Читать книгу The Sheriff of Bombay - H. R. F Keating - Страница 9

The Sheriff of Bombay. Ghote felt a hot prickling spread right up into the roots of his hair. To have caught such a distinguished citizen in such a place as the gharwali Heera’s brothel. Why, it was not even as if this was one of the most respectable houses in the area. Of course, it was not any of the really cheap places, the ones in 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th Kamatipura Lanes. They were the very bottom. But neither was it one of the houses in Sukhlaji Street, or Safed Galli, Whites Lane, as it had been called when the European and half-caste prostitutes had congregated there in the days of the British Raj. If someone like the Sheriff was going to come for such purposes to this area at all, and not to one of the few discreet posh brothels in respectable parts of the city like the place on top of Tardeo Air-conditioned Market that the Vigilance boys had raided not so long ago, then it should have been to Sukhlaji Street or perhaps to one of the numbered houses in Foras Road.

And yet he himself had distinctly seen him — Was it the Sheriff? Yes. Yes, he could not mistake that well-known face — sneaking off towards some doubtless vile-smelling back way out of the house. The gharwali, who surely was the fat creature in the red sari, must have heard Dr Framrose’s loud, high-pitched voice talking to the Svashbuckler as they were about to enter, and have hurriedly escorted away her distinguished client.

Her distinguished client. And he was distinguished indeed. Doubly so. First, he was the Sheriff of Bombay.

Ghote had read once in one of the papers when a film star had been given this high municipal office that it ranked third in order of social precedence in the city. It was an annually held office dating from the British days, like such posts as the Protonotary and Senior Master of the Admiralty and Ecclesiastical Registrar, and its duties were largely honorary. At the Quarterly Court of Sessions it was the Sheriff’s task to call on the various accused to rise and to read out the charges. It was also his official duty to execute the decrees of the High Court, although in practice these were attended to by his staff. But unofficial duties the Sheriff had by the hundred. He was expected to meet and greet visiting dignitaries to Bombay. He was begged to open important new buildings, to inaugurate large-scale commercial functions, to be the chief participant at the ceremony releasing the occasional important book, to preside over the city’s most prestigious annual prizegivings.

If the present holder of the office had been no more than that, some huff and puff fellow who had given useful political service to the party in power and had been granted his reward, the situation would have been embarrassing enough.

But the present Sheriff was much more than this. He was almost as much a figure of renown as a top film star. He was the Rajah of Dhar, until not so long ago captain of the Indian cricket team. A hero to the Bombay crowds who, come each Test series, are fired with wild enthusiasm for the strange game the British introduced to India’s shores, fired with enthusiasm from the richest businessmen abandoning their luxury offices and paying extortionate sums for a seat in the Wankhede Stadium down to the meanest barefoot coolie padding the streets under his head-load and striving to overhear the interminable commentary from one of the myriad transistor radios clamped to the ears of those slightly better off than himself. Why, even his own son, even little Ved, had a photograph of Randhir Singh, Rajah of Dhar, pinned up by his bed, and referred to him familiarly as Randy.

And this was the man he had seen sneaking out of a low-class brothel,

Ghote stood where he was at the top of the flight of narrow stairs, looking transfixed along towards the darkness at the end of the passageway where the gharwali and the Sheriff of Bombay — it could be no other — had scufflingly disappeared. In front of him Dr Framrose, the weak light from the open door glinting on his bald splotched skull, called out in his high, erratic voice.

‘Heera. Heera, my dear. I have brought some valuable customers to admire the exquisite female flesh you have on sale. To admire only, I regret to say. They’ll hardly bring you in a rupee. But then, as one of them is a policewalla, you’ll doubtless be glad to be in his good books.’

There came no answer from the far end of the passage. Dr Framrose set out towards it.

‘Heera, Heera. Whatever are you doing out there? You’ll catch some dangerous illness, let me tell you. The back of your house is notoriously unhygienic.’

So, Ghote thought, the doctor has not recognized the Sheriff. If he had, he would hardly be pursuing the fat old gharwali in the way he was doing. She would not thank him if he stopped her whisking away that high personage so unfortunately caught out.

But, of course, the Parsi was probably half-blind, and those spectacles of his must have slid right down to the end of his long nose.

And, another thing. The Svashbuckler, who had after all never visited India before, would be highly unlikely to know the Sheriff by sight, even if once or twice he might have seen him playing when he had led the Indian cricket team to England.

He advanced further along the passage. The gharwali would return in a few minutes and the visit to her establishment must go on. Entertaining the Svashbuckler was his immediate duty, and he would carry it through.

Behind him on the stairs he heard footsteps. He turned and saw one of the prostitutes they had brushed past on the bench in the doorway. Was she coming up to make them an offer? If she did, she was going to get a pretty sharp firing.

But instead, it seemed, the girl had got herself a willing customer. A dark shadow was creeping up behind her, head turned sheepishly to the wall. The girl — she was, Ghote noticed now, a pretty enough thing, young, pleasantly plump and with an air of happy bright-eyed assurance about her — was evidently anxious to occupy the room behind the first of the ramshackle doors, all the while firmly shut.

‘Kamla,’ she called out, loudly and clearly. “Hé, Kamla, what for are you still in there? Don’t you know how to make a man do what he has to do? Come on. My customer can hardly wait, such a lion he is.’

Ghote had some difficulty suppressing a laugh at this: the girl’s customer, standing now three-quarters of the way up the stairs and doing his best to shrink right into the dirty, betel-juice-splashed wall beside him, looked anything but a lion.

‘Kamla. Kamla. Come on.’

There was still no response from behind the flimsy door. Nor had the fat gharwali reappeared from the far end of the passage.

‘Kamla.’

The little prostitute — she can hardly be more than sixteen or seventeen, despite the lively knowingness, Ghote thought — tired of waiting, grasped the top of the partition door with both hands and pulled her plumply rounded body up till her bare toes dangled.

Ghote heard her give a little gasp as her eyes came level with the wide gap at the top of the door.

She slid back with a thump on to the dirt-engrained boards of the passageway. Then she gave the three of them standing waiting for the gharwali a quick, sharp look.

Ghote could read the thought behind it as clearly as if he had been looking at a comic strip in one of the papers and the words had been written out in a bubble. It was a thought he had known applied to himself on countless occasions: Policewalla, watch out.

What had the girl seen, he asked himself, that a policewalla had better not know about? It could hardly be the customary scene that would go on behind that apology for a door. Police officers knew all about that, even participated in it often enough by way of receiving a gift from brothel madams and proprietors. And besides, in the tolerated area it was not even illegal.

So what had the girl seen in that quick glimpse inside the room that had caused her first to gasp and then to go suspiciously silent?

Whatever it was, she was certainly not going to let out the secret. She was turning now to her poor, shame-faced client and telling him, with cheerful impudence, that he should be ashamed of himself coming to a house like this and that he had better get home to his wife before that lady lifted her belna from rolling out chapattis and hit him over the head with it. Next she turned and, pushing past Ghote and the others, head stuck in the air, disappeared round the corner at the end of the passageway where the gharwali and the Sheriff had gone.

Something is definitely wrong in that room, Ghote thought. But something serious? Or something best to ignore? He could not decide. He toyed with the thought of strolling back to the door and casually peering over its top in his turn. But, he realized, he would not be able to do so without standing on tiptoe, and the notion that he would be thought of as doing that in order just to observe the usual goings-on inside was not something he felt prepared to lay himself open to. The Svashbuckler had already shown too much willingness to laugh at him.

He was saved from making up his mind by the abrupt reappearance of the wobblingly huge gharwali.

‘Doctor Sahib,’ she said, gently patting her fat hands together in a show of enormous pleasure. ‘Doctor Sahib, it is good to be seeing you. And these gentlemen, very, very good also.’

She came simpering and waddling up to the Svashbuckler and favoured him with an immense smile, showing betel-red teeth filed to sharpness in wide gums.

‘From Vilayat?’ she said. ‘From England, isn’t it? Ah, I am so glad to see English gentleman. Many, many have I had between my legs when I was a young, young girl only.’

The Svashbuckler, who had been smiling back at her nearly as heartily, retreated a pace.

Well, Ghote thought, the idea of anyone being between the massively fat legs straining that red sari to splitting point was certainly not attractive.

‘But you must have some tea,’ Heera breezed on. ‘Some tea, some cold drink, some paan to chew.’

She advanced again on the Svashbuckler and looked at him roguishly.

‘Perhaps the angrezi gentleman would like a bed-smasher paan,’ she said. ‘Something in it to lend force-force to him before the night is finish. Let us all go along to Olympia Café and have something. Perhaps stop at the paanwalla on the way, isn’t it?’

‘No, no, Heera, my dear,’ Dr Framrose broke in. ‘We haven’t come here just to be taken to that wretched eating-place. We’ve come to see the full delights of your establishment, to fill these gentlemen’s heads with thoroughly disturbing visions. And then take them off to safety before they can do anything to make fools of themselves. You know the way we always do it with the VIPs the police send along. What on earth makes you want to take us to the Olympia?’

Yes, Ghote echoed in his mind. What does make you want to get rid of us? It cannot be the presence in your house of the Sheriff of Bombay. You have spirited him away neatly enough. What is it then?

Well, one thing was certain. Whatever it was, it was something to do with what that plump little prostitute had seen when she had peered over the door. She had been quick enough to go and fetch her madam when she had seen that, and Heera was determined enough to get all three of them out as soon as she possibly could.

He turned, took a few sharp steps back along the passage, put both hands against the mysterious door and gave it a good hard push.

It flew open, and at once he saw what had made the girl gasp.

It was a wonder she had not screamed.

On the bed that filled most of the narrow room there was sprawled the naked body of a woman, face down. And it was clear beyond doubt that she was dead, that she had been murdered. Round her neck, biting deeply in, was the mark of whatever it was that had been used savagely to strangle her. Her whole head was twisted to an angle that no living body could have sustained.

But there was more than that to make a fellow prostitute scream out. All down the back of the body were the deep weals of a brutal beating, the very cross-thongs of the coarsely plaited whip clearly visible.

Ghote, just inside the little room, was aware, as a small unnecessary irritation, that Dr Framrose and the Svashbuckler had crowded into the doorway behind him. Then there was a sudden crashing sound and, as he turned, he saw that the Svashbuckler had swung round and was now vomiting comprehensively in the passageway outside.

That is all I am needing, he thought. A VIP visitor put into my charge, and I have led him straight to the sight of an appalling murder. And now I shall have to get him back as soon as I can to his five-stars hotel and everyone in the lobby there will see him come in covered with his vomit only. And there is the murder also. It must be my duty to stay here to see that nothing is done to the body until an investigating officer from the Nagpada station can come. Because it is altogether certain that if Heera had succeeded to get us out then that little girl — what a cool head in one so young, what other terrible sights she must have witnessed in her short life — would have made damn sure the body disappeared before anyone else saw it.

He gave the gharwali a glare of rage for what she had attempted to do and then turned to Dr Framrose as the most reliable person to hand.

‘Doctor Sahib,’ he said, ‘you have seen that woman on the bed. Undoubtedly she has expired. Do you have telephone in your dispensary? Can you call up the Nagpada police and inform?’

‘Yes, yes, my dear Inspector. It will be a pleasure to assist our noble police in the performance of their duties, and perhaps also I could relieve you of this encum — Perhaps I could give myself the pleasure afterwards of putting Mr Kerr into a taxi and even seeing that he gets safely back to his hotel. By the most discreet entrance, I think.’

Ghote felt a waft of relief. At least that burden would be off his shoulders.

And then, as the doctor not without wild exaggerated gestures ushered the vomit-spattered Britisher down the narrow stairs and away, he realized that the Svashbuckler was by no means the most oppressive of his troubles.

What now weighed down on him was the possibility, perhaps even the certainty, that the brute who had inflicted those wounds on the girl in the room behind him, who had at last taken his whip and frenziedly strangled her, was none other than the Sheriff of Bombay. And, worse, he himself, and perhaps only fat Heera as well, was aware of the exact identity of the man who had been visiting the brothel when the frenzied killing had taken place.

Certainly Heera would never tell the investigating officer from the Nagpada station who it was who had been the murdered girls’s last customer. The possibilities for magnificent blackmail would clearly be too tempting. Nor would she at all know that he himself had caught that one revealing glimpse of the well-known face. As to any of the girls in the house being in on the secret, it was unlikely. They would be among the few Bombayites who were hardly interested in cricket, even at the sensational Test match times.

No doubt, too, the Sheriff had taken pains on any previous visits to the house not to be seen by more of its occupants than necessary. He would have slipped in always, if he had indeed visited the place regularly, by the same insanitary back way through which he had been smuggled out. Perhaps even Heera knew no more than that the man who had patronized her house was someone rich and influential.

No, the presence of the Sheriff of Bombay in a brothel where a horrible murder had taken place, perhaps the fact that he had actually committed that murder, was something that he alone, by the merest of chances, had had entrusted to him by fate. And he knew at once without having at all to think it out that, despite the nature of the crime, there would be tremendous opposition to any attempt he might make to get the Sheriff brought in as a witness. As to trying to assemble a case against him, should no one else appear to have been the killer, the very thought was too overwhelming even to contemplate.

All because of that single, swift sight of a face. Could he forget that he had seen it? Was he sure enough that he had seen what he had seen?

What a mountain of tribulation to have resting on his own slight shoulders.