The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery Read online

  ‘If logical methods are logically applied in accordance with accepted world-wide practice, you can rely on them obtaining results, Minister,’ Inspector Ghote said.

  Ram Kamath stood looking at the same blank expanse of wall. In silence.

  Inspector Ghote wondered whether he ought to salute into the air in front of him and go.

  But it seemed that he was expected to stay a little longer. The Minister added one more thing.

  ‘So, Mr Inspector,’ he said, ‘you know one of my little secrets.’

  Slowly he turned round and looked at the inspector through the lenses of his tin spectacles.

  ‘Do you think that is a good thing, Mr Inspector?’ he asked.

  He strode across to the door, opened it and held it wide.

  Inspector Ghote realized that this question would be answered only with the passage of time.

  He saluted and marched out.

  18

  Inspector Ghote did not telephone next morning to find out whether during the night there had been any change in Mr Perfect’s state. Instead he got to the Varde house early, and before doing anything else made his way up to the little room where the old Parsi lay. Try as he might he could not rid himself of the obsessive notion that his personal success and Mr Perfect’s state were bound up with one another. It was not as if he had not told himself a hundred times that such an idea was unworthy of his whole outlook. Yet it was there. Always at the back of his mind like a smooth, dense, black stone embedded at the very bottom of a deep pool. Immovable, adamantine, primeval.

  He found the room intolerably hot and stuffy. The monsoon was due and overdue, and over the city there hung a heavy grey mass of cloud, penning in the heat and making even the sea for those who bathed in it tepid, warm and unpleasant.

  The heaviness and the steamy heat were obviously having their effect on the still unconscious secretary, although the nurse, the competent Anglo-Indian girl, had assured him the moment he entered that there had been no real deterioration. But none the less the old man’s light breathing seemed even more tentative and wavering. His hand, when the inspector gently touched it with his finger tips, was dry and hot as a lizard’s back.

  The inspector glanced up at the useless little fan limping round above him on the ceiling. If the rain of the monsoon did not come soon, he could not believe that Mr Perfect would survive.

  With thoughts blackening moment by moment he went down to the hall where Axel Svensson was waiting for him.

  The big Swede was not looking cheerful, even though he had heard that morning that the boy victim of his car accident had had a good night in the hospital and was now expected to recover.

  ‘How do you find this weather?’ Ghote asked. ‘If you are not used to it, it can be very unpleasant. Myself even I have a little prickly heat at the back of my neck.’

  The Swede nodded seriously.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is certainly a problem there.’

  The little erect old bearer, who had gone to find Neena Varde at their request, returned.

  He salaamed.

  ‘Not at home, sahib,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, “Not at home”?’ Ghote said.

  ‘Gone out, sahib. Don’t know where, sahib.’

  ‘But she can’t have gone out. There’s a constable on the door and he tells me she’s in. And that means she is in.’

  The little bearer bent forward as much as his erectness would let him, but made no other acknowledgement.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Inspector Ghote, ‘I shall have to search the house.’

  He spoke the words bravely enough, but with every syllable he felt the optimism which he had brought from his triumph over the matter of the missing rupee oozing away. What was the good of logic if, when according to simple deduction a person who had not left a house and should therefore be available for interview by a police officer in the course of duty, was simply announced as not being there?

  The prickly heat at the back of his neck, which he had been able to cite with scientific disinterestedness in trying to cheer up Axel Svensson, suddenly began to itch and plague him in earnest.

  He swung irritably round and marched over to the little room off the hall where Mr Perfect had been found lying unconscious.

  ‘Well,’ he shouted, ‘is she in here?’

  She was not. The calm disarray of the little room stared back at him just as it had done on the morning he had taken his painstaking inventory of its contents. The old newspapers, the old books, the keys, the torch, the umbrella, the punctured air cushion, the oil lamp and the tall brass candlestick. Even the golf club which he had sent to the fingerprint bureau had been returned, after its examination had proved negative, almost to the exact place where he had first seen it. With an added jet of bitterness he recalled that the forensic scientists had been downright scathing of the notion that its rounded steel head could possibly have effected the curious long wound on the back of Mr Perfect’s skull.

  He stormed out and angrily began a systematic search of the rest of the house. For more than an hour he tramped round the insane juxtaposition of rooms piled one on top of the other, added to, subtracted from, multiplied indiscriminately. He rummaged through the dark caverns of the servants’ quarters, he forced his way into curious little cellars that had been left for year upon year to the rats. He stared glumly into each of the eight marble bathrooms. He opened cupboards, chests, almirahs, wardrobes. He shouted and he swore.

  The pre-monsoon heat was by this hour at its heaviest. The back of the inspector’s neck felt like emery paper, sweat poured from him at every pore, his clothes stuck to his body and every time he moved tore away with a shimmer of pain. His mouth was parched dry and his throat ached. Inside the house it was not as glaring as it might have been, but the air was so utterly without freshness that breathing was a penance: outside in the compound, where the earth of the flowerbeds was cracked and hard as concrete, the air was a slight degree fresher, but the glare from the flat grey sky was so oppressive that even sunglasses seemed powerless to alleviate it.

  If I suffer like this, thought the inspector, what about that poor old man upstairs? If the rain doesn’t come by this evening, he will die. Murdered by the heat and by a person unknown. Never to be known. The Perfect Murderer.

  At last the whole house had been searched with one exception. The inspector had sent frequent messages to the women’s quarter but he had put off time and again making an actual visit there himself. On each occasion the women servants he had sent scurrying off to ask if Neena Varde was there had come back and had promised and sworn that she was not.

  But nowhere else but the women’s quarter remained.

  Inspector Ghote looked round and spotted another of the women servants flitting towards the inexorably shut door.

  ‘You. You there,’ he called.

  The girl hesitated and then began an undignified scutter towards the protection of the door.

  But the inspector was too quick for her. He ran sharply forward and stood in front of the tall carved wooden door barring the way. A new wave of sweat sprang up on his body after this brief exertion and the prickly heat stung and smarted.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he said to the girl.

  He felt too tired and too sullenly angry to be anything other than bluntly direct.

  ‘Chaya,’ the girl said in a voice little above a whisper.

  She looked down at her neat brown toes and gave a gentle wriggle of embarrassment.

  ‘Very well, Chaya,’ Inspector Ghote said, ‘now listen to me. You are to go into the women’s quarter and you are to say that in one minute I, Inspector Ghote, C.I.D., am coming in after you. Do you understand that?’

  The girl lifted up her face so that her eyes just rested on Inspector Ghote’s for an instant.

  He decided that it was acknowledgement enough.

  He stepped aside from the tall wooden door and in a flash the girl had opened it a few inches and had slipped thro
ugh.

  The inspector stood outside waiting for the minute’s grace he had given to go by. He wondered whether Chaya would have enough courage to speak up with his ultimatum.

  The minute came to its end.

  Inspector Ghote looked at the door. There was something definitely formidable about it.

  He turned to Axel Svensson who had been following him with dog-like fidelity all through his search.

  ‘I think it perhaps would be better if you did not come,’ he said.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Axel Svensson. ‘There is the problem of embarrassment. I perfectly understand.’

  Inspector Ghote turned to the door again.

  He jerked back his shoulders.

  He turned the handle, pushed the door wide open and marched forward.

  It was plain at once that the shy Chaya he had spoken to was a very different person on this side of the tall carved door. She had succeeded in a matter of seconds in rousing the whole garrison. They stood there in front of him shoulder to shoulder, all the various women servants, their saris pulled up over most of their faces and, at the head of the whole array, scorning the protection of so much as an inch of sari, was Lakshmi Varde.

  But Neena was nowhere to be seen.

  Inspector Ghote attempted to restrain himself from licking his upper lip.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Varde madam,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ she replied, ‘I see you had come into our private place.’

  She looked like a stone goddess. Inspector Ghote invoked, with something like passionate devotion, the counter-forces of lucid rationalism.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with outward briskness, ‘unfortunately the officer in charge of a serious case sometimes has to go to the most inner places.’

  He looked steadily at the formidable figure in front of him.

  ‘And sometimes it becomes necessary to ask most intimate questions,’ he added.

  A little to his surprise his firmness of tone won an instant victory. Lakshmi Varde said nothing. But she turned slowly round and looked at her supporters with such imperious coldness that no words were needed.

  In a moment’s soft swishing of saris, faint tinkling of bangles and rapid padding of bare or slippered feet the inspector and Lakshmi were facing each other alone.

  ‘So, Inspector,’ Lakshmi said, ‘you had question to ask in private?’

  Inspector Ghote fervently wished that the enormous blond shadow of Axel Svensson was standing behind him.

  ‘Mrs Varde,’ he said, ‘I have already questioned all the people who were in this house at the time of the attack on Mr Perfect. None of them had alibi. Some of them had possible reasons for wishing to harm the victim. None of them had reason for carrying out the attack at the precise time it occurred. It showed no signs of what we call premeditation: yet who would suddenly wish to kill that old man?’

  He saw Lakshmi Varde’s grey eyebrows beginning to knit together impatiently at his long recital.

  ‘But one fact of importance has however come to light,’ he went on a little hurriedly. ‘It has come to my attention that just before the attack your son Dilip had learnt for the first time about the relations between his wife and a certain important figure.’

  ‘I am knowing nothing of this, Inspector,’ Lakshmi said.

  But she spoke too quickly, she came in too suddenly.

  Inspector Ghote needed only to register a look of disbelief.

  ‘All right,’ Lakshmi said, ‘let me say this. I had been told nothing by my husband. The marriage arrangement was not in my hands.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the inspector. ‘The negotiations, I take it, were conducted by your husband assisted by Mr Perfect.’

  ‘Certainly no.’

  Lakshmi Varde’s eyes blazed with stern anger.

  ‘I think you are not understanding,’ she said. ‘Although my husband made arrangement himself, he would not take anybody from office into his mind for this. And also at that time Mr Perfect was not secretary but clerk only.’

  Inspector Ghote decided that this dismissal of Mr Perfect was not put out simply for his own benefit. There had been something too habitual and unforced about it for him to have any doubts.

  ‘So now we come to the question of Mrs Neena Varde,’ he said.

  ‘Of my daughter-in-law?’

  Lakshmi looked at him haughtily. Too haughtily to be true.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I sent message that I wished to see her. Where is she, please?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  The statement was plainly meant to put him off. Stonily he persisted.

  ‘She has not left the house,’ he said. ‘The doors are watched. She is not to be found elsewhere in the house. I have searched myself. So she must be here.’

  ‘Already I have said. I am not knowing where she is.’

  ‘Then I must ask to search the women’s quarter,’ Inspector Ghote said.

  Lakshmi Varde’s eyes widened with anger. The sides of her mouth pulled sharply down.

  But after a moment she gestured permission without speaking.

  Inspector Ghote made a quick tour of the rooms, one leading to another. There were few places where Neena could be hiding. The inspector opened the three wardrobes he saw, looked at the string beds and lifted the lids of the few trunks he came across. But he found nothing. And he would not let himself be so illogical as to look behind the many pictures of gods and photographs of deceased relatives on the walls or under the grass mats on the floor.

  He did go so far as to prod a huge heap of piled saris in cotton, in silk, in georgette, in chiffon, red, blue, green, orange, pink, yellow, purple, lavender and turquoise, with here and there a glimpse of an embroidered gold or silver border and the sparkle of sewn-on sequins. But his hand plunged down unobstructed to the carved top of the flat wooden chest beneath.

  As the inspector entered each room the women servants scuttled out of it ahead of him. And a pace or two behind him Lakshmi Varde followed, silently regarding his progress.

  A thin chill wind of disapproval.

  Even in the sweltering heat the inspector felt it.

  He completed his tour.

  ‘Well, Inspector,’ Lakshmi said, ‘you have seen all.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have.’

  ‘Then you would leave us in peace now?’

  ‘But first,’ the inspector said, ‘I must ask your daughter-in-law the questions she has run away to stop me putting to her.’

  ‘Understand, Inspector, please,’ Lakshmi replied, ‘I do not perhaps agree with Neena keeping from you. I do not think such thing is necessary. But if she is wishing, it is her affair. If you want to question, you must find her first.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Inspector Ghote. ‘I will go and get her.’

  19

  ‘You know where is Neena?’ said Lakshmi Varde. ‘I am promising –’

  Inspector Ghote raised his hand to stop her.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘do not tell me that she is not here.’

  He turned and walked back through the inter-connecting rooms of the women’s quarter.

  For once defeated absolutely, Lakshmi let him go. Without hesitation he went back to the room where on the low carved chest the rainbow heap of saris lay piled. He swept them off on to the floor with a single gesture, stooped and lifted the richly decorated lid of the chest. And inside, crouching curled like a frightened rodent, was Neena Varde.

  ‘It would be best if you stood up,’ said the inspector.

  Neena struggled out of the confined chest and got to her feet.

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t lie in there if I want to,’ she said.

  She glared defiantly at the inspector.

  ‘Now,’ he said sharply, ‘I want to know what is the connexion between Mr Perfect and your previous relations with Ram Kamath?’

  Behind him he heard Lakshmi shoo away the servants. He paid no attention. Nothing was going to make him relax his scrutiny of every flic
ker of expression on Neena’s face.

  And emotion was certainly being shown there. A conflict of emotion, difficult to assess.

  The inspector looked on, implacable as a camera.

  Suddenly the conflict was resolved.

  Neena burst into wild, broken trills of ringing laughter.

  ‘My poor man,’ she spluttered out at last, ‘how on earth could you think that the two things had anything to do with each other? It’s just ridiculous. That silly old stick of a Mr Perfect having anything to do with my private affairs.’

  She was laughing so much she had to sit back on the lid of the rosewood chest.

  ‘If it wasn’t so funny,’ she said, ‘I’d be furious. What do you mean, you nasty policeman, poking your nose into my business?’

  Inspector Ghote clung on to dignified silence.

  Neena still went on laughing, though by now she had calmed down to the level of occasional bursts of giggles.

  ‘Oh,’ she said after one of these, ‘if I had known you were so stupid I wouldn’t have run away from you for one moment.’

  ‘Then perhaps you would have answered my questions,’ the inspector snapped.

  ‘What questions? What other silly nonsense have you got into your head?’

  ‘Where were you when you were pretending to be lying in your room at the time of the Perfect Murder?’ the inspector shouted suddenly.

  ‘The Perfect Murder.’

  Neena exploded into laughter once more.

  ‘How can you be so silly?’ she said at last. ‘That dreadful old Parsi is still lying up there as alive as can be. What a murder.’

  Inspector Ghote felt a flush of irrational relief at the reminder, however humiliatingly put, that Mr Perfect was after all still alive, still just alive.

  But the relief did not last long. Within instants it was swept away by a new anxiety coupled with fury at having been betrayed into thinking once again of the attack on the old Parsi as the Perfect Murder.

  He stepped nearer the still-laughing Neena.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he hissed. ‘Be quiet. Do you want the whole house to hear what is being said?’

  Neena wiped the tears from her eyes. A streak of wet mascara was left smeared across the top of her cheek.