Читать книгу The Body in the Billiard Room - H. R. F Keating - Страница 10

It soon proved, however, that the time for further Hercule Poirot conversations had not yet come. While Ghote was working apprehensively through a large plate of creamy rice kheer and His Excellency was putting away a noble piece of apple crumble a youngish man dressed in a neat, tight-buttoned European suit, complete with tie, his face with its trim moustache partly concealed by a pair of large dartingly shiny spectacles, came into the room.

‘Ah, Iyer,’ His Excellency at once barked out. ‘Word with you, if you please.’

He leant confidentially towards Ghote.

‘The Efficient Baxter,’ he said. ‘Ooty version.’

‘Please?’

‘Ha, don’t know your P. G. Wodehouse any more than your Agatha Christie, eh? We shall have to see to your education. Efficient Baxter, secretary fellow in the great man’s works. Iyer’s just like him, always poking his nose in everywhere. Club nearly lost a damn good cook once because of him totting up supplies in the kitchens.’

‘Ah, yes, I am understanding,’ Ghote said.

And then the Efficient Baxter was with them, gleaming spectacles brightly inquiring, hands washing and washing themselves in an overwhelming desire to see something done down to the last detail plus a little extra.

‘Iyer,’ His Excellency said, ‘my friend, Mr Ghote here, would like to become a temporary Member. He’s up in Ooty for a few days. On holiday. On holiday, you understand. Nerves a bit out of order. Taking a break. Recommendation, as you might say, of Dr Moore Agar, of Harley Street.’

He turned to Ghote with a covert wink.

‘I make no doubt you at least know your Sherlock Holmes,’ he murmured. ‘Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, if I’m not mistaken. Holmes sent off to Cornwall to avoid a complete breakdown from overwork.’

Ghote smiled, palely.

‘Ah, yes, yes, Temporary Member,’ Mr Iyer said, redoubling the speed with which he was washing his hands. ‘I will fetch the necessary form immediately, and see it posted up on the notice-board for full scrutiny by existing Members before tomorrow dawns. Yes, yes, before tomorrow is in any way dawning.’

And he darted away.

Ghote turned to His Excellency.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I am noting that you are telling all and sundry I am here as a person recovering from illness only. But, sir, if I am to investigate into the murder of the man Pichu I do not at all want that.’

‘Eh? Not want it? But it won’t do to let the murderer know the Great Detective is on his track. Or her track.’

‘Oh, but, yes, sir. In so far as I am this person it would be altogether better if the miscreant is knowing there is someone besides Inspector Meenakshisundaram investigating. Then he would no longer be laughing in his sleeves all the time but would perhaps make some move that would show him up for what he is.’

‘By Jove, you’re right, of course,’ His Excellency said, looking, to Ghote’s secret pleasure, somewhat abashed. ‘Damn silly of me. Exactly what Poirot said in the Mrs McGinty case. Flush the murderer out, eh? But then you and Poirot are two of a kind, aren’t you?’

Ghote’s secret pleasure evaporated.

But he was saved from pursuing the subject by the speedy return of Mr Iyer, flourishing a Form of Application for Temporary Membership.

It took some time to get it filled in, largely because of Mr Iyer’s excess of zeal.

But the long-drawn-out business gave Ghote the opportunity of making a quiet assessment of the Club’s assistant secretary. He was, he thought, a type he knew: the painfully over-conscientious type, which would possibly make him an extremely useful witnesss.

So when at last the form was complete down to the last comma he put out a hand and detained him.

‘One moment,’ he said. ‘His Excellency has referred to Mr Sherlock Holmes and the matter of a devil’s foot, a story in which that most notable detective was sent off to recover from some sort of nervous illness. I suppose, however, that this was a case he was also investigating into and solving with uttermost brilliance.’

‘It was indeed,’ His Excellency put in.

Ghote looked steadily at the Efficient Baxter, waiting to see if his point had sunk in.

‘So perhaps,’ he added, ‘it would not be much of surprise to you if I myself am asking questions about the murder of one Pichu, billiards marker at this Club.’

But it did seem to surprise Mr Iyer, despite Ghote’s carefully planted warning.

He started back from the table as if he had dropped the soap from his ever-washing hands and it had landed on his toe.

‘But—’ he said. ‘But—But I was understanding that Pichu was done to death by a dacoit only. That is what Inspector Meenakshisundaram was saying. But—But is it that now it is suspected that some person—Some person in the Club is the culprit? That it is a Member even?’

‘You are very much astonished at such a possibility?’

‘But no one is becoming even a Temporary Member without the recommendation of one who is already a Member.’

Ghote put on a smile of heavy cynicism.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘such is not invariable guarantee of always first-class behaviour?’

Mr Iyer swallowed.

‘Perhaps you are correct, sir,’ he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

A look of swift calculation came on to his face. Ghote imagined that his machine-like mind was running through the total list of the Ootacamund Club membership.

‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me, Mr Iyer, can you think of any circumstance whatsoever, that is in any way unusual, concerning any Club member who was sleeping in these premises during the night in which Pichu was killed?’

The look of calculation on the assistant secretary’s face settled suddenly as if the whirring wheels in his head had locked together in one particular combination.

‘Well?’ Ghote said sharply.

Mr Iyer bent forward even more over their table.

‘I was reading article in The Hindu newspaper about one year back,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

Mr Iyer gave a strangulated cough.

‘Yes, Mr Iyer?’ Ghote said.

‘Well, I am not at all knowing if it is in any way relevant to the matter under discussion.’

‘You are bound to tell,’ Ghote said.

Mr Iyer swallowed. Once.

‘It was a case of smuggling,’ he stuttered. ‘The smuggling of drugs. In Cochin. There was a consignment of catfish, most strongly smelling, as you no doubt know. But, thanks to an informer, the Cochin police were able to raid that place and discover rupees three crore worth of heroin concealed therein. Only …’

He gave another strangulated cough.

‘Only the mastermind of the whole affair was absconding under the MISA,’ he said.

‘MISA?’ His Excellency interrupted. ‘Never can remember what that is. See it often enough in the damn newspapers.’

‘It is Maintenance of Internal Security Act,’ Ghote explained, furious at the loss of impetus in his questioning.

‘And the said absconder,’ Mr Iyer mercifully went on, ‘was described as being a Moslem gentleman of considerable size and weight.’

His hands, which had twisted and turned as he had come out with his story, now dropped to his sides.

‘That is all?’ Ghote asked.

‘Yes. No.’

‘No? What more is there?’

‘It is that Pichu, the late Pichu, had always to my feeling too much of money for one in such lowly occupation. He was the possessor of one transistor radio of great power wherewith he was able to obtain Test match commentaries from foreign. And I myself was constrained to show him certain favours to be able to listen also.’

‘I see,’ Ghote said.

So, he thought, perhaps His Excellency has more weight to his case than I was believing. It seems altogether likely now that Pichu’s behaviour is stinking of a blackmailer, and had been such for possibly many years.

‘There is one thing more,’ Mr Iyer whispered, bending yet closer.

‘Well, you are bound to state whatever you are knowing to fullest extent.’

‘It is drink. Pichu was frequently partaking of spirituous liquors. Perhaps from some illicit source in the Bazaar, perhaps even from one of the Club bars.’

‘Good God,’ said His Excellency.

‘I was never able to obtain one hundred per cent proof,’ Mr Iyer went on, ‘or otherwise it would have been a question of instant dismissal. But I had my most strong suspicions. Every night that I was in a position to do so I have smelt alcohol on that fellow’s lips when he was retiring to his sleeping place.’

‘That is finally all now?’ Ghote asked.

‘That is everything.’

‘Very good. You have done well to say what you were knowing. Very well.’

The assistant secretary smiled, bowed, gave one last quick wash to his hands and left them.

‘Well,’ His Excellency said, ‘Habibullah arriving about a year ago; that drugs affair taking place at much the same time; the fellow, the mastermind, escaping; and Pichu here needing money for drink I suppose, and confirmed as a blackmailer. It all adds up, you know. It certainly all adds up.’

He gave Ghote a look of quick admiration.

‘Had a small bet with myself,’ he said, ‘That you’d have the whole thing wrapped up within twenty-four hours, Ghote, but I never thought—’

‘But,’ Ghote broke in firmly, ‘a police officer is never proceeding on allegations only without checking the veracity of same.’

‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Quite right. And what steps do you propose by way of doing that?’

‘I shall talk with Inspector Meenakshisundaram in the morning,’ Ghote replied.

His Excellency blinked.

‘Meenakshisundaram? That tomfool? My dear chap, I don’t think—’

‘But, yes, it is necessary. And, besides, it is my bounden duty when I am in his territory.’

His Excellency pulled a long face.

‘Well, I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘So you won’t want to go talking to the others who were on the list now, will you?’

‘No,’ Ghote said, trying to contain his relief.

And then, almost without willing it, he added something.

‘But what I would be liking to do,’ he said, ‘is to examine scene of the crime itself.’

‘The billiard room?’

‘Yes, the billiard room.’

‘The observance of trifles, eh?’ His Excellency said. ‘The final nails in the case? I look forward to seeing a Great Detective at work on that. Yes, indeed.’

Ghote cursed his own over-conscientiousness. It had occurred to him that if Inspector Meenakshisundaram had really been completely fixed on the crime being the work of a dacoit, he might have overlooked some useful piece of confirmatory evidence in the billiard room. But he had not at all counted on having to give a demonstration of observing trifles, whatever that implied.

Sullenly he followed His Excellency out. He had a fleeting impression of dark walls with animal heads hanging from them, of pictures everywhere, pale views of Ooty and group photographs of cheerfully grinning white faces, or of hunting scenes with Englishmen dressed in red coats happily falling off horses. And then they were at the door of the billiard room.

There His Excellency paused.

‘Wait for the stroke,’ he said, repeating the words of a warning notice fixed to the wide door.

He bent forward and peered through a small glass inset panel.

‘Yes, all right.’

He opened the door and preceded Ghote into the room.

It was totally unoccupied.

There was just one table, its bare, once brilliant green baize noticeably faded under the light pouring down on it from a long fringed shade. Round the walls more animal heads looked down on the silent scene, great horned bison and a score of other lesser creatures brought down by the guns of white sahibs long ago. There were pictures here, too, mostly scenes commemorating feats of arms in distant days and very distant places.

Stepping further in, Ghote saw ‘The Battle of Tel el Kabir’, ‘The Defence of Rorke’s Drift’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.

‘Yes,’ said His Excellency, catching him peering at this last in which all the blood and mess of long ago had been turned into a never-changing scene of military glory. ‘Yes, some pretty historic things in here one way and another. You know that it was in this very room, on this very billiard table, that the rules of Snooker were finally hammered out, to be passed on through the years and over the world for ever?’

‘No,’ Ghote said. ‘No, I was not at all knowing.’

‘Yes, yes. It was here, on this self-same spot, that one Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain, later as Sir Neville to be Prime Minister of Great Britain, the man who tried to stem the tide of war by coming to an agreement with Hitler at Munich, it was here that he named his version of a primitive game called Black Pool as Snooker.’

He seized Ghote by the arm, swept away by enthusiasm.

‘Come over here. It’s all written up and framed.’

Ghote found himself propelled towards the long cue-rack – two of the cues in it were broken and others bent – where His Excellency read out for his benefit Sir Neville’s account of the historic moment.

‘“One of our party failed to hole a coloured ball close to a corner pocket, and I called out to him ‘Why, you’re a regular snooker’.” You see, my dear chap, at the Royal Military Academy in England first-year cadets were called snookers. It all fits in.’

‘Most interesting,’ Ghote said.

The lack of interest in his voice apparently did not impinge on His Excellency.

‘I tell you what, old chap,’ he said. ‘You must play a few shots on the table here and now. Just so that you can say you’ve actually put cue to ball on the very table on which Snooker was invented. Tell your grandchildren.’

Ghote, though he had no doubts about acquitting himself with a billiard cue, since an eye for a ball was one of the gifts he had been luckily endowed with from birth, prickled violently at His Excellency’s suggestion.

It seemed to him to be all a part of an attitude of airy frivolity which he had had hints of already. It went with looking on murder, not as the killing of a living person, but as a reason for writing concocted tales.

‘No, excuse me, sir,’ he said firmly. ‘As of today’s date I am investigating a most serious crime.’

‘Quite right, quite right, my dear fellow,’ His Excellency somewhat unexpectedly replied. ‘No doubt the secret of your success. Unremitting concentration, what?’

Ghote turned away and looked at the billiard table, as bare and monumentally still as when he had first seen it.

‘And the body of the marker, Pichu, was at the exact centre?’ he asked.

‘Saw it with my own eyes, before they took the poor fellow away. Lying there on his back, stab wound in his chest, little patch of blood on his white jacket. In the very centre of the table. He can’t have been put there for any other reason than the murderer, so to speak, saying “He deserved to die.” It’s a case of revenge against a blackmailer all right, take my word for it.’

‘But how was it that Pichu was in this room in the middle of the night only?’

‘Ah, forgot to explain that. Simple really. You see, he slept in here.’

‘In here?’

Ghote looked round. There were certainly the benches from which in past days no doubt groups of eager sahibs had watched thrilling games. There were some comfortable wicker chairs, too, if now dry and broken here and there. Near him there was even a sturdier affair in dark wood, with on it a brass plate recording that it had been presented in the year 1875 by Captain Winterbotham of the Madras Sappers. Pichu could have slept in moderate ease on any of them.

‘But you were telling that the Club has quarters for all servants,’ he said. ‘That none of them could have had access to the scene of the crime.’

‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Can see there’s nothing much gets past you. Ha. But Pichu was an exception to the rule. Slept in here to guard the Club trophies. Had done for countless years. Lay down on the shelf in front of that cupboard there where they were kept. You can see where the murderer forced the doors to make it look like a dacoity and deceive that idiot, Inspector Meenakshisundaram.’

‘These silver trophies were most valuable?’ Ghote asked.

‘Well, my dear fellow, they did have a certain value, yes. But that wasn’t why old Pichu slept here to guard them.’

Ghote felt puzzled.

‘Not because of the value of those objects?’

‘No, no. Or only because of their sentimental value. You see, some of them had the names of competition winners engraved on them, on little silver shields, you know, going back a hundred years or more.’

‘They were rolling trophies?’

‘Yes, yes. You kept the one you won for six months or so, and then it came back to the Club to be contested for again. Some historic names on some of them, you know. Major Jago, for one, after whom the Jago Room here’s named. Lots of others.’

‘Major Jago?’

‘You haven’t heard of Major Bob Jago?’

For a moment His Excellency looked as if he was beginning to doubt the brilliance of the man whose skills he had used all his influence to acquire, and Ghote felt a tiny leap of relief. But the moment did not last long.

‘Well, suppose a chap from Bombay side might not know about Jago,’ His Excellency conceded. ‘Was Master of the Nilgiri Hounds. One of the great hunting men of all time.’

He threw back his head and broke into a curious sort of chanting. Ghote realized, just in time, that it was verse.

‘Oh, it’s jolly to hunt with the Nilgiri pack, Major Bob with the horn and a straight-going jack.’

‘Please,’ Ghote said, after a properly reverent pause, ‘what is a straight-going jack?’

‘Oh, a jackal, old boy. Jackal. Can’t hunt the fox here, you know. But hill jackal’s always made a pretty good substitute. Not like his brother of the plains, nothing sneaky about your hill jackal.’

Ghote did not feel he had any comment to make.

His Excellency grunted.

‘Not that there’s all that much hunting nowadays,’ he said. ‘Not with the factories they’ve put up on the Downs, and nobody much with the money either except a few Army wallahs from the barracks over at Wellington.’

He sighed deeply for a past that had gone, days of leisured regularity and ordered existence.

Ghote, anxious to get down to some proper police work, moved away from him and went to the window which, from its still empty panes, must have been the one the thief had broken. Or the one that had been broken in order to lay a false trail.

He looked hard at the damaged area. But all the remaining pieces of glass had been removed and every trace of any splinters swept up. Nothing to be gained.

He then moved on to the cupboard from which the trophy with Major Jago’s famous name on it and the others had been taken.

‘If you want to grasp the real sentimental value of what’s gone,’ His Excellency said, joining him, ‘you ought to talk to old Bell. His name’s been on a trophy ever since he won the snooker contest back in the early fifties, though that was in a damn poor year actually.’

A gleam of gossipy malice lit up his leathery features.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘lot of chaps still away after the war then. Why, I don’t suppose anybody even saw his triumph right through to the last frame. And old Ringer’s never put cue to ball since. Daren’t, I suppose.’

But Ghote was busy examining the ravaged cupboard. Would it be possible to tell whether any damage had been caused by a real dacoit, or by some amateur imitator?

It was a sturdily-built piece with glass doors on its top section and a broader bottom half forming a wide shelf. Certainly it was clear that the top doors had been recently levered apart. The wood round the lock was splintered and still light-coloured and fresh. It looked, too, as if some sharp, pointed instrument had been used.

But, again, it was impossible to tell whether the harm had been done by a determined thief or an ingenious faker.

But could it really be true, Ghote thought, that the theft had been a subterfuge only? After all, despite what His Excellency had said, silver was actually valuable. It was by no means unlikely that some local dacoit would have heard of the rich haul to be made here: if firewood looters could steal a whole tree, then trophies at the Club could no longer be considered safe.

And His Excellency’s theory, looked at in a calm light, was surely too fantastic. To murder an old man for some reason and afterwards to break open the cupboard of trophies, pretend to force the window and take away all the silver cups and bowls just to make it look like a killing in the course of a dacoity. Really, there was too much of elaboration there.

So could it be – the idea slipped traitorously into his head – could it be that His Excellency simply wanted there to be a mystery here at the Club? A mystery for a Great Detective to come and solve?

‘You can see the grease mark where old Pichu laid his head,’ His Excellency said abruptly, causing Ghote to give a little jump of surprise. ‘No amount of polish will ever remove that, I dare say.’

Ghote, recovering, turned to face him.

‘The cupboard is cleaned every day?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes, definitely. The Club still keeps up its standards, you know. Damn great army of sweeper women come up from the lower town at crack of dawn each day.’

‘Then there will not be much of clues remaining.’

‘Well, no. No. Dare say not.’

Then His Excellency’s face brightened again.

‘But it’s the psychology we’ve got to rely on here,’ he said. ‘Unless of course, you yourself have already noticed something the significance of which has escaped everybody else?’

Ghote turned to his wistful companion and looked him straight in the eye.

‘As you have said yourself, sahib,’ he replied. ‘The Great Detective is never giving away his thoughts. Not even to such a person as you were calling his Watson.’