Go West, Inspector Ghote Page 8

  “Yes,” said Emily.

  It was the merest whisper of a word.

  “That was something you did not want to hear, what Swami said up here with Mrs. Russell Walters?” Ghote said. “Up to then you had still believed in Swami, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I came here—”

  She checked herself.

  “Oh, how’s anybody to know?” she said. “I guess Swami needs a car. And if he’s going to ask for one with quadrophonic speakers in it, TV set, phone, CB radio, refrigerator, the very best you can buy, well if he wants everything Mrs. Russell Walters is ready to get for him, then …”

  “But how does he know just what is the best car?” Ghote persisted. “If he is going to tell Mrs. Russell Walters just what he is wanting, how does he know which make to say?”

  “Brochures,” Emily answered simply. “That’s why I knew he was telling her a downright lie. He’d asked me to get him all the brochures and the car magazines I could lay my hands on. He’s got a whole pile of them in his own house, the place with the orange roof, you know. They’re there right now.”

  She sounded like someone who has run the hardest race of her life. And lost at the tape.

  Ghote looked at her.

  “Miss Emily,” he said, “do not forget one thing.”

  She gave him a quick glance, a sudden flicker of new hope.

  “Do not forget this, Miss Emily. When I came into the hall here I had just been having a long, long air journey all the way from Bombay. My head was beating and beating. And Swami took one look at me right across to near the doors over there, and he knew at once. He knew and he called to me, and then he put his hand on my neck, Miss Emily, and the pain went. The pain went.”

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, it’s true, isn’t it? There is something else. There is more to this world than—than, oh, business and cheating guys and tennis and boys and making some bucks and fixing yourself up with the best condo on the block. There is, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” said Ghote. “There is.”

  SIX

  It was almost midnight at the ashram. Inspector Ghote stood some hundred yards downhill from the circle of buildings at the heart of the place, his back to the harsh, flaky-barked trunk of a redwood tree, breathing in the cool, odiferous air. Above, the sky was pricked with an infinite quantity of stars, seemingly smaller, harder and more diamond-like than the familiar rich spangling of the Indian night.

  Ahead all appeared to be profoundly quiet. The ashram’s disciples in their huts and tents scattered through the forest were surely all blamelessly sleeping. And under the white dome of the Meditation Hall, palely visible against the distant sky, Swami With No Name must be sitting, upright of back, feet tucked against the inner side of his thighs, soundlessly meditating on his tiger skin.

  Or would he be?

  Was he really a meditator? Or was he no more than a confidence trickster? A man not much different from a dozen clever criminals encountered over the years in Bombay, if perhaps as clever or more clever even, more ruthless even, than any of them?

  For the umpteenth time Ghote debated it in his head. And came, once more, to the same conclusion. The swami was a man who had developed in himself a power quite different from the everyday feelings, the lust for fame, money or influence that otherwise might motivate him. Yes, he was capable of truly meditating. He was capable of curing in an instant with a firm touch of his unnaturally warm hand a pounding headache.

  So now, surely, he would be there in the Meditation Hall in that deep state of inner-directed striving they called samadhi. And there would therefore be nothing to prevent a person who lived in the ordinary world and who had enough determination from entering the fellow’s extraordinary orange-roofed private house and making sure that there, ready to be shown to Nirmala Shahani as soon as he could get hold of her, was a solid pile of richly printed brochures and magazines detailing every last advantage of the best and most expensive automobiles to be found in the American market.

  Ghote momentarily bit his lower lip. He was going to beat this fellow. He was going to wrest the girl he had been sent to rescue from his grasp and take her away to her rightful home.

  He set off up the hill.

  He felt alertly ready for the task he had set himself. He had had five hours of solid sleep in a nearby motel. Fred Hoskins had insisted on getting him a room with a waterbed, but even the curious rolling motion underneath him had not, thanks to his extreme fatigue, succeeded in keeping him awake for even a few minutes. He had, too, eaten a good meal, a huge glass of fresh orange-juice, machine-extracted in front of his eyes from oranges so large that he had not been able to prevent himself expecting to smell the sharp tang of grapefruit, with a plate of fried eggs, again so big that he had not liked to think of the chickens that could lay them. Even having to watch Fred Hoskins, seated opposite him, ravenously demolish a hardly-cooked steak so huge that it lolloped over the edges of the plate had not put him off.

  And—he chuckled quietly to himself—he had succeeded in avoiding any unwanted assistance now by telling the jutting-bellied private eye after the meal that he wanted to go back to that waterbed. He had even offered the opinion, in a major sacrifice of truthfulness, that the thing was a very great improvement on the rope-strung charpoy of India. And then he had slipped out of the window of his room at the back of the motel and had briskly walked the four or five miles back to the ashram.

  Just short of the inner circle he came to a halt again.

  Swami’s extraordinary, spiralling-roofed house was only some twenty yards distant and the big white dome of the Meditation Hall another twenty or thirty yards farther on. There was still no sign of life anywhere. Not a light in any of the other buildings of the circle. Not a sound.

  A few careful, careless questions to the disciple who had resumed his duties at the Visitors’ Centre on their way to the motel had elicited the information that Swami’s house consisted in fact of no more than one large room under its orange roof, partitioned off at the back into a small bedroom and a small bathroom. The disciple had said proudly that Swami had designed the whole place himself in one long session of meditation. An architect called in to bring it to reality had declared that its high-spiralling, flyaway roof, conceived of as illustrating man’s soaring soul, was impossible of construction. “But we did it. We all just pitched in thinking of Swami, and there it was.”

  Ghote maintained his watch on the house for another full five minutes and then slowly and cautiously he approached the building and began to walk round it, peering hard in the dim light of the moonless night at its rough log walls, at the eaves of its roof above them. There seemed to be nothing to give him any cause for doubts. The logs were solidly set together, thick and substantial, and there was nothing else but them. Not a single window, not a ventilator, even at the back where presumably bathroom and bedroom were.

  Then, with a suddenness that sent his heart beating and racing, he walked straight into something. His shin came into sharp contact with a metallic object and there was a jangle of sound.

  In the still darkness it seemed so noisy that he expected in an instant voices would be raised everywhere, feet would come running.

  He stood absolutely still.

  And nothing happened. His heart slowed to its accustomed pace, and he realised that in fact the noise made by whatever it was he had stumbled on had not been very loud.

  He peered downwards.

  It was a bicycle. The bicycle he had looked at as he had walked through the passageway between Swami’s house and the ashram dining-hall when he had first been going to the Meditation Hall. The ancient bicycle that had, because of the familiarity of its half-repaired state, given him at that moment a much-needed burst of confidence. He saw that it had in fact been moved a little from its original position. Evidently whoever owned it had made one more attempt at repairing it—they seemed to have gone off with its damaged inner tube—and had left it sticking farther out into the passagew
ay.

  Well, once more life’s intractabilities seemed to have defeated someone. And, once more, paradoxically, this gave him a spurt of confidence.

  Yes, all was well. No one was near and there was nothing to prevent him just going into this strange-looking building, seeing what he wanted to see and quietly leaving, ready as soon as he could find Nirmala Shahani’s hut to prove his rash assertion to her about Swami’s integrity. The two of them could be on a plane to Bombay together before the next day was out. Perhaps within a week even he himself would be in Banares, with Protima beside him no longer bitterly accusing, listening to the words of some real swamis—and perhaps noting some he could confidently put down as fakes.

  There would be no difficulty about getting into the house either, not if what the disciple at the Visitors’ Centre had said was true.

  “We can always go right ahead and see Swamiji, you know. The doors of his house are never locked. No doors in the ashram have locks. We can just walk right in on Swami, only, of course, we never do.”

  “No, no. Of course not. That would be quite wrong.”

  It had been a little heartless to play up to the young enthusiast like that. But there was a task to be carried out.

  He took one last look round. Under the cold glittering Californian stars all was hushedly still.

  He marched over to the couple of steps leading up to the doors of the house, paused at the top and then gently pushed. With only the faintest of creaks the doors gave way in front of him.

  A single quiet step and he was inside.

  Once the doors were closed behind him he dared bring out the flashlight he had bought at the motel shop. Fred Hoskins had given him a tremendous lecturing when he had made out before going to bed that he was afraid the power supply at the place might fail, but he had defied his scorn and made the purchase. By the flashlight beam he saw now that the young man at the Visitors’ Centre had misled him a little. Swami’s house did not consist only of the one large room with a bedroom and bathroom at the back. He was still only in an entrance lobby, presumably a place where people coming in to see the great man could leave their shoes, and perhaps their logic too.

  He stooped and removed his own shoes, placing them carefully just beside the open double doors, pointing outwards—the need for silence rather than respect, he thought with a hint of a smile. And there was no harm in putting them where he could scoop them up if he should have to leave in a hurry.

  He could make out all of the lobby now, not that there was a great deal to see, just a small statue of the Dancing Nataraj on a tall pedestal and the single plain door that led into the interior of the building.

  With minute care he turned the doorknob and exerted a little pressure. The door moved open easily. But the instant it began to do so he saw that the room on the far side was bright with light. The solid door had blotted it all out till now.

  He took his hand away, extinguished his flashlight and left the door the merest quarter of an inch open. Was Swami here and not in the Meditation Hall after all?

  As unmoving as the statue on its pillar beside him, he stood and thought.

  Should he simply creep away? Or should he chance it on the supposition that Swami had simply left the lights on inside when he had gone out? Was the fellow meditating where he had said he would be, a true yogi despite the signs of greed he had shown over Mrs. Russell Walters and her offer? Or was he lying alseep inside, in the far bedroom, a grin of triumph on his trickster’s face?

  He turned his head so that his ear was near as possible to the crack at the edge of the door. Could he hear anything? Was there anything to hear?

  No. No, he was certain. There was nothing. Not even the faintest sound of breathing.

  He decided suddenly to risk it. If Swami was there inside, he could pretend that he had come to see him, that he was seeking guidance even, that he did not know the fellow was supposed to be elsewhere.

  For a few extra seconds he continued to listen at the door-crack. But there was nothing. Not the slightest of moans, not a sigh.

  He thrust the heavy door wide.

  Swami With No Name, at once yogi and cunning cheat, was lying flat on his back in the centre of the large, almost bare room. His throat was cut from ear to ear.

  Bare-chested with only a silken orange dhoti round his middle and the thick black cord of a sacred necklace across his ample, palely brown chest, he lay with his head seemingly tossed back and his thick curling black locks spread out round it on the bare polished boards of the floor. The blood from the gaping wound in his neck had collected in a small puddle beside him, and as Ghote stood there, shocked into immobility, suddenly its surface tension broke and a thin trickle ran out a few inches farther over the close-boarded floor.

  The sudden tiny shocking little event brought Ghote at once back to life. And to the instant realisation of what in fact that event meant.

  If the blood was still liquid like that, the man must have been killed only minutes earlier. Not more than ten minutes at the most. Blood congealed at least that quickly: It was a fact he remembered from lectures in his days at Police College.

  So Swami must have been alive still when he himself had gone prowling round the outside of this house. But then whoever had killed him—and there was no weapon here, he must have been killed by someone—must still be inside the house. They must be. During the time he had made his circuit of the building the area immediately in front of it had not been out of his sight for more than four or five seconds while he had walked past the back wall. No one could have come out and walked away without him seeing them. They could not.

  Swiftly, in his socked feet, Ghote moved towards the two doors at the back of the big, bare room. The doors to Swami’s bedroom and his bathroom. The killer must be behind one or the other of them.

  But which?

  Impossible to decide.

  He gave the floor in front of each door a long, careful inspection under the bright glare of light that came from the four separate globes in the neatly wood-panelled ceiling. There was not the least sign to indicate that anyone had gone through one rather than the other, not a pine-needle off the bottom of a shoe, not a crumb of red earth.

  And in the room itself—he looked back at it—there was nowhere where anybody could possibly be hiding. The sole piece of furniture was a sort of low throne against one of the bare walls, a mattress covered in yellow silk with some cushions on it. Besides that there was nothing, unless you counted an incongruous telephone on the floor beside the yellow-silk throne, a gleaming, all-white telephone. Otherwise everything was strikingly bare.

  So into which little room at the back had the murderer gone? Into Swami’s bedroom? Or his bathroom?

  And which in fact was which? There was no telling. The two doors were identical, solid blanks of light-coloured wood like the door from the lobby.

  There was nothing to choose between them. And yet behind one of them there must be standing the person who had murdered Swami. Armed with the very knife or dagger he had used. And ready, no doubt, to use it again. It must have been the faint creak which the outer doors had made when he had pushed them gently open that had alerted the killer. In the short time that he himself had been standing in the lobby, taking off his shoes and looking at the Dancing Nataraj on its pedestal and the oblong of the door in front of him, the murderer must have silently retreated into one of these two rooms.

  But which? Which?

  He must make up his mind one way or the other within the next few seconds. If he was to keep any vestige of surprise on his side—and, unarmed as he was, he would need all the surprise he could find if he was going to subdue whoever held that appallingly sharp knife—then every half-second ticking away counted.

  He slid on socked feet towards the door on his left, shot out his left hand to its handle, paused for one heartbeat more and then in one swift continuing movement jerked it round and swung his right shoulder hard against the door.

  It hurtled back.
<
br />   And the room that confronted him—it was the bedroom, with a wide bed that was solid to the ground with two shallow drawers under it and, yes, a pile of brightly-coloured pamphlets beside it—was plainly empty. Its door had crashed right back against the wall. There was nowhere where anybody could be crouched ready to spring.

  The moment he had realised this he had jumped back into the big, bare main room and had braced himself to meet an onslaught from someone coming hurtling out through the other door—with that terribly honed knife raised high. After the explosion of noise the door he had thrust open had made he could expect nothing else.

  One second passed. Two. Three.

  Whoever he was, was taking his time. Perhaps he had succeeded in checking his immediate impulse to come rushing out. Perhaps he had decided he would do better to wait for the intruder to come to him.

  And perhaps he was right. He would know exactly what to expect now. The swift turning of the doorknob, followed immediately by the door banging hard back. So the killer could plan his counteraction in advance. Be ready, tensed to spring, from whatever part of the little bathroom best suited his purpose.

  So should he too wait it out?

  Ghote was tempted. It would be a lot less frightening than going head-first into danger. But a moment’s thought made him realise that the killer in the bathroom would not wait for ever. If he were to stay in there too long, he would be trapped. The ashram disciples would begin to stir perhaps as early as five o’clock so as to be ready for the announcement that Swami was supposed to be going to make at six. There was always the chance, too, that someone would be about even earlier. It would need only a shout to summon them. And once there was more than one person to deal with, the chance of escape would be cut away to almost nothing. No, the killer could not afford to wait too long.

  So at some time in the next few minutes that door would fly open and he would be confronted with a murderer armed with a deadly knife. Better then to attack first again himself. And, if that was to be done, do it at once.