The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

  The Sherlock Holmes silence, Ghote wondered. Was this a time to play that card again?

  And then something that had been lying at the back of his mind, recorded but unnoticed since some time earlier in the afternoon, abruptly surfaced.

  Perhaps it is part of the woven pattern, he thought. And at least it will keep His Excellency occupied for a little.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, halting their walk just at the turning to the Club where the yogi still sat unmoving as the discreet warning notice beside him. ‘Sir, you were saying when we were first discussing that there are always in such cases as this, in the books that is, six suspects or seven. Well, sir,here and now there are not five just. There are six. Six suspects, sir.'

  .

  11

  ‘Six suspects?’ His Excellency said with sharp displeasure. ‘But, my dear fellow, I explained to you. There is no question but that the murder must have been committed by one of the people inside the Club on the night. One of the five. Unless, of course, you’re going to believe that bungler Meenakshisundaram and say the murderer was a dacoit who happened to break in.’

  His Excellency darted him a quick, anxious look.

  Ghote, wondering if he was seeing his whole concocted detective story on the point of falling to pieces, contrived not to let the least glimmer of any inner thoughts appear on his face.

  ‘No,’ His Excellency went on, reassured, ‘as I said at the beginning, the billiard room was absolutely snowbound at the time. No doubt about it. The whole Club building was locked up tight. Iyer sees to that every night, and he’s completely reliable if nothing else. No, it has to be either that fellow Habibullah, the Maharajah or the Maharani, or Lucy Trayling or, least likely of all, Professor Godbole. One of those five. Definitely.’

  Ghote swallowed. Was he, after all, right in what he was about to claim?

  ‘But sir,’ he said. ‘But, Your Excellency, I was just only finding out. It was while I was talking with the Maharajah on the golf course.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Poirot always said—’

  ‘Mr Iyer. It is Mr Iyer,’ Ghote banged in, tired to his bones of hearing about Poirot.

  ‘Iyer? But—But Iyer doesn’t sleep in the Club. Lives down in the lower town. Has a wife and children, and all that.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Ghote said, ‘last night at least, in the middle of the night itself, Mr Iyer was seen upon said premises by the Maharajah. He was asking him at that time to play at golf with him today. He was saying also that Mr Iyer was often and often working until the small hours only. He must be locking up sometimes when it is almost dawn.’

  An expression of shining delight came on to His Excellency’s leathery face.

  ‘Hah,’ he said, ‘I knew I was right. Knew the only thing to do in an affair like this was to go straight to the top. If you’ve got a really baffling murder on your hands, I said, only the consulting detective will do.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ Ghote said, ‘it was just only something I was happening to hear.’

  ‘Too modest. Too modest altogether, my dear chap. That’s one point where you do differ from Poirot: no one could ever accuse him of being too modest.’

  ‘No, that is so, Your Excellency, yes, indeed,’ Ghote chimed in, seeing an easy way of establishing that he had more of an acquaintance with Mrs McGinty’s Dead than two or three sleepily read pages.

  ‘But you’re well up to all the Poirot tricks,’ His Excellency went on excitedly. ‘The moment you told Iyer you had come to Ooty to investigate the murder, told him deliberately, he looked so upset I thought he was going to burst into tears. Full marks to you, Ghote, for that.’

  ‘But, sir, that might have been because he was just only thinking that a Club member—’

  ‘No, no. Guilt, my dear fellow. Plain as a pikestaff. So now we’ll have him up in front of us and question him till he confesses. Break him down.’

  ‘That is what Shri Poirot would do?’

  His Excellency looked disconcerted.

  ‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘No. Actually, Poirot never seems to go in for that sort of thing. None of his like do really. Prefer to rely on the sudden seeing of that which has never occurred before, as little Godbole was saying. Clouds of pipe smoke and all that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘I was thinking that such questioning was the method an ordinary police officer would employ. But if you are wanting such, you must be going to Inspector Meenakshisundaram. I am having no official status here in Ooty.’

  ‘Meenakshisundaram. The fellow wouldn’t even listen.’ ‘Yes, that is what I am thinking also. So if Pichu was murdered by one of those six persons inside the Club, whether it is Mr Iyer or not, then we have got to have some damn fine proof and after go to Meenakshisundaram.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

  His Excellency sounded so despondent that Ghote, before he had time to check himself, came out with a suggestion.

  ‘Sir, we can consider what is to be found out about Mr Iyer later. But this afternoon only, when you were requesting me to play at golf with the Maharajah, I was on my way to see whether the film star Sarla Kumar was definitely continuing to have illicit relationship with the said Maharajah. Sir, I think it would be best now if I was to resume checking up such line of inquiry.’

  ‘Yes, by Jove, Pratapgadh and that film girl. Mustn’t forget that. Iyer can wait. You go off there, Ghote. Fast as you can.’

  Twenty minutes later Ghote spotted his possible witness, the manager of the Willingdon Talkies, standing in the cinema’s foyer beneath two large and impressive, if dusty, photographs of Lord and Lady Willingdon, Viceroy and Vicereine at the height of the British Raj. The fellow, a little paunchy man wearing a European black bow-tie and a not very clean white shirt, was watching the audience arriving for the last performance but two of Prem Putla starring Sarla Kumar. But, in spite of the personal appearance she had made the night before, ticket-buyers were only a mere trickle.

  Ghote began to make his way across.

  As he did so, another ancient photograph caught his eye, and he stopped to read the legend beneath its faded sepia. The Ooty Beauties - Grand Concert - Planters' Week 1937. Above, the group showed rows of feebly grinning white faces, the men in tennis flannels, the girls in flowered frocks. It all seemed to sum up for him the ordered, distant past of this still just existing relic of a less muddled age.

  And then he saw that one of the men, one not wearing flannels, was none other than His Excellency. The recognition gave him a curious little sense of shock. But there could be no doubt who it was, despite the long lapse of time and the fact that he was dressed as a Scotchman, complete with dangling leather purse in front of his kilt and a dagger-like knife in his stocking.

  He stood looking wonderingly at this fragment of a past time, the true Ooty time, that he felt now connected to.

  ‘Sahib, may I help?’

  It was the manager. His witness.

  ‘Yes. Yes, you can. Yes, I am wanting to know: is it that Miss Sarla Kumar is continuing to stay in Ooty after her personal appearance?’

  The manager’s attitude of oily willingness vanished in an instant.

  ‘What for are you asking this? Always and always people are asking.’

  But Ghote had dealt with too many truculent witnesses in his time to be set back by any such attitude as this.

  ‘Police,’ he barked. ‘Answer up.’

  It was all that was needed. Yes, the manager admitted in a rush of babbled information, Miss Kumar was still in the district. She had rented a bungalow. It was called Sunnyside Cottage. It was in a colony, a new colony, just outside the town. She had not told him why she was staying on. He did not know. No, she had not had any visitors while she was making her personal appearance. Yes, she would most probably be out at Sunnyside Cottage now. Where else would she be?

  Ghote took a taxi.

  The manager, he thought, might decide he had more to gain by warning Sarla Kumar about this mysterious police officer th
an he had to lose from that police officer’s wrath.

  The collection of new houses that comprised the colony disturbed, he was surprised to find, his notions of what was proper. They were set as close together as their gardens would permit and built in the most modern style, clean-looking and white-painted. But somehow in the course of the short time he had spent in Ooty he had developed a strong feeling that Ooty cottages ought to be like the ones that had been built a hundred years ago and more. They ought to be English, with roses round the door. And to stand apart from one another by a good distance, aloof and reserved like proper Englishmen.

  Sunnyside Cottage, when they located it, proved to be even smarter than its neighbours with a very posh diamond-shaped window with coloured panes looking out across a garden dotted with flowering shrubs.

  Telling the taxi driver to go a little further along and wait, Ghote opened the neat, white-painted wooden gate in the wire fence surrounding the place and made his way up a stepped concrete path to the front door.

  He had decided his best plan would be to pretend he had been informed that they took in paying guests at Sunnyside Cottage. If it was indeed a love-nest for Sarla Kumar and the Maharajah, he would quickly be told that he was mistaken. But, with a little skilful manipulation in asking whether any of the nearby cottages would take him in, he might be able to learn at least something.

  He knocked at one of the thick glass panes set in the door. After a moment he heard steps inside.

  Would he see Sarla Kumar herself? Could he pretend to recognize her and burst into praises for her performance in Prem Putla? Tell her he had seen the film a dozen times in Bombay and that it was the best he had ever sat through? Would he even know who she was if she did answer the door?

  The door opened. The woman who stood there was definitely not Sarla Kumar. She was a large, pillar-like, dumpy sixty-year-old, wrapped in a dull blue sari with a pair of rimless spectacles plastered across her pudding of a face. She was probably, he thought, from her air of placid authority, some old auntie of the star’s, brought to Ooty as a companion.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I—That is—Are you having —Please, are you taking paying guest?’

  ‘No.’

  He licked his lips.

  ‘But, please, this is Sunnyside Cottage?’

  ‘Name is on gate.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I was seeing. But they were telling me you were looking for paying guest.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? You are sure? I mean, I am very, very much in need of somewhere to sleep tonight.’

  ‘Then where are your baggages?’

  ‘They—They—I was coming by taxi. The fellow was not knowing just where is this cottage. I have just only arrived in Ooty.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? But why . . . ?’

  ‘Bus is not getting to Charing Cross until one half-hour’s time.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. No, I was coming by private car.’

  ‘You said taxi.’

  ‘Taxi, private car, it is all the same.’

  ‘No. Taxi you are taking from the town. Private car you are hiring in Coimbatore. If you can pay.’

  For an instant Ghote wondered whether he could claim to be rich enough to have done this. But at once he knew that, even with his new Ooty jersey, he did not cut such a figure. He decided that, confronted by the old auntie’s unyielding opposition, all that was left to him was tactics of some brutality.

  ‘Miss Sarla Kumar is staying here?’ he demanded. ‘She is inside now?’

  But the podgy, stern face looking back at him did not change by so much as a quiver.

  ‘That is what I am all along thinking,’ came the retort. ‘You are some sort of film fan only. Perhaps you were bribing manager at Willingdon Talkies.’

  ‘No. Yes. Yes. That is, I am very, very much admiring Miss Sarla Kumar. I would like autograph. That is my inmost desire. Is she here?’

  ‘Go away.’

  The door was closing. Should he put his foot in the gap? Even if he did there would be nothing to be gained.

  He turned away.

  Darkness had begun to fall.

  Gloomily he made his way back down the concrete path. But as he reached the last of the steps leading to the lane outside there came the sound of a burst of music from the cottage behind him. Western disco music.

  He stopped still.

  Yes, if that sort of music from the noisy, strident world far beyond the ordered calm of Ooty was blaring out, then Sarla Kumar was definitely in the house. And if she was there at home, waiting, was it not likely that the Maharajah, as soon as he had gone through the ritual of dinner at the Club, would jump up, leave his wife there nursing her pekinese and come out to join the star who had stayed on after her personal appearance at the Willingdon Talkies was over and done with?

  He looked round the garden in the swiftly gathering darkness. Several of the bushes in it were reasonably big, though none of them seemed quite large enough to hide him. Then at last he spotted a sprawling hibiscus. It was not very thick, but he thought it would do well enough.

  He went hastily back to where his taxi was still waiting, and dismissed it. Then he quietly re-entered the garden and stationed himself in his chosen hiding-place.

  He thought that he would in all probability have a long wait. He would certainly miss dinner at the Club himself. But to sit in that dark panelled room again surrounded by the pictures of Masters of the Ootacamund Hunt, rock-like on their rock-like horses, with His Excellency persistently comparing him to Shri Poirot, was something he would be quite happy not to have to do.

  But if supposing this evening will end, he thought, with cent per cent proof that the Maharajah of Pratapgadh is still the lover of one Miss Sarla Kumar, then I would be a good step nearer to showing that the said Maharajah was the blackmail victim of the billiards marker Pichu. And therefore was having damn good reason to dispose him off.

  And that would be good, hard, police-work proof, not some piece of mystification suddenly unknotted, as in His Excellency’s favourite form of fiction.

  But before long he began to wish that he had brought with him his Agatha Christie, or any other book His Excellency might care to lend him, and then had found a hiding place distant enough from the cottage to be able to risk reading by torchlight. He had started his observation much too early. The Maharajah would only just have begun on his celery soup.

  And, who knows, he thought, I might after all be finding in that Mrs McGinty affair some hint of a reason why Pichu’s body was laid out so squarely in the middle of the billiard table.

  Certainly His Excellency would believe that Hercule Poirot could show the way to solving the mystery here. Look how he had been reading the book once more in the Nilgiri Library.

  Time crawled by.

  The Maharajah would be tackling his lamb cutlets or roast chicken now.

  Now the roly-poly pudding would be being placed in front of him. Would he take coffee also, sitting on one of those blue and white sofas somewhere? No. Surely he would be more urgent to come out to Sarla Kumar. But what excuse for disappearing would he make to his wife? Well, no doubt he must have some story ready. He would have thought it out when he knew Sarla Kumar was going to set up this love-nest.

  In the darkness a jackal howled from somewhere in the hills, safe now from Major Bob Jago and the hounds of the Ootacamund Hunt.

  It was cold. A chill striking even through his jersey, under the tiny blinking diamonds of the stars.

  But better not to flap his arms or jump up and down to restore some warmth. Someone might chance to look out from the cottage.

  If only it would all turn out to be worth it. If only it was the Maharajah who was responsible for the body in the billiard room. The Maharajah and not a master criminal absconding under the MISA. Or a wiry old English memsahib avenging the death of her husband. Or the Maharani, blackmailed over her young Bengali lover. Or Mr Iyer, the Efficient Baxter, perhaps caught out by Pichu falsify
ing the Club accounts. Or a talkative professor from Bombay side, just because it was the most unlikely explanation.

  Faintly in the cold night air there came the sound of a car engine. The Maharajah. He must have downed that pudding at top speed.

  But the sound died away. Some other person coming back to another cottage at the far side of the colony . . .

  He allowed himself the luxury of a good shiver, and settled down to wait once more.

  And what if it was Meenakshisundaram who was right? True, he had not so far put his hand on any dacoit who might have broken into the Club. But all the same his account of the business was really the more likely of the two. Even if, as a rule, professional robbers did not commit murder in the course of their crimes.

  One thing was certain, though. If in the end it should turn out that His Excellency’s idea of wliat had happened was correct the two of them would have to have a watertight case to put to Meenakshisundaram.

  Abruptly he realized that he was not staring as he had done for the past hour or more at the unvarying shapes of the bushes in the garden in front of him and the pale strip of the concrete path up which the Maharajah would come. Instead he was seeing a moving figure. Someone was creeping towards the cottage and for silence and secrecy was keeping to the grass beside the path.

  Who? Who could it be? Was it the Maharajah? Had that distant car, though its engine had not sounded like the roar of the jeep’s, been his after all? But why should he approach like this? It was his mistress — a film star — he was going to. He should bound up the path like a film hero.

  So who?

  And why?

  The figure had come to a halt now beside a smaller hibiscus bush nearer the cottage, one he himself had rejected as cover earlier on. With only the faint haze of light from the curtained windows of the cottage it was difficult to make much out. But it looked as if the intruder was settling down to crouch there.

  Another watcher? But who? And what for?