‘Don’t lie!’ Kabir oozed fury, in his expression and his voice. ‘We know you wanted him dead. Tell us why.’
Aditya coolly rose and walked up to Kabir. ‘Being asked the same question multiple times, in different tones, by different people will not change my answer,’ he said, staring at him. He ambled back to his seat. ‘I have said this before: I did not kill him.’
‘Oh really?’ It was Krishnan this time. ‘Maybe you’ll change your stance after this.’
‘Nothing will make me change my stance. Because. I. Did. Not. Kill. Him.’ He spoke slowly, enunciating each word carefully.
Kabir took out his phone and played the messages that he’d recorded.
‘Trying to reach you. Call me back. It is urgent!’
‘Where are you? Have been calling you on your mobile. It’s switched off. Call me!’
‘Nirav, I need to speak with you. It is urgent.’
‘Nirav, I am worried. I am scared. Call me back. It is urgent.’
A few more similar sounding messages played out, and finally,
‘Nirav, we need to talk. Aditya wants me to convince you to get out of the Zaveri Bazaar Union and get the other merchants to move to the BKC bourse. In return, he will give me the chairmanship of the bourse and a three per cent stake in the company. But the Surat bourse has been my dream. I can’t give it up. He has a video of me which he is using to blackmail me. He is not to be trusted. If you don’t agree, he wants me to hurt you. He . . . I don’t know how to handle this. Please call me. I fear he will carry out his threat of killing me. Keep Divya away from him. He is extremely dangerous for all of you.’
At a nod from Krishnan, Kabir stopped the audio.
‘So,’ the DGP said. ‘What’s the story here?’
‘I have no clue what he is talking about.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Khan.
‘Yes.’
‘What video is he referring to?’
‘I have absolutely no idea, Mr Khan.’ Not a single line of worry creased Aditya’s forehead as he faced Kabir and Krishnan.
‘What were you doing at Padma Teertha Kulam on the night Kannan Ramalingam was killed?’
‘Me?’ asked Aditya, apparently stupefied. ‘Why would I be there?’
‘Look, Aditya,’ Krishnan said very softly. ‘We know that recording a murder is not on everybody’s agenda. People normally step in and save the victim. You didn’t. The least you can do now is tell us why you were clandestinely recording Subhash Parikh killing Kannan. We have you on camera.’
Aditya abruptly stood up and began pacing up and down the cell, nervously rubbing his hands over his face. He seemed worried, frightened even, like an animal that’s been cornered.
Krishnan started to say something, but Kabir held up his hand and asked him to keep quiet. Sometimes, when left to themselves and forced to introspect, even hardened criminals softened up. Aditya was quiet. Very quiet. When he finally turned to face them Kabir Khan could see that his eyes were red. Blood red.
‘I wanted to kill that bastard! I was scared that he would expose me to Nirav Uncle and Divya. I love Divya! I felt the only way to get out of this mess was to get rid of him. But I didn’t kill him. Believe me!’ he insisted. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘Expose you? Expose what?’ Khan demanded. Aditya didn’t respond.
Krishnan picked up the conversation. He wanted the flow of information to continue. ‘Well, if you threaten to kill someone, and the person ends up dead next morning, you better have a damn good alibi.’
‘I—’ Aditya paused. He was measuring his words and speaking very carefully. ‘I did want to kill him. I even went to his room that night.’
Kabir and Krishnan exchanged tiny smiles. They were almost there.
‘But . . .’ Aditya trailed off.
‘But what?’ Kabir prompted.
‘When I went to his room, I couldn’t.’
‘What do you mean you couldn’t kill him? How did Parikh die then?’ Krishnan asked, a touch of impatience creeping into his voice.
‘Because he was already dead when I got there.’
109
Aditya’s interrogation left everyone confused. He firmly denied threatening Subhash and wanting him to harm Nirav Choksi and put it down to the hallucinations of an old man.
‘He is lying!’ Madhavan declared the moment they were out of the interrogation room. ‘There is no way that he did not kill Subhash Parikh! Absolutely no way.’ He shook his head. ‘It has to be him.’ Madhavan was excited. ‘Did you see how he evaded the question about how he got the key to Subhash’s room? He is hiding a lot of things.’
‘Well,’ Khan said calmly. ‘That apart, most of what he said ties in with what we already know. Let’s take it with a little bit of caution. I have asked Mumbai Police to conduct a thorough search of his residence and scan the area for clues. We should be hearing from them any time now. Even the Kerala Police team that has gone to search his room at the Lotus Pond should be returning soon.’
‘Warrant?’
‘We will deal with it, Madhavan.’ Kabir dismissed Madhavan’s objection.
Krishnan joined the conversation. ‘If for a minute we assume that Aditya is telling the truth, then who could have killed Subhash?’
‘There aren’t too many people who could have killed Subhash. It has to be an insider. Someone who chose the most opportune moment to commit the murder and palm it off on the wrath of the lord,’ Khan said with a grimace.
‘You are right,’ Krishnan agreed. ‘Murderers are almost always someone on the inside. Someone who knows the lay of the land and also has access to the potential victim. In this case, three people together met Subhash the night he died. A fact corroborated by Lakshmi Narain. If it is true, and if Aditya is not the killer, then it has to be one of the other two.’
‘Our nth hypothesis,’ Madhavan lamented.
‘We can’t ignore it even if it is the nth.’ Khan went up to the window and opened it. He wanted some fresh air. They had been awake all night. It was morning now. The newspapers had come in.
Krishnan rang the bell to summon a constable and asked him to get them some coffee. He stretched and yawned. ‘Let me call Sundari and tell her that I’ll be late. I have an early morning meeting with the home minister.’
110
By noon, a Mumbai Police representative flew into Thiruvananthapuram carrying videos, photographs, documents and other items which had been seized in the raid on Aditya’s apartment. Thanks to Kabir’s relationship with ACP Patil and DGP Krishnan’s conversation with the Mumbai Police chief, things had moved quickly.
Kabir was perusing all of those. There was an image of a trophy, an award that Aditya had won at Amsterdam, a few certificates, some credit cards, a few random hotel key cards, an envelope from Dior which contained an appointment letter—he had not lied to Divya about it—and a few photos of his worldly possessions, of which he had quite a few.
After some time, he casually picked up his phone and dialled a number again.
‘Are you free now? Can you come? I need your help. I’ll send the car.’
‘I don’t need the car. I’ll be there. Just text me where you want me to come,’ Pallavi said and hung up.
Krishnan returned from the state home minister’s office in a very irritable mood. The sight of Kabir Khan sitting with Pallavi in his office irked him even more. He was about to give them a piece of his mind, when better sense prevailed. ‘I need you for a minute Khan’ was all he said.
‘Sure,’ Pallavi rose and walked out of the room.
‘What happened?’ Khan asked. ‘You don’t sound too good.’
‘They are transferring me.’
‘What?’ Khan was shocked. ‘You have a month left until you retire.’
‘Yes. I am being transferred to the traffic department,’ Krishnan said with loathing.
‘Why on earth?’
‘Inept handling of the Padmanabha Swamy Temple murders.’
&
nbsp; ‘You are kidding me!’
‘Does it look like I am?’
‘But we are almost there!’ Kabir was visibly distraught. ‘We are closer to the culprit than we have ever been.’
‘I think Dharmaraja Varma lobbied for it and he’s pretty powerful. Clearly our going after Radhakrishnan Nair and Madhavan’s visit to the construction site riled him. Our taking him on had to have some collateral damage. They can’t touch you, so they are coming after me.’
‘Damn! When is it effective from?’
‘A couple of days, I guess. They are waiting for the chief minister to return from Delhi. Only he can sign the orders.’
‘So we don’t have much time to crack this.’
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Krishnan scowled when he saw it was Pallavi. She ignored him completely and addressed Kabir. ‘Tanveer, my technology head, just called. I may have something for you.’
111
‘How is that possible?’ Kabir was flummoxed. ‘Could there be an error?’
‘Unlikely.’
‘Damn!’ Khan was both excited and worried at the same time. He had to wrap up the investigation before Krishnan was transferred. Otherwise he would not get any support from Kerala Police. And without their support he wouldn’t be half as effective. More so, he didn’t want Krishnan to fade away like this. Officers of his calibre deserved to be celebrated.
‘Is there a way to validate this?’ he asked Pallavi.
‘The only way is to call.’
‘Call them?’
‘Yes. Call as a tourist, saying that you forgot something there. It was not too long ago, right?’ Pallavi asked.
Kabir gave her a wide smile. ‘When you quit the hotel industry, come and join me.’ He adored her.
‘Do I have to quit the hotel industry for that?’ she asked coyly. It took Kabir a few minutes to understand what she meant. And then his smile became even wider.
Khan looked at the key card in front of him. It had the hotel name and contact details. He looked at his watch. It was almost noon. Amsterdam was three and a half hours behind. It would be morning there. For a minute he contemplated waiting until it was night there. The late night shift in hotels was normally staffed with inexperienced and new staff, many of them trainees. It would be easier to talk his way through their ignorance of procedure. But he decided not to wait. They were running against time.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s call now.’
Pallavi picked up his phone and keyed in the telephone number on the card. There was silence for a moment and then the line connected.
‘Hotel Okura, goedemorgen!’ came the operator’s voice.
‘Good morning,’ Pallavi said. ‘I’m calling from India. I need some help.’
Realizing that she was talking to someone who would not understand Dutch, the telephone operator switched to English. ‘How may I help you, madam?’
‘I was there in March this year, 16 March. Room 2160. I may have forgotten a photo album in the room. It is filled with my memories of Amsterdam. I was looking for it today, but I can’t find it at home. In fact I haven’t seen it since I came back. Could you please check if I left it behind?’
‘You said room 2160?’
‘Yes. Shreyasi Sinha. Room 2160. Although, could you double check the room number before you speak to Lost and Found? Just in case I’ve got the room number wrong.’
The receptionist could be heard tapping a few keys on her system. ‘Yes, madam, it is room 2160.’
Pallavi looked at Kabir and smiled. She gave him a thumbs-up.
‘Just one more thing, miss. My friend was staying at the hotel around the same time. If you can’t find the album under my name in your Lost and Found, can you check if it was left behind in his room? His name is Aditya Kumar.’
Again the receptionist tapped a few keys. ‘Can you spell out the name for me, please?’
Pallavi spelt out the name and the receptionist went back to work.
A few moments later she asked, ‘Are you sure he was staying here? In this hotel? I can’t find anyone by that name in our guest list.’
‘That’s all right. Don’t bother. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I took it out of my room; I must’ve left it there.’
‘Sure, madam. Let me check. If you could give us some time?’
‘Thank you, miss. I will call back in an hour.’
The moment she hung up, Kabir asked her, ‘Is it what we think it is?’
‘Worse. She certainly stayed at this hotel. But our friend didn’t. Given that he won the award in Amsterdam, it is safe to assume that Aditya was in Amsterdam on those dates. However, he must have stayed at a different hotel. But then how did Shreyasi Sinha’s key card end up with him?’
‘Unless they stayed together and he unintentionally carried the key card back.’ Kabir looked at it. ‘It looks quite neat. Maybe he brought it back as a souvenir.’ He walked to the window and went through the sequence of events in his mind. One of the items Mumbai Police had confiscated from Aditya’s home in Mumbai was a pack of key cards. One of them was the key card of a hotel in Amsterdam. When Tanveer ran them through a card reader that hotels have, he discovered that all the key cards had been issued to Aditya Kumar—all except one. The hotel key card of the hotel in Amsterdam was issued in the name of Shreyasi Sinha. And the dates of their stay in Amsterdam also coincided. How had Shreyasi Sinha’s hotel room key card landed up in Aditya’s room? How did Aditya know Shreyasi? Was there an angle there which they couldn’t see? If Aditya indeed was the one who killed Subhash, was Shreyasi an accomplice? His head started spinning at the number of possibilities this discovery of one key card had thrown up. The more he tried to unravel the different threads, the more entangled he got.
‘Shreyasi Sinha!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where are you? You are the domino I am looking for. The first domino. All I need is to topple the first domino. Where the hell are you?’
112
When Kabir narrated what he had found out to Krishnan, the latter did not believe him at first. ‘Strange. Very strange,’ he said. ‘One thing is certain. Aditya is definitely involved. He knows a lot more than he is telling us.’
‘Well, if you look at it, the post-mortem puts the time of death between 2.30 and 3.30 a.m. Aditya claims to have gone to his room to kill him at around 4.30 a.m. Why? We don’t know. We have someone who heard Subhash alive around midnight. The last of the messages that Subhash left for Nirav was at 1.30 a.m.,’ Kabir reasoned. ‘But how do all these timelines tie in?’
‘So what are you hinting at?’
‘I am saying that Alprax, which is the poison suspected in the post-mortem report, takes three to four hours to act. The victim does not realize that he is dying. He just falls into a deep slumber. Considering the time of death is between 2.30 and 3.30 a.m., and he was sending Nirav a message at 1.30 a.m., it’s unlikely that the Alprax was the cause of death. It has to be something else.’
‘What about the three empty strips of Alprax that were recovered from his room?’
‘Well, they could have been placed there by the killer in order to mislead the investigation. Moreover, to kill someone Subhash’s size, the killer would need over two hundred Alprax tablets.’
‘You sound like a killer yourself. Do you realize that?’ Krishnan chuckled.
‘Well, I was in Delhi during the Sunanda Pushkar case. I followed that investigation very closely; some of the investigators were my friends. It was a similar story—murder in a five-star hotel. They suspected it was Alprax, but as the investigation progressed, they figured out that it could have been something else as well.’
As they stood there, looking out of the window pensively, Kabir said, ‘It was an insider who killed Subhash.’
‘And he is still in the hotel. But none of these people are hardened criminals. They are not people who kill for a living,’ Krishnan said. Though it did cross his mind that if Subhash could kill Kannan so mercilessly, there was no reason to b
elieve that the others were not hardened criminals. ‘They haven’t left a single decent clue. I’m afraid this might just be a perfect murder,’ he lamented mournfully.
‘There’s no such thing,’ Kabir said firmly. ‘They must have left a clue. It’s just that we haven’t found it yet. When we get to the bottom of this, you will see that just like a perfect diamond has a flaw, even your so-called “perfect murderer” leaves a clue.’
‘I wonder how they can commit a murder so easily. Even if I wanted to kill someone, I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ Pallavi said.
Krishnan turned and looked at her. ‘Exactly what I was thinking.’
‘But,’ Kabir asked, ‘if you were desperate to get rid of someone, what would you do?’
‘Figure out what would work?’ Pallavi responded.
‘How?’
‘Google?’
‘Exactly!’ Krishnan thumped his hand on the table. ‘Khan, if any of these guys committed the murder, I bet they did some research online.’
Kabir’s interest was piqued. His back divorced itself from the chair and his elbows came to rest on the table in front as he leaned forward to listen to what Krishnan was saying.
‘The killers are not experts. At least that’s what it is beginning to look like. They must have done some research on how to kill, or on the impact of their actions. None of them is a medical student or expert. So they must have accessed the Internet to get some information,’ Krishnan said.
Kabir was thinking out loud. ‘And the only way to access the Internet would be the hotel Wi-Fi or mobile data.’ And after a moment’s thought he added, ‘They could also use a dongle. Or even a data card.’
‘Correct.’ Krishnan nodded. ‘Kutty will be able to track all the mobile connections that exist in their names. The challenge will be getting the hotel to cooperate.’
‘Let me check with Tanveer if he can help. His fiancée works there,’ Pallavi offered.
Krishnan looked at her quizzically.
In the Name of God Page 27