Inspector Ghote's First Case by H. R. F. Keating

Author:H. R. F. Keating [H.R.F. Keating]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2020-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Bullybhoy came striding in, a privileged visitor, without any waiting to know whether his sudden arrival was interrupting any business Dawkins sahib might be engaged with.

And, yes, Ghote thought, I believe now I did hear that jangling bell, only I was so much worrying about what I must say to Dawkins sahib that it was making no impact on me.

‘Ah, Darrani,’ Dawkins greeted Bullybhoy. ‘Just the man. Been hearing some extraordinary things, unbelievable things, from Inspector – er – here. Like to have your opinion. Take a pew. Take a pew.’

Ghote stood, looking at Bullybhoy as he pulled a chair forward, trying hard to stamp down the fury he was feeling. How like the fellow to come bursting in at a moment like this. And how like his carefully nurtured ‘friend’, the khansamah, to bring him into the room in a way no servant should.

In a way, now I think about it, that is very much surprising. But no time for things like that. What will Bullybhoy say, and do, when he is hearing what I was discovering? And, worse, when Dawkins sahib was just only saying that what I had forced myself to tell him, the truth as I was hearing same from Mrs Pansy Watson, was unbelievable?

The answer came soon enough.

Dawkins sahib had barely finished giving Bullybhoy his account of what he had just heard – he had told it all more or less accurately – when Bullybhoy delivered his I-am-right verdict.

‘Forget it.’

Forget? Ghote had wanted to snap out in amazement.

But, luckily for him, Dawkins sahib had stepped in.

‘Forget? I’m not altogether sure what you mean.’

‘Simple enough,’ Bullybhoy replied sharply, in a way that Ghote thought he himself could never have done. ‘Simple enough. Forget it all, forget the whole business of your wife’s unfortunate death. It’s all been dealt with. I dealt with it. Christian burial carried out ek dum. Dare say memorial stone is all but ready, just simple name and dates. All that’s needed. Inquest went off – what they are calling word to wise – without even one hitch. So, all can be forgotten. It happened in days gone by. No more to be said.’

Not for the first time in Ghote’s relations with Bullybhoy, he found himself astonished. How can the fellow say a thing like that, he asked himself. How can he?

‘Barrani bhai, that will not do,’ he said, under the impulse of truth he could not but bring it out. ‘You cannot just only bury away all this. Why, that day, did Iris memsahib take the twelve-bore and shoot herself? Dawkins sahib has a right to know, if it can at all be found out. When something like that is happening it is even more than just only his right. The whole world of order and decency has the right to know.’

‘Always head-in-sky,’ Bullybhoy declared. ‘I was with this fellow at Nasik Police Training School, Dawkins sahib. He was always like that, wanting to know till last drop what is lying behind each and every old crime we were examining.

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