The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

  After a minute or two more of fruitless speculation Ghote set off towards the smaller bush. On the grass his feet made not the slightest noise.

  In a few moments he was within jumping distance of the crouching watcher.

  Should he jump?

  Yes, he decided. After all, this was definitely an intruder. Nefarious purposes were clear. And, however far he himself was from his proper territory in hugger-mugger, noisy, crowded Bombay, he was still a police officer. He had a duty.

  And, besides, he was very curious.

  He took a deep breath and launched himself.

  It was only as his arms closed round the crouching intruder that he realized he had in them a woman. And, smelling suddenly a tangy, musky European perfume, he knew that the woman he had in his grasp was none other than the trouser-wearing Maharani of Pratapgadh.

  12

  Ghote whipped his encircling arms away from the utterly unexpected figure they had enveloped.

  ‘Madam, madam,' he said.

  The Maharani, who had let out a single whistling gasp of fright when he had leapt on her, began to recover. She got to her feet and peered forward in the darkness.

  ‘Madam,’ Ghote said, ‘it is I, Mr Ghote, the guest of His Excellency Mr Surinder Mehta.’

  ‘What—’

  Her face came closer in the dark. He smelt again her tangy European perfume, and wondered abruptly what she had done with her pekinese. No doubt left in charge of some servant in the Club.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, it is. You’re the Great Detective. That’s what my husband said.’

  ‘Well, madam . . .’

  In the darkness he saw her straighten her back and move half a pace away.

  ‘Then let me tell you this, Mr Great Detective. You are not wanted here. Not wanted in Ooty, and certainly not wanted in the Club. Why the hell they let you in in the first place I don’t know.’

  Ghote felt a burst of resentful anger. Who was it, after all, who was illicitly present in this garden? And who was it, too, who had been stated as being a person who would not have been allowed in the Club in old days? Stated by Mrs Lucy Trayling. None other than this Maharani.

  And, he thought, he had learnt the reason for that, even in the short time he had been there. A lady who could let herself have a love affair in a third, no, fourth-class hotel in the Bazaar.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I am staying at Club as guest of Mr Mehta. He was calling me from Bombay. It is his belief that the billiards marker Pichu was murdered by some person within the said Club, and I am here to find such.’

  ‘What nonsense. My husband was saying something like that, and I told him he was talking tommyrot. I don’t believe Surinder Mehta asked you here at all, not even if he is practically gaga.’

  ‘Madam, you are accusing myself of uttering falsehoods? I tell you, I am here in Ooty to investigate the murder of the billiards marker, and I have good reason to suspect that his murder was committed by one of the persons sleeping in the Club on the night in question. And among such persons, madam, you are there.’

  The onslaught appeared to have had some effect. The Maharani stayed silent.

  Silent and thoughtful.

  ‘Oh God,’ she exclaimed at last, ‘let’s go away from here. That bloody woman will come out or something if she hears voices, and I certainly couldn’t face her just now.’

  ‘Very good, madam,’ Ghote said. ‘I also would not wish to be found here.’

  They crept to the gate, opened it and stepped down into the lane.

  ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting along here,’ the Maharani said. ‘Do you want a lift?’

  ‘You are most kind.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure of that. I don’t feel very kindly disposed to anyone just now.’

  They walked on in silence for a little. The air felt penetratingly cold.

  Suddenly the Maharani turned towards him.

  ‘And what were you doing hiding there yourself?’ she demanded.

  Ghote wished he had not laid himself open to the inquiry by retreating from Sunnyside Cottage in the way he had. He sought rapidly for some plausible lie. And decided there was none to tell.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I will answer the simple truth. I was there in that garden, I am thinking, for the very same reason as yourself. I was wishing to have proof that your husband was in the habit of consorting with Miss Sarla Kumar.’

  For a moment the Maharani was frozen in silence. Then she responded.

  ‘Damn. Is he so obvious? Does every bloody soul in the Club know what’s going on?’

  Ghote, blinking a little at the vigorous language, pushed on with his truth-telling.

  ‘Madam, I am not thinking so. It just happens that there came to my notice one out-of-date item of filmi gossip connecting your husband with Miss Kumar, and I learnt also she is staying on in that cottage after making her personal appearance at Willingdon Talkies.’

  ‘Did you indeed? And what do you deduce from that, Mr Great Detective? That Vikram is renewing the affair and — what? - that that creepy billiards marker got to know of it, tried a bit of blackmail and that Vikram silenced him? Is that what you think?’

  It was. Or it was, Ghote acknowledged to himself, certainly one of the things that Mr Detective, great or small, had thought. But he did not find it easy to say as much to the wife of this suspect.

  ‘Madam, an investigating officer has to examine each and every possibility.’

  ‘Loves to poke his dirty nose into each and every possibility, you mean,’ the Maharani retorted, her former rage returning.

  It brought up an equal anger in Ghote.

  He had not wanted in any way to poke his nose into the affairs of these people up in the clear air of Ooty. He had been ordered to do so, and he had never relished the task.

  ‘Madam,’ he said fiercely, ‘let me state this also: when I am saying each and every possibility I am not at all forgetting the possibility that you yourself could have been victim of Pichu’s blackmailing.’

  She came to an abrupt halt in the darkness. Some way further on Ghote could see the dim light coming from the interior of the taxi in which she had made her way out to the colony.

  ‘Victim of that nasty old man’s blackmail,’ she said, ‘and I suppose you think his killer too.’

  Ghote drew himself up.

  Why not? Why not accuse this suspect to her face here and now?

  ‘Yes, madam. The killer of the billiards marker in the billiard room.’

  ‘What bloody nonsense.’

  Ghote felt he had dived head first into swirling, muddy waters. Where their buffeting would carry him he could not tell. But he had taken the plunge. He had told this woman he believed she had killed a man. That she had murdered him. Not that she was a mere playing piece in some bloodless game, the game His Excellency so delighted in. Not that she was just the “Suspect” who, it had turned out, had done it.

  No, not that, but that she was an actual murderer, a killer.

  ‘Not at all nonsense,’ he said. ‘Can you deny that you are having as much of secrets as your husband?’

  ‘What do you mean? You dirty-minded little tick. I said you shouldn’t ever have been let into the Club, and, by God, I was right.’

  ‘I am meaning the Bengal Vegetarian Hotel,’ Ghote said.

  It stopped the outburst like a blow from a bludgeon.

  A silence fell in the starlit darkness.

  ‘How much do you know?’ came the Maharani’s cold voice at last.

  ‘I am knowing the name of Mr Amul Dutt,’ Ghote said.

  Another silence.

  Then another question.

  ‘How much do you want so as to keep your mouth shut?’

  ‘Madam, I am not at all wanting. I may not be any sort of a Great Detective, but this much at least I am sharing with Mr Sherlock Holmes: I am not taking bribes.’

  ‘Then you’re the first policeman I’ve met who doesn’t. If enough’s offered.’


  ‘But you, you were not able to offer enough to Pichu? That is what I am asking myself.’

  The Maharani laughed then.

  ‘A billiards marker in a club? He wouldn’t have wanted a tenth as much as a Great Detective.’

  In the dark Ghote saw her turn sharply away.

  ‘And as for you,’ she called out, ‘you can get back to your dotty friend Surinder Mehta on your own two feet.’

  He stood where he was as she strode away. In a few moments he saw her outlined against the feeble light from inside the taxi, then came the choked splutter of its engine as it moved jerkily away. Soon there was nothing but the silence of the night.

  Stubbornly he set out on the long walk back.

  *

  It was not until breakfast time next day that he saw His Excellency again.

  Then, tucking into porridge with all the more appetite for having gone hungry to bed the night before, and much too tired even to attempt one more page of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, he dutifully recounted to his influential Watson the events of the evening in the garden of Sunnyside Cottage.

  It was only as he put his spoon down in the empty porridge bowl that a thought occurred to him. If the murderer was truly a Club member, now that it was believed by one and all that he himself was the only person who could solve this baffling mystery, then it would not have been impossible for a secret adversary to have added to his porridge white arsenic. No doubt rat poison could easily be obtained down in the Bazaar.

  ‘So what do you think?’ His Excellency was asking. ‘Did the Maharani do it?’

  Ghote, who when his softly-brought bed-tea had come had woken to find he had arrived at a firm conclusion about the dark-of-night confrontation, wagged his head.

  ‘She must go low down on the list of suspects, Your Excellency,’ he said. ‘What she was pointing out about how easily she could have bribed Pichu is altogether correct. Why then should she kill him?’

  ‘Yes. See that. And, if I may point it out, you didn’t exactly succeed any better last night in adding to your case against Pratapgadh himself. I mean, I realize you did more or less have to leave your place of hiding. But, you know, when Sherlock Holmes followed somebody who said afterwards that he hadn’t seen him he was able to reply “That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.” ’

  Ghote was tempted more than ever to shout aloud ‘But I am not Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ However, he refrained.

  ‘So,’ His Excellency went on, ‘our friend Iyer goes to the top again, eh?’

  He leant forward, lined up salt-pot, pepper-pot, mustard-holder, Dipy’s Tomato Ketchup bottle, sugar bowl and milk jug.

  ‘Hm,’ he grunted. ‘Well, let’s say the salt’s the Maharani and the pepper’s our friend Iyer. Now, we’ll make the mustard the Maharajah - “keen as mustard”, what? - and the ketchup Habibullah, why not, and then the sugar can be old Lucy Trayling - lady sweet as sugar, of course -while right at the end, the milk, that’s little Godbole, so absolutely innocent I can’t help wondering every time I think of him whether he must be the one.’

  Ghote debated with himself whether to say, yet again, that complete innocence was surely complete innocence. But he knew that any such argument would be labour in vain.

  ‘Right,’ said His Excellency.

  And down from the head of the line to its very end, even below impossibly suspect Professor Godbole, went the Maharani, the salt-pot. Ghote, recalling the night before, thought that the mustard-holder would have better represented the swearing, hot-tempered Maharani.

  But the pepper-pot was now at the head of His Excellency’s line. Looking at it, Ghote realized that he was as little anxious to interview the assistant secretary as he had been to tackle any of the sahibs and memsahibs, white or brown. Mr Iyer, after all, coming from the turbulent world below, would be much more likely to see that he could refuse to answer possibly incriminating questions from anybody other than Inspector Meenakshisundaram. Nor would the fellow, knowing who he himself was, be as easy to bounce into giving answers that might betray him as he had been when he had been bullied into opening up Pichu’s quarter.

  ‘And there’s another thing now that you’ve brought Iyer into the picture,’ His Excellency went on. ‘He was, you know, the first to see the body.’

  ‘Ah, good. Good. I can perhaps talk with him giving such only as my reason.’

  ‘But, no, old boy.’

  ‘What? That is not a good enough reason? You are thinking Inspector Meenakshisundaram has already asked him what he was seeing then?’

  ‘No, no. Meenakshisundaram didn’t bother with Iyer at all. Iyer told me so himself. No, that brainless plodder simply took it for granted that the signs of a break-in meant the affair was a dacoity and went on from there.’

  ‘But if Inspector Meenakshisundaram has not put any questions to Mr Iyer, then I myself should do so forthwith.’

  ‘No, old fellow, that’s not my point at all.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Thing is: the Efficient Baxter was the first to see the body. And you know what that invariably means, don’t you?’

  Ghote thought. No, he did not know what that invariably meant.

  Luckily, His Excellency took his silence to convey just the opposite.

  ‘Quite right, quite right. It wasn’t, I think, Poirot himself but one of those shrewd regular policemen he sometimes worked with who said: the first person to find a dead body is often the same as the person who last saw him alive.’

  Ghote blinked.

  ‘That is what the British police are believing?’ he said. ‘But it cannot be so. Many, many times we at Crime Branch in Bombay are having cases where the body was reported by old, old women or by small children even, and they are never ultimately being charge-sheeted under Section 302.’

  His Excellency looked down at his plate of bacon and eggs.

  ‘Well, I dare say I may have quoted it a little wrong,’ he muttered. ‘Probably the chap said “quite often”. “Quite often” or something of that sort. But you can take it from me: it’s a damn suspicious circumstance. A damn suspicious circumstance against our friend Iyer.’

  ‘Very well,’ Ghote said, rising from the table. ‘I would go at once and talk with Mr Iyer.’

  He thought, as he strode out of the dining room abandoning all ideas of toast and Dundee marmalade, that His Excellency had half-risen from his chair as if to call him back and suggest a joint interview with this juicy suspect. But he ignored him.

  To his pleasure, when he thrust open the door of the Club office without knocking, he found the assistant secretary sitting at his table, his glinting spectacles deep in an assortment of bills and receipts. He looked up with some astonishment at the unheralded intrusion.

  ‘Mr Iyer,’ Ghote said without preliminaries, ‘I am understanding that you were the first person to see the body in the billiard room on Tuesday morning.’

  The Efficient Baxter put one lean finger into his floppy sheaf of papers to keep his place.

  ‘Well, yes, that is so,’ he agreed with evident caution. ‘Ah. Then—’

  ‘And yet it is not so.’

  Ghote foresaw the need to be tough, and gathered up his forces.

  But Mr Iyer was smiling placatingly.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘it is just like this. While I was the first person properly to see Pichu’s body, in fact before me a sweeper woman had been into the billiard room.’

  ‘A sweeper woman? But she had not noticed the body, is it? Yet, so Mr Mehta was telling me, it was altogether in the very middle of the billiard table.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that is so. That is as I myself saw it.’

  ‘But the sweeper woman did not see?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, she saw. She came shouting and calling to tell me myself. And, of course, I made prompt investigation.’

  For a moment Ghote stood looking down at the Efficient Baxter, the necessity of keeping his place in the pile of bills preventing him for once from washing his hands toget
her.

  ‘So you yourself were not actually the first to see the body?’ he said.

  ‘No. Not if you would count the sweeper woman.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ghote said. ‘I do count this sweeper woman. What is her name, if you please? And where would I be able to find?’

  ‘Name? Name? I do not—Oh, yes. Yes, now I have it. It is Gauri. I think, Gauri. But I am not at all able to tell you where you would find her this a.m. She would long ago have finished her work here, and I do not know where she stays. Most probably in one of those hutments the poors are always building.’

  ‘I see,’ Ghote said.

  He turned to go.

  And put the question he had been careful to keep until this moment.

  ‘Mr Iyer, on Monday night, when Pichu was killed, you were in the Club till a late, late hour. Why was that?’

  The suddenness of the demand seemed to have had all the effect he could have hoped for. The Efficient Baxter swallowed, started back in his chair, took his long finger out of his sheaf of papers, stared at them blankly as they flopped into confusion.

  ‘Well?’ Ghote demanded.

  The Efficient Baxter licked his lips.

  ‘Please,’ he said croakingly.

  ‘Mr Iyer, what were you doing in the Club building in the middle of the night when Pichu was killed? And I am warning: no wool-over-the-eye business.’

  ‘I—You see—Sir, it is—It is like this. In the town I have the smallest of houses only. And children. I have five children. No, six. And if I don’t get sleep my work-standard is altogether deteriorating. So, often I am dossing down in this office itself. But Major Bell would not—’

  But then suddenly in place of the look of gathering desperation on his face there came a broad, dawning smile.

  ‘Six children,’ he said. ‘Six children. I have six children now.’

  ‘What is this?’ Ghote barked out, unable to see how the fecund turmoil of the Efficient Baxter’s domestic life had any relevance.

  ‘But it is simple,’ Mr Iyer replied, still looking almost idiotically pleased. ‘Last Monday night my sixth child came into the world. She is a daughter. We are calling her Radha. And there was a question of a difficult birth. So naturally I fetched Dr Fatbhoy, and he was there to see that I spent all that night in my house. I boiled a great quantity of water with my own hands.’