“Mr. Peduncle. My detective.”
Now it was the Englishman’s turn to sound offended.
“Yes, yes. I was once going through one of those books. Mr. Peduncle Caught in the Meshes. Very good.”
“Ah yes. Well, thank you.” The noted author seemed less hurt. “Well, you see, it’s like this. A couple of years ago, finding the Peduncle books were bringing me in a rather decent income, I decided to try a bit of an experiment. I wrote a crime novel in verse. A long poem really. Set in India, actually. In the days of the Raj. And, well, because of it the British Council asked me to come on this tour.”
“And you would be visiting Bombay also, yes?”
“Well, yes. Yes, eventually. Only... Well, this is what I’m ringing about actually. You see, I’ve been arrested.”
“Arrested? But what for are they arresting?”
“It— It’s— Well, the thing is, they think I’ve committed a murder.”
“But why are they thinking such? And what for are you telling me this per telephone?”
“That’s it. That’s it exactly. You see, no one here would listen to me. Or to the chaps from the High Commission either. And then I remembered you. You’re the only Indian police officer who’s ever paid any real attention to anything I said.”
Ghote remembered in his turn. How — warm Indian hospitality being day by day more and more worn away — he had battled and battled to find answers to those on-and-on damned questions.
“So that’s why,” the now familiar British voice went on, “I’d like you to get on to the Head of Crime Branch here and tell him that he’s being utterly ridiculous.”
The words, in that bang-bang voice, had entered Ghote’s ear. But it took several seconds, it seemed, before such an outrageous request entered his mind.
For him, for a simple inspector from Bombay, to telephone the Head of Crime Branch at the Centre and to tell him — To tell him what he was doing was utterly ridiculous. It — It — It would be like telling Bombay’s number one film star he was incapable of acting, or, worse, of dancing.
“But, Mr. Reymond — But, sir... Sir, what you are asking is a marathon impossible thing. Hundred percent.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line.
And then the voice that came trickling into his ear was very different from the one he had heard up to then.
“Inspector... Inspector, please. Please, I didn’t do it. Inspector, you know me. We knew each other well back then in Bombay. We were friends, weren’t we? You know I’m not someone who could ever kill anybody.”
Ghote thought.
What his bugbear of long ago had said was certainly true. Insofar as he could ever state that any human being was incapable of murder, he would have said it about the big, flabby, cucumber-cool, unexcitable Englishman he was recollecting more and more clearly with every passing minute.
So — the thoughts went click-clicking through his mind — if Mr. Henry Reymond, who was now, it seemed, a distinguished poet, had been arrested on suspicion of committing a murder which it was almost impossibly unlikely he had committed, then whoever was responsible in faraway Delhi was on the point of causing an international incident. The British newspapers would kick up one worldwide tamasha.
So... So, if there was anything he himself could do to get the business quietly forgotten, then it was up to him to do it. No one else in the whole of India probably knew more about Mr. Henry Reymond than he did.
And he thought that, just perhaps, there was something he could do. If he went to his own boss, Assistant Commissioner Pradhan, and explained to him what the situation was, then just possibly Mr. Pradhan might phone his opposite number at the Centre and convince him he ought to go much, much, much more carefully.
“Mr. Reymond,” he said, “I will to my level best do what I can. Kindly await development.”
So it was that, scarcely more than three hours later, Inspector Ghote found himself aboard an Indian Airlines plane bound for Delhi. He felt not a little confused. Never for a moment had he thought that trying to circumvent an international incident would mean he would be despatched himself without a moment to draw breath to the distant capital. And to do what? To somehow make sure, a task agreed to by the Head of Delhi Crime Branch, that a noted British author had beyond doubt not murdered one Professor V. V. Goswami. To disprove, in fact, the belief, held it seemed by the whole of the Delhi police, that Henry Reymond had committed murder in order to obtain possession of a certain valuable document — if just only one poem, hitherto unknown, handwritten by some deceased foreigner by the name of Eliot, Eliot with some initials in front, could possibly be so maha-valuable.
But when the plane swooped down to the airport and he stepped out onto the tarmac, a yet greater surprise awaited him. It was cold. Sharply and bitterly and horribly cold.
In an instant, shivering like the leaves of a pipal tree in his simple shirt and pants, he realised that, of course, he had read in the newspaper — Was it only yesterday? It somehow seemed already weeks away — that Delhi was in the grip of a colder than usual December. Bitingly chill air from the Himalayas mingling with the ever-increasing fumes of the capital’s jockeying and jolting traffic had covered the city in freezing, immovable smog. Roofless beggars were dying from exposure by the dozen. Everyday life had come to almost as much of a standstill as it customarily did in the intensest heat of summer
However, he had his duty. He marched off, flapping his arms round himself in a vain attempt to instill some interior warmth, and found an intrepid-looking Sikh taxiwallah.
“Police Headquarters,” he barked out between chattering teeth.
“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey... And the camels, dah-di-dah refractory.”
What on earth was this Mr. Brian Quayne saying? Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to hear what the two other poets had to tell rather than talk first to his friend Mr. Henry Reymond, if friend he was.
“Please, I am not at all understanding. What it is, please, about camels that are— What was it you were stating? Refractory?”
“Well, Inspector,” the paper-thin, chalk-faced, big-beaked poet said, blinking at him through a pair of round spectacles, “when we first arrived in Delhi we saw camels here and there. Can’t say I was really expecting to, somehow. And if the wretched beasts weren’t refractory in this awful cold, then I don’t know why not. Even if old Tom Eliot was thinking of a slightly less freezing journey than ours. Sharp, that’s what he says in the poem, after all. The ways deep and the weather sharp. Okay, I suppose, for stuff from the pre-Electronic Age.”
Ghote felt he was beginning to glimpse a meaning in what the fellow was saying. But this poem he was quoting, was it the one Henry Reymond was suspected of murdering to get hold of or not? This Tom Eliot, was he, or was he not, the world-famous Eliot? The one with the initials. T something. T. F. Yes, T. F. Eliot.
But never mind all that.
“Yes, yes,” he said, rapping it out impatiently, “such is all very well. But what I am asking, Mr. Quayne, is are you believing your fellow poet, Mr. Henry Reymond, was killing one Professor V. V. Goswami?”
“Damn it all, Inspector, it’s totally obvious a fat idiot like Reymond would never have the guts to murder anyone. Unless it was one of the paper tigers he stuffed into that rhyming travesty he’s so absurdly proud about.”
“So what is it you are saying was happening?”
“The whole business is totally absurd. How I got caught up in it, I’ll never know. The foremost poet, though I say it, of the Electronic Age. Beating my brains out to produce work with all the implacable logic of the computer, and I find myself involved in a ludicrous business about us all having to hide our copies of some ridiculous book and then having them all found and brought back to us, as if we were in some demented French farce.”