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The Case of the Missing Servant

Page 14

by Tarquin Hall


  In Puri’s presence, Facecream was always serious, calm, respectful and, although it rarely showed, affectionate. She seemed totally removed from the party girl or cheeky village damsel she often played.

  The detective surveyed her appraisingly. He found himself wondering who the real Facecream was. And whether she knew herself.

  “Yes, sir, I have important information for you,” she said. Her soft, eloquent pronunciation was unidentifiable as Seema’s coarse village burr.

  “I’ve spent the past few days working side by side with Jaya. We’ve cleaned together and, in the evenings, cooked and shared all our meals. I’ve told her many stories about my—Seema’s—past. She loves hearing them and a bond has formed between us.

  “Last night, Jaya started telling me about herself and the many difficulties she’s faced. She was married off to her second cousin at fifteen. They had a son, but he died after two years. Cause unknown. It sounds to me like jaundice. Then two years ago, her husband was killed in a train accident. Her in-laws said she was cursed and threw her out of the house. When she tried to return to her parents’ home, they refused to take her back.

  “Jaya was taken in by her eldest sister here in Jaipur. This sister got her the job with the Kasliwals. Things started to go better for her. But one evening, when her sister was out working, her brother-in-law forced himself on her. Somehow the sister found out and blamed Jaya. After that, she had to come and live in the servant quarters.”

  Puri nodded encouragement to go on.

  “Jaya is extremely shy and nervous,” Facecream continued. “She also gets very frightened at night and hates to sleep on her own. This evening, I discovered why.”

  Tubelight lit a cigarette and squinted in the haze of smoke that swirled in front of his face.

  “When the police arrived this morning and arrested Mr. Kasliwal, Jaya became extremely distressed,” Facecream recounted. “I found her making up the beds in tears. When I asked her what was wrong, she refused to answer. I sat with her for a while as she cried. And then she said, ‘He didn’t do it.’

  “‘Who didn’t do what?’ I asked.

  “‘Sahib is a good man. He didn’t kill Mary. It was somebody else.’

  “I couldn’t get anything more out of her after that. For the rest of the day, she looked grief stricken. At teatime, she dropped a cup. Mrs. Kasliwal shouted at her and called her stupid. Jaya went to her room and in the evening she refused to eat.

  “After I had finished my duties, I took her some food and sat with her and combed her hair. Then she asked me if we were friends. I told her, ‘Yes, we are good friends.’ She took both my hands in hers and asked me if I could keep a secret. She said it was a very big secret and that if I told anyone, we would both be in danger. I assured her that I would help her in any way I could. Then, Jaya told me in a whisper that she knew who had killed Mary. She said she’d seen the murderer disposing of the body.”

  “Go on,” said Puri, shifting in his chair in anticipation.

  “On the night Mary disappeared, Jaya was fast asleep. But at around eleven o’clock, she was woken by a commotion in Mary’s room. She opened her door a crack and saw Munnalal, the driver, carrying away Mary’s body in his arms. Jaya caught a glimpse of Mary’s face. She says it was ghostly pale. Her eyes were wide open, but frozen.

  “Munnalal carried her to Sahib’s Tata Sumo, laid her on a big piece of plastic in the back, shut the door quietly and then quickly drove away with his headlights off.”

  “What did Jaya do next?” asked Puri, sipping his drink.

  “She crept out of her room. On the ground, she says she noticed some drops of blood leading to the spot where the Sumo had been parked. She found the door to Mary’s room half open and looked inside. The thin cotton mattress was soaked with blood. On the ground next to it lay one of the kitchen knives from the house, also covered in blood.”

  “By God,” said Puri.

  “Jaya ran back to her room and bolted the door behind her. She sat there for hours in the darkness, crying, terrified. Eventually, she fell asleep. In the morning, the trail of blood on the ground had vanished.”

  “Did she look inside Mary’s room again?”

  “Yes. She says the door was wide open. All Mary’s belongings, apart from the posters on the wall, had gone.”

  “The mattress?”

  “That too. The floor had also been washed.”

  Puri thought for a moment, gently rubbing his moustache with an index finger.

  “Munnalal must have come back and gotten rid of everything,” suggested Tubelight.

  “Might be,” said Puri. “Let’s put ourselves in his chappals. In the dead of night, he returns to clean up his misdeed. He’s got to get rid of her paraphernalia and all. So what next? Could be, he takes it all away. Gets rid of it elsewhere. Or he tosses it over the back wall.”

  “That’s the likeliest possibility,” Facecream ventured.

  Puri shot her a look.

  “You found something?” he said eagerly.

  She grinned and pulled up the leg of her baggy cotton trousers. Taped to her ankle was something wrapped in a plastic bag. She placed it on the table and opened it. Inside was a four-inch kitchen knife. The blade was rusted.

  Tubelight let out a low whistle.

  “I found it in the undergrowth,” she said.

  “Absolutely mind-blowing!” exclaimed Puri with a big, fatherly smile.

  “I’ve got other good news,” said Tubelight.

  “Munnalal?”

  “My boys found him today. He’s living in the Hatroi district of Jaipur.”

  “First class!” said the detective. “Tell them to watch him round the clock and I’ll pay him a visit tomorrow.”

  “Any more instructions for me?” asked Facecream.

  “Spend time with Kamat,” instructed Puri. “Find out if Mrs. Kasliwal was correct and he was doing hanky-panky with the female.”

  Sixteen

  Mummy, like so many Indians, had a gift for remembering numbers. She didn’t need a telephone directory; the Rolodex in her mind sufficed.

  The late Om Chander Puri had often made use of her ability.

  “What’s R. K. Uncle’s number?” he would call from his den in the back of their house in Punjabi Bagh as she made his dinner rotis in the kitchen. Seeing the digits floating in the air before her eyes she’d reply automatically, “4-6-4-2-8-6-7.”

  Mummy had no difficulty remembering the numbers of “portable devices” either, despite their being longer.

  Jyoti Auntie, a senior at the RTO (Regional Transport Office), was on 011 1600 2340.

  It was this lady, with whom Mummy had partnered at bridge on many a Saturday afternoon in East of Kailash, who she called now to ask about tracing Fat Throat’s BMW numberplate.

  “Just I need one address for purposes of insurance claim,” she told Jyoti Auntie when she called her the morning after Majnu had lost him in Gurgaon.

  “Oh dear, what happened?” asked Jyoti Auntie.

  “The owner was doing reckless driving, bashed up my car and absconded the scene,” she lied. “Majnu gave chase but being a prime duffer, he got caught in a traffic snarl.”

  Jyoti Auntie sympathized. “Same thing happened to me not long back,” she said. “A scooter scratched my Indica and took off. Luckily I work at RTO, so after locating the driver’s address, Vinod paid the gentleman a visit and got him to reimburse me for damages done.”

  “Very good,” said Mummy.

  “You have a note of the numberplate?” asked Jyoti Auntie.

  “No need, just it’s up in my head. D-L-8-S-Y-3-4-2-5. One black color BMW. It is Germany-made, na?”

  Her friend tried to look up the numberplate in the system, but the computers were “blinking,” so Mummy had to call back after an hour.

  “The vehicle belongs to one Mr. Surinder Jagga, three number, A, Block Two, Chandigarh Apartments, Phase Four, Home Town, Sector 18, Gurgaon,” divulged Jyoti Auntie.


  Mummy wrote down the details (she did not have a head for remembering addresses) and thanked her.

  “You’re playing bridge on Saturday, is it?” asked Jyoti Auntie.

  “Certainly, if not totally,” said Mummy. “Just my son, Chubby, is facing some difficulty and requires assistance.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Let us say it is nothing I cannot sort out,” said Mummy.

  Less than two hours later, Mummy and Majnu pulled up outside Block Two, Chandigarh Apartments, Phase Four, Home Town, Sector 18, Gurgaon.

  Fat Throat’s black BMW was parked in front of the building.

  “You wait here and don’t do sleeping,” instructed Mummy. “Just I’m going to check around. Should be I’ll revert in ten minutes. But in case of emergency, call home and inform my son’s good wife. You’re having the number, na?”

  “Yes, madam,” sighed Majnu, who was only half listening and privately lamenting the fact that he had missed his lunch.

  Mummy let herself out of the car and made her way to the entrance to Block Two.

  Chandigarh Apartments was not one of the high-end superluxury developments. It housed call center workers and IT grunts, most of whom hailed from small towns across the subcontinent and had flocked to Delhi to live the new Indian dream.

  Like so much of Gurgaon’s new housing, which had been sold for considerable sums amid a blitz of slick marketing and—false—assurances of round-the-clock water and electricity supplies, Block Two was beginning to crumble. Less than two years after its “completion,” tiles had started falling off its façade; the monsoon rains had left enormous damp stains on the walls and ceilings; and the wooden window frames were warped.

  The lift was out of order and Mummy had to climb the stairwell where the builders (who had cobbled together the structure with substandard bricks) had failed to remove blobs of plaster from the bare concrete stairs. Here and there, wires hung incongruously from the walls as if the very innards of the building were spilling out.

  Mummy, bag in hand, soon reached the third floor landing.

  Flat 3A was on the immediate left.

  A pair of a men’s black slip-on shoes lay in front of the door. On the wall to one side of it hung a plaque that read:

  TRUSTWORTHY PROPERTY DEALERS LTD.

  OWNER: SHRI SURINDER JAGGA

  This was all the information Puri’s mother required for the time being.

  Now that she knew Fat Throat was a property broker, Mummy would ask around and find out more about him. With any luck, someone might be able to tell her what Jagga and his co-conspirator, Red Boots, were up to.

  Mummy turned to head back downstairs. But just then, the door swung open.

  Standing there in the doorway, eclipsing a good two-thirds of the frame, was Fat Throat, no longer dressed in his white linen suit but a black cotton kurta pajama. Behind him in the poorly lit interior she could make out another, smaller figure.

  Surinder Jagga narrowed his eyes and stared at Mummy suspiciously, as if he recognized her, and said, in the same deep, chiling voice she remembered from the Drums of Heaven restaurant, “Yes, madam? You’re lost?”

  Mummy, caught off guard and intimidated by the sheer size of the man and his thuggish bearing, stuttered, “I…see…well…just I’m looking for, umm, Block Three.”

  “This is Block Two,” answered Fat Throat abruptly.

  “Oh dear, silly me. Thank you, ji. So confusing it is, na?” she said and started down the stairs.

  Mummy had taken only a few steps when Fat Throat called after her.

  “Wait, Auntie!”

  She stopped, feeling her heart beat a little faster. Without turning around, she reached inside her handbag and wrapped her fingers around her can of Mace.

  Could be, he spotted us following him home, Mummy said to herself. Curse that idiot driver of mine. It’s all his fault, na.

  “Which apartment you want?” Fat Throat asked.

  “Um…a…apartment six number, A,” she ventured.

  There was a pause.

  “The Chawlas, is it?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “OK, auntie, it’s across the way,” he said. “You want I should send someone with you?”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Mummy continued on her way. As she made the first turn in the stairs, she heard another voice coming from the landing above her. Looking up, she saw a second man emerge from Fat Throat’s apartment.

  He stooped to put on his black shoes and, in the shaft of light coming in through a window in the stairwell, Mummy got a good look at his face.

  She recognized him instantly.

  It was Mr. Sinha, one of Chubby’s elderly neighbors. And he was carrying two thick briefcases. One in each hand.

  Seventeen

  Pandemonium broke out when Ajay Kasliwal arrived at the Jaipur District and Sessions courthouse at eleven o’clock the following morning.

  But it was carefully orchestrated.

  Rather than being brought in through the building’s back entrance, away from the eye of the media storm, he was escorted through the main gate in a police Jeep.

  Twenty-five or so constables made a show of trying to hold back the baying pack of “snappers” (which had grown significantly in number). But the determined press-wallahs quickly surrounded the vehicle. And as the accused stepped down from the back of the Jeep with the police around him, he was accosted by lenses and microphone-wielding reporters all screaming questions at once.

  A couple of burly constables then took Kasliwal by his arms. With some of their colleagues acting like American football linebackers, they tunneled a passage through the crowd, frog-marching him inside the courthouse.

  Inspector Shekhawat—plenty of starch in his spotless white shirt; comb grooves etched in his wavy hair—stood to one side of the steps, watching the “chaotic scenes” that he knew would play so well on TV.

  After the media tidal wave crashed violently against the entrance and was successfully repelled, he answered some of the reporters’ questions.

  “Is it true you’ve discovered some bloodstains?”

  “Our forensics team put Ajay Kasliwal’s Tata Sumo under the scanner and came up with dramatic results. Dried blood was found on the carpet at the back. There was so much, it had soaked through.”

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  “We also found a number of women’s hairs. These also we are analyzing. Also, we found a woman’s bloody fingerprint on the bottom of the backseat. So there’s no doubt in my mind her body was placed there and driven to its final destination.”

  “Can you confirm that Kasliwal refused to answer questions yesterday?”

  “Yes, under interrogation he refused to answer any and all questions.”

  “Why he chose to be silent?”

  “It’s his right, actually. But it’s unusual. An innocent man has nothing to hide.”

  Puri slipped past Shekhawat unnoticed and made his way inside. He found the corridor outside Court 6 crowded with defendants, plaintiffs, witnesses and a disproportionately large number of advocates in white shirts and black jackets. The court crier appeared, calling out the names of those to be summoned before the judge in the same affected, nasal voice that Indian street vendors use to advertise their wares. The presiding judge, Puri discovered, had an extremely busy day ahead of him. Kasliwal’s arraignment, although the most high-profile case, was only one of twenty slated to be heard.

  Some would require only a few minutes of His Honor’s time: a deposition would be taken and then the case would have to be adjourned because a key piece of evidence had gone missing and the police needed time to track it down (a classic delaying tactic). Others might drag on for thirty or forty minutes while the lawyers wrangled over a precedent in law established in a landmark case dating back to Mughal times.

  Puri chatted to an advocate he met while waiting in th
e corridor for Kasliwal’s arraignment to begin. The young man was representing himself against a former client who had paid him with a bad check.

  “How long has your case been going on?” asked Puri.

  “Nearly two years,” replied the advocate. “Every time I want to get a court date, I have to pay a bribe to the clerk. But then my client feathers the judge’s nest and he adjourns the case, and so it goes on and on.”

  “Judge Prasad has a sweet tooth, is it?” asked Puri.

  The advocate smiled wryly, evidently surprised by the detective’s apparent naïvete.

  “His shop is always open for business,” answered the young man. “You can pay at the bench as easily as you buy milk from Mother Dairy.”

  It was another twenty minutes before the court crier stepped out into the corridor and summoned Ajay Kasliwal.

  Soon, the accused was brought from the holding room where he’d spent the past thirty minutes consulting his lawyer.

  Puri clipped into the courtroom ahead of him and, finding it packed to capacity, stood by the door. The gallery was cluttered with a hodgepodge of benches and old rickety cane chairs, some with holes in their seats. Before them, stretching across the breadth of the room, rose the bench, a solid wooden structure that looked like a dam designed to hold back flood-waters. In the center, wearing a black cape, thick glasses and a bomb-proof countenance, presided Judge Prasad. Two clerks and a typist sat on either side of him.

  When Kasliwal was led inside, every head in the gallery strained to watch him escorted to the dock, a little platform surrounded by a waist-high grille. It might well have dated back to the sepoy trials following the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857.

  Puri’s client had clearly not slept a wink on the hard concrete floor of his cell. The bags under his eyes had darkened to the hue of ink and the tic in his eyelid had grown more pronounced, causing him to wink with perturbing frequency.

  The detective could only imagine how humiliated Kasliwal must feel. But he retained a dignified and defiant pose, standing erect with his arms behind him and chin held high. When he looked into the gallery and saw his immediate family sitting there, including his son, Bobby, who had flown in from London the night before, his expression conveyed confidence and courage.

 

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