Читать книгу The Sheriff of Bombay - H. R. F Keating - Страница 11

Back at his desk, confronting once more the case of the Major-General’s son and the stolen platinum chain, Inspector Ghote found the notes he had made from the fat tome in Records of all known chain-snatching and cinema-ticket fraud criminals hard going. Which one of them would be worth chasing up in whatever unsavoury part of Bombay he was recorded as living in? Would a trip to somewhere in the not too distant mofussil, the noted native-place of some particular gang member, be worth the time and effort?

Would it be possible somehow to get hold of the fingerprints of the Sheriff of Bombay and —

No. He was working on the City Light Cinema chain-snatching. That and nothing else.

He forced himself to read on.

Zinabhai Darji, aged 26, convicted at Esplanade Police Court of attempting to snatch one gold chain at or near Mahalaxmi Temple, sentenced to one month’s rigorous imprisonment … Native place: Mehsana, Gujarat.

No. A not very courageous Gujarati, probably making his sole attempt at theft. Certainly not worth going all the way out there on the chance he had gone home following a more successful try.

After all, damn it, the A.C.P. could not have been more clear. The Falkland Road murder was to be strictly for the Nagpada station to handle. It was chance only that he himself had been on the scene. Double chance that he had glimpsed that face. So, forget.

Forget, forget, forget.

Kanchan Phaterphaker, aged 23, convicted at Ballard Pier Police Court of snatching a gold chain. Sentenced to six months R.I… .

Very doubtful. Someone working the bus queues in the dockland area was not going to be a member of a gang operating on Matunga side, eight or nine miles away and a district of a completely different character.

But that face which it was such double chance to have glimpsed: it was the Sheriff of Bombay’s. It was. It was. And if it was, if the Sheriff had committed that frenzied, madman’s murder, was he not one day, sooner or later, going to do the same thing again?

No, he had said all that to the A.C.P. and the A.C.P. had been quite plain in his answer. ‘Dismiss, Inspector,’ he had said. No business of yours. No business of ours at Headquarters. We have quite enough on our hands without that. We have the City Light Cinema chain-snatching case.

Ghote pushed himself to his feet and set off once again for the narrow, rubbish-strewn lane in Matunga where, just a fortnight earlier, a young man willing to pay twenty rupees for a ten-rupee best seat had lost a platinum chain valued at Rupees 6,000, and where perhaps a witness was still to be found.

But that evening, back at home, he was not able to expel from his mind the thought of the prostitute Kamla and what little, plump, happy Munni had told him about her. Of what he had learnt, and of how he had seen the dead girl lying on the bed — its dull blue-checked bedcover had been rucked up at one corner to reveal a thin greyed stripey mattress — her head savagely wrenched to one side by the violence with which in the end she had been strangled.

‘What for are you sitting and standing and sitting again all the time?’

He looked up from the thoughts that had taken him back once more to the noise and the crowds and the blatant sexual marketing of Falkland Road.

His wife was standing staring down at him, an expression of considerable exasperation on her face.

‘It is nothing, nothing.’

‘Five minutes past I was asking if you were wanting a paan. You still have not answered yes or no.’

‘Oh yes. Yes. That is, no. No, I do not want any paan.’

‘When I have made only?’

Furiously Protima thrust out her hand in which there lay the spice-packed, bright green, neat triangle of folded betel-leaf cunningly secured with a clove. A symbol of wifely duty, however little tendered at this moment with wifely humility.

‘Oh yes. Yes, I will take. Your paans are always so good.’

He took the folded leaf, thrust it into his mouth and chewed with vigorous appreciation.

For perhaps five up and down jaw movements.

Should he talk about his problem to Protima? It was his principle not to discuss police affairs outside of office. But then again on the other hand sometimes he had let that principle go hang. And sometimes even what Protima had said to him had been helpful. She never understood anything about what police work really meant, of course. But sometimes something she had said, had, it was true, somehow made him see something in a different light.

But to mention the Sheriff of Bombay. To say out loud that it was possible that someone as respected as the Sheriff of Bombay had at about 1830 hours the previous evening brutally murdered one Kamla, a prostitute, in the notorious Cages? No, no. That could not be done.

That was something to keep in his own head only, until he had proof-proof that it was true. No one, not even a wife who had never gossiped away a single one of his secrets, must ever know what he had seen. Not now that he had reported the matter to his superior officer and been told that he had not seen what he had.

But he had.

‘Now, what for are you pacing and pacing the room?’

He looked round. It was true he was on his feet again. And he had been sitting down. Chewing a paan.

He found to his dismay that the whole little bundle was still almost intact in his cheek.

He slunk back to his chair, placed himself in it in an attitude of complete repose, and chewed and chewed and chewed.

And then he realized, something he ought to have seen long before, perhaps as soon as he had set foot inside the door: that he was not the only one with something on his mind. Protima, too, was distressed.

Her unease had expressed itself differently from his. Where he had not been able to stop himself moving about, she had lost all her customary gracefulness of movement. The flowing rightness that she had always possessed even in the least little action, adjusting the collar of young Ved’s shirt, keeping her own sari draped to its best advantage, lifting the bundle of tamarind leaves she kept in the food cupboard for freshness to take something out from behind it, all had vanished. Instead she was stiff and tense, and unusually silent.

‘But, you,’ he said, ‘what for are you worrying? Are you ill? Some fever? Or Ved? Ved, is he ill just now?’

Protima turned and stood facing him. And, yes, her body was rigid as a cripple beggar’s crutch-pole.

‘Do you think everything-everything can be put down to symptoms only?’ she broke out. ‘Do you think everything that goes wrong with a person is no more than some fever that will go away before long?’

‘But — But — But it is not fever that Ved has got? That you have got?’

Ghote felt his every bearing had suddenly been twisted round.

‘Fever? Fever only? I tell you that boy has got worse-worse than fever. His mind is sick. Sick, sick, sick. His mind is sunk in deepest filth, and all you do it talk about fever.’

‘In filth? What filth? Ved’s mind is sick? What only are you saying?’

Protima’s eyes flashed with a fire that had been for too many hours kept in check.

‘I am saying?’ she shot back at him. ‘Now you are making out that it is all in my head only. But you would not get away with it so easily. I have proof. Proof-proof I have got.’

She left the room in a banner-streaming flutter of flying sari.

Ghote sat rooted to his chair, wondering how exactly it had come about that suddenly he was engulfed in such a tempest of accusations, of accusations of he knew not what. And something else was trying to obtrude into his dazed and disoriented mind.

Proof-proof, Protima had said that she had. Of something? Of whatever it was. And it was proof-proof that he had been worrying over before all this had so abruptly cascaded down on to him. Proof-proof that the Sheriff of Bombay was a frenzied sex killer, a dangerous maniac beneath the happy exterior of the glossy photographs that were to be seen, jostling with those of film stars, saints, gods and goddesses, in half the picture stalls of Bombay. And one even pinned up beside Ved’s bed.