The Dead Don't Confess

by Monabi Mitra

  The call went unanswered. Ghosh put down the receiver, thought for a moment and rang up the inspector in charge of the lock-up.

  ‘Bring the man from Fulia called Bishu to my room,’ he said.

  ‘But Fulia Bishu is being questioned by Sheena Madam in hers,’ answered the inspector, puzzled.

  Oh! Clearly this was unexpected. Crime Branch seemed to be bubbling with a powerful effervescence today. Only he sat here sulking and exterminating ants.

  The door opened and an orderly brought in a banana leaf. Inside was curled a clammy dosa minus chutney.

  ‘Where’s the sambar?’ asked Ghosh.

  ‘All finished,’ murmured the orderly. ‘Tea?’

  Ghosh shook his head and stared malevolently at the plastic dosa. The time was clearly out of joint for him and if he needed to impress Virendra Singh he would have to do something drastic. Ghosh mopped his forehead and frowned, then took some kind of a decision and pressed the bell for his peon again.

  ‘Tea?’ The peon was unusually persistent, perhaps to make up for the dosa which lay abandoned on the table.

  ‘My car,’ snapped Ghosh.

  He was almost at the door before he turned back, picked up the banana leaf and its contents and tossed them into the dustbin.

  * * *

  The man who glared at him at the office of Lotus Productions had bleached blonde hair, a diamond in his left ear and a crystal bracelet on his right wrist. Ghosh, who disapproved of tattoos, piercings and hair colour as a matter of principle, frowned as he explained his intent.

  ‘Mala is away at a shooting,’ said the man ungraciously. ‘Farmhouse near Barrackpore. Won’t be back for three days. Who are you?’

  ‘CID,’ said Ghosh grandly and waited for effect.

  ‘You don’t say so!’ The man looked unperturbed. ‘Why do you want her? She had broken up with the producer who got killed a long while back. Nothing much there.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide. I want to speak to her now. On the telephone.’

  The man raised his eyebrows in horror.

  ‘Do you have any idea how a movie shoot progresses? She’s probably in the middle of take five. Try around lunchtime.’

  ‘It is lunchtime. Phone her now.’

  The man sighed, took out his phone and dialled a number. Ghosh could hear a raucous movie song play as the caller tune. The man kept time by drumming his fingers and, for a while, finger-drum and caller tune went on and on till Ghosh decided to put brakes on the situation.

  ‘Here’s my number,’ he ordered. ‘Tell her to ring me as soon as she can.’

  ‘’Course.’ The man stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket without glancing at it and looked instead at Ghosh with palpable relief.

  ‘What’s the address of the farmhouse?’ pursued Ghosh.

  ‘Are you going to track her down there?’

  ‘Probably,’ threatened Ghosh. He hadn’t intended to, but didn’t feel like divulging that to the man.

  The man smiled and displayed a row of paan-stained teeth.

  ‘Great! Imagine the publicity. “Police torture actress at film shooting.” I can see the headlines that will appear the next day. The publicity section can get something wonderful out of that!’

  ‘I can think of something even more impressive. “Cinema star tries her hand at real-life shooting. B-grade actress arrested.” How about that, huh?’

  Having delivered a suitable exit line, Ghosh left.

  * * *

  Sheena Sen was sitting at her office table and studying Bishu, who looked as if he might pass out any moment. His trousers were patchy with sweat and grease, the white of his upturned collar was grey, his face unshaven, his lips were cracked and his hair stood on end like that of a cartoon character in shock. For a moment there had been hope when he heard that a ‘police madam’ was to interrogate him, but one look at Sheena Sen’s sharp frown had obliterated all optimism and his eyes had misted over. Sheena tapped her tabletop and began.

  ‘I’ve gone through your statement of activities on the night of the 20th and found that you were out bursting crackers with your friends. Is that true?’

  It was.

  ‘And on the same night someone killed Piloo Adhikary by injecting him with a high dose of anaesthesia commonly used for animals. Do you know anything about that?’

  Bishu stared at her. ‘I heard he was shot.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t,’ said Sheena Sen before adding unkindly, ‘and you are the main suspect.’

  Fear rushed into Bishu’s eyes as he quavered out to Sheena Sen to believe him and let him go; he had nothing to do with the killing.

  ‘I had seen him the day before his death. He gave me my pay and a thousand rupees more for the festive season. Why would I kill him? What would I gain by it?’

  ‘You had a quarrel,’ said Sheena smoothly. ‘Over money matters. You lost your head and plunged the needle into his heart,’ she added picturesquely.

  ‘Never,’ said Bishu. ‘The medicines were kept in another room. How could I walk around the house without him knowing?’

  ‘He wouldn’t imagine you were out to kill him,’ continued Sheena Sen relentlessly. ‘So he was watching television peacefully. Only you could have stolen up from behind, undisturbed by the dogs, and killed him.’

  Bishu covered his face with his hands and began to cry. Sheena Sen pursued her advantage. ‘You could have slipped out from Fulia, come to Calcutta, killed him and gone back. A motorcycle could have done the trick and the roads would have been empty because of Diwali.’ She leaned forward and smiled at him. ‘We have made enquiries. Your friends tell us that you were missing for an hour under the pretext of attending to your dogs and buying some whisky.’

  ‘The shops were closed,’ sobbed Bishu. ‘I had to sweet-talk the owner and give him a hundred bucks and persuade him to let me have a bottle. It took time.’

  ‘What did you quarrel about?’ asked Sheena innocently.

  ‘We didn’t quarrel,’ wailed Bishu. ‘We were friends. Piloo sir was good to me. He would buy dogs from me for his friends, Labradors and Alsatians and Dobermanns. He was prompt with his payments. He was like a brother to me. I would never have done anything like that!’

  ‘Can you think of an enemy?’

  Bishu could not and maintained that Piloo Adhikary was a good man.

  ‘But you were the only one with definite veterinary medical knowledge in that house. Who else but you could have killed him in that manner?’

  Bishu sat defeated in his chair. He had no clout, no contacts who might bail him out, nothing but a pregnant wife and a perpetual shortage of money and a difficult means of livelihood. Once there had been dreams of setting up kennels and becoming the most sought-after dog handler in Bengal, now there was only scrounging and misery. All it required was a murder charge to finish him off completely.

  Sheena Sen felt irritation bordering on rage at this man. He had the means, the knowhow; there were perfect pieces of evidence ranged against him and yet he had a beautiful alibi. That motorcycle bit was made up to frighten the suspect; no one could travel to and fro between Fulia and Calcutta in an hour. They would have to force confessions out of him, which would be difficult with Toofan Kumar away and the saintly Bikram in charge. Sheena Sen rang the bell and made arrangements for Bishu to be dragged back into the lock-up, fantasizing all the while that Bishu had confessed and she had solved the case. Someone else would have a go at him again during the day and maybe she would try it again the next day. By that time, if they were lucky, Bishu would be confused enough to begin making mistakes. He looked callow and frightened and silly enough to do that!

  Right now, it was time for the first follow-up meeting on the case.

  * * *

  Virendra Singh’s office room tried to exude personality. There were badly executed paintings of horses and mountains and foaming seas and a bookshelf crammed with colourful spines. Virendra Singh was playing with his tablet importantly and nodded faintly
at the group that filed in. Ghosh sat down heavily on his chair, Sheena Sen pertly on hers and Bikram arrogantly on his. There was no coffee or biscuits a la Prem Gupta, but there was no endless tedium either as with Toofan Kumar, who usually made them wait while he finished phone call after phone call. Virendra Singh, instead, put away his tablet, laced his fingers together into a steeple and began briskly.

  ‘So we’re all here. I want to discuss mainly the matter of the murder of Piloo Adhikary and then move on to other matters as well, if we have time. First, the progress report. The man was drugged by an anaesthesia commonly used for animals, which led to his death. The assailant or assailants shot two dogs that attacked them and then mutilated their bodies. Nothing was missing from the house except the diary of the murdered man and his mobile phone. Motive: unknown. Arrests: Bishu, the man who helped them out with the dogs. Other suspects: many. And this is where I want to move off the beaten track and help you go beyond yourselves.’

  He paused expectantly and looked around. Everyone sat silent because they knew they weren’t expected to make any comments. Then Sheena Sen spoke up.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the helper from Fulia. The man called Bishu. He swears that he doesn’t have any idea of who could have done it, and that there was never any trouble between him and Piloo Adhikary. He got paid two thousand rupees a month to come in and look after the dogs and attend to any new ones twice a week. He had been there the day before but had taken the evening off on Diwali. He’s in charge of some kind of Kali puja in his neighbourhood and was too busy organizing that. At the time that the man was killed, he says he was bursting crackers with his friends.’

  ‘Very well. That means all of them have alibis!’ Virendra Singh almost rubbed his hands with glee. ‘Iron-clad alibis mean trouble spots. No indication of innocence. Think Three Act Tragedy! Remember The Case of the Mythical Monkeys?’ He looked around him and smiled. ‘But that’s not exactly what I want. I need real ideas! Ghosh, you first. What do you think can really help us now?’

  Ghosh crinkled up his face as if in deep pain and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. ‘If we could trace the fingerprints on the knife, sir, and the bullets, and then see if the call details from his cell phone came through and could lead us to any enemies . . .’ he trailed off as Virendra Singh smiled happily.

  ‘Ah, conventional policing. The bane of our force. Bullets and call details and the scene-of-crime sketch.’

  Virendra Singh looked waggish. ‘But what about the psychology behind it, the human element?’ He leaned forward in his seat and said dramatically, ‘The artistry behind it, as Hercule Poirot would say!’ Then leaning backwards, he stretched out his hand towards the bookcase and pulled out five books, which he slapped down face upwards on the table, declaiming theatrically as he did so, ‘Here we are! Agatha Christie! Perry Mason! James Hadley Chase! Put yourself in the murderer’s shoes. Not how but why! People, all people, commit murder from some inner urge. Mine out the psychology and you have the murderer! Look at Perry Mason! Courtroom duels! Plug in the Indian Penal Code and find the sections you can use to squeeze the suspects. Look at this book. It’s the latest in America about an investigator who finds murderers through forensic investigation. Cut through the viscera and the clues they contain which no one has cracked! Rise above petty Indian-style policing and be original. What?’

  There was a tense silence. Sheena Sen gaped at the books and at Virendra Singh. Ghosh blinked and his face assumed the toad-like expression it usually had when matters got out of hand. Virendra Singh looked at Bikram but his light-grey eyes were hooded and there was little clue as to what was going on behind them.

  The silence became unbearable. Ghosh began to fidget. Virendra Singh frowned.

  ‘Well, go on, say something. I’m sure you must have realized what I’m trying to get at. It’s not the conventions that work but the deviations. Try a new approach. That’s what all these books say. You must have done some reading also!’

  Ghosh, who had never read anything but the morning newspapers, wondered if Virendra Singh was making some monumental joke at their expense. You never know with these IPS ones, he thought bleakly. Sheena Sen, who had once attempted to read Fountainhead while in college, was trying to remember if that was a detective novel and whether she should mention it.

  ‘Bikram?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Questions! Comments! You’re supposed to be some kind of high-flying Bong intellectual.’

  ‘Am I?’ Bikram sounded genuinely surprised.

  ‘Yes. What are your views?’

  Bikram thought for some time, then said in a flat voice,

  ‘I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above;

  Those that I fight I do not hate,

  Those that I guard I do not love . . .’

  This time it was Virendra Singh who was dented. He recovered soon enough. ‘Which book?’ he said suspiciously.

  Bikram remembered the heavily underlined and annotated poetry book it came from and shook his head.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he murmured. ‘But I get your point,’ he said.

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Virendra Singh, still frowning.

  ‘Cutting through the detritus of violence and chicanery and finding the impulses behind it,’ said Bikram glibly. ‘Love, hate, money and revenge, that’s all there is to every crime in the end. Slot the reason and solve the crime.’

  Virendra Singh rubbed his hands in joy.

  ‘Exactly! You’ve got it. Now look at this here.’

  He moved the cursor on his laptop, which had gone into sleep mode, and the screen glowed to life. Virendra Singh turned the laptop around so that everyone could see. On the screen, printed in large blue and bold font was the heading, List of Suspects. Underneath it blazed four names with red question marks adorning the sides.

  Wife? Lover?Money?Monica Sarkar

  Anger? Hate? Cowardice? Neighbours

  Sex? Money? Sleaze? Mala

  Argument? Money? Revenge? Bishu

  ‘That’s the lot,’ said Virendra Singh triumphantly. ‘Your murderer or murderers are there. Bishu’s not the only one, though we arrested him first. Each one of them on the list has a plausible motive. Our only stumbling block is the alibi. Crack the alibi and you’ve got him or her.’

  Ghosh looked around him to gauge reactions. Virendra Singh’s face looked bright; Sheena Sen was nodding and bobbing her head. Bikram looked at the screen with interest. Ghosh scratched his neck in frustration and bewilderment and decided to hazard a remark.

  ‘There . . . could be . . . others also,’ he said haltingly.

  Virendra Singh smiled beatifically. ‘I had the same thought too,’ he said. Then he leaned over the keyboard and typed rapidly. Another line popped into existence.

  Mala’s friend. He paused and looked at Bikram. ‘What did you say her name was?’

  ‘Poornima, sir,’ said Bikram humbly.

  P-o-o-r-n-i-m-a tapped the keyboard happily. ‘I bet you didn’t think of that!’ said Virendra Singh excitedly. ‘Suburban Student living alone in a Paying-Guest accommodation can mean only one thing nowadays. The dead man, who had links with the movie world, used her as a hooker. She blackmailed him, he threatened her, and she got some of the hoods from the sex world to bump him off. And make it look like Bishu did it. Or why would anyone leave the vial and tourniquet behind for evidence? Consider that!’

  They considered, at least Sheena Sen tried to look as if she did, and Bikram looked as if he really did. Only Ghosh fretted silently and tried to recall when Toofan Kumar would be back. Toofan Kumar was a trying man but at least was true to type. This Virendra Singh would send them all into fits of distraction.

  ‘You’re absolutely right about the scene-of-crime evidence, sir,’ said Bikram slowly. ‘Whoever left the vial and tourniquet behind wanted to make it look like Bishu did it. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. There’s more to all this, as you said. We got some ba
nk details from the Kolkata Bank but there doesn’t seem to be much there. A man like that who finances movies must have other bank accounts in places we know nothing of. We’ll be opening the vault tomorrow with his wife as a witness but I doubt if there’ll be anything there. The real stuff must have been in the diary that disappeared, and in the mobile phone that got stolen.’

  ‘But we have the number! Did we track down the phone calls made to and from that number?’

  ‘Yes, and started work on some of them, but there are so many.’ This was Sheena Sen.

  ‘Besides, two or three of the numbers don’t exist any more, so the owners must have dumped the phones once the man was murdered.’

  ‘There you are! Whoever doesn’t want to be traced is guilty. Find the missing numbers and you have your murderer!’ Virendra Singh sounded ebullient again.

  ‘Or a fresh set of suspects,’ said Bikram doubtfully.

  ‘Who can always be linked to the first catalogue,’ said Virendra Singh. ‘That’s the test of a good Crime Branch officer. Fit evidence to those already suspected and your case is sealed. Leena Mukherjee’s husband, for example. Everyone’s been mighty quiet about him, but consider the fact that he was close to the dead man’s wife. There you are! Motive ready, alibi waiting to be cracked. By the way, did you get the ATM break-in?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Bikram truthfully.

  ‘Well, you’d better,’ said Virendra Singh in a crushing tone. ‘One of these days someone will really break into a bank and then we’ve had it.’

  He looked at his watch and seemed to remember something. ‘We’d better break up now. Ghosh, you get that film girl, what’s her name, Mala. Bikram, get to work on the phone calls. Sheena, continue to break down the helper and start working on a new suspect like Leena Mukherjee’s husband. Meeting adjourned.’

  ‘Is he for real?’ questioned Ghosh in the car park. He had controlled himself with great difficulty in the lobby and the lift, waiting for Sheena Sen to be out of earshot.

  ‘Unfortunately yes,’ said Bikram lightly. ‘But he left Leena Mukherjee, the wife’s friend out of it. I wonder why.’