Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

by Vaseem Khan

  Flushing, she stood to face the woman.

  “Hello Mrs. Chopra. You haven’t seen your husband around, have you?”

  “No,” said Poppy stiffly. “Actually, I have not seen him around very much at all. He seems to be very much occupied with your case.”

  “Hollis Burbank was my client, and now he’s dead,” said Taylor mildly. “I’d really like to know what happened.”

  “Well, I am certain my husband will get to the bottom of it,” said Poppy. “He is very good at that.” She could not help the trace of bitterness that edged her words.

  “If you see him, do let him know I’d like to talk to him. He doesn’t seem to be picking up his phone.”

  “He gave you his phone number?”

  “Yes. So that we could keep in touch. About the investigation.” Taylor gave Poppy another dazzling smile. “I must say that really is a lovely sari you’re wearing.”

  “Thank you,” said Poppy, automatically. “And that is a lovely bikini you are wearing.”

  “What? Oh no, this isn’t a bikin—” Taylor stopped. “Oh, I see. Ha ha. Yes, I suppose you’re right. It is a little revealing, isn’t it? But I have a client flying in from Singapore and, just between us girls, he’s a bit of a letch. A dress like this, well, it gets me halfway to the sale. I’m sure you understand.”

  Poppy hesitated.

  She hated the way Lisa Taylor made her feel unsure of herself. And then she hated herself for feeling that way. “I will let my husband know that you wish to speak with him.” Another thought flashed into her mind—before she could stop herself the words had tumbled from her mouth. “I will be speaking to him soon to remind him to take his pills. I will tell him then.”

  Taylor’s perfect brow crunched into an elegant frown. “Pills?”

  “Oh, yes. Did he not tell you? He is suffering from a heart condition.”

  “God, no! Is it serious?”

  “Very. He almost died from it. That is why he retired from the police force. He has been told by his doctors to avoid stressful activity. He could drop dead at any minute.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “I am not joking. This is not a matter of joking. He is an old man. His body is breaking down.”

  “Well, you could have fooled me. He looks in great shape. And I wouldn’t have pegged him a day over forty. He’s got great skin. And that hair… Personally, I think he looks like one of your Bollywood movie stars, a mature one, maybe.”

  “He is not forty,” snapped Poppy. “He is in his late forties. And he has the heart of a sixty-year-old. You must not overexcite him.”

  “I shall bear that in mind,” said Taylor coolly. “Probably a good thing he didn’t see me in this dress then, right?” She gave a breezy grin, and Poppy flushed, wondering if perhaps there had been a disguised barb in the Englishwoman’s statement.

  Ganesha reached up with his trunk, tapped Taylor’s dangling hand.

  She smiled at him and patted his skull, earning a waggle of his ears in return.

  Et tu, Ganesha? thought Poppy, grinding her teeth.

  Meanwhile, some four kilometres away in the Dhobi Talao district of south Mumbai, the man at the centre of this uncomfortable discussion was standing in the reception of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, Mumbai, attempting, with a growing sense of impotence and frustration, to make another man understand exactly what it was that he required.

  That man, a civil service bureaucrat called Balaji, appeared to have been, in the distant past, nailed to the chair on which he now sat. Somehow, from his seated position, he contrived to look down upon Chopra.

  “Let me see if I understand you correctly, sir,” said Balaji. “You wish me to locate records for an American gentleman you say may have worked in India thirty years ago, and yet you do not even know his name?” He said this in a tone that indicated to the others waiting in the reception that this was possibly the most ludicrous of the many ludicrous things that he had heard in all his years of wearing out the seat to which his backside was attached.

  Someone sniggered, emboldening the martinet. “Perhaps you would also like me to eat fire, and run over hot coals?”

  Chopra realised that, in the interminable drudgery of Balaji’s existence, here was a moment of unexpected glory, one to be grasped with both hands.

  “I did not say that I do not know his name,” he said, through gritted teeth. “What I said was that I believe this man may have changed his name since he worked in India. It really is quite important.”

  “Well, why did you not say, sir? I shall, of course, drop everything else and focus my sole attention on you. Please give me a moment to inform all these good citizens—” he swept an arm lavishly at the crowded waiting room “—that their petty concerns are of no importance when a man such as yourself barges his way in here and makes demands of us little people.”

  Little people!

  Chopra stifled the urge to reach out and put his hands around the idiot’s throat. Instead, he took out his wallet and showed him his identity card. “This is police business,” he said loudly, then leaned over and whispered: “And if you don’t help me, you will have to answer to the chief minister himself.”

  The man shot to his feet, suddenly as nimble as a ballet dancer.

  If there was one thing Indian civil servants feared more than death itself, Chopra knew, it was the wrath of a politician.

  As Balaji led him deep into the bowels of the FRRO building, he spoke quickly, suddenly as loquacious and helpful as a blue jay. “You say this man was in India in 1985?”

  “That is my belief.”

  “Well, sir, at that time there were only two FRRO offices in the country. In fact, it only became mandatory for foreigners staying in the country to register themselves in 1984. Any foreigners who came to work in India would have been registered in either Mumbai or Delhi. You are certain that the man you are looking for was working in Maharashtra?”

  “I believe so,” Chopra repeated. The writing on the back of the photograph that had been found in Burbank’s possession had said Chimboli, Feb. 1985. The Chimboli region was in the state of Maharashtra.

  “Then his records must surely be here in our Mumbai office. We have records stretching back to the very beginning. You will not believe me if I tell you that our record-keeper also stretches back to the very beginning. Ha ha. His name is Laxman. He began work here in 1984, and he is still here. He is a most interesting character; you will surely love to meet him.”

  Chopra was certain that his forthcoming encounter with the legendary Laxman would be anything but pleasant, but he forbore from commenting.

  They arrived at a dark door, entered and walked down a flight of steps into a cramped anteroom. A single lightbulb threw shadows around the musty-smelling gloom.

  Balaji banged an old-fashioned bell sitting on a splintered wooden counter, and whispered, “We have no space upstairs. All our records have been placed down here, in Mr. Laxman’s safekeeping. The authorities keep making noises about computerising everything, but Mr. Laxman is very opposed to this.” He suddenly clammed shut as a figure materialised noiselessly behind the counter.

  Chopra stared at Laxman.

  He had heard that people who worked for years in a particular role sometimes took on the contours of their profession. Indian policemen, for instance, often became jaded and cynical, their legs bowed by the weight of the petty human connivances and malfeasances they carried around with them for years. This Laxman, with his pallid complexion, ashen hair, watery eyes and starved look, had taken on the tragic aspect of a phantom, having haunted this dark, musty hall of records for three decades. Chopra supposed that something of the bloodlessness of his work had settled into the man’s soul.

  Quickly he explained his request. “I am looking for a man whose name I do not know. But I believe he may have been working here in India in 1985. And he was American. It is possible that he had a colleague here, a man named Faulkner, though I cannot tell you wh
ich nationality this Faulkner is.”

  Laxman continued to stare at Chopra. The only indication that he had heard was the almost imperceptible twitching of a nostril.

  “It is official police business,” piped up Balaji, then instantly piped down again, as Laxman turned his vampire’s gaze upon him.

  “Please come with me,” he said finally, and turned away.

  Chopra followed the record-keeper through a maze of wooden shelving that loomed over them, each shelf crammed with red manila folders. The whole place was sunk in a Stygian gloom, with the old pressed air of a tomb, and seemed to whisper with the scurrying of mice, and the gentle crunch-crunch of invisible mites eating their way through decades of yellowing paper.

  Finally, Laxman ghosted to a standstill, so noiselessly that Chopra almost walked into him.

  The record-keeper waved at the shelf behind him with an anaemic hand. “Here you will find all the files for the year 1985. There are a great many of them. This was a time of industrial liberalisation in India. Major reforms by the Delhi government enticed foreign companies into the country, bringing with them employees of all nationalities.”

  Laxman recited this as if delivering a lecture. Chopra got the feeling that beneath the man’s waxy, corpse-like exterior there beat the heart of a historian. In some ways, Laxman was a historian; or, at the very least, a custodian of a tiny slice of time in that monolithic past that continued to define the country even as she marched confidently into the future.

  “I will leave you to it,” said the record-keeper, and turned on his heel.

  Chopra had been expecting the man’s help, but he didn’t bother to call Laxman back.

  He decided to start at one end of the lowest shelf before him. He pulled out a file—coughing loudly as the dust tickled his nostrils—untied the fraying string holding it together and opened it.

  The yellowing paper at the front of the file held a faded colour photograph of a white woman called Marie Bouhana, French national, born in Paris in 1958. The remaining documents comprised Bouhana’s official papers and employment visa—to work with a Mumbai-based textile firm named Sunrise Textiles Private Limited.

  Chopra closed the folder, retied it and slotted it back into place.

  He looked up and down the length of the shelving, then sighed.

  This was going to be a lengthy and unpleasant task.

  Poppy looked around Anjali’s bridal suite. It seemed even larger than when she had last been here, now that the only ones in the room were herself, Huma Dixit, Irfan and Ganesha.

  She had decided to take matters into her own hands. The fact that the search for the missing bride within the hotel had proven unsuccessful only confirmed that Anjali Tejwa was a very resourceful young woman. She would not have prepared such an elaborate escape, only to allow herself to be discovered so swiftly. With little else to go on, Poppy had decided to employ a technique that she knew her husband favoured—a close examination of the crime scene.

  Over the course of the following two hours she proceeded to go over every inch of the suite.

  Confronting the missing woman’s personal effects, she asked Huma’s permission before diving into the suitcases. The morose young girl simply shrugged. “Do what you like. It hardly makes a difference now, does it?”

  Anjali had brought along an entire wardrobe for the wedding, including her astonishing bridal dress, a shimmering silk lehenga in traditional red, embroidered with gold and encrusted with jewels. It was the single most beautiful garment Poppy had ever seen. Her own wedding outfit had been a humble creation, handed down to her by her mother and altered by the village tailor back in Jarul, who had tut-tutted his way through the alterations, as if it was Poppy’s fault that her proportions were not as generous as her mother’s had been at that age.

  Unable to resist, Poppy held the dress against herself and took a quick glance in the mirror while Huma was distracted on her mobile phone. The dress seemed to breathe, shimmering with a life of its own. She could almost hear it whispering, reminding her that her own anniversary was just two days hence…

  She realised that Ganesha was staring up at her with a quizzical expression.

  Irfan had draped a colourful Kashmiri shawl around the little elephant’s shoulders; it glimmered faintly in the sunlight pouring in from the room’s latticed windows. The mischievous boy had also painted lipstick over the tip of Ganesha’s trunk.

  Poppy smiled. “Don’t we both look absolutely fabulous?” she whispered, then put the wedding dress back into the wardrobe and continued her search.

  Methodically, she worked her way through the rest of Anjali’s luggage, finishing with a small travelling case, clearly an item handed down through the generations. The brass plaque on the case declared it to be the handiwork of Taylor Brothers of Cavendish Square 1860; it was inlaid with purple velvet, and the outer carved wooden shell was inset with mother-of-pearl handles. Various compartments provided sanctuary for make-up, and other essentials for the woman-about-town.

  In one of these compartments Poppy discovered a wad of receipts wrapped in a rubber band.

  She leafed her way through them. Most were for items of clothing Anjali had purchased recently for the wedding. With a pang of envy she saw that Anjali had been shopping at some of the most exclusive stores in Mumbai. A smile touched her lips as she came across a receipt from a famous Mumbai tailor, Lightning Lala. She recalled Lala’s adverts from the television; the self-proclaimed “fastest tailor in all of India.”

  Ganesha moved up behind her and poked at the inside of the travelling case. The aroma from the bottle of perfume that Anjali kept inside was probably playing havoc with his hypersensitive trunk. Poppy knew, from her husband, that an elephant’s trunk was one of the most sensitive organs in the whole of the animal—

  She froze mid-thought and then sat back, staring at the sheet of paper in her hand, at the typed lettering that had halted her search.

  “Well,” she muttered to herself. “This is unexpected. Most unexpected, indeed.”

  Chopra found what he was looking for in the 167th file he took from the shelves.

  By this time he had sunk down onto the floor, his back slumped against the shelving, the small bones of his neck aflame with cramp, eyes fatigued from reading in the dim light, his nostrils raw from the constant sneezing brought on by the clouds of dust released each time he opened a new file.

  Many of the files had cursory information, and no photographs, so were useless for the purposes of his investigation.

  Cursing silently to himself for the umpteenth time, he had opened this particular file and immediately found himself staring at an image of the white man in the photograph discovered inside Hollis Burbank’s suitcase, the man he assumed was Faulkner.

  He excavated the photograph from his pocket and compared the images.

  There was no doubt.

  It was the same man.

  His full name was Jared Faulkner, American national, born in 1952—making him thirty-three years old in 1985—in Beaufort, South Carolina, and an employee of Fermi Engineering India Private Limited, a joint American–Indian company operating in India at the time. Faulkner’s stated purpose for being in India was given as “Chemical Engineer,” which meant little to Chopra. His proposed address while in the country was listed as a corporate guesthouse in Pune, which, again, was of little use.

  He took a picture of the documents on his mobile phone, then returned the file.

  He called Rangwalla, sent him Faulkner’s details via his phone and asked him to dig up what he could. In truth, he thought, it was a hopeless task. Assuming Faulkner was still alive, he would be in his sixties by now. And he might be anywhere in the world.

  Nevertheless, Rangwalla could start by attempting to trace him in his home town in the United States. Chopra knew this task would inspire dread in his former sub-inspector, so he told him to make use of Kishore Dubey again. He needed more information about Faulkner; he felt certain this would bring him o
ne step closer to Burbank, the real Burbank.

  Chopra finished going through the rest of the files. He did not find anyone in there who might have been Hollis Burbank. Then again, with so many files missing that all-important photograph, it was possible that he had held a file with Burbank’s true identity in his hands and not recognised it for what it was.

  Instead, he decided to focus his attention on the company that Jared Faulkner was listed as having worked for, Fermi Engineering India Private Limited. It was a good bet that Burbank had a link to the same organisation.

  A quick online trawl using his mobile phone revealed nothing. Clearly, in the thirty years since Fermi Engineering had set up in India, it had either ceased operations or changed its name.

  Yet there was a way for Chopra to peel back the veil, and find out more about the company. It would necessitate a visit to another of India’s ubiquitous administrative agencies, a thought that did not immediately fill him with enthusiasm.

  The Western Region office of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in India was located in the ambitiously named Everest Tower on Marine Drive, only a few hundred yards from the artist Shiva Swarup’s studios that Chopra had visited the previous day.

  Once again, he parked his van and made his way along the crowded promenade, the heat of the midday sun shimmering from the asphalted pavement. A man stepped in front of him holding an enormous knife.

  Chopra reared back, but the man just grinned at him. “Coconut, sir?”

  He thrust the brown fruit at the former policeman.

  It was almost lunchtime, and Chopra found his stomach suddenly rumbling. He bought the coconut and, further along the promenade, three freshly fried samosas, ignoring the flapping semaphores of alarm from his panic-stricken brain. The samosas, smeared in mint chutney and squashed between two floury baps, tasted better than he remembered, though he was willing to concede that there might be a bill to pay later on.