The Perfect Murder: the First Inspector Ghote Mystery Read online

  ‘But he told me you insisted on asking him what he did at each moment of last evening.’

  ‘But, of course, sahib. I had to ask him that. Mr Perfect was attacked in this house last night. He is in danger of death. The door was bolted, the windows are fitted with grilles, the servants were locked away in their quarters, it is essential that I know where everybody in the house was.’

  Inspector Ghote stood to attention. He was thinking about Mr Perfect. Was he in fact still alive? Was the case still one which he could hope to deal with successfully?

  Lala Varde looked sombrely down at the shining leather of the inspector’s belt.

  ‘Yes. He has to know.’

  It was Axel Svensson.

  ‘You understand, Mr Varde,’ he went on, ‘a policeman has to know the whereabouts of every possible witness when a crime of this sort has been committed. When he knows that, he knows what can and cannot have happened. Inspector Ghote needed your son’s statement as evidence.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Lala Varde.

  A great smile spread across his face.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now I am understanding. You must excuse an old man like me, Inspector. I am a silly old man only. I do not understand your time-table fables. But if you say it is important, then I will believe you.’

  He shook his head sadly.

  ‘You cannot expect a boy like Dilip to understand, though,’ he said. ‘It is all right for me, you know. I have a head on my shoulders good and hard.’

  He grasped his huge head in between two widespread palms and shook it slightly from side to side.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘good and hard. But Dilip. My poor Dilip does not understand things, Inspector. He does not understand.’

  He looked round with new belligerence.

  ‘Why should he understand?’ he went on. ‘Why should a son of Lala Arun Varde understand? He does not need to understand. It is all right for his old father to have to understand things, and how the world is run. But Dilip does not need to worry his head with that. He can worry about better things. My Dilip has great worries about family honour. All the time he worries about his honour. When you have plenty of money punny behind you, Inspector, you can do that, you know.’

  ‘I am afraid I do not –’ the inspector began rather stiffly.

  But there was no stopping Lala Varde.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘it is a good thing that Dilip does not have to understand business matters. I let him have an office of his own, of course. Best air-conditioning, direct import ex-U.S., carpets wall to wall, Coke machine, everything he wants. But I do not let him get in the way. I set him up in the Delhi branch, but, by god, I took care that all Delhi business was done from Bombay office. And when he tried to give orders I had to bring him back pretty damn quick, eh?’

  Inspector Ghote looked politely interested.

  ‘Ah,’ Lala Varde said, ‘I don’t say he isn’t a very useful person to have in the business though. I tell you he is worth every anna of what he is paid. Every anna. If I want to do business with an American firm or a British, is it any good them coming to me, Lala Varde? I ask you, is it?’

  Axel Svensson gave a slight chuckle.

  ‘I think you might be too smart for them, Mr Varde,’ he said.

  Lala Varde looked at him. He slapped his belly and roared with laughter.

  ‘Oh, Mr Svensson, Mr Svensson,’ he said, ‘you are a great joker, I see.’

  He wiped his eyes with the back of a podgy hand.

  ‘But you are right,’ he said. ‘You are right. If I have to do business with an American firm they think I am cheating always. But with my Dilip they say “Ah, here is guy we can do business with.” No? They think they can cheat him. Yes?’

  A new gusher of laughter stopped him going on.

  Inspector Ghote decided that it was time he took control. Each occasion he had had to deal with Lala Varde had been the same: events had got wrested out of his hands. He was a police officer in the course of his duties. There were matters he had to investigate. And investigate them he would. In the proper manner. No matter whom he was talking to.

  ‘Mr Varde,’ he said.

  To his surprise he found that he had shouted.

  But at least it had the effect of stopping Lala Varde’s laugh.

  ‘Mr Varde,’ the inspector said more quietly, ‘now that you have said you understand why certain questions must be asked, there is a matter I wish to put to you yourself.’

  He gave a dry little cough.

  ‘Mr Varde, what were your movements after you had had dinner last night?’

  Lala Varde looked at him with astonishment like a great buffalo suddenly called on to dance a foxtrot.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘You are asking me what I was doing when they committed the Perfect Murder in my house? You are asking Lala Arun Varde to account for his movements? You are treating him like a dacoit? Have you gone mad, Inspector? Has a brainstorm come into your head? Do you know even what you are saying?’

  Inspector Ghote backed a step.

  ‘But, Mr Varde, but, sahib,’ he said, ‘already it has been explained to you by Mr Svensson, by my friend. It is necessary for the investigating officer to acquaint himself with the movements of everybody at the scene of the crime, irrespective of whether they are likely to have committed it or not. It is part of the official procedure as laid down.’

  ‘Laid down, spade down. I am not going to be made part of your procedures, Mr Inspector. When you are dealing with Arun Varde you are dealing with somebody different. You can’t go asking me your questions, and you can’t go asking my son either. I will send him back to Delhi tomorrow. I will send him to England. I will send him to America. But you shall not ask him one bit of one single question.’

  ‘Mr Varde,’ said Inspector Ghote. ‘You are attempting to interfere with a police officer in the course of his duties. I must warn you that that is a very serious matter.’

  ‘You must warn me?’

  Lala Varde’s face took on an expression of concentrated explosiveness.

  ‘You must warn me?’ he repeated. ‘Oh, no, Inspector. I must warn you. Oh, yes indeed. I must warn you. One bit more of this and you will be out of inspector just like that. Back in constable you will be. Back walking the streets, and in the poorest quarter too. One, two. Just like that.’

  Inspector Ghote listened to the tirade with little gushes of hot anger shooting out inside him till he felt on the point of bursting. Threatening a police officer. Who did he think he was? He needed to be shown pretty quick that that sort of thing didn’t work in Ind –

  And the trickle of cold doubt. Hadn’t he heard gossip at the station? Perhaps he couldn’t of his own knowledge pin down a case of an officer having been sent back to the ranks, dismissed the force even, because he had trodden on someone’s toes. But he had heard stories. Most unpleasant stories.

  The thought of his wife, of his boy Ved, of their neat new house in Government Quarters came into his mind with the suddenness of a clanging bell.

  Methodically he pushed the thought down again. He was a police officer. All his life he had wanted this, and now he had achieved it. Inspector. And an inspector of police could not be threatened. No matter by whom. Lala Arun Varde or anyone else.

  He drew himself up as erect as every muscle could make him. Under the thin khaki of his shirt his bony shoulders stood up in two sharp ridges.

  ‘Mr Varde,’ he said. ‘It is my duty –’

  The sound of booted feet running hard along the stone floor of the corridor outside made him stop in mid-sentence.

  They all turned and looked at the doorway.

  It was Head Constable Sen. He clattered to a halt and saluted Ghote.

  ‘Message from D.S.P., Inspector sahib,’ he said.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  Sen looked a little hurt at the unexpected sharpness in the inspector’s voice.

  ‘Result of check on window-cleaners, Inspector.’

  I
nspector Ghote’s eyes gleamed. This was just what he wanted. When Lala Varde saw for himself how an important case, a case at the Ministry itself, was solved he would realize that the Bombay C.I.D. was not to be trifled with.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘They’ve got him, have they?’

  He turned to Lala Varde.

  ‘Nasty case of theft,’ he said. ‘From the Ministry of Police Affairs itself. But the fellow didn’t get very far, thank goodness.’

  Head Constable Sen coughed vigorously.

  ‘D.S.P. tell me to say windows were not cleaned this morning,’ he announced. ‘Schedule is behindhand. Cleaner wallahs cannot be guilty. D.S.P. want to see you straight away, Inspector sahib.’

  ‘A theft of one rupee and you cannot catch the thief,’ bellowed Lala Varde happily, breaking into great peals of hooting laughter.

  But Inspector Ghote did not stop to listen to them.

  9

  When Inspector Ghote arrived at the office, very hot and very bothered, he found that D.S.P. Samant had packed up and gone home for the day. As all the other office workers of Bombay were thinking of doing the same thing this was to be expected. The D.S.P. had however left orders. Very strict orders. And there had been another development.

  It had been reported from the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Arts that when the Minister’s peon, Felix Sousa, had been required to perform his last duties of the day no one could find him anywhere in the whole sprawling, spreading building. The D.S.P. was inflexible in his attitude to this event: Sousa was to be located, without the least delay. Once found, Sousa was to be interrogated. The interrogation was to produce a complete and circumstantial confession. A report embodying this was to be on the D.S.P.’s desk first thing in the morning. Sousa was thought to live in the mill district. The D.S.P. had obtained his address from the Ministry records section.

  Inspector Ghote looked up at Axel Svensson, faithfully shadowing him still. The Swede, in spite of his size and weight, did not look as hot and sticky as the inspector felt.

  ‘Well, Mr Svensson,’ Ghote said, ‘it looks as if my day is not over yet. I shall have to go and see if I can get hold of this fellow. So I will say “good evening” to you.’

  Finding one particular person in all the hundreds of thousands who lived in inextricable confusion in the poorer quarters of the city would not be made any easier by being interrupted at frequent intervals with requests for explanations of the Indian way of life.

  But he knew that whatever he said was going to be useless.

  As it was.

  ‘But, my friend,’ the big Swede said with boisterous enthusiasm, ‘we will go together. I have not yet had an opportunity to see more of Bombay than the tourist parts. This is exactly what I wanted. The problem of policing areas of high population density is one which has never been sufficiently examined.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Inspector Ghote.

  They climbed back into the police truck and set off at the dangerous speed which their impassive driver felt to be necessary if the status of the force was to be maintained.

  But even he could not keep it up for long. Once past the main boulevards and properly into the mill district progress at anything much faster than a walk became impossible. Men, women, children, cows, dogs and various other forms of life so crowded the narrow streets that to have gone at even ten miles an hour would have caused a massacre.

  After nosing their way through the indolent flood of living creatures for nearly an hour they came to the street they had been making for. It was a narrow alleyway by the side of a large decayed house once belonging to some prosperous cotton merchant and now a teeming tenement.

  The alley was too narrow to take the police vehicle. So Inspector Ghote and Axel Svensson scrambled out. At once they were surrounded by a swarm of begging children shrilling at them at the tops of their voices.

  Axel Svensson looked at them.

  ‘It is getting late,’ he said. ‘You ought to be all in your beds.’

  ‘You are our father and mother,’ screamed one little boy of about eight with a brightly cunning face above sticking-out ribs and bloated stomach. ‘You are our father and mother. Give us money to buy beds.’

  Inspector Ghote felt irritated. It was getting late and this was the second night he had been up in succession. He felt that the Swede’s reference to beds was at the least tactless.

  ‘Children like these have no beds to go to,’ he said. ‘They have no homes for their beds. They go about the streets at night in bands like this to beg, and sleep where they can in the day.’

  The Swede looked shocked.

  The expression of bewilderment on his high-boned cheeks was so appealing that Inspector Ghote at once regretted his brusqueness. He made up his mind to protect him.

  ‘Go away, get out, hut jao,’ he shouted at the seething mass of children. He aimed a few blows towards them at random.

  ‘But no, my friend,’ Axel Svensson said. ‘Look, I would like to give them something.’

  He dug in his pocket for coins.

  ‘No, sahib. That is not the way,’ Inspector Ghote said. ‘Give to one and you get a hundred. You must learn to accept them. Come on.’

  He caught hold of the tall Swede’s bare arm and with his fingers almost buried in its jungle of fair hairs he steered him up the narrow alley by now nearly in complete darkness.

  ‘But – But a few cents, a few öre –’ the Swede babbled.

  Inspector Ghote tugged him forward.

  They came at last to the house they were looking for. A fat man lay asleep just in the doorway, wheezing and panting.

  The inspector knelt down and shook him awake. He raised himself on one elbow and was immediately caught by a fit of coughing that looked as if it would be his last act on earth.

  They waited patiently and in the end his gigantic paroxysm subsided enough for the inspector to be able to convey that he was from the police. The man heaved himself up to a standing position.

  ‘It was not my fault,’ he said. ‘I was not there. No one can prove –’

  A new spasm of coughing assailed him. The fat on his bare chest slobbered and heaved as he rocked to and fro.

  Inspector Ghote banged him heartily on his equally fat back. At last the man’s anxieties subsided to the point where he was able to take in that he was being asked simply whether a Goanese named Felix Sousa lived in the house.

  He was obviously so puzzled by the question that the inspector believed him almost straight away when eventually he said that he had never heard of Sousa. They tramped dutifully through the ramshackle building but soon came to the conclusion that it was inhabited entirely by South Indians and that they had drawn a complete blank.

  They stepped out again into the comparative freshness of the air of the alleyway.

  ‘But this was the right address?’ Axel Svensson asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Inspector Ghote. ‘But Sousa does not live here.’

  They went back to the vehicle and the inspector told the driver to make for the Dhobi Tulao district, explaining to the attentive Swede that this was one of the main Goanese areas of the city.

  Again they pushed and shouted their way through narrow streets filled with people and animals while overhead a great coppery disc of a moon looked down on them.

  ‘Doesn’t anybody ever go to bed?’ asked the Swede.

  ‘Some people do,’ the inspector said. ‘Just before dawn it gets much quieter.’

  After nearly an hour’s tortuous journey across the packed suburbs they arrived. There were at least plenty of Goanese about and crowded among the tenements and mills were several dilapidated-looking Christian chapels.

  They stopped the vehicle, got out and buttonholed the first Goan they could lay hands on.

  ‘Do you know a man called Felix Sousa?’ Inspector Ghote asked.

  The man, a tall, incredibly serious-looking individual with a long, thin face, answered up promptly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I
am Felix Sousa.’

  ‘But no –’ began the big Swede.

  Inspector Ghote interrupted him before his wrath fully exploded.

  ‘It is a very common name,’ he explained. ‘No doubt we shall find dozens of them before we get the one we want, if we ever do get him.’

  He turned to the serious-looking Goanese.

  ‘The man we are looking for is a little different,’ he said. ‘He works for the Ministry of Police Affairs. He is the Minister’s personal peon.’

  The man looked impressed.

  ‘He has got a good job,’ he said.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘No, sorry. I do not know him at all. But I do know another Felix Sousa, a shoemender.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Inspector Ghote still retained some politeness.

  But before long the last of it had evaporated in the humid, richly smelly night air. They questioned almost a hundred people. They pursued a dozen false trails. And they were nowhere nearer finding their quarry.

  Inspector Ghote’s head was whirring with the inconsequent thoughts produced by lack of sleep. Occasionally a vision of Mr Perfect lying on the old string bed in Arun Varde’s house troubled him for a little. But even this had to take second place to the ceaseless, plodding to-and-fro of their inquiries.

  In spite of frequent visits to sellers of mysterious bottles of highly-coloured, faintly sweet mineral waters his mouth felt as dry as cinders. His shoulders ached. His heavy belt seemed to hang from his waist like a leaden circlet. Every now and again he felt a fit of trembling make his legs quiver uncontrollably.

  ‘We will try only the next place we get a clue about,’ he said. ‘And then we will give up.’

  Once more they set out, buttonholing anyone who looked like a Goanese and plying them with questions. Even the Swede conducted his own inquiries whenever he could find anyone whose English he could understand. And it was while the inspector was doing his best to extract some information from a small boy who was trying to protect his sister because he thought she was wanted for an immorality offence that he caught sight of his towering friend pushing his way excitedly down a nearby passageway.