The Body in the Billiard Room. H. R. f. Keating
already cheerfully tucking into – but why was he already eating the last course? – he might rise up and float gently away. Dressed in white, from the round lacy cap on his head to the elephant-sized muslin trousers on his legs, he certainly hardly had the air of the ex-official His Excellency had said he was. He looked indeed, with the stout ebony silver-headed walking stick leaning on the chair beside him, more like an Urdu poet, if of a more earthy nature than many – how he was enjoying that pudding – and it was hard to think of him too as any sort of killer.
Not that murderers could be detected by their physical appearance, Ghote thought. He had seen too many mild-looking men sent to Thana Gaol to be hanged on the second Thursday of the month to be in any doubt about that.
‘Well, there you have them’, His Excellency said. ‘Five suspects.’
Ghote sat in silence. The bearer returned with bowls of celery soup, a dish apparently both military and brahmin. The bowls, which were smoothly thick and white, had on them, Ghote saw, the Ooty Club crest. They seemed to gleam with assurance.
‘And you are certain, Your Excellency,’ he asked, ‘that one of these five persons only must be the murderer of the said Pichu, billiard marker in this Club?’
‘Ah, no, my dear fellow, you don’t catch me out that way. Five suspects, yes. But not just one of them may have committed the murder. Agatha Christie’s taught me better than that. Remember Evil Under the Sun? Two in combination, eh? Perhaps the two who seem least likely to have any connection between them? Mr Habibullah, retired officer of Indian Railways, who worked, if I remember rightly, in Cochin a good many miles from here, and, say, Mrs Trayling, who to my knowledge hasn’t left Ooty since she and Brigadier Trayling retired here when he left the Indian Army? Or … Or, no, there’s always The Orient Express.’
‘Mr Habibullah has some connection with such a train?’
‘Quite right, my dear fellow. Him and Mrs Trayling and the Maharajah and Maharani and little Godbole, all in it together, eh? It’s a possibility. It’s a possibility we shouldn’t altogether neglect. But, assuming in this case there’s just one solitary murderer, who are you going to point to now you’ve seen the field, my dear fellow?’
‘I would not be pointing anywhere whatsoever,’ Ghote managed to say at last.
‘Quite right, quite right, old chap. The Great Detective never gives his thoughts away, not even to his Watson.’
But Ghote felt determined not to be prevented once more from saying what he had begun.
‘Oh, that is not at all what I was meaning,’ he declared. ‘I was meaning that no detective would fasten upon any criminal without evidences.’
‘Quite right, my dear chap. Quite right. Observation as well as logical deduction, eh? Right then, as soon as we’ve finished going the rounds here, we’ll take a look-see at the billiard room.’
‘That would be a very, very good idea,’ Ghote said, thinking that actually setting eyes on the scene of the crime might even produce some evidence that was more than extraordinary ideas out of books.
‘Yes,’ His Excellency went on, ‘and there you’ll see what all the rest of us have missed, eh? The observance of trifles. What none of us thought was even significant.’
Ghote felt a new depression settle within him as if he, too, was eating the weighty plain boiled potatoes that accompanied His Excellency’s military lamb cutlets.
But more immediate trouble was about to break over him.
They had been eating in silence for a while when His Excellency suddenly looked up.
‘Habibullah,’ he exclaimed.
‘Mr Habibullah? You have thought of some circumstance that is telling against him?’
‘No, no. No such luck, my dear fellow. Or not unless you think it’s a sign of guilt sometimes to eat only the pudding.’
‘Pudding? It is roly-poly, yes? That is some sign of guilt?’
‘No, no. But it does mean that the chap is going to get up and wander away at any moment. Seen him do it times without number. Unpredictable, you know. Unpredictable. So it’s up Guards and at ’em, eh?’
‘You mean I should talk to him? Now?’
‘That’s the ticket, my dear chap. The Poirot technique. Look forward to seeing you at it.’
And His Excellency jumped up and plunged off in the direction of the table where, sure enough, the big Moslem was rising to his feet.
Ghote followed.
But what was he to say to this retired railways official? What exactly was it that was the profound belief of this Poirot fellow His Excellency kept bringing up to the fore? Talk for long enough on any subject and the suspect in question will let out some damning fact? Yes, but on what subject? And for how long?
He had hit on no answer before he found himself face to face with the enormous, white-clad Moslem. His Excellency performed brief introductions.
‘Mr Ghote,’ he concluded cryptically, ‘is here for a few days at my invitation.’
‘Ah,’ Mr Habibullah replied, a wide, dreamy smile appearing on his air-blown cheeks. ‘I trust you will find Ooty as altogether pleasant as I do myself, Mr Ghote. It is, you know, pure unreality.’
‘Unreality?’ Ghote echoed, wondering where on earth a conversation that had started this oddly would go.
‘Yes, yes. You must already have noticed as much, in however brief a time you have been with us. It is England here, my dear sir. England, is it not? And we are, or so we suppose, in India. There’s unreality for you. Delightful, disconcerting unreality.’
‘Well, yes,’ Ghote cautiously agreed. ‘I am noticing many things that seem most English. So, yes, there must be some unreality. Yes. I am quite able to see what you are meaning.’
The balloon-like Moslem’s eyes lit up.
‘You are? My dear sir, a fellow soul. This is a happy chance. A happy chance in a world that often seems to me altogether too much regulated, too much ordered.’
He beamed at Ghote.
And Ghote, whose belief on the whole was just the opposite, did not have the heart not to smile agreement.
Besides, he needed to keep the Poirot conversation going.
‘I am supposing,’ he ventured, ‘that it was your daily tasks that gave you this feeling? You were working, I understand, for the railways.’
‘Indeed it was, my dear sir. Indeed it was. You know, it was I, I myself and no other, who was responsible when I was in Delhi for framing the chapter on “Disallowances and Objections” in the handbook known as Indian Railway Administration and Finance?’
‘No,’ Ghote said, ‘I was not knowing. May I offer congratulations? It must have been a most comprehensive undertaking.’
‘No, sir, no. Congratulations are not proper. Commiseration would be much more gratefully received. Sir, such order, such regulation, such devising of rules: it warped my life. Absolutely. Indeed, it was only the thought that the majority of those rules were destined to be consistently ignored and regularly flouted that saved me at times from a suicide’s grave.’
‘Yes, I am seeing that,’ Ghote replied, unable to think of any way at all, subtle or not, of moving the conversation nearer to the murder in the Club’s billiard room.
He could, he thought, have mentioned how his own life was ruled for the most part by attempting to see that the Indian Penal Code with all its sections and sub-sections was strictly adhered to. He could have added that this often could be managed only by discreetly ignoring the equally strict provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code. But His Excellency, by the way he had carefully omitted to mention that the guest he had brought to Ooty was a detective, had