Up in Flames

by Evans, Geraldine

  ‘Your daughter was a very courageous young woman, Mrs Khan,’ was all the consolation he could offer her. ‘Try to force your mind to concentrate on that. She died bravely, with honour. It is something to be proud of.’

  Casey glanced at Rathi Khan in the heavy silence that had fallen. Perhaps he read reproach in Casey’s glance, for Casey had no chance to say anything before Rathi Khan launched into a torrent of speech.

  ‘What was I to do, Inspector? Remember this was my mother we’re talking about. She had Alzheimer’s. She wasn’t responsible for her actions any more than Chandra’s little daughter would have been. When Magan, Chandra’s husband, died she began to say to Chandra that she must become sati. At first Chandra laughed about it. We all did. But then my mother began collecting chunks of wood and coconut hair and built a pyre in the back garden. Suddenly it wasn’t so funny. She took Chandra’s bridal sari and hid it so that it would be ready for the day, she said. She sounded so sane, so matter of fact that it was frightening.

  ‘By this time we were all terrified of what she would do, so I got the tenants out of the flat and moved Chandra and the baby in. As my wife told you, we didn’t think my mother even knew about the flat, but she still had her lucid moments and must have taken in more than I thought. I certainly never imagined she would be able to get herself over

  there on her own.’ Head in hands, he added brokenly, ‘I thought Chandra would be safe there. I thought what I did, everything I did, was for the best. I didn’t know what else to do. My brother in India refused to have her back. He couldn’t bear the stigma. He had never been her favourite son.’ He gazed plaintively at Casey and asked, ‘What happens now? I suppose we’ll be charged as some sort of accessory?’

  Casey hesitated. Personally, he thought the family had suffered enough. ‘As to charges, I’ll need to discuss that with my superintendent, but I think I can safely say he’s likely to take a lenient view. But it would at least stop all the hot-heads from trying to stir up trouble if you’ll all come down to the station and make statements. Get everything out in the open.’

  Rathi Khan nodded. ‘We’ll come. Of course we’ll come. We would not like all these sad deaths in our family to be the cause of any further tragedy.’

  Evidently believing that the day’s revelations released him from his vow of silence, Catt remarked, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t try to arrange to get your mother back to India, safely secreted in some out of the way village where we’d never trace her.’

  ‘I was trying to, with my brother’s help. But he wasn’t being very co-operative. I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to talk him round. What with the shock of Chandra and Leela’s deaths and at the hands of my own mother. Then my father’s stroke...’ Rathi Khan raised his gaze to Casey’s. ‘You may not believe this, Inspector, but I loved my daughter. She was the apple of my eye. But I loved my mother, also. Always, I have tried to be a dutiful son. Chandra and Leela were dead — my mother was still alive. Naturally, I had to protect her.’ He sighed. ‘I believed the marriage I arranged for Chandra would be a good one, with a man I knew already adored her. Many women —’ briefly his gaze rested on his plain, sad-eyed and neglected daughter-in-law where she sat alone in the corner of the room — ‘would be thankful for such a loving husband. I knew Roop Bansi, Chandra’s mother-in-law, could be difficult, but I was sure that in a few short years Chandra’s husband would be persuaded to move away from his parents’ home and find a place of their own. He was ambitious and had far more drive than his father. He had the modern ideas, too, just like my son. And like my son, Chandra and Kamala he had been born and brought up here. More English than the English - isn’t that what you say?’ He essayed a tiny smile that quickly faded. ‘Things are changing in our community. The old ways are giving way to the new. It is right that they should. But for Chandra things didn’t happen quickly enough.’ His shoulders sagged and all at once his face took on the furrows and contours of a much older man. Faintly, he added, ‘I am not such a fool as to make the same mistakes with my second daughter.’

  He stood up. ‘Please give us a few minutes and we will come to the station and make those statements.’

  Casey and Catt waited in the hallway while the family gathered themselves and their grief together. ‘Terrible business,’ a subdued Catt muttered as they waited. ‘Not only his mother, daughter and her child gone up in smoke, but I imagine his reputation, too.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll all be pleasantly surprised,’ said Casey. ‘Sometimes tragedy brings out the best in people. We’ll just have to wait and see. But at least the super and the rest of the PC brass will have to accept the outcome. Maybe now they’ll stop their eternal handwringing and apologising and start realising that not everything white is bad and everything black or brown good.’

  Catt snorted. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. Last I heard from one of my Asian snouts was that the not-so-super has arranged to don saffron robes and join in procession with the Hare Krishna lot down the High Street.’ Catt shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why, for God’s sake, can’t he be what he is - white, middle-class and Christian, instead of always aping the rituals of other faiths? To my mind, a man who won’t stand up for his own beliefs or people is unlikely to be a reliable defender of anyone else’s either. Not a very healthy thing in a senior police officer.’

  Casey could find nothing to add to that. Shortly after, they formed their own procession, as one, two, three cars, followed one another in almost funereal mode, to the police station.

  And as the family signed their statements, Casey could only hope it put an end to all the hatred. At least till the next time.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Do any of us know who we are?’ asked Catt much later. The Khan family had long since left and he and Casey were about to leave for home themselves. ‘Did Chandra? Caught between two worlds as she was how could she ever find the time to discover her true self?’

  Making the first — and Casey hoped —the last reference to the other evening when Catt had turned up at his home, Catt added with the sharp insight Casey had come to recognise, ‘Do you? Whose whole lifestyle it seems to me - apart from what I presume was a lapse the other evening - has been deliberately chosen in reaction against your parents’ way of life.’

  Catt’s words prompted Casey into an evaluation of himself as he climbed in to his car and drove home.

  Was he whatever he was merely in reaction against his parents’ lifestyle? Rather than because it was what he wanted to be? Casey felt Catt might have a point, to an extent at least. But unlike poor, beautiful, tragic Chandra and her child, he had a chance to do something about it. He had a chance to metamorphose into the true him. Whatever that was. But maybe it was time he found out what it might be.

  Maybe it was time he tried doing some of the things he should have done in his youth, might have done in his youth but for his parents continuing to do them in his stead. Wasn’t that meant to be the whole point of youth? To discover who, what, you were? Like Chandra Bansi he had missed out on all that. Chandra had tried to accommodate her family’s demands, while he had been too busy being the responsible parent when he should have been the child to ever really have a youth. Maybe, if he now, belatedly, went through the rituals of the young, he would come out the other side a more rounded individual.

  Official communication with the Indian authorities had revealed that Rathi Khan’s mother’s mental health had been failing for some time before she travelled to England. Presumably, the culture shock upon her arrival in modern Britain had exacerbated the disease’s extent. Her son had told them that, until her marriage at the age of thirteen, his mother had lived all of her life in one village - Sikar. Like all Indian brides, on marriage, she had moved to her in-laws’ home village. As a child she had witnessed widows committing —or being forced — to commit sati. Didn’t they say that the memories and experiences of youth were the ones most vividly retained as one grew older and the grasp on reality is dimmed?

  Chand
ra’s parents had, in some ways, been rigidly old-fashioned. So, by clinging to their hippie lifestyle long after its glory days had passed, were his parents. Strange he had never realised that before. And to think they accused him of being a stick-in-the-mud reactionary.

  Maybe, as well as finding the true Willow Tree Casey, he ought to persevere with changing his parents, dragging them into the 21st century rather than them thinking he should adopt the fading mores of a generation that had never been his in the first place. And as he opened his front door and shouted, ‘I’m home,’ he reflected that, truly, this case had opened his eyes to a lot of things.

  Poor Rathi Khan. What a predicament he had found himself in. His daughter and granddaughter murdered, yet he had been unable to give himself over to grieving; this natural emotion had perforce to be put aside in order, for duty’s sake, to protect their murderer, his own mother.

  Casey was conscious of a sudden chill along his spine as he realised how easily any individual might find themselves in such a position. With at first, a few barely noticed alterations in behaviour, the subtle chemical changes in the brain could bring who knew what obsessions to stalk the mind of one’s daily companions.

  And as his parents packed up around him, preparing to return to their smallholding in the morning - rather than raise his credit card limits he had made the ultimate sacrifice of selling his most treasured share certificates to clear his parents’ debts - Casey thought about how dementia might affect them.

  Rathi Khan’s mother had become obsessed with the sati rituals she had witnessed in her youth in Sikar, memories strengthened by witnessing the 1987 sati episode in Deorala in Rajasthan when she was already showing the first signs of developing dementia. Maybe she had also read about the Dalit woman who committed sati in the 90s.

  Casey horrified at what effect such dementia could have on a family, uneasily considered his own. What might his family and friends’ individual obsessions push them into doing? His parents, for instance? How many times had he read that drug use, particularly of the variety and extent that his parents had gone in for, induced psychotic episodes? Schizophrenia, for instance, was believed by many medical experts to be a direct consequence of drug-taking.

  And as his father picked up the guitar that had been a constant companion for decades, fondled it and started a tuneless strumming prior to packing it away in their assorted baggage, Casey studied him for signs of incipient madness. Although his father looked much the same as he always had - so had Rathi Khan’s mother. Just because a person looked normal - or relatively normal in his father’s case, proved nothing. How dreadfully ironic that such catastrophic changes should be so invisible.

  His father, if so affected, might become convinced he was the greatest guitar player the world had never heard — and would probably, if he could summon sufficient energy — merely take up a harmless, if singularly tuneless, busking; demanding money with a menacing tin ear and tambourine accompaniment.

  His mother, whom he caught with the corner of his eye hunting through his father’s discarded jeans for his wacky baccy pouch, would, with her innate curiosity about everything, take up serial snooping or stalking.

  Catt, of course, would surely develop an unhealthy obsession with other people’s parents, while Rachel might well murder her orchestral conductor. How often had she voiced the desire to kill the maestro currently behaving like a megalomaniac during rehearsals? Perhaps with the bow of the first violin - another daily irritant - specially sharpened for the deed.

  As for himself, maybe his dotage would encourage him to take up the irresponsible hippie lifestyle he had spurned as a youth.

  That left Superintendent Brown-Smith. But on the whole Casey thought he would really prefer not to dwell on the prospect of the PC-obsessed super going quietly, invisibly demented while still in harness. After so much tragedy such thoughts really were the stuff of nightmares.

  About the Author

  Geraldine Evans has had twenty novels published. Her popular Rafferty & Llewellyn mysteries was her first procedural series. Up in Flames is the first novel in her second, Casey & Catt procedural series.

  Her other publications include one historical novel, a contemporary medical thriller, a romance and articles on a variety of subjects, including, Historical Biography, Historical Places, Writing, Astrology, Palmistry and other New Age subjects. She has also written a dramatization of Dead Before Morning, the first book in her Rafferty series and a sitcom, Jamjars, set in a vehicle repair workshop, which is awaiting offers. (Cockney rhyming slang: Jamjars= cars).

  Geraldine is a Londoner of Irish extraction, but now lives in Norfolk England where she moved, with her late husband, George, in 2000.

  You can learn more about Geraldine Evans and her novels at:

  http://www.geraldineevans.com

  You can read her Blog at: Geraldine Evans' Blog

  Geraldine Evans’ Other Novels on Kindle

  Llewellyn procedural The Rafferty and series

  Dead Before Morning #1

  Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/114K3eh

  Amazon US: http://amzn.to/ToGN88

  Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty is investigating his first murder since his promotion. What a shame the victim is a girl with no name and no face, found in a place she had no business being – a private psychiatric hospital. With everyone denying knowing anything about the victim, Rafferty has his work cut out, so he could do without his Ma setting him another little problem: that of getting his cousin ‘Jailhouse Jack’ out of the cells. Although he has no shortage of suspects, proof is not so plentiful. It is only when he remembers his forgotten promise to get his cousin out of clink that Rafferty gets the first glimmer that leads to the solution to the case.

  Down Among the Dead Men #2

  Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/U5LmTs

  Amazon US: http://amzn.to/10C2SmT

  When beautiful Barbara Longman is found dead in a meadow, uprooted wild flowers strewn about her and, in her hand, a single marigold, Inspector Joe Rafferty at first believes the murder may be the work of the serial killer over the county border in Suffolk. But then he meets the victim’s family – and, after liaising with the Suffolk CID, he rapidly comes to believe that the killing is the work of a copycat… one much closer to home, someone among the descendants of the long-dead wealthy family patriarch, Maximillian Shore. Everyone, it seems, had a motive: Henry the grieving widower; the victim’s brother-in-law, Charles Shore, the ruthless tycoon; Henry’s first wife, the Bohemian Anne, who has lost the custody of Maxie, her teenage son, to the saintly Barbara. Even the long-dead patriarch, Maximillian Shore, seems, to Rafferty, to have some involvement in the murder, though how, or why, Rafferty doesn’t understand until he finally grasps the truth behind the reasons for the killing. A truth sad and dreadful and which had been evident from the start, if only he had had the eyes to see.

  Death Line #3

  Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/10BPdfL

  Amazon US: http://amzn.to/TM7qV2

  Trailer: http://bit.ly/TXlc31

  Jasper Moon, internationally renowned ‘Seer to the Stars’, had signally failed to foresee his own future. He is found dead on his consulting-room floor, his skull crushed with a crystal ball and, all, around him, his office in chaos.

  Meanwhile, Ma Rafferty does some star-gazing of her own and is sure she can predict Detective Inspector Joe Rafferty’s future – by the simple expedient of organizing it herself. She is still engaged on her crusade to get Rafferty married off to a good Catholic girl with child-bearing hips. But Rafferty has a cunning plan to sabotage her machinations. Only trouble is, he needs Sergeant Llewellyn’s cooperation and he isn’t sure he’s going to get it.

  During their murder investigations, Inspector Rafferty and Sergeant Llewellyn discover a highly incriminating video concealed in Moon’s flat, a video which, if made public, could wreck more than one life. Was the famous astrologer really a nasty sexual predator? Gradually, connections begin to emerge between Moon a
nd others in the small Essex town of Elmhurst. But how is Rafferty to solve the case when all of his suspects have seemingly unbreakable alibis?

  The Hanging Tree #4

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  Amazon US: http://amzn.to/RY0aBj

  Trailer: http://bit.ly/UHOGES

  ‘The original crossroads used to run by here,’ Sam told Rafferty. ‘Legend has it that this was the old Hanging Tree.’

  When Inspector Rafferty first hears the report that a bound and hooded body has been seen hanging from a tree in Dedman Wood, he dismisses it as a schoolboy hoax, especially when police at the scene find nothing out of the ordinary.

  But his anxiety rises sharply when the witness turns out to be a respectable local magistrate, who identifies the corpse as Maurice Smith, a man once accused of four child rapes. Thrown out on a legal technicality, Smith’s case had become a cause-celebre which had generated much ill-feeling within the community.

  Rafferty and Sergeant Llewellyn visit Smith’s home – to discover he has mysteriously disappeared. And in his flat they find a threatening letter, and fresh bloodstains…

  Then the body turns up again in the woods. Could there be a self-appointed executioner at work, meting out his own form of justice on the legendary Hanging Tree?

  Absolute Poison #5

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  Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty is having a bad week–two pensioner suicides already and he can’t help feeling trouble comes in threes. Also niggling in his mind is the fact that Llewellyn, his posh sergeant, has bought a ‘bargain’ suit from Rafferty’s mother. Sure to be stolen goods, the suit is bound to drop Rafferty in it when the holier-than-thou Llewellyn wears it on his wedding day, with the promise of a gimlet-eyed Superintendent Bradley in attendance..