And it was his own duty to stop that happening. Whatever the attitude of the Judge was to him, he had this duty. He had been sent here as a police officer to prevent a most serious crime and to detect one scarcely less serious. Then he would do that duty.
Errr-bock. Pause. And then, when it seemed for the thousandth time that the damned thing was going to stop at last, again: errr-bock.
No, the Deputy Commissioner, old hawk of ancient days, had made the matter crystal clear in giving him his parting instructions.
‘Understand vun thing, Ghote. Vat ve have on our backs is not just an MLA only. That fellow is almost as damn influential as the Minister for Police Affairs himself. Ven he is asking, that is ordering. And so here am I, vith heaven knows how much vork to be done, having to find an officer to go and protect that British-loving svine who sentenced those chaps to death.’
‘Sir,’ he had put in then, those dry-as-fallen-leaves reports of the old case fresh in his mind. ‘Sir, I do not think Justice Sir Asif Ibrahim was acting from British-loving motives only. Sir, I believe from what he said then that he saw himself as doing no more than upholding the law.’
‘Nonsense, man. He knew that Independence must come soon. He could have imposed some damn long gaol term, vell knowing that they vould get their pardon ven the day came. Any reasonable man vould have done that. Vy, he embarrassed some of the British even by vat he had done. No, no. I do not vish one bit to help a svine like that.’
‘No, sir.’
‘But somevun I have got to send, and that is going to be you, Ghote.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But do not be thinking the fellow is going to thank you in any vay vatsoever. His cousin was making it vun hundred per cent clear that he does not vish to be helped. But, you, Ghote, have got to persvade him. I am going to see that the fellow is damn vell protected, and you, Ghote, are vat I am going to do that vith. You are the thin end of my vedge, Ghote. The thin end of my vedge.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So vunce you get there, push, man, push.’
‘Yes, sir.’
TWO
As it turned out, Inspector Ghote was up from his high, wooden-ended bed, all dark swirls of heavy carving, well before the long afternoon stupor had ended. What jerked him abruptly into a sitting position on the hard wide mattress was a sound.
At first he had thought it was only some slight extra noise coming from the aged fan above him, a new continuous low groan added to the regular, maddeningly delayed, inexorable errr-bock, errr-bock that had kept him half awake all the long deadeningly hot afternoon. But in a minute or so he had realized that the noise was not coming from anything in the room at all. It was coming from outside. Somewhere in the sun-compressed stillness, where every least bird was stifled into silence, something was making a sound, a tiny unbroken buzzing.
He sat there on the bed and strained his ears. Was it only the generator down in the tin shed at the far end of the big overgrown gardens, by the ruin of the fort? He had understood from Raman, wide-eyed, scared-looking, shyly-grinning Raman, that the engine ran only when light was needed in the big house and that the stored power of a set of big old batteries was sufficient for such other needs as there were during daylight hours. But perhaps for some special reason the ancient engine had been started up early today. But no. He recalled the machine’s throbbing sound well enough from the evening before, deep and reluctant, like the fan grunting round above him still, or like the blood in the Judge’s old veins, feeble but formidably obstinate.
And the buzzing was getting minute by minute louder.
Suddenly he knew what it was. He slid from the tall bed, went over to the window and pushed apart the heavy time-bleached wooden shutters. The light of the sun, although it was not striking directly on to this side of the house, struck him like a blow on the nose. He blinked. But, far away across on the other side of the almost dried-up river, he saw what he had been expecting to see. There, under the jabbing glare, moving steadily onwards like an indefatigable beetle, was a little motor-scooter with crouched on it, as if it had a pair of filmy white wings, a man wearing a white kurta on his upper half and below a baggy white dhoti, its ends streaming out in the slight breeze created by the machine’s modest speed.
A visitor.
It could be nothing else. There was nowhere else to go other than this house along the dusty unmade-up road, once past the cluster of huts that was the village.
But the river? How would that determinedly advancing rider in the dhoti cope with the broken surface of the river bed?
Standing at the window, eyes screwed tight against the quivering whiteness of the sunlight, Ghote watched to see what this newcomer would do.
Who could he be? Someone arriving by scooter could not have come from very far away. In fact, could have come only from the town. There was nowhere else within range of such a little machine. Some municipal official? Perhaps. Yet the Judge had said nothing, when the conversation at dinner last evening had turned to how few people they saw, about expecting any visitor, and it was surely likely that if someone was being sent to see a person as important as Sir Asif Ibrahim, notice would have been sent to him by letter. And even if the Judge had decided to say nothing of an expected caller, Begum Roshan would hardly have kept silent on the subject. There had been several long awkward gaps in the talk at the dinner table which she had made painful efforts to fill. She was hardly likely to have let such a promising topic go unmentioned.
So who was this white-clad figure on the little buzzing scooter approaching with such steady certainty?
Was it someone with a typewritten note concealed somewhere about his person? A note containing the words ‘twelve days only remaining’?
But who could that be? And why should he be coming?
The scooter slowed at last as it reached the top of the gentle slope of the river bank. The rider weaved his way twistingly right down to the broad bed of the shrunken stream itself. Then the noise of the engine – it had become more of an angry whine than a buzz when it had got nearer – abruptly ceased. The rider, who Ghote could see now was wearing a white Congress cap as well as his white kurta and dhoti, dismounted. He seemed to be an individual in late middle age, weighty and deliberate in his movements, though he was still too far away for his features to be at all clear.
He watched him gather the falling pleats of the dhoti in a bunch in his left hand and then awkwardly grasp the handlebar of his machine with them. Then he began to make his way across the river bed, pushing the little machine onwards as implacably as when he had been riding smoothly towards the house. He seemed to know the broken, stony terrain well, changing his course from time to time without pausing to choose the best route and contriving never to have to go through water much deeper than the tops of his ankles.
In five minutes more he would be at the house itself. But who was he?
He decided abruptly that he would go down and keep watch over his arrival. Someone who so evidently knew his way to the house could well be the person responsible for delivering those notes threatening Sir Asif with death. Could well then be someone who in twelve days’ time would attempt to murder Sir Asif ‘by means of an explosive detonation’.
Hurriedly he scrambled into trousers and shirt and respectable socks and shoes, pushing away as he did so the niggling thought that he had brought with him too few clothes to keep up for another twelve days the standards he had discovered that the Judge expected at his dinner table. Why, he had only one necktie, and that was already looking decidedly