Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

Ghote had hardly sat himself down to wait and wonder at the end of one of the rows of wooden chairs when a big all-white Contessa came motoring fast across the grass and up to the entrance gate. Its driver brought it to a fine screeching halt, and from it stepped none other than Ganglord Vasubhai, a somehow impressively powerful figure, despite his short, almost squat frame made all the more arrogant by the brick-red safari suit he was wearing. He was hastily followed by one of his bodyguards carrying a small suitcase, his flapping kurta barely concealing a pistol holster.

Ghote jumped to his feet and ushered the ganglord past his two solid constables.

“Vasubhai sahib,” he greeted him. “You are remembering myself, Inspector Ghote, Crime Branch?”

The ganglord confronted him, contriving to look down at him although in fact he was a little the shorter.

“Yes, yes. Ghote. Once, when I was very young, you took my knife from me. My best and sharpest knife. Forgiven now. That was long ago, and I have had many others since. But why is Deputy Commissioner sahib not here? I was sending invitation, full-colour picture of my Bhakti, plenty-plenty gold lettering, red silk string also.”

“Deputy Commissioner is sending myself in advance,” Ghote lied. “To be making sure everything is hundred per cent in order.”

“Fine, fine. And he is coming himself? In good time also?”

Ghote thought it wisest to avoid a direct answer.

“But, excuse me, Vasubhai sahib,” he said quickly. “If I am to be doing my duty to my level best, I must be asking to see inside that case your bodyguard is carrying.”

He feared that the ganglord would be too conscious of his own dignity to agree. But he need not have worried.

“Good, good. Maxi precautions. One very fine dancer is to perform here, each and every thing must be fully pukka.”

The surly, silent bodyguard planked the suitcase on the ground and opened its catches. A magnificent green Kanchivaram sari was revealed.

“Yes, I may take inside?” the ganglord asked, picking up the case the bodyguard had snapped closed.

“Certainly, certainly.”

Ghote waited at the edge of the big carpet, the bodyguard a stony pillar beside him. He decided to take the opportunity to give the whole area one more careful scrutiny. Was it Vasubhai that Gulshan Singh was planning to kill here? Was that what was going to happen? But, he thought, it is not very likely. There are rules to their game. Neither top gangster would get rid of his rival directly: doing so would bring instant and equal reprisal. Only gang members at the bottom of the heap were expendable.

So, what was to happen after all? Seemingly nothing.

There followed a terrible thought. Had the Deputy Commissioner become alarmed for no good reason? And how would he tell him, if it was so, that he had been tricked?

Minutes passed. Ghote began to wish that Vasubhai would come out of the dressing-room. It would be something if he could be sure where the ganglord actually was. But no doubt the beauteous Bhakti’s doting father was taking his time to arrange that Kanchivaram sari to its best effect, draping it perhaps first across the bare wooden table and then over the little gilt chair. And next changing his mind and doing it the other way round. He even might be holding it up against his ugly brick-red safari suit and looking at himself in the tall mirror.

“Vasubhai must be very-very proud of his daughter,” he said to the hulking, silent bodyguard.

The fellow simply grunted by way of answer.

Ghote took another look all round. A few early comers were making their way across the neatly mown grass towards the entrance gate, the women in their best, bright glowing saris, the men less colourful in smart shirts and trousers. Behind them the musicians had also arrived, a drummer with his pair of tablas, a woman who would pluck the droning accompaniment from her tall-necked, deep-bowled instrument, a big fat man lugging his heavy, much decorated harmonium.

Then, bursting out from between the canvas flaps of the dressing-room entrance like a bull released from its stall – or a bullet from a gun even, Ghote thought – Ganglord Vasubhai took two striding paces out on to the big carpet and stopped dead.

“Inspector, Inspector. Something you must be seeing.”

There was such a note of urgency in his voice that Ghote could not stop himself running across.

“Inside, inside,” Vasubhai yelled at him, voice hoarse with emotion.

Ghote, going past him towards the dressing-room, found himself recording that a thick sheen of sweat had sprung up all over the ganglord’s formidable face.

The moment he broke through the entrance curtain behind him he understood why Vasubhai had been so alarmed. Evidently for some reason or other he must have flicked back the green tarpaulin on the bundle of unused tent poles. And he had revealed that more than tent poles were tucked away there out of sight. He had revealed a body.

Ghote had immediately smelt blood.

But, going closer, he saw that the corpse had, in fact, been strangled. The mark left by the cord was unmistakable. The dead man was small and utterly nondescript in appearance. His face, Ghote thought with a quick flick of pity, could be that of a hundred, of a thousand, other people. Not a single distinguishing mark. Nor was what he was wearing any more an indication of who he might be, just a simple, much-stained white banian vest and a pair of equally dirty khaki half-pants. But, blotting out everything else, was the monstrous fact that, right up close to the bottom of those greasy old khaki shorts, both the man’s legs had been cut off.

It was from the two hacked-off stumps, Ghote realized, that the smell of blood must be coming. But in that case – the thought came crashing in – it must have been Vasubhai himself, inside the little room for longer than expected, who was responsible. Certainly, if the dead man’s legs had been cut off before Vasubhai had gone into the dressing-room he himself would have smelt blood when he had taken a glancing look at the heap of tent poles under the tarpaulin.

Why, why, he cursed himself, had he not done what Vasubhai must have done and lifted the tarpaulin to make sure nothing suspicious was under it? But he had not. There had not seemed to be any reason to lift up the sheet when the ends of the poles were projecting from it, though now it was plain there had been many fewer of those than it had seemed. The ones scattered now on the grass must have been carefully arranged round the body of the small man whose corpse had been put in the dressing-room. For some reason? For what reason?

And why had this man been strangled, this scrawny little figure, who might be any one of a thousand, no, of ten or twenty thousand other almost anonymous people going about the city scraping out some sort of a living? Certainly his murder was not going to be a case for the elite Crime Branch. The local police would have to carry out some sort of an investigation, though there was almost no chance that the murder of such an almost faceless victim could be tied down to some equally anonymous killer.

Unless… Unless the killer could possibly be Vasubhai, there for so long in the little darkened dressing-room? But, no. No, that little insignificant corpse must have been put under that green tarpaulin long before Vasubhai had entered.

But Vasubhai, did he still carry the sort of knife he always had so long ago? Very likely, though if so it was well concealed now. So, demand to search him? Not all that easy a thing to do. Vasubhai, ganglord though he is, is definitely a man of influence in this crime-dominated city of ours. Politicians by the dozen in his pocket. Offend him and I could find myself posted to the Armed Police in some distant, distant part of the State. All right, if it was plain he had committed a murder, I would arrest the fellow here and now. But it is not, not at all.