The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘But, please, we are not at all in smoking room. And I am asking, why is the Maharani a person who would not have been welcomed?’

  Mrs Trayling gave him a look now that was quite clearly disapproving, and turning to the patiently waiting clerk at the counter resumed giving her order in a particularly loud and emphatic manner.

  After a moment Ghote took advantage of her firmly turned back to whisper urgently to His Excellency.

  ‘Sir, what is it that would stop the Maharani staying in the Club in old days? Sir, it is important to consider, no?’ His Excellency, who had become deeply interested in the display of brightly coloured picnic chairs, turned to him reluctantly.

  ‘Dare say it is important in a way, old fellow,’ he said. ‘But, the truth is, I don’t really know myself. Dare say old Lucy’s picked up some gossip somewhere.’

  Ghote came to a decision.

  Abandoning His Excellency, he stepped outside onto the veranda and placed himself squarely in the path Mrs Trayling would have to take when she came out.

  As soon as she appeared he challenged her.

  ‘Mrs Trayling. Please, I am most interested in the Maharani of Pratapgadh. Would you kindly tell what it is you are knowing to her detriment?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Lucy Trayling.

  And she swept past and marched down to the sunlit, bracingly chilly street below. To be followed a moment later by one of the counter clerks waving above his head the knitting-bag she had left in the shop. From it there fell with a tinkling jangle like a long glissando from some film hit-song a stout knitting needle. It rolled all the way down into the road where a band of urchins fell on it with cries of delight scenting baksheesh.

  Ghote stood on the veranda next to the tall tin-backed thermometer with its alarming figures rising up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit and its bold lettering pointing to Blood Heat and Fever Heat. He felt such rage that he might almost have reached this last state himself. Rage against Mrs Trayling for her hinting and withdrawing, but more rage against himself for the way he had mismanaged the talk that should have produced revelations.

  And then he felt a tugging at the sleeve of his new jersey.

  He swung round in quick irritation. Beside him, down on the wooden floor of the veranda, he saw the sly-faced man he had half-noticed squatting there before, the man with the little aluminium case. He saw now that painted in shaky red letters on its side were the words A.T. Ramamirtham Diseases of Dogs (All Kinds) Treated By Best Homeopathic Methods.

  The fellow was still plucking at his jersey.

  ‘What is it you are wanting?’ he said to him furiously. ‘Are you thinking I am having a diseased dog?’

  ‘No, no, sahib. It is to tell what you are wishing to know that I am wanting.’

  ‘Are you a fortune-teller also? Such I am not needing. My fortune is too bad altogether.’

  ‘Sahib, I bring you good luck only. It is about one diseased dog I am altogether curing by my methods that I would tell.’

  ‘I am not interested in any dogs, cured or not cured, by your methods or any others.’

  He pulled his arm from the fellow’s grip and made for the steps down to the street.

  ‘Sahib, not if it is the dog of the Maharani of Pratapgadh?’

  Ghote turned in an instant. He looked quickly from side to side.

  ‘If you have anything to tell,’ he said, ‘follow me till I find somewhere we would not be seen together.’

  7

  Glancing back to make sure the dubious dog doctor was following, Ghote made his way quickly down towards the Bazaar. He hoped that among the jumble of humanity there, which till now he had been aware of as little more than the sound of innumerable jangling bicycle bells, furiously tooting truck horns and the wail of music from countless conflicting sources, he could find a place of concealment. It would never do, he thought, for anyone from up at the Club to see the pair of them, Great Detective and wretched dog doctor, apparently, as the saying was, going together like dal and chapattis. A chance observer of that sort might gossip, and give his suspect an opportunity to cover any tracks.

  He had hardly got down into the noisy clutter of the lower town when he saw what he wanted. Behind a huge hoarding painted with a film advertisement — over which someone had already plastered a bright yellow handbill -there was a conveniently hidden patch of ground.

  He gave one more quick look behind, saw the man with the little aluminium case was within sight and stepped sharply into hiding.

  In a minute his possible informant joined him.

  ‘Well,’ he asked him at once, ‘what is it you have got to tell?’

  ‘Sahib, I am a poor man. At this moment itself I should be giving one treatment to the dog of a guest of a most posh hotel.’

  Ghote sighed, poked two fingers into the top pocket of his shirt and drew out a note, just far enough to see that it was an orange twenty-rupee one. He left it peeping out of the top of his new jersey.

  The dog doctor promptly put on a face of woebegone disappointment.

  ‘Not one paisa more,’ Ghote said, already regretting he had not fished out something smaller.

  The dog doctor gave a resigned shrug.

  ‘Sahib,’ he said, ‘I was hearing what you were asking Trayling Memsahib. Trayling Memsahib went always to that Western-science vet they are having, so that her dog by the name of Spot was at once dying—’

  ‘Dying of old age,’ Ghote interrupted brutally. ‘Now, what have you got to tell that Trayling Memsahib would not?’

  ‘Sahib, it is this. You must go to Bengal Vegetarian Hotel. There you would see a certain person.’

  ‘What person? That is not enough.’

  Ghote made a pretence of stuffing the orange note back into his pocket.

  ‘Sahib, he is called Mr Amul Dutt. He is coming all the way to Ooty, sahib, from Calcutta though he is student only and not at all rich.’

  The dog doctor came to a halt, plainly hoping to have given enough to cause the twenty-rupee note to appear again.

  ‘Go on,’ said Ghote sharply.

  ‘Sahib, you must be asking why he stays in such a third-class place. And also whose was one pekinese dog I was seeing him making unholy fuss over.’

  Ghote pulled the note right out. In a flash the dog doctor’s sly hand folded over it.

  Ghote let the fellow go. He felt he had learnt enough. He would go at once to the Bengal Vegetarian Hotel, wherever it was, and see how true what he had been told might be. After that he could perhaps face seeing His Excellency once more.

  Thank goodness, he thought, I have succeeded to leave him among those Scottish shortbreads and beach balls.

  He stepped out from the shadow of the big hoarding -it was advertising, he saw now, a police story featuring a come-and-gone star called Sarla Kumar, a notorious flop picture in Bombay a year or more ago - and made his way further downhill. The Bengal Vegetarian Hotel sounded as if it was hardly likely to be up in old Ooty.

  Sure enough, as soon as he began to make inquiries he was directed, not without one or two contrary pieces of advice, to a lane at the far end of the Bazaar.

  He made his way along towards it, noting with momentary exasperation that the Tibetan refugees squatting there beside arrays of woollen garments were calling out prices about half the amount he had paid for his almost identical jersey.

  Then as he made his way through the crowds clustered round stalls piled high with vegetables and fruit — he recognized the fine quality, Ooty quality, the fruits of paradise- he came to an abrupt halt.

  At a banana stall, bargaining over a small, still greenish hand of fruit, there was an elderly, red-faced European wearing a faded sola topee against the bright sun and a tweed suit not unlike the one His Excellency had sported that morning, though plainly a great deal more threadbare. Slumped in a patient, panting heap at his feet was the most ancient of woolly-looking dogs.

  Major Bell. He did not quite know why he was so certain that this must be the Oot
acamund Club secretary. But he was certain. The man fitted the description His Excellency had given of him when he had first arrived, right down to the ‘desperate old dog’ that ought to have had its life mercifully ended.

  Dasher, that was its name. A first-class joke now, however right once.

  Then a cold sweat broke out over him. What if Dasher’s master had seen him talking with that dog doctor? What if he had not had the good sense to hide behind that hoarding? A person like this Major Bell - if this was Major Bell - would be just the sort to go gossiping at the Club. Gossiping perhaps to the Maharani, whose pekinese had been seen in a hotel in this insalubrious quarter of the town.

  What an escape.

  He slipped behind a stall piled high with little pinkish potatoes, crept with head bent past another heaped with big orangey tomatoes and a third on which the stall-keeper, in a heroic attempt to impose a pattern upon disorder, had tirelessly arranged long curly pale green gourds so that their rounded ends placed together made a whole wall some three feet high.

  Then he reckoned he was beyond the danger point.

  He straightened up and made his way swiftly to where the consensus of opinion had stated the Bengal Vegetarian Hotel was to be found.

  The consensus was right, though he missed the place at first, so unprepossessing was its appearance. It seemed to have been built not many years before, in the flat-roofed, square block style so frowned upon by His Excellency and Mrs Trayling. But, for all that it could not be very old, it was already shabby. Its white front was now stained with long greenish streaks and its cement outer coating had flaked away here and there in dark irregular patches. The V of ‘Vegetarian’ was missing from its once bold and colourful signboard and the rains and mists of Ooty had reduced the rest of it to something little more than a mere random pattern.

  On the broken pavement outside a circle of young men squatted, happily playing cards. Beside them a knife-grinder had set up his apparatus constructed chiefly out of an old bicycle and was making the air around shriek each time he touched a blade against his whirring stone.

  Ghote stepped into the building’s constricted lobby. Behind a counter on which the red plastic covering had become wavy as an ominously swelling sea, a little fat man wearing a dingy white kurta under a much-mended fairisle pullover sat slumped in a doze. His almost completely round face was the sepia colour typical of Bengal.

  Ghote thought for a moment, then coughed loudly and went up to him.

  ‘Good morning, do you have any accommodations?’ he asked in English.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ the fellow said, jolting awake and brightening rapidly by the moment. ‘Most certainly, yes. Very, very good rooms, most spacious and modern. Highly respectable also. No hanky-pankies allowed. And in dining room very best Bengali cooking. Oh, you would enjoy, sir. Also my wife and three daughters are all the time singing most sweet Bengali songs. You are following Bengali?’ ‘Unfortunately not,’ Ghote said. ‘But, tell me, do you have many Bengali persons residing at the present time?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir, yes, yes. My rooms are full-full with happy guests from my distant native-place.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ghote said, seizing on this way out of the consequence of his first pretended inquiry, ‘then you are not having any rooms available after all?’

  ‘My dear sir, no, no, no. Exactly the opposite. You would have best room in all hotel, with bathroom attached. Almost with bathroom attached. We have just only one person staying at this exact moment, and he is not at all a first-class guest. He is having our cheapest room only.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And may I ask his name? I have a young Bengali friend who spoke of coming to Ooty, and I am sure that if he is here he would stay at this hotel.’

  The fat little proprietor rubbed his hands together. ‘Then you will stay also?’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would like your friend, Mr Amul Dutt, to be having a better room next to your own, sharing same bathroom, and not much of extra cost?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ Ghote answered.

  Then, leaning forward across the wavy red counter, he gave the proprietor of the no hanky-panky hotel a broad wink.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘is my friend seeing that lady he was hoping would come, very modern, very beautiful, somewhat more old?’

  The proprietor returned his wink.

  ‘Oh, sir, that is occurring. From time to time, yes, that is occurring. A most posh lady with one very fine pekinese dog. You are having similar arrangement also?’

  For a moment Ghote wondered whether, in the interests of his investigation, he had got himself in deeper than he had counted on. Then inspiration came.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘my friend Mr Dass is most happy here.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, yes. Mr Dutt is very, very happy to be in my beautiful, first-class, altogether vegetarian and pure hotel. You would be also. Please, what is your good name?’ He began hauling a battered register from beneath the time-warped counter.

  But Ghote was ready for him.

  ‘Dutt?’ he said. ‘Dutt? Did you say Mr Dutt?’

  ‘Yes, your good friend, Mr Amul Dutt.’

  ‘But the name of my friend is Mr Amar Dass. You were altogether hearing wrong. I must look for him elsewhere. Yes, yes, elsewhere definitely.’

  And, rather more hurriedly than was perhaps dignified, he made his way out into the noisy street.

  The scream of the knife-grinder’s wheel sounded loud in his ears, but he endured it happily. He had, at last, discovered a fact that might well prove a step towards solving the mystery of the death of the old billiards marker.

  If Pichu truly had had a taste for blackmail, and from the evidence of Mr Iyer it seemed that His Excellency’s bald assertion earlier had some substance to it, then what was more likely than that Pichu had somehow found out about the Maharani of Pratapgadh’s secret love affair with a poor Bengali student in a third-class hotel and had threatened to tell the wealthy Maharajah? And that this had brought about his sudden demise on the billiard table?

  Yes, now it would be possible to go to His Excellency with something worth telling. Perhaps now he could even bear to be hailed as a Great Detective, however much what he had learnt had been wormed out of a witness by the somewhat dubious methods ordinary detectives employed on occasion.

  He set off with a light step to go back up to the Ooty of old.

  The former ambassador, he remembered, had been carrying a book when he had met him outside Spencer’s. No doubt he had been on his way to the Nilgiri Library. He would see if he could find him there.

  He located the Library without difficulty, just past the shop of a Chinese shoemaker, a tall old building in brick with prominent white stone surrounds to its narrow windows that made him think of Bombay’s older Christian churches. Inside, he was greeted by a fierce-looking lady wearing a coat draped over her sari against the sharp Ooty air, seated at a gleamingly polished wooden counter.

  How different, he thought, from my last encounter at a reception desk. He felt a quiet burgeoning of contentment.

  ‘Good morning, you are wanting for to join up to the Library? Fee is now Rupees 10, and you may borrow out books straightaway.’

  He swallowed.

  ‘I should very much like to be becoming a member,’ he said. ‘But I hope I will be in Ooty for a short time only. That is — That is, I am afraid that my stay here would not be for more than two-three days.’

  ‘Then what is it you are wanting?’

  ‘I - I am believing that His Excellency Mr Surinder Mehta is in this building, and I am wishing to communicate with him most urgently.’

  He received at this a long severe look through the pince-nez spectacles the Library’s guardian was wearing. But he seemed to pass the test.

  ‘Yes, Mr Mehta is inside. You may go in. But kindly observe strict silence at all times.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, very good. Thank you,’ he whispered.

  He crept in, pushed open with great caution a pair of double doors and found himself in a lofty chamber lit by f
ive tall arched windows on each side and an even taller one at the far end. A picture of the Queen of England presided over the whole, only rivalled - he saw as he tiptoed further in — by the head of a large bear, rather ant-eaten, suspended over the entrance doors. Ancient glass-fronted cases of books ran along the walls and on round tables with green-shaded lamps there were laid, with scrupulous neatness, a few newspapers and magazines. A number of sadly sprawling armchairs added to the atmosphere of dilapidated comfort.

  There were three people present. Two of them, men in tweedy suits, were talking to each other, in rather loud voices. The third, a girl in a deep-green muslin sari wearing a pair of huge-lensed spectacles, was standing beside one of the tables reading what looked like a newspaper from the UK.

  But nowhere could he see His Excellency.

  Then he spotted a small door at the far end. Tiptoeing still, though the sound of the two talkers’ voices almost drowned the creak of his shoes, he made his way down the length of the room.

  Yes, it was an English paper the girl with the big spectacles was reading. The Sunday Times. For a date at the end of November of the previous year, two full months ago. Beyond the small door he found a flight of steep stairs

  and mounting them step by careful step he came into the Library’s upper storey. Here there were book stacks rising up to the ceiling containing, he saw, volumes on every subject under the sun. He even noticed a copy of the much-trusted Criminal Investigation by Dr Hans Gross, as adapted by John Adam MA, Crown and Public Prosecutor, Madras, and J. Collier Adam, Public Prosecutor, Madras, that he himself possessed. It stood between Alfred Swaine Taylor On Poisons, 1848, and a collection of famous British trials.

  Then, rounding a stack towards the far end of the room, he saw His Excellency. He was sitting perched on a pair of tall library steps, plunged deep in a book.

  Ghote went up to him.

  ‘Mr Mehta. Sir. Your Excellency. I have made a discovery.’

  His Excellency looked up from his book - it was another copy of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, the one he had said was so much like this case itself - and at once put a finger to his lips.