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sent all this way to provide. But then those elaborate English words were, quite likely, being used with the object in fact of making his own task more difficult. Because if any one thing was plain, it was that the Judge did not want his help.

      ‘I am at a loss really to understand, Inspector – or ought I to call you “Doctor”? You are after all Doctor Ghote, the research assistant, are you not? – I am at a loss to understand why your presence here is necessary.’

      ‘Well, sir, you have, isn’t it, received a number of threats to your life.’

      ‘Doctor.’ Why had the Deputy Commissioner insisted on him being called ‘Doctor’? It was ridiculous. He had no idea of the way a Doctor of Philosophy should behave. The Deputy Commissioner had got carried away. There was no denying that. Giving him some sort of cover story was sensible enough, since the Judge had apparently made it a condition that he should not have anyone known to be a police wallah in his house, and making him out to be a research assistant come to help with the old man’s Memoirs was as good a disguise as any. But a Doctor of Philosophy. No, that really passed the limit.

      Then Sir Asif had laughed. A dry cackle in the dry air of the high, faded, book-odorous room.

      ‘Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.’

      ‘Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person’s life is a criminal offence.’

      And then the eyes on either side of that flattened beak of a nose had momentarily flashed.

      ‘I do not need any Inspector from the Bombay CID to tell me the law. May I remind you that I was a Judge of the Madras High Court for five years before my enforced retirement. And a Sessions Judge before that. And an Assistant Judge before that. And a Sub-Judge before that.’

      ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I did not mean …’

      Difficult enough to protect a person plainly determined to object to any form of protection. And more difficult still to have to supply that protection while pretending all the time to be simply someone here to help over the Judge’s Memoirs, Memoirs that until now had never been so much as mentioned. But doubly and trebly difficult to have to do all that and to battle against that person’s apparent resolve to make life as awkward for you as possible.

      Errr-bock. Pause, long pause. Then again at last: errr-bock.

      And the damned thing really did almost nothing to relieve the heat. Back in Bombay, even if you seldom found yourself anywhere with first-class air-conditioning, at least fans usually revolved at a reasonable speed. But here, out in the furthest mofussil, the generator in the tin shed under the big tamarind tree down at the far end of the gardens near the ruined fort must be almost as old as the dawning of the age of electricity, jerking out its feeble power like the slow pulsing of the blood in the old Judge’s veins itself.

      It was too swelteringly hot even to think.

      Errr-bock.

      And what had he succeeded in achieving in the time he had been at the old house? Nothing. Nothing, except getting his one interview with the Judge. And a lot of good that had been. A blank refusal to assist him in any way.

      ‘No, Doctor – it is “Doctor” you are to be called, isn’t it? – no, Doctor, I do not think it lies within the confines of my duty to fill your head with a lot of idle suppositions.’

      If the old man had asked him once whether he was ‘to be called Doctor’ he had asked him it a dozen times in the course of that extremely unpleasant half-hour.

      And almost every minute of the thirty a sheer waste. Hardly a thing learnt.

      ‘Oh, I realize, Insp – I realize, Doctor, that you had no option but to come here on that absurd pretext of yours. My cousin in Bombay is after all a respected MLA and members of the Legislative Assembly, especially if in their day they have been Ministers, have a way of making life very difficult for senior police officials if their requests are not acceded to. And, yes, my daughter was so foolish as to tell Cousin Iftikhar that these ridiculous notes had been found about the house here purporting to threaten my life. But none of that means that I am bound, as you put it, to assist in your inquiries. Far from it.’

      For a few sullen moments, there in the long dim room permeated with the faintly rotten smell of old leather bindings mildewed in monsoon after monsoon, he had thought darkly that surely he did have the right to get answers. After all, there was such a thing as Indian Penal Code Section 179, and he himself was a public servant authorized to question. But all too soon he had, with a sigh, abandoned the notion. Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim would with laughable ease, and at interminable length, argue out the case against and somehow win it hands down. No, the only thing had been to hang on with a muttered ‘if you say so, sir’ and then to listen once more to the blank refusal. In that bloody precise Englishman’s English.

      ‘Sir, could you at least let me examine one or more of these threatening letters?’

      ‘Certainly not, Doctor. Of their nature they were private communications addressed exclusively to myself.’

      ‘But, sir, it might be possible to tell from the handwriting what is the community of the individual who wrote them.’

      ‘Hardly, I think. The notes were typewritten.’

      ‘Typewritten? But, sir, in such a place as this, remote from civilization, there cannot be –’

      ‘Remote from civilization? Inspector?’

      The old man’s eyes had slowly surveyed then the fine proportions of the long dim room. They had ranged over the rank upon rank of leather-bound books in the shelves all round it. They had rested as deliberately here and there on a finely carved chair or table, on the pair of tall, beautifully shaped blue vases standing on either side of the wide doorway. They had finally glanced at the fine Bokhara rugs covering the ancient crack criss-crossed marble floor.

      Ghote had felt the dark blush coming up from the moment his thoughtless words had been so sharply interrupted. And he had been unable to prevent it at last flushing his whole face.

      ‘I mean, sir, in such a remote locality.’

      He had actually had to make the last part of the journey by bullock cart. In this day and age. The plane, the train to the nearest town and a call on the District Superintendent of Police to be assured that no suspicious strangers had been observed in the neighbourhood, then the ride in a battered old hired car, and, in the end, when at the village a mile or so from the house they had come to a halt outside the building of the Rural Co-operative and his driver had announced ‘All change, sahib’, the bullock cart. In it he had groaned and creaked under the deadening sun as far as the almost dried-up river that marked the boundary of the gardens of the house, had bounced and jolted while the cart’s owner had, with much twisting of his animal’s thick tail, got them across the river’s wide stony bed and at last had reached the big old place itself. Which had been solidly asleep in the beating heat. As it was now.

      He had had the devil of a time, too, to rouse anyone. Only at last by dint of calling and shouting in the thick, sun-jellied air had he wakened Raman, the Judge’s long-serving Orderly. Poor Raman had received a terrible shelling from Sir Asif afterwards for not having been there up and about waiting to let him in, for all that he could not possibly have been expected to know when this rare guest would reach the house. The old man’s anger had raged on so long that he himself had at last felt obliged to intervene.

      To be given a look of cold silence which had been his first hint of what relations between himself and the man he had been sent to protect were going to be.

      Well, at least in his private interview later he had discovered one new fact. That the threatening notes had been typed. And it was a fact that might well be useful to him. Remote from civilization as they were here – yes, from civilization, from air-conditioning and fans that actually produced some sort of a breeze – it should be possible to track down whatever typewriters were in existence. The notes, after all, if what Sir Asif’s cousin, that influential MLA,

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