But what he heard after a little emerging from behind the heavy, well-polished door of the office came as a distinct surprise. Meenakshisundaram’s baying voice sounded tamed as if he had been transformed from unleashed bloodhound into one of the docile dogs of upper Ooty. And Professor Godbole’s high, gabbling monkey chatter appeared to be every bit as irrepressible as it had been when in the Nilgiri Library he had first propounded his theories about the Great Detective.
Phrases penetrated the heavy teak door.
‘ . life, you might say, Inspector, is in this wholly exceptional instance writing a detective story in reality . . . the naked truth for once without disguise . . .’
Then, after an interlude of inaudibility, Meenakshisundaram’s tamed rumble rising to loud astonishment.
‘Please, let me be getting matter clear. You are stating that it was you, who as some sort of experiment, killed this fellow? Or not-not? Yes or no? Please.’
‘Only an instance, my dear Inspector. I suppose, if such were the facts, you would hardly expect me . . .’
A lapse into squeakings and rumblings.
Then the professor’s voice coming through clearly again. ‘ . . . the poet, as I may say, and the mathematician combined in one . . . ‘
‘But me, I am never making verse-worse. Never.’
‘ in clouds of tobacco smoke, a veritable three-pipe affair . . .’
And at last the rumble mounting to final fury. ‘Professor, I am not understanding. Not one damn-sham thing. Please to go. Go, please. Go. Now.’
And little Godbole spryly emerged, hands rubbing together in evident delight.
Ghote, unnoticed in his tucked-away post of observation, wondered what might be the true cause of such pleasure. Was it simply that Godbole had had another chance to air those theories of his? Or was he, possibly, just possibly, triumphing at having pulled very much of wool over Meenakshisundaram’s eyes?
With a sigh he abandoned speculation as pointless.
Meenakshisundaram’s interview with Mr Habibullah seemed at the start to be going on the same quiet lines as had Professor Godbole’s in its beginnings.
‘ . . . did seem to be acting in a most methodical manner in the churchyard, my dear Inspector, reminding me of the fearful methodicalness I was for so long . . .’
A descent into mere murmuring.
But, after some time, a new note. The fat Moslem’s voice definitely louder in response.
‘Inspector, I am in no way surprised. Certainly you would not have found one A. A. Habibullah in the roll of names there.’
No Habibullah employed as an officer of Indian Railways?
Ghote jumped to his feet, crossed to the door of the office and, careless of whether he might be seen or not, pressed his ear hard against it.
Meenakshisundaram had put another question he had not been in time to catch. But the answer came clearly through the door.
‘No, no, Inspector, it is quite simple. I wished, may Allah the merciful forgive me, to wipe away all traces of my servitude to Indian Railways, its many rules and its mountains of regulations. I did not wish to be pursued by its million-clawed bureaucracy. Inspector, I have taken a new name. I have taken a new personality even.’
Something low, menacing and uncomprehending from Meenakshisundaram.
‘Well, my dear fellow, you must believe it or not as you will. But, no, I do not intend to tell you that name of shame.’
Growl. Growl.
‘If you like, Inspector. I cannot say I welcome the thought of a police cell, but one never knows, it may have unexpected charms.’
There was the sound of a chair scraping back.
Ghote hurriedly retreated, right round the nearest corner.
In consequence when he crept back to his place in the depths of the sofa he was unable to make out who it was who had followed the airy, almost inconceivably inconsequential Muslem into Inspector Meenakshisundaram’s spider parlour.
He listened with head cocked, but could make out no more than that than the voices behind the heavy door were exchanging rapid question and answer. Had Meenakshisundaram, even without his customary methods, got on to something?
After a while he began to feel sure that at least the other quiet voice was a man’s. Mr Iyer? The Maharajah? Perhaps His Excellency. Even he might be summoned as a witness.
Then at last the voice rose a little just once and he realized that it was the Maharajah’s. A maharajah, descendant of Rajput warrior princes, as uncharacteristically subdued as Meenakshisundaram himself.
He wondered whether to stand with his ear at the door again. But, even if he were to take the risk of being seen in that undignified posture by some passing soft-footed Club servant, he doubted whether he would be able to hear anything worthwhile, so quiet were the two of them inside.
So he waited.
He even began to wonder whether from the long exchange there would emerge at last a Meenakshisundaram beaming in triumph and a handcuffed Maharajah.
But when the door opened it was the Maharajah who came out alone.
For perhaps two seconds Ghote saw a chastened figure, one who put his hand to his forehead and wiped away the sweat which even in cool Ooty had gathered there. But almost at once the beaten man straightened his shoulders and could be seen pasting a careless smile on to his handsome, aristocratic face before striding off.
A few moments later his wife, for once not wearing brightly coloured trousers though still carrying her popping-eyed pekinese, swept past and entered the office. Her heavy silk sari, Ghote thought, must be worn to proclaim status and invulnerability.
He wondered how much of the interview he would be able to hear.
Soon enough he had his answer. The Maharani’s confident voice came through the thick door as if it was paper.
‘I’m not ashamed of it, not one bit. I have a lover. And, yes, he’s younger than I am. And, yes, again, he’s poor. Just a student. But he is mine, and no one is going to stop me.’
Meenakshisundaram’s reply was altogether inaudible.
‘Oh, I don’t care if he does get to know. He can’t do anything, not now. I’ve got every bit as much evidence against him as he could possibly get against me. The law with all its damn weighing and balancing can’t alter that. My husband has been stupid enough to let himself get caught by that creature. He’s given way to his damned urges once too often. And I’ve got him. Now I can do just what I like, and to hell with him. To hell with him.’
Once more Meenakshisundaram in putting his next question seemed completely subdued.
‘And what if Amul could have bought some damned dog poison?’ came the clarion voice in answer. ‘You won’t be able to prove he has. And I warn you, Inspector, try any of your tough stuff on him and you won’t hear the end of it, not so long as you live. I know people who could have those pips off your shoulder before you could say Chakravarty Rajgopalachari. So be warned.’
The discreet murmur that followed this threat made it plain to Ghote that it had been accepted at face value.
But what about the threat itself? Had it been made simply to protect an innocent young man waiting for love down in the Bengal Vegetarian Hotel? Or had it been made to protect someone who had, in fact, when the Maharani had yet to secure that hold she had over her husband, gone to somewhere in the Bazaar and bought a quantity of dog-poison?
He heard the door of the office beginning to open and pressed himself hard back into the deep sofa. The Maharani, her eyes sparkling, the pekinese held triumphantly before her, spotted him at once.
‘Ah, it’s you. Do something for me, would you?’
Ghote hastily got to his feet, striving to make it look as if he had by chance been lounging there at his ease.
Was there some magic formula he could use to make this arrogant creature, flushed with her success, answer the questions he had been asking?
But inspiration failed to materialize.
‘Yes? Yes, madam?’ he was reduced to stammering out.
‘Find Mrs Trayling, would you? Tell her that bloody inspector wants to see her. I’m not going to run his errands for him.’
She strode away.
Ghote stood for a moment, attempting to find some circumstance that would shatter the brazen facade he had been shown. But he could hit on nothing.
Sadly he set off to see if Mrs Trayling was waiting anywhere in the Club, as she must have been asked to be.
He found her sitting out in the portico and informed her that Inspector Meenakshisundaram wanted to see her.
She pushed herself up in a flurry from her long cane chair, sending her knitting-bag tumbling to the ground, made a grab for it and sent her handbag to the ground on the other side.
Ghote went round picking them up, restoring to the wide flowered knitting-bag a long metal needle such as he had once wondered might be His Excellency’s famous sharp instrument.
‘Mr Ghote,’ Mrs Trayling said, ‘tell me . . .’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Inspector—Oh, I’ve forgotten his name again.’ ‘Inspector Meenakshisundaram, madam?’
‘Yes. Yes, him. Is he ... ?’
The question faded into silence.
‘What is he, madam?’
‘Well, I mean, will he . . . Will he, well, will he bully me, Mr Ghote? You see, I get muddled at times, and—And I don’t know what I might say if he begins to shout and bang the table and . . . And all the rest.’
Ghote’s first thought was whether he could do anything to protect this helpless, muddled lady. But at once he remembered it was still not impossible that she had wanted to kill the man who, she believed rightly or wrongly, had let her husband drown. She had certainly done her best once to get him dismissed.
So was she truly helpless? Or, under an air of helplessness, was there a steely will acting according to some decision arrived at in the confused secrecy of her own thoughts?
He looked at her.
‘Well, madam,’ he lied, ‘I do not think an officer of Inspector Meenakshisundaram’s standing would shout at a lady such as yourself. But in any case kindly allow me to stand outside the office where he is, and if you feel yourself to be in need of assistance please to call out.’
‘That—That is most generous of you, Inspector.’
Inspector, he thought, as he escorted her to Meenakshisundaram. So Trayling Memsahib is very well aware that I, too, am a police officer. Is it by calculation she is wanting to take my help then? Is it, even, so as to build up a picture of cent per cent innocence?
He knocked at the office door for her. But when Meenakshisundaram called ‘Come’ he did not open it himself but stepped back and took good care his colleague did not see him.
But, listen out though he did, he heard no shouting nor table thumping nor bullying. And in five minutes Mrs
Trayling emerged, walked straight past clutching knitting-bag and handbag and disappeared.
So now, he thought, there is just only Mr Iyer.
But it seemed that Meenakshisundaram was not going to attempt to break down the alibi the assistant secretary had established, the details of which Ghote had dutifully reported the evening before. Because, without any warning, he himself came banging out of the office.
‘Oh, so you are there,’ he said, seeing Ghote.
‘Yes, yes. I was sitting only.’
‘Hm? Well, let me tell. Not one speck of good-should out of any one of the buggers. Sticking to their stories from start to finish. Or, worse-purse, trying to give me some damn-sham ideas I was not at all able to follow. And they are saying-saying one and all that, no, it was not them who was putting poison in any drink-stink that bloody Pichu was taking.’
Ghote had hardly expected Meenakshisundaram immediately to crack the case, with whatever sort of interrogation he chose to use. But he could not stop a feeling of leadenness from slowly sinking down into him at this renewed blank failure.
If all of the suspects His Excellency had lined up for him, salt-pot, pepper-pot, sugar bowl and the rest, were going to persist successfully in simply denying any connection with the poisoning, the mystery was never going to be solved. And, though he told himself that anyhow it was really no business of his, and that Professor Godbole had even declared that Sherlock Holmes had sometimes failed, and that if the matter had to be left on the file it would be on Meenakshisundaram’s record not his, he was unable to suppress a simple desire in himself to know . . .
He paused in his thoughts to find the exact words he wanted.
Then they came to him.
To know who had done it. Just that.
‘Well,’ he said to Meenakshisundaram, ‘I suppose you can try questioning the servants. One of them may be knowing something, even if it is not more than how Pichu came to get that drink.’
Meenakshisundaram’s eyes brightened.
‘Yes, by God,’ he said, ‘I can beat something out of one of them. By God, I can.’
He turned, rejuvenated, to go on this happy errand. But at the corner he looked back.
‘And you, Ghote bhai,’ he called out. ‘Give us some of that Bombay-style think-pink, yes? Make that brain-pain of yours work some more and find one of your explanations-complications like last night, yes? Yes?’
‘I would try,’ Ghote answered.
Without enthusiasm.
For a little he stood there, overwhelmed by depression. Yet again he wished with all his might that he was not where he was, in Ooty, cool and cut-off. He wished he was back in Bombay. He wished even he had been given some filthy, miserable, back-breaking task like a hunt for some mad mass-killer through a huge unmapped slum. He wished, above all, that he did not feel, inescapably, that he wanted to know who had done it, who had set out to poison blackmailing Pichu.
But - he slowly began to admit to himself - might there after all not be a way in which he could answer that insistent question.
Meenakshisundaram had requested him to think. And that was something he could do. Not in the way he had been used to thinking, sitting in his cabin in Headquarters in Bombay, working out by logic what might have happened in any particular case and then seeing if he could find evidence. But in a different way. The different way, here in different Ooty, that he had already once successfully brought off.
Could he not try again the Great Detective’s way?
All right, last night, lying in bed, he had altogether failed to get into that state of yogic trance which had worked for him earlier. But. . . But there was another approach. The true Great Detective’s way.
Professor Godbole had pointed it out, more than once.
He turned, marched out of the Club, marched down the hill and past the yogi without paying him the least attention, marched on into the town - and received an unexpected check.
Spencer’s Stores, where he had seen himself as going, was Sunday-closed.
But, after a little hunting round, he found, down some steps opposite the Nilgiri Library next to the equally Sunday-closed Royal Hairdressing Saloon, a paan-seller. And from him he succeeded in buying, not a refreshing paan to chew, but a tobacco-pipe, matches - two boxes since they were probably very unreliable - and a large packet of unexpectedly cheap tobacco.
21
Ghote waited until he had got clear of the upper town, with its elderly inhabitants out in their heavy tweeds or snug overcoats for Sunday morning walks, dogs of all descriptions at their heels in well-trained obedience. Then he halted and experimentally filled the newly-acquired pipe with the coarsely sweet-smelling tobacco. He had never before smoked a pipe, and was anxious to commence unobserved.
After a little he got the bowl stuffed to his satisfaction, put the stem to his mouth, took out a match, struck it - it lit - and applied the flame to the tobacco. He sucked in hard. Smoke filled his mouth, stinging and sharp.
But, he thought, I have mastered this art, at the first attempt. One good omen. It must be.
He set off walking again, striding away, sucking and puffing. Past the outlying co
ttages and bigger houses, Glen View, Runnymede, Harrow-on-the-Hill - a house hardly on much of a hill, but its name echoed with old Britishness - Woodbriar, Stella Cottage, Dahlia Bank, Clifton Villa. He glanced at each one as he went by, waiting all the time for the pipe-smoking trance as certified by Professor Godbole to establish itself.
There they were these houses, he thought vaguely, pieces of utter Ootiness, from another world than teeming, twisting India below, with their sloping roofs in those mild red tiles, their occasional little plaything turrets made out of warm terracotta bricks, their windows often with picture-book diamond panes, their neat verandas and their toy-town balconies.
Once he almost came to a halt at the sight of a particularly well-kept garden that was full of all sorts of pale flowers he had never seen before, grown years ago no doubt with seeds from England. Were those tall, thin ones the hollyhocks which Brigadier Trayling had failed to persuade to parade in lines? Perhaps.
And the name boards beside each gate, though they were almost all Indian, were so neat and ordered that he did not feel they took away at all from the general Britishness of everything - Col. and Mrs D. C. Saxena, Lieut.-Gen. and Mrs R. K. Singh, Dr and Mrs R. D. Pochkhanawala, Major J. K. Bell.
At this last he came to a halt. So this was old Major Bell’s house, the place from which, so His Excellency had said, firewood hunters had made off with a whole tree. It was easy to see how. The garden had been let fall back into something not far from jungle and the cottage, glimpsed behind the overgrown, sprawling bushes, was every bit as neglected. There were tiles missing from its sloping roof, one window at least had a broken, unrepaired pane in it and on the cream-coloured walls huge patches of yellowish-green, the damp of many winters, spread in gloomy triumph. On the mossed-over path near the lopsided gate - the house name, My Abode, could only just be picked out thanks to the strong sunlight - it was plain that ancient old Dasher had long since ceased to be able to scrape himself a proper place for his natural functions.
This, then, was what an old Ooty hand could become reduced to.
Ghote sighed.
The Body in the Billiard Room Page 21