‘Now?’
‘Here.’ Patil handed over his cell phone to Sharma. ‘Call him and ask him to meet you outside the Parsi Dairy in Marine Lines. Give him whatever reason you want . . . maybe say you want to discuss a business opportunity.’
Sharma took the phone from him and dialled a number. ‘Switched off,’ he said a few seconds later looking at Patil and Khan.
‘Okay,’ said Khan, bringing the discussion back on track. ‘When did you get the call?’
Maybe 6 or 6.30 p.m. I was at the temple at the time.’
‘When did you realize Subhash was not coming? Did you get a call telling you that you could leave?’
‘No, sir. I waited for over two hours after his flight had landed. Sometimes clients miss their flight and take the next one. But in this case the next flight was in the evening. When he didn’t come out of the airport, I thought he might have stopped to eat something inside or had got stuck at the luggage bay. When he didn’t show up even after two hours, I left.’
‘Did you have another pickup?’
‘No, sir. I was booked for two days. I was told that I had to stay with him and drop him back at the airport whenever he wanted. So I did not accept any other assignments.’
‘Did Mr Parikh ever call you? Which number did he call you from?’
‘His regular number.’
‘Can you check your phone and tell us the number?’
‘It is an old phone, sir, doesn’t save so many numbers. But Travel House will have it.’
‘Okay. Why did he call you?’
‘He called me a couple of times. Once, the night before he was to come to Mumbai, just to confirm the timings, and then around midnight.’
‘Midnight?’ Kabir was curious.
Sharma nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What for?’
‘I think the second call was a mistake. He didn’t say anything. I could overhear some conversation at the other end, but couldn’t make head or tail of it. After staying on the line for a few seconds I disconnected.’
‘Could you tell how many people were there in the conversation you overheard?’
‘Three maybe?’
‘Will you be able to recognize their voices if you heard them again?’
He shook his head. ‘I barely heard them for thirty seconds. They were speaking so fast that I could not understand anything.’
‘Do you remember what you heard? Any words? Phrases? What were they talking about?’
Lakshmi Narain Sharma thought about it for a while, his brow furrowed in concentration, and then nodded slowly.
83
Back in the ACP’s office in Marine Lines, Kabir asked Patil: ‘That scar the guy had, running across his forehead and down one side of his face? Makes him look rather ghastly, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s the result of an injury he sustained during the Mumbai blasts. He was driving the taxi that blew up near the airport. Even then he was stepping in to cover up for absenteeism in taxi companies. He survived but his passenger died. In fact, he came back to work only a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Lucky him. But, poor fellow, he was scarred for life.’
‘Are you headed back tonight?’
‘Yeah!’ said Khan. ‘Please get me that data I asked for. It will really help,’ said Kabir in a worried tone. Patil nodded.
84
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
‘One thing is certain, then,’ Krishnan said after Kabir briefed him upon his return from Mumbai. ‘Subhash was alive till midnight. Whatever happened, happened after that. This could also mean that the men the driver heard on the call were the ones who killed Subhash.’
‘It’s possible. The post-mortem puts the time of death between 2.30 and 3.30 a.m.,’ Kabir said. ‘We’ll hopefully know whom Subhash was meeting in Mumbai in a day or two. I’ve asked for the phone records of Dallu Driver. He’s the one who fixed up the taxi driver for Subhash’s visit. Mumbai Police is also on the lookout for him.’
‘We are running out of time,’ Krishnan lamented. ‘We know nothing.’
‘It’s like a pack of dominoes, sir. The moment one piece falls, the fortress will collapse. We just have to find the right piece to topple.’
‘I hope you are right. I don’t want an embarrassment just before my retirement.’
Before Kabir could reply, Krishnan’s phone started ringing.
‘Yes, Sundari,’ he said, taking the call with an apologetic smile. He spoke to her for a few minutes and ended the call with, ‘I will send the car. Go to the doctor. I will let him know you’re coming . . . No! The doctor won’t come. You will have to go, Sundari. You can’t stay at home forever. Go out. Meet people. That’s the only way you will start getting back into your normal frame of mind.’ He hung up.
‘Sorry about that,’ Krishnan said to Kabir. ‘That was Sundari. Same old problem. Depression. She hasn’t stepped out of the house even once in the last ten days.’
‘I am sure she will get better.’
Krishnan gave a small smile. ‘I hope so. By the way, Dharmaraja Varma complained about you to the chief minister. I got a call yesterday.’
‘What did he complain about? That I called a crook a crook?’
‘No. He was upset at the manner in which you asked the questions, not the questions per se.’
‘That’s quite generous.’
‘He is not a bad human being. He is quite reasonable. Expecting a certain respect because he is royalty is not wrong. After all he is the king.’
‘Not in my eyes,’ Kabir said dismissively. ‘That Nair fellow and Dharmaraja Varma have some connection which we haven’t figured out yet. If we take Nair into custody and thrash him, I bet he will sing like a canary.’
‘He is already inside.’
‘Are you suggesting something?’
‘He is seventy years old. If you thrash him he is likely to die.’ Krishnan didn’t want anything controversial to mar his tenure as police chief.
He excused himself for a moment and called the psychiatrist to tell him that his wife would be coming for a session. The psychiatrist must have reassured him because Krishnan smiled in response and hung up. He then called his driver and told him to go home and take madam to the doctor.
‘So, where were we?’ he said, turning back to Kabir once again.
‘You could have told your secretary to do this . . .’ Kabir was curious to know why Krishnan hadn’t taken the easy way out.
‘If I ask my secretary to do this, it will become gossip. I don’t want that.’ There was a hint of a pain in his eyes. ‘Give me just one more minute. I’ll tell her to be ready.’ He walked to his table, and looked around. ‘Where did I keep my phone?’ he said, searching for the phone he used to communicate with Sundari.
‘Call from the landline,’ Khan suggested.
‘Won’t help. She doesn’t answer any calls, unless they’re from this number.’ He finally pulled out his regular phone and dialled the second number. Seconds later, his pocket began ringing, and he sheepishly pulled out his other phone from it. Kabir smiled; he had seen him do this a few times in the past too.
While Krishnan spoke to his wife, Kabir stood to the side, trying to block out the conversation between husband and wife. He tried to divert his mind and started thinking of Subhash. The night Subhash died. Who were the men in Subhash’s room? What was the number of Subhash’s second phone? Whom had he called that night outside the Taj. Everything seemed so simple but was proving to be so complex.
‘I’ll call you once you are done with the doctor,’ Krishnan was telling his wife, one phone clutched in one hand and the other one pressed to his ear. ‘Bye.’
‘Sorry,’ he said to Kabir. ‘I am done now.’
Kabir didn’t respond. He was looking at the DGP as if in a trance. He pointed at the phone. ‘That’s your second phone.’
‘Yes,’ a confused Krishnan responded.
‘What you just did . . . Subhash must have too.’
‘Wh
ich is?’
‘Dialled the second number from the first to find out where the phone was.’
‘Right!’
‘If we look at his phone records, specifically at calls he made that didn’t get connected, we might be able to find his second phone number. In fact, once we have the list, we can pare it down to those numbers which were in the vicinity of his primary number at the time the call was made—that should definitely help us determine his second number. We can confirm it by checking the location of that number at the time Subhash was outside Taj Kovalam. If all of these match, we’ll have the number we want.’
‘Brilliant!’ exclaimed Krishnan. ‘This might just be the breakthrough we need.’ He walked out of his room, and called his assistant. ‘Call the mobile intercept and telecom surveillance team to my room right now.’
When he walked back into the room, Kabir just raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Dominoes. We need only one to topple.’
85
‘I need to take up a job,’ Aditya said to Divya that afternoon. ‘Dior has offered me the position of an intern in Paris. ‘Do you think I should take it?’
Divya was taken aback when Aditya said this. ‘You never even told me that you applied.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Then?’
‘They sent me this offer.’ He showed her the mail from Dior.
Divya looked at it and forced a smile. In the mail, the person from Dior had mentioned his win at the competition in Amsterdam, said how impressed they were with his work and made him an offer. Below it was a mail from Aditya, declining their offer. When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes.
‘You think I’d leave you and go, you idiot!’ Aditya said, hugging her tightly. ‘I’ll figure something out in Mumbai.’
Divya returned his embrace, but the warmth in her hug was missing.
‘How would I know?’ A tear squeezed itself out of Divya’s eyes.
‘What if I don’t go? What if I stay here and end up becoming a bigger designer than your dad and then he has ego issues with me?’ he asked, trying to lighten the mood.
‘We will deal with it.’
‘That’s why I keep telling you to marry me soon, so that he can hand the business over to me and retire peacefully.’
‘It will be his call if and when it happens,’ Divya said curtly, pulling away from him.
Aditya didn’t try to stop her. ‘Is everything okay, Divya?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ she responded flippantly. ‘Let it be, Aditya. No man can be like my father.’
She had noticed that the printout that Aditya had shown her didn’t have a ‘sent time stamp’ on the mail. She decided to ignore that for the time being.
A harried Aditya got up and walked out of the room.
86
The analysis of Subhash’s phone records was taking longer than expected. A data storage and retrieval upgrade at Vodafone had rendered the phone records partially inaccessible, frustrating Krishnan and Kabir.
Madhavan arrived later that morning after a brief trip to Chennai. Upon his return from Mumbai, Kabir had asked him to join the investigation formally. He had spoken to both DGP Krishnan and Commissioner Iyer in Chennai.
‘Your logic in locating Parikh’s second number was brilliant. Let’s hope it gives you the desired result,’ Madhavan said the moment he came in.
‘We will know only tomorrow.’ And he explained the reason for the delay.
‘Great. So what do we do today?’ Madhavan asked. ‘Kerala ayurvedic massage?’ he recommended, gleefully rubbing his hands together.
Kabir glared at him. ‘Maybe you could check out the Kuzhivilakom temple for me.’
Madhavan just looked at him with raised eyebrows. He didn’t understand what was being said.
‘About one kilometre from Taj Kovalam is a temple. It is right opposite a construction site. On the board outside the temple is an image of Lord Ganesha. It resembles the small figurine that we have – the one found in the Wafi Mall heist. I’m not sure if it is the same one. Could you do a cursory check?’
‘You could have checked it yourself. You have an image of the statue.’
‘With a name like Kabir Khan, it is almost impossible to enter a temple, let alone entering and investigating. And I was so drawn into these murders that it completely slipped my mind.’
‘I thought I was the one who was growing old,’ Krishnan said, and the three of them started laughing. ‘I will ask my assistant to organize a car for you,’ he volunteered.
‘Thank you, sir!’ Madhavan bowed to the two of them and smiled.
‘And a last piece of advice,’ Krishnan offered. ‘Go in plain clothes. People in Kerala get really defensive if they see a policeman asking questions. And the only reason why we are asking you to go is that sending someone from the local police force is a guaranteed way of attracting media attention.’
‘Thank you. It is the same in Tamil Nadu too. I will change and go.’
After Madhavan left the two of them started discussing the temple. ‘No one there is what they seem,’ said Krishnan.
Kabir readily agreed. ‘I really do not know whom to trust and whom not to.’
‘How about no one!’
‘We don’t have any other option,’ Khan lamented. But soon, realizing that it was a worthless point to brood over, he moved on. ‘What happened to the steps which were being excavated on the eastern side of the temple perimeter wall?’
‘The excavation has been stopped temporarily. The site has been handed over to the state archaeology department. They have sought the state government’s approval for carrying out excavation on site. They’ll resume work once the approval comes.’
‘Assuming that it leads down into the temple . . . what lies on that side of the temple?’ Khan asked. ‘It is the vaults, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s really impressive how the entire city was planned so well in those days. Quite at variance with the way town planning happens nowadays.’
‘I couldn’t agree with you more.’ Krishnan nodded. ‘In the olden days every city was planned. Down to escape routes for the royal family. And at times even for the population at large.’
‘We have seen evidence of this across the country, sir. In Mumbai too, such secret underground routes have been discovered. Recently a passage was discovered which extended from the GPO—where the Bombay Fort once stood before it was demolished—to Apollo Bunder. Apparently the British built this passage in the eighteenth century, fearing an attack from Napoleon.’
‘We have them here as well. They were used for the royal family and their entourage to escape or hide in, in case of an attack. A lot of them were integrated with the drainage system, and ran parallel to the drainage pipes. Large drainage pipes facilitated the movement of people and goods from the palace to a safe haven close to the port. This discovery next to the temple seems to be one of those, hitherto unknown.’
‘Some day, I tell you, your Dharmaraja Varma will take his family and all the riches and scoot. You will be left with the temple and empty vaults and your lord’s blessings. Mark my words.’
‘You say this outside the four walls of this room, Mr Khan, and you will be lynched.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Kabir replied with a smile. And then suddenly the smile disappeared from his face. ‘What if that is actually what is happening here? What if the king is actually using these passages to systematically loot the temple wealth? Who would know if such a passage exists, from the king’s palace? Would you?’
‘No, but the state archaeological department should know.’
‘Can we meet them? Just to make sure that we have that end covered? As it is I’m sure Varma is smuggling temple artefacts through sand-laden trucks. How’s he doing that? Obviously the trucks are not coming into the temple. So someone is stealing the artefacts from the vaults or elsewhere in the temple and taking them to Varma’s mansion, or to some other secret spot from where they are loaded
on to sand trucks and dispatched to various ports, to be sold in the international markets.’
‘We have a team which deals with the archaeological department. Mr U.R. Murthy is the ACP in charge of all such issues.’ Krishnan reached out for his landline to call in Murthy.
A short stout man with an impressive handlebar moustache arrived shortly after. Krishnan began to make the introductions, at which point Murthy admitted to knowing Kabir. He was a much-spoken-about man in Kerala Police circles. His aggressive stance towards Dharmaraja Varma was quite the talk of the town, albeit in hushed voices.
When Krishnan asked him for information on the secret passages, Murthy said, ‘I have a fair idea of where the secret passages are, but give me half an hour and I will check and get back to you.’
Half an hour later, Murthy returned to Krishnan’s chamber. ‘Okay, so here we are,’ he said, pointing to a map of the city. ‘There is an underground passage, well, it is not a passage so much as an escape route integrated with the city drainage, from the king’s palace to just below the Swati Thirunal Palace which is a stone’s throw from the Padmanabha Swamy Temple. It is a large drain; people can easily step in and wade through in a crouched position. There is no documented evidence of it having been used, ever. It was intended to evacuate the Padmanabha Dasa from the temple in case of an attack on the temple and its vaults.’
‘This Swati Thirunal Palace . . . it’s the museum, right?’
‘Yes, the same one. It is called a palace because at one point in time it was the official residence of the king. Now it is a museum. Long ago it was a part of the temple precinct. The doors connecting the complexes still exist, though these days they have been locked for safety. And though it is speculated that one exists from the temple vaults to the Swati Thirunal Palace, no underground passages have been discovered till date.’
‘Oh, okay!’ Kabir Khan said. ‘So the best Dharmaraja Varma can do at present is escape to the Swati Thirunal Palace, in case there is an attack.’ He smiled. ‘He can’t escape to the port or away from the city.’
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