Читать книгу Inspector Ghote's First Case - H. R. F Keating - Страница 8

‘Oh, what a pity. We also could have been down at Eros Cinema. At last I could have seen the Hamlet I was having to miss when everybody in Senior English was discussing and discussing about it.’

That had been Protima’s reaction when Ghote had arrived back at their cramped flat perched at the top of the block in the Dadar PS compound and had told her, almost shamefacedly, of his unsuccess. For an instant a flare of anger rose up in him at the reception Protima was giving his bad news. She should, he thought, be asking and asking why Sir Rustom had gone to see Hamlet when, it seemed, he had requested Crime Branch to have himself visit as soon as possible.

But, at once, the mere sight of her sari – she had put on her sun-yellow one – billowing out like the sail of a yacht racing across Back Bay quenched that hardly risen flare.

No, the mother of my son – or of my daughter, my daughter – must be allowed to think whatever has entered her mind. She is needing calm, utmost calm. Thank goodness, I was succeeding to tell her this without anything of quarrel.

His holding back appeared to have earned him a reward. Protima gave him a long, silent look.

‘Food is waiting,’ she said. ‘I was keeping hot till you would be coming back, as much at least as the rotten stove here would let me.’

‘But soon, soon that stove will be one bad memory only, the cupboard also where we are having to keep food fresh by putting in a piece of tamarind,’ he replied. ‘Before too long we will be finding that flat where I can be near Crawford Market HQ and have at last telephone.’

‘Yes, you are right. Before too much of time has passed Inspector Ghote will be having his new flat, And-and in it will be a cradle, a nice, nice wooden cradle that is swinging from side to side. And in that cradle will be Inspector Ghote’s son.’

Ghote lightly laughed.

‘Not Inspector Ghote’s daughter?’ he asked. ‘Every mother is wanting a daughter, yes?’

‘Yes and no also. For me, it is first a son, a son for you, and then it is as many daughters as I am liking.’

‘Well, we will be seeing. And tomorrow I also would be seeing why Sir Rustom is wanting to be visited by Inspector Ghote. I was telling his servant Ten ack emma, sharp.’

Ghote had been standing in the lobby on the top floor of Marzban Apartments peering at his watch till the minute-hand pointed exactly to ten. At once he stepped across and gave the bell-push of Number 20 one sharp jab, quick but long enough to make sure the sound beyond would be heard throughout the flat.

At once Sir Rustom’s servant – Was he also waiting just inside? Ghote asked himself – drew back the tall door.

‘It is Inspector Ghote? Sir Rustom says you may see him ek dum.’

He led the way, almost at a trot, through into the big apartment. Ghote was aware only of walls lined with a sombre green paper decorated with darkly framed photographs of Sir Rustom’s ancestors, mostly in the sepia shade which placed them firmly in the dim historical past, bleakly impressive men in tall backwards-curving, black-lacquered Parsi hats wearing the traditional white, loose-fitting dugla. And then the servant had tapped at a tall, polish-gleaming door and a voice from inside said ‘Come.’

Sir Rustom, when Ghote found himself face to face with him, looked, although tall and very upright, by no means as forbidding as his ancestors, dark-framed along the corridor walls. Dressed in a plain grey suit rather than the duglas of his forebears with their hints of the mysteries of a little-known religion, and wearing a tie in the subdued colours of some club, the large-lens glasses on his long nose betraying the weak eyes afflicting many Parsis, he rose from his tall-backed, ornately carved chair and offered a fine, lightly wrinkled, long-fingered hand.

‘Inspector Ghote?’ he said. ‘DSP Divekar told me that it was you he had found to do this small service for me. You are at present on casual leave, I understand?’

‘Yes, sir. Yes, Sir Rustom. And I am sorry I did not get to see you sooner, when I was told to come asap.’

‘Oh, my dear chap, there wasn’t all that much hurry. I dare say Dinesh Divekar gilded the lily a little. But I hope you will find what I am asking you to do, though really only a very minor matter, will prove to be rewarding. At least in terms of experience.’

‘Sir?’

‘Ah, but I am forgetting myself. Will you take something? Rather a late riser myself nowadays, I have only just finished my breakfast. One finds oneself, you know, when one reaches my age, more and more pleased to lie comfortably in bed in the mornings. And last night, as a matter of fact, I got to bed a good deal later than my customary hour. I had been, you understand, to see that interminably long film Hamlet. But you? You must have breakfasted long ago. Won’t you take something now? Coffee? Tea?’

Ghote, who had been up for a good many hours, was tempted. But he was much keener to know what the minor matter … that will prove to be rewarding would turn out to be.

And a little, too, he had wondered whether he could possibly ask what Sir Rustom had thought of Hamlet. And why he had found it interminably long.

‘No, sir, thank you,’ he said, ‘I am not at all needing anything. I also was somewhat of a late riser. On account,’ he improvised, ‘of my wife being, sir, with child. I am liking to give her maximum of sleep.’

Sir Rustom sank into his tall chair, gripping its ornately carved arms.

‘Good, good. Then let me – do sit down, old chap – put you in the picture. It is rather an odd story, but it would be of considerable help to me if you could make a few inquiries and set my mind at rest.’

Set Sir Rustom Engineer’s mind at rest? What can it be that has caused him in his retirement this amount of worry? And how fine it might be if I myself am able to be of help to him.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘It’s like this, Ghote. A good many years ago, while I was still in the rank that you now hold, I was serving as an instructor at the Police Training School in Nasik, where, incidentally, I am told you did particularly well yourself. I happened there to make the acquaintance of an Englishman, a civil engineer engaged in that most useful of tasks, roadbuilding. In the end we used to go regularly for shikar together, though I admit I am by no means a good shot. And neither was he, incidentally.’

A short indulgent laugh.

‘No, our shikar expeditions were intended, I thought then and think now, to put that chance acquaintanceship on a firmer footing. You see, I gathered that my friend intended, when Independence arrived as it was to do just a few years later, to stay on in India. I had got the impression he came from a rather humbler background than the majority of the sort of English civil servants you find in the ICS.’

Ghote, about to put in another Yes, sir, bit his tongue. Best to appear somehow not to have taken in Sir Rustom’s hinted criticism of his British friend.

Sir Rustom for an instant looked up.

‘You will appreciate, being the sort of police officer I think you must be, that a man like my former friend would see himself as having a much pleasanter life here in India, servants always to hand et cetera, than he would have had – he was a bachelor in those days – in some wretched flat in a cheerless England hardly recovered from the effects of war.’

Yes, Ghote registered, Sir Rustom Engineer has praised me for seeming to understand even a man like his white sahib friend. That is something I hope I was learning from my treasured Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation, read and read again. That a good detective must know men and be eternally vigilant.

‘You see,’ Sir Rustom gave a little cough, ‘at that time it wasn’t every ICS man who was willing to go about with an Indian, and one was bound to wonder whether his purpose was to secure for himself in future days what you might call a friend at court.’

He fell silent, putting the long fingers of his hands together in five upwards pointing pairs, his elbows on the chair’s carved arms.

‘Poor fellow,’ he said.

‘Was he at last, then,’ Ghote asked, ‘having to go to UK, that – you were saying – so much one uncomfortable place?’

‘No, no. I have misled you. No, my British friend, or perhaps I should say friend of former years, easily succeeded in remaining here under the Indian sun. And, indeed, for years I heard nothing of him. But then, quite recently, he wrote to me, claiming, as it were, the dues of that friendship he had cultivated in the days when he saw me – I can put it in no other way – as someone likely to become a senior figure in the New India, whenever that might come into existence.’

‘He is then poor now in the way only that he is somehow needing your help?’

‘Exactly so, Inspector. Yes, they have sent me the right man.’

A flush of pride all but caused in Ghote a give-away blush.

Yet more anxiously he asked himself what the retired English sahib must be hoping to get through the help of now distinguished Sir Rustom Engineer, once by no means a good shot in the ritual of Raj days shikar.

He was soon to learn.

‘Yes, the poor chap writes to me in great distress to say that some weeks ago his much younger wife, of only two or three years I understand and in fact pregnant with their first child, had suddenly and inexplicably committed suicide. The act has left him, it seems, tormented day after day by a need to find out why. And, as I feel I do perhaps owe him something still, I think I should offer him what assistance I can. In fact, you, my dear fellow.’

Ghote sat there – He had perched himself on the edge of a sofa a yard or two away from Sir Rustom – filled in an instant with doubts and fears. Sir Rustom attempting to help this white sahib by sending me to him? Myself to go to this tormented Englishman and somehow discover why his wife has taken her own life? How possibly will I, a stranger and no countryman of his, be able to bring to light something that is altogether puzzling him? And then the lady is, no, was, pregnant. With their first child. Just only exactly like Protima. Will Protima …? No. No, that is impossible. But … but a first pregnancy, a time, isn’t it, full of strange thoughts for the mother-to-be. Can that be …?

He pulled himself together.

‘And-and you have sent for me, sir,’ he managed to babble out, ‘to-to solve this … this mystery?’

Sir Rustom looked at him, gravely intent eyes half-concealed by the thick-lenses of his spectacles.

‘Yes, Inspector, I asked for some intelligent Crime Branch officer who could be spared for some days, and they have given me you. Let me say at once that I have few doubts, if any, that you will be able to give my former friend, Mr Robert Dawkins, out in Mahableshwar, such assistance as he may need. As I mentioned at the outset, his anxieties are in fact likely to be something that can quite easily be cleared up. I dare say, he’s just been looking at the whole business somehow the wrong way round. Not the sharpest of the sharp, Robert Dawkins.’

‘Sir, I am hoping if I am asking right questions … But, sir, at this moment I am knowing nothing about the lady who has committed suicide in this mysterious way. Sir, is she – was she – an English lady, or did he …?’

‘No, no, my dear chap. Dawkins’ letter made it quite clear. His wife’s Christian name, as they say, was apparently Iris. Yes, Iris. Though I don’t think I’ll trouble you with some of the other things Robert says about her in his letter. Pretty incoherent stuff. Yes, best, I think, to let you find out the facts for yourself.’

‘Very good, sir. I hope when I will have been there in Mahableshwar a few days—’

He came to a sudden halt.

A few days. But what if during those few days the baby is coming? Yes, yes, Dr Pramash has told Protima that it will be – she was saying – as much as six-eight weeks before birth is likely. But … but I have heard stories of a child arriving unexpectedly when the mother is no more than seven months into pregnancy. Less even. Calculations are not always based on proper facts.

But Sir Rustom was prompting him.

‘A few days, you were saying …’

Oh God, how long have I been sitting here in silence? Keeping Sir Rustom waiting. And why? Because some ridiculous anxiety about the baby came into my mind.

‘Sir … sir, I-I am sorry. Sir, it is just only, as I was telling, my wife is expecting our first child. And, sir, I am having at back of mind some worries about it.’

‘My dear fellow, that’s natural enough. But when is this birth expected? Perhaps, if it’s more or less imminent, we should find somone else to go to Mahableshwar. Though that may be a little difficult …’

‘No, sir, no. No, birth may not be for six-eight weeks. Sir, I am hundred per cent ready to go.’

However likely it was that, away in the hill-station of Mahableshwar in the cool of the towering Western Ghats, Dawkins sahib’s anxieties could quickly be laid to rest, in Bombay Inspector Ghote’s troubles were by no means over.

‘You may need some form of transport up there if your inquiries take you to any of old Dawkins’ former haunts,’ Sir Rustom had said, adding casually, ‘You have a motor?’

A gari? How should I, till now no more than Assistant Inspector, have had money to buy a car?

Ghote looked, a little too wildly, all round the big drawing room seeking some answer to Sir Rustom’s expectant query. Rosewood cabinets everywhere with on their shelves, just to be made out behind panes of glass, objects in brightly delicate china or gleaming in silver. On a table in the same dark wood there stood a big wireless set, its loudspeaker covered in a pattern of fretwork, equally dark. Two bookcases, again behind glass, were ranked with leather-bound volumes.

Will the plays of Shakespeare be among them? Certain to be. Hamlet with them, of course. What is it Protima is Always saying to me: Am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. But now am I …?

‘No, sir. No, Sir Rustom, I am not having any car.’

‘No? Well, that may be a problem.’

For one hither and thither moment Ghote thought he might not, after all, have to be away from Protima at perhaps the crucial time. Then that fleeting inadmissible hope vanished.

‘But, no,’ Sir Rustom said abruptly. ‘No, no problem. Ever since, on retirement, I acquired for myself an Austin Princess, I have had in the garages here the old Ambassador I used on those occasions when a police vehicle was inappropriate. You can borrow that, Inspector. I imagine it still goes pretty well. And, as to petrol and that sort of thing, and the hotel you find up there, I can, of course, let you have here and now whatever you may need.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ was all Ghote could find to say, although his mind was racing with all the complications suddenly thrust upon him.

‘Yes, and if whatever I have about me is not enough, Sir Rustom went on, ‘I dare say Dawkins will let you have the necessary. He must be pretty well off. A decent pension no doubt, and— Well, not to put too fine a point on it, in his working days, here and there in India, he may not have been above accepting what they called a token of appreciation. No point, of course, in expecting a British officer to take a money bribe, but what if he’s offered a basket of fruits? And what if underneath …? Mind you, when Robert and I were pals, of a sort, I took dashed good care not to inquire too deeply into things like that. Even to this day, I wouldn’t like to assert anything.’

Ghote did not know which way to look. He had always been told the British were utterly above corruption, and now this business of baskets of fruits being thrust under noses. Baskets, no doubt, crowded with choice specimens, and hidden under them …

Mercifully, Sir Rustom was going on.

‘Must give you Robert’s address in Mahableshwar. Got it on his letter somewhere. Let you have it before you go. Never do to find yourself out there not knowing where the old fellow hangs out.’