Death in Leamington

by David Smith

  ‘Indeed, it’s a huge stroke of luck, he was beginning to ask some uncomfortable questions,’ added Sir William.

  ‘Well, that’s exactly why I’m here. There’s something about this whole latest episode that I don’t like, something fishy. Are you sure you haven’t inadvertently said something you shouldn’t have about Enigma to the police?’

  ‘Of course not, Khand. I’m in this as deeply as you are.’

  ‘You are indeed,’ Khand smiled ominously.

  ‘Look, Khand, this whole thing has to quieten down, you have to keep my name out of it. This business has caused me all sorts of problems. You never told me what was really going to happen and I certainly didn’t expect a body on my doorstep. And now with that other murder, the actress and Hunter and this friend of Nadia’s – the whole thing’s running out of control.’

  ‘Bullshit! You know it had to be done, they were both beginning to ask the wrong kind of questions, you know what that could have meant,’ said Khand, the menace returning to his voice.

  ‘Are you questioning my commitment?’

  ‘I’m merely stating the obvious based on the facts as they are.’

  ‘But Christ, why did you have to kill them?’

  Khand looked at him intently and brought his own face right up close to Sir William’s. He stared at him for maybe thirty seconds before speaking. Sir William felt the barrel of a gun in his stomach as he stared at the evil expression in Khand’s eyes. So that was what Khand was fingering in his pocket, he’s got a bloody gun, he thought. He swallowed hard, wondering what he should do next, not certain at all about how impetuous this dangerous man could be.

  Thereto the Blatant beast by them set on

  At him began aloud to barke and bay.

  Spenser, The Faerie Queene

  ‘You’ve had a remarkably good run in our service, Sir William, but I smell a rat and my sense of smell is usually incredibly good. I’m not sure if I can trust you anymore. Tell me why I shouldn’t just pull this trigger right now.’

  ‘Look, Khand, I’ve done everything you asked me to do, haven’t I? Put that stupid thing away and let’s talk sensibly about this.’ Sir William was beginning to shake uncontrollably; he had not seen Khand like this before. He knew he was dangerous and unpredictable but how much further would he go?

  ‘Tell me now what you’ve told the police.’

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all, why would I tell them anything?’

  ‘I know you were at Guy’s Cliffe. Rohit was there too, what did you tell them about Enigma?’ asked Khand with real venom in his voice now. Sir William looked aghast and struggled for words.

  ‘Nothing, that was some stupid stunt that Hunter was pulling. It took me totally by surprise. Anyway how do you know about that?’ he eventually stammered.

  ‘I told you before, I have my spies in the police.’

  ‘Look, I’ve already told you before; we’re in just the right place with Enigma. The tender will be awarded next Friday and with the document rewrite and a little lubrication of the process we are nearly home and dry.’ Sir William’s voice was beginning to crack from the strain of the tension and broke into a sort of grizzled falsetto.

  ‘Hunter had some sort of paper on him,’ said Khand, loosening his grasp a little on Sir William’s collar, at the same time pushing the gun deeper into his stomach to reinforce his message. ‘It referred to Enigma. That can’t be a coincidence. There’s absolutely no room for mistakes here, do you understand? He won’t tolerate failure. And as for your loyalty…’

  *

  Before he could finish his sentence, there was a knock on the study door and both men turned towards it, surprised by the interruption. Nadia poked her head around the door and Khand moved away from Sir William quickly, hiding the gun under his coat.

  ‘Nadia, I asked you not to bother us,’ said Sir William in an irritated voice. She stared at Khand with utter contempt but did not deign to address him. Khand smiled back at her, opening his mouth so that she could see the gold crowns on his teeth.

  ‘You are looking very beautiful, Nadia,’ he said in the most obsequious of voices. She ignored his comment and his gaze, turning back to her husband.

  ‘You have another visitor at the front door, my darling,’ she said with a false sweetness.

  ‘What now? Can’t you see we’re busy? Who is it?’ he asked, flustered by this news.

  ‘I really don’t think it can wait, my dearest, shall I show him in?’

  Before Sir William could say anything to stop her, she opened the study door wider and a tall, rather Germanic, fair haired and blue-eyed man entered the room, still hobbling a little on his crutches.

  ‘Hunter!’ gasped Sir William, realising he had caught them red-handed. ‘You’re supposed to be dead…’

  Hunter was followed by another three police officers who moved quickly to grab both men. The room descended immediately into chaos. Still in shock, Sir William was submissive and did not offer any resistance, but Khand on the other hand reacted quickly and decisively, struggling free of their grasp. He pulled his gun and fired a shot that winged the officer nearest to him.

  There was a cry of pain and Hunter shouted, ‘Don’t move Khand, put the gun down.’

  *

  Without a word, Khand ducked his shoulder to avoid the other officer’s hands and span on his heels. With surprising dexterity for a middle-aged man, he launched himself through the open French doors into the garden outside. One officer continued to handcuff the stunned Sir William and read him his rights, while the others gave chase to Khand, out onto the balcony and into the back garden. There were two more shots that lit up the garden instantaneously and the officers were forced to take cover for a second. They shone their torches through the undergrowth to try and locate where Khand was hiding. There was no sign of him. On his radio, the officer holding Sir William gave instructions to direct the spotlights of a police helicopter and sweep the back gardens of the row of Regency houses and the workshops that backed on to them behind.

  *

  Next door, I saw the sound crew put their thumbs up. Operation ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ had worked.

  ‘Got them,’ I said. ‘With a full confession.’

  A second later, I was back on my radio. ‘Damn it. Khand’s got away, they’ve got him on the thermal cameras though and the helicopter is trying to track him.’

  *

  Khand was running for his life now, all his training at the K-company terrorist camps flooding back into his mind. He doubled back through the lane behind the houses, back through the yard of a second hand car dealer. Above him he could hear the throbbing of the helicopter and in the surrounding streets the sound of sirens rapidly converging, the blue lights strobing against the walls of the buildings, obscuring the weaker sodium light streetlights. He paused for breath and tried desperately to think what he should do next.

  In that split second of hesitation he felt the cold steel of the silenced barrel of an SV-99 at the back of his head. Instinctively he began to raise his hands, knowing he had only a moment or two to grab the barrel, twist and bring his hands down quickly to redirect the gun towards his assailant’s solar plexus while stamping his heel down on his foot to knock him off balance. But before his hands were even past his shoulders, the gun was fired. The shot took one side of his head off completely and his body fell to the ground, instantly lifeless.

  *

  The Sikh holding the gun was disguised as a police marksman. The silencer on the gun meant that the shot was executed without a sound. He was quick and efficient in packing Khand’s body into the boot of his black cab and drove away through the rapidly filling streets, turning off the ‘For Hire’ sign to avoid being flagged down.

  An hour later, the park keeper in Jephson Gardens found Khand’s mutilated body as he was locking up. It has been dumped near the group of statues called ‘Elephants and Boy’, the monument to Sam Lockhart’s three elephants, the ‘Three Graces’. Every limb had been crushed
with a sledgehammer and the remaining half of Khand’s ghoulish head was barely recognisable, balanced on the trunk of one of the elephants.

  During the Mughal era it was a common mode of execution to have the offender trampled underfoot by an elephant.

  G. A. Natesan, The Indian Review

  *

  ‘It looks like K-Company has done our work for us,’ said Hunter, shaking his head when we arrived at the scene. ‘Let’s get this mess cleared up. At least maybe we’ll all get a medal now from the chief.’

  ‘Forensics have just arrived, Sir,’ I said.

  ‘Wait, before they start let me see Khand’s right hand,’ Hunter said, looking at the ‘bite’ on the web of the detached right hand between the thumb and forefinger. ‘As I thought, our friend the Browning,’ he added in satisfaction. Alice, already dressed in her protective suit, came up beside us with her forensics bag.

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, ‘we do seem to be keeping you busy this week. This one’s a bit of a mess I’m afraid.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Alice, grimacing at the sight of the crushed limbs and severed head.

  Hunter pointed out the mark on the man’s hand to her and said, ‘I think we might have the man who fired the Browning, Alice.’

  ‘Maybe, but of course the Browning was not the cause of Troyte’s death you know.’

  We both looked at her in surprise.

  ‘And in any case, it’s Rohit’s prints that are all over the stock and his footprints were in the garden, there weren’t any others.’

  ‘You mean, Troyte wasn’t killed by the Browning?’ asked Hunter. He looked anguished by this news.

  ‘No, we believe he died of a massive heart attack, I’d estimate it occurred at least an hour before the bullet wound was inflicted. He was already long dead when he was shot through the head, we can tell that from the way the blood flowed from the wound.’

  ‘So it wasn’t murder then?’ I asked, totally confused by the implications of this.

  ‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions about that,’ muttered Hunter, who also looked genuinely perplexed by this unexpected twist.

  ‘I guess it’s not surprising that Rohit’s prints would be on the gun if he stole it from Baxter,’ he deliberated. ‘We’d better get him picked up again all the same. Are there any more surprises for us in your report, Alice?’ he said, scratching his head. He was clearly irritated that his tidy explanation of events was unravelling with these new revelations.

  Alice paused and brushed away the hair flapping around her face in the wind. ‘Well yes, the other really strange thing we’ve discovered concerns the condom we found in Troyte’s bedroom. The semen is Troyte’s alright; it’s a perfect match to his other fluids we tested. But there are no other fluids on the surface of the empty sheath; in fact there is no sign of any female or male contact. It’s almost as if it was never used in anger, so to speak.’

  ‘Why would anyone bother to use a condom if there was no one else involved, was it some kind of fetish?’ I asked. This was getting stranger and stranger. A thought came into my mind and I reminded the DI about the strange photographs we found in the box in Pearl’s safe.

  ‘I think you may be right,’ he said. ‘But the photos were all part of Miss Taylor’s elaborate revenge plot, so I think we’ve got a pretty full explanation for that now. Is there anything else, Alice?’

  ‘Yes, we got a lipstick and saliva sample from the rim of the champagne glass in Troyte’s house. We’ve run a DNA match and have a result.’

  ‘OK and what is that?’

  ‘There’s a match to one of the victims,’ her voice sounded somewhat triumphant as if she was proud of her own detective skills. I wondered what else she had up her sleeve, one of my best friends trying to upstage me again.

  ‘A match to Troyte’s DNA?’

  ‘No, interestingly there’s a match to Nariman. Whoever drank from that glass, and we have to reasonably assume from the lipstick it was a woman, must be a very close blood relative of his.’

  ‘Nadia?’ I asked, ‘How can that be? She was in the house all day.’

  ‘No not Nadia, Penny, remember there is another woman involved in this whole confused story,’ said Hunter. I could see by his changed expression that he was beginning to understand the significance of this new information. ‘All the same, I think we do need to get Nadia to give us a blood or saliva sample for Alice to test and it would be good to get something that we know belongs to Miss Taylor as a cross-check.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What’s Miss Taylor got to do with it?’ I asked, my mind racing over new possibilities, but I was by now completely confused.

  ‘I’m afraid that despite my earlier assurance to the contrary, Miss Taylor seems increasingly likely, albeit probably accidentally, to have the code to the whole enigma,’ he stated mysteriously.

  *

  After the police had taken Sir William away in handcuffs, Nadia asked the butler to lock the doors again and went back up to her room. She decided to take the bath that she had promised herself earlier. Despite the arrest of her husband, she felt both a sense of rage and a huge sense of relief at the events of the evening, however disturbing they were, especially once she had heard that they had found Khand’s body. Of course they had spared her the more gruesome details of that discovery; however she was still very worried about Rohit. After she had bathed and oiled her hair, she wrapped herself in a towelling robe and sat on the bed watching the unravelling news reports on the TV in her room. It was then that she heard the familiar but unexpected tap of Rohit’s signal on her window pane and she hurriedly opened the shutters to see him standing there, silhouetted against the flashing lights from the police cars. They were still searching the garden and lane behind for any further evidence of Khand’s flight and his attacker. She embraced Rohit, bursting into tears at the joy of seeing him again, released for a moment from the tension of the evening’s trauma.

  Like gold, indeed, O maiden, is your shining body,

  And like sapphire, your fragrant dark hair.

  Abraham Mariaselvam, Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems

  Unfortunately, this time he had been spotted as he made his way along the balcony and their lover’s sweet nothings were soon rudely disturbed as two large police officers arrived and were led upstairs by the butler to her bedroom. Nadia protested at the intrusion but Rohit calmed her, saying he had nothing to fear from the police and was quite willing to go with them peacefully. When Hunter arrived a few minutes later, they read Rohit his rights and then bundled him into the car to take him back to the police station for a second round of questioning, this time under caution. Hunter stayed back to speak with Nadia for a few minutes; he had been joined by Alice and another female officer.

  ‘Inspector Hunter, what on earth is going on? Why are you taking Rohit again? I told you he would never have harmed my grandfather,’ she said, sobbing.

  ‘I’m afraid this time it is nothing to do with your grandfather’s murder,’ replied Hunter, ‘there is something else that has emerged this evening that we need to question him about. In the meantime, we need to establish something else about your grandfather’s medical history. Would you mind terribly if Alice here takes a swab from your mouth as a close relative? It won’t hurt and will take only a second.’

  *

  After they had taken the sample, Hunter returned to the station quickly and went to the interview room straight away with one of his team. Rohit was sitting there with a duty lawyer. He looked calm enough. After the usual preliminary questions, Hunter quickly got to the point.

  ‘So Rohit, it appears you were not entirely straight with me before about what you were doing last Sunday,’ he said sternly. ‘You weren’t hiding in Coventry all day, were you?’

  The lawyer whispered to Rohit to explain to him what he should and shouldn’t say. Rohit shook his head and indicated he wanted to answer the question.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Inspector?’

&
nbsp; ‘You paid a visit to a Mr Troyte in Lansdowne Circus, didn’t you? We know because you left your prints. Now why would you have gone there, if it wasn’t to commit some sort of mischief?’

  Rohit suddenly looked very concerned and began to bite his lip nervously. His lawyer turned to Hunter and indicated that his client would not answer the question. Hunter shook his head and looked again at Rohit, repeating his question. The lawyer went to intervene again but before he could stop him, Rohit broke down into sobs and started to answer anyway.

  ‘Inspector, please believe me, it’s not what it seems.’

  ‘OK, well I’m all ears,’ Hunter pressed him firmly.

  ‘I went to ask him about Nadia,’ Rohit replied, falteringly this time. ‘I’d found out from my research that he was friends with Mr Nariman at College about the time that Nadia’s mother was born and I wanted to know whether Mr Nariman was really her grandfather or not. You see I had my doubts, from the research that I had done, some things in the story just didn’t fit. I even had DNA tests done. They were negative; there was nothing, no match, no connection between them.’

  ‘And so what happened when you got to the house?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me in at first. Something had scared him, but when I mentioned Mr Nariman’s name and told him that I used to work for him, he opened the door and reluctantly agreed to see me. We sat in his drawing room in silence, while he paced around the room. He was clearly very anxious about something. Eventually he sat down and asked me to tell him the whole story, as I knew it. After I had finished, he just looked at me like a guilty child. He told me it was all a very long time ago and he could not remember very well what had happened. Maybe there had been some sort of mistake, some sort of mix up. In any case, all he knew was that he’d done Mr Nariman a favour by sorting things out for him, but I could tell he wasn’t telling the whole truth.’