The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery Read online

  ‘Oh, oh,’ said the bull’s keeper. ‘Oh, oh, that is much to ask.’

  ‘It is in the interests of justice,’ Axel Svensson said.

  ‘But a question like that, it will be very difficult for Bhole Nath to find answer,’ said the keeper.

  ‘But let him employ the ancient magic of the East,’ Axel Svensson cried.

  ‘Lord Siva knows everything,’ said the keeper, ‘but he does not always think it good for what he knows to be revealed.’

  ‘But –’

  From the far side of the now wildly curious crowd Inspector Ghote called sharply across to the big Swede.

  ‘Money. He wants money.’

  This streak of material consideration in a mystical matter momentarily discomposed Axel Svensson. But his inner struggle was mercifully brief and in a few instants he was pushing note after note into the keeper’s hand. Bhole Nath could scarcely refuse to answer now.

  The keeper turned to his charge and put Axel Svensson’s question again.

  ‘Bhole Nath, Bhole Nath, that man there, has he taken money from his master?’

  Slowly the gaudily caparisoned bull advanced. Felix Sousa shrank back.

  But the crowd was not going to be cheated of a sight like this. Inflexibly they pressed forward behind the tubby little Goan till he and Bhole Nath were face to face.

  The bull with its great limpid peering eyes was unquestionably the more dignified of the two. Minute after minute it scrutinized the flabby cheeks and quivering lips of the peon.

  And then unmistakably and with entire solemnity it nodded its great head to indicate the answer to Axel Svensson’s question. Had Felix Sousa stolen from the Minister?

  Yes.

  And at once the prognostication received complete justification. Felix Sousa collapsed on to his knees and babbled out a confession.

  ‘Yes, yes, it is true,’ he blabbered. ‘Yes, it is true. I have stolen. I have stolen from the Minister.’

  11

  Inspector Ghote and Axel Svensson leapt forward. Side by side they stood in front of the incoherently weeping Goan peon.

  ‘You stole from the Minister?’ Ghote said.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. By god, yes. I stole every damn thing I could. Oh, by god, yes, I am a wicked man.’

  ‘Every damn thing?’ Ghote said.

  ‘Every damn thing, by god. I stole with the utmost damned rapidity.’

  Axel Svensson’s clear blue eyes shone with a pure excitement.

  ‘The mysterious East, the mysterious East,’ he said. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘You stole a one-rupee note from the Minister’s desk yesterday?’ Ghote asked implacably.

  ‘Everything, everything. I damn well stole every – No, no, no, no. I never took that bloody damned one-rupee note.’

  Axel Svensson gripped Inspector Ghote’s knobby elbow.

  ‘Is he saying he didn’t?’ he asked passionately.

  Inspector Ghote relaxed. He turned to the bear-like Swede.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘that’s just what he is saying.’

  ‘But is it true?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Inspector Ghote, ‘it’s true. You heard him. He said “no” four times at least. That means “no”. If he’d said it once it would have meant “yes”. Twice would have meant “perhaps”. Three times “no”. And he said it four times or more.’

  ‘So it’s “no”,’ said the Swede. ‘We are back to the beginning once more. He didn’t steal the rupee.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sahib, by god, that’s right,’ Felix Sousa said from down on the filthy ground. ‘By god, that’s right. All the time I am stealing from the Minister. One, two, three, four. Just like that. But yesterday I couldn’t steal nothing. That damned Mr Jain he wouldn’t let me go into the Minister’s room. Not never, not damned once.’

  Inspector Ghote looked round the busy streets running each way from the corner where Bhole Nath had put on his act. As he had hoped, watching the scene covertly from a distance was a police patrolman. The inspector beckoned to him. For a few seconds the constable tried to pretend he was looking the other way, but eventually he broke down and came over at the double.

  He saluted.

  ‘Take this man to your nearest chowkey,’ Inspector Ghote said. ‘Lock him up there, and charge him with theft from Shri Ram Kamath, Minister for Police Affairs and the Arts.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Inspector sahib,’ said the constable.

  He seized Felix Sousa and hauled him to his feet. Inspector Ghote watched them go and sighed.

  He turned to Axel Svensson.

  ‘I think there would be a telephone in that big shop over there,’ he said. ‘I have to make a call.’

  The big Swede tramped along beside him to the shop and waited while he asked for the sickeningly familiar Varde number. He wished he could have stopped himself. He knew it was wrong to have allowed this totally illogical link to spring up between his success with the case and the life or death of the old Parsi, but he could not suppress it. It was stronger than even the best of his intentions.

  His anxiety was neither allayed nor worsened when he got through. The bearer who answered had just seen Doctor Das go up to Mr Perfect’s room. He had been hurrying, but looked cheerful.

  So presumably Mr Perfect was still alive. But the doctor had been hurrying. Inspector Ghote felt suspended, waiting.

  He paid for the call and looked at Axel Svensson.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said. ‘But I am hot. Let’s relax a moment and have a drink somewhere.’

  The Swede unexpectedly groaned.

  ‘That is something I cannot learn to tolerate,’ he said. ‘Always my Indian friends are suggesting a drink, and nine times out of ten it is sticky coloured water, or sherbert or buttermilk, or orange juice they are drinking.’

  ‘This time it is sticky coloured water,’ Inspector Ghote said. ‘There’s a halwa stall over there. Let’s go.’

  ‘To a sweetshop when one wants a drink,’ said the Swede.

  He groaned again.

  A few people from the crowd round Bhole Nath had got to the stall before them, although during the bull’s performance the enormously fat merchant who presided over the stall, aided by a pathetically thin boy, had been completely deprived of custom. It appeared that the merchant had not liked to desert his post in case of wholesale pillage, but he had made up for this by tormenting his young assistant. The two or three customers standing in front of the stall drinking buttermilk from tall brass tumblers did not keep him so busy that he was unable to continue this pleasurable activity.

  It consisted of shouting an order to the emaciated brat to move one of the many trays of variegated sweetmeats, yellow, green, white, pink or prettily covered in silver foil, to a position on the stall supposed to be more advantageous to trade, and before the boy had had time to adjust the trays and dishes to order him to move something else to somewhere else. Even before the inspector’s arrival this had produced considerable confusion in the not noticeably well ordered stall. Dishes of one sweet had been placed precariously on top of dishes of another. Trays had been left here and there on the ground round about while the xylophone-ribbed boy had dashed to the other end of the stall in obedience to a fresh bellow from its owner. Jars of buttermilk and jars of fruit juice had become inextricably confused.

  The only beneficial result had been to keep the tribes of flies that beleaguered the stall in more than usual movement.

  The inspector ordered a bottle of mineral water for himself.

  ‘I might as well have one too,’ said Axel Svensson resignedly.

  ‘Yes, sahib. Certainly, sahib,’ the merchant replied, bending obsequiously forward from the coil of fat that represented his waist. ‘Pink mineral, sahib, or yellow mineral?’

  ‘What are the flavours?’ said the Swede.

  ‘Very good flavours, sahib. Best flavours out.’

  ‘Yes, but what –’

  The inspector interrupted.

  ‘It makes no differen
ce,’ he said. ‘It is only coloured and sweetened water anyhow.’

  The gross merchant smiled a sickly smile.

  ‘Then pink,’ said Axel Svensson. ‘It looks less like real liquor than yellow.’

  ‘Two pink,’ the inspector said.

  The merchant served them, puffing and panting as he leant slightly forward from his sitting position behind the stall. And then while the inspector and his towering European companion looked on at the array of sweets – rasgullas, gulab jamuns, jelabis, chiwaras – with increasing moroseness, the fat old man turned back to his sport.

  He stormed out another volley of commands at the poor emaciated boy, and hardly had the lad scuttled off to perform them than a contradictory series was bellowed after him. In the meanwhile the merchant put out an immensely podgy hand and let it hover meditatively over that section of his stock which he could reach without disturbing himself.

  At last Inspector Ghote saw him pick on one particular sweetmeat, one so ravaged by the flies that no customer was likely to choose it. The merchant scooped the sticky green mass from out of its little earthenware container and conveyed it between fat-encased fingers towards his mouth. Even at this point he could scarcely bring himself wantonly to destroy some of his stock in trade. But at last greed overcame avarice, as to judge from the heavy rolls of flesh that spread downwards from his neck it must have often done before, and the great fat man took a tiny nibble.

  Savouring it, his eyes fell on the scrabbling matchstick-legged boy. He smiled beatifically, and reaching forward as far as he could without toppling over he placed what was left of the green sweetmeat within the boy’s field of vision. Then he turned away and began a jocular conversation with two of the customers spinning out their tumblers of buttermilk.

  But all the while he kept the corner of his eye on the green, sticky, half-consumed bait.

  And at last he was rewarded. The boy, who looked as hungry as a jackal in a famine, was unable to resist any longer. With trembling caution his thin fingers stretched out towards the sweet. And the great tub of fat pounced. His squabby hand closed like a swath of fat tentacles round the almost fleshless wrist of the boy and his mouth opened to pour out a compacted stream of abuse.

  ‘Hey, there, halwa wallah,’ snapped Inspector Ghote. ‘Some more drink. And quick. The police force cannot be kept waiting all day.’

  The merchant hastily let the boy go, heaved himself to his feet, brought two fresh bottles of his sticky concoction and poured them out into the already used glasses. While the inspector and Axel Svensson quickly drank down the slightly cooling liquid, the merchant carefully retrieved the first two bottles ready to fill them up again that evening and restore their labels to something like the state in which they had once emerged from the factory.

  As the big Swede set down his glass he turned to the inspector.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it is back to the Perfect Murder now?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Inspector Ghote snapped in sudden fury. ‘No, it is not the Perfect Murder. It must not be that yet. It cannot be.’

  ‘Very well,’ Axel Svensson said soberly. ‘Let us say “back to the Perfect case”. I am sorry.’

  ‘I am sorry too,’ said the inspector. ‘And you are right: it is important to get back. Too many things have been left for too long. But first there is one thing I must do: I must arrange to see Shri Ram Kamath.’

  ‘See the Minister for Police Affairs?’

  The Swede sounded disconcerted.

  Inspector Ghote’s small mouth set in a determined line.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the Minister himself and no one else.’

  ‘But, my friend,’ said the Swede.

  He laid a gentle restraining paw on the inspector’s arm.

  ‘But, my friend, is that wise? Did I not hear that the D.S.P. himself had advised the utmost tact over this matter? I am sure he didn’t intend you to see the Minister, and I am sure the Minister will not want to be disturbed by the inquiries of a simple inspector. If you don’t mind my saying this.’

  Inspector Ghote looked at him with hard eyes.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I shall have to see the Minister. I have only just realized it, but I shall have to do it.’

  The whole expression of his face was stonily glum.

  ‘But why? Why, my friend? Please, please, think what it is you are going to do.’

  ‘Can you not see?’ Inspector Ghote said in a dreamily distant voice. ‘There is only one course of action for me.’

  ‘But, listen. That man, Felix Sousa, he may not have actually taken the missing note. But he has confessed to stealing from the Minister before. If you prosecute him, that will be enough. The case will be closed. Even, if you wish, you could bring up the matter of the note. No magistrate would find him Not Guilty over that, and Guilty on the other. You have no need to worry any more about the missing rupee, my friend.’

  ‘No,’ said Inspector Ghote, ‘I must see the Minister himself.’

  He marched back to the shop where he had telephoned to the Varde house. Axel Svensson went back to the vehicle and sat beside the impassive driver, who smelled powerfully of sweat, and waited. His face bore an expression almost of pity.

  Quite soon Inspector Ghote came pushing back through the milling crowds.

  ‘Well?’ said the big Swede.

  ‘I have an appointment for 9 a.m. tomorrow,’ the inspector said.

  For all the length of the journey to Lala Varde’s house he remained quite silent.

  As soon as they arrived he asked the bearer who opened the door, the erect little ramrod man, whether Doctor Das was still with Mr Perfect.

  He did not dare to put the question he really wanted answered: whether Mr Perfect was still with the living, or whether his life had in ever slower breaths leaked at last away, leaving a black insoluble mystery as its only bequest.

  But the little bearer’s face split into a silent grin at his query.

  ‘Doctor left, sahib,’ he said. ‘Told lady-nurse one or two nasty things. She made goddam mistake, Inspector sahib. Made doctor sahib come running for no need.’

  He chuckled hoarsely, struggling to keep his utterly rigid back unquavering in spite of his mirth.

  Inspector Ghote was possessed by a fierce desire to put the man to a probing examination about the exact state of Mr Perfect’s health. He wanted to know to the last tenth of a symptom whether the nurse had had any reason or none to summon Doctor Das. But the dry little bearer laughed so long that by the end of it he had had time to realize that the man would know nothing.

  ‘I have come to see Mr Prem,’ he said when he thought he would be heard with attention.

  ‘Yes, sahib. Very good, Inspector sahib.’

  The little bearer, still occasionally letting out a hoarse steamjet of dry laughter at the thought of the lady-nurse’s discomfiture, led them into the house. Axel Svensson, trying comically to shorten his immense strides to the bearer’s inflexible trot, leant down to the inspector and put an inquiry in a circumspectly low voice.

  ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘do you think it is important, then, to find out what these two brothers were talking about on the night of the attack?’

  ‘But you remember what Doctor Gross says?’

  The Swede’s clear blue eyes clouded in thought.

  ‘I do not seem exactly to recall his observations,’ he said at last.

  ‘Surely you cannot be forgetting “Nothing comes about which is inexplicable, isolated, incoherent”?’ said the inspector.

  ‘No, no, of course not. I see what you mean now. Yes, yes. It is a very good point. This conversation is indeed unexplained, and isolated. It certainly ought to be investigated most closely.’

  ‘And besides,’ the inspector confessed, ‘so far it is the nearest I have been able to get to anything which looks as if it should not be. Lala Varde and Dilip have denied and denied so often that I have not even begun to find out what they know.’

  He walke
d along beside the tall Swede looking despondent. When they came to the second-string sitting-room where the inspector had caught Prem trying to overhear their conversation the little bearer pointed to the doorway, jerked out a stiff salaam, and left them.

  The inspector stood and looked into the quiet room with its overstuffed European furniture. Prem was standing by the window gazing out on to the deserted inner compound of the house. There did not seem to be anything much for him to be looking at.

  At the sound of the inspector’s steps on the stone floor he wheeled round.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you, Inspector. I thought I would be seeing you again before long. Well, let me tell you straight away. I have changed my mind. I refuse to tell one word of what Dilip said to me on the night of the murder.’

  Inspector Ghote thought hard and quickly. Then he answered.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have made decision, and you must stick to it. I respect it absolutely.’

  Prem’s head jerked forward and he gave the inspector a suspicious glance.

  ‘But –’ he said. ‘But – But you must not do that. A police inspector has no right not to ask questions.’

  The inspector smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you think it is my duty to get information out of you somehow, do you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is. And it is my duty not to let you have it.’

  ‘This is a very hard view,’ Inspector Ghote said.

  ‘It is only possible view,’ Prem answered.

  He sounded passionate.

  ‘It is only possible view,’ he repeated. ‘You are here to do what a policeman has to do: I am here to do what a murder suspect has to do.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said the inspector. ‘Each has to play his part, is that what it is?’

  Prem stared at him sullenly and said nothing.

  ‘But, listen,’ said the inspector, ‘what must happen if you got hold of the wrong part?’

  ‘The wrong part?’

  ‘Yes. Suppose you are not murder suspect.’

  ‘But I am. I must be.’

  ‘You must be? I do not know why that is so.’

  ‘Because a murder was committed in this house. No one could get in. Even the servants were locked in their quarters. And I was one of the people in the house. I have no alibi. I must be suspect.’