DGP Krishnan finally found his voice. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! Till you told me a few moments ago, I didn’t even know that she had come back from the hospital. I did not authorize anyone to speak to the wife.’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘And my team would not do anything like this without my authorization. Which can only mean that Rajan and the wife are lying.’
‘Or . . .’ Kabir frowned. ‘Someone went there in the guise of Kerala Police to find out how much she knows. Someone is worried about what Kannan discovered. And as we suspected, the clue to both the murders lies on the route that Kannan took that night.’
‘Damn,’ was all Krishnan could say.
80
The meeting with the king was set up for the same night. Krishnan had called up Dharmaraja Varma directly. The king had been expecting the call; he had been briefed by the chief minister’s office.
At 12.30 that night, Krishnan and Kabir arrived at Dharmaraja Varma’s palace in an unmarked car. They did not want to raise any eyebrows. The king received them at the main door. He was extremely courteous.
‘Welcome! Welcome!’ he greeted them warmly—after all, they were his guests—and led them to the living room. Though large in size, the room was not lavishly appointed. An eight-seater sofa, an old carpet, and a few other accessories were all that were in the room. Dharmaraja Varma lived a frugal life.
Krishnan touched Varma’s feet, probably to ensure the king knew whose side he was on. Kabir settled on the sofa and looked around the room, waiting for the niceties to end. As far as he was concerned, they were here to interrogate a murder suspect. Kannan had gone to see him before he was killed. The king had too much at stake and would have wanted to end the audit of the vaults at any cost.
‘So, Mr Khan,’ Dharmaraja Varma began the conversation. ‘The chief minister tells me you want to ask me something.’ He laughed. ‘I wonder why they should be so worried about anyone talking to me.’
Kabir completely ignored everything the king said. ‘What do you have to say about the murders of Kannan Ramalingam and Mr Subhash Parikh?’
‘About the murders?’ The king thought for a moment and then said, ‘Unfortunate. What else can I say? Anyone dies, it hurts. Every man is the lord’s creation.’ He glanced at Krishnan and looked back at Kabir. ‘In our religion, at least, that’s the way it is. What do you say, Krishnan?’
The latter smiled and nodded. Kabir kept his cool. He realized that Krishnan would never be able to act against the king if such a need were to arise.
‘It’s the same in every religion, Mr Varma,’ Kabir retorted, promising himself that he wouldn’t get angry. ‘I know you had a fundamental disagreement with the team taking stock of the vaults, but did you have any arguments with them over the past few days.’
‘None. I always maintain a cordial relationship with everyone.’ Dharmaraja Varma smiled. ‘Maybe because of who I am, no one enters into arguments with me. Occasionally, non-believers like you come along.’
‘Non-believers.’
‘Yes. People who don’t have faith in the Hindu religion?’
‘What does not having faith in the Hindu religion have to do with these killings?’
‘If you had faith, you wouldn’t ask me these questions. Both these deaths, three, if we include poor Gopi, happened because of the will of Padmanabha. He is unhappy with what is happening. Didn’t the Devaprasnam prove this?’
‘Rubbish,’ Kabir burst out.
‘Careful, young man!’ the king reprimanded. ‘Be conscious of where you are right now.’
‘Forget where I am,’ Kabir continued. ‘Where were you on the nights when Kannan and Subhash were killed?’
‘Is it so easy to become a CBI officer these days?’ Dharmaraja Varma looked at Krishnan and asked. Gradually shifting his glance towards Khan he added, ‘Can just anyone become a CBI officer?’
‘Excuse me?’ Kabir was taken aback.
‘You asked me a stupid question. You think if I wanted to kill someone at this age, I would go myself, chase them and slit their throats? If I wanted to kill the two of them, there are enough means at my disposal to do so without moving from my seat. If it were me, I would make sure I stayed at home, and had a rock-solid alibi. In this country money can buy anything. Even human life.’ Dharmaraja Varma smirked.
‘Mere moments ago you said that in your religion, every life is considered god’s creation. So you mean to say that you have the power to buy out god’s own creation. Well done, sir. I didn’t realize how powerful you are.’ Kabir gave the king a thumbs-up. ‘However, I’ll let that pass.’ And he smiled. An arrogant smile. ‘Would you know of anyone who would want to kill Kannan?’
‘I hardly knew Kannan, Officer. It is not the job of royalty to keep track of commoners. There are hundreds and thousands of autorickshaw drivers in Thiruvananthapuram. Should I know all of them?’
‘What about Subhash Parikh?’
‘I knew him for a week.’
‘And Mr Nair? Mr Radhakrishnan Nair?’
‘What about him?’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Yes, I do. His father was a loyal subject of my predecessor.’
‘Then you are aware that you made an investment in Mr Nair’s transport company many years ago.’
‘Did I?’ He thought about it for a minute, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, I recall. He had borrowed money from me and in return he insisted that I take a stake in the company. We keep doing such charity. Helping those in need.’
‘How many such companies have you invested in like this, sir?’
‘I can’t say. Everything I have is the lord’s. And whatever the lord gives me is used to take care of his people.’
‘Umm . . . the stake?’ Kabir reminded him.
‘I really don’t remember.’
‘We checked your tax returns for the last few years. This is the only investment that shows up.’
‘How dare you?’ the king roared, red-faced. ‘How dare you check my documents without a proper order? This is ridiculous! I am going to take it up with the CBI director and the state.’
‘I’m sure you’d want this discussion to remain private, sir.’ Kabir smiled.
The king was seething, but he calmed down in the face of Kabir’s veiled threat. ‘I don’t recollect any other investments. Even this one I remember because Nair’s father was close to the previous king.’
‘You must have heard about a truck belonging to APS Transport being seized in Madurai from which some artefacts were recovered. It seems the truck was taking them to the port in Tuticorin from where they would be smuggled out of the country. An offence punishable with up to ten years in jail.’
‘Are you teaching me the law, son?’
‘Apologies, sir.’ Kabir quickly tried to calm him down. He wanted to finish this interrogation before he got thrown out. ‘In the truck there were expensive ancient artefacts. Some of them could be from your vaults.’
Dharmaraja Varma was reaching the limits of his patience. He wanted the interview to end. ‘Look, Officer. The truck you are referring to does not belong to Nair. Nair’s wife called me after your third-degree treatment of him. His business shut down years ago. So the trucks are not his.’
‘The signature on the RTO papers are his.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Validated by a handwriting expert.’
‘That may be. But the items you found in the truck could be from anywhere. Not necessarily from the Anantha Padmanabha Swamy Temple’s vaults. Pots like those were very common in the olden days. And the jewellery styles were the same across temples and kingdoms. I am sure there has been a mistake.’
‘We will look into that, sir. We will be matching the jewellery in your vaults with the jewellery that was recovered to confirm if the source is the same.’
‘Of course,’ the king responded nonchalantly.
‘Anything else you would like to tell us, Mr Varma? Any questions?’ Kabir asked him, abruptly cutting
the conversation.
‘You’re the ones who requested this interview. Left to myself, I would not have said anything.’
‘Thank you, Mr Varma.’ Kabir Khan rose and walked out of the room. Krishnan stopped to touch the king’s feet and then turned to leave.
‘Manage him. He is trying to get ahead of himself.’
Kabir was already in the car when Krishnan came out.
‘Don’t you think you were a bit too arrogant with him?’ he asked, starting the engine.
‘He put me off initially by talking about my religion. Where does religion come in here? We are talking about two people who have been killed. We don’t know who killed them. We have come here to ask him a few questions and that guy throws attitude. Touch me if you can! What do you expect me to do?’
‘He is the king. The whole of Kerala looks up to him.’
‘And that gives him the right to do what he wants?’
Krishnan shook his head in exasperation. ‘Anyway, are you happy now? Satisfied that he is not involved?’
‘He is.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said he is involved.’
‘And what in today’s conversation makes you say that.’
‘No one except you, me and Madhavan knows exactly what was found in the sand truck; the press release only says artefacts.’ He looked at Krishnan, eyebrows raised.
A confused Krishnan asked him, ‘What?’
‘Unless you told him.’
81
Krishnan looked at him indignantly. ‘No, I didn’t.’
Kabir was so taken in by the mature way in which Krishnan had handled the accusation that he felt sorry for what he had done. But he had to get to the bottom of this.
‘Then how did he know about the numbered golden pots that were found in the truck? Either he saw the news and independently found out what was seized—our system is so porous that somebody or other could have squealed to him—or he is involved in the actual crime in some way. But how deep his involvement runs? I don’t know.’ He turned and looked at Krishnan who was staring at the road ahead. ‘Yet!’
Krishnan didn’t utter a word the rest of the drive back to the Lotus Pond. After dropping Kabir at the hotel, he drove back home.
As Kabir walked into the hotel lobby, his mobile phone beeped. He looked at it. A smile lit up his face. He hurriedly dialled a number.
‘Hey, sorry for calling so late. I just saw your message.’ As the conversation went on, Kabir’s smile widened. ‘No, no. I was awake. Just came back from an interrogation. This is the best news I’ve got in weeks! How did it happen? . . . Wonderful. Have you started the interrogation yet? . . . Okay, good. Hold on. I will be there tomorrow morning. We can do it together. Bye!’
Kabir disconnected the call and immediately dialled Krishnan’s number. He had just reached home, and was parking his car. ‘I need to go to Mumbai tomorrow morning.’
‘Is everything okay?’ Krishnan asked. He was still feeling uncomfortable about the discussion with Dharmaraja Varma, more so about Kabir’s conversation with him in the car.
‘The driver is in custody.’
‘Which driver?’
‘The one who was waiting at Mumbai airport to receive Subhash Parikh. They caught him at a checkpoint. He didn’t know that Mumbai Police was on the lookout for him, and drove straight into a trap. From the look of things, he is a regular taxi driver who occasionally works on contract with Travel House. When they have more customers than cars, they outsource work to empanelled drivers like him. I am glad that they were able to nab him. I had lost hope when we couldn’t get his number from Subhash’s phone.’
‘Hmm. Okay. Do you want to take someone with you?’
‘No. I’ll let you know.’
The next day Kabir Khan was on the 6 a.m. flight to Mumbai. He had a feeling that it was going to be a defining day for him and the investigation.
82
MUMBAI
‘Let’s go!’ said an excited Kabir Khan the moment he walked into the Marine Lines office of Mumbai Police.
ACP Patil looked up from his desk and smiled. ‘Hello, Khan,’ he said. ‘You are looking fit as ever.’
The two of them had worked together several years ago when terrorists had attacked the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Patil was now ACP in the crime branch of Mumbai Police.
Kabir gave Patil a quick hug. ‘Yeah, yeah. Come on! Let’s go!’ he hurried the ACP. There was a spring in his step.
‘Hold on, man. What’s the rush? You just walked in.’
‘We can’t afford to lose time, Patil! There is a lot happening. Every second, those fuckers are getting ahead of us.’
An attendant brought in a glass of water, which Kabir gulped down. He was thirsty, but more than that he was anxious. Patil asked the attendant for some tea, and then led Kabir to a sofa in one corner of the room. ‘Sit. Just for five minutes,’ he said over Kabir’s protests.
‘You have not changed a bit,’ Patil said some time later and glanced at Kabir’s midriff, ‘except for a few inches down there.’ He smiled.
‘It is stress, I guess. Once I am done with this case, I will be back to normal,’ Kabir said defensively.
‘That’s okay. Even now you are likely to put all of us to shame,’ he said, and the two of them laughed.
‘So what’s keeping you awake in Mumbai these days?’
‘Mumbai is hell, my friend. You are lucky that you are not here. Crime syndicates, mafia, drugs, murders, violence, political apathy, terrorism, they’re all here, making sure I don’t get a moment’s peace.’ He pointed to a document lying on the table. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night.’
Kabir reached out and picked up the document. It was the charge sheet in the Mumbai blasts case. Next to the table was a large carton full of thousands of sheets of paper, which he assumed were the supporting documents. He casually flipped through the charge sheet and dropped it back on the table. Tea had been brought in. He asked after Patil’s wife and children, his hurry forgotten momentarily. The conversation was more therapeutic than any he had had in the last few weeks.
‘Ready to leave?’ It was Patil’s turn to hustle now. Kabir set down his cup and followed Patil. At the door, Kabir abruptly turned back. There was something in the charge sheet that was niggling at him.
‘Khan?’ Patil asked from the door.
‘Just one second.’ Kabir walked back to the table, picked up the charge sheet and flipped through it again. Three men had been arrested in the case. He looked at their pictures. That’s when it struck him.
‘Patil,’ he called out over his shoulder.
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you sure this guy was involved in the blasts?’
‘That’s what the charge sheet says. Why?’
‘Wasn’t this guy an informer? The guy who worked with us when we were struggling with identifying the insiders in the Taj Mahal Hotel terrorist attack case, remember?’
Patil walked up to him and took the charge sheet from him. He looked at the picture carefully. ‘Can’t recollect.’
‘I am positive. Do check on this. He can’t be a terrorist. He helped us that time. People don’t change allegiances so easily.’
‘Well, informers always lead a dual life. They play the system from both sides. They normally become informers to settle personal scores. That’s how it works, Khan. You know that as well as I do,’ ACP Patil said. ‘Shall we leave?’
Khan smiled. ‘Yes, we don’t have much time, do we?’
The two of them exited the building and set off in Patil’s jeep. Throughout the drive the thought of his informer being involved in the Mumbai blasts bothered Kabir. It even took the sheen off the fact that he was meeting the man who had come to receive Subhash at the airport. Their first proper lead in weeks.
Twenty minutes later, they drove into Arthur Road Jail and parked in front of the admin blocks. Nobody had stopped them at the gate, nor did anyone check them as they walked into the building. Mobi
le phones were not allowed in Arthur Raid Jail, not even for jailors, but no one asked them to surrender theirs at the front desk. The chief warden met them and led them through a maze of passages to a solitary confinement cell. He inserted a key into the door of the cell and pushed it open. Slouched in one corner was the old man Kabir had seen in the picture that Krishnan had pulled out from the CCTV feed from the airport. Lakshmi Narain Sharma was in his seventies. He hardly looked like a criminal. The moment Kabir and Patil entered, Sharma stood up and slid along the wall, moving to the far corner.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Sharma said. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don’t know what is happening.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Patil thundered. His demeanour had changed the moment he entered the cell.
Kabir could see the fear in the old man’s eyes. There was a large scar on his forehead. Most likely from a blow inflicted by a sharp weapon, Kabir concluded.
‘You are the owner of a white Innova, number 4008?’ Kabir started the conversation. He was not one to waste time.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You were at the airport a few days ago to receive a man by the name Subhash Parikh?’
The driver nodded. ‘It was like any other pickup, sir. Travel House had contracted someone else. When he couldn’t go, they asked me.’
‘Who asked you to go? And where were you supposed to take Subhash Parikh?’
‘I got a call asking me to go to the airport to pick him up. As I said, the driver who was contracted by Travel House for the trip had fallen sick. I don’t know where he was going. No details were given.’
‘So you are saying that if anyone calls and tells you to go to somewhere to pick someone up, you will go? Even if you don’t know who called you.’
‘No, no, sir. I know the person who called. What I was not told was where the client wanted to go. Normally, we take them wherever they tell us.’
‘Who called you?’
‘We call him Dallu Driver. Dallu as in “Dalal”. He is a go-between. He gets us assignments.’
‘Can you call him now? And ask him to meet you?’
In the Name of God Page 20