The Body in the Billiard Room. H. R. f. Keating

      

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Author’s Note

       Introduction

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

      THE BODY IN THE BILLIARD ROOM

      H. R. F. Keating

      This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

      First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Hutchinson.

      This eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital,

      an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

      Copyright © 1987 by H. R. F. Keating.

      Introduction copyright © 2020 by Vaseem Khan.

      The right of H. R. F. Keating to be identified as the author of this work and the right of Vaseem Khan to be identified as the author of the introduction has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

       A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0398-4 (e-book)

      Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

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      Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

      Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

      Author’s Note

      The setting for this story is not so much the South-Indian hill resort of Ootacamund, familiarly Ooty, as Dream-Ooty, a mingling of Ooty as it ought to be with some of Ooty as it is and as it was. Consequently, none of the people portrayed – not even Inspector Ghote himself – is anything other than an upswelling of imagination.

      INTRODUCTION

      Sitting on my bookshelf in my east London study is a twenty-year-old and somewhat dog-eared copy of The Perfect Murder. Some of the pages are marked by my own all but illegible scribbles, others are crinkled by a combination of damp and rainwater; not just any rain, mind you, but honest-to-goodness monsoon rain. I bought the book from a roadside seller while living in Mumbai in my twenties, the sort of grinning, roadside sprite that is as much in evidence in H.R.F. Keating’s 1960s vision of India as he was in the India I found myself in. I’d gone there in 1997 to work as a management consultant, and ended up spending ten wonderful years ‘in-country’. My parents hailed from the subcontinent but I’d grown up in Thatcher’s Britain – all I knew of India came from hazy memories handed down to me by my father (he’d been unceremoniously shunted across the newly-created border to Pakistan as a child during Partition) and bits and pieces I’d gleaned from Bollywood movies.

      The India that I discovered was a nation on the cusp of transformation, a country beginning the journey from a semi-industrialised agrarian economy – the post-colonial India that Keating introduced to us decades earlier and that had largely stagnated since – to the status, today, of superpower-in-waiting. A country of swamis and snake charmers – as it had always been – but now, increasingly, a country of call-centres and coffee shops, of shopping malls and software firms, of MTV and McDonald’s. A country that Inspector Ghote would find both recognisable and wholly beyond his imagining.

      By the time I returned to the UK, a decade later, I had already decided that I would encapsulate those incredible memories of India into a novel. The result was The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, the first in my Baby Ganesh Agency series. These crime stories, featuring a policeman forced into early retirement from the Mumbai police service and subsequently compelled to ‘adopt’ a one-year-old baby elephant, are my attempt to chronicle the tumultuous landscape of the India that I observed first-hand. Five novels and two novellas in the series later, I can admit that these tales of the subcontinent owe a debt to H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote series.

      Back when I was casting around for a suitable template upon which to base The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, my eye alighted