He did not particularly cherish the idea of the white sahibs of former times and their claims to superiority, still occasionally accepted. But somehow these signs of loss of status, of a former security fallen to nothing, saddened and disturbed him.
But he had not come walking out here to mourn the passing of the British Raj. He had come out with a purpose.
And his damn pipe had gone out. It must have done so as he had mused over the Major’s house.
In a ruffling of irritation he refilled it, struck a match, struck another, and another, and at last got the thing going again. Then he strode off, once more rhythmically puffing, waiting for the wisdom that would come from the magical joining of poet and mathematician. The wisdom that would produce in a burst of light the answer.
Soon he was climbing steadily, entering the wide grassy area they called the Downs. In the distance, majestic, rose the peak of Mount Dodabetta. The views were magnificent. Behind him the clustered buildings of the town, the brilliant glinting of the Lake and, to one side, the long oval outline of the Racecourse with the enormous thatched coverings of its stables. Nearer, the mellow red roofs of the cottages he had passed earlier stood out in the universal green. Here and there the squared-off oblongs of the cultivated terraces on the hill slopes showed each a different colour from a different crop.
He strode. He puffed.
But nothing, as yet, showed any signs of happening.
He strode on.
He stopped again to recharge the pipe, this time leaving on the ground a huge circle of failed and broken matches.
He set off once more.
Should he try combining pipe yoga with Dr Joshi’s? Concentrating perhaps, not on the tip of his nose, but on the smoke-curling bowl of his pipe?
What, he knew, he must on no account do was to let his thoughts return to the actual question of who was respon-
sible for the body in the billiard room. If they did, he would be attempting to solve the mystery by the ordinary processes of logic plus haphazard guesswork, the customary police way. And this had ceased to be the sort of case that could be dealt with on those lines. No, Professor Godbole’s path was the only one left to take.
But where - puff - was the entrance to that path?
He marched on. The smooth Downs gave way to more rugged country. There were wooded ravines, sholas he had been told they were called, where perhaps even today a leopard might be lurking, wild and unpredictable.
On he strode. On he puffed. Upwards he climbed.
He began to feel a little sick. Was it, he asked himself, the thin air at this height? Or the tobacco?
That had certainly been cheap. Or might it be the pipe itself? It, too, had cost less than he had expected and it had been the only one the paanwallah had for sale, grimed with sticky dust from years of remaining unsold. He had not, he had to admit, so far gained any pleasure from smoking it. Presumably Sherlock Holmes, however, did enjoy the business. Perhaps you could not get into a really revealing tobacco trance unless you were a fully accustomed, deeply enjoying pipewallah.
Quite suddenly he felt very sick indeed. He snatched the reeking pipe from his mouth and staggered down on to the nearest crag of grey rock. Below him, at the bottom of a small ravine, a silver stream trickled. He longed to go and dip his face in its cool water.
But he had a feeling that if he got to his feet to do so the worst would happen.
He tried instead deep breathing of the pure Nilgiri air.
This did have some effect. Only, after a few inhalations he realized that he was also breathing in the acrid remains of smoke from the pipe on the rock at his side. He picked it up, looked at it and then, with one gathered-up effort, swung back his arm and sent the stinking thing flying through the air.
It landed in the stream at the bottom of the ravine, sinking in its clear water with a hiss that made him think of a defeated, angry snake-demon.
But it was he himself who had been defeated, he reflected. Defeated in his struggle to become a true, pipe-smoking Great Detective.
Would he never now know who had done it? Who it was who had committed the murder in the billiard room?
He thought he would just stay sitting where he was for a long, long time. He would not go back to the Club and risk encountering His Excellency, full of his theories again and insisting on him performing impossible tasks. He would not go back to the town, sleepy in its Sunday calm, and risk bumping into Meenakshisundaram to learn either that he had or that he had not advanced matters a little by bullying and browbeating the Club servants. He would sit and sit and sit where he was.
So, instead, he rose to his feet, turned in the direction he had come from and went tramping back down.
It took him about three-quarters of an hour to reach the outskirts of the town, and as he did so he became aware that from St Stephen’s Church there had sprung up the sound of bells, a gentle, lapping, melodious ringing that seemed to be repeating softly but insistently Ootacamund, Ootacamund, Ootacamund.
And, standing still so as to appreciate the - to him -extraordinary sound all the better, he realized something. He had, after all, experienced the true Great Detective’s trance.
Somewhere in the course of his long walk back, without the aid of so much as a puff of tobacco, the knowledge of who it was who had been Pichu’s poisoner had flowered in his mind. Everything had mysteriously come together at the very back of his head, in the innermost recesses. As he had tramped along he had - yes, he had - altogether without thinking of it done the thing Professor Godbole had spoken of just once. He had bent himself into the posture of the hunched and peering hatred of the poisoner.
Now he knew.
He walked on, under the sound of the lapping bells, stunned into mindlessness by the shock of his discovery. Then a voice hailed him.
‘Ah, Ghote. Good man. Can’t stop just now, on my way to church. But I’ll see you after.’
His Excellency. Wearing a dark blue suit witn a white shirt and a striped regimental tie.
‘No,’ Ghote said, waking from his somnambulistic state. ‘No. No, no, Your Excellency, I would come to church with you.’
‘Really, old man? You’re a Christian then?’
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘Well, no need for you to come. Church parade and all that. Don’t feel you’ve got to.’
‘No. But I must come. Yes, I very much must come with you.’
His Excellency shrugged.
‘Well, if you’re sure. But we’ll have to step out. Doesn’t do to be late, you know. Specially if a chap’s reading the lesson.’
‘Yes,’ Ghote said, not following this but not wanting a single word more of conversation.
Together they walked smartly along to the foot of the hill where Inspector Meenakshisundaram had forced a doubtful confession out of the wretched Balakumar, and on through the church gates, this morning invitingly open. In the deep porch Ghote caught a glimpse of the plaque he remembered His Excellency speaking about, Built at the Expense of the Right Honourable Stephen Rumbold Lushington. He had just time to recall that the timbers of the roof inside had been taken from the besieged palace of Tippoo Sultan before they were in the building itself.
What struck Ghote immediately and impressively was the hushedness of the atmosphere. Though in the rows of cane-backed seats there was a scattering of some twenty-five or thirty people, mostly Indian with half a dozen Europeans, not one of them was talking. There was the sound of music, wheezy, slow, turgid music, but it was so discreetly played - from some giant harmonium, no, an organ, it was called an organ - that it hardly seemed to be making a proper sound. It was more as if it was simply wrapping itself around the overall silence.
How different, he thought, from a noisy, chattering, bell-clanging temple, loud, too, with the sound of half a dozen different, heartily sung bhajans.
How those little girls in clean frocks and with braided pigtails, sitting so demurely with their stout mother and stouter father, had they b
een little Hindus, would have talked and run about and dodged round those tall white pillars and stopped every now and again to worship the god.
His Excellency had taken a place on one of the cane-backed benches. Ghote saw a free space immediately behind him and carefully stationed himself in it.
After a moment, seeing His Excellency pull out a sort of stubby cushion from under the bench in front of him and drop on to it in a posture of mild prayer, he in his turn pulled out his own hard cushion and knelt. Above all, he did not want anyone to realize he was not accustomed to this procedure, that he was not there as an ordinary worshipper.
His Excellency had put a hand to his brow as if to ward off rays of power coming from the god at the front. Only there seemed to be no god, no picture, no idol. Ghote imitated him, and from underneath his spread fingers took a careful look round.
Yes, as he had expected, Major Bell was one of the scatter of people sitting or kneeling there, as was Mrs Lucy Trayling. Had not His Excellency said, on that first evening, that the Major had been a ‘sidesman’ at St Stephen’s for many years? Only why then was he not sitting at the side?
He abandoned this Christian puzzle and let his covert glance roam further. He read a plaque let into the wall just within his view. Sacred to the Memory of Helen Cecilia, Wife of John Sullivan. John Sullivan, he had been the very founder of Ooty. And he had left his wife here, dead. But she had been remembered, it seemed, remembered through a hundred and fifty years by a little world that had retained in itself order and regulation enough to remember. That had them still, if only just.
Now there was a disturbance from somewhere at the back, but the mildest only of disturbances.
Ghote, seeing His Excellency seat himself and turn his head, did the same.
A small procession was coming up the central aisle, an Indian wearing some sort of white, lace-edged kurta over a long, black, dress-like garment, and four young girls similarly clad. The five of them made their way up to the front beyond a rail cutting off the, no doubt, holier part of the building. There the girls divided and went two and two to benches on either side facing each other. The Indian- was he a priest? - turned.
‘We shall sing No. 165 in Hymns Ancient and Modern,’ he announced. ‘Oh, God, Our Help.’
The organ changed its quietly meandering music for something more rhythmical. Led by the four girls who had entered in procession, the scatter of worshippers raised their voices in song.
Rather doleful song.
‘Oh, God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home.’
Ghote, as he succeeded in piecing out the words, began to reflect on them. Ooty was, true, a shelter from the stormy blast, and had been so for at least the past ages back to the time of John Sullivan, Collector. But it was not, sing as they all might, truly an eternal home. Things changed. Even here. And it was not altogether a monsoon-proof shelter either. Even here, even in the heart of sheltered Ooty, the ugly blast of murder had come striding in.
And, as the voices rose and fell around him like the dull surge of the sea back in Bombay when the monsoon threatened, he returned to thinking of the revelation he had had on his walk in the hunched and peering manner of the murderer of Pichu.
He paid little attention to the remainder of the service, automatically standing and kneeling and sitting when His Excellency in front of him did, and only just stopping himself in time from following when at one point His Excellency stepped out from his bench and went up to a tall reading-stand. There he proclaimed a passage from some Christian sacred book. It must, Ghote had supposed, have been the ‘lesson’. But he learnt nothing.
He was aware, too, that at another stage Major Bell had gone round from bench to bench holding out a shallow dish for alms. He did remember afterwards, oddly, that the dish had a circle of soft green baize at its bottom, presumably so that the clink of coin should not spoil the general air of calm. But he could not remember whether he himself had found any money to put into the dish, nor whether it was at that time or a little later that he had wondered briefly if the Major, poor as he was, was ever tempted to take out any of the crumpled rupee notes others had put in.
But at last the ceremony was over. The worshippers filed out, exchanging in the porch a little conversation with the priest.
Ghote followed His Excellency as closely as he could, and when eventually he walked away down towards the ironwork arch over the churchyard gates he stepped up to walk beside him.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I have something of utmost gravity to say to you.’
His Excellency have him a quick, startled look.
Then after a second or two he spoke.
‘Well, say what you have to say, Inspector. Now must be as good a time as any.’
‘Yes, sir.’
For a little Ghote kept silent as they walked gravely along side by side in the direction of the Club.
‘I know who is the murderer,’ he said at last.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes, sir. It is not your Least Likely Suspect, even if Professor Godbole might have been interested in the idea only of killing a person for purposes of experiment.’
‘Not Godbole? Very well.’
‘It is not the Maharajah of Pratapgadh, who as any individual who has been with him on a golf course would know, is devious and not direct, however much he is descended from Rajput ancestors. So he would not have resorted to any direct action in answer to a blackmail attempt.’
‘I see.’
‘Nor is it the Maharani, who is on the contrary too direct not to just only bribe a man as little rich as Pichu, as she was once trying to bribe myself, instead of murdering the same.’
His Excellency turned his head and looked Ghote straight in the eye.
‘Suppose, Inspector,’ he said, his voice edgy, ‘you just name the name.’
‘It is not Mr Habibullah,’ Ghote replied composedly. ‘He, if he was a notorious criminal absconding under the MISA, would also have been able to stop Pichu’s mouth with hundred-rupee notes at least for as long as he needed to go elsewhere into hiding.’
‘Lucy Trayling?’ His Excellency said.
‘No, no. It is not at all her. If she had wanted to put poison into the drink Pichu was having, she would have succeeded to put in wrong glass, or to put some harmless substance in correct glass.’
‘I dare say you’re right. Certainly Lucy’s always been in some sort of a muddle, though I don’t find your reasoning altogether faultless.’
‘But let me assure: it was not Mrs Trayling. Because I am well knowing who it was.’
‘Iyer’s alibi? You’re going to tell me it can be broken after all?’
‘No. It cannot.’
‘Then you have arrived at the point, Inspector, of clearing all six possible suspects.’
‘Sir, there did not need to be six. There could be seven.’ ‘Seven? I don’t—’
‘Sir, there was always someone unaccounted for who has a bedroom in the Club and who must have been in same on the night in question.’
‘But—’
‘Yes,’ Ghote said, ‘as soon as you were fetching me one necktie to wear in dining room under By-law Number 13 on the first night I was here, I was observing to myself that you also, Your Excellency, could be upon the suspects’ file.’
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His Excellency stopped in his tracks. They were only a few yards from the entrance to the Club grounds. The yogi was, of course, still there, a stone pillar beside the Club signboard’s wooden post.
‘Yes,’ Ghote repeated, ‘seven suspects. Did you not once tell me that Seven Suspects was the title of a very, very famous book by a British writer?’
‘Michael Innes, the American title,’ His Excellency said automatically, his mind plainly elsewhere, thoughts racing.
Now Ghote felt his ever-hovering Watson had finally been put in his place.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I did not truly consider that it had be
en you who had murdered Pichu. Even though I was knowing that you at one time had dressed up as a Scottish with a dagger in your long sock which might have been the weapon. And also that you might have had a motive.’ ‘A motive?’
‘Yes, yes. You also could have had that motive which is in the story you yourself obtained in secret from the Nilgiri Library, namely Into the Valley of Death written by Miss Evelyn Hervey. There the murderer is blackmailed because he was winning one VC award under false pretences. And you are possessing one MC award.’
‘But—’
‘But you are right, it must be only in detective stories that a person who has committed a Section 302 offence would call a detective with some high reputation to investigate in order to establish his own one hundred per cent innocence.’
‘Yes,’ His Excellency said, with a weary sigh, ‘I imagine such a thing would hardly happen in real life.’
He stood looking vaguely round for a few moments. Then a slight frown appeared on his leather-brown face.
‘But if you’ve really eliminated all the six - all the seven people who could have . . .’
‘But, you see,’ Ghote said, ‘once it was certain that Pichu was stabbed by a dacoit — whoever he was, Balakumar or some other — and that he was also poisoned, then the murderer with poison did not need to have been someone who was sleeping in the Club. The Club, you see, was no longer, as you were once calling it, snowbound. We do not yet know how Pichu was obtaining almost every night alcoholic drink, but it is not at all impossible that such was put for him at some time before the Club was shut up and the servants went to their quarter.’
‘So, a fellow servant?’ His Excellency said, visibly brightening.
Ghote felt that, now he had finally sent the Watson-Holmes business flying, he could spare the old man a reference to servants not being acceptable as murderers.
‘No,’ he said simply, ‘it was not a servant. The reason Pichu had to be killed was because he was a blackmailer, do not forget. And he was not going to blackmail a fellow servant who could pay so little.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Who then? I gather it has to be someone connected with the Club?’
The Body in the Billiard Room Page 22