The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

  Ghote felt an onrush of guilt. He had broken the rules. He had failed to observe silence. And His Excellency was justly rebuking him.

  He wondered whether quietly murmuring ‘Sorry, sir’ would add to the offence or mitigate it.

  But then he saw that His Excellency was jerking his thumb over his shoulder, past the bookstack in the direction of the end of the room.

  He looked.

  There was a portrait of Victoria, Empress of India. There were two enormous black leather armchairs like obediently crouching elephants. And, almost invisible in the gloom, sitting cross-legged on the further one of them not unlike the elephant’s mahout, if a mahout could be absorbed in an immense leather-bound volume, was Professor Godbole, his broad-bladed paper-knife glinting whitely on the arm of the chair beside him.

  Ghote understood. The professor, after all, was still one of His Excellency’s list of suspects.

  He leant down towards the ex-ambassador and spoke softly.

  ‘Your Excellency, I have succeeded to discover that the Maharani of Pratapgadh is having secret rendezvous with a young Bengali student by the name of Mr Amul Dutt at a third-class hotel in the Bazaar. You are seeing the significance?’

  His Excellency looked up. A beaming, joyous light shone in his eyes.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said in an echoingly loud voice. ‘I knew it. No sooner does the Great Detective arrive than mysteries begin to be unravelled. Splendid, splendid.’

  ‘Ah,’ came a high-pitched voice from beneath the benevolent gaze of Victoria, Queen-Empress, ‘the Great Detective. A most interesting phenomenon. And really of considerable importance.’

  And Professor Godbole hopped down from his sprawling armchair and came over to them, grinning all over his monkey-like countenance.

  ‘I did not have the pleasure of a formal introduction when I saw you in the Club dining room last night,’ he said to Ghote. ‘My name is Godbole, and I am by occupation a professor of English literature.’

  He gave a sudden sharp sideways smile.

  ‘Oh, yes, my dear sir,’ he said, ‘I am well aware that this makes me, so to speak, a character in a world-famed novel by the late Mr E. M. Forster. Such was my fate from my earliest years. A devotee of English literature in all its wayward glory, I wanted nothing more than the academic life and, indeed, a professorship to crown laborious days. So sooner or later I was bound to become Professor Godbole, a figment from a novel, and, worse now, a pasteboard representation in a cinematograph film.’

  Ghote, washed over by this incomprehensible flood of words, and half-suspecting that behind them lay some sort of joke, could do no more than murmur a reply.

  ‘Most unfortunate. That is - most fortunate. I mean -But, in any case, I am most pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘And I to make yours,’ the professor replied. ‘The Great Detective himself. Oh, we have heard all about you, my dear sir. Word goes round, you know. Servants listen, and servants speak.’

  ‘But - But I—’

  His Excellency broke in.

  ‘Exactly, my dear Professor,’ he said, in a manner so heavy with threat that Ghote looked over at him in sharp surprise, until he recalled that the excitable little academic was still if only marginally one of the five marked-out suspects.

  ‘Exactly. The Great Detective here to solve the mystery of the body in the billiard room.’

  But if His Excellency had hoped by these tactics to bring a betraying look to the professor’s face, he was altogether unsuccessful.

  ‘Ah,’ the little brahmin exclaimed, eyes bright, ‘but more even than a solver of this particular mystery, my dear sir. The Great Detective is a mythical figure, no less. Yet, here he is, a living example in front of us.’

  ‘A mythical figure?’ Ghote blurted out, too astonished to keep silent. Who was he being labelled as now? Some personage out of the time-encrusted legends of the Mahabharata?

  ‘Oh, a myth, yes, indeed,’ Professor Godbole said to him. ‘That is what you are, my dear sir, no doubt about that. You see, I am by way of being an authority on the subject of detective fiction. Some years ago, you know, I was misfortunate enough - or perhaps fortunate enough, who shall say? - to be given the task of supervising a student seeking the degree of PhD who had taken it into his head to make his thesis subject The Detective Story in England from Conan Doyle to Peter Dickinson. A subject that would hardly have won the approval of the Board of Studies except that the candidate in question happened to be the nephew of none other than our Vice-Chancellor.’ He stopped abruptly and cocked an inquiring eye up at them both.

  Ghote felt that no comment, however, was needed.

  ‘Yes, you see,’ Professor Godbole launched out again, ‘the Great Detective, first adumbrated by that flawed genius, Mr Edgar Allan Poe, has become a figure known throughout the world, if only through the representations of the curving tobacco pipe and deerstalker headgear of his later avatar - if I may so put it — Mr Sherlock Holmes. His features appear, you know, at least once a month in advertisements in the Indian papers, the vernacular press almost equally with the English-language. And why is that? Because Holmes is a person, a super-person one might say, of a unique sort. He is a man able to combine at the highest level the intuitive powers of the poet with the powers of logical analysis of the mathematician. He unites in himself, to borrow from popular psychology, the thinking of the left-hand side of the brain, that is to say the part of the mass of grey matter—’

  ‘Hah,’ His Excellency interrupted the word flow with explosive force. ‘Hah, the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot.’ But any such hastily thrown-up dam was instantly swept away.

  ‘ . . . that part of the brain which thinks logically, with the thinking of the part which makes the leaps of intuition of the poet, the right-hand brain.’

  The professor did halt for a moment now, just time enough to give a quick smirk of self-satisfaction.

  ‘The part of the brain which is most developed in my own case,’ he added. ‘The part that has produced some of the greatest discoveries of all, I may say, of the greatest poems. Now, you see, it is a person combining these sides to the utmost that Mr Poe put before us in the shape of the Great Detective, and after him Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a whole tradition, as we may say, of lesser lights. Now you can see why this figure has gripped the imagination of the world. He, and he alone, putting himself into a state of trance, often induced by the inhalation of tobacco smoke- “Quite a three-pipe problem” Holmes is once made to exclaim - from a trance induced, then, often by an ounce of tobacco, the Great Detective produces at last that altogether startling answer to the apparently insoluble problem, what Mr Poe called “that which has never occured before”.’

  But the repeated word ‘trance’ had set off in Ghote’s head a diverging train of thought. Dr K. S. Joshi, he recalled suddenly, I have altogether forgotten your Yoga in Daily Life. Ever since I was stepping out of that bus into the clear air of Ooty I have not given you one moment of attention.

  Yet his instant resolution to amend the negligence petered into nothingness almost at once. What Professor Godbole had gone on to say caught his ear.

  ‘I tell you, gentlemen, it is not just the power of thought that the Great Detective possesses. He is also capable of actually uncovering the mysteries put before him. He acts. He performs for us that which we all want to see done: to have uncovered, in the words of Mr Charles Dickens, “the naked truth without disguise”.’

  To act. To bring out the truth.

  Ghote forced himself to concentrate with all his might on what the professor was saying. Was he himself not, at least in Ooty and according to His Excellency, just such a Great Detective? And was it not his bounden duty then to uncover that naked truth without disguise?

  ‘The Great Detective,’ Professor Godbole was torrenting on, ‘puts himself, in order to perform this feat, wholly into the minds of others. We have, remember, Mr Sherlock Holmes disguising himself by plunging into the very personality of
an assumed character, varying, as Dr Watson is made to say, his very soul. We have Mr G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown declaring that he does not know who a murderer is until - I am quoting kindly note - “I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred.” We have—’

  But once again, His Excellency hurled himself into the turbulent flood.

  ‘We have Miss Marple,’ he almost shouted out, his aged fluting voice echoing round the book-stacked room. ‘We have Miss Marple in her very last case, if I have it right, saying she actually feels ill when she finds herself in the shoes of the murderer.’

  But a dark cloud of depression now filled Ghote’s mind. How could he, just only a CID officer, do what these towering figures did? Get into the souls of murderers? Into their hunched and peering hatreds? Feel altogether ill by seeing who had committed a crime?

  ‘But, no,’ he broke in with abrupt rebellion, ‘that is not the way offences under Section 302 of Indian Penal Code are dealt with. I myself have never acted like any Great Detective.’

  Professor Godbole took a step backwards in something like astonishment.

  ‘You have never acted as a Great Detective?’ he repeated.

  ‘No,’ Ghote said simply, wishing that he could make the declaration bolder but intimidated a little in the presence of His Excellency.

  Professor Godbole looked at him.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘it seems as if I have been casting such pearls as I have before—’

  He checked himself.

  ‘Well, before you two gentlemen, let me say.’

  For a moment he looked almost abashed. Then he perked up.

  ‘But I must be getting back to my work,’ he said. ‘The demands of scholarship. A world I understand. Remote though it may seem. Good day to you.’

  He turned, scuttled back to his battered elephant armchair, jumped on to it and immediately resumed his study of the large volume that had rested on his knees.

  His Excellency took hold of Ghote by the arm and almost dragged him out on to the steep stairway.

  ‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘I suppose you must have had some good reason for issuing that denial. But Godbole was talking away, you know, and Poirot did say, after all, that talk will ultimately reveal all a man’s secrets.’

  Ghote felt simultaneously infuriated at having Hercule Poirot and his methods thrust in his face once more and disgraced by his failure to have triumphed in Poirot’s way. He attempted to account for his action. ‘But, sir, but, Your Excellency, nobody can be thinking truly that Professor Godbole is the murderer of Pichu. He had not been staying in the Club for long enough to become in any way whatsoever the subject of blackmail.’

  Surprisingly His Excellency did not seem offended at this uncompromising removal of one name from his declared list of suspects.

  ‘Ah, but, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘you’re forgetting.’

  ‘What forgetting?’

  ‘The Least Likely Person, old boy. Godbole’s the perfect example.’

  Ghote thought hard, but still felt baffled.

  ‘The least likely person to have committed the murder, yes,’ he said. ‘That is what I am stating. Professor Godbole is altogether unlikely to have had anything to do with the matter.’

  ‘Which, as you will recall,’ His Excellency answered happily, ‘is why, in the end, it may very well turn out that he is the murderer.’

  8

  Despite Ghote’s renewed attempt to renounce the title thrust on to him, His Excellency’s opinion of him seemed unchanged. It was, he said in a friendly manner, almost the tiffin hour and they ought to be getting along to the Club to eat, ‘at the scene of the crime, eh? At the scene of the crime.’

  So they walked together through the curious, English-looking town with its spacious shops and pretty, tin-roofed cottages to the little hill on which the Club stood, cool and white under the cheerful blue sky. Mercifully, His Excellency seemed temporarily to have run out of detective suggestions, and they parted outside Ghote’s room with nothing more about the case having been said.

  Entering the dining room as soon as the gong in the portico had boomed out, Ghote, this time properly dressed, saw there were more people present than on the previous evening. Evidently various Ooty inhabitants, Indian or aged English, took lunch there from time to time. Making a quick survey, he located under the numerous photographs of former Masters of the Ootacamund Hunt, thickly-moustached and rock-unshiftable on their huge horses, only three of His Excellency’s suspects.

  There was Mr Habibullah eating - curiously, already - steamed ginger pudding with so much enjoyment that it seemed to radiate out from him in circle after circle. And there was the Maharajah of Pratapgadh with his Maharani. She was wearing trousers as brilliantly red as the post-box seen on his solitary walk following his meeting with Inspector Meenakshisundaram. The little dog on her lap, confirmation that it was she who had been the secret visitor to the Bengali student at that disreputable hotel, looked every bit as much in need of a homoeopathic purge as ever.

  Mrs Trayling, he remembered, had returned to her own house now that her servant had recovered from her illness. How was that going to affect his investigation, he wondeied. If it should turn out that she had been blackmailed by Pichu and had stabbed him to death because of it, little likely though that seemed, how was he going even to see her now? Let alone to question her?

  And Professor Godbole, the even more unlikely candidate for all His Excellency’s ideas about that making him somehow more likely, was evidently not in the dining-room because he was still studying whatever it was he had been reading in the Library.

  He took a second quick glance at Mr Habibullah. Was he really no more than the retired railways officer he gave himself out to be? Or was he, just possibly, that absconding king-pin of the Cochin drugs-smuggling racket? After all, Meenakshisundaram’s belief that the absconder had been sighted in Madras had been based on gossip only. And if he had been surely there would have been an arrest.

  But he had no time to ponder further. His Excellency had come to join him, and as they went over to their table he murmured something in an undertone.

  ‘Excuse me, I was not quite hearing.’

  ‘I said: better not discuss anything here. Walls have ears, and all that.’

  ‘Yes, yes, first-class decision,’ Ghote answered, grateful for another respite.

  But he did not have long in peace. Barely had he finished his stewed pears and custard (not very nice) when His Excellency whisked him off into ‘Major Jago’s Room’.

  ‘Bound to have it to ourselves,’ he said, ‘when everybody’s on ration in this damned dry Tamil Nadu of ours.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ghote.

  In the dark-panelled room with its rows of semiforbidden bottles behind the bar they settled themselves underneath the glass case in which for ever Bob Jago’s hunting whip, once so vigorously wielded, lay in calm repose.

  ‘Well now,’ His Excellency said, ‘let’s just see where we’ve got to.’

  Ghote felt that this was hardly how a Watson should address a Holmes. But if he was not such . . .

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Hah. Well, Number One in my book at this moment is the Maharani. If you’re right about her having an affair with some damned Bengali student somewhere down in the Bazaar, then she’s got something to hide all right. And, pretty woman though she is, I wouldn’t put it past her to stick a sharp instrument into old Pichu. There’s a lot of weight there, you know, a lot of weight.’

  Ghote, contemplating for a moment the well-filled trousers, pure white or startling red, wagged his head in agreement.

  ‘But, trouble is,’ His Excellency went on, ‘just what was that confounded sharp instrument? I mean, if she did deal with Pichu, she probably did it at pretty short notice. So she would have had to have availed herself of whatever she could get hold of easily. So what was it? What was it, eh?’

  He gave Ghote a look that seemed to combine uncomfort
ably acute inquiry with due respect.

  Ghote scrabbled hard for some brilliant answer. But nothing came.

  ‘Well, Your Excellency,’ he said at last, ‘it is always best in these matters to continue to suspect everyone.’

  To his surprise His Excellency answered this feeble attempt with a sudden joyous smile.

  ‘Quite right. Quite right. Just what I’d expect. Quotation for you. Not Poirot, but Poirot’s occasional colleague, that very shrewd Superintendent Battle. Said something like this once: if you were to tell me that a dear old maiden lady, or an archbishop, or a schoolgirl was a dangerous criminal, I wouldn’t say no. Hah.’

  Ghote reflected that never in any of the cases that had come his way had an archbishop or any other top-ranking Christian holy-man been the malefactor. Nor had any old lady, nor even one single schoolgirl. But he thought it safest to let His Excellency’s remark pass with merely a look of deep interest.

  ‘Yes,’ the ex-ambassador went on, ‘I agree we mustn’t lose sight of any of the others. I mean, there’s the Maharajah. Fellow used to getting his own way, if ever there was one.’

  ‘And perhaps,’ Ghote suggested, happier now, ‘such person would also somehow defy the law in order to obtain that own way. And thereby he would fall into the clutches of a blackmailer.’

  ‘Exactly. High on the list, then. And Habibullah, mustn’t forget him. I dare say he seems to have been cleared if what that fool Meenakshisundaram told you is right. But as I said before, clear a suspect early in the story and. . . . After all, blackmail doesn’t have to be at the root of the business, you know.’

  ‘It does not?’ Ghote asked, trying hard to work out why his domineering Watson should seem to be reversing something he had so definitely stated earlier.

  ‘No, no,’ His Excellency said, ‘it’s a possibility I don’t at all like to raise, but, you know, murder can be committed for the strangest of reasons. Or even none at all.’

  ‘Well, yes, that is so,’ Ghote agreed cautiously. ‘In Bombay we have had cases of killers running mad.’