A Small Case for Inspector Ghote?

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A SMALL CASE FOR INSPECTOR GHOTE?

  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 2009 by Allison & Busby.

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

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2009 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: 978-1-4483-0408-0 (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

  ONE

  Inspector Ghote, ensconced in his newly won cabin at Bombay Police Crime Branch, head down at work, was just aware every now and again of a smell. An odour by no means obtrusive, but there. There and, yes, somehow wrong.

  Each time it impinged on him he gave brief thought to it. What can it be? Is there a dead pi-dog somewhere underneath the floor? Or a …

  But, no. Get on with the work. Bandobast, the interminable juggling to fit all the cases under investigation to the available inspectors. Damn it, I am keeping waiting the Head of Crime Branch himself, Assistant Commissioner of Police Mr Ramprasad Divekar. And there is a lot more still to be done.

  Down again went his head.

  Yet, not very much later, he found his thoughts had wandered and he was reckoning that he had been working at his bandobast task now for – it must be – five weeks. I joined duty on the first day of the Hindu month of Chaitra and now we are well into the month of Baisakh, the annual promise of fresh blooming flowers and summer warmth. So it must be more than five weeks. Yes, almost six. And still I have not been given my first proper Crime Branch case. An investigation, not into any of the everyday murders that happen all over Bombay, but of a case involving one of the city’s important and influential people. A crime that counts, some case of—

  No, no, no. Get on with the work. My duty now.

  What next? Ah, yes.

  Once more he glued his eyes to the schedule in front of him. And, almost immediately, found that they had closed and he was giving a long exploratory sniff. Yes, definitely, smell still there. Drains? Everywhere in Bombay there is almost always a smell from defective drains, somewhere or another. But this doesn’t seem …

  No, get on with the work. Mr Divekar may at any time actually pick up one of the three telephones on his desk and ask me why I have not finished. And then I may find myself for even longer on bandobast duty, perhaps for weeks and weeks more.

  For the fifth or sixth time he brought himself to concentrate on the particular memo from Mr Divekar that was lying in front of him.

  Or can there be a crow that has somehow got into the cabin, and died here? But surely a smell of that sort must long ago have been dispersed by the fan in the ceiling.

  He glanced upwards.

  Damn it. Wretched thing not even switched on. Once again Bikram has failed to do what he very well knows is every peon’s duty at the start of each day. Really, the fellow is altogether too incompetent. I cannot think how killed-on-duty Inspector Patil, whose place I have inherited, never simply got rid of him. Should I myself even be getting him hundred per cent chucked out now? Would that be the full demanding way to behave for a full Crime Branch officer?

  On the other hand … Well, Bikram has a right to gain a livelihood, even if almost every paisa he gets seems to be spent on rum. Every day that goes by that disgusting stale odour is breathed out all over me.

  But the fan.

  Making his way across the narrow width of the cabin, he flicked down its switch. The three groaning blades above began reluctantly to stir the already-too-warm air.

  Back beside his desk, Ghote squeezed himself through the narrow gap between it and the wall behind, slid down on his chair and took from his in tray the next bundle of orders sent down from Mr Divekar’s huge airy cabin on the balcony directly above. Determinedly he worked on, thinking how to fit each new demand – more than a few superseding ones already dealt with – into the complex pattern of possibilities.

  Soon, the smell that had niggled and niggled at the back of his mind was altogether forgotten, absorbed as he was in officers’ names, in requirements for periods of leave (casual or earned), in police dogs’ availability, in transport demands, in cancellations and cancellings of those cancellations. With, ever present, the fear that finally one of his instructions might prove to be totally and impossibly at odds with another.

  And then, all in an instant, it came to him what the persistent slight irritation, now once more blossoming in his nostrils, was.

  It was the smell of blood.

  Yes, it must be blood. I think I can recognise it clearly now, even though it is so faint. But where can it be coming from, if it is really the sweetish odour of blood? The three dirt-grimed blades of the fan slowly pushing the air round seem still not to be dispelling it, slight though it is.

  But after all, he abruptly thought then, perhaps it is not truly the smell of blood? Words from his personal holy book, bought long ago from a pavement vendor, Dr Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation – just there on the cupboard top – had come back to him. When it is a question of determining the correctness of a smell-perception great care is necessary, and all the more because the sensibility of the organ varies so much.

  So it may be blood, or …

  But never mind that. I have by no means finished my work. Back to it once more. Do not think about the damn smell until I have altogether finished.

  So now it was only when there were intrusive interruptions that Ghote even for a moment looked up. There was Mr Divekar’s own Goan peon, smartly dressed Thomas, giving him from time to time a polite drawing-attention cough before putting another batch of orders into the tray. Why should it be Thomas coming now and not Bikram? he half-thought as he took the new papers, absorbed their instr
uctions and began working out how they might be fitted in.

  Then there was the tea boy. Suddenly and silently there, pouring with intent care the milky liquid from his heavy canister into the waiting cup, its inner surface still rimed with stains Bikram had failed to remove. Did I pay the boy before he went? Did I, or didn’t I, even give him a word of thanks? I forget, already. But there’s always his second round. Ask then if I paid before.

  Next came a hesitant tap-tap on the top of the batwing doors of the cabin and Sergeant Moos, Bombay Police fingerprints expert, came sidling in from the noisy compound outside. Ghote, in his very first week in the job, had learnt that Moos was notorious for always wanting any officer he could persuade to listen to give him ‘two-three minutes just to mention something’. The ‘something’ always being a long, long explanation of some new intricacy arising from his kaam, the work he was wedded to as devoutly as God Krishna had loved his Radha.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he muttered to him, scarcely looking up. Then, as Moos eagerly drew back one of the two chairs ranged in front of the desk, he let the droning of his voice become no more than the buzzing of the flies that constantly came in from the compound beyond the doors. But, when at last he realised that he was now ready to type out the result of all his crossword puzzle work, he found that at some point Moos must have simply drifted away. Did I murmur something to him by way of saying I had found it all most interesting? Heaven knows. I am just hoping that I did.

  Pushing his chair the two or three inches clear of the desk before it knocked against the wall, he twisted round and reached down into the dark corner beside him for the much worn, keys-jamming typewriter he had inherited with Patil’s cabin. But as his fingers sought for the worn leather strap of its cover something about the waste bin tucked beside it caught his eye.

  Damn it all, it is full. The bin is full to very brim. And that idiot, Bikram, knows as well as he knows anything it is his duty to empty the bin each evening before he goes home. Or, more likely, goes to whatever beer bar it is where he gets his rum. And why, in any case, is the bin so crammed with rubbish? I certainly did not throw very much into it yesterday. Yet here it is, full to top.

  And, yes. Yes, it is from there surely that the smell is coming. I am certain of it. And it is the smell of blood. My smell-perception of it is hundred per cent correct. I know this odour well enough from the murders and assaults I dealt with in my assistant inspector years up in Dadar. But what on earth is the crumpled newspaper doing in the bin, looking like the froth on a tall brightly layered glass of falooda from a juice bar? I never brought a newspaper into the cabin yesterday, nor on any other day. This is no place for idle reading. So why is there a newspaper in my bin?

  Nose wrinkling at the smell, he grasped between finger and thumb one corner of the newsprint sheets and gave a gentle tug.

  Ah, I see now. It is the Matunga News, the rag I used sometimes to see when I was posted in Dadar, next to Matunga itself. But how on earth did a paper from there, halfway across the city, get into my waste bin? And that photo on the page I am holding, surely it is of that politician about to contest the by-election for the South Bombay seat in the Legislative Assembly, the fellow who has earned the full wifely contempt of my Protima? Does he then come from Matunga?

  Reaching down deeper into the bin with his other hand, he caught hold of what seemed to be the twine handle on one side of an old shopping bag. He pulled at it. Then, finding it unexpectedly weighty, he gave it a series of rather harder tugs. The bag’s other handle, folded back, emerged. He got hold of it and half-inch by half-inch pulled the whole bag up. He realised now that what he could feel at his fingertips at the edge of the newspaper sheets, was … was nothing else but cropped wiry human hair.

  Wait. Wait a moment.

  He dipped down deeper.

  Yes, I can see clearly now that I am looking at the top of a man’s head. Short greying hair in one tangled mass, and altogether dirty also, scurf-encrusted under an almost dry layer of blood. The cause of the smell. Definitely, definitely.

  A stray puff of breeze from the compound beyond gave an extra impetus to the sullen air stirred by the slow-grinding fan. The Matunga News pages were flipped a little further apart. And suddenly Ghote’s whole mouth went as dry as if he had been sleeping for hours with lips wide apart.

  Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he let go one handle of the bag and reached blindly back for his long-neglected cup of milky tea, draining its whole clammy contents at a gulp. He had in one glimpse recognised whose head it was that he had hauled to the light of day. It was Bikram’s.

  TWO

  The first thing that came fully into Ghote’s mind then was, incongruously, So this is why it has been the ACP’s Thomas who has brought down my orders all morning. Then other thoughts, more to the purpose, one by one made themselves manifest. Bikram is dead. His head has been hacked away from his body. Yes, when I got a glimpse deeper into the bag I made out that death did not come in one clean cut. Bikram had not, going home in his usual state of drunkenness, walking beside some railway line, fallen down and stayed there, out to the world. No, he did not come to die as a train rumbled by. He has been murdered. Brutally murdered.

  And that should not have happened to him. It should not happen to anyone, any human being whatsoever. Bikram’s life was sacred. Sacred despite the way he always contrived to get his peon’s khaki shirt and shorts altogether more stained and shabby-looking than those of any of the others fetching and carrying from one Crime Branch cabin to another.

  Yes, despite the drunkenness he was hardly able ever to disguise, Bikram was a man, a human being. He should not have been killed in that appalling manner.

  He looked down again at the bloody mess of the head in the shopping bag on the floor now at his feet. Then he heaved it back again, out of sight beside Inspector Patil’s still-closed typewriter.

  Yes, he reasoned, twisting himself upright again, someone must have brought Bikram’s head, in that bag, from wherever it was that he was killed. They must have carried it here, themselves looking little different from the thousands of other bag-carrying shoppers going each day to markets all over Bombay. But where had this particular one been carried from? Where precisely? Where was it that Bikram’s killer hacked away his life? And then carried that shopping bag from wherever it was he had done it to … to here. Into my cabin. My Crime Branch cabin itself.

  But Bikram’s killer, who can he be? He? Yes, it must be a he, a man, and one ruthless and brutally strong enough to have done what was done. But who can it have been? Who? And where was it that he put drunken Bikram’s head into this particular bag and then carried it right into my cabin? Or …? Yes, this is possible: did he get someone else to carry it here? But who could that be?

  All right, the bag could easily enough have been brought into the Headquarters compound by almost anyone. Inside the compound there are, after all, living quarters for police lower-ranks. The occasional person could wander about there unchallenged at any hour of the night. And my batwing doors are, of course, open to the whole of the compound, which is why at night I have to make sure everything is under lock and key. Yes, if someone wanted – but why should they? – to put Bikram’s head in the very place where the wretched fellow went about his duties, so far as he ever did, then my cabin is where, in the whole of Crime Branch, it could most easily be left.

  But what reason would anyone have to bring Bikram’s head here? In all probability it must surely have been for some specific reason, however it had been managed.

  If whoever killed Bikram in this terrible way had simply wanted to get rid of the evidence they could have simply dropped the body and the head, too, into the sea surrounding almost the whole of the city. Very probably the body itself must already have been consigned to the waters, to be within a short time rendered unidentifiable. Provided it was without a head. So that head would have had to be dealt with in some other way.

  Whoever had hacked it from Bikram’s body could hardl
y have taken it to the new Electric Crematorium that, in growing and growing Bombay, takes some of the burden off the Burning Ghat. But neither did the head have to be brought into Crime Branch. Yes, murder, or rather, patent evidence of murder, had been brought right into Crime Branch itself.

  So … A new thought. Surely that murder must be investigated by Crime Branch, however far removed the case might appear to be from the important and influential affairs the Branch is actually here to handle. However much Bikram was at the very opposite end of that scale.

  So what to do? One answer only. Report this discovery at once to the Head of Crime Branch. To ACP Divekar himself.

  But then yet another thought. One almost as disturbing as the finding of Bikram’s head, if in quite a different way. It is this: might it be that Mr Divekar would give the investigation to the officer who actually discovered the severed head? To me? After all, with the victim being no more than a peon, and a wretched enough one too, the case can really be only a small one. One, isn’t it, quite suitable for a newly arrived officer to try his teeth on?

  Ghote stood looking at the winding stone stair that led, from almost beside the batwing doors of his own cabin, up to the ACP’s airily spacious one on the balcony above. This will be, he thought, only the second time I have entered same. The first was after Superintendent Ghorpade, Crime Branch second-in-command, had shown me, with full explanations and much friendliness, all over our building. Then he took me to Mr Divekar for my official welcome. But that first meeting with the ACP turned out to be more of a warning than a welcome. A warning about the conduct expected of any officer working under him and the strict obedience he required, plus then a little of welcome also.

  But now, up at the top of the winding stairs, on my own, unescorted, I must peer through the little square of glass in the ACP’s door, as I saw Mr Ghorpade do, and make certain Mr Divekar is disengaged. And then …

  Then I must give the door one good hard tap. A much harder tap than the one I gave when waiting outside before. My quiet knock then earned me, as soon as I stood before Mr Divekar, a sharply fierce shelling. Did I not realise it was necessary to knock loudly enough to be heard above the sound of the fans overhead? And those, I saw, were full seven-bladed ones, the whole row of them.