“Mr. Quayne, kindly be telling me, if you are even able, exactly what was occurring? Facts only.”
Across the poet’s chalky face there came for an instant a flush of pinkness, whether of shame or anger it was impossible to tell.
“Very well,” he said in a rather more businesslike manner. “It was like this. After we Three Wise Men from the West had given our reading at the British Council there was a reception for us at Professor Goswami’s house. Little spicy bits brought round by a creepy-looking servant and nothing at all to drink. If you don’t count orange juice.”
Ghote once more felt an urge to defend Indian hospitality, even offered by a creepy servant, if creepy the man really was. But, before he could find the right words, with a shudder of distaste the British poet went back to his account.
“And then each one of us was given, or we had thrust into our hands, more like, by someone called Mrs. Namita Rai, a copy of her poetical works, entitled — would you believe — In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Well, naturally, none of us wanted to lug something like that all round the rest of India. So, as it turned out, we each of us contrived discreetly to leave our copies in various parts of the hotel we had been put up at, the Imperial. I hid mine in an inconspicuous corner of what they call the Business Centre, where I was sending off some faxes. Arnold Brudge stuffed his down the side of one of those big sofas in the foyer, and that idiot Reymond left his in the tiny hotel bookshop. In imitation, he said, kept on saying, of that Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”
“I am well-knowing that tale,” Ghote put in, keeping his literary end up.
“Well, everybody knows it. But the thing was — and this is just about as stupid as you can get — the bloody books had been dedicated to each of us by name. So in less than an hour they were all three brought back to our rooms by a bowing and scraping, tip-seeking hotel servant.”
Ghote saw the joke. And kept a straight face.
“But why are you telling all this?” he asked. “Kindly stick one hundred percent to point in hand.”
The foremost poet of the Electronic Age drew in a sharp sigh.
“This is the point,” he snapped. “The bloody ridiculous point of it all. You see, we were invited to Professor Goswami’s again next day. Plunging out into the bloody cold smog just to drink a cup of milky damn tea and look at this Eliot poem that had somehow found its way to India and been totally forgotten ever since.”
“That is Mr. T. F. Eliot, expired?”
“Expired?” The poet gave a cold giggle. “Yes, I suppose you could say that. Now we’ve entered the Electronic Age, Eliot and all his stuff has pretty well expired.”
“So what was happening, please, at this second visit to late Professor Goswami?”
But it was from Arnold Brudge and not Electronic Age Brian Quayne that Ghote eventually heard his most coherent account of how a copy of Mrs. Namita Rai’s poetical works had led to the arrest on suspicion of murder of his erstwhile friend Henry Reymond.
“Henry Reymond,” said the massive man opposite, wide chest stretching a rough wool, high-collared, tree-brown pullover to bursting point, two slabs of raw red hands flat on the table in front of him, “that fat slob, he’d faint dead away if he so much as saw a hawk swoop to its kill. He’d piss himself if he heard a dog-fox scream in lust. He’d puke at the smell of a decent bit of blood.”
“Yes, yes,” Ghote had answered sharply, feeling he ought at least to defend a little his friend of long ago. “But, please, I was asking what was happening when you, all three, were going to Professor Goswami’s to examine this poem they are saying is so valuable.”
“Oh, that. Well, you see, according to bloody Henry Reymond he had taken with him his copy of In the Footsteps of Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley. He says he wanted to hide it in the room where that wretched woman made him accept it. But, because apparently I’d told him to for God’s sake shut up about his stupid Edgar Allan Poe, he never said a word to either of us about his sneaky little plan. Then, after Goswami was murdered that night — probably some intruder, I don’t know — the police found the bloody book in the room. It was conspicuous enough, for God’s sake, hand-bound in fancy red silk. But now Goswami’s servant swears it wasn’t there before the murder. Dare say the fellow could be right, the way he was going about all the time with a cloth over his shoulder looking for something to dust.”
The mountainous poet gave a snort of contempt. Ghote felt puzzled.
“But you, Mr. Brudge,” he asked, “were you seeing Mr. Reymond leave that book there? Can you provide confirmation itself?”
His question was answered with a single long, muffled roar. Only on the end of it were words.
“... bother with anything bar Nature. Not what a great slob like Reymond might be doing.”
Ghote’s hopes sank away. The poet of the Electronic Age had been just as unhelpful over this point. And it was a vital one. If no one who knew Mr. Henry Reymond had seen him hide that silk-bound volume among Professor Goswami’s crammed bookshelves, then the chances of persuading the Delhi police that his old acquaintance was not a murderer were slim almost to vanishing point.
“So,” he asked desperately, “you cannot be stating definitely whether or not this book by Mrs. Rai was in Professor Goswami’s room prior to the event of murder?”
“Said I can’t, didn’t I?”
It felt like being crushed by a wall of ice.
“Thank you, Mr. Brudge.” He roused himself. “And may I say I am hoping one day I would read some of your very-very nice poetry.”
“Not nice. Christ’s sake.”
Ghote retreated.
Perhaps Mr. Henry Reymond himself would, asked the right questions in the right way, be able to produce some proof he had not returned to Professor Goswami’s in the dead of night in order to steal this newfound valuable poem. Then it would be clear he had not been disturbed by the professor, had not let fall the works of Mrs. Rai, and had not then, as the Delhiwallahs believed, struck the professor down.
But now all the poet of the once-upon-a-time Raj could do, ask him what he would, was to bleat out that he had never left his hotel room that night, and that he had, he had, he had put Mrs. Rai’s book onto a shelf in Professor Goswami’s room during his afternoon visit.
“Inspector, I know I did. I know it.”
“But, please, was anyone seeing?”
For one quiet moment the crime writer/poet sat and thought. But it was for one moment only. Then panic and hysteria set in again.
“No one saw me. No one. Oh God, I wish they had. Then I’d be believed. But— But, you see, that servant seemed to be everywhere I was when I was about to get rid of that awful book. So in the end I just turned my back and stuffed it into the first place I saw.”
“But where was that itself?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. All I know is, Professor Goswami was alive and well when I left. I told him how deeply I admired the Eliot manuscript, and then I made that farewell gesture of putting your hands together — one has to make an effort to show you don’t feel superior — and we all three got a taxi back to the hotel.”
“That was the newly found poem of late Mr. T. F. Eliot?” Ghote asked, hoping for some last tiny corroborative detail.
Henry Reymond gave him a chill look.