The Case of the Missing Servant

by Tarquin Hall

  Puri brought her up to date with the events of the night before and told her how he had come to examine the knife wound for himself. When he was finished, Facecream said, “Sir, was the motorcycle a blue Bajaj Avenger?”

  Puri’s eyes lit up with expectation. “Tell me!” he said.

  “Sir, Bobby Kasliwal has one. Last night he rode away on it at around eleven-fifteen.”

  “By God! What time he returned?”

  “Past midnight.”

  Puri let out a long, resigned sigh. “It’s what I feared,” he said to himself.

  “What is, sir?”

  He didn’t answer, but asked, “Is the motorcycle kept in the garage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Puri nodded. “I’ll have a look. Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Sir, I’ve been trying to find out what more the servants know about Munnalal. Nobody has a good word to say about him. Jaya claims he constantly harassed her. She says he groped her a number of times. Once, when he was drunk, he tried to force his way into her room.”

  “Does she know if there was anything going on between Munnalal and Mary?”

  “She’s not sure, sir. She heard some sounds coming from Mary’s room one night. This was soon after she started working here, in late July. But she couldn’t say for sure whom Mary was with.”

  Puri heard a rustling sound coming from the side of the servant quarters and signaled to Facecream to close the window. Casually, he put his hands behind his back and pretended to be looking for something on the ground so that if anyone appeared asking him what he was doing there, he could claim to be searching for clues.

  The rustling grew louder.

  Presently, a large black crow hopped into view, turning over leaves with its beak.

  “False alarm,” he gestured to Facecream, who came back to the window and opened it.

  “Can you tell me anything else?”

  “Sir, I got the cook’s assistant, Kamat, drunk. He liked Mary but I doubt there was anything going on between them. I got him to admit he’s a virgin.”

  “Is he aggressive?”

  “Yes, but he’s not that tough.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He tried it on and I slapped him. He ran off crying.”

  It was Facecream’s opinion that the mali, too, was no threat. “He’s smoking charas all day,” she said, “and can no longer differentiate between reality and fantasy. He makes up stories about everyone. He seems to hate Kasliwal. Apparently he’s been telling everyone that Sahib has been coming to my room at night!”

  “By God,” murmured Puri. “Anything more?”

  “That’s all,” she answered. “But, sir, have you considered that after you confronted Munnalal, he figured out that it was Jaya who saw him carrying away Mary’s body and he was planning to intimidate her or silence her?”

  “That would certainly explain why he was carrying a weapon,” said Puri. “But there is one other possibility—”

  His words were interrupted by the shrill sound of Mrs. Kasliwal’s voice. She was calling from the kitchen door.

  “Seema? Seema! Chai lao! This instant!”

  “Sir, I’d better go,” said Facecream reluctantly. “I’m not in her good books. Yesterday I broke a plate and she’s docking my salary forty rupees. That doesn’t leave me much to take home!”

  Puri laughed. “Just a few more days and we’ll have you out of here. Let’s talk tonight at the usual time.”

  The detective remained where he was while Facecream hurried off toward the kitchen.

  “Haanji, ma’am. Theek hai, ma’am,” he heard her saying to Mrs. Kasliwal.

  The two women went inside, closing the door behind them, and Puri stole over to the garage, which was on the other side of the garden to the left of the house. He tried the side door, found it open and stepped inside.

  Bobby’s Bajaj Avenger was parked at the back.

  The numberplate was coated in red mud.

  Upon further inspection, Puri found a spot of blood on the accelerator grip. There was another on the helmet.

  “He’s gone to visit his father in jail,” Mrs. Kasliwal told Puri when he asked about Bobby’s whereabouts.

  She was on the front lawn in the dandasana position, squeezing shut one nostril with her index finger and breathing out hard through the other.

  “At what time, madam?”

  Mrs. Kasliwal snorted a couple more times and then laid her upturned hands on her knees. “He left at six-thirty or thereabouts,” she said.

  “You’re certain, madam?”

  “Of course I’m certain, Mr. Puri!” she snapped.

  Puri watched as she moved into the Ardha Matsyendrasana, or Half Lord of the Fishes, pose.

  “He’s carrying a mobile phone, madam?” asked Puri.

  Mrs. Kasliwal sat up straight again, exhaling as she did so.

  “Certainly he’s having one, Mr. Puri. But why the sudden interest in my son?”

  “Actually, there’s a certain matter I would like to discuss with him.”

  “Tell me what exactly?”

  “Actually, I was hoping he might bring me one or two caps from London next time he’s reverting to India. I’m particularly partial to Sandowns. By far the best quality is made by Bates Gentlemen’s Hatter of Piccadilly. I hoped Bobby would bring me one or two. Naturally I would make sure he’s not out-of-pocket.”

  She looked at him with a baffled expression.

  “Caps, Mr. Puri? Caps are the priority, is it? What about the investigation? What progress is there?”

  “Plenty, madam, I can assure you.”

  “So you keep saying, Mr. Puri! But I see no evidence of it. Thousands are being spent of our money and for what? No progress at all! Frankly speaking, I don’t know what it is you’re doing all day.”

  She lowered her chin to her chest.

  “Fortunately my lawyer, Mr. Malhotra assures me the police case is shot full of holes. Only the flimsiest of evidence they have. Nothing concrete. He’ll be getting Chippy off for sure.”

  Puri fished out his notebook.

  “What is Bobby’s mobile number, madam?” he asked, pencil at the ready.

  Mrs. Kasliwal rattled off the digits too quickly for the detective, who had to ask her to repeat them three times before he had it written down correctly.

  “Very good, madam,” he said, putting away his notebook. “I’ll be on my way. One thing is there, though. Your former driver, Munnalal. Last night only, he was most brutally murdered.”

  Mrs. Kasliwal’s body visibly tensed for a moment.

  “It happened in the property directly abutting your own, madam, at eleven-thirty. You heard anything?”

  “Nothing,” claimed Mrs. Kasliwal. “I was fast asleep I can assure you. Such a long, tiring day it was. But how can you be sure he was murdered?”

  “He was stabbed in the neck, madam.”

  Mrs. Kasliwal made a face as if she had smelled something unpleasant and shook her head from side to side.

  “Such dangerous times we live in, I tell you,” she said. “Most probably he got into an altercation with the wrong sort.”

  “Anything is possible, madam,” said Puri. “But seems odd to me he was murdered here—right behind your house.”

  “Who knows what goes on, Mr. Puri? These people live such different lives to us.”

  “He wasn’t coming to see you, madam?”

  “Me, Mr. Puri? What business would he have with me?” Mrs. Kasliwal’s words were liquid indignation.

  “Could be he was in need of assistance?”

  “What kind of assistance exactly?”

  “I’m told he was facing financial difficulties.”

  Mrs. Kasliwal rolled her eyes. “That is hardly news, Mr. Puri! Munnalal was always asking for salary advance. These types are in and out of trouble. So much drinking and gambling is going on.”

  “Did you ever give him anything extra?”

  “Extra?” as
ked Mrs. Kasliwal, regarding him with mild contempt.

  “Like a bonus, say?”

  “I gave him his salary. That is all. Buss! Now I’ve answered enough of your questions, Mr. Puri. There’s such a busy day ahead. Mr. Malhotra will be arriving at nine-thirty to go over the defense. And I’m hosting the monthly meeting of the Blind Society.”

  “No need to explain, madam,” said Puri. “It’s about time I pushed off. Till date, I’m without my breakfast.”

  Puri picked up Tubelight ten minutes later from behind the Sunrise Clinic.

  He could hardly control his excitement.

  “Boss, the security guard remembers a girl being brought in on August twenty-first night!” he said, clambering into the car. “Says she was covered in blood. But, Boss! She was very much alive!”

  “He’s certain of it?” asked the detective.

  “One hundred—no, three hundred and fifty percent certain!”

  “Why so certain?” Puri said skeptically.

  “She was dropped off by a man matching Munnalal’s description in a Sumo, and the very next night she left!”

  “She left? How?”

  “Taxi. Came and took her.”

  “She was with someone?”

  “The guard’s got confusion on this point,” answered Tubelight. By this the operative meant that the guard had clammed up suddenly when asked.

  “Could he tell you where the taxi went, at least?”

  Tubelight grinned.

  “No delay! Tell me!” insisted Puri.

  “Train station.”

  “He’s certain?”

  “Overheard the taxi-wallah being told where to go.”

  “Very good!” exclaimed Puri. “Tip-top work!”

  “Thanks, Boss,” said Tubelight with a grin.

  The detective instructed Handbrake to head directly to the station.

  “Boss, you don’t want to interview the clinic owner? He’s Dr. Sunil Chandran.”

  “Naturally I would want to know why it was Mary was discharged and who all paid the bill,” he said. “But I’ll visit Dr. Chandran later. For now, let us stick on the trail while it remains hot.”

  On platform 2, where the Jat Express to Old Delhi was about to depart, hundreds of passengers with suitcases and bundles balanced on their heads were trying, all at once, to push through the narrow doorways of the already crowded second-and third-class carriages.

  The weakest, including women with babies and the elderly and infirm, were ejected from the crush like chaff from a threshing machine, while the strongest and most determined battled it out, pushing, shoving and grabbing one another, their voices raised in a collective din.

  Puri watched as an acrobatic young man clambered up the side of one carriage, scrambled along the roof and then attempted to swing himself inside over the heads of the competing passengers jammed into one of the doorways. But he was roughly pushed away and, like a rock fan at a concert, was passed backward aloft a sea of hands and dumped unceremoniously onto the platform. Unperturbed, he scrambled to his feet and clambered up the side of the train to try again.

  The detective continued along the platform where the calls of chai-and nimboo paani-wallahs competed with train tannoy announcements preceded by their characteristic organ chords. A knot of migrant workers, evidently waiting for a long-delayed train, lay sprawled over sheets of newspaper on the hard concrete platform, sleeping soundly.

  Near the first-class retiring room, he found the men he was looking for: three elderly station coolies who were sitting on their wooden baggage barrows taking a break from the grueling work of ferrying passengers’ luggage on their heads.

  Like the other coolies Puri had just interviewed at the main entrance to the station, they wore bright red tunics with their concave brass ID plates tied to their biceps. Their arms and legs were thin and sinewy.

  Puri explained that he was looking for a missing girl called Mary who was said to have come to the station on the night of August 22. His description of the girl was cobbled together from the facts he’d gleaned about her during his investigation—together with a certain amount of deductive reasoning.

  “She is a tribal Christian from Jharkhand in her early twenties. She would have been extremely weak and probably had bandages wrapped around her wrists. I believe that if she boarded a train, its destination was probably Ranchi.”

  The old men listened to the detective’s description. One of them asked, “What was the date again?” Puri repeated it. No, he said after some discussion with his fellow coolies, they had not seen a girl who matched that description. “We would remember,” he said.

  The detective made his way to the last platform. There he found a young coolie who was carrying three heavy-looking bags on his head for a family traveling on the Aravali Express to Mumbai.

  Puri walked alongside him as he made his way to one of the second-class A/C carriages.

  “Yes, sir, I remember her well,” said the coolie after he had dropped off the bags for the family and Puri had described Mary to him. “She could hardly walk. She seemed sick. Yes, she had bandages around her wrists.”

  “Did she board a train?” asked the detective.

  “A man put her on board the—” The coolie suddenly stopped talking. “Sir, I’m a poor man. Help me and I will help you,” he said.

  Puri took out his wallet and handed the man one hundred rupees. This was as much as the coolie made in a day, but his composed expression did not change as he tucked the note into his pocket.

  “She boarded the Garib Niwas.”

  “You saw her get on?”

  “Yes, sir, I helped her.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “I asked her if she needed a doctor, but she did not answer me. She looked like she was in shock, just staring blankly, not even blinking.”

  “What happened to the man she was with?”

  “He waited until the train departed. Then he left.”

  “Describe him.”

  Again the coolie pleaded poverty. Puri had to hand him another hundred rupees.

  “Middle aged, dark suit, white shirt, expensive shoes—well polished.”

  Ever grateful for the observational powers of the common Indian man, the detective made a note of the coolie’s name and went in search of the station manager’s office.

  Twenty minutes later, he was back at the car, where Tubelight and Handbrake had been waiting for him.

  “There is one ‘Mary Murmu’ listed on the manifest for the Garib Niwas train to Ranchi on August twenty-second,” he said. “Sounds like she was extremely weak.”

  “What’s our next move, Boss?” asked Tubelight.

  “You and Facecream keep a close eye on Bobby Kasliwal. He is up to his neck in this. I want him watched every moment of the day and night.”

  “Think he murdered Munnalal?”

  “There’s no doubt he was there on the scene.”

  “And you, Boss?”

  “I’m going to Jharkhand tonight to locate Mary.”

  “Jharkhand. Could take forever. Where will you look?”

  “The uranium mines of Jadugoda.”

  Twenty-two

  The passenger manifest showed that whoever purchased Mary Murmu’s train ticket on August 22 had opted for a seat in a non-air-conditioned three-tier carriage. The train from Jaipur to Ranchi had been a “local” and had stopped at every station along its 740-mile, 30-hour journey east across the subcontinent.

  During his student days, Puri had always traveled in the cheapest trains and carriages out of financial necessity. He looked back on the experience with nostalgia. The hypnotic swaying of the train, the camaraderie between passengers, all of them poor, had been wonderful.

  But he knew how unforgiving the conditions could be. And now, as he traveled in the comfort of a first-class carriage on a fast train (top speed 87 miles per hour) on the same route Mary had taken, he pictured her—weak, with nothing of her own to eat or drink, possibly fading in a
nd out of consciousness—crammed into the corner of a bottom wooden bunk with the rough feet of the occupants on the bunk above dangling centimeters from her face.

  Her carriage would have been heaving with laborers and rustics, who routinely clambered aboard slow-moving local trains between stations, occupying every inch of space. Mary would have been forced to share her bunk with up to six or seven other passengers. With no one to guard her place while she went to the toilet, she might well have found herself squeezed onto the floor.

  When the train stopped during the day and the sun hammered down on the roof, it must have been like the inside of a tandoor oven. The circular metal fans bolted to the ceiling would have offered little respite. During the inordinate number of stops, there would have been no letup from the footfall of hawkers selling everything from biscuits and hot tea to safety pins and rat poison. Nor from the perpetual stench of “night soil,” which, on all Indian trains, went straight down the toilet chutes onto the tracks.

  Had someone taken pity on Mary and helped her? Perhaps a sympathetic mother who had given the poor girl some water and a little something to eat from her family’s tiffin.

  Had she had made it to Ranchi alive?

  The odds were not good. And without Mary, or at least irrefutable evidence that she had not ended up dead and mutilated on the side of Jaipur’s Ajmer Road, Puri was going to have an extremely hard time proving what had happened on the night of August 22. A train booking with her name on the roster would not be enough to prove Ajay Kasliwal’s innocence.

  The detective watched the striking Rajasthani landscape slip past his window. The sun was setting over an intricate patchwork of small fields—the dry, baked earth rutted with grooves made by ox-drawn plows in expectation of the monsoon rains.

  His eyes followed the progress of a herd of black goats and a stick-wielding boy along a well-worn pathway that led to a clutch of simple homesteads. In front of one stood a big black water buffalo chewing slowly and deliberately. Nearby, on a charpoy, sat an old man with a brilliant white moustache and a bright red turban watching the train go by.

  Puri reached Ranchi early the next morning. He had phoned ahead to arrange transportation and exited the station to find a driver who hailed from Jadugoda waiting for him.