Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  INSPECTOR GHOTE CAUGHT IN MESHES

  H. R. F. Keating

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain in 1967 by Collins Crime Club.

  This eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital,

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 1967 by H. R. F. Keating.

  The right of H. R. F. Keating to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0389-2 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The nature of this story has made it necessary to venture here and there into fantasy. There is no such thing as the Special Investigations Agency (though there is a Federal Bureau of Investigation, but that is in another country). There is no India First Group, and the secret that it protects is equally imaginary. There is certainly no such person as my Inspector Phadke and his behaviour is dictated entirely by the demands of the story. There is not even a Queen’s Imperial Grand Hotel.

  H.R.F.K.

  PROLOGUE

  The three men had been sprawled there in the shade of the big Flame of the Forest for nearly two hours, but although it was very hot and almost intolerably muggy they had not slept. There was a feeling of tension behind their air of easy-going relaxedness. It showed in the way every now and again one of them would check over his gun.

  The Sikh in the orange turban had an American self-loading Garand rifle and the other two had revolvers, one a British Army officer’s issue Webley and the other a much abused Smith and Wesson dating from the early years of the century. This last was hardly reliable at a range over five yards, but none of the three expected to use it at even this distance.

  The people of the village just below the slight hill on which the solitary Flame of the Forest stood had taken some time to get used to their visitors, but an hour after their arrival they were left almost completely to themselves. The old women squatting outside the huts gossiped away as they pounded the corn and hardly so much as glanced across at the three of them in the shade of the big tree. The little children tumbled and played unconcernedly in the dirt. Over in the fields, still muddy from the monsoon rains which had hardly yet finished, the men, naked all but for a cloth round their waists, and the women, with their harsh red and green saris tucked between their legs, bent low over their work as they had done all their lives and would go on doing. Afterwards.

  Nor did any of the villagers pay much attention to the bullock cart that had lumbered past about the same time that the three strangers had settled down under the Flame of the Forest. It came from the next village south and its driver was known to them all, a notorious ne’er-do-well, Bholu, much gossiped about because once a year or so he would make his way right up to Poona, toiling over the sharp ascent of the great Ghats, and there he would lose every anna he had been able to lay his hands on in whatever gambling games he could find.

  With a man like Bholu it was not in the least surprising that he should drive his lumbering beasts through the village, going this time north away from Poona on the road which led eventually to the distant, teeming city of Bombay, and then abruptly seem to lose interest and stop. He had halted in the shade of a small banyan tree by the roadside. He had had at least that much sense. And there he had stayed, letting his great, heavy-horned beasts lower their heads and tug discontentedly at the few tufts of grass growing there.

  A hundred yards or so down the road a gang of men, some of them recruited from the village, were at work mending the embankment where it had fallen away during the first heavy monsoon rains. But Bholu paid them no attention. Instead he sat on the boards of his big, awkwardly-constructed cart and looked backwards to where under the wide-spreading Flame of the Forest tree the Sikh stranger’s orange turban shone like a gaudy jewel.

  If anyone spared Bholu a thought they would have believed he was sleeping away the heat of the day. But he was not. In spite of everything he was awake, wide awake.

  The three men waiting under the Flame of the Forest had already passed through the village earlier in the day. They had come from the direction of Poona in a battered old Buick painted for the most part a bright blue. But they had not stopped and no one had taken any notice of them. Dozens of vehicles went rattling by along the road between Poona and Bombay at every hour of the day.

  In the car then there had been five of them. They had driven past, negotiated the place where there was single-lane traffic only by the roadworks and had gone on to a village about ten miles away. Here two of the party had been let out of the car, rather unceremoniously. No sooner had the battered blue Buick swirled round and left again, heading back in the Poona direction now, than the pair had begun conducting a search of the immediate area. Whatever it was they were looking for they appeared not to find, because after a little a short and rather angry consultation had taken place between them. Then they had approached the villagers.

  With a good deal of truculence they had asked for fuel to build a fire, and when they paid they had done so too generously, which did nothing to appease the feelings of resentment they had aroused. The blacksmith, from whom they had bought a can of kerosene at a grossly inflated price, was most vocal in expressing this general annoyance. As a man of substance, the possessor of a petrol pump strategically situated at a point where the straight road from Bombay made a small unaccountable twist and traffic conveniently slowed up, he naturally exercised certain rights of leadership. He was expected to set the tone in questions both moral and practical. And he enjoyed exercising this right to the full.

  So he was the first to express open doubts about the intentions of the two interlopers. Why did they want to build a fire? They had brought nothing to cook. And even when the fire was ready, a neat heap of dried dung-cakes and pieces of brushwood, they had done nothing about lighting it.

  The blacksmith did not actually put these doubts to the two men sitting beside the unlit fire taking advantage of the shade made by the road embankment. Every time anyone had asked them a friendly question they had bristled aggressively. It was quite likely
that if they were pressed too far they would start an ugly incident of some sort. But in the shelter of his tumbledown little shop the blacksmith put the case against them in no uncertain terms.

  “And why do they jump up to look at every car coming from Bombay direction?” he demanded in conclusion. “They are cars only. There is nothing to look.”

  His hearers nodded gravely. That clinched the matter.

  The elegant, dark green, hired Chevrolet, not long out of Bombay, was moving fast down the straight length of the trunk road to distant Poona. Already it was covered with dust, although there was nothing like so much of it on the surface of the concrete as there would be later in the year. But then the car was being driven a good deal faster than it should be.

  Leaving the city not long before it had acquired a long black scratch on the rear nearside wing where the driver, a tall, beige-suited young American with a crest of extraordinary, flaming red hair and an equally unmistakable streak of flaming red beard, had grazed a lamp standard. But this experience had apparently done nothing to warn him to take it less hectically. The car, headed firmly south now, was shooting along the road every bit as fast as it was safe to go, and faster.

  The two truculent men beside the unlit fire leapt to their feet for the twentieth time. The car coming towards them slowed. The driver, a harassed Mysore civil servant taking his family back to Belgaum after a wedding, negotiated the double bend by the blacksmith’s petrol pump with care. The two men craning over the top of the embankment slumped down again and sat waiting.

  Bholu, the bullock driver, sitting in his cart in the shade of the small banyan by the roadside, shook himself to make sure he had not dropped off. Above him the sky was brazen with heavily massing clouds.

  Under the Flame of the Forest on its gently moulded hillock the Sikh pulled two cigarettes from a packet of Cavander’s and tossed them over to his companions. Then he pushed himself up from the rope bed they had hired from the people in the village. It was not a very good bed. The wooden end-bars were too thin and in consequence the long cords were slacker than the cross ones. The Sikh had been contemptuous when it had first been carried over to them, but a chorus of voices had sworn that it was the best in the village. He had paid less to borrow it than had been hoped.

  With his face crinkled to protect his eyes from the glare he looked away north in the direction of Bombay. The road stretched straight and long into the far distance cutting through the patterned squares and strips of the caramel-coloured fields. Here and there a tree broke the straightness of the line for a moment, like the little banyan in the shade of which the bullock cart still rested. Farther on the line was more effectively interrupted by the gang at work on the fallen embankment. Piles of stones lay half across the concrete, and ant-like figures could be seen moving slowly from one heap to the next or clambering painfully down the side of the embankment itself.

  Beneath the wide sweep of the metallic sky, with the sun almost directly above them now, the sounds of the gang’s labours were too faint to be heard. The Sikh slumped down on the creaky bed and picked up the Garand rifle once again.

  When they had first arrived, parking their battered blue Buick in the shade of a straw-rick and facing it carefully towards Poona, their weapons had evoked a flurry of questions from the curious villagers. Eventually and grudgingly the Sikh had said that they had come to shoot “some mad dogs.” The reply had appeased the villagers, more or less. It was the most informative answer they could persuade the party to make on any subject, and so they had been shruggingly abandoned as a source of entertainment. Back at their laborious daily round, nobody thought to wonder why it was that the strangers never made any attempt to find mad dogs to shoot.

  The red-haired, red-bearded American was still pushing the elegant green hired Chevrolet along for all it was worth. Penetrating dust had settled everywhere round him and his taut features were covered with a fine layer of it, streaked once or twice where a path had been traced by a heavy drop of perspiration.

  Suddenly on the long, straight road ahead he spotted a man in a check shirt and jeans standing beside a small, over-loaded family car waving energetically. The little car, a Fiat, was halted far enough out on the road to make it necessary to slow down drastically.

  The red-bearded American was unable to avoid looking the stranded driver full in the face. The appeal made to him was blatant.

  He braked abruptly.

  “Hell,” he said.

  The man in the check shirt hurried over.

  “Gee,” he said, “you from the States too?”

  “Guess so.”

  “That’s just great. You see what’s happened to us? Back axle gone.”

  He turned and glanced at his car. Back-axle trouble might have been expected. From its heaped-up roof rack to its cluttered floor the little vehicle was almost all load. Spare tyres, a push-chair and rolls of bulging bedding made up the roof baggage. In the open boot there was a Primus stove, petrol cans, a formidable tool-kit, two buckets and a shovel. In the back three T-shirted children sat cross-legged on top of a mound of suitcases. Each spare space held a box of Kleenex. A determinedly cheerful young mother wearing a faded Aertex shirt sat in front nursing an enormous string-bag of fruit. She looked very, very hot.

  The father of the family had become even more cheerful.

  “This is great,” he said again. “We saw a kinda garage about ten miles back. I think someone from there could fix this. They’re pretty good at breakdowns, the Indians.”

  The red-bearded driver of the big, hired Chevrolet looked at him in silence.

  “So if you could just give me a lift back there,” he went on, unabashed, “then maybe they could come out here with some kind of a mechanic.”

  He looked expectantly at his compatriot.

  “Ten miles back,” the red-bearded man said. “I saw that place. It’s fifteen miles there if it’s a yard. I’m sorry but I have to get to Poona and quick.”

  He looked at the watch strapped to the inside of his dust-covered wrist.

  “Hell,” he said, “I’ve wasted too much time as it is.”

  “But—but, gee. I can’t ask just anybody to go back, and if I have to walk all that way in this heat …”

  The young family man looked up into the brazen dome of the sky. But already his fellow countryman was jerking the hired Chevrolet savagely into gear.

  It took the blacksmith a good while to stir up his fellow villagers to the point of action. But at last they moved in a body out of the comforting shade at the back of the shop. The blacksmith followed them. He had picked up a rusted length of iron drain-pipe that had been lying in a corner for years waiting for a use to be found for it.

  Three or four of the stouter-hearted villagers looked around for other weapons. It took them a few minutes to find anything suitable. But at last they were ready, one armed with a length of chain, another with a big vegetable-chopping knife, a third with a long piece of bamboo which had been half holding up a corner of the blacksmith’s veranda.

  “We’ll teach them,” the blacksmith said. “Coming here like that.”

  There was a satisfying, angry mutter of agreement.

  “Get them running,” the blacksmith shouted.

  They advanced in a knot to the edge of the road opposite the point where the two interlopers had built their unlit fire. The sound of a car approaching fast from the Bombay direction caused the posse to halt. They might perhaps have got across the road before it arrived, but they were prudent men and they waited.

  The car slowed with a squeal of brakes at the unexpected kink where the petrol pump was. On the far side the faces of the two intruders appeared on the top of the embankment like two dusty boulders with wide, white staring eyes.

  They both registered the fact that the driver of the car was red-haired and red-bearded at exactly the same instant. Simultaneously they let go their holds and slithered down the slope of the embankment. As if carrying out a well-practised routine, one
seized the kerosene tin, screwed off its cap in a series of swift jerks and upended it. The liquid golloped out on to the little pile of sticks and dung-cakes. The other watcher had already opened a box of matches. With shaking fingers he pulled one out and, without closing the box, attempted to strike it.

  The dark green Chevrolet pulled smoothly away. The blacksmith and his men took heart from the suddenness with which the intruders had vanished the moment they themselves had appeared at the other side of the road. They set out to cross now with new resoluteness.

  The fumbler dropped his match.

  From the top of the embankment the blacksmith and his men looked down.

  “What do you want here?” the blacksmith shouted. “You have no right. Do you think you own the place?”

  The man who had poured the kerosene grabbed the match-box.

  The blacksmith’s supporters were applauding.

  This time the new match was struck without trouble. In the silence that had followed the blacksmith’s speech the tiny spluttering sound as the flame burst could be distinctly heard. The man holding the match stooped swiftly.

  From the heap of sticks and dung-cakes a twirl of thick, sooty black smoke went up.

  The two interlopers turned at once and ran. With a ragged cheer the villagers set out after them. None of them paid the least attention to the fire. But its smoke, despite its coming into being so haphazardly, rose steadily into the sullen stillness of the midday air.

  Under the shade of the big Flame of the Forest the Sikh leapt up from the creaky bed. He grabbed hold of the arm of the man nearer him and pointed.

  To the north perhaps some ten miles away a thin, soft black streak of smoke was slowly mounting into the brazen sky.

  Quickly the Sikh unknotted the grimy white sweat cloth from round his neck. He took a couple of paces forward out into the sunlight. He lifted his right arm and slowly waved the dirty cloth. It spread out and fluttered a little. The others, intent on giving their guns one last, unnecessary check, paid no attention.