‘I bought Sux to kill Aditya. I thought it would be easy. But killing someone needs guts. I’m not glorifying murder, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I chose the next best option. Kill myself. My boyfriend cheated on me. My boyfriend wanted to kill my father. It couldn’t get any worse than that. So I took fifteen tablets of Alprax. I told myself that I would inject myself with Sux just as I started falling asleep. But I got scared. And called Dad.’
‘Ah,’ Kabir said. ‘And daddy came to help the little baby out?’ This meant that the call he wanted Madhavan to confirm had happened. Now he didn’t need the data that Pallavi’s contact was running for them. ‘So, Mr Choksi’—he turned to Nirav—‘you went to help her out?’
‘Yes, I did.’ Nirav was irritated. ‘What else could a father do?’
‘Why haven’t you mentioned this to us before? We have had multiple conversations on the murders,’ Kabir asked both Nirav and Divya.
‘Probably because it was not relevant to the case,’ Nirav snapped. ‘And what did you expect me to come and tell you? That my daughter was trying to commit suicide?’
‘We will discuss that later. Tell me, what did you do after that?’
‘I went to her room. Scared that she would get locked in, she had left the door open. She had passed out by the time I reached. Fifteen Alprax tablets are not life-threatening. At best they put you to sleep for a long time.’
Kabir made a mental note. This probably explained why her door was open from 1.12 to 1.28 a.m.
‘How did you get to her room?’ Kabir asked him.
‘The fire exit is right across my room. I ran up two floors.’
That was why there was no data suggesting that the lift had stopped on that floor during that time, Kabir thought to himself. He also figured that if Nirav could have run up the stairs to Divya’s room, someone else could have used them to come to their floor too. He looked at Divya. ‘Where is the Sux injection now?’ he asked. ‘After all, you didn’t use it.’
‘Must be in my bag,’ Divya responded.
‘Let’s find out,’ Kabir said, dialling a number on his phone. ‘An ACP from DGP Krishnan’s team is in your room right now.’
‘Any luck?’ he asked when his call was answered.
Within a minute he disconnected the phone and looked up. ‘There is no trace of the injection in your room.’
‘What?’ Divya was shocked.
Kabir nodded, a dire expression on his face. ‘Tell us, Ms Choksi, when did you inform your father about the fact that Aditya and Shreyasi were using Subhash to kill him?’
‘As long as Aditya was cheating on me, I kept it to myself. I was too ashamed to tell anyone. But the day I heard them discussing a plan to kill Dad, I couldn’t stay quiet any more. I had to tell him. I went straight to his room from the twelfth floor. I was furious. I told him everything, apologized for having fallen in love with Aditya and promised to break it off.’
‘If that is true, then why did you look surprised when you heard the messages left by Subhash on your hotel phone the other day, Mr Choksi?’
‘I . . . I was surprised that Subhash tried to come up to me and tell me about it himself.’
‘That didn’t seem to be the case, Mr Choksi,’ Kabir retorted. ‘You appeared, at least to us, completely ignorant of the fact that Subhash was asked to kill you.’
Instead of responding to Kabir’s question, Nirav turned his attention to Divya and hugged her. She was devastated.
‘Mr Choksi,’ Kabir said. ‘Your daughter almost committed suicide. Your prospective son-in-law schemed and wanted you dead. Your friend was tasked with murdering you, and yet the only thing you were bothered about was how to get even with everyone around.’
Nirav’s grip on Divya slackened. ‘What?’ he asked, surprised. ‘What do you mean, Mr Khan?’
‘Mr Choksi, do you know someone called Ankit?’ Kabir asked. He had an intense look in his eyes—one that scared the people in the room.
Nirav Choksi looked around the room, and then raised his eyes to look at the ceiling. He was thinking. Trying to put a face to the name.
‘Ankit Shah?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Khan nodded. The look on his face didn’t change.
‘Yes. I know him. Akhil Bhai’s son. He went overseas for some work. Didn’t want to be in the jewellery trade.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Or is it that you wanted him out of the country? Because you wanted Akhil Bhai under your control? Isn’t it true that Ankit was pushing his father to move out of Zaveri Bazaar? And that’s why you sent him overseas, so he would be out of the way?’
‘That’s not true! We were neighbours in the Bazaar. But Akhil Bhai came to me one day and wanted me to help him get some work overseas. I put him in touch with some of my clients in Dubai. One of them—I don’t even remember who—offered him a job and he moved.’
‘That’s lovely. Who doesn’t want to help one’s neighbour!’
Nirav was quiet.
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘No. He switched jobs once he went there.’
‘Are you sure you don’t know where he is?’
‘Absolutely. But what does that have to do with anything?’
‘Just curious,’ Kabir said. ‘I was speaking to his mother today. She said Ankit is overseas and that she still gets a monthly remittance from him, which now comes to you since his father is dead, and you pass it on to her. When I asked her about his whereabouts, she started crying. She doesn’t know where he is.’
‘Neither do I. I give her the money every month. Last two months in fact. Yes. But that’s not something which he sends. I do it on my own. Just to keep her going. I just tell her that it is from her son.’
‘Why?’ Kabir asked him. He looked around the room and then at Nirav. ‘Is he dead, by any chance?’
Kabir was not looking for an answer, he was looking for a reaction. A reaction is far more meaningful and visceral than a mere answer; a reaction is not as easily manipulated as an answer.
Nirav had a shocked look on his face. ‘I have no clue.’
Kabir pulled out two pictures from his folder. And handed them to Nirav.
‘The first one is a Times of India newspaper cutting with a picture of Ankit Shah and his family. Published in the papers after Akhil Bhai was killed in the blasts. The second is the reconstructed photo of a man who was killed in the Wafi Mall heist in Dubai. Both are the same person. Isn’t it, Mr Shah?’
Nirav looked at both the pictures and slowly raised his eyes to meet Kabir’s piercing gaze.
‘You know, don’t you?’ Kabir asked. ‘You are the one who sent him to the Alsafa gang that deals in jewellery and antiques. He was your eyes and ears in the Middle East. You ran your trade through him.’
‘What rubbish is this?’ Nirav started yelling. ‘How dare you imply that I run a smuggling racket!’
‘Because you do!’ Khan said. ‘Till weeks before the Wafi Mall heist, you were in touch with Ankit in Dubai. The day he was shot at and killed, your calls stopped. Why would you not tell a mother that her only son had died? Why would you deprive her of the right to grieve? And most importantly why would you hide it? Ajmal Jewellers was a large client of yours. We had your accounts checked for remittances. Ajmal Jewellers accounts for over forty per cent of your foreign inward remittances.’ Khan had checked the bank statements as a routine part of the investigation. When he was investigating Dilip Patankar’s purchase of five cabs, he had asked for Nirav’s bank statements for the last one year. And when he specifically looked at it for evidence, it all came together.
‘Ajmal Jewellers is an old client of mine.’
‘That may be true, but that does not explain you not sharing the news of Ankit’s death with either Akhil Bhai or his wife! Unbelievable!’ Kabir was furious now. ‘You promised to buy the property off Mrs Shah because you didn’t want her to create a scene and expose you. She still thinks you are a good Samaritan.’
&n
bsp; ‘I didn’t know that Ankit died in the heist. Besides, you can’t hold me guilty just because my acquaintances are guilty of misconduct. If Ankit does something wrong, I can’t be the one held responsible.’
‘Of course not!’ Kabir nodded. ‘I just wanted to set the context. Before I come to the issue right here in Thiruvananthapuram. Aditya clandestinely recorded Subhash killing Kannan. It turns out Kannan had seen Subhash strike deals with the cigarette vendor outside the Taj Hotel for stolen antiques. CCTV recordings from outside the hotel show Subhash frequenting the shop. They also show Kannan confronting Subhash the day he was killed. It is possible that he threatened to inform the king who is the ultimate moral authority in these parts. Subhash chased him and killed him.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Aditya recorded Subhash killing Kannan and used the video to blackmail him into agreeing to murder you. For he had a vested interest in the BKC bourse and wanted to avoid potential conflict with the Surat diamond bourse. The losses there are in tens of crores a day, and the only person standing in their way was you.
‘And when Subhash walked out of the room, Aditya and Shreyasi made plans to eliminate Subhash after he had accomplished what he had agreed to do. Divya overheard that when she was outside their room. She came and told you about their plans. You were worried. When Divya called you after she took the Alprax, you went to her room. When you saw her sleeping, you decided to use the situation to your advantage. You saw the Sux and figured that this was a brilliant way of eliminating the competition—to put an end to the threatening Surat diamond bourse that Subhash wanted to set up. After all, the Surat diamond bourse would have been a very attractive proposition for many of the traders and merchants in Zaveri Bazaar. Despite your control on your people, they would have ditched you and gravitated towards the Surat bourse, thus severely undermining your control over the trade. These people hadn’t moved to the Mumbai bourse because of a lot of factors that were genuinely not trader friendly—capital value, rents, space, distance, cost of operation. It would have pushed the cost of doing business up and made the trade less profitable. It was easy for you to convince people to not go. But the same would not have been true for Surat. He was making inroads into your antique trade. And now he was out with a mandate to kill you. Obviously, you had no idea that he was trying to warn you about Aditya’s intent. All his messages were going to the other room. So before he could kill you, you killed him, probably hoping that the blame for the entire episode would fall on Aditya since he planned on killing Subhash anyway. You would also have got your revenge on the guy who cheated your daughter and rocked your lives.’
‘Nothing you are saying is making sense.’
‘You left Divya’s room and came down to your floor by the lift. You rang the doorbell in Subhash’s room just as he was leaving a voice message for you in room 543. Subhash opened the door. He assumed you had heard his messages and come. You killed him. You injected an unsuspecting Subhash with the Sux. You watched him die and then went back to your own room. The only thing which remains unanswered for me is how and when you made him ingest the Alprax. That aspect is not critical in light of the rest, however, I would put my money on the fact that after you injected the Sux, a desperate and breathless Subhash asked for water, and you gave him water laced with Alprax . . . Am I right, Mr Choksi?’
He waited for Nirav Choksi to say something, but nothing happened.
‘What you didn’t bargain for was the fact that the hotel had upgraded its key lock mechanism only recently and hence did not rely on just the CCTV cameras to track movements. We don’t know whether you bought off the CCTV vendors or Aditya did or if it was a sheer coincidence. It doesn’t matter given the evidence we have now. You didn’t bargain for Subhash being used as a weapon to kill you to take you out of the equation in the conflict of the bourses and Zaveri Bazaar. You didn’t reckon on Subhash valuing your relationship of over forty years, and paying you back for the favour your dad did in keeping him out of the juvenile remand home, you didn’t—’
‘It was not me,’ Nirav burst out. ‘You are mistaken!’ And then realizing it was futile, he added. ‘I need to make a call.’
Kabir walked up to him, made a fist and punched Nirav in the face. Nirav tumbled to the floor. Divya started shrieking as blood spurted from his nostrils.
‘Suits you, you bastard,’ yelled Kabir as Nirav fainted and fell on the ground.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to DGP Krishnan. ‘Let’s be ahead of schedule for the meeting with the home minister.’
As he walked out, he looked back. Madhavan, who had returned from Lotus Pond, was still in the room. He smiled, raised his fist, made a thumbs-up sign, then he stepped out, followed by the DGP.
‘The home minister is in for a surprise,’ he said as he affectionately put his arm around DGP Krishnan and hugged him.
Epilogue
The Wafi Mall heist was never solved. It is one black mark on the impeccable track record of Dubai Police. The authorities could never zero in on the temple from where the Ganesha figurine was stolen. But as in life, where one incident has an unexpected effect on another unrelated one, the Wafi Mall robbery and Kabir Khan’s investigation into the stolen artefacts had the unforeseen outcome of bringing the key players together in Thiruvananthapuram and thereby the temple murder case to a closure.
Nirav Choksi was taken into custody for the murder of Subhash Parikh. The second post-mortem conducted on Parikh’s body confirmed death due to injection of Sux. Since Succinylcholine is absorbed and broken down by the enzymes in the human body, there is very little Sux left in the body for the post-mortem to detect. However, when they tested for the breakdown products, called metabolites, the coroners had some success. They detected high quantities of succinic acid, a metabolite formed by the disintegration of Sux, which clearly pointed to its use in the murder of Subhash Parikh. Two important pieces of evidence nailed Nirav in the coming weeks. Key was the discovery of a syringe in the vault at the Anantha Padmanabha Swamy Temple. It had Nirav’s fingerprints on it and a forensic analysis revealed that it had been used to administer the Sux. Unable to decide how to dispose of the syringe after using it to kill Subhash, Nirav had hidden it safely, deep inside the vault, hoping no one would find it. However, he had not accounted for DGP Krishnan’s intuition—a closed-door search conducted in Vikram’s presence led to the discovery of the murder weapon. Further investigations revealed that Nirav had been in touch with Ankit Shah in Dubai till the morning of the day Ankit was killed at Ajmal Jewellers. Old CCTV camera footage at the Wafi Mall confirmed that Ankit was a frequent visitor to Ajmal Jewellers. Nirav’s phone and bank records showed that Ankit’s visits corresponded with calls to Nirav and, later, an inward remittance from Ajmal Jewellers to Nirav Choksi. While that was not clinching evidence in itself, it was reason enough to begin another investigation into Nirav’s involvement in the widespread thefts of artefacts from temples in Tamil Nadu. Madhavan suspects that Subhash’s emergence as a dominant player in the business of smuggling antiques could have compromised Nirav’s stature, giving him reason to be on the lookout for an opportunity to get rid of Subhash. Madhavan has begun an independent investigation into this hypothesis. Nirav Choksi is currently in Thiruvananthapuram Jail, waiting for the law to take its course.
Aditya was taken into custody for orchestrating the Mumbai blasts. It did not take the police long to figure out that his claim of being brought up by a single mother, was nothing but a smokescreen. He was the son of Jinesh Shah—brother of Gopal Shah, promoter and chairman of the BKC Diamond Bourse—and his estranged wife. Shah’s wife had taken her son and left India after an acrimonious battle years ago, but father and son had always been in touch. Gopal Shah didn’t have a family. Knowing that after Gopal Shah’s death, everything would come to him, and that the BKC Diamond Bourse would be a white elephant unless the merchants from Zaveri Bazaar moved in, Jinesh Shah and Aditya planned the blasts, intending to kill both Gopal Shah and Nirav Choksi. The perpetrators almost got away
with it till Kabir Khan interrogated the two taxi drivers. And once the police figured out that it was not a terrorist attack, it didn’t take them much time to unravel the remaining story.
Aditya wanted to eliminate Subhash Parikh for he was a threat, regardless of whether or not he killed Nirav. Aditya’s dalliance with Shreyasi had left him exposed. He was not aware that Divya knew about the two of them. Shreyasi was worried that Subhash Parikh would use the power of attorney to transfer the property to someone else, and carry forward his dream of a Surat diamond bourse, even more so after he learnt about Aditya and Shreyasi. Subhash was sure to take steps to not only protect his own interest, but usurp hers too. She chose the safe way out and, with Aditya’s help, found a buyer. In fact, it was she who had lovingly accosted Aditya outside Divya’s house when Aditya dropped Divya home after the dinner at St Regis, and sought his assistance.
Shreyasi and Subhash were to meet that buyer at the Taj in Kovalam to take the discussion forward. Aditya hung around at Shreyasi’s insistence. While Subhash was waiting for Shreyasi to come, he had observed a few transactions taking place at the kiosk and figured out that it was a front for nefarious dealings in antiques and drugs. On the way out of the hotel, a slightly drunk Subhash got into a discussion with the cigarette vendor. Unknown to him, Kannan was there too. He had driven Rajan there for his meeting with Andrew Mormon, the HSBC relationship manager from Zurich. When he heard Subhash discuss antiques and temple jewellery with the cigarette vendor for a price, Kannan confronted Subhash and threatened to tell the king. However, he was not allowed to meet Dharmaraja Varma, who was fast asleep. A shocked Subhash had chased Kannan through the streets of Thiruvananthapuram, finally catching up with him at the Padma Teertha Kulam, late at night where he killed Kannan mercilessly. Subhash even planted the gold brick in a bag in Kannan’s auto rickshaw, to deflect the investigation—a small price to pay, to keep his real identity under wraps. Aditya, who had been following Subhash on Shreyasi’s bidding, clandestinely filmed him killing Kannan.
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