LITMIR.BIZ

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so, was certainly an odd circumstance. And murder was by no means the modus operandi of the ordinary dacoit.

      So, let matters continue a little longer. See what happened, and take the first chance possible to have a talk with Meenakshisundaram. He might be able to put the whole thing straight with just one word.

      But first His Excellency’s five suspects, so-called suspects. To be confronted with them at dinner in this posh club …

      ‘Come along, my dear chap. I’m certainly peckish, even if you’re not.’

      Yet getting a meal did not prove as easy as Ghote, who found he was very hungry, had assumed it would be. At the door of the big dining room a Club servant barred their way.

      The fellow looked at His Excellency with an expression of mingled determination and dismay.

      ‘Sahib, it is By-law 13,’ he said.

      ‘By-law 13? Oh, no tie. No tie. Yes, of course.’

      His Excellency turned to Ghote.

      ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap,’ he said. ‘Never took in that you weren’t wearing a tie. And, of course, no one’s allowed in the Club dining room in European dress without one. But don’t despair. Just hold on a tick.’

      He disappeared.

      Ghote stood just outside the dining room staring in at its dark wainscoted walls and the round tables dotted about. At which of them were the five suspects seated?

      He did his best to ignore the blue-uniformed bearer who did not seem altogether sure that he would make no further attempt to breach By-law 13. He tried, too, to dismiss the decidedly appetizing odours that floated through the open doors.

      Luckily, His Excellency reappeared within a couple of minutes, carrying dangling in his hand a long silk tie, plain green in colour.

      ‘Not much of a match for your shirt, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘But it’s the only one I’ve got that doesn’t belong to some club or regiment you wouldn’t be entitled to wear.’

      ‘Thank you all the same,’ Ghote confined himself to saying, as he wound the luxurious silk round the neck of his by no means expensive pink-checked cotton shirt.

      Once he was properly attired the bearer stepped aside and with a salaam permitted them to enter.

      ‘Ah,’ His Excellency said in a low voice, ‘I’m glad to see we’ve got a full complement, every single suspect present and correct. You’ll be able to give them a good looking-over, and then when we’ve eaten I’ll introduce you and you can chat to them. You remember what Hercule Poirot says about talk?’

      ‘No,’ Ghote said, unable to suppress a little swirl of resentment at once again hearing the name of Agatha Christie’s detective. ‘No, I am not at all remembering.’

      ‘Oh yes, forgot you don’t know the works. Have to see about that before the night’s out. But what Poirot said is something like this: it is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject at all, sooner or later they give themselves away. Pretty clever, eh? Always remembered that.’

      ‘But—But …’

      Ghote decided to abandon objection to this curious method of detection. He was, after all, more or less under His Excellency’s orders, however odd, or alarming, they were.

      He buried himself in the menu card where, he saw, lamb cutlets jostled with vegetable curry and roly-poly pudding and apple crumble matched kheer and kulfi. But he found his appetite was not as sharp as he had thought. The prospect of parading round the dark, impressive room contriving conversations with members of this exclusive institution, whom he was also expected to regard as potential murderers, sat heavily on his stomach as if he had already consumed a monster helping of that roly-poly pudding.

      ‘Well now,’ His Excellency said, swiftly discarding his own menu and looking eagerly round the room, ‘where shall I begin? Hm, yes. The couple over there in the corner. Maharajah of Pratapgadh and his Maharani, the second or third maharani, I believe.’

      Ghote looked in the direction his host – and his Dr Watson – had indicated.

      He saw a handsome, straight-nosed man of forty or so, slightly running to fat, dressed in a gold-buttoned blue blazer and wearing a tie which, from its combination of ugly stripes, could only be that of some exclusive sporting organization. A typical Rajput, he thought.

      His wife, the second or third, was dressed in a deep blue silky blouse covered with a variety of gold chains and a pair of extremely tight white trousers. On her lap she was nursing a fluffy and dyspeptic-looking pekinese. The word ‘voluptuous’ came clicking into Ghote’s mind.

      ‘The Maharani?’ he asked His Excellency. ‘She is one of your five? There are ladies also staying in the Club?’

      ‘Yes, yes. There’s accommodation for married couples, and for single ladies. Which brings me to that person over there, Mrs Lucy Trayling, widow, long-time resident of Ooty, staying here temporarily owing to the illness of her ancient ayah, single servant she still has.’

      Ghote looked at Mrs Trayling.

      She was very much the British memsahib he remembered from his earliest boyhood, if a rather older version. She wore an aged tweed suit of an indeterminate browny-green colour. Iron grey hair straggled all round her head. And a large handbag lay dumped on the table to one side of her, wide open and sprawlingly tilted. On her other side was an even larger knitting-bag made out of some thick, flowery material. A sturdy pair of needles stuck out from a ball of pale mauve wool at its crammed top.

      A murderer, Ghote thought. Surely not. And yet, old women did commit murders sometimes. And Mrs Trayling looked wiry and strong enough, for all her age.

      But the next candidate His Excellency presented for inspection seemed almost as unlikely.

      ‘Now, two tables further along. Little fellow with his head stuck in that damn great book. Name of Godbole, some sort of academic. Not been here very long, about ten days. But in the Club all right on the night in question.’

      Ghote dutifully turned his gaze in the direction indicated. He saw a small, spry, almost monkey-like man with a cap of wavy black hair and large hornrimmed spectacles perched on a hooked nose. A Maharashtrian brahmin by the look of him, coupled with that name. He was, as His Excellency had said, deeply absorbed in a large, leather-bound volume, almost crouching over it. As Ghote discreetly observed him, he picked up a strong ivory-bladed paperknife and slit apart two of the book’s pages as yet unseen by any prying, curious eye. In front of him a vegetarian dish of phool gobi ki bhaji stood neglected.

      Well, Ghote thought, surely one suspect who is hardly a suspect at all. An academic, a typical absent-minded professor type. And a new arrival. No, one of His Excellency’s five at least could be dismissed out of hand.

      A bearer at his elbow was murmuring something.

      ‘What? What?’

      ‘Sir, I am requesting: military or brahmin?’

      A feeling of dazed bewilderment came over Ghote. Was the fellow asking him which was the most likely murderer of the billiards marker? The Maharajah, military descendant of a long line of warlike Rajput princes, or the stooping brahmin pedant?

      ‘Means do you want the English menu or the Indian’, His Excellency explained. ‘Always use those terms here. Come from the British days, of course.’

      ‘Oh. Oh, yes. Vegetarian. Er—brahmin. Yes, brahmin.’

      ‘Very good, sahib.’

      As soon as the bearer was out of earshot His Excellency leant forward and once more murmured in Ghote’s ear.

      ‘The big Moslem over there.’

      Ghote turned, trying not to look as if he were doing so.

      ‘Name of Habibullah, Mr Ali Akbar Habibullah. Been here in

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