by Mark Dawson
Men, women and children spilled out of the main street that led into the heart of the slum. The time was irrelevant; the streets were always busy. There were so many inhabitants inside the slum that it felt like a city within the city. Residents were sucked in from the outlying rural regions of Maharashtra and beyond, lured by the promise of prosperity and given something very different instead. There were separate areas for Muslims, Christians and Hindus. It was a vibrant place that was more than just a collection of habitations; Isabella had read that it housed industry that brought in more than a billion dollars a year, the constant flow of commercial vehicles heading into and out of the area bearing testimony to that. Columns of smoke piled up into the air from industrial furnaces and the thousands of open fires over which water would be boiled and food prepared.
Isabella put the block to her back and set off towards the old fish market. She had walked there yesterday evening while she searched for a pharmacy. It was a mile away from the block, but she could smell it as soon as she turned on to the main road. The trawlers had been landing at Ferry Wharf to the southeast of the market all night, and now the catch was being brought here to be sold. Isabella strolled by open lorries and pickups that were loaded with baskets of fish: limp Bombay duck and rawas, pomfret with bulging eyes and protruding lips, leathery skate, proud king mackerel and curled shrimp. Women were queuing to get inside, their baskets empty, ready to be filled with whatever produce the women could afford. The fishermen spoke with the dialect of the Kolis, an indigenous tribe once resident on the swamp marshland of Mumbai, but their language was subsumed within the clamour of shouted Gujarati, Telugu, Hindi and countless dialects.
Isabella went by, ducking as a basket of red snapper was propelled from the back of a lorry up to a first-floor window, where it was deftly snagged by a trader. Big specimens were pulled up by their tails and inspected; children laid out fish on tarpaulin sheets and gutted them with tiny knives held in deft hands. Prices were argued over, rupees exchanged, the shoppers dispersing with their prizes.
The New Raj Chemist and General Stores was opposite the market. The dusty white sign above the window bore the name of the business in both Marathi and English. Isabella went in through the open door and waited in line to be served. The queue shuffled forward slowly as the languorous clerk went to and fro between the desk and the store at the back of the shop, bringing back medicine in tatty white bags.
Finally, it was Isabella’s turn. ‘Yes, miss,’ the man said, in awkward English. ‘How can I help you?’
Pope had arranged a prescription from a doctor that he seemed to know from a previous visit to the city. The man was crooked and, for the sake of a few rupees, he had been prepared to refill the prescription as many times as they wanted. Isabella took it out of her pocket and handed it over. The man straightened his glasses and squinted down at it.
‘Do you have any ID?’
She took out the passport that she had been travelling on. It was the one that belonged to Pope’s eldest daughter. They shared the same colour of hair, but that was about it. The border guards had not given the document much attention, as Pope had anticipated; that had been fortunate.
The clerk gave it a similar cursory glance and slid it back across the counter.
‘Wait.’
Isabella turned away from the counter and glanced out of the dirty window on to the street outside. It was busy, with a traffic jam slowly edging forward, the drivers of the cars providing an angry symphony as they leaned on their horns. Men and women went about their business, slumped forward as if bent that way by the weight of the mounting heat. The shop was ventilated by a fan, the streamers fixed to the aluminium cage snapping straight out in the stiff breeze that the blades provided. There was a queue of twelve men and women waiting for their turns. The man behind her was younger, his limbs thin and the insides of his wrists ruined by unmistakeable needle marks. He was jittery, his hands trembling and his jaw bulging as he ground his teeth together.
The man came back with a paper bag. ‘Here, miss,’ he said, putting the bag on the counter.
Isabella took out the bottle that she found inside. She recognised the white plastic and the blue lid of the Percocet. Pope had been relying on it to dull the edge of his pain.
‘Three thousand rupees,’ the clerk said, putting out his hand.
It was extortion. He knew that the prescription was bogus, he knew she wasn’t eighteen, and he was charging three times what he should have charged because he had come to the conclusion – correctly, as it happened – that Isabella was not in a position to shop around. She was paying him to look the other way.
She took out the notes, laid them on the counter and made off with the prescription before anything else could be said about it.
She was on the stoop, blinking into the brightness and already buffeted by the wave of heat that washed over her, when she felt a vibration in the pocket of her jeans. They each had burner cell phones that they had purchased from the Raghuleela Mega Mall. Isabella took hers out. It was ringing. She looked at the display, covering it with her hand so that she could read it in the glare of the sun. It was Pope.
‘I’m here,’ she said.
‘Hello, Isabella.’
It wasn’t Pope.
‘Who are you?’
‘Listen carefully. I’m here to help you. But you need to move quickly. You and Mr Pope are in great danger.’
The voice sounded artificial, with robotic distortion around the edges, as if it had been run through a piece of software to render it anonymous.
She heard the sound of a siren. It was an angry up-and-down yowl and it instinctively set her nerves on edge. She felt an immediate thrill of anxiety. There was no logic to her reaction; Mumbai was a vast city of twelve million people, and the slums attracted the worst of society with the promise of anonymity, just as they had attracted Pope and Isabella. But sirens signified authority, and Isabella knew that they were being hunted.
She put the phone back to her ear.
‘Why are we in danger?’
‘You have been compromised.’
Three vehicles came into view: two lorries and a large car behind them. The two lorries were painted blue and had ‘Mumbai Police’ stencilled along the flanks. They travelled fast under blue and white lights, their sirens wailing and engines roaring as they sped by on Isabella’s right, racing by the Dharavi Sports Club and on to the main road. The third vehicle was different to the lorries that had preceded it, a black Ford SUV with tinted windows and red and blue lights mounted into its grille.
‘Did you see them?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re on their way to your apartment now. Mr Pope is not answering his phone. You need to warn him. And then you need to leave.’
She started to walk: slowly at first, then faster. ‘Who are you?’
‘A friend. More than that is irrelevant now. Be quick, Isabella.’
Chapter Fourteen
Isabella ran.
The snarl of traffic at the entrance to the slum had slowed the convoy, despite their sirens and lights. She caught up with them as the apartment block came into sight and, rather than walk right by, she turned left and then right and approached the building along a side street.
She reached the block as the first lorry drew up. It parked outside the entrance to the building and was joined by the second lorry. The doors opened and armed police jumped out. Isabella shrank back and watched. She counted twenty men. They wore body armour and were toting a mixture of MP5 submachine guns and combat shotguns. The third vehicle – the black SUV with the tinted windows – pulled up. One of the armed officers jogged over to the window of the SUV and conversed briefly with the occupants. The policeman gave a stiff nod, turned back and pointed to the building. The men nearest to the door opened it and led the way inside. Most of the others followed.
Isabella took out her cell phone. She dialled Pope’s number. There was no response.
They had ag
reed on a fallback. There was a landline in the apartment, too, and Pope had said that it was never to be answered. They would listen instead: four rings would signify that they had been compromised. They would evacuate the area and rendezvous at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The railway station was one of the busiest stations in India and offered both long-distance trains and the commuter shuttles of the Mumbai Suburban Railway. It would be easy to melt into the crowds and disappear.
She dialled. Nothing. The phone wasn’t even ringing. Isabella looked at the display. The bars at the top of the screen said she had no signal.
‘Are you having trouble, too?’
Isabella turned. A woman was leaning against the wall of the building next to her. She was holding up her own phone.
‘Can’t get a signal,’ Isabella said.
‘Neither can I.’
Isabella glanced out at the street. She saw others looking at their phones with confusion on their faces.
The local network had been blocked.
She looked back at the apartment block and up to the window of their flat.
Pope was inside. She had to warn him.
The convoy had blocked the road. A lorry from the fish market was unable to get through and a snarl of cars and other commercial vehicles quickly congealed behind it. The morning sun beat down, dust clouds eddied and the drivers of the trapped vehicles took out their frustrations by leaning on their horns. The lorry driver opened his door and stepped down, turning back to the angry queue behind his lorry, and proffered his raised middle finger. The malodorous stink from the fish in the back of his lorry filled the air.
The crush was a useful distraction, and Isabella took advantage of it. She knew that the police would have been given her description as well as Pope’s and, in many ways, she stood out more than he did: fifteen-year-old white girls on their own were not common here. She did her best to stay out of the way. She jogged a hundred yards down the road and crossed, passing between a car and an autorickshaw. There was no way that she could use the main entrance. Four of the armed policemen had been posted there.
There was an alleyway between their building and its neighbour. Isabella slipped into it, the temperature dropping instantly as she moved into its dark shadow. The bamboo scaffolding started on the first floor, and there was a ladder halfway along the alleyway that offered access to the platform above. She clambered quickly up it, scrambling on to the rough boards and then regaining her feet. Another ladder offered a way up to the second floor and she took it, then taking the ladders that led to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors. The platform on the sixth floor was below the lip of the roof, which was too high for her to reach and so haul herself up. She hurried around the boards to the back of the building. An air-conditioning unit had been fixed to the side of the wall and, by clambering on to the rusted box, she was able to stretch up for the lip of the roof. She pulled herself up, found purchase for her feet and scrambled over the parapet so that she could roll on to the roof.
It was burning hot now, and there was no shade. She was sweating and out of breath, but there was no time to gather her strength. A raised brick structure in the middle of the roof had a door. She ran to it. The door was fastened with a rusted padlock. Isabella cursed, but looked for options. The builders had stacked a collection of bricks on the roof and Isabella took one. The clasp of the padlock was corroded, and it only took three hard strikes with the edge of the brick to snap it apart.
She discarded the broken lock and the chipped brick and opened the door. A flight of unlit stairs was directly ahead of her, leading down into the building.
She took them.
Chapter Fifteen
Isabella could hear the sound of boots on the stairs below. It appeared that the intelligence that had been given to the police was incomplete. They knew that Pope and Isabella were in the block, but they didn’t know in which apartment to find them. They were going door to door. That gave her a limited window of opportunity.
She hurried. Somewhere below she heard the sound of hushed, urgent voices. Isabella tried to work out what floor the police were on. The first? They had two or three dozen apartments to check before they reached them.
She vaulted the last few steps, ran down the corridor to their door and fumbled the key from her pocket. She unlocked it and went inside.
Pope was on the bed. He had been asleep.
‘We have to go,’ she said.
Pope sat up. ‘Why?’
‘They know we’re here.’
Pope slid off the bed. ‘Who does?’
‘Armed police. They’re inside. They’re on the way up.’
Pope knew to trust her judgement, but asked, ‘You’re sure they’re for us?’ as he quickly got to his feet.
‘I had a call just before I saw them. A warning.’
‘From who?’
‘They didn’t say.’
Pope frowned, but there was no time to pursue that now. He looked to the papers scattered on the floor and the bed, and the documents that he had tacked to the walls.
‘How many?’
‘I counted twenty. They’ve left four on the door.’
They both froze as they heard the clatter of booted feet in the corridor outside.
‘Police!’
The voice came from farther down the corridor. They hadn’t reached their door yet.
But they couldn’t leave through the door.
‘Get under the bed,’ Pope said.
‘What about your arm?’
‘I’ll have to manage. Get under the bed.’
Isabella did as he asked, dropping to her belly and sliding beneath the iron frame until she was out of sight.
She watched as Pope went to the door. He unlocked it and quietly pulled the handle, leaving it ajar. The door opened back into the space that was left between the side of the wardrobe and the wall, and Pope pressed himself into it. Isabella heard the sound of terse conversation from the apartment next to theirs and the sound of a baby crying. The men had gone inside to check.
Isabella steadied herself.
‘Police!’
The voice was loud and close, right outside their open door.
Isabella breathed in and out. She could see Pope; he was still, his fists clenched.
Isabella overheard a quick, tense conversation between two men and then held herself stock-still as their door was gently pushed open.
She watched as the first man came into the apartment. He was dressed in a blue police uniform, bulked up with body armour and with a balaclava covering his head. He was toting a weapon in both hands, the muzzle pointed ahead. A shotgun. He had a can of pepper spray and a pistol in holsters clipped to his belt.
He stepped forward so that a second man could come into the room. He was similarly equipped to the first, except that he wasn’t carrying a weapon. He had a holstered pistol. His hand rested on the butt.
Pope waited. The first man came into the room, right up against the edge of the bed. The second man edged forward, turned to the left and pushed the door that opened into the tiny kitchen. Pope crept out from behind the door. The holster’s retaining strap was undone. He slipped the fingers of his right hand around the butt of the pistol and grabbed the back of the man’s body armour with his left. He shoved the policeman into the door frame at the same time as he yanked the pistol out of its holster, drew it back and crashed it down against the policeman’s head. The man’s body went limp.
The first man turned, the shotgun lowered.
Pope pulled the dazed policeman closer to him, looping his arm around his chest to support his dead weight. He winced; the effort evidently caused him pain.
Pope aimed the pistol squarely at the man.
‘Put it down,’ he said.
The man stopped there, the gun levelled. If he pulled the trigger from this range, he would kill Pope and his unconscious colleague.
Isabella slid out from underneath the bed.
Pope kept his face blank as Isabell
a took a step forward.
‘I said put it down,’ Pope repeated, doing his best to distract the policeman as Isabella closed in.
She reached for the pepper spray.
Before the man realised what was happening, she had taken it from the holder and stepped to the side so that she could spray it into his face. She was close and couldn’t miss; the liquid splashed across his eyes and nose and mouth. The man staggered away, turning in Isabella’s direction and blindly swinging the shotgun at her. She danced back out of range, and Pope took the opportunity to dump the body of the man he had knocked out so that he could close in. He grabbed the shotgun, prised it out of the policeman’s hands, flipped it and drove the butt backwards into his face. The man dropped to his knees. Pope struck him again, the butt crashing off the man’s chin, and he fell to the side and lay still.
‘I told you to stay under the bed,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘You were having trouble.’
Pope closed the door to the apartment and propped one of their wooden chairs against the handle. ‘We need to be quick,’ he said.
Chapter Sixteen
They had stripped one of the policemen of his uniform and now Pope was wearing it. The balaclava was pulled down tight over his head so that only his eyes and mouth could be seen. The body armour was a little small for him and the balaclava only partially hid his white skin.
‘Well?’ he asked.
Isabella shrugged. ‘I think it’ll be obvious if anyone takes a long look at you. What about your arm?’
‘It’s sore,’ he admitted, ‘but I can use it. We only need to get outside. The lights are off in the corridor and we’re not going to hang around. We just need it to buy a little time.’ He reached over to the dresser and picked up the can of pepper spray. He tossed it over to her. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘Keep it out of sight.’