The Case of the Missing Servant

by Tarquin Hall

  “They say he’s got a new plasma television, too,” Tubelight had told Puri when the two had rendezvoused on the edge of the Hatroi neighborhood twenty minutes earlier and the operative had reported all he’d learned. “It’s his Koh-i-noor. Spends his days sitting and staring at it.”

  Cricket was Munnalal’s main staple, along with Teacher’s Fine Blend.

  “He’s completely tulli most days,” Tubelight had added. “A heavy punter as well. Into the bookies for twenty thousand.”

  The local lassi-wallah had also proven a mine of information. Over a couple of glasses of his refreshing yogurt drink, he’d told Tubelight that Munnalal was a wife beater. On a number of occasions the vendor had spotted bruises on Munnalal’s wife’s face and around her neck.

  The man sitting on the side of the lane, selling padlocks, combs and wall posters of Hindu and Bollywood deities, had confirmed this. He’d also told Tubelight that Munnalal often fought with his neighbors. Recently there had been a dispute over a wall shared with the Gujjar family. It had resulted in a punch-up. Munnalal had put his neighbor in the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm.

  “Sounds like quite a charmer, isn’t it?” Puri had commented.

  “Want me to keep an eye on him, Boss?” Tubelight had asked. “See what he gets up to?”

  “Such a fool will provide his own rope,” the detective had replied sagely. “I’m going to shake his tree and see what falls to earth.”

  “You’re going to do a face-to-face?”

  “Why not? I’m feeling sociable! Let us pay Shri Munnalal a visit. Lead the way.”

  Puri soon reached the house and banged on the door. It was answered by a harried-looking woman with a bruise on her cheek, who looked him up and down suspiciously and demanded to know what he wanted.

  “You’re Munnalal’s wife?” asked the detective in Hindi in a deep, authoritative voice.

  “What of it?”

  “Go tell him he has a visitor.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “Go tell him. Don’t waste my time.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment and then let Puri in.

  “Wait here,” she said as she went to fetch her husband.

  By now Puri, who was wearing his aviator sunglasses, was standing on the edge of a small courtyard scattered with a few children’s toys and bucket of wet laundry waiting to be hung on the clothesline. In one corner, a charpai leaned against the dusty wall.

  TV cricket commentary blared from an open door on the other side of the enclosure. A moment later, it suddenly stopped and Puri could make out the woman’s scolding voice followed by a man’s. He was speaking Rajasthani, which the detective didn’t understand, but his tone was suggestive of someone less than pleased at being interrupted.

  A moment later Munnalal appeared at the door to inspect his visitor.

  One look at Puri caused him to stand a little straighter and to thrust the bottom of his vest into the top of his loose-fitting trousers. There was no hiding the fact, however, that he was a man loath to shift from his favorite mattress. Fat-faced, with a gut spilling over his waist, he had not shaved in days. Stubble had taken root on his bloated throat like black fungus, spreading over his chin and cheeks and threatening to engulf the rest of his features. His sunken eyes were bloodshot. And his vest, which failed to contain the great bunches of hair that protruded from his armpits, was dotted with spots of grease.

  Still, what Munnalal lacked in looks and appearance, he evidently made up for in shrewdness. In Puri, he instantly recognized a threat. Rather than demanding to know his visitor’s identity and purpose, he turned on the charm.

  “Welcome to my home, sir,” he said in Hindi with a smarmy smile.

  “You’re Munnalal?” asked Puri with a perfunctory handshake, almost overcome by the stench of booze on the man’s breath.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve come to offer you some help.”

  “Help? Me, sir?” he said, surprised. “How can I refuse?”

  “You can’t,” said Puri.

  With a half-quizzical look, Munnalal offered the detective a plastic deck chair in the shade on the east side of the courtyard.

  “Make yourself comfortable, sir,” he said before disappearing back into his room and calling his wife to bring the two of them refreshments.

  When Munnalal reemerged a few minutes later, he had put a comb through his greasy hair and changed into a clean white salwar.

  “So, sir, what can I do for you?” he asked Puri, drawing up a chair opposite his guest. He offered Puri a cigarette and then lit one of his own.

  “I need some information,” replied the detective.

  “Ask me anything,” he said grandly with a broad grin and a flourish of his hands.

  “I understand you used to drive for Mr. and Mrs. Ajay Kasliwal.”

  “That’s right,” replied Munnalal. “I was with Sir and Madam for a year or so.”

  “So you knew the maidservant Mary?”

  Munnalal’s grin froze.

  “Yes, sir. I knew her,” he said, cautiously. “Is that what this is about?”

  “You knew her well?”

  “Not well—” Munnalal broke off, clearing his throat nervously. “Sir, why all these questions? Who are you—sir?”

  Puri explained that he was a private detective from Delhi working for Ajay Kasliwal. Munnalal digested this information for a moment with a troubled frown, drawing on his cigarette a little harder each time.

  “They’re saying on the TV that Sahib murdered the girl,” said Munnalal, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

  “Ajay Kasliwal is innocent. Someone set him up. I’d like to know what you know about it.”

  Munnalal forced a laugh.

  “Me? What could I know? I’m just a driver, sir.”

  “You were a driver. But from what I hear you’ve gone up in the world. They say you’re a rich man these days.”

  “Who says that?” Munnalal asked skeptically.

  “Your neighbors, mostly,” said Puri. “They say you live like a maharaja. Munnalal-sahib they call you. Apparently, you drink Angrezi liquor. You bet big sums on cricket. Seems you’ve come into a lot of money recently.”

  Munnalal shifted uneasily in his chair. “It’s my business how I live.”

  “Where did the money come from?”

  “An uncle died and left me his house,” he said defiantly.

  “An uncle?”

  “He was childless. I was his favorite.”

  Puri surveyed Munnalal with patient eyes.

  “What can you tell me about the night Mary disappeared, August twenty-first?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Nothing at all?” Puri smiled. “Come now, you must know something. Where were you that evening?”

  “I took Sahib to a hotel and waited for him in the car park.”

  “You didn’t go back to the house?”

  “Not until later when I dropped him home—that was around one in the morning.”

  Munnalal stubbed out the end of his cigarette and quickly lit another one.

  “That’s strange,” said Puri, whose hands were folded neatly in his lap. “I’m told you were at the house at around eleven o’clock and carried Mary’s body from her room to the back of the vehicle.”

  “Who told you that?” exploded Munnalal, his eyes filled with venom.

  “That’s not important,” answered the detective coolly. “What is important is that you tell me exactly what happened at Raj Kasliwal Bhavan on August twenty-first. Otherwise I might have to pass on what I already know to Inspector Rajendra Singh Shekhawat. Perhaps you know him? No. Well, he’s a very energetic young officer. I’m sure he’s good at getting people to talk.”

  Abruptly, Munnalal pushed back his chair and stood up. For a moment the detective thought he might lunge. But instead, he began to pace back and forth, regarding Puri like a caged tiger.

  “You were there that evening, weren’t you?” said the
detective.

  “I never left the hotel car park. The other drivers will back me up.”

  Puri slipped his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and stared at Munnalal over the top of them.

  “I have a witness who saw you carry the body from Mary’s room to Mr. Kasliwal’s Tata Sumo.”

  “I never murdered anyone!” shouted Munnalal.

  Puri held up a calming hand. “There’s no need to get angry. As long as you cooperate you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Just then, Munnalal’s wife emerged from the kitchen bearing two metal cups of water on a tray. She served Puri first and then her husband. Munnalal downed the contents in big gulps. Then he handed the empty cup to his wife, fished out a few rupees from his shirt pocket and sent her out to buy him another packet of cigarettes.

  “What do you want?” asked Munnalal when they were alone again.

  Puri placed the cup of water on the ground untouched.

  “What any person wants? To be comfortable.”

  Munnalal’s lip twisted into a knowing sneer.

  “How comfortable?”

  “That depends. First I want to know what happened at Raj Kasliwal Bhavan that night.”

  “What if I refuse to talk?”

  “I don’t need to tell you what the police will do to you to get a confession.”

  Munnalal grunted knowingly and sat down again. A long silence ensued as he weighed his options.

  “Sir, I never killed that girl,” he said, sounding conciliatory. “She tried to kill herself.”

  His words were met with an expression of cold skepticism.

  “That’s the truth,” insisted Munnalal. “I went to her room and found her lying on the floor. There was blood everywhere. She’d cut her wrists.”

  “What business did you have going to her room?”

  Munnalal faltered. “I…she…she owed me money. I went to collect it.”

  Puri sighed. “Don’t lie to me or it will be the worse for you. Now tell me: why did you go to her room?”

  “I already told you, sir!” protested Munnalal. “I went to her room to collect the five hundred rupees she’d borrowed from me. She was lying there covered in blood. She’d used a kitchen knife. But she was still alive. So I tied her wrists with cloth to stop the bleeding, carried her to the Sumo and drove to the clinic.”

  “Then what?”

  “The nurse took her in. That was the last I saw of Mary.”

  “What was the name of the clinic?”

  “Sunrise.”

  Puri took out his notebook and wrote down the name.

  “Then what did you do?” he asked.

  “I returned to the hotel to pick up Sahib.”

  There was a pause.

  “You had blood on your clothes?”

  “A little but I washed it off.”

  “And the knife? How can you explain it ending up in the garden behind the house?”

  Munnalal shrugged.

  “Someone else must have thrown it there.”

  “You never touched it?”

  “When I first entered the room, I picked it up. But I didn’t return to the room after that.”

  “Did you inform anyone the next morning?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Munnalal looked cornered. He took another long, hard drag on his cigarette and said, unconvincingly, “It could have meant trouble for me.”

  Puri pushed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.

  “Let me tell you what I think really happened,” he said. “You went to that room to have your way with Mary. Probably it wasn’t the first time. She turned a knife on you. There was a scuffle and you stabbed her. Maybe she died then and there. Or, like you say, she was still alive. Either way, you carried her to the Sumo and drove away. Later, you came back to the house and cleaned up the blood, got rid of her things and threw away her knife. Probably you also went into the house and took a silver frame to make it look like she’d stolen it and run away.”

  “I told you, I didn’t murder her and I never stole anything either,” objected Munnalal. “Go to the Sunrise Clinic and they’ll tell you she was brought in alive.”

  Puri stood up.

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “But there is still the matter of the knife and the witness who saw you remove the body.”

  “Sir, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,” Munnalal said. “I’m a reasonable man.”

  “When you’re ready to tell me the whole truth, then we’ll find out how reasonable you can be,” said the detective. He handed Munnalal his card. “You’ve got until tomorrow morning. If I don’t hear from you before then, I’ll tell Inspector Shekhawat everything I know.”

  Nineteen

  Puri and Tubelight sat together on the backseat of the Ambassador as Handbrake drove to Jaipur airport.

  “How many of your boys have you got watching Munnalal?” asked the detective.

  “Zia and Shashi are on the job, Boss.”

  “They’re experienced enough? I don’t want anything going wrong.”

  “They’re good boys,” said Tubelight. “Want me to check on this Sunrise Clinic?”

  “Make it your top priority. I want to know if that bloody Charlie took the female there. Ask the doctors and all. They must be knowing. Could be they’ll tell us what became of her.”

  “Think she tried suicide, Boss?”

  “Munnalal is so used to telling lies he wouldn’t be knowing the truth if it landed in his channa. But why he would concoct a cock-and-bull story about a clinic?”

  “You think he killed her?”

  Puri shrugged. “We’re still only having some of the facts. So many open-ended questions remain. There’s been no satisfactory verification of the body. I’m certain the police are barking up the wrong tree. Let us be sure not to do any barking of our own.”

  Puri’s mobile rang and, after scrutinizing the number on the screen, he answered it.

  By the time he hung up, Tubelight had formulated his own theory about what had happened at Raj Kasliwal Bhavan on the night of August 21.

  “Munnalal rapes the girl,” he said. “Gets trashed and abuses her. She pulls a knife and there’s a tussle. Mary gets stabbed and expires. Then he carries the body to the vehicle and dumps it on Ajmer Road.”

  He looked triumphant, but Puri sighed.

  “Baldev,” he said, using Tubelight’s real name, “why you’re always insisting on doing speculation?” Puri’s tone was not patronizing. Tubelight was, after all, one of the best operatives he had ever worked with, even if he was prone to jumping to conclusions.

  “A pen cannot work if it is not open. Same with the human mind. Let us stick to what facts there are. According to police estimates, the body was dumped on twenty-second night. So if Munnalal did the killing, seems odd he would hang on to the body for twenty-four hours.”

  “He had to move it, Boss.”

  “He’s a fool, but not so much of a fool. Either Mary and the dead girl are not one and the same, or something else transpired after Munnalal removed Mary from her room.”

  Puri took off his sunglasses and rubbed his sore eyes.

  “Ask yourself this: why a common driver should be opting to take the female to the private clinic who’ll be charging a hell of a lot when the state hospital is near to hand? Number two, what’s he doing hanging around the house so late in the first instance? Not doing the dusting, that is for sure. Should be Jaya and other servants have the answers. Let us hope Facecream finds out. Three, if Munnalal didn’t return to the scene, who cleaned away the blood and all?”

  Tubelight nodded, impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

  “Deduction is my specialty, actually. But deduction cannot be done with thin air. That is where you come in. After the Sunrise Clinic, find out where this bugger got so much money. Must be he’s doing blackmail. Question is, to whom he’s giving the squeeze?”

  Puri checked his watch as
Handbrake pulled up outside the airport terminal. The last flight was due to depart for Delhi in thirty minutes. That was just enough time to buy a ticket and get through security.

  “You’re coming back tomorrow, Boss?” asked Tubelight as Puri got out.

  “Handbrake’s to proceed from here directly to Gurgaon. Tomorrow morning we’ll revert at first light. Should be we’ll reach by eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  “You’ve got airsickness pills, Boss?”

  Puri gave him a resigned look.

  “Bloody lot of good they did me last time,” he said.

  Puri didn’t get airsick. It was a myth he perpetrated to disguise the real reason he avoided planes: being up in the air terrified him.

  Over the years, he had tried all manner of treatments to cure his phobia, but so far nothing had worked. Not the Ayurvedic powders. Not the hypnosis. And certainly not the Conquer Your Worst Fears workshop run by that charlatan “Lifestyle Guru” Dr. Brahmachari, who’d taken him up in a hot air balloon and only succeeded in giving him nightmares for weeks.

  To make matters worse, Mummy was forever reminding him about the prophecy made at his birth.

  According to the family astrologer (a complete bloody goonda if Puri had ever met one), the detective was destined to die in an air crash.

  “Don’t do flying,” Mummy had been telling him for as long as he could remember. “Most definitely it will be your doom.”

  Puri considered himself a spiritual man, but in keeping with his father’s belief system, he was not superstitious. To his mind, astrology was so much mumbo jumbo and had an adverse effect on people’s thinking.

  Rumpi did not altogether agree with him, of course. She couldn’t help herself. But the detective had always told his three daughters that no good had ever come from soothsaying.

  “Imagine some seer predicts you will marry a rich babu,” he’d told them one day when they were all teenagers. “It will create a bias and get your thinking into an almighty jumble. You and your mother will pass over boys with greater qualities who are more compatible. Ultimately, you will not find contentment.”