The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

But from the collection of individuals scattered in ones and twos among the drawn-up rows of chairs his eyes at once picked out five in particular, as if each was spotlighted by a dazzling arc lamp. The Maharajah of Pratapgadh and his Maharani, seated with a grey, paint-chipped chair between them. Mr Habibullah, seeming to spread over two of the ranged chairs, dressed as usual in spotless white muslin, his heavy walking-stick between his knees, hands folded over its silver knob. Mrs Trayling, sitting a little apart and knitting furiously at some indeterminate garment in bright fluffy yellow wool. And, lastly, Mr Iyer, also sitting at a distance, in the very back row, casting quick glances from side to side through his peering spectacles as if he felt that he ought not to be where he was.

  There needs now only Professor Godbole, the Least Likely Suspect, to make the gathering complete, Ghote thought with dank resignation. His Excellency had, of course, succeeded in getting every one of them to attend. He was the man for that.

  And, as if the very thought of Professor Godbole had caused him to appear, at that moment a door at the back of the room opened and the little brahmin came scuttling in, urged on from behind with gentle flapping gestures by the lank form of Dr Fatbhoy, grey-haired and hungry-eyed.

  Well, Ghote thought, at least while the professor is talking - and he will talk, surely, for a long, long time - I will be able quietly to go over every aspect of the case, working strictly in accordance with the precepts of Dr Hans Gross and the rules I learnt at Detective School. And by the end I may have been able to work my way through all the mess and muddle and fairy-tale strands with which the affair is covered and perhaps see an answer. Or perhaps not.

  He settled down in his chair beside His Excellency. Dr Fatbhoy launched into his chairman’s introduction. At its end he dextrously unhooked the garland from the chair behind him and slipped it over Professor Godbole’s head.

  Professor Godbole grinned hugely.

  Not so much, Ghote guessed, at the honour done to him as at the prospect of being able to talk uninterruptedly on a favourite subject for many, many minutes to come.

  And at once, bearing out his guess, Professor Godbole began.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I have the honour to introduce to you one of the major figures of our age. Sherlock Holmes, the Great Detective, and to ask whether he be alive or dead. The Great Detective, a myth of our times, no less. A myth, certainly, come to life among us. Or come at least to that semblance of life which is literature. Because, let us be clear about this at the outset, the Great Detective cannot of his nature exist in reality.’

  Ghote, at these last words, felt such a surge of gratitude and relief that all ideas of not paying attention to the professor’s words while he wrestled instead with the facts of the case of the body in the billiard room deserted him in an instant.

  18

  Freed of the chasm-creating thought that it was up to him to represent some impossible creature, Ghote found himself listening with fascination to what Professor Godbole had to say about the investigator from the world of books, the world of books and nowhere else. Soon he began to think that the professor’s ideas, which had seemed when he had originally heard them to be altogether fantastic, had in them a good deal of sense.

  ‘We are, are we not,’ the little brahmin said, favouring his scattered audience with a sharply wicked grin, ‘each one of us trapped? Trapped within our own personalities. Over the years we build up in our minds a picture of ourselves. A picture of a person we can bear to live with, perhaps often a person of whom we are secretly proud.’

  Well, Ghote thought, one thing I am knowing: His Excellency is damn proud of the picture he has made of himself, of a detective story-loving man living in some sort of England translocated. That is one thing certain.

  ‘But,’ Professor Godbole went on, giving each one of them a quick and ferocious glare, ‘but a picture that we create for ourselves in this way has a most terrible effect. It places round us limits. It lays down for us rules, rules we dare not break even though they are rules we alone have devised. But the Great Detective . . . Ah, the Great Detective, he — or sometimes she — in the pages of those books we delight to read can by the force of genius show us these self-imposed rules being broken. He can show us that the prisons we make for ourselves can be escaped from.’

  Yes, Ghote, thinking hard, conceded, what he is saying is very true. I myself am in such a prison. I have all along been serving one life-sentence therein, as a man fixed in the shape of a police officer. And, worse even, in these last few days in paradise Ooty I have been in a yet more strict prison. One where the Gaol Superintendent laying down rules and regulations is not even myself but - he turned to steal a sideways glance - this influential fellow who has been inflicted upon me. So can I—

  But Professor Godbole was still in full flow.

  ‘Yes, the Great Detective, whilst we read with simple pleasure of his triumphs, can teach us by the secret ways of imaginative writing that it is possible to escape from the prisons, the locked rooms, imposed upon us by our own egoes. Now, what is one of the ways, perhaps the most striking, in which this lesson is presented to us? Why, by the simple yet always intriguing device of disguise. In that notable tale A Scandal in Bohemia we read of Mr Sherlock Holmes disguising himself as a drunken groom, making himself - note - wholly into a person smelling equally of the horse and the bottle. And we realize then, without realizing that we have realized it, that other people exist. That as a drunken syce comes to exist for, and in, Mr Sherlock Holmes, wholly to exist, so some person equally foreign to us can be seen as existing, truly existing, as real as ourselves.’

  Ghote took a quick survey of the professor’s small audience. Were they realizing they could become drunken syces? It did not from their politely dazed expressions look like it.

  ‘Yes, we see, we are made to see,’ the monkey-faced professor rattled on, ‘that it is possible for any one of us, however high-minded the life we lead, however powerfully intelligent we happen to be, to enter into the soul - the soul, I do not hesitate to say - of any fellow human being, however low.’

  ‘Yes, Ghote gropingly thought, perhaps if now, or in just only a moment, I could enter into the five - six souls of the suspects in this room itself, I might possibly find the answer to the whole business I have been brought here to solve.

  But, once again, Professor Godbole was pouring out his rich mix of ideas, and Ghote found himself listening willy-nilly.

  ‘But notice, notice this, ladies and gentlemen, in that tale A Scandal in Bohemia, the story in which Mr Holmes rebukes Dr Watson with the ever-famous words: “You see but you do not observe”, in that story the disguise which Holmes has plunged himself into is penetrated. It is penetrated by a woman. By that Madame Irene Adler, whom Holmes is said ever afterwards to refer to as The Woman. And because his disguise is penetrated Holmes himself fails in this adventure. Yes, the Great Detective shows that he is no more than a prophet: he is not God Almighty. He does not enter into everything there is, only into some souls, some drunken grooms. He has thus to recognize, for himself and for us also, that the whole outside world is there. A world beyond him, a world of the other. So sometimes he fails. Yes, the great Mr Sherlock Holmes could fail, and in that failure lay his ultimate strength.’

  He fails, Ghote echoed. And he realized that, even if His Excellency had not taken in enough of what Professor Godbole had been saying to relieve him himself of the burden of Great Detectiveness - and there was small hope that anyone with ideas so fixed would have done that — then it could still be permitted to him not to succeed in the case that had been thrust upon him. He could leave Ooty eventually with the baffling business still unsolved and feel he had not failed in his duty.

  He ventured another sideways glance at his Watson. His Excellency was looking just perceptibly worried by something. Was it at hearing his simple beliefs about Great Detectives upset? Or could he be trying to recall an occasion when Shri Poirot had failed?

  ‘Ladies and gentleme
n,’ Professor Godbole resumed before Ghote could answer that question, ‘these pieces of simple entertainment we read are, in fact, of very much greater importance than might be thought from the apparent nature of the books themselves. They are in one sense light reading, yes, fiction for the simple purpose of entertainment. But they are also, with or without the willing connivance of their authors, much more than that.’

  For a naughty moment the diminutive brahmin allowed a silence to fall while he looked, twinkling-eyed, round his sparse audience. Even Ghote found himself churningly trying to think how books like Mrs McGinty’s Dead or even Into the Valley of Death could be much more than the fairytale fiction he had thought them.

  ‘What are they, these simple stories?’ the professor went on, letting his listeners off the hook at last. ‘They are nothing short of deeply symbolic constructions. Their heroes are figures of pure myth, albeit they became as time went on a myth diluted. But their stories are stories of the everlasting struggle between Good and Evil. And they are tales in which the weapon of Good is in the hands of the Great Detective half at least Reason. Reason fighting to restore in a world to which Evil has brought imbalance and chaos the orderliness which we, each one of us, cannot but desire.’ And half also, of course, intuition, the poet’s vision.

  Seated on his droopy canvas chair, Ghote felt rising up in him a wave of crusading vigour. These investigators the professor had described, these fighters against evil and chaos, these strivers for orderliness: he was one of them.

  They might be in books. He was in the world, which was harder by far to bring any orderliness to. But bringing order was what his task in life was, like theirs. And he was proud of it. To bring orderliness. Orderliness. Orderliness.

  The word with its tumbling syllables repeated itself murmurously in his head. It sent him almost into that very state of meditation which, by directing all his thoughts to the tip of his nose, he had striven to reach for most of the day behind him. Unless he had been asleep.

  Almost it sent him, but not entirely. He was aware still, dimly, of Professor Godbole’s voice going on and on. Odd words continued to impinge.

  Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  Dr Watson.

  Still, in that sense, alive.

  Hercule Poirot. Lord Peter Wimsey. Superintendent Maigret. The Great Detective. The Great Detective.

  Then, emerging abruptly from his semi-trance, he became aware that the handful of people in the room were decorously applauding. Professor Godbole had finally brought his discourse to an end.

  Dr Fatbhoy was standing up. He was thanking the speaker, talking about a veritable feast. And announcing that after the coffee interval he was sure our learned friend would be most happy to answer questions.

  Then two servants came in with trays on which there were cups of coffee and plates of glucose biscuits. Ghote took a cup when it was presented to him. The coffee was distinctly watery. But he sipped at it with as much simulated relish as he could contrive. While thus occupied he felt he was excused from engaging in conversation with His Excellency, something he was more than ever disinclined for. And neither could he be expected to chat with any of the other visitors from the Ooty Club, something he was utterly averse to.

  Soon the coffee interval was over. The cups were collected. The almost depleted plates of biscuits were taken away. Dr Fatbhoy, to Ghote’s relief evidently feeling that, since the Great Detective had authoritatively been declared to be only a figure in fiction, it would not be appropriate to draw attention to the presence among them of a simple CID wallah from Bombay, asked if there were any questions for ‘our honourable speaker’.

  There were none.

  After a sufficiently long embarrasing pause, during which Professor Godbole alternately hopped up from his chair and hopped back on to it again, Dr Fatbhoy repeated, almost word for word, his earlier speech and then declared the meeting closed. Most of those present got up rather quickly and made their way out into the cool night.

  Ghote thought the professor’s torrenting ideas must have been rather too much for them. But they had not been too much for him.

  He contemplated going up to the little brahmin to tell him so. Until he realized that the people who had not yet left were precisely His Excellency’s collection of suspects, added to only by the spare, bald-domed, unshiftable figure of Dr Fatbhoy.

  The Grand Confrontation. With an ice-chill descent, Ghote realized that this was what was going to take place now. At once. Directly. By whatever manoeuvres and authority had been necessary His Excellency had set the scene.

  The suspects had been assembled, waiting for him.

  There was Mrs Lucy Trayling, who might have murdered the man she believed had allowed her drink-fuddled husband to drown. There was Mr Habibullah, who might not be Mr Habibullah at all but a master criminal somehow betrayed to the over-inquisitive billiards marker. There was the Maharani of Pratapgadh, who was certainly having a love affair with one Mr Amul Dutt, student, and who at all costs did not want to be divorced by her extremely well-off husband. There was the Maharajah of Pratapgadh who, turning the situation the other way round, might be very determined that his wife should not learn that he was picking up his old affair with the sultry Sarla Kumar and who might have thought it easier to kill blackmailing Pichu than to buy him off. There was Mr Iyer, so efficient in his handling of the Club accounts that it was by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that he had been milking them dry.

  Or there was even Professor Godbole himself, with no conceivable reason to have killed an old Club servant whom he had not set eyes on until recently, but who nevertheless had been one of that handful of people in a position to have murdered him on the fatal night. The Least Likely Suspect.

  Unless - a sudden thought - that doubtful honour should go to Dr Fatbhoy. He had, after all, been somewhat unaccountably allowed to remain in the room which His Excellency had transformed into the library, or drawing room, in which by tradition Grand Confrontations took place. His Excellency had, of course, said that Dr Fatbhoy was a hard person to get rid of. But on the other hand he had also said he was a terrible fellow and, more to the point, that he was frequently to be seen not at his own club but at the Ootacamund Club itself, scene of the crime. Could he have been there, somehow lurking unseen, on the night of the murder? It was not quite impossible.

  Or there was, in the most outside of chances, Mr Biswas, proprietor of the Bengal Vegetarian Hotel. He had a link with Pichu, that card of his. But was that link only that Pichu perhaps sold him from time to time drink stolen from the Club? Or was it, just possibly, something else?

  And here he himself was, expected by his ever-hovering Watson to conduct this confrontation. But he had no idea, not the least glimmer of any idea, of what order even he should take each of the suspects, make it look as if he or she had committed the murder and then show that after all this was not so until he finally picked on the one among them all who was the real murderer.

  His Excellency, he saw, had made his way up on to the deserted platform and was toying with the tumbler and water carafe on the orange-clothed table. Now he replaced the glass on top of the carafe with a sharp clink.

  All of them sitting in the body of the room below looked up at him.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said in a voice that reverberated under the lofty, cross-beamed roof, ‘I believe Mr Ghote, our visitor from Bombay, has something to say now. Something highly important.’

  Ghote got to his feet.

  He had nothing to say.

  And then he found, as if a jewel-bright object had been thrown into his hands, that he did have something to say. A revelation he had had, unknown to himself, during his long withdrawn day of trance in his bedroom at the Club. It had at this last moment made itself clear to him. It had fallen into his mind. Or perhaps risen up there.

  It must after all have been dharana, not sleep, that had overcome him. It might even have been dhyana. But, whichever it was, somewhere inside him it had linked t
ogether things he had seen but not observed, or had not realized that he had observed. He had done just what Professor Godbole had said Mr Sherlock Holmes did: he had fused into a new whole the products of reasoning and the jumping lightning-strokes of intuition. He had discovered that which has never occurred before.

  He knew now just how it had come about that Pichu, the billiards marker and blackmailer, had been done to death.

  He had known it, he realized, from the very moment that His Excellency, by knocking on his bedroom door, had filled his head with irrelevant images of Agni, god of fire, and his thunderbolts. And, because His Excellency had been there, urgently demanding that he should attend the Culture Circle, the knowledge of what had come to him in his trance had been temporarily driven from his head.

  It was rather as if he had forgotten some unimportant little task because something more pressing had suddenly come up.

  But what he had forgotten, and had now remembered, was not unimportant. It was as important as could be. A matter of life and death. Of a murdered man’s death, and perhaps at some future time of a murderer’s life.

  He pushed aside the grey stacking chairs impeding him and strode up on to the platform. He took up a position behind the table and leant forward across it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I think His Excellency was expecting for me to accuse each and every one of you in turn of murder, and after to find each of you but one not guilty. But I am not going to do any such thing whatsoever. I cannot do such. I am not at all knowing who was committing the murder of Pichu, the billiards marker.’

  He was aware of His Excellency stepping back in affronted dismay. But he went determinedly on.

  ‘No, that I am not knowing. That I am not knowing, yet. But what I am knowing is the manner of Pichu’s death. For, you see, Pichu was not murdered once. He was murdered twice.’

  19

  The eight of them in the high-beamed room looked back at Ghote after his announcement with a shifting variety of expressions. Shock, deep puzzlement, something approaching incredulous contempt, something that might have been fear. Was there among them, he asked himself, somewhere as well a fiercely concealed enmity?