Читать книгу Breaking and Entering - H. R. F Keating - Страница 6

Despite everything, Inspector Ghote found his head filled with pleasantly vague thoughts. Yes, the month of October was not the best time to be footing it here and there about the city. It was almost as hot as full summer, plus the last of the monsoon showers made it sweatily humid. And, yes again, the case he had been given was not very likely to bring him success.

It would have shown more of respect for my abilities, he thought, if instead of this fag-end affair I had been sent, like every other inspector in Crime Branch, to work on the Ajmani murder. To be the one who put the handcuffs on the fellow who in that altogether mysterious manner succeeded to get right inside that double and triple protected house … Altogether feathers in my cap.

But what has been given to me? When you are coming down to it no more than a fellow climbing in to commit a handful of B and E offences, breaking and entering under Indian Penal Code Section 446, Whoever commits ‘house-breaking’ after sunset and before sunrise is said to commit ‘house-breaking by night.’ Very well. Serious enough crimes. But not at all so serious as murder, the crime that nothing can put back.

But Deputy Commissioner Kabir has put this case into my hands now and no one else’s. My responsibility.

He felt it as a heavy weight thrust on to him. And all, he thought, because Pinky Dinkarrao in her Pinky Thinking column that everyone is reading was comparing the climbing thief I am expected to find to Yeshwant, the big ghorpad lizard that in times past carried a rope up rocky crags to capture impregnable forts. And from then on the sunset-to-sunrise fellow was grabbing all the headlines. Until the Ajmani murder put every other thing into shade.

Still, there is one good side to it all. I am on my own. No one here to tell me to do things the way they want them done. True, not much of excitement just only going round where other officers have already been, trying to pin down this fellow, month after month defeating best efforts of local stations. Even now of Crime Branch itself. But in the end there may be something of kudos for whoever is nabbing this Yeshwant. And perhaps it may be myself. Even if so far I have not hit on one new fact. Modus operandi same each time: in through a high window, and out with one first-class haul. And never a single physical clue.

And there is another reason, in the humidity and the heat, to be glad I am neither sitting under the fan in my flat nor within reach of my wife at the end of a telephone. Things at home are not at all peaceful. Trouble is Ved. A young man of his age, even if he is still a student, should be out on his own. But how can anyone, unless they are fully rich, find money for even the smallest of rooms in a city that is boasting its top rents are higher even than those in great Manhattan? So there the boy is, wanting to live his own life, and bumping up at every moment against his mother, living her own life.

There had been that ridiculous business last night. Ved using the TV to play some video he had bought from a pavement vendor, some damn nonsense of Lost in Space, and it coming up to time for Swabhimaan, Protima’s favourite programme. Ved, when she had pointed this out to him a few minutes beforehand, muttering a promise to let her switch over, but then sitting on, glued to those Western imported spacecraft adventures of some Americans called the Robinson family. And, when Protima had reached across and switched over herself, he had shouted, Be for once getting out of my hairs.

And he himself had walked right into it all. There was Protima using her tongue, which he occasionally thought of, in secret, as ‘sharp as a fish knife’ with in his mind’s eye a fishwalli from Sassoon Docks or Mahim Bay gutting pomfret after pomfret with single strokes of her razor-keen blade. And there was Ved blustering almost as loudly. Does she think she is owning me still? I am no more her little baby. And Protima retorting with quieter but more stinging words.

No, better by far to be tramping the fiercely hot streets, going from one rich robbed lady to another, only to be told time and again that they had already answered each and every police question.

He found himself now at the end of the long stretch of the Oval Maidan. Almost without realizing it he came to a halt in the shade of the thick trunk of one of the tall Royal palms fringing the long spread of still-green post-monsoon grass. Half a dozen cricket matches were in progress. He stopped for a moment to watch, switching between games played so close one to another that an alert boy in the outfield of one could catch an overambitious batsman in another, or even in two others.

Or he saw, as he felt the hot throbbing wall of held-up early rush-hour traffic almost singeing his back, there was one fielder at least taking no part in either of the games to each side of him. He was a boy of ten or eleven, plainly lost deep in some private dream, eyes raised to the horizon, totally motionless.

Suddenly Ghote remembered an occasion when he himself, at much the same age, had been taking part in an untypically dull game, almost British in the way the batsmen had been cautiously poking at each delivery. Relegated to the deep field, he had fallen into a similar faraway reverie, idly holding out in front of himself the ancient sola topee his mother insisted on him wearing. And then, with a heavy little thump, the ball had landed exactly in that basin-like hat. He had come to, blinking, to shouts of laughter from every other fielder, the two batsmen, even the boy umpiring, and, mortified beyond anything, had run from the scene.

So what he had never been able to ask afterwards was whether that ball had landed in his old topee as the result of a batsman’s stroke – and would that have given him a catch? – or whether some fellow fielder, seeing him in his lost-to-the-world daze, had crept up and tossed the ball in. It was something that, from time to time, he still wondered about.

Behind him, he became aware, breaking into his present reverie, of a loud tapping noise, almost a hammering.

He turned.

A huge tourist coach, Rajah Super Airbus in florid letters of gold all along its red and cream painted side, had been held up in the inching-forward, fumes-belching traffic. Inside it, he could just make out through its heavily tinted glass someone banging on a window with the heel of his hand while at the same time agitating the other arm as violently as if he were a captive being led away to death.

He looked round. There was no one else near him.

Can the fellow be signalling to myself only?

He wondered whether to turn and walk away. What could anyone in a tourist bus, probably full of white firinghis, want with him?

And, besides, he felt furious at the way his pleasant cocoon of thoughts had been broken into.

But then he saw that the figure behind the tinted window – and, yes, he was wearing a foreigner’s white suit – was blundering along towards the front of the vehicle. A moment later its door slid open and its steel steps descended.

‘It is Mr Ghote? Inspector Ghote?’ a tremendously loud voice boomed out into the vibrant heat of the day.

But who …? Who in this huge tourist bus is knowing my name? And why? Why are they calling and calling at me?

He shook his head in bewilderment.

This big firinghi in the white suit, with his red-red face and – I am seeing just only now – those blue-blue eyes—

But—

But it is. It must be … It is Mr Svensson. Mr Svensson from Sweden, who was here making some UNESCO report years and years ago, soon after I was joining Crime Branch and was investigating that Perfect murder. That poor old Parsi, Mr Perfect, who in the end was being not so perfectly murdered but recovering under the first rain of the monsoons and living also some years more.

Mr Svensson here now.

So I must …

He went up to the shiny steps of the bus and reached forward, hand held out.

‘Mr Svensson, it is you? Here in India? But what for have you come? You are making a new UNESCO report, yes?’

‘But it is Axel, my friend. You always called me Axel. And I called you Gandhi. You remember?’

‘Well, it is Ganesh.’

‘Yes, yes. Ganesh. Ganesh Ghote, my old friend.’

But now the storm of violently irritated hooting from the whole stream of vehicles held up behind the huge tourist bus at last impinged on the Swede.

‘But— But we must not keep all these good people waiting behind. Come in. Step up. Ride with me. We are coming from the airport to the Taj Mahal Hotel. Would going there be too far for you? Otherwise we may never meet anywhere else.’

Ghote calculated quickly.

He had been making his way, unhurriedly, to the Bombay Hospital in Maharishi Karve Road, which he still sometimes thought of as Queen’s Road as it had been when he first came to Bombay. One of Climbing Yeshwant’s victims was now a patient there and he had hoped to discover when he would be able to see her. But that could wait. He was hardly likely to learn anything that would enable him to arrest the miscreant before the day was done.

‘Very well, Svensson sahib.’

‘But it is Axel. Axel, er, Ganesh. You must always call me Axel.’

The cacophony of hooting had grown even louder.

‘Come in, come in.’

The big Swede seized Ghote’s hand, dragged him up and in. The door swished closed behind him.

He felt at once an extraordinary coolness. The huge coach, he realized, was fully air-conditioned. No wonder Axel Svensson had been able to wave and shout so energetically. Without shedding one drop of sweat.

Stumbling along to the seat next to the one the Swede had occupied he felt as if he had been miraculously removed to another world. And it was quiet. The hooting of the vehicles behind could no longer be clearly made out. The roar and clatter of the huge city all around seemed to have been cut off with the sharp efficiency of a heavy steel shutter descending. There was space to breathe.

But hardly space to think. Axel Svensson was torrenting out questions.

‘So, Ganesh, what is it you are doing these days? You are still in the police? Have you risen above the rank of inspector? You are in command somewhere? Or are you still in— What was it called? Yes, the Crime Bureau.’

‘The Crime Branch. Officially even it is the Detection of Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police.’

‘Mumbai Police? Mumbai? But this is Bombay. I booked to go to Bombay.’

‘Yes, yes. This is Bombay. But these days it is being renamed Mumbai, the name they say it was having many, many years ago. So now I am finding myself a member of the Mumbai Police—’

But the big Swede broke in.

‘My dear Ganesh, I have to tell you some sad news. My wife, my dear wife of twenty years, is dead. A sudden illness. And I am left a widower. But your wife? I remember her so well. Parvati.’

‘Protima.’

‘Yes. Yes. And she is well. And children? You had a little son. Are there more now? Sons? Daughters?’

‘No, we were never having more of children.’

‘Well, my beloved Gosta and I did not have children. That is why when she was dying I felt so lost. I had nobody. Only my older brother, the very opposite to me in temperament, looks, height, everything. As short, you may say, as a dwarf. In the end I decided I must get right away from Sweden. And I remembered my time in India, so different from Sweden, so much sunshine and light, so much life. And how I had shared your investigation of the Perfect murder. I thought how much I would like to meet you again. And now, what a fine chance. Here you are, when I have not been one hour in Bombay. No, let me get it right. In Mummai.’

‘No, no, you should say Mumbai. Mumbai. And, look, Mr Sven— Axel, look. We are almost at the Taj.’

‘The Taj Mahal Hotel? Yes. Yes, I remember it from all those years ago. A fine building. And I had a magnificently comfortable stay.’

‘So, now I am knowing where you are, it would be very, very easy to ring you up and perhaps arrange to meet again.’

‘But, no. No, my dear Ganesh. I have a lot more to hear about your life nowadays. A lot more. We have scarcely begun. So you must come inside. It will not take much time, I think, to complete the formalities. And then you must have a good long drink, and tell me all about yourself and your family and your work. You are on some Number One priority case, ja? Something like the Perfect murder, eh?’

Ghote felt the questions and the demands entering his head like so many busy invading rats. With difficulty he contrived to answer the last one.

‘Number One priority, no. No, that is the Ajmani mystery. No, I have another case. Not altogether like the Perfect murder. But I will explain.’