LITMIR.BIZ

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to the back of the little crowd around the shuttered shop and was staring at it almost transfixed.

      “A piece of luck for you, Inspector,” Shruti Shah said. “That is the man who was finding the body. By the name of Saxena. I had a word with him yesterday when Mike was making out the F.I.R. on the case.”

      The First Information Report on the affair was a document Ghote would dearly have liked to have had a sight of. But this chance meeting with the watch company salesman who had discovered Ramrao Pendke’s battered body might be almost as rewarding.

      He took one quick glance at his own watch—was it still going to time?—and saw that he had a few minutes in hand at least.

      “I would very much like to talk,” he said to Shruti.

      She gestured the salesman across.

      “Sub-Inspector Miss, good morning,” he greeted her. “You would be asking yourself what for I am here again, isn’t it?”

      “Well, yes, Mr. Saxena,” Shruti Shah answered. “That I was very much wondering.”

      The watch salesman produced a smirking grin under his brush of a moustache.

      “Oh, it is most easily explained,” he said. “Most easily. You see, it was coming into my head this morning itself that this shop may be up for selling, now that poor Rustom is no longer on the spot. And, though I am most happy in my job—”

      He came to a stop, hauled up the left sleeve of his shirt, and revealed, on a hairy forearm, not just one watch but four, strapped one above the other.

      “Hindustan Machine Tools products,” he said. “Look, each and every one telling exact same time. ‘H.M.T.—timekeeping within everyone’s reach.’ Our slogan itself.”

      Abruptly he yanked the sleeve down again. But not before Ghote had noticed that the uppermost watch was in fact two minutes behind its fellows.

      Evidently Mr. Saxena realized what he had seen.

      He grinned his uneasy grin again.

      “Yes, well,” he said, “I was altogether forgetting to wind up same this morning. In my state of excitement, you understand. Because—because of what I had thought about taking over this Tick Tock shop.”

      Another smirk of a grin under the thick moustache.

      “You see, it is these Tata Titan fellows. They are moving into the field, you know. Future is not too assured.”

      “You definitely expect this Mr. Rustom to be found guilty and his shop to be available?” Ghote asked sharply.

      “What else to think is there? The body was in his shop. Rustom himself was absconding. No other explanation.”

      “Well, at least that is what A.I. Lobo is believing,” Ghote commented. “But you seem to know Mr. Rustom well. Tell me, please, you were not at all surprised at what he had done?”

      “Oh, yes. Yes. Altogether surprised. I mean, a chap is not coming into a shop and finding one dead body on the floor without feelings of surprise, no?”

      “But is it that you were surprised when you learned Mr. Rustom had been charge-sheeted?” Ghote persisted.

      Mr. Saxena shook his head, this way and that, up and down.

      “With the human being you cannot ever be telling,” he said at last. “That is my experience. Absolutely. Why, last month only Rustom would not take one single H.M.T. watch. Not one. Titans only, he was saying. Titans. What nonsense and rot.”

      He lifted his sleeve again, as if to show that in the intervening minutes none of his three lower H.M.T. watches had varied from conformity by as much as one second.

      And Ghote, looking idly at the array on that hairy forearm, saw that each one of the three said twenty-two minutes to two. He ought to be off at once if he was to get to V.T. Station in decent time to buy a ticket and catch that 14:15 train to Nagpur.

      “Look, Shruti,” he said, “I must be off. But thank you very much for the help you have given. And—and not a word to Mike Lobo, please.”

      He began to go. But he had hardly lugged his suitcase beyond the fringe of the small circle of onlookers when he felt his free arm grabbed by what seemed like a claw of steel. A harshly croaking voice in his ear demanded, “Time kya? Time kya?”

      He turned.

      It was a madman who had grabbed him, a bushily gray-bearded fellow, dressed only in a pair of filth-grimed cotton trousers with a shirt flapping open to reveal a chest covered in festering scratch marks and a long ugly wound or scar running down under the rib cage. A waft of filthy breath, sour with the rottenness of food gone bad before it had ever been eaten, assailed his nostrils.

      “Time for bus to be starting, yes?” the fellow went on, voice raw as a crow’s. “Time for bus. Oh, sahib, sahib, I was bus-starter before … Yes, one first-class job. And then came Saturn.”

      Ghote let his case drop, took the hand that had fixed so ferociously onto his arm, and tried to loosen it.

      “Saturn?” he asked, hoping to distract the fellow’s attention.

      Two mad creatures in one day, he thought. It was hardly fair. First there had been that woman with her banana peel just before he was due to go in to the D.G.P. And now this fellow, who once, if what he was saying was true, had been employed getting buses out of the depot neither before nor after the correct time and now was well past the limits of sanity.

      “Oh, sahib, I am under curse of Saturn. Astrologer foretold all. Seven years under Saturn in my horoscope. Oh, why did I have it cast?”

      “But—but that is perhaps nonsense only,” Ghote said, still trying to pry away the grimy claw.

      “No, no, sahib. True, true. From the first day he told it. My job retrenched. Then no money. Turned out from the room we had. Wife was dying. Son gambling, gambling, and then, when I had got all he needed to pay off those fellows, running away. So many rupees, gone, gone, gone. No money, no wife, no son, no watch. Oh, sahib, sahib …”

      Ghote had managed to force back only two of the grime-flaked fingers. He thought of his train. If he could do no better than this he would still be here at 14:15 when it left.

      “Let go, let go,” he shouted into the fellow’s face.

      “Time kya? Time kya, sahib? Bus must start.”

      “Will you let go?”

      “Now, gently, gently.”

      It was Shruti Shah. Seeing his predicament, she had come up behind the madman and now she put a coaxing arm round the filthy, flapping shirt on his back.

      Her crooning reassurance worked almost magically. Ghote felt the claw grip slacken. He slid his arm away. Shruti was still hushing the wild fellow, but she contrived to glance away to Ghote with a grin of complicity and a nod of the head that told him to make off while he could.

      He stooped, grabbed his suitcase, looked hastily up to the lane end, spotted the yellow roof of a stationary taxi, and ran.

      He got to V.T. Station with a decent amount of time in hand and breathed a sigh of relief before paying off the taxiwalla. He marched hurriedly into the huge, pillared concourse, trying to remember where exactly the ticket office was.

      In a moment he saw it. And above its windows the implacable painted notice CLOSED FOR ACCOUNTING 14:00 TO 14:30 HOURS. The windows were shuttered. He looked at his watch. It was 14:01.

      THREE

      So Inspector Ghote traveled “WT” to Nagpur, without a ticket for the first time in his law-abiding life. And at the end of his long journey he contrived to stroll out of the night-quiet station unchallenged. He booked himself in at the Skylark Hotel, the first he came to in the dimly lit city. Resting in bed, he read for a few minutes

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