‘And you did not once leave? Not for a short time even?’ ‘No, no. I would not. When my wife was at a death’s door perhaps.’
‘Yes. Yes, I see. Well, thank you. Yes.’
Ghote retreated.
But he still felt that he ought not to take this unexpected alibi totally on trust. So, without stopping to do anything else, he walked straight down to the Collector’s Office, all arcades, glassed-in balconies, upspringing arches and the rattle-rattle-bang of all the typewriters that kept the administration of the district wrapped up in bureaucracy. From one of the clerks there he learnt where it was that Dr Fatbhoy had his dispensary.
It was down in the Bazaar, as he had expected, and once more he descended from the openness, Englishness and peace of the old town into a familiar packed conglomeration, strident with the sound of voices raised in huckstering invitation, in sudden argument or even in mere talk. Vigorous hootings from every form of motor transport added to the clamour together with the incessant clanging of bicycle bells and the wail of half a dozen different sorts of music, from transistors, tinny tape-machines and not a few elderly record-players.
He saw, as he passed, Mr Biswas standing outside his Bengal Vegetarian Hotel, with the knife-grinder still busy with his screaming trade beside him, and was offered an obsequious smile and a folded-hands greeting. For a moment he wondered whether he should stop and inquire into the relationship the Bengali had had with Pichu, the blackmailer, as revealed by the greasy visiting card he had discovered.
But he felt he had more urgent business.
He soon found the dispensary, a rather more prosperous looking place than he had expected. A squatting, chattering circle of patients waited in its outer room.
He paused in the doorway, thinking what line he could take with the doctor. Back in Bombay as ‘a Government Officer authorized to question’, in the words of the Indian Penal Code, he would not have had any hesitation. But here? Here where he was what? The merest private detective, and without even a card to say that this was what he was. It was all very well in His Excellency’s detective stories for a Hercule Poirot simply to go up to a suspect or witness and ask whatever he wanted to know. But he here was, no more than one Mr Ghote, staying at the Ootacamund Club, and wanting to know from a particular medical practitioner whether it was true that he had attended a certain Mrs Iyer last Monday night and whether her husband had been present and had remained so all during the night. How could he demand answers to such questions?
Could he pass off as a journalist, he asked himself. But even then his questions were hardly those a journalist would be wanting answers to.
At last he decided simply to make his way in, ask to see Dr Fatbhoy and trust to luck, or perhaps to a certain air of authority.
Certainly, the air of authority, together perhaps with his expensive Ooty jersey, at once gained him admittance to Dr Fatbhoy ahead of the patiently waiting squatting crowd in the outer room.
Sitting behind an ancient, dark-wood table, he saw an elderly Parsi, grey hair sparse across a high-domed skull, eyes deep-set, luminously brown and hungry looking.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he began. ‘My name is Ghote, and I—’
‘Ah, the Great Detective. The Great Detective in person.’
‘But—But how—But how were you knowing who I am? Or, rather that . . .’
‘Oh, my dear Mr Ghote, it is plain you are hardly acquainted with Ooty as yet. Everything is known to everybody here, tucked away as we are up in the Hills.’
He smiled.
‘Of course, I exaggerate. Here in the lower town not everything is known of what goes on in the Club, for instance. The majority of people here, my daily patients, would scarcely follow the rules of snooker. Snooker, is it? But there are some links between us. Yes, some indeed. The Culture Circle, for example. I myself, as something of a music lover, have the honour to be a vice-chairman of the Culture Circle, and, of course, its monthly meetings are largely attended by what I might call the old hands of Ooty. Yes, the old hands of Ooty.’
He leant across his dark, scratched table with its two or three tattered medical books at one corner and a stethoscope that seemed yet older lying beside them and rubbed his hands sharply together.
Ghote wondered whether it was to halt the distinct trembling he had noticed in them. But he soon decided it was not. It was a sign of eagerness.
‘And, my dear Mr Ghote, this is a coincidence beyond expectation. Because, you see, you are just the person we want for our meeting tomorrow evening itself. Professor Godbole, whom you must know, has consented to give us a talk, and the subject he has chosen is none other than “Sherlock Holmes, Alive or Dead?” So, you see, to have a Sherlock Holmes actually present, palpably alive as I may say, would be nothing short of a triumph of the first magnitude for us.’
‘But—’
‘Now, Mr Ghote, do not deny me.’
And Ghote saw then that he could not refuse the request. He would have to allow himself to be Sherlock Holmes palpably alive. Because as a simple investigator he wanted from Dr Fatbhoy information that he was in no way bound to give.
‘Very well, Doctor Sahib,’ he said. ‘Yes, it would be my pleasure to attend your meeting. But, please, there is a small matter you could be helping me with.’
And he put then to the doctor the questions he had thought about so dolefully standing in the doorway of the dispensary. And received answers. Yes, Mrs Iyer had given birth, with some difficulty, a forceps delivery, to a daughter on the night of Monday - Tuesday last. And, yes, of course, the husband had been there. Throughout.
‘In fact, my dear Mr Ghote, he was a positive nuisance. In the end I had to send him off to boil water. An old dodge among us medical men in such circumstances. And he boiled and boiled water during most of the night.’ ‘Thank you, Doctor Sahib. And now, if you would kindly excuse me . . .’
He left as hastily as he could, before the doctor began wanting to know why a Great Detective had been asking questions about innocent, alibied, off-the-hook Mr Iyer.
So, he thought as he trudged despondently up to the old town again, it is back to five once more. Back to five suspects, and nothing decent or definite to choose between them. Unless you opted for Meenakshisundaram’s unknown dacoit.
He groaned aloud.
13
Outside the Nilgiri Library Ghote encountered among the earnest dog-walkers, overcoats over saris or Britishy tweeds in the cool, fresh air, His Excellency. He decided at once that the evidence that had finally been confirmed by Dr Fatbhoy was something that Sherlock Holmes would pass on to Dr Watson.
Or, more in the realms of the everyday, here was something of a gift for the influential, if rather ridiculous, personage who had brought him all the way from Bombay to Ooty.
But he found, when he laid out the facts of the matter, that Mr Iyer’s alibi was no proof of guiltlessness - in some eyes.
‘My dear chap, you know what a watertight alibi means?’
‘It is that the professor of such is not at all the guilty party?’ Ghote ventured without much hope.
‘No, no, my dear fellow. Remember the words of the Sage of Baker Street: “Only a man with a criminal enterprise in hand desires to establish an alibi.” ’
Ghote felt a rush of almost overwhelming fury. That a watertight alibi meant the person with it was guilty of the very crime he could not have committed: it was absurdly against reason.
The world of detective stories, he thought with a jet of bitterness, how damned idiotic it was. Where simple logic, which was what the real world creaked and stumbled along by, seemed at once to be turned right-about. Where - God, what nonsense - if a man had an alibi, as he himself had fully established that Mr Iyer did, then he was to be set down as the most likely suspect of them all. Bukbuk, utter bukbuk.
In the seething bubbling of his mind he asked himself how he could put this simple fact to the man who had had him transported into this upside-down world. How he could? Rather, whether h
e could?
He supposed sadly that all he could really do was to agree. Or at least let the ridiculous notion somehow slide over him.
But, damn it, how could the alibi be faulted? Dr Fatbhoy, who had no possible reason for backing a lie, had stated plainly as plainly that the husband of his forceps-delivery patient had been in his house in the Bazaar for the whole of the night in which the murder had taken place in the distant Club billiard room. The doctor had seen him, had seen too much of him. There could be no getting round such testimony. Could there?
Then, in the state of depression in which his burst of fury had left him, another gloomy thought surfaced. The Culture Circle. He had pledged himself to attend it next evening, to be paraded at it as a living Sherlock Holmes while Professor Godbole launched into doubtless more and more abstruse and fanciful speculations about this storybook figure.
Non-existent, he thought with a renewed spurt of bitterness, in real life certainly.
Wearily, rather than endure any further discussion of alibis and their alleged ineffectiveness, he offered the
Culture Circle and that promise of his as another gift to His Excellency. Who, of course, was delighted.
‘I generally put in an appearance there myself,’ he said. ‘Must support worthy causes and all that. But I hadn’t realized Fatbhoy, who’s the most terrible fellow by the way, had got hold of Godbole. And to talk about Sherlock Holmes, too. I most certainly will come with you, my dear fellow, and listen keenly to your own contributions to the subsequent discussion. Yes, indeed.’
Ghote was even more put out by this assumption that he would make contributions to a discussion which he had not in any case foreseen as taking place. So much so that he quite forgot to ask why Dr Fatbhoy was ‘a terrible fellow’, though when His Excellency had pronounced the condemnation he had meant to question it. The Parsi doctor had by no means seemed a terrible fellow to him.
The thought was pushed even further from his head by a sudden loud bird-like call from the steps of the Library.
‘Mr Mehta! Mr Mehta! Your Excellency! Your Excellency!’
It was the guardian lady of the entrance counter. She was waving a book, in a bright dust-wrapper, and seemed in a state of high excitement.
His Excellency turned abruptly and set off towards her. But she was much too delighted with her news to wait for him.
‘Mr Mehta, it has come,’ she called out. ‘The dak from UK. And in it is just what you were hoping for.’
The ex-ambassador broke into a trot, for all his years, and on the library steps positively seized the bright volume.
‘Into the Valley of Death by Evelyn Hervey,’ twittered the guardian lady. ‘I have never heard of Miss Hervey, but it certainly is a first-class corker.’
‘You—You haven’t read it?’ His Excellency asked in sudden suspicion.
‘Oh, no, no. I would never. We all know that you like to be the first, Mr Mehta. We all have respect for that.’
‘Hah. Well, yes. Yes, thank you, dear lady. Very decent of you.’
And, tucking the boldly coloured volume under his arm, His Excellency made his way back.
But he was not to add to his disquisition on alibis and how they were in themselves highly suspicious. As he reached Ghote, he happened to look along the road, and what he saw sent him into an evident state of panic.
He darted glances left and right as if seeking sanctuary. He took the book from under his arm and held it behind his back. Then, realizing that this manoeuvre had made him look particularly conspicuous, he endeavoured to tuck the volume closely to his side at thigh level. And nearly dropped it.
Ghote, wondering at the performance, looked along the road, calm in the sunshine, dotted with old Ooty hands and their dogs of various sorts and sizes, aged alsatians all tugging long past, terriers that had once been bouncy and yapping, a Scottie grey-faced as a whiskered elder. At first he could not make out at all what could have caused His Excellency to behave in such an odd manner.
Then, as much from the direction of those panic-stricken glances as anything, he hit on it. Mrs Trayling. Mrs Lucy Trayling, widow of the brigadier, the sugar bowl perhaps of His Excellency’s breakfast-table line-up.
She was coming towards them, hair escaping as always from a wide sun-hat, ancient empty shopping basket in one hand, huge flowered knitting-bag in the other.
Why should such an everyday sight put someone usually so sure of himself into such a state? Could it be that he had somehow fixed in his mind on this unlikely figure as definitely the murderer? Well, if unlikeliness was the chief reason for considering someone as a murderer, then perhaps it could.
But, no.
‘Ghote, Ghote,’ His Excellency began to whisper piercingly, sidling near with the volume from the library still held tight against his tweed-covered thigh.
‘Yes, sir? What is it, please?’
‘Take this book, man. Take it, but don’t let Lucy Trayling see you.’
It was not easy to do as His Excellency had asked. To begin with, he still continued to maintain his rigid grip. Then it was necessary to get between him and the waftily advancing Mrs Trayling, and there seemed to be no reason to stand closely face to face in the public road. And finally there was the question of what to do with the book when he had got it. He could, he supposed, push it inside his jersey, but that was so well-fitting that the square bulge would be particularly noticeable.
As he tugged away trying to slide the volume out of the vice of His Excellency’s hand and thigh, he muttered his doubts.
‘Sir, when I have got I have nowhere to hide.’
‘Just tuck it under your arm, man. She won’t suspect you.’
Trayling Memsahib not suspect him? But surely he was meant to be suspecting her?
Overwhelmed by confusion, he got the book free of its imprisoning grasp at last and, turning, attempted to hold it in a carefree manner under his arm.
‘Good morning, Lucy,’ His Excellency called out the moment he was free of the object that seemed to embarrass him so much.
He sounded to Ghote hopelessly false.
Trayling Memsahib, although by now she was not far from them, appeared not to have heard the greeting. Ghote felt a sense of absurd relief. Whatever it was that His Excellency had wanted to hide, aided by himself, he had apparently achieved it. More by luck than any adroitness in their manoeuvrings.
‘Lucy! Lucy! Good morning!’
The fool. What for did he want to go and do that? If he had had the sense to keep his mouth shut only . . .
And, of course, this time she did hear.
She stopped, looked this way and that, recognized His Excellency and began with evident reluctance politely to come over.
Ghote, unostentatiously as he could, contrived to step somewhat behind the tall, tweed-clad ex-ambassador and to slip the brightly jacketed book more deeply under his arm.
‘Hah. How are you this morning, my dear? Miss your presence at the Club. Ayah fit and well again, eh?’
But Mrs Trayling replied to none of his questions.
‘Sorry, fearfully sorry,’ she said. ‘Got to go and take the dog for his walk. Must rush. Must rush.’
And she swung away and strode off at such a cracking pace and with such marked determination that Ghote began to wonder if, after all, she could have indeed scrambled out of the window of the Club billiard room and made her way with the silver to where Major Bell’s decrepit Dasher had found it.
Then, perhaps with the image of the wheezing, ancient Dasher in his mind, something else struck him.
Mrs Trayling’s Spot. The animal had expired some time ago. His Excellency had mentioned it, and so had the homoeopathic dog doctor. So why had Trayling Memsahib said that she had got to take her dog for a walk? Why had she told a blatant lie?
He turned to his Watson.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘urgent business.’
And he left at a run till he had made sure Mrs Trayling was within sight again.
It
was only as he began to follow her at a calmer pace that he realized he still had His Excellency’s book under his arm.
As he walked past a succession of Ooty cottages with their trim hedges and neat if faded name-boards, Woodbriar, The Lupins, Glenview, Cedarhurst, he began to think about the ridiculous episode he had just been involved in. It was clear, when he considered, that the book His Excellency had been given with such a show of excitement by the lady from the Library must be the latest detective story from England and that, with the freaks of behaviour apt to occur in any small cut-off community, His Excellency must have a bee in his bonnet about reading the newest story before anybody else. Plainly, too - His Excellency had even spoken about this - Trayling Memsahib was a rival reader. Perhaps she had once guessed an answer before His Excellency. Yes, that would be it.
So one mystery was explained.
But another was not. Ahead of him Trayling Memsahib was marching along with unflagging determination. And no sign of any dog.
Where was she going then? Would what she was doing prove to be a clue to the mystery of Pichu’s death?
It did not seem very likely. But then unlikely things seemed to flourish in the unlikely air of Ooty. And, if His Excellency was right about the murder being some diabolically clever scheme such as you got only in detective stories, then the fact that Trayling Memsahib was a keen reader of such books might mean that she had taken the idea of covering up her crime from just such a novel.
Well, at least she was not so diabolically clever as to realize she was being followed. There she was striding ahead, tweed skirt, slightly baggy at the back, jerking rhythmically, knitting-bag swinging from one hand, shopping basket from the other.
Even Sherlock Holmes would not have to do whatever it was he did so as not to be seen following if he was tracking Trayling Memsahib.
They had got down to the neighbourhood of the Lake now. In the distance across its wind-ruffled waters the extraordinary countryside, high up, out of this world, lay twinkling in the bright sunshine. On the little rolling hills the terraces of cultivation looked neat and pretty as if drawn by some child-like god. Here and there a cottage or a larger house stood, free from clutter and clean-looking as if a minor god lived inside it.
The Body in the Billiard Room Page 14