‘Good night, sir.’
Lieutenant Vasanth Kumar was in deep trouble. Against his better judgement, he had dropped his roommate Emile to the airport in the middle of the night so he could fly out to Mumbai. Emile had not taken permission to leave the base, and despite Vasanth’s repeated pleas had not called his course officer the next day to let him know of his absence. ‘Just tell him that I am SIQ [sick in quarantine],’ Emile had casually tossed the instruction over his shoulder as he ran into the airport to board the 3.45 am Air India flight 691 to Mumbai. ‘You better call him before he asks me, otherwise I’ll be jacked,’ Vasanth shouted back as the automatic doors to the airport closed on Emile’s receding back.
He had tried to make himself invisible in class the next morning, a difficult task in a large room with a handful of men. ‘Where’s Lieutenant Emile Jerome?’ The absence had not escaped course officer Vishal Singh’s hawk eye. Vasanth Kumar had no option but to lie. Emile was SIQ, he said.
‘With whose permission? Please summon him from the room.’
Vasanth left the classroom and tried to call Emile in Mumbai. His phone was switched off. Bloody hell. It was just past nine on May 7 when he got through to Maria and spoke to Emile. ‘You didn’t call the course officer as I told you to. He’s asking me about you now.’
‘Yaar,’ Emile was cool, ‘I tried to; his phone was unreachable.’
‘What are you doing? Please call him now, I told you I’ll be jacked otherwise,’ Vasanth recalled his words before the police.
But Emile did not call the course officer that day or the next, and Vasanth Kumar was asked to give a written explanation for making a false statement to his superior. An enquiry was initiated into his and Emile’s conduct, and an adverse note sent to his personal file. To add to Vasanth’s woes Emile’s father arrived unexpectedly in Kochi on the evening of May 8 demanding to see his son. Emile should have been back on base that day, but had still not returned. He called to say that he had missed his flight. Vasanth had to spend an entire evening placating Jerome Joseph.
Really, even by navy standards, there were limits to what a course mate could do, Vasanth thought, as he went back into his room on the morning of May 9 only to find Emile sprawled on the bed in his shorts, sleeping like the dead. From that day till the 21st of the month—the day Sub-Inspector Mahesh Tawade reached Kochi to arrest him—Emile displayed no untoward behaviour, said his superiors and course mates. ‘If anything he seemed calmer and relaxed,’ Vasanth Kumar told the police. ‘When I asked him the reason for that, he said, “My problems with my girlfriend have been resolved. I’ve decided that by year end we will get married, regardless of what my parents have to say.”’ Back in Mumbai, Maria too was displaying the same steeliness under interrogation.
Emile focused in class and on his swimming, he ate well, and spoke to Maria in hushed tones for long durations, several times a day. Lovebirds! Vasanth Kumar watched Emile, feeling somewhat forlorn as he thought of his own long-distance relationship with his wife. There was just one inexplicable change Vasanth Kumar noticed in his roommate after he returned from Mumbai. Emile had taken to getting up at 4.30 every morning to read the Bible.
After four days of continuous mind games, Maria was beginning to trip up. Inspector Raorane had been using his favourite ploy, one that had served him well during an earlier investigation into the murder of a businessman called Pradeep Jain at Dahisar. His suspect and eventual culprit had been the murdered man’s wife’s lover. ‘I’d call him to my office every day and ask him to help me with the probe. ‘What do you think happened?’ I kept asking. It was the same with Maria. I asked her to draw up possible scenarios of what could have happened to Neeraj. She kept saying, “I don’t know. I know nothing.” But if you keep asking the same questions time after time without letting up you may get a clue. The frustration builds up, not just for the interrogator but also for the other person and they can slip up. Pradeep Jain’s wife’s lover eventually confessed to killing him and even in this case, I began to get a sense that apart from her someone else was also involved in Neeraj’s disappearance.’
Like fast bowlers, good investigators too hunt in pairs. Inspector Raorane pulled in his colleague, Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar, into the interrogation sessions. Shivalkar, a tall man with a pleasant, impassive face has the enviable knack for saurian stillness. He could be in a room and be totally unobtrusive. He had a mild-mannered style of questioning, as if he just wanted to hear some stories, but he never missed a note. It also helped that Shivalkar had worked with the Economic Offences Wing, where he had dealt with white-collar suspects. ‘Once they [the suspects] secure themselves against a third degree, you can’t run a pandu investigation on them, hanh. So how do you overcome that? By being equally intelligent, equally patient, and equally crooked,’ said Inspector Raorane, elaborating on Shivalkar’s qualities.
Together they played good cop, bad cop with Maria. She had told them that on May 7 she had called up Nishant Lal around noon to tell him that Neeraj had left his phone behind. Later she and Emile had taken a taxi to Dadar at 4–4.30 pm to go shopping and romancing. A basic check on her statement, says Inspector Raorane, threw up many discrepancies.
The first breakthrough in the case came from the phone records, when the police traced the one call that was answered from Neeraj’s sister Shikha’s phone between 4 and 5 pm on the day he went missing. It was the only one of the hundred and thirty calls that the Grovers had made to Neeraj that day which was answered. The call was traced to Andheri, whereas Maria had said at that time she and Emile were at Dadar. A text message from scriptwriter Sumit Arora to Neeraj, received at 7.36 pm, showed the phone location at Dahisar. Neeraj had commissioned some work from Arora, a freelancer, and he had texted him back to say that the assignment was complete.
‘So this was our strategy. I would be sitting and chatting with her, and Sagar would just pop his head into the room to say, a call on Neeraj’s phone has been traced to Andheri, and he would leave right after while I would continue talking as before.’ Inspector Raorane recounted with relish their efforts to spook Maria into telling the truth. Maria and Emile were actually at Kiran Shreyans’s house in Andheri to borrow his car at the time, but she had told the police they were in Dadar. That’s why Neeraj’s sister’s call location had showed up in Andheri.
Maria’s second slip-up was when she told the police that she and Emile had travelled to Dadar in a taxi. For Dheeraj Solitaire watchman Satish Kumar Singh distinctly remembered the blue-grey Santro parked in the compound that evening. ‘I had just come back from a tea break and I saw a car parked that was not from our building, so I walked up towards it and saw the new tenant in 201 come down with a man, and put two suitcases in the boot of the car. The two of them went up again and returned with a huge plastic bag which they both were holding from the sides and which they struggled to put in the back seat,’ he told the police. ‘Maria madam saw me watching them and asked me how I was doing as she got into the driver’s seat. She then introduced me to the man sitting in the passenger’s seat in the front.’
‘He’s my fiancé,’ she told the watchman, caressing Emile’s face. Satish Kumar Singh had smiled and saluted smartly as the car drove out of the gates of the building.
‘So Maria,’ asked Inspector Raorane with endless patience, ‘tell me, did you really go shopping with Emile in a taxi to Dadar?’ He made sure that as she answered, she could see the watchman being interrogated in the next room from across the window.
‘By then I was sure that something drastic had happened to Neeraj. In all these days he had not bothered to get in touch with anyone, and all these lies that we had caught, they had to lead somewhere,’ said Inspector Raorane.
‘Monu, happy birthday, my darling.’
It was Maria’s twenty-eighth birthday on May 17. It had been ten days since Neeraj had gone missing. Had everything been well, she would have celebrated with Neeraj and his friends, as she had told them, or had a rendezvous wit
h Emile, as she had also promised him. But Neeraj’s friends had all turned against her after Rakesh Maria’s statement, and Emile, her lifeline to sanity, was at the naval base from where he tutored her every day on how to deal with Inspector Raorane’s questions. Thrust and parry, both sides planned well.
When she told him about Unit IX questioning the Dheeraj Solitaire watchman Satish Kumar Singh, Emile knew he had to call on his back-up. He had already phoned his friend Jitesh Saini in Mumbai. ‘There’s a problem, boss, I need your help.’
‘Abe teri kitni problems solve karu life mein,’ Jitesh had joked, referring to a previous occasion when he had sat up an entire night finishing the drawings for one of Emile’s engineering assignments. Both remembered the night well. While he had worked furiously to meet the deadline, Emile had kept him supplied with endless cups of chai made in the room using an immersion rod.
‘This is a bit more serious than some drawings. If anyone asks I need you to tell them that Monica and I had borrowed your car on May 7.’
‘That’s it? Consider it done. But what were you doing in Mumbai?’ Emile explained how he had come to Mumbai that day to see Maria without taking prior permission, and for which he was now facing an enquiry.
When she had realized that the watchman in Dheeraj Solitaire was being questioned, Maria changed her statement about the taxi and told Inspector Raorane that they had actually borrowed Emile’s friend Jitesh Saini’s car on the 7th evening. ‘I had forgotten,’ she said awkwardly.
She gave the police Jitesh’s name and not Kiran’s, because Emile was confident that his friend and course mate would weigh in for them, and tell the police whatever they asked him to say. The first inkling Jitesh had of police involvement was when Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar called him to ask about his car. Jitesh bought time by telling him he was busy and that he would revert in a couple of days. On her birthday, soon after he had spoken to her, Emile called Jitesh and gave him Maria’s number. ‘Yaar, talk to her, she is very troubled, it has something to do with her friend Neeraj Grover going missing, that’s why you’ll have to say you gave us your car.’
‘I don’t know why these things are happening to us, we’ve done nothing,’ Maria told Jitesh when he called. Affected by her troubled voice, he promised to deal with the matter and to also meet her the next day to understand why he needed to lie to the police.
Another course mate of Emile’s recalled that when he spoke to Maria to wish her on her birthday, she sounded tense and said to him, ‘Yaar, please pray for us.’
‘I said to her, “C’mon, your good times have just begun. Emile returned from Mumbai the other day and told me that you guys have decided to get married.” To which she said, “Arre yaar, there are lots of problems here, tu please pray karva that this year is good for us.”’
Like a scorpion stinging itself to death when caught in a circle of fire, Maria had begun to make suicidal errors under pressure. Jitesh Saini told her two irrefutable facts when he came to meet her at home the next day. There was no record, if the Crime Branch were to check, of either her or Emile calling him to borrow his car on the 7th. Second, more pertinently, he did not own a Santro. His car was a Maruti 800. Maria was shattered. She immediately called Emile. Jitesh told another friend, ‘I didn’t sleep that night wondering what I should be doing, until finally I decided that I could not lie to the police.’
Jitesh also received an unexpected call when he returned to Navy Nagar from Maria’s house. It was Maria’s brother Richard calling to apologize for all the inconvenience. ‘I had no idea that it wasn’t your car she used to go out that day. We’ll see to it that you do not get into any trouble with the police,’ he promised.
The investigation had now taken a more urgent turn. Maria retreated into a shell, talking obsessively only to Emile, and refusing to share anything with her family. Richard felt his judgement cloud. He no longer knew what to believe. The younger sister he thought he knew had turned into a dissembling stranger. ‘I was beginning to get worried. I thought she knew something about Neeraj going missing.’ Inspector Raorane was no longer the amiable interlocutor they had first met. There was now a rough, contemptuous edge to his talk. ‘Maar khayegi kya?’ (Would you like to be beaten up?) More than once Richard heard him say this to his sister. Instead of just talking, Raorane had also begun to coax Maria to give her answers in writing, put things on record.
When Inspector Raorane ordered Richard to ensure Maria told them the truth, he could only look at his sister helplessly. ‘Pray, Moni, and ask God to give you the strength to remember if you have forgotten something.’ The perfect crime lies not in the execution, but in the cover-up. Maria was about to blow hers.
‘Sir,’ she called Inspector Raorane a couple of days later, ‘I’d forgotten that we did not borrow the car from Jitesh Saini as I mentioned earlier. It slipped my mind but actually I had borrowed it from my friend from Bangalore, Kiran.’ After lying about the taxi this was the second time she was changing her account. Suddenly the car had become an important accessory in this mystery.
Maria had already warned Kiran about just such a call, so he was not unduly startled when Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar phoned and asked him to come to the Unit IX office. ‘Sure, I said. At about 9.30 pm that night I parked the Santro outside the unit IX office and told my assistants who were travelling with me that I’d be back in fifteen-twenty minutes, and I went in running,’ said Kiran.
It was the start of a four-hour ordeal for Kiran. ‘They took me to a room, sat me down, and began questioning me. They seemed infinitely patient as compared to my impatience, asking me how I knew Maria, what my relationship with her was, about my car, etc. Then another officer came and asked me exactly the same set of questions, then another and another. I didn’t know what was happening and I kept repeating myself. I still couldn’t quite connect Maria with what was going on. We are normal people and our friends cannot be criminals.
‘That evening, eight policemen asked me the same set of questions, again and again. Your name, father’s name, what do you do? And I kept saying, “Sir, is there anything I should be worried about, please tell me what has happened,” and they would turn around and say, “Why don’t you tell us what happened? She is after all your friend.” And when they told me to get the car in the compound, I got really scared. Finally at 1.30 or 1.40 am they said, “You can go home but leave your car behind. Behave with Maria as if you haven’t spoken to us at all.” But I was so hassled that the minute I got home I called her and told her the Crime Branch guys had called me. “What have you done, Maria?” I asked her. “Did you do anything in my car?” Until this point I had no idea what had happened or even who Neeraj was. She kept saying “Nothing” but sounded very stressed and panicky, and she also told me that she was very scared.’
Forensic examination later yielded blood samples from the back seat that matched Neeraj’s sample. By now Inspector Raorane was sure of not just Maria’s involvement, but of Emile’s as well—he knew that he had been with Maria all through the day Neeraj went missing, and he had been calling her all through the investigation. But Emile was a naval officer—he could not be touched by the civilian police without concrete evidence, so Maria was his only hope. He could see she was at breaking point. The overconfidence had long evaporated, leaving a shrunken wreck of a woman. The dark circles under her eyes seemed accentuated, and there was a nervous tremor in her voice, which had thickened with exhaustion.
When she walked into the Unit IX office the next day, May 20, Maria saw the familiar blue-grey Santro parked in the small compound, and blanched. Inspector Raorane, observing her wan face, decided to play his trump card. She entered the room and as usual put her mobile on the table. He waited for the phone to buzz as he knew it would. It was Emile. As she bent forward to pick it up, he leaned back in his chair. ‘Maria, don’t answer the phone.’
It was the first time since her interrogation began that he had stopped her from taking calls. They spoke only intermittentl
y after that, both sets of eyes remained trained on the phone that now throbbed every few minutes as Emile grew more and more frantic in Kochi. ‘All I did that day was to keep her in the office and not let her answer the phone; I also wanted Emile to get desperate.’
At 10.30 pm Richard, who had been waiting in the corridor of the Unit IX office all day for Maria to emerge, heard his sister cry out loudly. He rushed to see her weeping and Inspector Raorane telling her that he would hit her if she didn’t open her mouth. ‘He saw me and said, “Just get her to talk,” and with that he let us go.’ Maria reached home and immediately called Emile. According to Richard, they were on the phone for over an hour.
He had let her go all right, but Inspector Raorane was in a dilemma. He knew that Maria was ready to confess—to what he still didn’t know. Could he risk giving her the leeway to talk to Emile and plan further, or should he press home his psychological advantage and get her back again? He debated it with his colleagues over dinner, as it turned out for the final time in this case.
Inspector Raorane took a quick vote: Uske ghar ki apne ghar? (Her house or ours?) Sub-Inspector Shivalkar was of the view that nothing would be lost if they waited till the morning; most others concurred. Then Sub-Inspector Sanjiv Gawade spoke. ‘If we are going after her, why not now?’ There were no formal charges against Maria, he pointed out. What if she decided to leave town overnight?
It was a tough call for Inspector Raorane. There’s a Bombay High Court directive against bringing women suspects to a police station after sunset and before sunrise, though a later amendment in the Criminal Procedure Act allowed for such an arrest in exceptional cases provided they were carried out by a woman officer, after taking permission from a magistrate. Inspector Raorane said of his decision, ‘By now I was sure something serious had happened to Neeraj and felt that since we were this close to a confession, we should get her that night itself.’
Death in Mumbai Page 17