Inspector Ghote Draws a Line. H. R. f. Keating
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to borrow it? But he could hardly say to him, ‘Sir, I want to telephone Bombay to check on a regular visitor to your house, a person to whom you give your hospitality.’ And even if he found some pretext to give to Sir Asif for Inspector Ghote to make the trip to the town, he would then have to devise some other reason why Doctor Ghote should need to go there so soon after his arrival. What did Doctors of Philosophy suddenly need that would make a journey of twenty miles or more a matter of urgency? Extra notebooks? More pencils?
‘But, my dear Dhebar, you must meet our other visitor, Doctor Ghote, who has come to assist me with my Memoirs. Come and join us, Ghote.’
The old man had spotted him. Had known he was there listening all the time, most likely. It would be typical of him. And, no doubt, that warm welcome had been given to Mr Dhebar with the sole object of putting yet more confusion into his own mind.
He burned with rage. And fought to conceal it.
But the Judge’s last remark had, it seemed, caused Mr Dhebar much greater dismay even than the mysteriously warm welcome he had received.
Coming hurrying down the stairs, taking their wide flights much too quickly but unable to help himself, he saw that the newcomer had been plunged into a palpable state of agitation, rendered indeed temporarily speechless.
But only temporarily.
‘Judge. Sir Asif. Judge sahib, what – what are these Memoirs? You are not writing your Memoirs. Nothing at all has been said. You are not.’
He was hardly asking the Judge a question, even a blatantly impolite one. He was making an assertion. Declaring passionately that something was not happening.
Sir Asif smiled at him, a quick curling smile under his oddly squashed-down nose.
‘But of course I am writing my Memoirs, my dear fellow. I have been engaged upon the task for years. Are you sure that I have never chanced to mention them to you?’
‘Never,’ said Mr Dhebar. ‘Never, never, never.’
His eyes gleamed in a fury of denial.
‘Ah, well, if you say so, my dear chap. But it nevertheless remains that I have been steadily at work for, oh, a number of years. And what I have written will, I venture to think, be not without interest, even in these times when standards have been allowed so deplorably to degenerate.’
And the old man turned and began to walk slowly away, silver-headed cane tapping out on the hard marble of the floor with a steady insolent beat.
‘If you will excuse me,’ he murmured. ‘A little tiredness. The penalty of age. A short rest before teatime. You will find my daughter in the drawing-room. I am sure you both know the way.’
He disappeared into one of the four tall corridors leading off the hall.
Ghote and Mr Dhebar were left staring at each other like two castaways unexpectedly coming face to face at the crest of some empty pinpoint ocean island.
THREE
For a few moments Ghote stood facing the heavy short-statured figure of Mr Dhebar, his mind still sliding this way and that on the wide slippery expanse of doubt on which old Sir Asif had succeeded, in so few words, in setting him down.
Then he pulled himself together.
‘Mr Dhebar,’ he said briskly, ‘shall we go?’
Without waiting for an answer, since the newcomer appeared every bit as much disoriented as he felt himself to be, he turned and set off.
‘Sir, excuse me.’
Mr Dhebar was standing stolidly just where he had been.
‘Yes?’
‘My dear sir, I am much afraid that for the drawing-room you are taking altogether the wrong direction.’
With abrupt deflation, he realized that, sure enough, the passage he had so confidently headed for – a large bluish patch of dried mildew on its wall reminded him of the frontier-bound outline of Bangladesh on a map, a vague two-legged, two-armed shape surmounted by a sort of waving cock’s comb – was one which he had not gone down at all before during his time in the big old house.
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ he stammered out. ‘I am sorry. I arrived here only yesterday, you know.’
‘To assist with the Memoirs?’
Mr Dhebar had rapidly pulled himself together. Gone completely was the evident confusion Sir Asif had implanted in him: in its place was as marked a determination. It made Ghote suddenly see him as a steam-locomotive, long-serving and time-marked, fuelled perhaps by low-grade coal and capable of no great speed, but by no means easy to bring to a halt or to shunt off along a convenient side-track.
He coughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, allowing himself a little ambiguity, ‘I am here to assist Sir Asif in any way which he may require.’
‘With the Memoirs?’ Mr Dhebar asked bluntly.
‘Er – yes. With the Memoirs.’
‘I was not at all aware until just a few moments ago that Sir Asif was writing any such Memoirs.’
‘Yes. Yes. Yes, I understand that. Er – I believe it was a subject he did not much care to discuss.’
‘But now he is discussing,’ Mr Dhebar said implacably.
‘Yes. Yes, now he is discussing.’
Again he coughed, a long rattly sound. And then at last inspiration came.
‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘that Sir Asif has now at last reached the point where he can see the end of his task. Now he knows that he has enough material to achieve publication – yes, publication – and he feels in consequence that he can acknowledge the existence of the said Memoirs. And that – that is why he has requested my assistance. Such as it is.’
‘Publication is certain then?’ Mr Dhebar asked.
The question had been delivered in a way that did not admit of it receiving no answer. In a quick spurt of resolution he decided that attack was the only way to defend himself.
‘May I ask,’ he said sharply, ‘what it is that you yourself do? Why is it that you are here in this house?’
And it seemed that after all he had brought the ponderous locomotive to a stop. Mr Dhebar stood and blinked.
Then, after a second, he plunged his hand inside his stretched white kurta – close to he could see that it was no longer in fact white but had gathered from the miles of red road-dust a distinct pinkish tone – and brought out a very large visiting card, somewhat grimy at its fluted edges. He presented it with a weighty flourish.
P. N. Dhebar, Editor-in-Chief,
The Sputnik, A Journal of Opinion
(Weekly Publication Assured)
‘Though on occasion,’ The Sputnik editor added, ‘publication is fortnightly. Owing to the pressure of financial circumstances.’
But Ghote was thinking: an editor, a journalist, a fellow with typewriters of all sorts all around him, never mind what is his motive, it is altogether possible that he has in his pocket, next to those visiting cards, another threatening note ready for delivery.
‘And Sir Asif is a contributor to The Sputnik?’ he asked, making a sharp guess.
‘Yes, yes. My dear sir, you have come at once to the bottom of the matter. Some little time ago I realized that our district has the honour of having a person of such distinction residing within it. I entered into negotiation. Sir Asif contributes one pungent column per week, or in certain eventualities per fortnight.’
Ghote processed this new information. For one thing, it explained Mr Dhebar’s dismay at hearing about the fictitious