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H . R . F . KEATING

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

Preface by ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

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PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Preface by ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

H. R. F. KEATING was born at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, in 1926. He went to Merchant Taylors, leaving early to work in the engineering department of the BBC. After a period of service in the army, which he describes as ‘totally undistinguished’, he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a scholar in modern literature. He was also the crime fiction reviewer for The Times for fifteen years. His first novel about Inspector Ghote, The Perfect Murder, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger and an Edgar Allen Poe Special Award. He lives in London with his wife, the actress Sheila Mitchell, and has three sons and a daughter.

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of several series of novels and is best known as the creator of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books.

Preface

A perfectly loveable inspector

I went to Bombay, as Mumbai then was, as an incidental literary pilgrim. I was an incidental pilgrim in the sense that I had to pass through the city on my way elsewhere, but even so I was aware from the moment my plane landed that I was on hallowed turf: I was in the city of Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay C.I.D. Others feel the same way, no doubt, when they first set foot on the pavements of Baker Street, or find themselves outside one of the houses associated with Jane Austen. Pilgrims, of course, may go to the places of their pilgrimage in awe, but must be ready for a let-down. Bombay, though, did not disappoint: there were the Ambassador cars in which Ghote might travel; there were the street characters; there were the buildings and alleyways into which some suspicious character – some goonda perhaps, a thoroughly bad hat – might vanish. The whole intriguing world of this remarkable city, so brilliantly caught in Keating’s little gems, was there for the savouring. And yet, we might remind ourselves, the first nine Inspector Ghote novels were written before the author had actually visited India.

H. R. F. Keating began work on the Ghote novels as a deliberate attempt to give his fiction a more international tone. The Perfect Murder, the first of the series, was intended to broaden the appeal of his work, particularly in the United States. Something his earlier crime novels had failed to do, being considered ‘too British’ to appeal to American taste. And it would not have been surprising if novels set in a country the author had never visited ended up reflecting the author’s culture, rather than that of the country in which they are set. Yet in Keating’s case this did not happen. These books are not embarrassing portrayals of an idealized India; they have an authenticity that has been recognized, even in India. As such they fall into that small – very small – category of novels: those that are works of pure imagination but that nonetheless convey a valid sense of place and culture.

It would be easy, of course, to dismiss these novels as being classic examples of post-colonial assumption of voice, and no doubt there is a body of critical writing that does just that. Such criticism, however, is not only somewhat predictable, but misses the point that an accomplished piece of fiction can perfectly easily transcend the circumstances of its creation. It does not matter who wrote it and what the author’s personal credentials are: the story can soar above all that, revealing truths about what it is to be human. So the fact that Keating, at the beginning, had no direct experience of India matters not one whit. If he could make his books feel Indian; if he could step into the shoes of an Indian detective inspector and make it sound credible, or at least highly enjoyable, then that was merely testimony to a rich and creative imagination, a tribute to his ability as a novelist. After all, historical novelists do this all the time: they write about places they have never been and cultures of which they cannot, by definition, have personal experience. If one wants the contemporary blood and sinew of Mumbai, then one can read Vikram Chandra’s magnificent epic, Sacred Games; if one wants something more picaresque, something lighter and more comic, something that has the elusive quality of fable to it, then Inspector Ghote can be called to hand.

The real charm of the Inspector Ghote novels lies in the characters who populate them. Ghote himself is one of the great creations of detective fiction. Unlike many fictional detectives, who are often outsiders, possessed in many cases of difficult personal demons, Ghote is utterly loveable. His rank gives him some status, but not very much. He has his own office, with some personal furniture and effects, but we are always aware of his superiors, and of the barely disguised contempt that many of them have for him. In Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart, for instance, not only is there the coldly dismissive Superintendent Karandikar, known as ‘the Tiger’, who is only too happy to belittle a mere inspector, but we also meet the Commissioner of Police himself, a being so elevated as to inspire quite understandable awe in Ghote’s breast. What visitor to India over the last few decades – although less so now – will not have caught a glance of the chauffeur-driven cream or white Ambassador cars of such personages – complete with flags and curtains to exclude the common gaze.

Ghote, then, is the small man, the man who has made enough of himself to be given a position of responsibility, but who is always at the mercy of those more powerful than he is himself. If one were to read these books with no knowledge of India, one would conclude that it is a society of egregious inequality. And that, alas, is the reality of modern India, in spite of vastly increased wealth and the rise of a much larger middle class. Keating has an intuitive understanding of this feature of Indian society, and of the way in which the rich and powerful work. The wealthy Mr Desai, in Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart, is typical of the rich businessmen who crop up in the novels. He has made his money and is not at all apologetic about the comfort and power it brings. He is surrounded by servants, just as is Mr Lala Varde in The Perfect Murder, and these servants are treated with a haughty lack of consideration, not as people with feelings. Overstated? If one were to be tempted to say that the master–servant relationship in the Ghote novels is unrealistic, then one might simply read that remarkable fictional portrayal of exactly that issue in Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger. Keating, it seems, has got it spot-on.

Ghote’s dignified acceptance of his perilous status makes us want so much for him. We want him to remain on the case when influential people further up use every weapon they possess to have him taken off. We want him to be heard when he is ignored or deliberately silenced. We want him to find domestic contentment, and we want happiness for his wife, Protima, and his son, Ved. They deserve it so much more than the spoiled and over-indulged families with whom Ghote comes into contact. The picture of the ghastly child, Haribhai Desai, in Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart is utterly toe-curling and, one fears, very realistic. I remember once visiting a cloyingly luxurious safari lodge in East Africa and meeting fellow guests, a very rich Indian family (surely related to Keating’s Mr Desai). Their young son was with them – a pampered and overfed child dressed in a beautifully cut miniature safari suit. How the rich so obligingly set themselves up to be preserved in aspic by the novelist, and how skilfully, and with what relish, does Keating perform this task!

But it is not just finely pitched social observation that makes these novels so good, it is also Keating’s engagement with issues of corruption and integrity. Keating has often expressed his interest in broad philosophical issues, and his writing, although entertaining and amusing, frequently engages us in an examination of how we understand the world and work within it. This, perhaps, is the single quality that gives to the Ghote novels their timelessness. They are about how the good man, the honest man – the man who is sufficiently self-aware to allow himself a lot of room for self-doubt – preserves his integrity in a world of false values, greed and rampant injustice. Ghote’s struggles, like the struggles of the powerless and downtrodden people whom he sees in his day-to-day work, are universally recognizable. In these books they are presented in such a way as to engage and amuse us; that is Keating’s skill. That is what confers on these vivid and lovely little books their status as classics of detective fiction. That is what gives these novels their lasting appeal.

Keating’s overall contribution to crime fiction has been a major one, but we should be particularly grateful to him for what he has given us in his marvellous creation of Inspector Ganesh Ghote, Bombay C.I.D, solver of mysteries, agent of such justice as an imperfect world can muster, or expect.

Alexander McCall Smith, 2011

1

Inspector Ghote nearly broke his eggs before he had been in the little town two minutes.

He was leaving the station in a hurry, determined, despite his weariness after a long night in the train from Bombay and despite the onset of yet another heavy shower of steamy rain in this end-of-monsoon period, not to waste an unnecessary moment before seizing hold of the slippery-seeming facts of his task.

From the moment that he had been landed with the business only the afternoon before, he had raged at the lack of anything he could get his teeth into, and now that the chance was near he was going to let nothing delay him.

He had been cosily immersed in paperwork in the warren of Bombay C.I.D Headquarters with all the familiar objects of his stuffy little office comforting him – his desk whose every scored line and varnish whorl he knew and loved, the narrow brass tray in which he kept his pencils, the non-issue set of bamboo-edged shelves with its screwed-on plastic labels saying ‘Songs’, ‘Dance’, ‘Piano’, ‘Sacred’ and ‘Various’ and, above all, in its place of honour on top of these shelves, Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation, mildew-stained but masterly. And then the summons had violently broken into his peace.

First, Deputy Superintendent Samant had jerked open the door and barked at him to be ready to receive a telephone call from ‘an eminent figure in our public life’. And hardly had the DSP gone, with a parting warning that the call would mean dropping all other work for an indefinite period, coupled with a sharp request to supply him with his criminal statistics ‘without delay’, when the call from the Eminent Figure himself had come.

The orders Ghote had received from him, though well wrapped up, were simple enough. Fifteen years ago, he had been told, the wife of an ambitious young politician in a distant town near the State border had died quite suddenly in extremely suspicious circumstances. And soon afterwards the rising politician had married the only child of the Chairman of the town’s Municipal Council, to inherit within a year a considerable fortune and, what was more important, considerable local influence. He in his turn was now Municipal Chairman and had ten thousand votes depending on his word alone.

Very little appeared to have been done to investigate the first wife’s fatal illness at the time, the Eminent Figure had said.

It was only when he went on to mention that this same Municipal Chairman had recently been so incredibly foolish as to abandon his long-held political allegiance that Ghote had begun to realize what lay in store for him: an investigation fifteen years old with one suspect only, a man vested with something like absolute powers in his own domain, and a result, one result only, to be obtained as quickly as possible. It was a decidedly tricky business.

And the trickiness of the whole affair was what accounted for Ghote arriving in the little town with the eggs.

They were a dozen fresh eggs, quite extraordinary in size, and they reposed, each preserved in a layer of smearily shining grease, in a soft cardboard box of a glaring orange colour with bold blue lettering all across it: ‘Grofat Chicken Feeds Pvt. Ltd’.

The Eminent Figure had been responsible.

‘I have given some thought to the guise in which you should go about when you get there tomorrow,’ he had said. ‘It would be best for as few people as possible to know of your mission.’

Ghote had promised his wife and small son to take them next day to see a certain smash-hit film, ‘the greatest suspense thriller the screen has ever seen – 23rd colourful week – set to haunting music’, and now he would have to catch a train before night fell.

‘You will go,’ the Eminent Figure had continued silkily, ‘under the appearance of a salesman, a salesman for a new chicken-feed product. The average size of the Indian egg, did you know, is disgraceful as compared with the American and the British egg. It is nothing less, indeed, than a national disaster.’

He had left such a pause at this that Ghote had felt obliged to speak.

‘Yes, sir, I have no doubt.’

‘Now it so happens that a young nephew of mine has recently purchased a mill for the manufacture of a product guaranteed to increase the size of an egg by as much as forty per cent, and I have been able to secure for you one of the samples with which he equips his salesmen. I will have it dispatched to C.I.D Headquarters immediately. It will be exactly what you require.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

Ghote had rejected the notion of explaining to the Eminent Figure that, although within a reasonable distance of Bombay there were egg farms, often run as a hobby by wealthy film-stars, in the remote part of the state to which he was being sent chickens were just one more set of scavengers feeding where they could on what they could find.

After all, one did have a duty to look after one’s family. There could be no gainsaying that.

But he hoped profoundly, now that he had arrived, that the disguise the bold orange box provided would be sufficient.

In front of him as he paused in the station entrance there stretched a large area of nondescript muddy ground, diversified by huge puddles which heavy drops of rain were converting into so many miniature boiling and bubbling lakes. A big tamarind tree stood about thirty yards away to one side with a sad-looking hut of a shop near it, now apparently deserted. To the other side, the road leading into the main part of the town began an uncertain existence. Just at the point where it finally made up its mind it would have to be a road after all there was a small tamarind tree and under its doubtful shelter two tongas waited, the tonga-wallas hunched over their dashboards looking down at ribby horses with coloured head-plumes drooping sadly in the damp and the heat.

Ghote fixed his eyes on them and prepared to run across and take the first that offered.

And, at the very moment he started out, it happened. A miserable-looking figure whom he had scarcely noticed crouching beside him in the station entrance took it into its head to go forth into the world at that same instant, and Ghote tripped near-sprawlingly over a foot or a knee or an elbow. For a second he skeltered over the much-trodden muddy ground outside the station entrance, with the thought vivid in his mind just how furious the Eminent Figure would be if it ever came out that a box of extra large eggs prominently labelled with the name of his nephew’s firm had been smashed to sticky fragments within minutes of their arrival at their destination.

In the end he saved them and stood, his heart thudding and the heavy rain splashing copiously over him, trying to regain the determined calm he had possessed only moments before.

He turned to see what or when or whom it was that he had stumbled over.

It was an old woman, a hopeless wretched outcaste creature, dressed in a sari that must once have been gaudy indeed but was now through years of wear reduced to the drabness of dust. She was scrabbling to her feet, a look of venomous rage on her scimitar-nosed face with its scattering of thick curly grey hairs randomly sprouting.

She must have been travelling on the train, Ghote thought.

All her possessions were with her, half in an enormous glass jar – which once, according to its still intact label, had contained ‘Ovax the Egg Drink of the Night’ – and half in an earthenware pot that had been tipped over by the collision between them and had had most of its contents scattered over the slimy, foot-trodden mud.

But the crone, when she had recovered herself, ignored them all in favour of hobbling, spitting curses all the way, after an unexpectedly clean-looking copy of a magazine that she had, for what reasons it was hard to conceive, been clutching in one hand.

It had been blown by a puff of wind, or even forced over the ground by the battering raindrops, to within a foot or two of Ghote himself. He stooped and picked it up, wondering as he did so whether in a place as remote and old-fashioned as this he would get into trouble for having so much contact with a harijan woman. In towns of this sort the old ways were still powerful.

‘Mine, mine,’ the old crone crackled at him.

‘Yes, yes, I am giving,’ he answered, arranging the flapping pages as he spoke.

And then, a couple of words in the precious magazine caught his eye and quite transfixed him with astonishment.

There in bold black letters in the middle of a narrow column of print was his own name.

It was quite clear, unmistakable. ‘Ghote Goes In’. And the paragraph read on: ‘Top trouble-shooter Inspector Ganesh Ghote (pronounced Gotay) of Bombay C.I.D is to be sent …’

Totally ignoring in his utter surprise the old crone, who was by now plucking at his shirt sleeve, he looked up at the top of the page to see what on earth magazine it was that for some unimaginable reason was writing about him.

It was Time. Time magazine. He knew it. He had seen DSP Samant reading it.

But why? Why his name in Time?

He scurried to the head of the article. ‘Saint-v-C.I.D’. What was this? He read at lightning speed.

There was not, when he conducted one heat-stroke of analysis on the piece, all that much to it. Facts were evidently hard to come by. But what there were were terrible. The piece dealt precisely with the case he had just at this moment arrived to tackle, but it added one item that he had had no idea of. It seemed that a local holy man had, for unexplained reasons, set his face against the whole investigation into the Municipal Chairman’s first wife’s death. He was conducting a fast against any further inquiries, a fast ‘unto death’. And he had already been doing so for forty-eight days ‘as of now’. There was a picture too, not of the ‘saint’ nor of the ‘C.I.D man’ – and thank heavens for that at least – but of the Municipal Chairman, a sharp, crocodile-grinning face under a narrow white Congress cap, a good photograph, crystal clear, even down to a birthmark on the chin. ‘Chairman Savarkar: A Swami’s protection’.

A sudden whip-like fury sprang up in Ghote’s mind against the Eminent Figure who had so cunningly briefed him the day before. There had been not the least mention of this trouble. And it must have been well enough known about in this area for some sharp-eyed correspondent to have got hold of the tale and sent it as an amusing story – an amusing story – to Time magazine. And, worse, it had already been decided then, days and days ago, that he himself was to be sent to investigate. He had been the last to be told.

He was standing facing the station entrance. He very nearly marched straight back in and demanded the time of the next train to Bombay.

How could he conduct a tricky business of this sort when the whole town would be expecting him? When they all knew that he had been sent here to make out a case against Vinayak Savarkar, the man among them all who could see to it in the twinkling of an eye that any local official who came under his displeasure was moved off the scene for ever, who could do a thousand and one useful things for anybody who had obliged him, from getting a place for a boy at a coveted school to acquiring reserved train seats at a moment’s notice? What hope would there be of getting admissions about any dubious conduct fifteen years ago out of the people already warned in this way?

The hand pluck-plucking at his shirt became yet more insistent. The sprouting-haired face looking up into his was contorted with anxiety and anger.

‘Sahib, it is mine, mine. I must have, Sahib.’

He thrust the wretched magazine into the crone’s hand and watched her hobble away, clutching, one in either wrinkled arm, her earthenware pot and her Ovax jar.

Then he turned and set out for the waiting tongas. After all, he had been given orders, he had to obey.

So, with as an addition to his troubles the extreme slowness of the ride into the centre of the sleepy and stifling little town, and the continuing downpour which while it lasted sent spouts of water in through the unmended rents in the hood of the tonga, Ghote was feeling more despondent than determined when he reached the main street.

It lay, he saw, wide and puddle-pocked, with occasional bullock-carts and cyclists proceeding along it and some determinedly browsing cows, squatting children and rummaging pi-dogs scattered here and there, not to mention two hostages to the spirit of modernity in the shape of parked motor-cars, one dilapidated to the point of ruin and the other by contrast overwhelmingly bulbous and glossy.

But then at last there was the police-station, standing heavily whitewashed in every particular, between the Palace Talkies – now showing the last record-breaking hit film Ghote had succeeded in taking his wife to in Bombay about a year before – and on the other side of Rao Dispensary (Dr R. Rao: propr). And, as the tonga began to slow yet more its already leaden pace, Ghote greeted the smartness of the building with a small lifting of the spirit.

Policemen were policemen everywhere.

And then, when he had already risen in the tonga’s rearward-facing seat balancing the burdensome orange egg-box on his widespread right palm, the vehicle suddenly lurched sharply forward.

It was all he could do, clutching desperately at its frail side with his one free hand, to keep himself in at all. And in a couple of seconds he found himself clacking along the wide street again at a speed quite twice that which the lean-shanked horse had attained at any point in the journey before.

He jockeyed the egg-box on to the patched leather seat behind him and heaved himself down beside it. He was in the process of swivelling round to give the tongawalla a furious reprimand when the vehicle was pulled to a shakingly abrupt halt right in front of the big bulbous parked car.

A man in a white Gandhi cap was leaning out of its back window, a cigar clamped between widely grinning teeth. Ghote recognized him instantly, if only because of the big blotchy birthmark in the shape of a well-prowed boat on his lower left jaw. It was the Municipal Chairman.

And at once Ghote understood what had happened to his tongawalla. The fellow had not simply been struck with a fit of total wilfulness. When his vehicle had jerked forward in that startling way it had been because Vinayak Savarkar had leant out of the window of his big car and had beckoned. When the Municipal Chairman beckoned in this town people came running.

And then to Ghote’s sheer astonishment the Chairman, removing for an instant the long cigar from his grinning teeth, actually addressed him by name.

‘It is Inspector Ghote? From Bombay, all the way?’

Ghote looked at him in mute fury.

How on earth had the man known that this perfectly ordinary looking chap in white shirt and trousers sitting in an ordinary station tonga was an inspector of the Bombay C.I.D?

‘You are wondering how I know that you are the famous Inspector Ghote, long stories in the newspapers?’ the Municipal Chairman asked now with another snapping grin.

‘No,’ Ghote shouted.

‘But you are Inspector Ghote?’

Ghote swiftly considered denying it.

‘I see you are wondering whether to deny,’ the Chairman said. ‘But I am telling you it would be of no use whatsoever. I know too much.’

He sucked at the end of his cigar like a street-boy sucking at the end of a piece of sugar cane, with concentrated fervour.

‘So you are wondering still? Yes? No?’

He actually waited for Ghote’s answer.

‘Yes,’ Ghote said with dignity, sitting straighter on the tonga’s worn seat. ‘Yes, I am wondering.’

‘It is very simple,’ the Chairman answered, with something of the air of a very intelligent teacher instructing a provenly dull pupil. ‘A certain Eminent Figure in Bombay may send his spies to this town, but he forgets that I can send my spies to him. And no sooner had Inspector Ghote boarded the train at VT Station last night than a good friend of mine telephoned me straightaway. So when that train arrives at our town and I see just one of the station tongas coming I am not in much difficulty knowing who is here.’

‘Very well then,’ Ghote said, realizing with a glint of reviving guile that at least the boldly labelled egg-box was down on the tonga seat out of sight, ‘very well, I have come. I have come on orders to investigate the death of your late wife and I mean to carry out that investigation.’

The Chairman threw his cigar down into the slushy mud of the street. It was smoked to half its length only.

‘Now then, Inspector Ghote,’ he said, ‘shall I tell you why I went to such trouble to make sure I saw you just as soon as you were arriving?’

‘If you like,’ Ghote said.

The lean horse in the shafts of the tonga took a sudden half-step forward in an effort to get hold of a strip of much-trodden mango peel. The frail vehicle swayed and swung on its single axle. Ghote grabbed both sides.

He saw the Chairman’s wide mouth snap up the incident like a gecko lizard snapping up a chance mosquito.

‘Well then, Inspector, I did it so as to give you good advice. Good advice while there was still plenty of time for you. It is this: in Bombay things may be different but in this town it is what I say that goes. I am boss, see? I am telling you, every single damn one of the officials in this town owes his place to me – the District Judge, the Superintending Engineer, the Number One at the Hospital, the Head of the Public Works Department, the House Rents Controller – all, all. So ask who you want, ask what you want, you will not be learning one damn thing. See?’

His wide grin flashed out at Ghote, hard as a barrier of white-coated steel.

‘Now,’ he went on with unabated cheerfulness, ‘I am a reasonable man, Inspector. I know you have been given a job to do, and you must do it. So you stay in the town. Do not go. Enjoy yourself.’

His eyes flicked over the street.

‘Go to the Palace Talkies,’ he said, ‘No need to pay, just give your name to Manager. I will see he is informed. Best seat every night. And afterwards just drop in at the Krishna Bhavan Restaurant, or, if you do not like, try the Royal Hindu. Both proprietors are very good friends of mine. They will make no charge.’

He pushed his head a little further out of the car window, happily ignoring the few drops of rain that still fell at the tail end of the shower.

‘Oh, Inspector,’ he said with an atrocious wink, ‘if it is a matter of gay girls. It is Francis Street you are wanting. Do not mind which house. Of all I am landlord. Just to give my name. And then when you have stayed week, or ten days even, back to Bombay you go and tell them no bloody good. All right?’

The head went back in at the car window. The window began to rise.

‘No,’ Ghote shouted, causing the tonga to rock violently once more. ‘No. It is not all right.’

Abruptly the window was lowered to its full depth.

The Chairman’s grin shot out from it like a whip-crack.

‘But listen, Inspector, also,’ he said. ‘It is not top men only that are my friends in this town. There are goondas too that I know. Bad hats, Inspector, every one of them. Men who would not hesitate to set upon a perfectly innocent man in the street at night and beat the daylights out from him.’

Ghote stood bolt upright still in the gently oscillating tonga.

‘I am a police officer,’ he said.

That and no more.

2

The Municipal Chairman did not appear to be greatly put out by Ghote’s declaration. Yet perhaps his flashing grin was a little subdued as he slowly wound up the window of his big car muttering ‘As you like, as you like.’ And when the gross vehicle squelched slowly forward through the slush and wide puddles of the street Ghote was able to see that the birth-marked face on the far side of the glass was looking decidedly thoughtful.

He felt pretty thoughtful himself.

He had known from the start that he would not be able to conduct an investigation in a place like this without tough opposition. But somehow the very openness with which the Chairman had laid down his cards made the difficulties ahead seem all the more mountainous.

No doubt there had been some boasting in what had been said. A District Judge was hardly likely to be completely in the man’s pocket. And probably too most of the other officials whose names had been rattled off like that were not so indebted to him as he had made out. But, on the other hand, it was perfectly certain that anyone as rich as Vinayak Savarkar could have plenty of goondas at his beck and call. And he could see to it that they got away with inflicting a beating-up, too. There would be plenty of lawyers ready to discover something to the discredit of the arresting officer in such a case, or to invent it.

And when such a person as the Municipal Chairman also had the backing of the forces of good, as it seemed, in the shape of a holy man prepared to fast for days and days in order to protect him from any investigation, then the outlook was black indeed.

Ghote clambered down from the tonga and took some satisfaction in paying the driver the very minimum fare. Then, doing his best to conceal the gaudy egg-box in his cradling arms while it could still be linked with the Inspector Ghote the Chairman had spoken to, he picked his way back down the muddy street to the police-station.

If that man is not to get away with it every time, he thought to himself, there is only one thing for it. I must just act so damn quickly that even he is not prepared for me.

*

Inside the police-station the comforting impression Ghote had gained from its exterior smartness was at once reinforced. The outer office was in a state of scrubbed cleanliness on every scrubbable surface and everything that could possibly be polished had been polished till it dazzled. The constables on duty were every one turned out to a nicety, down to the last neat fold in their turbans.

One of them came smartly forward when Ghote presented himself at the uncluttered wooden counter, and when Ghote, in a careful undertone, gave him his name, there was an immediate and alert reaction.

‘Oh, yes, sahib. Special orders from Superintendent Chavan. You are to be taken in to see him ek dum.’

Ghote felt a positive stream of warmth go through him. He was on home ground.

He followed the man down a corridor – scrupulously painted doors, each with a clean name-card in a glintingly polished brass holder – and into the interior of the building. Soon the constable stopped, tapped respectfully on a final door, listened for the barked ‘Koi hai?’ and spoke up smartly in answer.

‘Inspector Ghote, Superintendent sahib. Brought straight in as per orders.’

An instant later the door in front of them was jerked open and Superintendent Chavan stood there.

He was a big man, out-topping Ghote by a good eight inches. Though heavy of build and broad and a little puffy of face, any unpolicemanlike impression this might have made was totally effaced by the extreme correctness of his uniform. It had been ironed to the last rigidity, a very ideal of what its wearer should look like.

While the constable threw up a heel-crashing salute, the superintendent urged Ghote into the office, a broad smile on his broad face.

‘Sit down, my dear Inspector, sit down. You smoke?’

A brilliantly polished brass cigarette-box was thrust forward. Ghote seated himself on the chair drawn up dead square to the broad desk.

‘It is most kind,’ he said. ‘But I do not smoke.’

‘No? Sensible fellow. Wish I could cure myself of the wretched habit.’

Superintendent Chavan drew up his own well-padded chair with businesslike briskness. He reached forward and adjusted the position of his braided uniform cap that lay to one side of the neatly-kept desk.

‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I cannot tell you how damned pleased I am to see you.’

‘I am certainly pleased to be here,’ Ghote said.

Superintendent Chavan looked up in surprise.

‘Pleased to be here?’ he asked. ‘In this town? Now?’

Ghote smiled a little ruefully.

‘No, not exactly that,’ he admitted. ‘But I am certainly pleased to be inside a police-station, and such a well-ordered one.’

The superintendent puffed out his broad chest a little.

‘I like to think I know how a station should be run, even though we are miles and miles from you chaps in Bombay,’ he said.

‘It looks so well run that I am a little surprised it was thought necessary to send me here at all,’ Ghote replied.

Superintendent Chavan tapped thoughtfully with long fingers on the edge of his braided cap.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is the problem.’

He gave the cap a final little pat, as though he derived strength from it, and continued.

‘Perhaps you have not altogether appreciated, my dear Inspector, what it is like to live in a town like this. It is not Bombay, you know. We are not very up to date. You will not find women in slacks, and inter-caste marriages. And here also we have to acknowledge that a certain individual is undoubtedly the boss.’

This confirmation of the words of that ‘certain individual’ himself struck chilly on Ghote’s renewed optimism.

‘Boss he may be,’ he said, in a defiant attempt to perk himself up. ‘But he is not above law.’

‘Certainly not, certainly not,’ replied the superintendent. ‘I hope you did not think I was meaning that.’

Ghote felt the warmth beginning to flow back. At least there was complete solidarity within the police camp, however strong the pressures from outside.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I could see from the moment I entered your station here that there was no question of that sort of thing.’

The superintendent bestowed on his braided cap a little tap of congratulation.

‘However,’ he said, ‘grave problems nevertheless exist. Picture this town, my dear Inspector. We are a little society, in many ways cut off from everywhere else. We have our workers in our cotton mills and our ginning factories, etcetera. And we have our higher reaches of society. Our professional men, our men of wealth. But – and this is my point, my dear Inspector – there are not so many of us here.’