The Body in the Billiard Room

by H. R. F. Keating

  Tall spiky eucalyptus trees, magnificent and alien, were scattered about. Where the land was not under cultivation dark green patches of gorse could be seen, looking like the scratchy plastic bushes round some model of a building before it had been put up and battered and defaced by grubby humanity.

  And now it became evident that Trayling Memsahib was heading for the far side of the Lake, making for an unfrequented part of the stretch of artificial water first created - so His Excellency had said - by the very founder of Ooty, one Mr John Sullivan, Collector of Coimbatore, who had, if His Excellency was to be believed, both fallen in love with this airy paradise and simultaneously made a good thing out of it financially.

  Ghote’s mind turned for a moment to the thought of certain politicians, high-sounding in their pronouncements and ever more wealthy from their dealings. Perhaps the changing world did not change all that much.

  Abruptly, some little distance ahead, Trayling Memsahib flopped to the ground and sat, an angular, hunched figure, on the fresh springy grass by the lakeside contemplating the glinting waters in front of her.

  Ghote stopped in his turn and looked round.

  There was a large gorse bush, spotted with dark yellow flowers, placed so conveniently for observation that it was almost too good to be true. Crouching a little, he made his way quietly and cautiously over to it and settled down flat on his stomach behind the cover it provided. If things always went so well for Sherlock Holmes, no wonder no one he followed ever saw him.

  Down by the water Trayling Memsahib sat still as a carving, in marked contrast to the energy she had shown in haring away from His Excellency outside the Library and in marching to this spot.

  And, of course, Ghote realized, this must surely be the very place where one dark night Brigadier Roly Trayling, wandering about in a state of alcoholic maziness, must have fallen into the Lake and drowned.

  Perhaps he was witnessing an act of remembrance which Trayling Memsahib performed at regular intervals. Once a week? Once a month? On the anniversary of the sad day? Yet somehow he did not think so. There had been too much hysteria in the way she had hurried down to the Lake. But at least he knew now why in all probability she had paid so little heed to His Excellency when he called out to her. Plainly she had been in the grip of some strong compulsion.

  Was she perhaps visiting the spot to ‘tell’ her dead husband that at last he had been avenged, that the man who had let him drown had met his own end, a body in the billiard room?

  But how was he himself to find out if this was in fact so?

  Presumably even if he went up to the brigadier’s widow in her moment of final triumph - if this was her moment of triumph, if she had indeed killed Pichu, if the murder was not, after all, a simple act of dacoity - she would hardly pour out a confession to him here and now. No, if she had murdered Pichu she had planned the crime with care, had done everything His Excellency believed had been done in order to cover it up. She was not going to spoil it all now with any easy confession.

  But, damn it, could she not do something? For how long was she going to go on sitting and sitting?

  The gorse bush cut off the sun from a part of where he was lying and his head and shoulders were beginning to feel distinctly cold even though his legs were prickling with sweat.

  His eye fell on the book His Excellency had transferred to him in that absurd manner, lying on the grass beside him. Well, if he had not got Mrs McGinty’s Dead to go through, perhaps he could look at Into the Valley of Death instead. It, too, was a detective story after all. The lady at the Library had said it was a first-class corker. Perhaps from it he would get a clearer idea of the way such books worked. Of the way, possibly, Lucy Trayling’s mind had worked.

  And - a gleam of maliciousness lit up inside him - if he could find out who had done the murder in the book perhaps a chance would come of letting His Excellency know that he himself had arrived at the answer before him.

  He took another look at Trayling Memsahib. Not a sign of movement.

  He opened the book.

  Time passed. The sun began to drop towards the horizon. It grew decidedly chillier. Every now and again he glanced up from the pages to make sure Sherlock Holmes’s quarry was still there, and then he read on, fired soon by the simple desire to know who had committed this murder supposed to have taken place in some woods in the English countryside about one hundred years ago.

  At last, having got the main facts clear in his head, he did something he vaguely felt to be wrong, though he could not exactly think why. He turned to the end and gulpingly read the final chapter.

  Ah, so that was who it was. Very clever, if rather farfetched. Still, not a bad reason for killing somebody. If you had been guilty of an act of cowardice during the Crimean War, not seemingly at the Charge of the Light Brigade displayed with all its mess-obliterated glory on the walls of the billiard room at the Ootacamund Club, but at some other battle in that war, and if, instead of being disgraced, you had by chance been awarded the Victoria Cross and somebody years later had learnt your secret . . .

  Yes, true enough, blackmail could be a good reason for—

  ‘Mr Ghote! What are you doing skulking here?’

  He looked up, startled into heart-thudding dismay. Trayling Memsahib was standing on the other side of the gorse bush looking down at him in fury and contempt.

  14

  Ghote, as his heart stopped thumping, felt a deep blush rising up all over his face. Sherlock Holmes had been caught out. His following of Mrs Trayling had been in the end appallingly incompetent. He had failed to obey the first rule of good detective work: to concentrate undeviatingly on the task in hand. Terrible words from the magisterial pen of Dr Hans Gross’s Criminal Investigation echoed in his head: ‘The Investigator must have a high grade of real self-denying power.’

  And how had he denied himself? He had abandoned observation of a suspect in favour of reading a trashy detective story only.

  He looked up at the stern, outraged face of Mrs Lucy Trayling under her wide hat with its surrounding wisps of iron-grey hair.

  And he realized that, despite having been caught at such a disadvantage, he must assume command of the situation.

  He rose to his feet in one single movement, ignoring a jab of pain that shot up his left thigh.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘what I was doing in this place was to keep strict observation upon yourself. You must be aware, isn’t it, that the murder in the billiard room at Ooty Club is not certain to be the work of some dacoit. It may well have been instead a most careful crime committed by a person sleeping within the said Club premises on the night in question. And, madam, you are such a person.’ He certainly seemed to have turned the tables. Mrs Trayling looked decidedly discomposed.

  ‘Madam,’ he went poundingly on, ‘kindly do not think that I am not very well knowing what it is that you are doing at this unfrequented spot.’

  Mrs Trayling strove for words.

  ‘Yes, madam, this must be the spot where your late husband, Brigadier R. Trayling, was falling into the Lake and drowning. You had come here for some purpose. But was it just only to mourn? That I am very much doubting.’

  ‘Mr Ghote—’

  ‘No, madam, was it not to tell the spirit of your late husband that the man who had allowed him to drown was now dead also? And at your hands?’

  ‘No. No. Oh, no.’

  Mrs Trayling seemed to lose in a moment all the iron backbone she had shown as she had loomed accusingly over the gorse bush.

  ‘No, Mr Ghote,’ she said. ‘No, it isn’t true. Oh, oh, I’m in such a muddle. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to turn.’

  ‘But in this muddle you were killing the man Pichu?’ Ghote said, not daring to unbend by the smallest amount.

  ‘No, no. Oh, you see, I didn’t come here to where Roly drowned - yes, you’re right about that, this is the place -I didn’t come here to tell him anything like that. Not at all. Not at all.’

 
‘Then what for were you coming?’

  Again Ghote forced himself to be unyielding as the Indian Penal Code itself.

  ‘It was to ask him—’ Lucy Trayling began. ‘Oh, Mr Ghote, I know you’ll think me silly, but it was to ask Roly’s advice that I came out here. Truly.’

  ‘You were asking the late Brigadier Trayling’s advice?’

  Ghote said, not feeling that this was altogether silly. ‘But what for were you wanting advice?’

  ‘About—About what I should do. I mean, while my old Ayah was still with me I knew I had to stay on here in Ooty and give her somewhere to live. All her family’s long since dead. Of course, she isn’t really much help in the house nowadays, but I don’t mind that. Almost everybody in Ooty - I mean everybody like us - has to do things we would never have dreamt of doing in the old days. No, I didn’t mind that, and I knew I must stay till poor old Ayah popped off. But she’s hardly going to last another month or two, I can see that perfectly well. And when she’s gone what ought I to do?’

  ‘But His Excellency Mr Mehta was telling that you would go to Home.’

  ‘Well, yes. I’ve said that to people. But should I go? I mean, what’s it like at Home now? One hears such dreadful things. Lawlessness, and something they call muggings. Perhaps when I get there I shall find it’s all too awful.’ ‘Yes, I can see that to go to UK if it is no longer an altogether law-abiding place would be a very, very bad risk.’

  ‘Yes. But to stay on in Ooty? There’s hardly anybody here I know nowadays. I mean, Surinder Mehta’s from the old days but he’s really awfully frail now. And dear old Ringer Bell’s worse. Don’t think I mind about people not being British. I got over all that long ago. But it’s simply that there’s nobody I really know. Scarcely anybody.’ ‘And you were coming here to seek the late Brigadier’s advice upon this? To go Home or to stay on?’

  ‘Yes. You see, Roly always knew the answer. It came from being an Army man. You had the regulations to go by. Parade at such-and-such an hour. Just one way to drill. Just one way to give commands. It was all fixed, definite, decided. And it made Roly decisive, too. I mean, I think that’s why when we retired he—Well, I think . . .’

  ‘It is why the late Brigadier was drinking very much of Indian whisky?’ Ghote asked softly.

  ‘Oh. You know? Well, yes, I suppose it’s common gossip, and Ooty is a fearful place for gossip. Well, yes, that was why poor Roly did feel the need. He didn’t have rules to go by any more. I mean, he tried gardening, but the damned hollyhocks would never grow in the lines he wanted. And it was the same with everything else really.’

  ‘I see. And, please, when you were getting up and coming upon myself behind this bush, had you obtained any answer from the late Brigadier?’

  Lucy Trayling sighed.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t really have expected to, should I?’

  ‘But, no. Some thought may have entered your head only.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it didn’t.’

  ‘So what is it you are going to do when Ayah is popping of!?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Ghote. I just don’t know.’

  Ghote looked at her.

  Her hair, in the course of this intimate discussion, seemed to have become even more unruly and the contents of her knitting-bag, tilted forward in her agitation, had begun to spill out, a ball of fluffy pink angora wool, another of bright green, clashing horribly.

  ‘Mrs Trayling,’ Ghote said at last, feeling his way. ‘Ooty is a very fine place. The air is so cool, yet the sun is shining with great brightness. There are many nice houses also, and other amenities. Do you not think this would be the place to stay?’

  The brigadier’s widow gave a huge sniff and wiped her hand carelessly across a lined, tanned cheek where a bright tear had glinted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I think perhaps you’re right.’

  She made an effort to scrabble back into her knitting-bag the tumbling balls of wool.

  ‘Well' she added, ‘I suppose Roly has spoken to me. In a way.’

  She seized a slipping metal needle and drove it fiercely down in among the other contents of the bag.

  ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said, ‘I think I ought to be getting back. I think I may have left a kettle boiling and Ayah isn’t very good at noticing such things any more.’

  And away she went.

  Ghote did not believe in the kettle. But he waited where he was beside the gorse bush until Lucy Trayling was well out of sight.

  And he made up his mind that he would say nothing of this strange encounter to his burdensome Watson.

  Not because he did not believe what Mrs Trayling had told him about her reason for coming to the lake, a great deal more than he believed in the ever-boiling kettle. But he realized that she had produced no hard facts to account for her not being responsible for the body in the billiard room. Indeed, the case against her was in some ways stronger. She was, after all, a great reader of detective stories, and the murder did appear to be a detective-story murder. And now there was her proven muddle-headedness. She could well be the sort of person, from what he had just seen of her, who would commit a murder for a jumble of reasons that would seem altogether insufficient to someone more rationally inclined.

  Yes, no doubt His Excellency would insist, with some reason, on retaining Mrs Trayling as one of the suspects. So there were still five. Six, if you counted alibied Mr Iyer.

  He had half hoped that, back at the Club, he would manage to avoid His Excellency somehow. But he was not so lucky.

  As he sat under one of the aged stags’ heads, consuming a large plate of cucumber sandwiches and a pot of tea by way of making up for the midday meal he had missed while lying watching Lucy Trayling, His Excellency descended.

  ‘Hah. There you are. Had good hunting?’

  Ghote got up from the deep sofa.

  ‘Please, what hunting is this?’

  ‘Lucy Trayling,’ said His Excellency, with more acuteness than a guru’s disciple ought to show. ‘Don’t think I didn’t cotton on when you left at such a gallop after old Lucy had told that fearful lie about her dog.’

  ‘Well, yes, I did wish to know where Trayling Memsahib was proceeding to in so much of hurry.’

  ‘Good man. And where was she off to?’

  ‘Oh, she was—That is—That is, I am sorry to state that I was not able in the end to follow her to wherever it was.’

  ‘Aha, not quite up to the great Sherlock, eh?’

  His Excellency dug him in the ribs. His thin old elbow felt extremely sharp.

  All the same, Ghote reflected, it had actually been by failing to keep watch on Trayling Memsahib with the miraculous invisibility of a Sherlock Holmes that in the end he had found out all he had about her.

  His silence, however, brought him further tribulation. It let His Excellency launch into a long comparison between Holmes and Poirot as sleuths, with particular reference to physical clues. Bicycle tyres came into it and little grey cells and why a dog had not barked in the night-time and some list of Poirot’s that had included the smell of oil paint, a picture postcard, an art critic and some wax flowers, all of which put together had proved that a murder could have been committed only in one particular way.

  Ghote listened to the confused recital with what patience he could muster. But at last he jumped up from the sofa down on to which his persistent Watson had dragged him.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, snatching at the first excuse that offered, ‘very regret but I must be proceeding to Sunnyside Cottage once more.’

  ‘Hah. Gathering evidence, eh? Keeping Pratapgadh and that secret amour of his well to the fore? Good man.’

  He shook his head appreciatively.

  ‘Yes, chaps of your sort never work on mere theories.

  Just as I was saying. Hard evidence is what they want -the picture postcard, the wax flowers. Off you go then, Poirot. And be careful not to get those immaculate shoes of yours dirty. Hah.’

  Ghote did not wai
t to find out what the last remark meant, but made his escape as fast as he could. Perhaps, he thought, when he came to read Mrs McGinty’s Dead all would be made clear. If, after the trouble Into the Valley of Death had caused him, he had the heart to tackle another detective story.

  Hurrying away from the Club as dusk began to come on, he thought that perhaps after all going out to Sunnyside Cottage again in fact would be no bad thing. If the Maharajah of Pratapgadh was the lover of Sarla Kumar, he might well have been so determined not to let his wife know this that he had simply got rid of blackmailing Pichu with the contempt of a Rajput of old for the merest menial. So it would be really useful to establish firmly that the amorous relationship did exist. And, out at the cottage this time, he would take very good care not to let his watch slacken by one jot. It would be Dr Hans Gross every second of the time, not that easily made invisible Sherlock Holmes.

  So best to go out there on foot and not risk the sound of a taxi engine alerting that dreadful auntie.

  He looked up at the sky, already fast losing its daylight brightness. He would have to hurry if he was going to get into a good hiding-place before there was any chance of the Maharajah leaping up from his dinner at the Club and into that jeep of his.

  But, just as he reached the foot of the avenue leading down from the Club and was peering about to see if he could make out the pillar-still form of the yogi there, something else drew his attention.

  It was the old watchman he had seen when first coming with His Excellency from the bus that had brought him to Ooty. The fellow was advancing waveringly to take up his duties for the night, long lathi in military fashion over his shoulder.

  And it occurred to Ghote at once that there were questions he ought to ask him. Questions he ought to have looked for the fellow to ask as soon as he had learnt the basic facts of the situation. But, with the watchman appearing only during the hours of darkness, he had not remembered. It was the penalty of being a mere private detective.