Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade by H. R. F. Keating

Author:H. R. F. Keating [H. R. F. Keating]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2020-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Inspector Ghote stood on the bare tiles of the clients’ dormitory of the Masters Foundation and gaped. On the string bed in front of him the boy called Edward G. Robinson sat with his legs tucked underneath him and his half-smoked, fat American cigarette dangling from the puckered lips of his raddled and diseased face. There was a look of utter candour in his eyes.

‘You saw Amrit Singh take the poison?’ Ghote said incredulously. ‘You actually saw in the dispensary hut and Amrit Singh went over to a cupboard and took some of the poison?’

His thoughts were wild. Shooting through them all was the feeling of maddening irony. He had contemplated disobeying the orders of a superior officer so as to avoid persuading this boy to say falsely he had seen the Sikh thug steal the poison. And all along the boy had actually watched him do it and had chosen to keep silent.

Mixed with this were surges of plain fury. Why had the little devil taken it into his stupid head to say nothing about going up to the window of the dispensary hut when he had been on watch at the bottom of the compound?

The fury might have over-ridden everything else, except for one thing. Amid all the inconsequent jumble in his head, Ghote could not entirely suppress a strain of growing triumph. Never matter how it had come out, the fact remained that he had now got his evidence against Amrit Singh. And he had got it without cheating. Here was something he could put up in court without the least hesitation, and it was something which by all the laws of reason and justice should hang Amrit Singh. At one stroke he would have ended the career of the biggest thorn in the side of the police department and at the same time have solved the murder of the biggest foreign benefactor in the whole city of Bombay.

But under the whirl and tumble of these thoughts another strain lay.

Ghote took a step nearer the boys on the bed and looked hard down at Edward G.

‘You saw him take the poison,’ he said, ‘the poison in the little blue jar?’

Edward G. looked up at him, candid-eyed as ever.

‘Oh yes, Inspector sahib,’ he said, ‘from the little blue jar. I saw with my own eyes.’

Ghote stepped back.

The smashed fragments of the brown glass jar on which the Fingerprint Bureau had failed to find a single print belonging to Amrit Singh formed a picture in his mind as clearly as if they were laid out at that moment on the cracked tiles of the dormitory.

Ghote might have persisted. Edward G.’s evasion had not solved his dilemma. If anything it had sharpened it. It was plain that, if the boy was happy to invent a story about seeing Amrit Singh steal the poison just to annoy, then in fact he certainly had not crept up to the window of the dispensary when the big Sikh had been in there.

So D.S.P.

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