The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE LEGS THAT WALKED by H.R.F. Keating

H.R.F. Keating (b.1926), known to his friends as Harry, is best known for his novels featuring the Bombay detective Ganesh Ghote. The very first of this series, The Perfect Murder (1964), which won an Edgar Award as that year’s best first novel, included an impossible crime involving the disappearance of a one-rupee note, though Go West, Inspector Ghote (1981), set in Los Angeles, involves a much more gory impossible death. Keating is also a well-read student of crime fiction and has written several reference books about the genre, such as The Bedside Companion to Crime (1989), and he knows his way around the impossible crime field. His books and stories have an irrepressible sense of humour, which is much evident in the following story, which I’d classify as a “locked-tent” mystery!

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The Deputy Commissioner looked at Inspector Ghote standing at alert attention in front of his wide semi-circular desk with its piles of papers, each held down under the breeze of the overhead fan by a round silvery paperweight bearing his initials.

“You’re a man who admires our Indian classical music, Ghote?” he said.

Ghote experienced a washing-over wave of absolute puzzlement.

“No, sir, no, not at all,” he answered with the truth almost before he had gathered himself together.

The Deputy Commissioner continued to look at him, blank-faced.

“You are a first-class connoisseur of same, isn’t it?” he asked again, each word heavy with meaning.

And now Ghote ceased to be puzzled.

“Yes, sir, yes,” he replied. “Yes, I am.”

“Good man. Right, I am sending you to the Annual Festival of the Indian Music Society this evening, out at Chembur. Just keep an eye on things, yes?”

Puzzlement returned.

“Sir, what sort of things it is?”

The Deputy Commissioner frowned.

“Just go there, Ghote, and- And – And keep your eyes open.”

“Yes, sir.”

Should I leave now, Ghote asked himself. Should I just only click heels to Deputy Commissioner sahib, turn smartly and march from his cabin?

But, he thought then, if I am going out to this festival and fail to see whatever I am meant to be keeping my eye on, then that will be worse than seeming not to understand here and now.

“Sir,” he said, “can you be telling anything more?”

The Deputy Commissioner brought his lips hard together in a puff of barely suppressed fury.

“Very well, very well,” he snapped. “So, listen. It has just come to my attention – never mind how – that Gulshan Singh, our damned Number One ganglord, believes something which the police should take note of will happen out at the festival this evening.”

“What sort of something, sir?” Ghote asked, before he realized that the Deputy Commissioner had already said more than he wanted to.

“Something, Ghote. Something. Do I have to dot every i, cross every t?” A glower at the twirling fan above. “Well, I suppose it may be relevant that tonight’s singer is, as it happens, the daughter of Vasudev Kalgutkar, otherwise known as plain Vasubhai.”

“The Number One ganglord?” Ghote could not help exclaiming, acutely aware of the contrast between the high-class culture event he was being sent to and the murky world of the city’s gangs. And then in another heart-sinking moment he realized that the Deputy Commissioner had already given the Number One title to Gulshan Singh.

“Yes, yes. Vasubhai,” the Deputy Commissioner answered, mercifully unaware, it seemed, of Ghote’s unwitting rival claim. “And Vasubhai, let me tell you, had the damn cheek a couple of weeks ago to send me – myself, Deputy Commissioner, Crime Branch – an invitation to the recital, or whatever it is, some damn daughter of his is giving tonight. So I am sending you there, Ghote. To keep your damned eyes open. Yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Nevertheless out at the recreation ground at Chembur that evening, shortly before the swift onset of darkness, Ghote was still conscious of not knowing much more about what to keep his eye on than he had done in the Deputy Commissioner’s cabin. Yes, most probably the place to watch was the gaily coloured tented shamiana under which The Beauteous Bhakti, as according to the posters Vasubhai’s daughter was called, was to sing. At no doubt interminable length. Whatever it was that had caused Vasubhai’s deadly rival, Gulshan Singh, to hint that a police presence would be needed was most likely to happen there. So far, so good.

Ghote had already taken every sensible precaution that occurred to him. Two tough constables had been posted at the entrance to the fenced-off audience area with its rows of slatted wooden chairs. Along each one of those rows he had marched himself, looking for anything that might possibly be suspicious. He had trodden over every inch of the luxurious carpet, supplied no doubt by Ganglord Vasubhai, on which Bhakti was to sing. But he had made no discoveries at all. He had even traced the thick black cable supplying the lighting for the evening’s performance all the way back to the generator gently throbbing on a truck in the road outside. But, again, there was no sign of anything untoward. Only, at the far side of the deserted recreation ground a mali was urging on a bullock pulling an ancient lawn-mower. Peace under the still light, cloudless sky.

The beauteous Bhakti was to put on her costume in a small dressing-room forming the back part of the shamiana. Going into its darkened shade, Ghote saw the room was as bare as it could possibly be. Its floor was no different from the rest of the neatly mown grass all round. Its walls were the canvas of the shamiana, supported at their corners by thin poles. A number of these, apparently unneeded, protruded indeed from a small green tarpaulin in one corner. But, besides this, the little room contained nothing but a bare trestle table, a single little gilt chair and, on a stand, a full-length mirror in which Bhakti could make sure she was truly beauteous before coming out from its single doorway to sing.

Satisfied, Ghote as a last precaution made a careful inspection of the rear of the whole shamiana. All the lower edges of its colourful canvas, he found, were well pegged into the ground. Its roof was firmly sewn down. Beyond any doubt no one could creep in that way so as to – Was this what Gulshan planned? – attack the beauteous Bhakti. Of course, when eventually Bhakti stepped out someone could perhaps shoot her from a distance. But, if this was what was to happen and not something else altogether, bar looking out for any places where a marksman could hide, there was nothing sensible to be done.

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