LITMIR.BIZ

      TWO

      The Great Detective. Ghote felt the confidence which had blossomed inside him with the first exhilarating whiff of cool Ooty air go spiralling sharply away.

      He was not any sort of a Great Detective. He was, he hoped, a good police officer. A competent detective. But it seemed to be just as he had feared when over the telephone back in Bombay he had heard the Assistant Commissioner say that the influential figure in Ooty considered him ‘the best there is’. He had been puffed up by that bloody British author into something far beyond his true status.

      A Great Detective. What was a Great Detective? Some super-best character like Sherlock Holmes? Someone who – his mind scrabbled among dimly remembered stories read as a boy – had solved, sucking at a pipe, mysteries baffling all Scotland Yard. Someone who with a lofty ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ had casually made clear utterly inexplicable events.

      Could he at once tell this Mr Surinder Mehta, ex-ambassador, one-time distinguished soldier in the British ranks, that he was no such thing as a Great Detective?

      He looked more closely at the tall figure confronting him with such easy assurance. In the lean, leathery face, immaculately shaved even at this late hour of the day, he saw a pair of disconcertingly fierce eyes. He was aware too that, though perhaps into his eighties, the former soldier’s bearing was still awesomely erect and commanding.

      ‘Well, but Your Excellency,’ he began. ‘That is, Your Excellence. Your Excellency, I am not …’

      He came to a halt.

      What had this influential person made of his stutterings?

      He appeared hardly to have heard them. The cool eyes in the lean face were looking at him still with an expression of simple expectancy. Waiting for the first pronouncement of the Great Detective.

      Ghote swallowed hard.

      ‘But, Your Excellence,’ he said, in lame substitution for the declaration he had found it not quite possible to make. ‘Your Excellency, I am not at all sure where I am to find boarding and lodging in Ooty. In Ootacamund, that is.’

      ‘Oh, all taken care of, my dear fellow. You’ll put up at the Club, of course. Only possible place really. I mean, you must be on the spot, mustn’t you? You remember how Poirot had to stay at that dreadful guest-house in Mrs McGinty’s Dead?’

      ‘Poirot?’ Ghote asked, repeating two unfamiliar syllables, completely baffled.

      ‘Hercule Poirot, old chap. Your distinguished predecessor, as it were. You’re India’s answer to Hercule Poirot, and to Lord Peter Wimsey and the others. Brilliant piece of work that double murder case you solved.’

      Then a sudden quick, almost suspicious look.

      ‘You have read your Agatha Christie, haven’t you?’

      ‘No,’ said Inspector Ghote.

      ‘No? No? Not read Agatha Christie? My dear chap, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. We’ll have to remedy that. We’ll have to remedy that. Why, when I was in the UK – I was Ambassador to Yuroglavia, you know, just after Independence, never actually got out to that pretty forsaken spot, just had an office in India House in London – well, when I was there, I tell you, I acquired such a liking for those books. Liking? No, such a love for them, it’s lasted me the rest of my life.’

      ‘But, yes,’ Ghote answered, feeling himself beginning to be swept away on this flood of warm reminiscence, ‘I am remembering now. I was once as a young man going through a book by that lady. It was called – It was called – Yes, The Murder of Robert Ockrent, I think. But, I am ashamed to say, I was altogether failing to discover who had committed that murder. And so, as one about to enter the police service, I did not attempt any more of those books.’

      ‘Well, I should imagine Roger Ackroyd would baffle even you, my dear chap. Especially if you were only a novice then. But you must battle it out with Dame Agatha again now. We’ll see to that. I can lend you a dozen at any time. Or there are plenty in the Nilgiri Library.’

      ‘Well, that is most kind. But if I am to be engaged in the investigation of a murder, I am doubting whether I would have much of time for light reading.’

      ‘Oh, but you mustn’t say that. Light reading? Agatha Christie and the others are much more than that. Those books, you know, show you the world as it ought to be. My dear fellow, when I read them first in England, I felt as if I was seeing things straight for the first time in my life. A world where the evil man, or the evil woman, by Jove, is always brought to justice in the end. That’s as things should be, you know. As things should be. Not like our wretched India today, I can assure you.’

      ‘Well, but—’

      ‘No, my dear chap. Those books are just marvellous. The worst of crimes uncovered by the best of men, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter, Mr Albert Campion, Hercule Poirot. Heroes every one.’

      ‘But,’ Ghote managed to break in, seeing a tiny chance of putting the objection he had wanted to make when he had first been hailed as the Great Detective. ‘But, Your Excellence—’

      He came to a stop. At the word Excellence he had seen the ex-ambassador stiffen minutely.

      So he had got it wrong. It was a black mark. But, come what may, he must say what he had to say.

      ‘Your Excellency,’ he began once more, with heavy emphasis. ‘Please, life is not at all as it is seeming to be for Mr Poirot and those others in books. What I am meaning is this: things are not always at all ordered in the life which we are living. You see, in that case of mine you were mentioning, I—’

      ‘But

Скачать книгу