Two hours after the steak-and-ale pies and the craft lager that tasted like something Simon had once vomited up, they reach the foot of the crag. Their walk through the valley has been pleasant enough. Nothing too strenuous, which suited Simon well. He’s more than aware that he’s treadmill-fit only; he’s not a huge fan of major-league sweat.
He looks up at the path of ascent and tries hard to suppress a frown. They should’ve gone the easy way … they’d be at the top right now, and all Simon would have to do was push the bastard off. Now, because of his bravado, he was going to have to climb up the damn thing first. Oh well, Simon thinks. At least I’ll have earned my reward. He wonders how it’ll feel, being a murderer. He glances across at Joseph, who is humming away to himself, busy sliding ropes through harnesses and clipping on karabiners. Simon knows then how it’ll feel … It’ll feel fucking fantastic.
‘Ready?’ Joseph says.
Simon sees he’s got a piece of meat stuck between his front teeth. It makes him feel sick. ‘I can’t wait,’ he says. He grins so hard he almost splits the skin across his cheeks.
The climb’s not as hard as he imagined it to be. In fact, he realises he’s quite enjoying it. It’s almost a shame to reach the top. He’s sweating hard, feels cold rivulets coursing down between his shoulder blades. Joseph hands him a water bottle and he drinks greedily, letting the liquid run down his chin and into the neck of his t-shirt.
‘Good?’ Joseph says.
‘Great … bloody great. Cheers mate. You know what? I never imagined you’d be the one to teach me something good – something I’d enjoy so much. It’s a shame, actually … I actually feel a bit bad about this now…’
He drops the water bottle on the ground. Takes a step towards Joseph, then another. Joseph steps backwards, then falters, realising he’s too close to the edge.
‘Bad about what, Simon?’ There’s a slight tremor in Joseph’s voice.
He knows. He must do.
‘Well I can hardly let you live, now that I know what you’ve done. Or should I say who you’ve done. You little snake. Did you really think she wouldn’t tell me? Did you really think you were special?’
Confusion flashes across Joseph’s face. Then realisation. His eyes pop wide open in fear. ‘No … listen, you’ve got it all wrong, Simon. Mate … come on…’
Simon takes another step closer. He rubs his hands on his trousers, wiping off the sheen of sweat that’s spread across them like mildew.
Then it happens.
Simon takes one final step, but Joseph’s fast. He darts out of the way, ducks under Simon’s outstretched hands. There’s a reason that people call him a snake and a weasel. He’s small, he’s slippery … and he’s away from the edge, while Simon is teetering on the brink of it, propelled by his own adrenaline. He windmills his arms, and for a brief moment he thinks he’s going over … until Joseph grabs the straps of his rucksack and drags him back to safety. Simon spins round. His face is burning. His heart is hammering so hard he’s sure Joseph can hear it.
‘So,’ Joseph spits. ‘You brought me up here to, what … to kill me? For Marianne? It was one night. One night! After everything you’ve done to her? This is absurd. You can’t have thought you’d get away with it?’
Simon has regained his composure. He’s still shaking, but he feels his energy coming back. It’s not over yet, not by a long chalk. ‘Oh but I can, little Joseph,’ he says. ‘It. Was. An. Accident. That’s all I’d need to say. It’s slippery up here, loose stones. And no one even knows where we are, do they? It’s not like you had anyone to tell…’
Joseph puffs out his chest. ‘I don’t think so, mate.’ He takes a step towards Simon, and it’s Simon’s turn to feel confused.
‘You what…?’
‘You didn’t really think you were going to do this, did you? Because I brought you here. Remember – this hike was my idea. I joked earlier that I couldn’t remember whose idea it was; well I can: It was mine. “Fancy coming along for a hike, sometime?” I said to you. You suggested the trip to France, but I knew I’d be able to change it at the last minute without you suspecting anything. You do remember that pub on the South Bank … the night I bumped into you and Marianne? What was it, five, six months ago? She’d covered up the bruises with make-up, but I saw right through her beige camouflage, just like I’ve always seen through you. You vain, odious bastard.’
Simon’s mouth falls open.
‘Just for the record, mate, it wasn’t just the one time, it was lots of times – every time she felt the need to escape from you and your overfriendly fists.’
Simon feels like his head is about to explode. ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, Joseph?’
Joseph doesn’t bother to reply. He lunges forward and throws his whole weight behind the thrust.
Simon feels his arms windmilling again as he slips over the edge. This time, Joseph doesn’t step forward to save him. Simon feels air whoosh behind him, then a jolt and a crack as he bounces against the side of the rock face. A sharp blade of fear slices through his chest. He looks down, and realises he is no longer falling. Something has stopped him. He spins and grips at the rock, his slippery hands struggling for purchase. He barely feels the stab of pain as a fingernail snaps off as he tries to wedge his hand into the smallest crevice, clinging on for his life.
‘Well,’ Joseph says, peering down at him over the edge. ‘That was unexpected.’
Simon looks up in horror as Joseph reaches one of his snake-like arms behind him and removes a walking pole from where it has been strapped to the back of his rucksack.
‘Any final words, Simon, mate? I’ll be sure to pass them on to Marianne when she collects me from the train station. By the way, has anyone ever told you that your teeth look like they’ve been painted with Tippex?’
‘Please … for Christ’s sake, man! You can’t leave me like this … I’m slipping … help me … I’m begging you … just take my hand, please…’
Joseph watches as a flurry of rocks tumble and bounce down the ravine, out of sight. ‘I’d like to say I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lie. There’ve been too many lies. It’s over now. It’s the only way. You know it is.’ He feels a lurch in his stomach. He could stop this. Grab hold of Simon, wrench him up over the lip of the jutting rock. But he won’t. He’s in control now. This is his story now.
A sickening realisation dawns in Simon’s eyes. ‘No … God, no … please, I’ll do anything … You know I will…’
Liar, Joseph thinks. You’re a fucking liar. It’s the pleading that convinces him. He’s right. He’s always been right. ‘It’s too late. So long, my friend. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be over quickly.’
He takes a deep breath. Crouches down. Keeping a hand on the largest of the rocks to steady himself, he leans over and pushes the tip of his walking pole into the loop of his Simon’s rucksack. The loop that had caught, by freak and by chance, on a piton left embedded in the rock from someone else’s ascent. One innocuous metal peg. If not for that, they wouldn’t be here now. It’d all be over. None of this lastminute pathetic begging.
Joseph stares into Simon’s eyes as he carefully lifts the walking pole like a giant crochet hook and slips the loop off the peg. There’s a split second where nothing happens, like in a cartoon. Then he watches as Simon’s hands slide away from their tenuous grip on the too-small ledge.
‘No … no! What’re you … you can’t just … aaaaarrrrggghhh…’
His old friend’s voice diminishes with the fall until there’s no sound but the blood rushing around his skull. Bubbling and cascading like a river smashing against rocks.
He thinks of Marianne, waiting for him at the station, ready to start their new life together. The words she said to him on the phone that morning, when he’d been full of doubt, ready to call off the whole thing.
Just make sure it looks like an accident.
Bombay Brigadoon
Vaseem Khan
‘They f
ound the body inside a well, out in the Aarey Milk Colony.’ Inspector Jamshed Bukhari glanced up at the stuttering ceiling fan as it ladled the glutinous air around his office, gently ruffling his thinning hair. ‘Burned black. No idea how long it’s been out there. ACP Shukla took one look at the First Investigation Report and decided it was some petty ruffian come to grief at the hands of the local underworld. Case closed.’
‘But you’re not convinced?’
Bukhari tapped his finger on the lunar-cratered surface of his ancient desk. ‘Something’s not sitting right, Chopra. You know what I mean, I’m sure.’
Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Ret’d) did know.
During his thirty years on the force he had come to believe that a policeman’s intuition was a finely calibrated instrument, something good officers developed over time, an instinct meticulously honed and polished, kept in precise working order by the twin lubricants of conscience and duty. Since his forced retirement from the service the previous year – the result of a bout of unstable angina – that instinct had weighed heavily upon him. The result had been the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency, and a renewal of his commitment to the cause.
Now he increasingly found himself consulted on cases that the overstretched Mumbai police service had neither the resources nor the will to tackle themselves.
Bukhari was an old friend, and an admirer of Chopra’s spotless reputation. After three decades in the Indian police service – recently ‘lauded’ by a national paper as only the third most corrupt institution in the country – his companion’s achievement was, in and of itself, worthy of accolade.
‘Who found the body?’ Chopra asked.
‘Two schoolkids. They were looking for somewhere quiet to canoodle. Their statements are in the file.’
‘Forensics?’
Bukhari gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Last week Shukla told us not to switch the fans on until the thermometer hit thirty. You think he’s going to waste money on forensics for a dead nobody?’ He picked at his khaki shirt, saddlebags of sweat under his arms. ‘There’s been a turf war recently. Petty criminals turning up dead all over the place, like bad pennies. If Shukla’s right then this one was dealt with in a particularly brutal fashion. I have a horrible feeling our friend was burned alive.’
‘There’s been no autopsy?’
‘I’ve asked for one. The pathologist has promised me the results later today.’
‘Won’t Shukla hit the roof?’
‘Possibly. But some things cannot be allowed to stand, can they, old friend?’
These words stayed with Chopra as he headed to the Sahar hospital.
In the rear of his modified Tata van, Ganesha, the baby elephant that his long-vanished uncle Bansi had sent him a year earlier, looked out into the impossibly crowded streets of Mumbai, a phantasmagoria of honking rickshaws, hooting trucks, buses, bicycles, handcarts, cows, goats, dogs and the occasional lumbering elephant.
Chopra still had no real idea why Bansi had sent him such a strange bequest.
In time he had accommodated the little elephant into his life – no easy task for a man who lived on the fifteenth floor of one of Mumbai’s trademark towers. Ganesha now resided in a compound behind the restaurant Chopra had established after his retirement, a restaurant that also served as the headquarters for his fledgling detective agency.
Recently he had got into the habit of taking the elephant out on his rounds – Ganesha needed the exercise, and his keen senses had proven useful on more than one occasion.
In the hospital mortuary, Chopra found his old friend Homi Contractor elbows deep in a fresh corpse.
‘Do I look different?’ asked the pathologist, from behind his bottlegreen surgical mask.
Chopra hesitated.
He knew that Homi, depressed after his recent fiftieth birthday, had embarked on an all-consuming programme of diet and exercise. It seemed strange that a man so successful, with a stable marriage and children he could be proud of, could fall victim to such late-blooming insecurity. Homi himself didn’t understand it.
Yet Chopra also knew that, even in a city of twenty million, loneliness and disillusionment stalked the gilded towers of the rich as readily as the slums of the poor. In his late forties now, he too sometimes succumbed to an inexplicable feeling of melancholia.
‘As good as Sachin batting on a hundred.’
This brought a smile to Homi’s lips. They were both cricket lovers, and fans of Sachin Tendulkar, India’s premier batsman.
Homi pulled the corpse out from the row of cold storage units.
Chopra regarded the blackened body, a few wisps of burned hair remaining on the melted scalp.
‘He was—’ Homi began.
‘You’re sure it’s a he?’
Homi gave him a caustic look. ‘He was immolated, old friend, not given a sex change.’ He showed Chopra a photograph of the body as it had arrived in the mortuary. ‘You see the pugilistic stance? It’s a result of muscle contraction as the body burns. We found elevated levels of carboxyhaemoglobin in his blood and soot in the airways. Do you understand what that means?’
‘That he was burned alive.’
‘Yes,’ said Homi, emphatically.
‘How old?’
‘Early to mid-thirties. Take a look at this.’ Homi put an X-ray up on a lightbox. It showed the back of the victim’s skull, fractured by a spider’s web of cracks. ‘Blunt force trauma. Heavy object. Definitely ante-mortem. Looks like someone tried to bash his head in, then burned him with an accelerant to cover up the crime.’
‘How long has he been dead?’
‘Best estimate, based on insect colonisation of the body: two to three weeks. There’s a couple of other things, might help with an ID.’ Homi put another X-ray onto the lightbox. ‘First, he has a metal fixation plate in his right tibia. From what looks like a Y-type fracture of the right tibial plateau, a few years old. Second, he has a tattoo, just above the heart. I found it using infrared photography. Most of the body had third-degree burns, destroying the dermis, but this patch was relatively shielded, possibly because his arm was slumped over it when the initial burning took place.’
He handed Chopra an infrared photograph of the tattoo.
It showed Christ on the cross, the foot of the cross enfolded by a banner emblazoned with the words: ‘Only God forgives’.
‘He was stripped naked before he was burned. My guess is because the killer wanted to make sure his skin was fully blackened. The clothes were never found.’
‘Why? I mean, why would the killer do that?’
‘Because this was no local ruffian. Our victim is not even Indian.’
‘What does that mean?’
Homi hesitated. ‘Based on an analysis of the skull – the mastoid process, the nasal aperture, the palate – it is my belief that this is the body of a Caucasian. A white man.’
Chopra felt the wind go out of him.
He considered the ramifications of a Western tourist murdered in Mumbai – in such a grotesque fashion. He felt the case coil itself around his throat like the tail of a snake.
The Aarey Milk Colony: a sprawling, four-thousand-acre expanse in the suburbs of the city, housing villages, lakes, gardens, Mumbai’s Film City, and some sixteen thousand cattle spread across innumerable farms and smallholdings.
It was on one of these smallholdings that the body had been discovered, in an area of relative wilderness.
The plot, a collection of crumbling brick buildings and tin cowsheds, was fenced in with rusted chain-link. A faded sign on the gate said ‘KEEP OUT. PROPERT Y OF OMKARA LAND DEVELOPMENT PVT. LTD’. A ragged tear in the fence beside the gate negated the sign’s edict.
The sun beat down mercilessly as Chopra scanned the area. Witch grass burned dry as tinder. An old wagon wheel propped against the nearest building, two spokes missing. A wooden outhouse, the wood warped by cycles of monsoon rain and relentless sun.
He walked into the outhouse.
Vines from a st
rangler fig behind the building had worked themselves through the roof, and hung down in snaky fronds. A scorpion scuttled away from his shoe.
The well was at the rear of the space, filled in to all but the top three feet. It was in this cavity that the body had been discovered by the two teenagers. It was, Chopra supposed, a comment on the city’s chronic overpopulation that youngsters had to come out to this desolate wasteland to find privacy.
Who was he? How had he ended up here?
Outside, he circled the plot, looking for anything, any sign out of the ordinary.
Ganesha watched him, then began to do the same, snuffling at the ground with his trunk. An elephant’s trunk was one of the most sensitive organs in the natural world.
Chopra’s eye was caught by a flash of white. He bent down to a log pile stacked up against the outhouse; a piece of paper caught between two gnarled and desiccated trunks.
He plucked it out.
It was a single page from a pocket bible, charred around the edges. The bottom of the page was stamped ‘St Francis Gospel Mission, Mumbai’.
He turned and saw Ganesha rooting around in a patch of darker soil by the edge of the plot, under the fence. The little elephant had found something.
Chopra walked to the patch of discoloured earth, fell to his knees, and began shovelling at the loose soil with his hands.
A foot down he found the charred ashes of clothing.
The St Francis Gospel Mission was a low, whitewashed building in the gentrified suburb of Malad East.
Inside Chopra met with the white-robed Brother Victor Mascarenhas, who examined the bible page that he had been handed with a frown. ‘Yes, this is from one of our texts. It is troubling that you found it while investigating a murder.’
‘Did you have a white man staying with you recently? About five-nine, dark-haired, early to mid-thirties. He would have vanished, probably without warning, some two to three weeks ago. He was last wearing blue jeans, possibly a white t-shirt.’
Mystery Tour Page 27