Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

A Cold Coming by H. R. F. Keating

© 1997 by H. R. F. Keating

Mr. Keating says of the series to which this story belongs: “While it provides a reasonably accurate picture of today’s India — a picture conditioned, I admit, by the fact that for the first 10 years I wrote about Ghote I had not actually visited his country — I like to think it puts a recognizable human being into... situations likely to happen to any of us.”

“It is someone urgent-urgent wanting you. Some angrezi it is sounding like.”

Inspector Ghote was not sorry his wife calling out had cut short his morning shower. In December in Bombay the water has a distinct chill to it. He wrapped a towel round his middle and hurried to the telephone, feeling the cool stone of the floor on his bare feet.

An Englishman wanting him? But who?

And urgently...?

“Ghote speaking.”

“Ah. Ah, thank God, it’s you. Henry Reymond here.”

Mr. Henry Reymond? The name was somehow half-familiar. Who the devil...?

“Inspector? Inspector? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, yes. I am hearing. Why not?”

“Well... Indian telephones.”

“Our system is one hundred percent first-class.”

Ghote had let himself voice some resentment. Who was this Westerner to decide that if something was Indian it must be inefficient, however much Bombay phones had once been a nightmare of crossed lines and sudden cutoffs?

And then some recollection of that half-concealed frigid disapproval told him who this Reymond Henry, Henry Reymond, was.

Yes. Years ago he had met the man. A noted British author, or so the papers had called him. In Bombay on some sort of exchange visit with an Indian author. And... And there had been a murder next-door to the flat the fellow had been lent. The Shivaji Park case. And all those years ago he himself had been landed with no more than the task of keeping this Henry Reymond, who wrote, yes, crime stories, out of the way. The fellow had been being one damn nuisance. And he had gone on plaguing him all the time with his high-and-mighty questions-this and questions-that about every awkward aspect of Bombay life.

“Mr. Reymond,” he brought himself to say — Indian hospitality must never be less than wholehearted — “you are altogether welcome here. You are in Bombay itself, yes?”

“No, no. I’m in Delhi. Er — New Delhi. I’m here on a tour for the British Council. Three of us poets.”

“Poets? Were you saying you are poet? But I am thinking it is crime books you are writing. Some hero who is collecting something. Yes, shells. You are writing books wherein this shells-wallah is all the time solving very-very fantastic mysteries.”

“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.”

“Mr. Quayne, kindly be telling me, if you are even able, exactly what was occurring? Facts only.”

Across the poet’s chalky face there came for an instant a flush of pinkness, whether of shame or anger it was impossible to tell.

“Very well,” he said in a rather more businesslike manner. “It was like this. After we Three Wise Men from the West had given our reading at the British Council there was a reception for us at Professor Goswami’s house. Little spicy bits brought round by a creepy-looking servant and nothing at all to drink. If you don’t count orange juice.”

Ghote once more felt an urge to defend Indian hospitality, even offered by a creepy servant, if creepy the man really was. But, before he could find the right words, with a shudder of distaste the British poet went back to his account.

“And then each one of us was given, or we had thrust into our hands, more like, by someone called Mrs. Namita Rai, a copy of her poetical works, entitled — would you believe — In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Well, naturally, none of us wanted to lug something like that all round the rest of India. So, as it turned out, we each of us contrived discreetly to leave our copies in various parts of the hotel we had been put up at, the Imperial. I hid mine in an inconspicuous corner of what they call the Business Centre, where I was sending off some faxes. Arnold Brudge stuffed his down the side of one of those big sofas in the foyer, and that idiot Reymond left his in the tiny hotel bookshop. In imitation, he said, kept on saying, of that Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

“I am well-knowing that tale,” Ghote put in, keeping his literary end up.

“Well, everybody knows it. But the thing was — and this is just about as stupid as you can get — the bloody books had been dedicated to each of us by name. So in less than an hour they were all three brought back to our rooms by a bowing and scraping, tip-seeking hotel servant.”

Ghote saw the joke. And kept a straight face.

“But why are you telling all this?” he asked. “Kindly stick one hundred percent to point in hand.”

The foremost poet of the Electronic Age drew in a sharp sigh.

“This is the point,” he snapped. “The bloody ridiculous point of it all. You see, we were invited to Professor Goswami’s again next day. Plunging out into the bloody cold smog just to drink a cup of milky damn tea and look at this Eliot poem that had somehow found its way to India and been totally forgotten ever since.”

“That is Mr. T. F. Eliot, expired?”

“Expired?” The poet gave a cold giggle. “Yes, I suppose you could say that. Now we’ve entered the Electronic Age, Eliot and all his stuff has pretty well expired.”

“So what was happening, please, at this second visit to late Professor Goswami?”

But it was from Arnold Brudge and not Electronic Age Brian Quayne that Ghote eventually heard his most coherent account of how a copy of Mrs. Namita Rai’s poetical works had led to the arrest on suspicion of murder of his erstwhile friend Henry Reymond.

“Henry Reymond,” said the massive man opposite, wide chest stretching a rough wool, high-collared, tree-brown pullover to bursting point, two slabs of raw red hands flat on the table in front of him, “that fat slob, he’d faint dead away if he so much as saw a hawk swoop to its kill. He’d piss himself if he heard a dog-fox scream in lust. He’d puke at the smell of a decent bit of blood.”

“Yes, yes,” Ghote had answered sharply, feeling he ought at least to defend a little his friend of long ago. “But, please, I was asking what was happening when you, all three, were going to Professor Goswami’s to examine this poem they are saying is so valuable.”

“Oh, that. Well, you see, according to bloody Henry Reymond he had taken with him his copy of In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley. He says he wanted to hide it in the room where that wretched woman made him accept it. But, because apparently I’d told him to for God’s sake shut up about his stupid Edgar Allan Poe, he never said a word to either of us about his sneaky little plan. Then, after Goswami was murdered that night — probably some intruder, I don’t know — the police found the bloody book in the room. It was conspicuous enough, for God’s sake, hand-bound in fancy red silk. But now Goswami’s servant swears it wasn’t there before the murder. Dare say the fellow could be right, the way he was going about all the time with a cloth over his shoulder looking for something to dust.”

The mountainous poet gave a snort of contempt. Ghote felt puzzled.

“But you, Mr. Brudge,” he asked, “were you seeing Mr. Reymond leave that book there? Can you provide confirmation itself?”

His question was answered with a single long, muffled roar. Only on the end of it were words.

“... bother with anything bar Nature. Not what a great slob like Reymond might be doing.”

Ghote’s hopes sank away. The poet of the Electronic Age had been just as unhelpful over this point. And it was a vital one. If no one who knew Mr. Henry Reymond had seen him hide that silk-bound volume among Professor Goswami’s crammed bookshelves, then the chances of persuading the Delhi police that his old acquaintance was not a murderer were slim almost to vanishing point.

“So,” he asked desperately, “you cannot be stating definitely whether or not this book by Mrs. Rai was in Professor Goswami’s room prior to the event of murder?”

“Said I can’t, didn’t I?”

It felt like being crushed by a wall of ice.

“Thank you, Mr. Brudge.” He roused himself. “And may I say I am hoping one day I would read some of your very-very nice poetry.”

“Not nice. Christ’s sake.”

Ghote retreated.

Perhaps Mr. Henry Reymond himself would, asked the right questions in the right way, be able to produce some proof he had not returned to Professor Goswami’s in the dead of night in order to steal this newfound valuable poem. Then it would be clear he had not been disturbed by the professor, had not let fall the works of Mrs. Rai, and had not then, as the Delhiwallahs believed, struck the professor down.

But now all the poet of the once-upon-a-time Raj could do, ask him what he would, was to bleat out that he had never left his hotel room that night, and that he had, he had, he had put Mrs. Rai’s book onto a shelf in Professor Goswami’s room during his afternoon visit.

“Inspector, I know I did. I know it.”

“But, please, was anyone seeing?”

For one quiet moment the crime writer/poet sat and thought. But it was for one moment only. Then panic and hysteria set in again.

“No one saw me. No one. Oh God, I wish they had. Then I’d be believed. But— But, you see, that servant seemed to be everywhere I was when I was about to get rid of that awful book. So in the end I just turned my back and stuffed it into the first place I saw.”

“But where was that itself?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. All I know is, Professor Goswami was alive and well when I left. I told him how deeply I admired the Eliot manuscript, and then I made that farewell gesture of putting your hands together — one has to make an effort to show you don’t feel superior — and we all three got a taxi back to the hotel.”

“That was the newly found poem of late Mr. T. F. Eliot?” Ghote asked, hoping for some last tiny corroborative detail.

Henry Reymond gave him a chill look.

“T. S., Inspector,” he said. “Tom Eliot’s initials were T. S.”

The icy hiss with which that final letter was pronounced finished it for Ghote. He found he was almost hoping Henry Reymond, despite the assurances of his two fellow poets, had been capable of murder and had attacked Professor Goswami. But he could not quite believe it.

So he went, not without internal trembling that owed nothing to the freezing smog, to see Delhi’s Head of Crime Branch, a yet more formidable figure than his own Assistant Commissioner Pradhan.

But before he had so much as uttered a single word of his report, he saw, prominently lying on the huge desk in front of him, what could be nothing else than the fatal copy of In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, beautifully hand-bound in glowing red silk. He felt it was an omen. Of ill-success.

The first words he heard confirmed all his worst fears.

“Well, Inspector? My detectives have got it all wrong, is it? A Bombaywallah is going to put us right?”

“No, sir. That is— Sir, please to believe this. The two poets accompanying Mr. Henry Reymond, who are knowing him well, sir, both are one hundred percent certain he is a man not able to commit any murder.”

“And you, Inspector, are you going to tell me there is one single human being in this world incapable, given the right circumstances, of committing an offence under Section 302, Indian Penal Code?”

“No, sir, no. I am not saying such. I would never say anyone is not at worst capable of murder. But, sir, all the same, I also am believing Mr. Henry Reymond would commit such only under tiptop provocation.”

“And you think the prospect of getting his dirty thieving hands on this priceless poetical manuscript, now missing, is not provocation enough? Poets are always poor, Inspector. Always needing money for wine, women, song. Even you must be knowing that.”

“Sir, yes, that I am understanding. But, sir, kindly consider this. Mr. Henry Reymond is not just only poet. He is crime writer-cum-poet, sir. He is one very-very famous writer of detective stories. Mr. Peduncle series, sir. And, sir, he was telling me. From those books he was making so much money that, sir, he was able to take leave from that work and write one poem in verse, murder story in times of Raj only. So, sir, he is having no need whatsoever of stealing any manuscript.”

“No, Inspector. No. Damn it, there is evidence. This book. Found at the murder scene itself. First-class evidence.”

A ferocious hand slapped down on the red silk.

Ghote, as soon as the hand was lifted, ventured to pick the book up. Perhaps Mr. Henry Reymond’s name was not actually in it? Perhaps one of the other poets’ was?

But no. There on the title page was the inscription: To my fellow poet Mr. Henry Reymond. In admiration. Namita Rai.

Why had the fellow not paid attention to the book being returned to him at the Imperial Hotel just only because of that inscription? Why had he not had the simple sense to tear out that page? Probably because he had believed in his coldly high-and-mighty way that no one would ever find the book among all the others in Professor Goswami’s room. But he had failed to reckon with the efficiency of the police searchers. Even the Delhi searchers.

He flipped over the page and read the titles of the first few poems.

“Leave that alone, Inspector.”

Ghote hastily replaced the red-silk volume.

“And listen to me. Unless you have something better to tell me than all that nonsense about poets not needing money and this friend of yours not being capable of murder, I am going to charge-sheet him. Now.”

“Sir, no. Sir, kindly give me some more time. I will talk to him again. Find if he has some alibi.”

“Alibi? Oh, yes, and what alibi did he produce for us? Asleep in his room at the Imperial Hotel. And not even a woman beside him. What sort of a poet is that?”

“Sir, one altogether timid.”

“Eh? Timid? Timid, did you say? Well, I suppose you’ve got a point there, Inspector. Point of sorts. All right, I tell you what. I’ll give you till ten P.M. tonight. Come back to me then with some sort of decent evidence and I’ll give the matter more consideration. All right?”

“Yes, sir. Yes.”

Ghote left. Hurriedly.

But go over and over the circumstances with Henry Reymond though he might, he could not extract from the crime writer-cum-poet one single fact that might prove he had not sneaked out of the Imperial Hotel, gone slipping through the chill, blanketing smog of Delhi’s nighttime streets to Professor Goswami’s and, while seizing this poem by Mr. T. F. — no, T. S. — Eliot, been disturbed by the professor and in a struggle killed him.

So it was well before his deadline hour that, sadly, he left the prisoner to his fate.

He wandered out into the bone-chilling night, still convinced, nevertheless, that Henry Reymond had never murdered Professor Goswami. That red-silk-covered book In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, what trouble it had caused. All because, in the warmth of fellow feeling for those visiting British poets, Namita Rai had made them the gift of those copies.

And how sad it was that the three of them, with cold-hearted Britishness, had tried to get rid of the books. Poor Mrs. Rai. If she ever got to know. And — then the thought struck him — she would get to know. When the papers described every detail of the trial for murder of a famous U.K. poet, it would come out that he, and his fellow poets, had all tried to dispose of Mrs. Namita Rai’s works.

No, he must tell her about it himself. He must tell her now. Break it to her gently. So that she would have not too much of suffering.

He hurried over to Police Headquarters, consulted a telephone directory, found that Mrs. Rai’s residence was not far away.

A quarter of an hour later he was closeted with the writer of Ode to the East Wind and Triumph of Death (Cancelled Opening).

And five minutes after that he was sitting in a glow of delight. He had obtained perfect proof that Mr. Henry Reymond had left his copy of Mrs. Rai’s book at Professor Goswami’s while that learned gentleman was still hale and hearty. Proof Mr. Henry Reymond had never taken that handwritten poem of Mr. T. S. — Yes, T. S. — Eliot so as to sell it for the huge sum it would fetch. No doubt the professor’s servant — Mr. Brian Quayne was right after all, the fellow must be “creepy” — had led some dacoit friends to this much vaunted valuable object and so brought about the professor’s death.

“But, Inspector,” Mrs. Rai had said, “I am well knowing what those disgraceful Englishmen were doing. Goswami Sahib himself was finding Mr. Reymond’s copy of my book pushed in among his shelves, and he was being so kind as to tell me what had happened in case I should hear of it from some less well-wishing friend.”