The Body in the Billiard Room. H. R. f. Keating
commemorating feats of arms in distant days and very distant places.
Stepping further in, Ghote saw ‘The Battle of Tel el Kabir’, ‘The Defence of Rorke’s Drift’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.
‘Yes,’ said His Excellency, catching him peering at this last in which all the blood and mess of long ago had been turned into a never-changing scene of military glory. ‘Yes, some pretty historic things in here one way and another. You know that it was in this very room, on this very billiard table, that the rules of Snooker were finally hammered out, to be passed on through the years and over the world for ever?’
‘No,’ Ghote said. ‘No, I was not at all knowing.’
‘Yes, yes. It was here, on this self-same spot, that one Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain, later as Sir Neville to be Prime Minister of Great Britain, the man who tried to stem the tide of war by coming to an agreement with Hitler at Munich, it was here that he named his version of a primitive game called Black Pool as Snooker.’
He seized Ghote by the arm, swept away by enthusiasm.
‘Come over here. It’s all written up and framed.’
Ghote found himself propelled towards the long cue-rack – two of the cues in it were broken and others bent – where His Excellency read out for his benefit Sir Neville’s account of the historic moment.
‘“One of our party failed to hole a coloured ball close to a corner pocket, and I called out to him ‘Why, you’re a regular snooker’.” You see, my dear chap, at the Royal Military Academy in England first-year cadets were called snookers. It all fits in.’
‘Most interesting,’ Ghote said.
The lack of interest in his voice apparently did not impinge on His Excellency.
‘I tell you what, old chap,’ he said. ‘You must play a few shots on the table here and now. Just so that you can say you’ve actually put cue to ball on the very table on which Snooker was invented. Tell your grandchildren.’
Ghote, though he had no doubts about acquitting himself with a billiard cue, since an eye for a ball was one of the gifts he had been luckily endowed with from birth, prickled violently at His Excellency’s suggestion.
It seemed to him to be all a part of an attitude of airy frivolity which he had had hints of already. It went with looking on murder, not as the killing of a living person, but as a reason for writing concocted tales.
‘No, excuse me, sir,’ he said firmly. ‘As of today’s date I am investigating a most serious crime.’
‘Quite right, quite right, my dear fellow,’ His Excellency somewhat unexpectedly replied. ‘No doubt the secret of your success. Unremitting concentration, what?’
Ghote turned away and looked at the billiard table, as bare and monumentally still as when he had first seen it.
‘And the body of the marker, Pichu, was at the exact centre?’ he asked.
‘Saw it with my own eyes, before they took the poor fellow away. Lying there on his back, stab wound in his chest, little patch of blood on his white jacket. In the very centre of the table. He can’t have been put there for any other reason than the murderer, so to speak, saying “He deserved to die.” It’s a case of revenge against a blackmailer all right, take my word for it.’
‘But how was it that Pichu was in this room in the middle of the night only?’
‘Ah, forgot to explain that. Simple really. You see, he slept in here.’
‘In here?’
Ghote looked round. There were certainly the benches from which in past days no doubt groups of eager sahibs had watched thrilling games. There were some comfortable wicker chairs, too, if now dry and broken here and there. Near him there was even a sturdier affair in dark wood, with on it a brass plate recording that it had been presented in the year 1875 by Captain Winterbotham of the Madras Sappers. Pichu could have slept in moderate ease on any of them.
‘But you were telling that the Club has quarters for all servants,’ he said. ‘That none of them could have had access to the scene of the crime.’
‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Can see there’s nothing much gets past you. Ha. But Pichu was an exception to the rule. Slept in here to guard the Club trophies. Had done for countless years. Lay down on the shelf in front of that cupboard there where they were kept. You can see where the murderer forced the doors to make it look like a dacoity and deceive that idiot, Inspector Meenakshisundaram.’
‘These silver trophies were most valuable?’ Ghote asked.
‘Well, my dear fellow, they did have a certain value, yes. But that wasn’t why old Pichu slept here to guard them.’
Ghote felt puzzled.
‘Not because of the value of those objects?’
‘No, no. Or only because of their sentimental value. You see, some of them had the names of competition winners engraved on them, on little silver shields, you know, going back a hundred years or more.’
‘They were rolling trophies?’
‘Yes, yes. You kept the one you won for six months or so, and then it came back to the Club to be contested for again. Some historic names on some of them, you know. Major Jago, for one, after whom the Jago Room here’s named. Lots of others.’
‘Major Jago?’
‘You haven’t heard of Major Bob Jago?’
For a moment His Excellency looked as if he was beginning to doubt the brilliance of the man whose skills he had used all his influence to acquire, and Ghote felt a tiny leap of relief. But the moment did not last long.
‘Well, suppose a chap from Bombay side might not know about Jago,’ His Excellency conceded. ‘Was Master of the Nilgiri Hounds. One of the great hunting men of all time.’
He threw back his head and broke into a curious sort of chanting. Ghote realized, just in time, that it was verse.
‘Oh, it’s jolly to hunt with the Nilgiri pack, Major Bob with the horn and a straight-going jack.’
‘Please,’ Ghote said, after a properly reverent pause, ‘what is a straight-going jack?’
‘Oh, a jackal, old boy. Jackal. Can’t hunt the fox here, you know. But hill jackal’s always made a pretty good substitute. Not like his brother of the plains, nothing sneaky about your hill jackal.’
Ghote did not feel he had any comment to make.
His Excellency grunted.
‘Not that there’s all that much hunting nowadays,’ he said. ‘Not with the factories they’ve put up on the Downs, and nobody much with the money either except a few Army wallahs from the barracks over at Wellington.’
He sighed deeply for a past that had gone, days of leisured regularity and ordered existence.
Ghote, anxious to get down to some proper police work, moved away from him and went to the window which, from its still empty panes, must have been the one the thief had broken. Or the one that had been broken in order to lay a false trail.
He looked hard at the damaged area. But all the remaining pieces of glass had been removed and every trace of any splinters swept up. Nothing to be gained.
He then moved on to the cupboard from which the trophy with Major Jago’s famous name on it and the others had been taken.
‘If you want to grasp the real sentimental value of what’s gone,’ His Excellency said, joining him, ‘you ought to talk to old Bell. His name’s been on a trophy ever since he won the snooker contest back in the early fifties, though that was in a damn poor year actually.’
A gleam of gossipy malice lit up his leathery features.
‘Yes,’ he went on,