They set out to go back to the Club. In silence.
And Ghote let the thoughts run through his mind.
Did what had happened prove that Meenakshisundaram’s account of the murder was correct? Yes and no. Yes, in that Meenakshisundaram had got his hands on a known Bad Character who had been seen behaving in a suspicious manner near the place where the missing Club trophies had been found. No, in that the confession beaten out of the fellow had sounded plainly false in one vital particular at least. No, also, in that the activity in the churchyard Mr Habibullah had described might have been simply innocent. And yet the confession could still be true, bar that one detail extracted in the face of threats.
Yet if the answer was indeed no, then was His Excellency’s version of events the true one? And the murderer then one of those five sleeping in the Club? With, just possibly, added to them Mr Iyer?
But there was yet another possibility . . .
As they walked along, with the rising sun beginning to take the frost off the patches of grass at the edges of the lane, Ghote took a sidelong glance at his companion.
Was he really the old retired railways officer he appeared to be? A wind-blown, rootless man who, it was quite possible to believe, would get out of bed at the crack of dawn and promptly start to birdwatch? Or was he, as from his physical description he well might be, an absconding master criminal? A person well capable of spotting an innocent fellow somewhere at the back of the Club grounds and seizing the opportunity of laying the crime of murder on to another’s shoulders, guessing too perhaps at Meenak-shisundaram’s rough and ready way of investigation?
The big Moslem ambled along beside him, smiling gently to himself. An inscrutable figure.
They reached the entrance to the Club grounds and began to make their way up the tree-shaded slope to the building itself. The notion of breakfast, an Ooty breakfast of steaming porridge, of toast and Dundee marmalade, making up for the bed-tea missed by his very early rising, entered Ghote’s mind.
Then, suddenly, a figure came flapping out of the Club portico towards them, waving and gesticulating like some wild, feather-fluffed bird. His Excellency.
His state of high excitement almost palpable.
Ghote’s spirits sank. He guessed that his breakfast might not be as near as he had anticipated.
‘Ghote! Ghote! My dear fellow!’
The elderly ex-ambassador came half-running up to them.
‘Yes, sir? Yes? What is it, please?’
His Excellency came to a halt, stood for a moment getting his breath.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, just the man. Just the man. Glad I saw you. You see, it’s the second murder.’
17
A second murder? Who could it have been who had been made away with? And why? Does this mean finally, Ghote thought, that His Excellency is right about the whole business? Or can it be that somehow Balakumar, Meenakshisundaram’s detenu, actually got into the Club before he was seen by Mr Habibullah and for the second time killed- who? Who?
Then a worse thought, a grimly terrible thought, came into his head.
Gauri. Had someone, one of His Excellency’s list or Balakumar, seen him himself out in the open talking with Gauri and, fearing her as a witness, done her to death? Was he responsible for that?
‘Please,’ he stammered out. ‘Please, who? Who is this victim?’
‘Ah, that’s what I hoped you could tell me,’ His Excellency replied, with much less consternation in his voice than seemed right.
‘Myself? But how can I be knowing who?’
‘Well, I thought if you had a pretty good idea by now of who the murderer is, then you’d know who their second victim is likely to be.’
Has the fellow gone mad, Ghote asked himself. Is he a case for locking up in the pagal khana?
‘This second victim,’ he asked cautiously. ‘Is it that you are stating that you just only expect there will be such?’ ‘Of course, my dear fellow. It comes in a good many Christie books after all, the second murder. Poirot or Miss Marple begins to get close, and the murderer gets rattled. Commits the second murder, sometimes to eliminate a dangerous witness, sometimes to lay a false trail.’
Ghote took a deep breath and looked up at the tall, tweed-clad figure in front of him.
‘You are saying that in real life, in this life which we are living now, even if it is here in Ooty only, that a person is going to commit murder just only to lay a false trail?’
His Excellency looked suddenly down at his well-polished brown brogues.
‘Well, don’t forget,’ he said, ‘Dame Agatha was a remarkably shrewd woman. Remarkably shrewd. I mean . . . Well . . . Well, it could happen, you know. It really could. Sometimes.’
‘But it has not happened here at the Club now?’
‘No. No, that’s what I came to say to you: if it is going to happen, it may happen quite soon.’
Abruptly he perked up.
‘And that’s another thing I wanted to say,’ he went on. ‘I mean, if we’re going to avert the second murder - and Poirot manages that in some of the books, of course - then isn’t it time you held the Grand Confrontation?’
‘A confrontation? One that is being grand?’
‘Well, yes. I mean, isn’t that pretty well standard form, after all? Summon all the suspects, generally into the library or the drawing-room, and then go round one by one pointing out how each of them could have done it, and finally say, no, of course, it wasn’t any of them and round on the actual murderer, someone you’ve already seemed to have let off the hook, and make whoever he or she is -mustn’t forget the ladies, bless them - break down and confess when there isn’t really enough evidence to bring a charge. You must know about doing that.’
Yes, Ghote thought in a flash of comprehension. Yes, of course I know about this. That frost-unreal book Mrs McGinty 's Dead, it all happened in that.
‘You are talking of books itself?’ he asked. ‘It is like the ending of the McGinty case?’
‘Exactly, my dear chap. Exactly. And glad to hear you’ve finished the book. It’ll be an enormous help to you in running your Grand Confrontation tonight.’
‘Tonight? What tonight?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say? Well, you see, it struck me that your agreeing to come to the Culture Circle for Professor Godbole’s talk was too good an opportunity to miss.’ ‘Opportunity for exactly what?’
‘Why, for getting them all together in one place. Then, as soon as the few other people likely to turn up have gone, with the exception perhaps of Dr Fatbhoy who’s always pretty difficult to dislodge even from the Club here, we’ll have just the circle of suspects left. And you can go round them one by one and eventually unmask the real murderer.’
Ghote would have liked at this moment to utter with all the force at his command the simple syllable ‘No’. But, despite his semi-triumph a few minutes before in somewhat shaming His Excellency over the absurd notion that anyone in the real world would go to the point of committing bloody, messy, awkward murder just to lay a false trail, he did not feel that he could challenge so influential a figure as flatly as this.
He would have liked to have said that the whole idea of Pichu’s death being anything other than the chance side-effect of the theft of the Club silver was ridiculous. He would have liked to have said that his own presence in Ooty was altogether unnecessary, and had never been necessary. He would have liked to have turned round and marched straight down to the place they called Charing Cross and jumped aboard a bus waiting there with its engine throbbing ready to take him twisting and turning down, down, down to the hot plains below and the complications and half-successes and three-quarter failures of police work in the real world.
But his suitcase and the few possessions he had brought with him were there, barred from him by His Excellency, in the Club itself. And, besides, no bus would be going down to Coimbatore for many hours yet.
Worse, it was by no means certain that His Excellency’s mad idea was not, b
asically at least, right. After all, Meenakshisundaram’s solution was far from being without flaw.
‘Well,’ he said, nerving himself up, ‘I was promising to Dr Fatbhoy that I would attend the Culture Circle, and there I will go.’
But, he added in the secrecy of his own mind, about any Grand Confrontation we would be seeing.
‘Good man.’
And then, as he thrust aside the implication of His Excellency’s congratulations, a thought planted itself suddenly and sturdily in his head.
He was not sure why it should have come to him at this moment. It may have been that, turning a little so as not to be looking at His Excellency full in the eye as he told his half-lie about the Culture Circle, he had caught a glimpse in the distance of the pillar-like yogi sitting by the Club entrance board unmoving in the early morning cold. Or it may have been sheer chance. Or it may have been that the mention of Professor Godbole had recalled to his mind that strange half-hour in the deserted upper room of the Nilgiri Library when the excitable little brahmin had propounded his theory about how Great Detectives were unique in that at their height they combined in a tobacco-wreathed trance the insights of the poet and the mathematician into that which has never occurred before.
But, for whatever reason it was, the thought had come to him: if they are always and always calling me as a Great Detective, let me see if that is what I am. I will enter into a trance. But not any Western Sherlock Holmes trance. No, I shall just only do what I was all along trying to achieve at home in Bombay. I will put myself into the hands of Dr K. S. Joshi, MSc, MA, PhD, of Yoga in Daily Life fame.
‘Well, Your Excellency,’ he said with briskness, ‘I must not stand here all the day idle. First, I should eat a good breakfast, then I will have work to do in my room. No disturbance, if you please.’
He must have achieved a note of sharp authority, because His Excellency stepped aside at once and Mr Habibullah made no attempt to accompany him as he marched off into the Club.
Soon, fortified by a breakfast that was all he had hoped for, creamy sustaining British porridge, boiled eggs each warmly protected under its own woollen cosy, and finally toast with amply spread Dundee marmalade, dark, tangy and somehow breathing rich assurance, he retired to his enormous bedroom. There he rested a hand momentarily on the bright yellow, pink and black cover of Dr Joshi’s paperback — no need to dip into its well remembered pages - and getting down on to the floor, assumed the lotus position.
Yes, surely, he thought, the floor of a bedroom at the Ootacamund Club, cleaned daily by servants drilled to preserve the highest standards, is a fit and proper spot on which to perform the techniques of yoga. A place, in Dr Joshi’s own words, well protected from the menace of animals, rodents and insects. And, if he was disobeying another of the precepts of the author of Yoga in Daily Life by setting out to undertake the asanas with a loaded stomach, well, surely this was a special case. Yoga in Ooty. It should have different rules. And at least he had avoided, as Dr Joshi urged, too much of chillies and spices.
Then resolutely he turned to attaining the state of dharana that had so frequently eluded him before. This time, he pledged himself, he would concentrate unswervingly on that point at the tip of his nose. He would eliminate every sign of the restlessness of mind, the idle thoughts, the whims and fancies that so often before had run about rat-like in his head.
He would attain dharana. And from there — who knows? — he might find he had entered into dhyana, that his mind, in Dr Joshi’s words, would become very stable like the flame of a lamp in a very calm atmosphere. And then . . . Then would he know what the answer was to this messy riddle that had been thrust at him? Was what Meenakshisundaram—
No. No, forget Meenakshisundaram. Forget His Excellency. Forget Ooty. Think only of the tip of his nose. And, however much later it might be that this meditation came to an end, see what had happened in his head then.
The tip of his nose. The tip of his nose. The tip . . .
*
There seemed to be thunder. Fire God Agni hurling his massy bolts. The rage of the heavens.
It was the door. Banging on the door of - where was this? Yes, of his room. In the Club. The Ootacamund Club. In Ooty.
‘Yes?’ he heard a croaking voice call out, a voice that must be his own. ‘Yes? What—Who is—Come, please.’
The door opened.
He looked round towards it. In the doorway stood a thin, tall, leathery-faced figure. It was—Of course, of course, His Excellency.
He scrambled to his feet.
‘Please, yes, good morning,’ he said.
‘My dear chap. Good evening. It is evening, you know. Been asleep, have you? Well, even the great Sherlock is recorded as sleeping, though he was usually up before Watson, eh? At his bedside with “Cocoa in the next room and the game’s afoot”, what?’
‘Please?’ said Ghote.
‘Well, I came to look you out, old man. Culture Circle’s due to begin in half an hour, and I thought I’d have seen you about somewhere before this, raring to go.’
‘In half an hour? In just only half an hour? But . . . But what has happened to the time?’
‘You’ve been asleep, old chap, I suppose. I must say when you went off in that very determined manner this morning, saying you were not to be disturbed, I thought you were going to get down to it and work out who’d done it. Like Poirot in Mrs McGinty when he took off his tight shoes, remember?’
Ghote did remember. He remembered that he had seen himself as taking off, not any tight shoes, but perhaps the tight rules that had prevented his seeing what might have been in front of his face all the time. And he remembered the particular way he had thought he would achieve this, a different and even a better way than those of Poirot and Holmes before him.
But how could he tell His Excellency, that former ambassador to some country in Europe, that man steeped in Western ways down to the very detective stories he spent his time in admiring, how could he tell such a person that he had tried to put himself into a state of dharana, had hoped even to achieve dhyana?
He was saved from the embarrassment by the sound of His Excellency’s clipped voice.
‘Well, come on, man. Don’t want to be late, do we? Guest of honour and all that. Better put on that tie I lent you, and then we’ll be off.’
‘Yes, yes. Two minutes only, if you please. I will come to the portico. I will meet you there. Two minutes only.’ As soon as His Excellency had gone, Ghote hastily dipped his face in a cooling basin of water, seized his comb and dealt with his hair, wound His Excellency’s tie round his neck and knotted it, pulled on his Ooty jersey, cursed, did his hair again and left the room at a trot.
His Excellency was waiting for him.
‘Thought we’d take my car,’ he said. ‘The Circle meets at the Indian Union Club, of course. Old Fatbhoy’s territory. Not that we don’t see all too much of him up here.’
The car, an ancient, stately Morris, imported from England perhaps as many as forty years earlier, still immaculate and shining in its polished grey paint and bluey-silver chromework, stood in the driveway.
Ghote obediently hurried across and got in. His Excellency climbed behind the wheel. A servant appeared, on cue, and swung the starting-handle dangling from the vehicle’s front. The engine caught with a warm, instant purr. The servant, well used to the routine, ran round with the starting-handle and clipped it into its place.
Ghote was just alert enough to register with astonishment the performance of this procedure from the past before His Excellency let in the clutch and they rolled forward.
The journey to the other, lesser club where the Culture Circle met, one originally established for Ooty’s Indian inhabitants of social standing, did not take long. Ghote sat through it in a silent daze.
Culture Circle, Culture Circle, he kept thinking, repeating and repeating the words like a mantra. But a mantra not of aspiration but of doubt.
How had he been so foolish as to get trapped int
o going to this meeting? And, worse, worse, worse, into going as the Great Detective personified? And had His Excellency, to add to it all, done what he had said he would? Had he contrived to persuade all those he suspected of the murder of Pichu to attend? When Professor Godbole’s talk was over was there going to take place that absurd Grand Confrontation?
For a moment it actually occurred to him that the wretched Bad Character Roll fellow, Balakumar, would somehow be there as well under the fiercely brutal charge of Inspector Meenakshisundaram. But, no, he thought. At least the suspects - if suspects they actually were - would be confined to His Excellency’s breakfast table line-up. Pepper-pot, mustard-holder, Dipy’s Tomato Ketchup, sugar bowl, milk jug and salt-pot.
And was he really in accordance with His Excellency’s wishes — no, His Excellency’s orders — was he at the evening’s end expected to challenge each one of them in turn and finally to pick out the one who had actually committed the murder in the Club billiard room? How could he? He had no idea who it was. He was not even sure that the murder had anything to do with any of them. Certainly his effort to arrive at an answer through yoga seemed to have led nowhere. Had he achieved dharana even? Or had he, as His Excellency had assumed, simply fallen asleep? Had that huge British breakfast been the undoing of him after all?
But now they were drawing up outside the Indian Union Club, a long, low bungalow at the end of a short, potholed drive, surrounded by a garden that, in distinction to the grounds of the Ootacamund Club, had been allowed to run riotously to seed.
‘Come along, come along, my dear fellow,’ His Excellency said, briskly leading the way into a lofty room, the corrugated iron of its ceiling criss-crossed by painted beams. Thirty or forty canvas stacking chairs were drawn up in front of a low platform on which stood a table covered with a patterned orange cloth with on it a water carafe and a solitary upturned tumbler. On one of the two chairs behind there was draped a marigold garland. Even down the length of the room Ghote caught a tang of its odour.
The Body in the Billiard Room Page 18