LITMIR.BIZ

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now, I’ve promised to take lunch at home today. A grandchild’s birthday. Must honor the occasion. So I’ve had a train looked out for you, er, Ghote, and …”

      He scrabbled for a slip of paper.

      “Ah, yes, the fourteen-fifteen hours for Nagpur. You’ll have to make your own way from there to Village Dharbani. But I daresay by the time you get back to Bombay you’ll find A.I. Lobo has got a detailed confession properly recorded in front of a magistrate and that will be that.”

      “Yes, sir,” Ghote said.

      He clicked heels in salute and turned to go, not without momentarily allowing a disloyal thought to enter his head. If this wonderful A.I. Lobo was going to have the whole business wrapped up in such short order, was it truly necessary for him himself to go all the way out to Dharbani and risk getting into a devil of a soup?

      But orders were orders …

      Then, as he went down the stairs and out into the road, another thought struck him. It was—he looked at his ancient watch—not yet a quarter to twelve. His train did not leave V.T. Station till a quarter past two. So, even after going home and packing a suitcase, he ought to have time enough to call in at the station covering Kemp’s Corner and the Tick Tock Watchworks nearby. And there at least he could make himself discreetly better acquainted with the facts of the case. Because, if he could do that, when he arrived at the remote Village Dharbani he would be in a very much stronger position. It would be all the easier then to find out how likely it was that Ganpatrao Pendke, the damn bad hat, had been responsible for killing his cousin rather than the watchshop owner, Rustom Fardoomji, so rapidly lined up as the culprit by Assistant Inspector Lobo, D.G.P.’s pet.

      Provided he went carefully, it need never come to the ears of the D.G.P. that he had ventured to go just a little against those orders to keep the Dharbani possibility strictly confidential. And—it occurred to him suddenly—he had a certain advantage here. One Sub-Inspector Miss Shruti Shah.

      He had worked alongside S.I. Shah out in the suburbs not many months before. It was a case in which a young school-teacher, who in a love match had married the daughter of a high-up municipal councilor, had then killed her. A tragedy that had for weeks given him periods of gray sadness. The murderer, tormented by his inability to provide his new wife with the comforts she had been used to, and yet more by the obsessive jealousy she had soon shown, leading her even to time to the minute how long it took to bicycle back from his school to their one-room flat, had in the end beaten her to death with her own wooden belna as she had been rolling out chapattis. He had afterward made a pathetic attempt to lie his way out of the crime. S.I. Shah had had no difficulty in seeing through his story, and he himself had had even less to do than usual in keeping his watching brief on the investigation. But he had been much impressed with the humane yet unflinching way Shruti Shah had handled her pathetic killer. And in the short while they had worked side by side they had become friendly.

      More—a great piece of luck—he had heard that she had recently been transferred to the Kemp’s Corner area.

      And, yet more good luck, when, suitcase in hand and wifely complaints over his sudden departure still ringing in his ears, he arrived at the station he was told that S.I. Shah was due back from her lunch break almost at once.

      He decided then to stroll up and down outside to wait for her. He was hardly anxious to meet the D.G.P.’s star, A.I. Lobo. But before long he had begun to think he had made a mistake. The minutes ticked by, five, ten, twelve, and there was no sign of Shruti Shah. His suitcase grew heavier and heavier in his hand, and there was no shade anywhere.

      He remembered now that Shruti, though a model officer in every other way, intelligent, quick, thorough, and sympathetic as well, was a congenitally bad timekeeper. She had not once, during the week they had worked together, met him at exactly the appointed hour. She had always arrived behind time in a desperate hurry, hair falling down, uniform sari tugged awkwardly over her shoulder, full of incoherent excuses. And this despite a habit she had—she had told him about it quite early in their acquaintanceship—of permanently keeping her watch five minutes fast. Adding, not much to his surprise, that in fact she never succeeded in tricking herself. She was, he had realized almost as soon as he had met her, much too quickly intelligent to let herself be deceived in this way.

      He had found this unpunctuality, her sole fault, endearing then. But now, with time going by before that train to Nagpur, he began to feel differently.

      He turned once more and walked slowly in the other direction, sweat gathering on shoulders and back. Should he give up the idea of finding out that little extra about the crime at the Tick Tock Watchworks and get off in good time to V.T. Station?

      “Inspector Ghote, it’s you.”

      S.I. Shah had come up behind him in a rush. She was looking every bit as disheveled as he had seen her before, face glistening with perspiration, a heavy shopping bag swinging at her side, a strand of hair running from forehead to lower lip.

      “Shruti,” Ghote said, “I have been wait—I had hoped I would see you. There is one favor …”

      “My God, but come inside. Ek minute just. There is a phone I must make. I am running behind time also.”

      She glanced at the slim watch on her wrist, and gave a little grimace at, once again, not having tricked herself by altering its hands.

      Ghote grinned. He could not help it.

      “I will come in,” he said. “But I cannot stay long, I have a train.”

      He followed Shruti’s scurrying figure into the station.

      Her phone call took her a good deal longer than the “ek minute” she had promised. But, listening with half an ear, Ghote had to recognize that she was not wasting the time. Evidently it was a tricky matter—something to do with a girl being possibly detained against her will—and he could only admire the way she was dealing with it.

      But at last she put down the receiver and turned to him, and he was able to explain what the discreet favor he needed was.

      “Well,” she said, “Mike Lobo is playing this one altogether close to his chest. But, if you are wanting, I can at least show you the scene.”

      Ghote looked at his watch.

      Yes, there should be time still if it did not take too long.

      The Tick Tock Watchworks, when Shruti Shah led him around to the lane just off busy, prosperous Kemp’s Corner, where it stood between a cheap eating place called the Sri Krishna Lunch Home and a small barbershop, the Decent Electric Hairdresser, came as something of a disappointment. He had had only the vaguest notion of what he might see there that would somehow eventually perhaps show up expeditious A.I. Lobo. But when he was confronted by the blank, pulled-down metal shutter of the little shop he realized that there could hardly have been anything to learn without having first arranged to get inside.

      “Well, there it is,” Shruti Shah said, as they pushed through a circle of idlers, small boys, beggars, youths with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, dallying office messengers, still staring hopefully at the rust-streaked shutter behind which a murder had happened. “You know it was a watch company salesman who first saw the body? He came into the shop and found the place deserted. The victim, badly beaten up, was lying on the floor just inside. So he phoned the station, and Mike Lobo came around, twice as fast as light as usual, just in time to meet a traffic constable bringing back the owner. Mike guessed he had been absconding, nabbed him, and straightaway got a confession.”

      “Just only like that?”

      “Just only with a few slaps and some hair pulled and probably a little more,” Shruti Shah answered. “Mike’s an expert.”

      “And why did this owner fellow do it?” Ghote asked, remembering only just in time that he had better not let even Shruti learn he knew the man’s name was Rustom Fardoomji.

      “Well, as Mike says, police has only to prove means and opportunity, and motive can go to hell. I am quoting. Hey, but look.”

      Ghote

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