Читать книгу The Body in the Billiard Room - H. R. F Keating - Страница 9

With the sound of the great gong in the portico still humming in the air, Ghote rose up from the edge of the wide leather armchair where he had been sitting. He felt trapped, and he felt foolish. How could the Assistant Commissioner have agreed to him being sent here? To take part in what seemed to be some sort of a detective story? But then he knew the answer. He had been sent because a person of influence had asked for him.

Yet, here in Ooty, paradise Ooty, hell Ooty, how had it come about that he had allowed himself to be engulfed in that influential figure’s unlikely theory? He thought he knew the answer to that, too. It was because he could not, when it came down to it, fly in the face of someone with so much influence and authority.

And perhaps he had been sensible not to have done so. After all, if he had, word would soon enough have got back to whatever high-up old friend the former ambassador had gone to in the first place. It might be a Cabinet Minister even. Or the head of some huge industrial empire with contacts at the top. Or some very, very senior civil servant. And when they got to hear his career might be blighted for ever.

No, it was best, in a way, to let this ridiculous business go on. And, besides, it might not be altogether ridiculous.

There was just something in what His Excellency had said. The circumstances of the murder were not one hundred per cent consistent with a killing in the course of a dacoity, as Inspector Meenakshisundaram had assumed was the case. The body being in the very centre of the billiard table, if it truly had been so, was certainly an odd circumstance. And murder was by no means the modus operandi of the ordinary dacoit.

So, let matters continue a little longer. See what happened, and take the first chance possible to have a talk with Meenakshisundaram. He might be able to put the whole thing straight with just one word.

But first His Excellency’s five suspects, so-called suspects. To be confronted with them at dinner in this posh club …

‘Come along, my dear chap. I’m certainly peckish, even if you’re not.’

Yet getting a meal did not prove as easy as Ghote, who found he was very hungry, had assumed it would be. At the door of the big dining room a Club servant barred their way.

The fellow looked at His Excellency with an expression of mingled determination and dismay.

‘Sahib, it is By-law 13,’ he said.

‘By-law 13? Oh, no tie. No tie. Yes, of course.’

His Excellency turned to Ghote.

‘Frightfully sorry, old chap,’ he said. ‘Never took in that you weren’t wearing a tie. And, of course, no one’s allowed in the Club dining room in European dress without one. But don’t despair. Just hold on a tick.’

He disappeared.

Ghote stood just outside the dining room staring in at its dark wainscoted walls and the round tables dotted about. At which of them were the five suspects seated?

He did his best to ignore the blue-uniformed bearer who did not seem altogether sure that he would make no further attempt to breach By-law 13. He tried, too, to dismiss the decidedly appetizing odours that floated through the open doors.

Luckily, His Excellency reappeared within a couple of minutes, carrying dangling in his hand a long silk tie, plain green in colour.

‘Not much of a match for your shirt, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘But it’s the only one I’ve got that doesn’t belong to some club or regiment you wouldn’t be entitled to wear.’

‘Thank you all the same,’ Ghote confined himself to saying, as he wound the luxurious silk round the neck of his by no means expensive pink-checked cotton shirt.

Once he was properly attired the bearer stepped aside and with a salaam permitted them to enter.

‘Ah,’ His Excellency said in a low voice, ‘I’m glad to see we’ve got a full complement, every single suspect present and correct. You’ll be able to give them a good looking-over, and then when we’ve eaten I’ll introduce you and you can chat to them. You remember what Hercule Poirot says about talk?’

‘No,’ Ghote said, unable to suppress a little swirl of resentment at once again hearing the name of Agatha Christie’s detective. ‘No, I am not at all remembering.’

‘Oh yes, forgot you don’t know the works. Have to see about that before the night’s out. But what Poirot said is something like this: it is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject at all, sooner or later they give themselves away. Pretty clever, eh? Always remembered that.’

‘But—But …’

Ghote decided to abandon objection to this curious method of detection. He was, after all, more or less under His Excellency’s orders, however odd, or alarming, they were.

He buried himself in the menu card where, he saw, lamb cutlets jostled with vegetable curry and roly-poly pudding and apple crumble matched kheer and kulfi. But he found his appetite was not as sharp as he had thought. The prospect of parading round the dark, impressive room contriving conversations with members of this exclusive institution, whom he was also expected to regard as potential murderers, sat heavily on his stomach as if he had already consumed a monster helping of that roly-poly pudding.

‘Well now,’ His Excellency said, swiftly discarding his own menu and looking eagerly round the room, ‘where shall I begin? Hm, yes. The couple over there in the corner. Maharajah of Pratapgadh and his Maharani, the second or third maharani, I believe.’

Ghote looked in the direction his host – and his Dr Watson – had indicated.

He saw a handsome, straight-nosed man of forty or so, slightly running to fat, dressed in a gold-buttoned blue blazer and wearing a tie which, from its combination of ugly stripes, could only be that of some exclusive sporting organization. A typical Rajput, he thought.

His wife, the second or third, was dressed in a deep blue silky blouse covered with a variety of gold chains and a pair of extremely tight white trousers. On her lap she was nursing a fluffy and dyspeptic-looking pekinese. The word ‘voluptuous’ came clicking into Ghote’s mind.

‘The Maharani?’ he asked His Excellency. ‘She is one of your five? There are ladies also staying in the Club?’

‘Yes, yes. There’s accommodation for married couples, and for single ladies. Which brings me to that person over there, Mrs Lucy Trayling, widow, long-time resident of Ooty, staying here temporarily owing to the illness of her ancient ayah, single servant she still has.’

Ghote looked at Mrs Trayling.

She was very much the British memsahib he remembered from his earliest boyhood, if a rather older version. She wore an aged tweed suit of an indeterminate browny-green colour. Iron grey hair straggled all round her head. And a large handbag lay dumped on the table to one side of her, wide open and sprawlingly tilted. On her other side was an even larger knitting-bag made out of some thick, flowery material. A sturdy pair of needles stuck out from a ball of pale mauve wool at its crammed top.

A murderer, Ghote thought. Surely not. And yet, old women did commit murders sometimes. And Mrs Trayling looked wiry and strong enough, for all her age.

But the next candidate His Excellency presented for inspection seemed almost as unlikely.

‘Now, two tables further along. Little fellow with his head stuck in that damn great book. Name of Godbole, some sort of academic. Not been here very long, about ten days. But in the Club all right on the night in question.’

Ghote dutifully turned his gaze in the direction indicated. He saw a small, spry, almost monkey-like man with a cap of wavy black hair and large hornrimmed spectacles perched on a hooked nose. A Maharashtrian brahmin by the look of him, coupled with that name. He was, as His Excellency had said, deeply absorbed in a large, leather-bound volume, almost crouching over it. As Ghote discreetly observed him, he picked up a strong ivory-bladed paperknife and slit apart two of the book’s pages as yet unseen by any prying, curious eye. In front of him a vegetarian dish of phool gobi ki bhaji stood neglected.

Well, Ghote thought, surely one suspect who is hardly a suspect at all. An academic, a typical absent-minded professor type. And a new arrival. No, one of His Excellency’s five at least could be dismissed out of hand.

A bearer at his elbow was murmuring something.

‘What? What?’

‘Sir, I am requesting: military or brahmin?’

A feeling of dazed bewilderment came over Ghote. Was the fellow asking him which was the most likely murderer of the billiards marker? The Maharajah, military descendant of a long line of warlike Rajput princes, or the stooping brahmin pedant?

‘Means do you want the English menu or the Indian’, His Excellency explained. ‘Always use those terms here. Come from the British days, of course.’

‘Oh. Oh, yes. Vegetarian. Er—brahmin. Yes, brahmin.’

‘Very good, sahib.’

As soon as the bearer was out of earshot His Excellency leant forward and once more murmured in Ghote’s ear.

‘The big Moslem over there.’

Ghote turned, trying not to look as if he were doing so.

‘Name of Habibullah, Mr Ali Akbar Habibullah. Been here in Ooty a year or more. Lives at the Club. Retired railways officer.’

Mr Habibullah looked like a balloon, as if at any moment, despite the roly-poly pudding he was already cheerfully tucking into – but why was he already eating the last course? – he might rise up and float gently away. Dressed in white, from the round lacy cap on his head to the elephant-sized muslin trousers on his legs, he certainly hardly had the air of the ex-official His Excellency had said he was. He looked indeed, with the stout ebony silver-headed walking stick leaning on the chair beside him, more like an Urdu poet, if of a more earthy nature than many – how he was enjoying that pudding – and it was hard to think of him too as any sort of killer.

Not that murderers could be detected by their physical appearance, Ghote thought. He had seen too many mild-looking men sent to Thana Gaol to be hanged on the second Thursday of the month to be in any doubt about that.

‘Well, there you have them’, His Excellency said. ‘Five suspects.’

Ghote sat in silence. The bearer returned with bowls of celery soup, a dish apparently both military and brahmin. The bowls, which were smoothly thick and white, had on them, Ghote saw, the Ooty Club crest. They seemed to gleam with assurance.

‘And you are certain, Your Excellency,’ he asked, ‘that one of these five persons only must be the murderer of the said Pichu, billiard marker in this Club?’

‘Ah, no, my dear fellow, you don’t catch me out that way. Five suspects, yes. But not just one of them may have committed the murder. Agatha Christie’s taught me better than that. Remember Evil Under the Sun? Two in combination, eh? Perhaps the two who seem least likely to have any connection between them? Mr Habibullah, retired officer of Indian Railways, who worked, if I remember rightly, in Cochin a good many miles from here, and, say, Mrs Trayling, who to my knowledge hasn’t left Ooty since she and Brigadier Trayling retired here when he left the Indian Army? Or … Or, no, there’s always The Orient Express.’

‘Mr Habibullah has some connection with such a train?’

‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Him and Mrs Trayling and the Maharajah and Maharani and little Godbole, all in it together, eh? It’s a possibility. It’s a possibility we shouldn’t altogether neglect. But, assuming in this case there’s just one solitary murderer, who are you going to point to now you’ve seen the field, my dear fellow?’

‘I would not be pointing anywhere whatsoever,’ Ghote managed to say at last.

‘Quite right, quite right, old chap. The Great Detective never gives his thoughts away, not even to his Watson.’

But Ghote felt determined not to be prevented once more from saying what he had begun.

‘Oh, that is not at all what I was meaning,’ he declared. ‘I was meaning that no detective would fasten upon any criminal without evidences.’

‘Quite right, my dear chap. Quite right. Observation as well as logical deduction, eh? Right then, as soon as we’ve finished going the rounds here, we’ll take a look-see at the billiard room.’

‘That would be a very, very good idea,’ Ghote said, thinking that actually setting eyes on the scene of the crime might even produce some evidence that was more than extraordinary ideas out of books.

‘Yes,’ His Excellency went on, ‘and there you’ll see what all the rest of us have missed, eh? The observance of trifles. What none of us thought was even significant.’

Ghote felt a new depression settle within him as if he, too, was eating the weighty plain boiled potatoes that accompanied His Excellency’s military lamb cutlets.

But more immediate trouble was about to break over him.

They had been eating in silence for a while when His Excellency suddenly looked up.

‘Habibullah,’ he exclaimed.

‘Mr Habibullah? You have thought of some circumstance that is telling against him?’

‘No, no. No such luck, my dear fellow. Or not unless you think it’s a sign of guilt sometimes to eat only the pudding.’

‘Pudding? It is roly-poly, yes? That is some sign of guilt?’

‘No, no. But it does mean that the chap is going to get up and wander away at any moment. Seen him do it times without number. Unpredictable, you know. Unpredictable. So it’s up Guards and at ’em, eh?’

‘You mean I should talk to him? Now?’

‘That’s the ticket, my dear chap. The Poirot technique. Look forward to seeing you at it.’

And His Excellency jumped up and plunged off in the direction of the table where, sure enough, the big Moslem was rising to his feet.

Ghote followed.

But what was he to say to this retired railways official? What exactly was it that was the profound belief of this Poirot fellow His Excellency kept bringing up to the fore? Talk for long enough on any subject and the suspect in question will let out some damning fact? Yes, but on what subject? And for how long?

He had hit on no answer before he found himself face to face with the enormous, white-clad Moslem. His Excellency performed brief introductions.

‘Mr Ghote,’ he concluded cryptically, ‘is here for a few days at my invitation.’

‘Ah,’ Mr Habibullah replied, a wide, dreamy smile appearing on his air-blown cheeks. ‘I trust you will find Ooty as altogether pleasant as I do myself, Mr Ghote. It is, you know, pure unreality.’

‘Unreality?’ Ghote echoed, wondering where on earth a conversation that had started this oddly would go.

‘Yes, yes. You must already have noticed as much, in however brief a time you have been with us. It is England here, my dear sir. England, is it not? And we are, or so we suppose, in India. There’s unreality for you. Delightful, disconcerting unreality.’

‘Well, yes,’ Ghote cautiously agreed. ‘I am noticing many things that seem most English. So, yes, there must be some unreality. Yes. I am quite able to see what you are meaning.’

The balloon-like Moslem’s eyes lit up.

‘You are? My dear sir, a fellow soul. This is a happy chance. A happy chance in a world that often seems to me altogether too much regulated, too much ordered.’

He beamed at Ghote.

And Ghote, whose belief on the whole was just the opposite, did not have the heart not to smile agreement.

Besides, he needed to keep the Poirot conversation going.

‘I am supposing,’ he ventured, ‘that it was your daily tasks that gave you this feeling? You were working, I understand, for the railways.’

‘Indeed it was, my dear sir. Indeed it was. You know, it was I, I myself and no other, who was responsible when I was in Delhi for framing the chapter on “Disallowances and Objections” in the handbook known as Indian Railway Administration and Finance?’

‘No,’ Ghote said, ‘I was not knowing. May I offer congratulations? It must have been a most comprehensive undertaking.’

‘No, sir, no. Congratulations are not proper. Commiseration would be much more gratefully received. Sir, such order, such regulation, such devising of rules: it warped my life. Absolutely. Indeed, it was only the thought that the majority of those rules were destined to be consistently ignored and regularly flouted that saved me at times from a suicide’s grave.’

‘Yes, I am seeing that,’ Ghote replied, unable to think of any way at all, subtle or not, of moving the conversation nearer to the murder in the Club’s billiard room.

He could, he thought, have mentioned how his own life was ruled for the most part by attempting to see that the Indian Penal Code with all its sections and sub-sections was strictly adhered to. He could have added that this often could be managed only by discreetly ignoring the equally strict provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code. But His Excellency, by the way he had carefully omitted to mention that the guest he had brought to Ooty was a detective, had put that out of court.

‘A friend, a sympathetic soul,’ the balloony Moslem intoned.

Well, Ghote thought, at least I have put myself on good terms with the fellow. With this suspect. But so far he has in no way betrayed himself as any sort of murderer. So what next? What more to say?

‘Any family?’ he shot out at last, aware that too long a pause had already occurred. ‘That is—That is, you are having your family members here with you in Ooty also?’

‘Oh, no, no, my dear sir. I had children. Yes. Three. Perhaps four. Let us say four sons. But they went their ways. To tell the truth, I found the duties of a father somewhat too much. After long days striving to regulate the comings and goings of the altogether unregulatable passengers of Indian Railways I was not able to face regulating the comings and goings of my sons. So they went. Yes, they went. I do not know where.’

Ghote felt more than a little puzzled. Could any father be so lacking in responsibility? Was Mr Habibullah really so? Or was this some blown-about fantastical joke? And again he wondered how, how, could a conversation which had taken such a turn be continued?

He swallowed.

‘And Habibullah Begum?’ he inquired. ‘She is here?’

‘No, no, my good friend. A wife who insisted endlessly in the house on a place for everything and everything in its place? No, no. Once I was freed of my chains in the railways I stood before her and pronounced Talaq, talaq, talaq.’

‘Divorce? Moslem divorce?’ Ghote stammered out, wondering more and more whether what he was hearing could be true.

‘My dear sir, the only possible course. Away with all cares. Away with all chains. And then, Ooty. Magical, unreal Ooty. Oh, you cannot tell how greatly I enjoy my life here.’

Enjoyments of Ooty, enjoyments of Ooty, Ghote thought. What to say about them? Golf. There was golf. And tennis? Walking also? And was there not a big, big Flower Show? And horse racing in the season? What was there to ask about the enjoyments of Ooty?

But he need not have racked his brains.

With a sudden doubly beaming smile the big Moslem had somehow stepped aside and was now propelling himself out of the room with his heavy, silver-topped stick.

Ghote gave an anxious glance at his Watson and here in Ooty, his boss. But he was spared criticism of his performance as a Poirot.

‘Always the same,’ His Excellency said with a shrug. ‘Start talking to the fellow about something really interesting, detective stories or something, and what happens? Bang in the middle he just drifts off. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.’

Extraordinary enough, Ghote thought. Perhaps altogether too extraordinary. So, was what the fellow had been saying – his mind began to race – was it all a show? Had it been done to convey a feeling to all and sundry of complete irresponsibility, just in order to conceal the committing of a well-planned deadly act?

Perhaps, after all, he himself was not such a bad Poirot. Only there were four more such conversations awaiting him.