Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 92, No. 3. Whole No. 547, September 1988

The Purloined Parvati and Other Artefacts by H. R. F. Keating

© 1988 by H. R. F. Keating.

“No this, no that,” complained the Assistant Commissioner crossly. “What good are your nos and woes to me, Inspector? It is results I am wanting. A most valuable statue of Goddess Parvati was stolen in broad daylight, and numerous artefacts also.”

“Artefacts, sir?” Ghote blurted the question out before he had time to see it would be a mistake to display ignorance of exactly what the English word meant.

“Yes, man, artefacts. Artefacts. Whatsoever they are.”

A story in Harry Keating’s enduring series that will make you laugh out loud. Would that Peter Sellers were alive to play any or all of the characters, excepting Marik but including Professor Mrs. or Miss Prunella Partington...

The Assistant Commissioner was angry. Inspector Ghote could be in no doubt of it. That voice, he thought, so loud it must be heard through entire Bombay.

The A.C.P. had thumped the glass-topped surface of his desk, too.

“It is not good enough. Not good enough by one damn long chalk.”

“No, sir. No, A.C.P. sahib.”

“The clear-up rate for Crime Branch has fallen almost to zero.”

Ghote thought of stating the exact figure, which, if it was somewhat down on the year before, was still well above that zero. But he realized that doing so would hardly calm the A.C.P.’s wrath. In fact, it might have the very opposite effect.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“And you, Ghote, are as much responsible as any. More even. More.”

Again Ghote was aware of a lack of precise factuality in the A.C.P.’s charge. But this time he did not even produce a word in acknowledgment.

“Look at the business of the Gudalpore Temple theft,” the A.C.P. stormed on, as unappeased by silence as he had been by sycophantic agreement. “How long is it since we were receiving that tipoff that the loot was held in Bombay for inspection by some damn unscrupulous foreign buyers? Two months? Three months? Four?”

Once more Ghote decided that silence was best. But it was not.

“How long? I am asking you, Inspector. How long? Three months, four?”

“It is seven weeks, three days, A.C.P. sahib.”

“Exactly. Seven weeks, eight, and what results have you succeeded to get?”

“Sir, it is not at all easy. We have had no more than that one tipoff itself. No hint even of where the loot may be hidden. No reports of any suspicious foreigners coming to camp in Bombay.”

“No this, no that. What good are your nos and woes to me, Inspector? It is results I am wanting. A most valuable statue of Goddess Parvati was stolen in broad daylight, and numerous artefacts also.”

“Artefacts, sir?”

Ghote blurted the question out before he had had time to see it would be a mistake to display ignorance of what exactly the English word meant.

“Yes, man, artefacts. Artefacts. Whatsoever they are.”

The A.C.P. snatched the metal paperweight inscribed with his initials off a formidable pile of documents to one side of his desk and began a scrabbling hunt through them. At last he produced a long list, badly reproduced on mauvish paper, and slammed the paperweight back before the breeze from the big fan behind him could play havoc with the pile.

He began reading aloud.

“One Goddess Parvati, Tenth-Twelfth Century, sandstone, height one hundred and forty-seven centimeters, seated upon a representation of a tipai in the semi-lotus position with the left arm resting upon the knee and the right in an attitude of blessing. Plus four God Ganeshas, terracotta, height twenty-two centimeters, twenty-three centimeters, twenty-five centimeters, and twenty-eight centimeters respectively. Plus one Goddess Sarasvati, bronze, twelve centimeters, tail of peacock partly missing. Plus two Krishnas, fluting, no heights stated. Plus eighteen other artefacts, various.”

He looked up.

“Eighteen artefacts, Ghote, and you have not been able to locate even one.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it is not good—”

The A.C.P.’s observations were interrupted by the shrilling of one of the three telephones on his wide-spreading desk. He picked it up.

“Haan?”

An urgent voice squeaked out.

“No,” the A.C.P. barked back. “No, I am not able to see. Every damn foreigner coming here has some letter of introduction from a Minister and thinks they can bother me with their every least wish. I have appointment. Lions Club luncheon. One hundred percent important.”

He slammed the phone down.

“Ghote,” he said, his voice much less furious than it had been a minute earlier, “there is some Professor Something-or-other wanting to make some complaint or protest or demand. Deal with it, yes?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, A.C.P. sahib. Right away, sir.” Ghote clicked heels smartly and left, buoyed up with relief at the unforeseen rescue.

Fate, it soon began to seem, was to be yet kinder to him. The foreign professor — who turned out to his surprise to be not the venerable man he had envisaged but an English lady, stout of person, red of face, bristly of eyebrow, and clad in skirt and jacket of some tough pale-brown material resembling the sail of a harbor dhow — had no sooner announced herself as “Professor Prunella Partington, good day to you” than she stated in a ringingly British voice that she had just seen in Bombay “a Parvati statue that ought quite certainly to be in its proper place in the temple at Gudalpore.”

Ghote could hardly believe his ears. Was this lady actually speaking about the very statue of Goddess Parvati, 147 centimeters in height, stolen from the Gudalpore Temple and hidden ever since somewhere in Bombay awaiting a foreign buyer? The very idol, together with other artefacts, that he had just been rebuked by the A.C.P. for not having located?

“Madam,” he said, his heart thumping in confusion, “what, please, is the height of said statue?”

“Height? Height? How the devil should I know?”

“But you have stated that you have just only seen same, madam,” said Ghote.

“ ’Course I have. Wouldn’t come round to Police Headquarters fast as I could, would I, unless I had?”

“But, then, the height of same?”

“Oh, I suppose about five feet. Far as I remember when I examined it at Gudalpore ten years ago. Statue of Parvati, seated on a stool in the semi-lotus position. Sandstone.”

“Madam, this is sounding altogether like one idol stolen from that same temple seven-eight weeks back, together with other art — art — other objects, madam.”

“Of course it’s been stolen from Gudalpore, and someone had better come along pronto and arrest the fellow who stole it.”

“You are knowing who it is? Please, kindly state where he is to be found.”

“In that appalling sham museum of his, of course,” she said. “Where else?”

“But, madam, you are altogether failing to name that appalling sham museum.”

“Nonsense, my good chap. ’Course I named it. Look, here’s the place’s piffling brochure.”

From her large leather handbag, stoutly clasped, the professor — was she Professor Mrs. or Professor Miss Prunella, Ghote wondered — produced a slim pamphlet printed in a shade of deep pink.

Ghote read.

He looked up at the burly form of the British professor. “But this is sounding cent per cent pukka,” he said, much impressed by all the — ologies and — ancies. “It is seeming not at all of sham.”

“Poppycock, my good man. Poppycock. A hodgepodge like that? Fellow must be an utter charlatan. You’ll think so pretty quick when you see him. Come on.”

“But, madam,” Ghote said, still reserving judgment, “in any case it is not possible at once to come on. If your detailed description of the idol of Parvati is correct, I am admitting there is prima facie case against one Mr. Hrishikesh Agnihotri. But if I am to nab the gentleman, certain procedures must be followed.”

“And in the meantime the fellow will take to his heels, accompanied by that dreadful dumb brute he keeps about the place.”

“There is another miscreant also?”

“I should jolly well say there is. Just as I’d spotted the Gudalpore Parvati, this hulking creature came out of a little door just behind it. Well, I’d seen quite enough anyhow, so I simply came straight round here. I’ve got a letter from your Minister for Health, Family Planning, Jails, and the Arts, you know.”

“Yes, yes, madam. And I am promising fullest cooperation itself. But, kindly understand, under Criminal Procedure Code it is necessary to have any arrest witnessed by two panches, as we are calling them.”

“Independent evidence, eh?” The professor drew her bristly eyebrows together in thought for a moment. Then she brightened. “Got just the chap for you,” she said. “Possibly two. You could call him an expert on Indian art. Staying at my hotel, as it happens. Name of Edgar Poe.”

Ghote felt a faint stirring at the back of his mind.

“Edgar Poe?” he asked. “It is the gentleman who is writing the famous story of The Pit and the Pendulum?”

“Good God, no, man. Edgar Allan Poe must have been dead over a hundred years. This chap’s another kettle of fish. Dealer in antiques. As a matter of fact, it was because of him that I went to that appalling museum at all. Heard him talking to an Indian friend over breakfast this morning. Sitting at the next table. Mentioned the place, and I thought it might be worth a quick look-see. Suppose it was, in a way, since I spotted the Gudalpore Parvati. But Mr. Poe and his friend would make first-class what-d’you-call-’ems — pinches.”

“Madam, it is panches. Panches.”

“Never mind. The thing is, we could be round there in ten minutes if you get a move on, pick them up, and get over to that place.”

“No, madam, no. I am thinking that it is not altogether a fine idea. Your friend would be kept here in India perhaps many, many months waiting to give evidence. No, I would instead obtain some very, very suitable persons.”

The professor shrugged her burly shoulders. “As you like, Inspector, as you like. But do hurry up or our birds will have flown the coop.”

Resenting obscurely being put under this pressure, Ghote picked up his phone, got through to the nearby Tilak Marg Police Station, whose good offices he relied on in situations like this, and requested that an officer should come round as quickly as possible with two of their regular panches.

“And, listen,” he added, “do not send the sort of fellows you are using when it is just only a question of pulling in some chain-snatcher. This is a Number One important business. So find some panches claiming full respect, yes? This is a fifty-sixty-lakh theft case. More.”

He got quick and complete agreement. Fifty-sixty lakhs was big money.

But when the two witnesses and a sub-inspector met them outside the little press-room hut near the entrance to the Headquarters compound, Ghote saw at once that they were by no means the respectable citizens he had so carefully specified. One was a very old man with a mouth that hung slackly open to reveal a single long yellow tooth, probably a retired office peon to judge by the raggedy khaki jacket that covered his bare chest. And the other, though much younger, was scarcely more presentable, a pinjari, one of the itinerant fluffers-up of cotton mattresses who go about Bombay advertising their services by loudly twanging the single taut wire of the harplike instrument they use in their work.

Nor was Sub-Inspector Jadhav more likely to impress the British professor, Ghote thought. He was a stocky, cocky fellow, who at once attempted to take charge of the whole operation.

“I am bringing four-five constables, Inspector,” he said. “You were not requisitioning, but for a job like this you would be needing some fellows who know how to get a suspect ready to talk.”

“No, I was not requisitioning,” Ghote snapped out, “and let me remind you I am in charge of this operation, S.I.”

He turned to the little group of tough-looking uniformed men at the sub-inspector’s heels. “Report back to your station ek dum,” he barked. “At the double, at the double.”

Turning, he bundled the two panches and the sub-inspector into the back of the jeep he had waiting, opened its front door for the British professor, scrambled in himself, and told the driver to go as fast as he could under the professor’s directions to the Hrishikesh Agnihotri Museum.

The place proved to be a large dilapidated-looking house, heavy with ornate wooden carving in the style of Gujarati mansions of some hundred years earlier.

They mounted the impressive steps and Ghote knocked thunderously on the solid wide door.

No answer came.

“What did I tell you, Inspector?” the professor snorted. “Flown the coop, both of them.”

Ghote, fighting off a sinking feeling that the culprits had indeed made off, hammered on the door once more.

“Better I should go round the back, Inspector,” S.I. Jadhav said. “You often catch fellows who are absconding that way. Pity we were not bringing some more men.”

Keeping half an eye on Jadhav to make sure he did not start to act on his own initiative, Ghote raised his hand to knock yet again. But as he did so, he heard beyond the thick door the slap-slap-slap of someone approaching with feet in loose-fitting chappals.

A moment later the door was opened a cautious inch or two.

The man who peered out at them was plainly the Museum’s Founder and Chairman of Trustees. Learning and respectability were written on him from head to foot, from his wizened agedness, from the gold-rimmed spectacles halfway along his thin and inquisitive nose, right down to his mismatched chappals, one pale-brown leather, the other black.

“Public admitted at a fee of rupees three per person,” he said.

“I am not at all public,” Ghote returned sharply. “It is police. I am wishing to examine your premises for the purpose of ascertaining whether there is to be found upon same one idol of Goddess Parvati, together with various other — er — er — artefacts.”

Whether it was the production of this last impressive word or the explicit mention of a statue of Parvati, Ghote’s statement appeared to stun the museum’s Founder and Chairman. His mouth opened. And shut. He fell back a pace.

Swiftly Ghote pushed the heavy front door wide and stepped into a narrow entrance hall lined with a series of tall glass-fronted cupboards. He turned to Professor Prunella, close at his heels.

“Kindly lead at once to wheresoever the idol of Parvati is to be found,” he said.

Unhesitatingly, the professor marched off. Following, Ghote took in that the tall cupboards to either side were crammed and jammed with an extraordinary variety of objects. One contained vases of all shapes and sizes — china, brass, enameled. Another was a jumble of clocks, elegant old European ones, cranky alarms, even a plastic kitchen-timer. A third was apparently filled with measuring devices, ancient sticks marked with notches, lengths of cord regularly knotted, rulers in bundles, even some round metal spring-loaded tapes.

On they went through an archway and into a series of tiny, floor-to-ceiling-filled rooms, each devoted, it seemed, to one or other of the many — ologies and — ancies the museum served the nation by preserving. The Founder and Chairman came clacking after them on his mismatched chappals, uttering from time to time little squeaks of protest or dismay.

S.I. Jadhav, swaggering along with his two disreputable panches, showed, whenever Ghote chanced to look back for a moment, a hair-raising tendency to swipe at any object that looked as if it might be easy to topple — a display of china European farm animals, a pile of inkwells of all sorts heaped one on the other, even a chair made entirely out of glass in a room devoted wholly to such furniture. The aged first panch broke out every now and again into a wild cackle of laughter and his younger companion, the pinjari, apparently felt that the higgledy-piggledy dignity of his surroundings obliged him to pause at the entrance to each successive little room and emit from his fluffing instrument one loud resounding twang.

Ghote thanked his stars that the British professor was too intent on her onward rush to the possibly stolen Parvati to pay attention to the rest of his party.

At last they came to a narrow downward-leading flight of stairs, each step used to display some other object from the museum’s collection — four or five different hookahs, a framed picture of an English cottage turned sideways, a small board hung with various patterns of padlock.

At the stairs’ foot they plunged once more into another series of little rooms. Professor Mrs. or Miss Prunella seemed to know her way, unerring as a bloodhound on the scent.

In the gloom here, the Founder and Chairman regained his voice and began to shoot out explanations of the riches under his control. “Opal water,” he said, gesturing abruptly to a tall glass jar half full of some cloudy liquid. “Where there is poison, there is also nectar, that is a mathematical truth.” Then in the next little chamber, “Alchemy Department. We are doing many experiments to turn copper into gold. Gold into copper also.” And in a room containing coins and banknotes of every conceivable kind — Ghote had to stop and prevent the pinjari secreting a heap of little silver pieces — “Kindly notice the Arab currency notes, all misprinted, very, very rare.” And in yet another room, its walls lined with narrow shelves on which rested, dustily, stones of every color and shape, “One thousand different, full of scientific importance, magical point-of-view, astrological point-of-view.”

This last utterance was too much even for relentlessly forward-marching Professor Prunella. She turned briefly and barked out over her shoulder, “Charlatan. Poppycock.”

Ghote, alternating during the whole of their clattering progress between being impressed by the sheer quantity of learned objects and feeling darts of doubt over the Founder’s claims about them, felt grateful that the professor made no further assertions of her uncompromising beliefs until they came, at last, to a faded loop of red rope barring their way.

Professor Prunella unhesitatingly thrust it aside, as doubtless she had done on her earlier visit. She strode forward a pace or two into the denser gloom of an ill-lit short corridor, reached up, and clicked on a light switch.

“There,” she said.

Behind, the pinjari gave not one but a whole succession of reverberant twangs on his instrument.

Screwing up his face in an effort to blot out all awareness of the sound, Ghote could not but recognize that, a yard or two further down the corridor, there stood an idol of Parvati, “the princess of the fish-shaped eyes” herself. Seated on the representation of a stool, with one leg tucked under, halfway toward the lotus position.

“It is from the Gudalpore Temple?” he asked the professor.

“Stake my life on it. It’s my subject, you know. This is going to make one hell of a paper for Indian Sculpture Studies.”

Ghote turned, with curious reluctance, to the Founder and Chairman. “Sir,” he said, “are you able to account for the presence here of an object that appears to have been removed from the Temple at Gudalpore without due and proper authorization?”

The aged amasser of all the varied objects they had seen licked at his thin lips. He cast a long, searching look over the rounded limbs and tall-crowned head of the stone goddess.

“The making of this museum,” he said, “has been my lifelong work.”

“That is not an answer,” Ghote replied, forcing himself to unrelenting severity, despite a prickle of doubt somehow running through him like an underground tremor, unaccountable but not to be ignored.

He waited for the old man to speak again. But he seemed to find it difficult to produce any further words.

“Come, Inspector,” Professor Prunella said with a snort of indignation, “you have my word for it: this is the Parvati from Gudalpore and nowhere else.” And as if to emphasize her certainty, she gave the rounded form of the goddess a resounding slap across her shoulder.

Ghote winced.

“Good, good,” suddenly exclaimed the pinjari in broad Marathi. “I would give a beauty like that more slaps than one.”

Ghote hoped profoundly that the professor’s Indian studies had not given her an acquaintance with local vulgarities. Apparently they had not because she simply contented herself with keeping the slapping hand on the goddess’s shoulder in a distinctly proprietorial manner.

Ghote turned again to the Founder.

“Sir,” he said, “you have not yet given proper answer to my request concerning this idol.”

And then the old man did reply.

“No,” he shot out, as if the single word of denial had been a hard bubble deep within him whose passage at last could not be resisted. “No, no, no. Who can say where such a fine object can have come from? This Parvati may have been in my storeroom many, many years.”

Ghote found himself in a dilemma. The Founder and Chairman’s response had clearly not been wholly satisfactory. Yet, equally clearly, it was a denial that this idol of Parvati, one after all among many thousands that must exist all over India, was the selfsame object that had once been in the Gudalpore Temple. But, on the other hand, the British lady professor had declared uncompromisingly that the Parvati was from Gudalpore. She had said firmly that she herself had seen it there. Yet she might be mistaken. That had been ten years ago, after all. And then one had a duty as an Indian not to accept each and every statement a Westerner cared to make as a holy truth. A patriotic duty even, though difficult.

“Inspector,” Professor Prunella snapped out now, “arrest this man.”

It almost decided Ghote. He was damned if he was going to carry out an arrest on the order of a Westerner, an angrezi even, relic of the British Raj, and, worse, a woman. But on the other hand—

Then he heard cocky Sub-Inspector Jadhav come clicking to attention as if to acknowledge orders from a senior officer he was showing the utmost willingness to comply with.

No, if the Founder and Chairman was to be arrested on a charge of concealing property knowing it to have been stolen, then that task was not going to fall to a little jumped-up fellow from Tilak Marg Police Station. It was—

But suddenly, from immediately behind the tall statue of the fish-eyed princess, there came the rending squeal of heavy wood on stone and a small door there was abruptly thrust open. In the narrow doorway there stood a bare-chested man of huge proportions, bullet-headed, heavy-jowled, arms loose-hanging.

Instinctively Ghote stiffened, expecting instant attack.

“Ah, Manik, there you are,” the Founder and Chairman said with sudden cheerfulness. “Just when I am wanting you.”

The hulk in the doorway answered only with a grunt, though he seemed to have understood.

“Manik, have you moved this Parvati idol?” the Founder and Chairman asked. “Where was it kept before?”

He turned to Ghote. “You will hardly believe it,” he said urgently, “but the museum has accumulated so many important objects in so many fields of Indology that at times even I begin to forget where and when they were acquired.”

The declaration had the effect, for no conceivable reason, of causing the old, slack-mouthed ex-peon panch to break out into another of his long cackling laughs. Was it, could it be, Ghote thought, somehow a mocking comment on what the old museum owner had claimed? And should he act on it?

He was saved, however, from feeling he had been swayed by any such ridiculous motive by the explosive shrilling of a large bell clamped to the wall nearby, connected to a telephone elsewhere in the old building.

“Some person offering some new object for the collection,” the Founder immediately claimed. “Or perhaps they are wanting to arrange some seminar.” He made as if to go and answer.

Ghote quickly stepped across and laid a detaining hand on his arm.

The old man turned to Manik. “Go and answer it,” he said. “I really must give this gentleman and lady my fullest attention.”

The silent hulk shuffled off in the direction of the stairs.

“S.I., go with him,” Ghote snapped. “See he makes no attempt to leave.”

Turning from making sure the sub-inspector had obeyed, Ghote saw that the Founder and Chairman had darted off to the little narrow doorway behind the Parvati statue. Brushing past the substantial form of the British professor, still laying claim to the goddess, Ghote dived through the doorway in pursuit.

But he found that the old man was not making for any tiny back entrance, as he had feared. Instead, he was moving rapidly from one object to another in the dimly lighted storeroom, peering at representations of gods and goddesses, some so thickly covered in dust as to be almost unrecognizable, others clearly to be seen as elephant-trunked or many-armed or many-headed, playing flutes, astride peacocks, chipped here, broken almost in half there, complete to the last detail elsewhere.

“Sir,” he said, sharply as he could, “I am not at all satisfied by your answers till date. Kindly accompany me back to the idol in question and give detailed assurances.”

For a moment it looked as if the old man was going to ignore him. But he straightened up at last, breathed a heavy sigh, and made his way out to stand on the other side of the disputed Parvati from the stout, competing form of Professor Prunella, still with her hand on the goddess’s shoulder.

Ghote felt that the pair of them were somehow presenting his dilemma to him as a living picture. Which of the two had the real right to possess Parvati? Was it the imperious lady professor, bringing to her claim all the overwhelming confidence of the West? Or was it this old man, steeped in the philosophies of the East, seeing this Parvati as one among the many, many accumulations of a lifetime of gathering objects to illustrate and enhance the concept of Indology? — And yet, had there not been something distinctly doubtful about the way he had advanced his claim to possession of the princess? But there again, the British professor had surely been more aggressive in her demands than was altogether right. She had spoken of a contribution to — what was it? — the Indian Sculpture Studies as if that meant more to her than anything else.

So could she have—? But then, could he not—?

Ghote was unable, faced with the living picture, to prevent himself looking with fervent prayerfulness to the goddess herself, as if from her stone lips the answer might somehow come.

And it did.

Because suddenly he realized there was a way of making sure this Parvati was the Gudalpore Parvati. An almost certain way.

Sub-Inspector Jadhav had just returned, sullenly shepherding in front of him the huge silent bulk of the man Manik.

“S.I.,” Ghote said to him, “keep sharp watch on each and every person here. I would not be one moment.” And, without waiting for any acknowledgment of the order, he set off at a run through all the little crammed and crowded rooms of the basement area, past the thousand different dusty stones, past the misprinted Arab currency, past the alchemic apparatus, past the tall jar of opal water. He took the stairs two at a time, ignoring padlocks, hookahs, everything. And on he went, still hurrying fast as he dared, past glass chairs and bedsteads, past china farm animals — how did they reflect Indology? no matter — past the heaped pile of different inkwells, till at last he came to the entrance hall. And to the glass-fronted cupboard that contained measuring instruments from the most distant past to the present day. Without hesitation, he wrenched open its door, reached up, and took from its place one of the neat, modern measuring tapes he had seen almost without seeing it as Professor Prunella had hurried them toward her quarry. To the tape he added, as a last-second afterthought, one of the straight notched sticks from the most distant past.

Then, in even less time than it had taken him to get to the cupboard, he ran back to where the disputed Parvati stood. The Founder and Chairman had not budged from his place at one side of the stone goddess, nor had the British professor moved from her position on the other side. Each silently asserted possession as firmly as before.

“Excuse, please,” Ghote said.

And he brushed the two claimants aside, took the notched stick he had seized, and laid one end on the topmost stone jewel of the princess’s crown. Then he swiveled the stick’s other end until it touched the nearest point on the wall behind, and made there a tiny scratch on the plaster.

Next, swiftly kneeling, he took the spring-loaded tape, zipped it open, and measured the exact distance between his scratched mark and the floor beneath. The tape, he found with sudden relief, was marked in centimeters rather than inches. And in a moment he was able to look up and proclaim triumphantly, “One hundred and forty-seven.”

“One hundred and forty what, for heaven’s sake?” Professor Prunella boomed. “Have you gone dotty, Inspector?”

“Madam,” Ghote replied, still kneeling on the floor, “not one hundred and forty, but one hundred and forty-seven. One hundred and forty-seven centimeters, the exact height of the idol of Parvati stolen from the Gudalpore Temple, and reported on first-class authority to be kept hidden in Bombay for inspection by foreign buyer or buyers unknown.”

“You’re telling me nothing I haven’t been saying all along,” Professor Prunella answered, puffing her chest out to wonderfully new dimensions. “Arrest this man. Haven’t I told you it’s your duty half a dozen times already?”

Ghote rose to his feet. “Madam,” he said, “I am thinking I very well know what is my duty.”

He took a deep breath. As he had knelt checking the exact figure on his measuring tape, a number of things he had observed in his brief time in the Hrishikesh Agnihotri Museum had formed into a pattern in his head. A satisfyingly coherent pattern. “Madam,” he said, still looking steadily at the majestic form of the British professor, “there is not only the question of one Parvati idol itself, there is the question of other artefacts also.”

“What?”

“Madam, from the Gudalpore Temple there were also stolen four terracotta representations of God Ganesha — that is with the elephant head, as you must very well be knowing — plus also one Goddess Sarasvati, riding as per custom upon a peacock, in this case with tail partly missing. Plus again two God Krishnas, playing upon flutes together, with eighteen other artefacts, various. Madam, in this storeroom just only behind where I am standing I have observed, as also has Mr. Agnihotri, each and every one of these items, notably free from dust. So, madam, what is to be learnt from this?”

“Why, damn it, that this fellow has stolen the whole lot from Gudalpore.”

“Not so, madam. I have told. Mr. Agnihotri was just only examining these items. He was not attempting further to conceal same. No doubt he was wishing that, like this Parvati idol, they were objects he had at some faraway time acquired, but he knew in the core of his heart that they were not. No, madam, he was not responsible for hiding these things.”

“Then who the— No, wait, I know. My Mr. Poe’s Indian guest at breakfast this morning.”

“No, madam, no. It was the person strong enough to move from place to place one Goddess Parvati in sandstone, one hundred and forty-seven centimeters in height. The person who also, though he is appearing dumb, can very well answer telephones and could also communicate with accomplices suggesting to them to hide Parvati among so many other gods and goddesses. A most clever device used, I am thinking, by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe in the story by the name of ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

He shot out an order to Sub-Inspector Jadhav.

“Take him to your station and charge-sheet him, in my name, with concealing twenty-six various artefacts, knowing them to have been stolen.”

“Artefacts, Inspector?” the S.I. inquired, a frown on his face even as he grabbed the hefty and bewildered Manik.

“Yes, man, artefacts. Artefacts. Are you not knowing what are artefacts?”