58
Sara
Neel stared at the ceiling and said, ‘How the hell do we ever find Roy?’
We were lying next to each other. It was past midnight but neither of us could sleep. I extracted a cigarette from an old pack of Marlboro Lights, kept in my bedside drawer for occasions when I desperately want to smoke. I lit it and took a deep pull, feeling the nicotine enter my bloodstream.
‘Neel, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. We have no clue where he lives, what he does, whether he’s assumed a different name…’
‘Do you think he lives in Goa? Both Anna Grishin and Rachel were killed there.’
‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.’
‘Maybe we should go to our friend D’Mello with this. If Roy is in Goa, I’m sure the police will be able to find him.’
I didn’t think that was such a great idea. ‘Don’t you remember what D’Mello said? He hates the thought of anyone interfering with his investigation. If we tell him we know who Anna Grishin’s killer is, that too without concrete proof, the first thing he’ll do is put us behind bars!’
Neel chuckled.
I asked, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘I was imagining the expression on D’Mello’s face if we went and told him that the man he’s looking for is actually someone who died twelve years ago.’
I smiled. He would definitely burst a blood vessel or two! ‘We have to think of something else.’
‘You’re right.’ Neel was quiet for a moment. ‘There is another way to find Roy.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We make him come to us.’
‘But how?’
Neel sat up. His eyes were shining. ‘He knows we’ve been trying to find out what happened to Rachel. The deaths of Zoe, Grigor and his girlfriend prove that.’
‘Neel, we’ve discussed that before.’
‘He knows we’ve figured out that Rachel was doing a story on Anna Grishin and that her own death wasn’t a suicide.’
‘Obviously.’
‘And yet, why are we still alive? Why hasn’t he come after us?’
‘I’m not sure he hasn’t.’ I thought about the incidents in Goa. ‘Don’t you remember the SUV which tried to run Omar and me off the road? We could easily have been killed. And what about the two men who tried to assault me on the beach that evening? I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t shown up when you did.’
‘I’m not denying that both were deliberate attacks on us, instigated by Roy in all probability…’
‘Probability? What do you mean, Neel?’ My voice rose several decibels. ‘I can’t believe that you still don’t get it. It is Roy! There is no probability about it. He killed Rachel, and he’s out to kill all of us as well. Unless we can do something to stop him!’
‘Calm down, Sara.’ Neel held my hand. ‘All I’m saying is that if Roy wanted to kill us, he would have succeeded by now. I think he was just trying to warn us off.’
‘He’s not shown any hesitation or remorse about taking lives so I don’t understand why he would start with us.’
‘What if he was worried that killing us would open up a Pandora’s box? If a number of people closely acquainted with each other were to be murdered suddenly, the police would start to look for connections—a common friend turned enemy perhaps. They would dig into the past and Roy would risk getting exposed.’
‘Then why did he kill Rachel?’
‘I think he had no option. She must have found out too much.’
My head began to hurt. ‘I don’t know where you’re going with this.’
Neel put his face close to mine. ‘I’m convinced Roy doesn’t know we’re on to him. That’s why we’re still alive!’
‘Wouldn’t he be worried that Rachel might have spoken to us?’
His expression darkened. ‘I can only guess that he made Rachel talk before she died. She must have convinced him that she hadn’t told us anything.’
That was almost true anyway. Rachel didn’t tell us much, and we misunderstood what she tried to tell us about Roy.
Neel continued. ‘What I’m proposing is that we send Roy a message.’
‘A message?’
‘Yes. Telling him that we know he’s alive and responsible for multiple murders, including Rachel’s.’
‘But won’t that put us in great danger? You yourself said…’
Neel raised his hand. ‘Hear me out, Sara. He won’t know the message is coming from us. It will be from an anonymous sender, who will indicate that he’s ready to keep his silence for money.’
‘You mean blackmail?’
‘That’s what we’ll want Roy to believe.’
I was beginning to see the light. ‘So we try to get him to agree to a rendezvous?’
‘Exactly. We’ll just have to put enough information in the message to ensure he has no choice but to come.’
‘And once he arrives, what do we do?’
‘We kill him, Sara.’
59
Omar
I got a call from Kabir Ahmed that night. D was gone by then, and I had dozed off while watching a Hitchcock rerun on television.
‘Hello, Omar,’ he said. ‘Sorry to call you late.’
‘No problem. I was awake,’ I lied.
‘I remembered where I’ve seen your friend. The one who had disappeared.’
‘Roy?’ I was instantly alert. ‘Go on.’
‘It was around a year ago. A young girl was found dead inside a car parked on Woodhouse Road in Colaba. She had been slashed repeatedly with a very sharp knife, and some of her wounds were horrific. The owner of the car saw the body lying on the backseat only after he had started driving to work in the morning, and ended up crashing into the back of a bus. I can’t blame the poor fellow. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
‘The Crime Branch was called in quite quickly, for it was an unusual case. I was the lead detective. We interrogated the car owner, of course, but it was clear that he wasn’t the perpetrator. The man was a widower in his late fifties and a well-known resident of the area, having lived there for three decades. Why the killer had chosen his car to dump the body of the girl remained as much a mystery to him as for us. It had been done overnight but no one saw anything.’
I listened to Kabir intently. What he was telling me fitted the pattern of the killings perfectly. Anna, Sasha, Jo—young girls cut up with a knife. Here was undoubtedly another victim in the series. I had many questions but I didn’t want to interrupt him.
He continued. ‘Her name was Rafat. She had just turned twenty, and studied in a college in Churchgate. A bright, pretty girl with her whole life ahead of her, until some bastard just took it all away. She was found naked, wrapped in a plastic sheet, but there was no sign of rape. That surprised me, I can tell you.’
I asked, ‘Why?’
‘Well, in such cases, some form of sexual assault is almost always present. It also explains the motive. But this one was very different. We tried to probe if Rafat had enemies but there weren’t any. By all accounts, she was a quiet and inoffensive girl. She didn’t have a boyfriend either, coming as she did from a conservative Bohra family.
‘The man who had done this was a psychopath and a cold, calculating one at that. He had planned things very carefully. The fact that there was very little blood meant that Rafat had been killed elsewhere. There was hardly any physical evidence to go on. The car had been opened expertly, and then locked again after the body was placed inside. I could only assume that he chose that particular car because it was parked in one of the darkest spots on the road.’
‘But why a car in the first place? It would have increased the risk of being seen.’
Kabir sighed. ‘I initially thought he wanted to delay the discovery of the body but then I became convinced tha
t he did it only to mock us. A strange twist which would leave the police scratching their heads and going off into different directions in their investigation.’
‘So I assume the case wasn’t eventually solved?’
‘You’re right, Omar. We never did find the man who killed Rafat.’
I asked gently, ‘So where did Roy come into the picture, Kabir?’
‘I was coming to that.’ He was silent for a moment.
‘This was one of the most frustrating cases of my career. I tried every trick I’ve learnt in my twenty-five years of law enforcement. To recreate the scene in my mind, I went to Woodhouse Road one night at around four o’clock, the time we suspected the killer had come to dump the body. The street was dark and deserted, except for one man standing almost at the exact spot where the car had been parked.’
‘Roy?’
‘Yes, it was the man in the photograph you showed me.’
‘Are you sure it was him? You said it was dark.’
‘I flashed my torch in his face. It was definitely him. About your age, fair and big-built. He looked very fit, like he was in the military or something.’
Roy in the military? I didn’t think so. It would have made it difficult for him to have killed all those people. But he had always been a very physical kind of a guy.
I asked, ‘Did you speak to him, Kabir?’
‘I identified myself and asked him what he was doing there in the middle of the night. He said that he lived close by and was on his way home from a friend’s house. It wasn’t a very convincing explanation but I let it go. After all, this is a free country and there’s no law against being out on the streets at night.’
‘Did he tell you anything else?’
‘No. He walked off immediately. I didn’t see him get into any vehicle so maybe he did live close by.’
There was no guarantee of that, of course.
‘What was he wearing?’
‘I don’t remember but it wasn’t anything striking, that’s for sure.’
After a pause, Kabir said, ‘So this Roy has never contacted any of you in all these years?’
‘No. I don’t think anyone even knows he’s alive.’
‘Very strange. I wonder why.’
I could have told him but I chose not to. The three of us had agreed that we needed something more substantial to support our theory before going to anyone with it, especially the police. Kabir was a friend but he was also a police officer.
‘You said you weren’t convinced by what Roy told you. What do you think he was really doing there that night?’
‘I…don’t know. He was standing right at the place where Rafat’s body had been dumped but it could have been a coincidence. I didn’t really think much about it at that time. It was only after you told me about your friend and showed me his photo that all this came back to me. In hindsight, maybe I should have questioned him some more.’
I didn’t say anything. I guess Roy had done what criminals often do—return to the scene of their crime.
I asked, ‘Do you remember anything that might help us trace him?’
He thought for a moment and replied, ‘No, nothing. I’m sorry. But at least you now know for certain that your friend is alive.’
60
Neel
We decided to send our message to Roy through a newspaper advert.
The options were extremely limited. Especially when you have no clue where the person is. Or what name he might be living under.
Not that we didn’t try to think out of the box.
Omar proposed that we start a chain email. You know, the ones which end with a demand in bold font that the message should be forwarded to ten other people. And failure to do so would invite a fate worse than death. A surprising number of people continue to fall for this old Internet hoax. Sara came up with the idea of an SMS campaign. She had hired a direct marketing agency to promote her store. They had sent out text messages to lakhs of people. At a reasonable cost.
Not to be left behind, I suggested that we start a Facebook page or publish a YouTube video. I hadn’t quite figured out how it would work. But I had seen some of these things getting zillions of “Likes” and views. So it seemed like a pretty effective medium to reach out to the world at large. What I didn’t know is that getting visibility on these social platforms can be a very expensive affair. Except for that rare viral phenomenon.
In the end, we shot down all these ideas. None of them could help us reach the huge number of people who still read their newspaper every day.
I did some research. It was surprising that the readership of several Hindi papers far exceeded that of the most popular English one. Come to think of it, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Only a small percentage of our country’s population live in urban areas. But we could be absolutely sure that Roy would stick to the Queen’s language in his choice of newspaper. His Hindi used to be awful. Bordering on the hilarious, in fact.
We then debated the format of the advertisement.
Classifieds was the cheapest option. But they were only for people looking for something specific. Like a spouse or a house. Ours would have to be a display ad. Somewhere between a product commercial and a tender notice. We chose the top two English dailies. And hoped that Roy read at least one of them. Wherever he was.
It wasn’t cheap. Ms Moneybags Sara offered to fund it. Neither Omar nor I protested. There was no guarantee of success, of course. Maybe Roy was one of those new-age types who only checked the news online. Maybe he wouldn’t have time to read the paper on the day the ad was run. Maybe he subscribed to one of the lesser known publications.
There were too many imponderables. We just had to go ahead. Hoping for the best.
The text of the ad had to be short and cryptic. Yet leaving no doubt in Roy’s mind about what we were trying to convey. However, we had to do this without letting him know who was behind it. Addressing the message wasn’t a problem. Everyone used to call him Roy. We decided to leave Rachel’s name out. That would invariably have pointed the finger at us.
It was only while preparing the draft that a major snag in our plan came to light. How would we get Roy to a rendezvous if we didn’t know where he was? The country was a big place. I don’t know why this hadn’t struck any of us before.
Omar came up with the solution. We would have to give out a phone number in the ad. And ask Roy to call us. Using any of our numbers was too risky. So we would have to create a new connection for this purpose. Nowadays, it isn’t easy to even get a prepaid mobile card without a lot of documentation. In the end, Sara took one in her maid’s name. The young girl didn’t have a mobile phone. She was ecstatic when she learnt that she was going to get one after we were done.
The stage was set.
The ad was going to run for two days, Friday and Saturday. To maximise our chances. If Roy saw it, we would know pretty quickly. I was sure he wouldn’t waste any time in calling us.
61
I was absently flipping through the newspaper when something caught my eye.
The ad was quite prominent, bold lettering in a large box. It went: ‘Roy, I know about Jo, Anna, Sasha and the others. Call me on 8819111972.’
I was shocked. How could it be possible?
I took a few deep breaths and let the initial panic subside. This was really serious. In fact, it was disaster. Someone had not only made the connection between the killings but also…Anyway, that was the lesser of the two problems. How could I not have known?
I immediately thought of Rachel. She was dead but had she lied to me about not having spoken to anyone else? That was most likely now, though every instinct back then had told me otherwise. Perhaps someone had stumbled on to her story after her death.
Could it be those three? I was positive Rachel hadn’t told them anything otherwise they wouldn’t have blun
dered about in Goa for as long as they did. They would have gone straight to the police and destroyed me. They were still poking around, of course. I cursed myself for not finishing them off when I had the chance.
I read the ad again and again. There was an obvious window of opportunity for me there but I had to first find out who was behind it. Whoever it was, it almost appeared as if he wanted to…blackmail me. I would be quite happy if that was the case, for it would give me a way to get out of this. The man had no idea who he was dealing with.
I made a call. The person at the other end picked up instantly, as I knew she would.
I gave her the phone number from the ad and said, ‘Find out who it belongs to.’ I hung up without waiting for a reply.
She called back within fifteen minutes. ‘It’s a Delhi number, registered to a woman living in a slum near Nizamuddin.’
I thought for a moment. This was going to be easier than I had expected. ‘Send someone to her home and find out who she works for.’
This time, it took an hour. I guess I wasn’t surprised when I heard what she had to tell me.
Sara. Bitch.
What did she and those other two assholes take me for? Fucking amateurs.
I thought about Sara. It had been evident very early on that she lusted for me. I remember getting out of the pool one day and noticing her staring at me quite unabashedly. She was done swimming so I presumed she had stayed back to watch my race. Which I won, of course.
I went straight up to her, dripping water, and said, ‘Liked what you saw?’
She looked me in the eye and said coolly, ‘You were good.’
‘I know,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Aren’t we modest?’
Sara was wearing a sleeveless blouse with two buttons undone, revealing more than a hint of her perfect breasts. Her long, slim legs emerged from a pair of shorts as brief as knickers. Everything about her oozed sensuality—her striking body, her husky voice, her lazy posture, her brazen attitude. I knew that some of my mates were quite infatuated with her but honestly, she didn’t have that impact on me. Not quite yet.
Second Lives Page 19