Last Victim of the Monsoon Express

by Vaseem Khan

  ‘However, one day, the deputy secretary of the Ministry for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare visited the state, to promote the scheme – he was particularly keen to engage smaller firms. He gave an impassioned speech to a group of start-ups. Afterwards, he asked us to write up grant requests, which we all duly did. In total the sum that we were collectively advised to request from the central coffers was the equivalent of ten million dollars. It would have been enough to get all our businesses off the ground and see us each through at least three years of research, production and trading. With the secretary’s support, the grants sailed through government channels and were duly approved.

  ‘Within a month, the first tranche of funds was transferred into accounts we had been asked to set up. The day after they were due to arrive I went to check on my account. To my horror, I discovered that almost all of the money had vanished. It had been withdrawn as cash and spirited away. When I queried this, I was told that I had misunderstood the terms of the arrangement and that it was none of my concern. When I checked around with the other start-ups, I discovered that all had suffered the same fate.

  ‘You can imagine what had happened, of course. We had been tricked into helping pull off another of the scams that have become commonplace in our country. The Americans have a wonderful term: patsy. We were all patsies. You see, tech start-ups in India were a relatively new phenomenon back then. We had very little voice. No one wanted to listen to us accusing a respected government official of scamming us.

  ‘The blow was crushing to many of us. Tech start-ups burn through a lot of cash. Without the grant money most of them folded, including mine. A lot of people lost their life savings, and those of their families, even their homes. Everything they had poured into the business. Some walked away disillusioned, others were broken. One even took his own life.’ She stopped again, anger and sorrow warring over her features. ‘The man responsible for all of this, the man who orchestrated the scam, the then deputy secretary of the Ministry for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, was Neil Bannerjee.’

  So there it was. Chopra had been half expecting something like this, but it was still unsettling to hear Ribeiro confirm his suspicions.

  ‘What really happened in his cabin last night?’

  ‘I went there late, around midnight, when I was almost certain no one else would be up. He was awake and delighted to see me. He thought his earlier attempts at seduction had paid off. His eagerness quickly faded once I told him who I was and why I had paid such a large sum of money to board the Monsoon Express. You see, Chopra, ever since my first start-up went under, I have nursed a desire to get even, not just with Bannerjee, but with all the Bannerjees that continue to prey on the ordinary citizens of our country. Somewhere, someone has to take a stand.

  ‘When I heard about the Monsoon Express and Bannerjee’s role in leading the delegation, I knew that the opportunity had finally arisen for me to not only gain my revenge but also to maximise publicity for my cause. The eyes of the country are on us. My plan was to expose him when we got to Delhi. To ruin his reputation, so that he would have to be replaced on this mission. It would have been the ultimate humiliation for him, coming just before his moment of glory.

  ‘He became hostile, threatened to have me arrested by the on-board security. I told him to do his worst. I wasn’t the same young woman he had swindled all those years ago; I couldn’t be pushed around. I had built a successful business from the ashes that his fraud had left behind. I was wealthier than he could imagine. And in India wealth equals power. I told him that I would spend every last rupee I had to bring him down, by whatever means it took. That rattled him. Men like Bannerjee always think they have the advantage because others will never stoop to the same depths as they will. But I assured him that I would stop at nothing to destroy him.’

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t,’ said Chopra.

  ‘I didn’t kill him, Chopra, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t intend to. But things got out of hand. The rage that you’ve nursed for so many years—’

  ‘Stop!’ She all but shouted this. In that instant, he sensed the fury that lay coiled within the woman. She seemed to realise this and took a deep breath. ‘I confronted him, but I didn’t kill him. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted him to admit his crime to the world. I wanted to shame him. Whoever killed him took that away from me.’

  ‘Why did you take the chess piece?’

  ‘I don’t know. I saw his desk, his room, how meticulous everything was. I realised he was one of those people who had to have everything just so. I guessed it would irritate him no end to discover that he was missing a piece from his precious chess set.’

  ‘Was it his suggestion or yours? To play chess?’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The game of chess,’ said Chopra. ‘It just seems strange. After all, he only had one thing on his mind, and you had gone there with your own agenda. How did you end up playing chess?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t the one playing chess with him. The board was already there, mid-game, when I arrived.’

  Five minutes later, Chopra was back in the dead man’s suite. He wasn’t certain whether he believed Mary Ribeiro’s protestations of innocence but her claim that she had not been the one playing chess with Bannerjee had struck him as genuine.

  But if not her, then who?

  It was one of those details that had become lodged in his throat, like a wishbone.

  As he gazed down at the board, he realised that the game itself had only been in its early stages when it was interrupted. From the arrangement of the pieces he could tell the Italian Gambit had been deployed, with white attempting to control the centre of the board. It was a common opening, demonstrating a familiarity with the game.

  Who was Bannerjee’s mysterious opponent?

  As he continued to look down at the board, it seemed to him that those sixty-four particoloured squares represented the whole sorry saga of seventy years of Indo-Pak politics, move and countermove, aggression and defence, feint and counter-feint. He was suddenly struck by an image, of two men hunched over the board, playing chess not for the pleasure of the game, but for the symbolic battle that it represented, a feud of nations . . . Excitement gripped him. But how to prove it? How to verify his hunch?

  As he considered the problem, he realised that there was a way.

  He made his way back down the train, through the lounge where Ganesha was now entertaining his audience by slurping up water from an ice bucket and shooting a jet of it into another bucket. A round of applause set the little elephant’s ears spinning. Chopra had no time to stop. He hurtled through into the dining car and the galley.

  Here he found Belzoni, the chef, filleting a halibut.

  ‘I need corn starch, a measuring cup, a candle, a ceramic bowl, a knife and a mixing bowl.’ He raised a hand to forestall the chef’s protest. ‘I have no time to explain.’

  When the objects were gathered before him, he set to work.

  First, he lit the candle and held it below the ceramic bowl. Within minutes a layer of soot had coated the bottom. He used the knife to scrape the soot into the mixing bowl. He repeated the process until he had a generous quantity of soot.

  Around him the chef and his team looked on in mystification.

  Next, Chopra mixed an equal quantity of corn starch with the soot, resulting in an ashy powder. He poured the powder into a small container, then hurried back up the length of the train to the murdered man’s suite, picking up Homi Contractor along the way. Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he set to work.

  Standing over the chessboard, he picked up each of the pieces that had been moved from their starting positions – careful to hold them by the base – and sprinkled some of the home-made fingerprint powder onto them. He then used sections of clear plastic tape to lift prints from each piece, before pressing the tape down onto a white sheet of paper. By the time he h
ad repeated the process with each of the pieces he had six prints – three from the black pieces and three from the white.

  The prints were far from perfect. The shape of the chess pieces made the process of retrieving prints less than efficient. But their sheer size, and the rosewood, had worked in his favour, allowing decent-sized prints to be deposited.

  ‘What now?’ said Homi. ‘You’ll have to fingerprint everyone on the train to compare these against.’

  Chopra acknowledged this. ‘Yes. But it would not take that long. Before that, however, I must check one more thing.’

  He searched Bannerjee’s desk and found an ink-pad. Approaching the bed, he lifted back the sheet, grabbed the dead man’s hand, and pressed the thumb and index finger of his right hand – Bannerjee was right-handed; he recalled this from the dinner the night before, watching him lift his glass so that his colleague might pour him some wine – onto the pad before transferring them to a clean sheet of paper. He compared them with a magnifying glass to the prints from the chess pieces.

  ‘White,’ he said eventually. ‘Bannerjee was playing white.’

  He had expected no less. A man like Bannerjee would seek any advantage that he could get.

  ‘Do you want me to get everyone together?’ asked Homi. ‘For the fingerprinting?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Chopra. ‘I have a hunch as to where to begin.’

  He picked up the sheet of prints and the ink-pad and headed out of the cabin.

  Moments later, he was knocking on the door of Hassan Sher Agha’s suite.

  He entered to find the Pak politician penning a letter at his desk, an empty lunch plate at his elbow.

  ‘I hope you come bearing news of progress,’ he asked as Chopra entered the room.

  ‘Possibly.’

  Chopra set down the ink-pad. ‘Would you mind? I would like to take your fingerprints.’

  Agha seemed set to protest, but then simply shrugged his shoulders.

  Within minutes, Chopra had his answer.

  His instincts had proved correct.

  ‘You were in Bannerjee’s cabin last evening,’ he said. ‘These prints were taken from his chess set. Why did you deny being with him?’

  Agha’s mouth compressed into a thin line beneath his moustache. ‘Should I have willingly walked myself onto the gallows? Do you think I would have got a fair hearing from the Indian delegation?’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What time were you in his cabin?’

  ‘At around nine-thirty.’

  Chopra considered this. The timing didn’t fit the window for the time of the murder, which, according to Homi, had taken place between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. Was Agha telling the truth? If so, did it verify his claim of innocence?

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Bannerjee invited me. He thought we might talk things through, quietly, away from the others. As the leaders of our respective delegations. It was his suggestion that we play chess as we talked.’

  ‘Why did you abandon the game?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Agha hesitated. ‘Because the man was insufferable. His idea of talking things through was to try and put me in my place. He kept going on about India the global superpower, Pakistan the poor cousin. His notion was that I should be grateful to be part of this mission. He was the star of the show and I merely his sidekick. I tell you, it made my blood boil.’

  ‘So much so that you could have killed him?’

  Agha’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, I could have killed him. Throttled him. Bashed him over the head with his own chessboard. But violence is what has got us into this mess in the first place. Violence is not the answer and never has been.’ He stood and moved to the sideboard to pour himself a drink. ‘I admit: I was in his suite last night. But I wasn’t there for long. When I left he was very much alive.’

  An Emergency situation

  He was very much alive. As Chopra made his way back to Neil Bannerjee’s cabin, these words stayed with him. They seemed to be the common thread connecting the testimonies of all those he had managed to place in the murdered man’s suite on the night of his death. James Fairbrother, Kimi Rawal, Pravin Sharma, Mary Ribeiro, Justice Khan, Hassan Sher Agha.

  Who was lying? Who was telling the truth?

  With so little time to investigate there was the distinct possibility he had missed something.

  He went to the desk and sat behind it. Taking out his notebook, he riffled through his notes. The clock ticked on the wall.

  Twenty minutes later, he leaned back and closed his eyes.

  The facts of the case continued to float behind his eyelids. During his career on the force, he had often pictured an investigation as a maze. At the beginning the walls were too high to see beyond. But as the available information mounted, he would slowly rise into the air until his perspective was so far above the maze he could see the whole labyrinth laid out below him.

  Who had killed Bannerjee? Why?

  It always came back to that elusive why.

  The worst cases were always the ones when there were no motives or too many. This was one of the latter.

  His phone rang, interrupting his train of thought. Rangwalla.

  ‘What have you discovered?’ he asked.

  ‘I found your retailer Patnayak & Sons. It’s a general store, been around for decades, handed down from father to son and now to granddaughter. The paterfamilias was a meticulous man, a great one for record-keeping. Kept great big ledgers setting down every transaction. Apparently, he was paranoid about a raid from the tax authorities. The granddaughter was only too happy to help.’ He paused; Chopra heard the pages of a notebook turning. ‘The case containing that particular bobbin was sold on 13 February 1977 to a man named Subir Roy, a local tailor. Each case is identified by a serial number – all the bobbins in that case are stamped with the same number so that they can be traced back to their plant and date of manufacture. Roy had apparently requested that exact type of bobbin from Patnayak & Sons, who had then ordered it from Usha International on his behalf.’

  ‘Is he still alive? Did you go to his premises?’

  ‘I did. Not that there was much to find. The funny thing is his business shut down just a few days after he bought that bobbin. He was killed in an altercation with police officers. They were rounding up men in the locality for the sterilisation programme. This was all during the Emergency, of course.’

  A flag began to wave at the back of Chopra’s mind. Something Pravin Sharma had told him. About Neil Bannerjee and Sanjay Gandhi, the man who had risen to prominence during the Emergency, two years during which Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, had declared a state of emergency, allowing her to rule by decree, to suspend elections and curb civil liberties. With her political opponents thrown into prison and the press heavily censored, the world’s largest democracy effectively became a dictatorship.

  During this period, her son Sanjay became one of the most powerful men on the subcontinent.

  Unelected to any office, he nevertheless spearheaded various ‘improvement’ campaigns for the government. From the outset, Sanjay’s approach was heavy-handed. In 1976, his attempt at beautifying the area around Delhi’s Turkman Gate led to 150 deaths when the police opened fire on displaced slum dwellers living there. But Sanjay was remembered chiefly for his draconian approach to family planning. His compulsory sterilisation programme led to mass protests, but was forced through anyway using the nation’s police apparatus. The problem was that local politicians had been given ‘targets’ to meet. Failure to meet those targets led to disfavour. Pravin Sharma had told Chopra that Neil Bannerjee – then a local politico in Mumbai – had been one of those whose stock had risen during the programme, that he was considered a friend by Sanjay. Sanjay Gandhi had been notorious for only keeping friends who were useful to him. Had Bannerjee led a local sterilisation campaign and thus found favour with him? If so, how was it connected to his death?

  ‘Wh
at can you tell me about Subir Roy?’

  ‘Not a great deal. I spoke to an old man who used to know him, a neighbour. Roy was about thirty years old then, a widower with a young child. He was dead set against the whole forced, you know, snip thing.’

  ‘Snip?’ echoed Chopra.

  ‘Vasectomy,’ said Rangwalla, lowering his voice.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Can’t say I blame him,’ continued his deputy. ‘When the police showed up and started rounding up all the local men he got into a tussle and was cracked over the bonce for his trouble. They carted him off anyway. Turns out that he was bleeding into the brain. He died in hospital later that day. It was chalked down as an accident; at least, no one was ever taken to task for it. Turns out Bannerjee personally attended the raid that day. Wanted to make a point, grab a little publicity for himself.’

  ‘What happened to Roy’s child?’

  ‘Ended up in an orphanage. I took the liberty of hunting the place down and asking a few questions. Thought you’d want to know.’

  As Rangwalla read out his notes, Chopra felt the thrill of synapses firing, connections flickering into view. By the time his deputy had finished, he all but had his answer.

  He ended the call, then went to find Singh. ‘I want you to gather all the passengers together in the dining car in one hour,’ he said. ‘It’s time to unmask a killer.’ As Singh scurried away, Chopra took out his phone again.

  ‘But first,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I need to make some calls to Delhi.’

  Precisely one hour later, the dining car was full, some seated, some standing, stewards and staff crowded around the doorway at the end of the carriage. All were infected by nervous anticipation. The murder, and Chopra’s subsequent investigation, had been the only topic of conversation for almost twelve hours.

  As darkness fell outside, everyone sensed that matters were finally coming to a head.