took the proper precautions over seeing that the transfer of such evidence to the Fingerprint Bureau was duly witnessed at every stage. If it was going to be the Rajah of Dhar who was to stand at last in the dock, every step in the prosecution case would have to be conducted altogether beyond the possibility of being undermined by the most cunning lawyers money could buy.

He saw that the little prostitute who had so levelheadedly warned her madam had come creeping back from the rear of the house. Fat old Heera had seen her too.

‘Munni,’ she said abruptly, ‘get water. The angrezi sahib was sick. Sweep it away.’

So much by way of thanks for a warning cleverly given, Ghote thought, pitying the girl a little.

But she did not seem to feel she was being ill-rewarded. Without a word but without any sign of sulkiness either, she disappeared again out to the back and returned in a minute or so with a bright blue plastic pail and a short twig-bundle broom. When Heera saw that her order had been obeyed she gave Ghote one swift venomous look and waddled off up the next flight of stairs, the wooden treads creaking sharply under her weight.

Ghote, standing on guard at the door of the murder room, watched little Munni as she swished water from her pail on to the floor, stooped and with energetic sideways strokes of her broom dealt with the Svashbuckler’s mess.

Something in the very liveliness and straightforwardness with which she had set about her not very pleasant task touched a chord in Ghote. He had intended to stand there an impassive sentinel, but instead he spoke.

‘The one in there,’ he said obliquely, nodding his head behind him. ‘Did I hear you call her Kamla?’

‘Yes, she was Kamla.’

He heard a choke in the girl’s voice and realized that his question had aroused a deeper response in her than might have seemed likely from the coolness she had shown when she had made her gruesome discovery.

‘You liked her?’ he asked. ‘She was a particular friend?’

‘She — She was my ma,’ plump little Munni answered, the sound of grief yet clearer in her voice as she continued to wield her broom. ‘She was the only ma I ever had. All I can remember of my child days is sleeping on the footpath wherever it was that I was born, and then one day, just after I had become a woman, you know, I was begging at the railway station there and all of a sudden I thought “Shall I see where that train goes?” and I hid in it and it came to Bombay. At VT Station a man saw me and said he would take me to somewhere nice. He brought me here and sold me to Heerabai.’

She looked up at him, an unexpected glow of pride holding back her looming tears.

‘Rupees five hundred he got for me,’ she said, ‘because even then I was just the sort of girl men are liking.’

‘And you began — began the business then?’ Ghote asked.

‘Yes, yes. I was ready. And I enjoyed. But the best thing was to have Kamla. She was always good to me, a true ma.’

And now the tears did come flooding out, bringing with them down her plump cheeks black streaks of the kohl with which she had darkened her eyes.

Ghote did not quite know what to do. He put out a hand and hugged the girl’s shoulder as she half-squatted, half-knelt in front of him with her broom.

At once she looked up at him, feeling the pressure of his hand on the springy softness of her flesh.

‘You want?’ she asked. ‘We cannot go into that room but we can go into one of the others.’

‘No, no.’

He withdrew his comforting hand quickly as if he had accidentally laid it on a sun-scorched rock.

Munni did not seem in any way put out.

‘Yes, Kamla was like me,’ she said. ‘She was older, of course. Perhaps old enough to be my real ma. But she too liked always the business. That is why so many men liked her. You know she was —’

‘So many men liked her?’ Ghote was unable to prevent himself breaking in. ‘But do you know who she was with — who she was with when it happened?’

‘No,’ Munni answered, a sudden animal-fierce look drying her tears. ‘If I did — If I did I would tear out his eyes only with my fingers.’

She held up her little hands — the nails were clumsily painted with bright red varnish — and made them into a pair of small claws. But Ghote had no doubt that, pathetic though they looked, she would indeed dart them at the face of any man she knew to have killed her substitute mother and have truly tried to tear out his eyes.

‘But do you know anything about the fellow?’ he asked.

Now that he had, against his better judgment, begun to do the work that properly belonged to the investigating officer from the nearby Nagpada station — and when was the fellow going to turn up? — he felt he might as well go on with it and hand on any information he gathered.

But again Munni shook her head in negative.

‘No, you see,’ she said, ‘it was the beginning of the night only. Heerabai had not even finished her bath. I was busy rubbing her with mustard oil the way she likes. So I do not know how that man came. He did not come by the front, I know that. When I saw that Kamla’s door was shut already I asked the others down there who she had got, and they said she had taken no one. So it must have been a man who has been here before and knows how to come in by the back.’

‘There are many like that?’ Ghote asked.

‘Some. Not many. Some rich ones who are liking us low-caste girls, the ones who want you to have some smell to you, you know, they come in that back way because they are afraid to be seen in a house like this.’

Ghote made a mental note to pass on to the officer from Nagpada station a suggestion to question the house’s madam closely about such men. But he doubted very much whether Heera would be helpful. She had nothing to gain and, more than likely, a reputation for discretion to lose.

‘But you were going to tell me what your friend Kamla was like,’ he said to Munni, sensing that the girl would be the happier for talking.

And certainly she looked at once more cheerful.

‘Kamla was like me,’ she said. ‘To her the business was always fun, even with the men who liked to whip her. She knew how to keep them from doing too much. Until — Until —’

The tears looked as if they were going to pour out again.

‘But she enjoyed?’ Ghote said, putting a little unbelief into his voice so as to provoke a retort that would stave off a new access of grief. ‘She really enjoyed what she did?’

‘But, yes. It’s nice, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to be making fun all the time with many, many different girls?’

‘Never mind about me,’ Ghote said quickly. ‘Tell me about Kamla.’

‘She was a Kolati girl,’ Munni answered. ‘You know in that community when they are old enough they have to choose: will they have a husband or will they go in for prostitution line? And Kamla — she told me often — had seen the jogtis walking happily, carrying shining images of gods and goddesses and shouting praises and laughing always, and she knew she wanted to be one of them.’

‘And when she — when she became one, did it seem as good to her then?’

‘Oh, there are some bad days always, but it was better than she thought even. Better, better. She liked and liked and liked.’

The words were, as it turned out, a final epitaph for the murdered girl. No sooner had Munni pronounced them, her pretty plump face a-glow, than there came the sound of heavy feet on the stairs and the police party from the Nagpada station arrived.

It was led, Ghote saw with a jolt of dismay, by Sub-Inspector D’Silva.

D’Silva, a young Christian officer, had been posted at CID headquarters until about a year before and he had not won Ghote’s good opinion. A stocky, well-built, swaggering young man who affected the pencil-thin moustache of an airline captain and wore a succession of boldly colourful shirts day after day, he had never hesitated to display his knowledge of the seamier parts of the city, knowledge gained he made tiresomely clear through excessive practical experience. Whether it was because of this or because he invariably cut every corner he could and bullied suspects beyond the limit, he had had a particularly good clear-up rate on the cases that had come his way. So much so that he had soon been posted away to the Nagpada station to take charge of the Vigilance Branch there with its manifold responsibilities for the sexual life of the area, embracing as it did much of notorious Kamatipura.

No, Ghote thought instantly as he recognized that cocky, moustache-embroidered face, if this fellow gets an inkling that someone as rich and with such a high position in society as the Sheriff of Bombay is a suspect in this case there will never be any question of any of it becoming public.

‘My God, who have we here?’ D’Silva burst out as soon as in the dim light he had spotted Ghote. ‘Old Ganesh, ace sleuth from Crawford Market. Been up here to sample the wares, have you, Ganeshji? You should have come and seen your old pal first. I could have put you on to some much juicier stuff than these five-rupeewalis.’

‘I was not here for any such purposes,’ Ghote answered, more swiftly than he would have liked.

‘Oh ho, such morality. You’re worse than old D’Sa, bhai. And how is my fellow community member? Still going grey with worry about all this modern decadence, eh?’

‘D’Sa is very well,’ Ghote answered. ‘He is busy with the bandobust for the Police Vegetable and Flower Show.’

‘Well, that should keep him out of trouble,’ D’Silva said. ‘Until he finds a carrot or a mooli root that looks too much like something else.’

His laugh resounded clangingly along the narrow passageway.

‘Sub-Inspector,’ Ghote said. ‘There has been a bad case of murder here. A girl’s body very, very horribly mutilated. She is in this room.’

‘Old Heera lost one of her treasures, has she?’ D’Silva replied. ‘Well, let’s see which of the beauties it is.’

He barged into the room where Kamla’s body lay.

Ghote stood outside in the passageway for a moment, thinking.

Yes. Yes, he would do it. Far from drawing the attention of the investigating officer to the weapon used, he would, if he could, get hold of it himself and whisk it away under the fellow’s nose.

That whip was a first-class piece of hard evidence. With any luck it would link the dead girl and the Sheriff of Bombay together so tightly that no amount of courtroom hanky-panky could upset the scientific fact. But let D’Silva get hold of it and it would either disappear entirely or it would go to the Sheriff himself ‘as a keepsake’, in either case for a hefty sum.

He looked into the room. D’Silva was bending over Kamla’s body, heaving it over to look at her face.

Ghote stepped quietly forward, reached out to the wall beside him where on the bright-coloured calendar a green-tinged near-naked Shiva gazed for ever amorously at a doe-eyed Parvati, gripped the dangling whip by the very end of its lash far from the fingerprinted handle, twisted the thong once round his fist, jerked the whip off the nails it had rested on and, in one dextrous movement, concealed it behind his back.

He retreated a step to the room’s doorway. D’Silva was peering down at the dead girl’s face.

‘Yeah, Ganesh bhai,’ he said. ‘I know this one. She was a goer, man. I’ve had some spicy fun with her once or twice.’

Ghote choked down the reply that had come to his lips.

‘Well, Charlie,’ he said.

Was the fellow’s name Charlie? He had never used it before.

‘Well, Charlie, I must go off now. I had brought a VIP tourist here and I must be making sure he is quite all right.’

‘See you, man,’ D’Silva answered, without looking up from the body on the bed.

Ghote slid sideways, still keeping his face towards the open door of the murder room and then, safely clear, turned and hurried down the rickety stairs leading to the street.

From the corner of his eye he saw little Munni, squatting still with her broom finishing her unsavoury task. She glanced up at him.

Would she make anything of the fact that he had dangling behind his back the whip that had been used to kill her protector and friend? Probably not. What would a girl like that know of fingerprints and police procedures? No, she would forget all about him in a day or two, and soon enough she would carry on unconcerned in the profession which she seemed to get so much unexpected pleasure out of. She would forget him, as in a week or so he would forget her.

In the doorway of the house just before stepping out into the noisy street, half garishly lit from its many barred windows and open shop-fronts, half plunged into dark shadows, he stopped and contrived to stuff the whip underneath his loose shirt without touching its handle. Better that his driver, still waiting at the end of the street, should not see this piece of unorthodoxly obtained evidence. There would be no one in the Fingerprint Bureau at this late hour, but tomorrow first thing he would slip over and have a quiet word with one of the people there he knew.

But next morning when Ghote, having safely deposited the stolen whip with his friend in the Fingerprint Bureau, went to see the A.C.P. matters quickly took a very different course from the one he had expected.

‘The Sheriff?’ the A.C.P. said when he had heard what Ghote had finally come to suspect at the end of his disastrous visit to Kamatipura with the Svashbuckler. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, Inspector. The fellow was one of India’s best-ever cricketers, you know.’

‘Yes, sir, I am very well knowing. My son was a most keen fan of his batting, sir. He has a picture of him beside his bed still. It is because of that I am sure the man I saw was truly the Rajah of Dhar, Randy Dhar as they are calling him, sir.’

The A.C.P. wrinkled his moustache from side to side.

‘But you say he was leaving when you arrived?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the passageway in this — this place, it was not very well lit up?’

‘No, sir. There was no light there itself.’

‘Very well then, Ghote, how did you see the fellow?’

‘Sir, it was by the light coming through the door of one of the rooms. There are gaps at the top of those doors, sir. They are not all pukka, sir. And by a beam of light coming from the furthest of them I saw his face, A.C.P. Sahib.’

‘No. No, I don’t think so, Ghote. Not very likely. Letting your imagination play tricks on you. Not what I like to find in any of my officers.’

Ghote stood abashed. He wondered whether to tell the A.C.P. about the whip, that it would possibly prove with scientific certainty that the Sheriff had been in the room where the girl had been murdered. But he was no longer altogether happy about his own conduct over that potentially valuable piece of evidence. He had taken it from the scene of the crime without making sure that his action was witnessed by impartial persons. If the Sheriff was ever brought to court the fellow’s Defence advocates would make chutney out of him over such laxity.

He decided that, especially since he had no way of knowing whether the prints on the whip’s handle would indeed correspond with the Sheriff’s, he would keep silent about this angle, at least for the time being.

‘But, sir,’ he said. ‘If there is a suspicion only that a person of importance is involved in the matter, sir, shouldn’t the case be handled here at Headquarters?’

‘Not at all, Ghote, not at all. You say Sub-Inspector D’Silva is in charge from Nagpada? Well, I have seen his Service Sheet and I am very well satisfied with it. An officer with an excellent record, Inspector. Likely to go far.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Ghote stood in silence for a moment. He knew really that the interview had come to an end. The A.C.P. had taken one of his shiny brass paperweights off the pile of papers it was protecting from the breeze of his desk-fan and had put it down on the dark surface of his desk. He could scarcely have given a clearer indication that important work awaited.

‘But, sir,’ Ghote burst out nevertheless. ‘Sir, if you had seen those marks on the body, sir, and the way that whip had been pulled round the girl’s neck. It was the work of a maniac only, sir. Sir, should it be that the man is not after all just someone who can be picked up in the red-light area, then he is a great, great danger to the public, sir.’

‘To the public, Ghote? Well, you can call it the public if you like. But the fellow, even if he wasn’t some local dada taking revenge on a girl who had stepped out of line, is obviously going to confine his activities to the prostitute class. I don’t think it’s a matter that need worry us at Headquarters. Dismiss, Inspector.’

‘Yes, sir. Yes, A.C.P. Sahib.’

Ghote clicked his heels, turned and marched out of the A.C.P.’s big, airy office. A miserable man.