‘You want to have a fight with me?’ asked Yuri, rolling his window down. His blue eyes flashed in the sunlight as he smiled menacingly.
‘No. Just asking you to drive carefully. That is all. Why should we have a fight, uncle?’ the scooter rider asked in a mild tone, looking worried. ‘Anyway, where are you trying to go? This road only leads to my house. I am Bhola Ram, by the way,’ he added, wiping the sweat from his hands with a red handkerchief and reaching forward to shake hands with them.
‘I am Yuri, this is Deven, and in the back seat are Cyrilo and Madam Prema. We are from the Happy Home and we are looking for a boy, a small boy with curly hair.’
‘Hundreds and thousands of small boys with curly hair in Goa, sir,’ said Bhola Ram, grinning. Yuri’s little van and Bhola’s scooter were both blocking the road and five scooters waited patiently for them to finish their conversation. Bhola now called out to the man who was trying to edge his scooter past them, almost driving into a muddy drain.
‘Oh. Hurry, hurry. Lobo. What is your hurry? These gentlemen and the lady are looking for a small boy with curly hair. How many do we have living in Vaddy? One thousand?’
‘Maybe one thousand and one. Tony had a son last night. Going for breakfast there.’ He laughed as he revved his scooter but didn’t move. ‘I tell you what. I will take you to Tony de Costa’s house. He is celebrating the birth of a baby son. Everyone will be there for breakfast and you can see if the boy you are looking for is there. Okay?’
Deven looked doubtful but everyone else agreed this was an excellent plan. They had not had a proper Goan breakfast for many years. Prema muttered that she was not dressed properly for a feast and had left her teeth at home but when Cyrilo asked her again, she agreed. She took out a comb from her bag and quickly patted her hair in place. ‘Does my hair look all right?’ she asked.
‘You look like the queen of England going to a garden party,’ said Cyrilo.
‘But without her teeth,’ whispered Yuri.
As Bhola Ram had told them, there were at least a hundred small boys running around in the large garden. A few more were climbing trees, and some were racing in the fields nearby. ‘Trees. Let us first question the boys on the trees. Remember, Maria said the boy had been perched on a tree that morning. He had pointed out the dead body hanging from it,’ said Deven in an excited voice.
‘We know. We were there too,’ muttered Yuri, picking up a sausage from a plate and dipping it in a rich red tomato sauce. Cyrilo had piled up his plate with chunks of bread, thick slices of roast chicken and three boiled eggs. Prema was only drinking tea and looking around with a haughty air like a queen at a servant’s ball. ‘We have not really been invited. You two should not eat like starving beggars,’ she hissed when she saw Cyrilo and Yuri going for a second helping.
‘Please eat some more,’ said an old lady, coming up to them.
‘It was very kind of you to let us come,’ said Prema in a voice that sounded exactly like Eliza Doolittle’s in My Fair Lady. Everyone stopped eating and gaped at her. Prema tried to smile, keeping her mouth closed since she did not want to display her toothless gums.
Suddenly, a small boy dressed in a Superman costume came running up to them. ‘You are from the dead lady’s house,’ he shouted, pointing at Yuri. ‘I saw you that day. You vomited at the gate.’
‘I did not. I did no such thing,’ said Yuri, looking around sheepishly. ‘I had a bad cough and I just coughed because something was stuck in my throat.’ Now some of the other guests gathered around them and someone pushed a little boy forward.
‘He found the body,’ Tony said proudly, patting the boy on the head. Yuri stared at him and the half-eaten sausage fell from his hand. It was the brown cherub he had seen in the fish shop.
‘But the boy cannot speak. It is very sad but otherwise he is a very clever boy. He looks after the garden for us. His name is also Tony.’ Tony Senior then moved away to talk to his other guests.
The boy smiled at them and pointed to the gate.
‘Is he saying he wants us to leave? How cheeky!’ said Prema.
‘No, I think he’s saying he wants to go out with us to the gate,’ said Deven and turned to leave.
‘Let us say thanks to our kind host,’ said Yuri, but Tony was nowhere to be seen so they walked out quickly, Cyrilo leading the way.
Their white van stood under the shade of a banyan tree and scooters were parked all around it like bees around a honeypot.
‘How will we ever get out?’ screamed Prema. ‘Why did you park in such a stupid way?’
‘Relax. Your blood pressure will go up if you shout so much,’ said Cyrilo. ‘Calm down, take a deep breath.’
The boy moved forward swiftly. As they watched, he took out a bunch of keys and began moving the scooters. Within a few minutes he had cleared a path for the van. Yuri clapped his hands.
‘This boy is a genius. We should employ him at the Happy Home. He can help you in the garden, Cyrilo, and maybe we can have some flowers one day instead of a forest of weeds.’
The boy smiled and took out a small notebook from his shirt pocket. ‘My name is Tony. The Happy Home has a very good mango tree,’ he wrote in clear, neat handwriting.
‘Did you see anything that morning when you were sitting on the tree?’ asked Prema.
‘I will ask him the questions if you don’t mind, Prema,’ said Deven.
‘Yes, good idea. Prema is quite deaf, you know,’ whispered Yuri.
‘I heard you. I can hear better than you any day. I will not waste my time if you don’t need me here. You think you are all so clever. Anyway, my hearing aid batteries are going now.’ She started walking away.
‘Prema, come back. The boy is going to write his answers down. She can read; it doesn’t matter if she can’t hear,’ said Cyrilo gently. Prema sniffed the air like an offended vixen a few times, adjusted her hearing aid and came back. She didn’t want to miss anything.
Tony sat on an upturned drum that had been left on the road and looked up at them. Then he pointed to Yuri.
‘What does he mean? Why is he looking at me?’ muttered Yuri, moving backwards. His heart was beating very fast. He drummed his fingers on the car nervously. Had the boy seen him talking to Olga? He could have easily seen them together near the villa and now he would tell the others. He must quickly think of an excuse before the others could understand what the boy was trying to say.
But just as Tony was about to write something, he stopped and jumped up. A thin, small man dressed as a clown in bright red and green trousers was walking down the road towards them, followed by a group of children. He waved to Tony, his eyes glaring from his face, painted white, his red mouth angry. The boy started running away from them.
‘Alfie. Alfie. Show us tricks,’ shouted the children, but the clown ignored them and ran behind the little boy.
* * *
The monsoon rains had turned the fields outside Trionim into vast stretches of green, and some women walked from one paddy field to another carrying tufts of long, green plants. ‘See, that is how they plant rice,’ said Rana as they sat on his balcony sipping lukewarm coffee. Olga yawned. Now he is going to lecture me on the monsoon, she thought, gazing beyond the fields where she could see traffic moving in a long, slow line. Her friends must be heading out to beach parties. She wished she could invite some of them over for dinner, then she would not have to sit alone with Rana. Time hung heavy in the air when she was with him. She would go and call up a few people later after he had finished telling her the boring details of the rainy season that hit Goa every summer. At home in Moscow nobody ever talked about the rain. They just unfolded their raincoats, covered their heads with plastic caps and went out. When they moved into Rana’s house in London she would learn to talk about the weather. ‘The English love talking about the weather,’ her friend Martina had told her. She was well settled in London and spoke really good English now. ‘Come here next month. We will both go to classes to learn table decora
tion,’ she had said the previous night.
Olga wished she could run out of the house and escape Rana’s voice still going on and on about the monsoon. He was now telling her in great detail about the history of the rains and how they had once flooded the Rajasthan desert many years ago. Olga smiled and nodded at Rana as she stroked his arm. She saw herself plunging a knife into his chest, through his Armani shirt, through his gold chains, through his Mont Blanc pen, right into his heart. She picked up an apple and sank her teeth into it. I must call Yuri at the Happy Home as soon as Rana leaves for Delhi. I hope Ziriko comes to the restaurant tonight with my packet. I am running out of pills. Oh god. I really need one now. I will never be able to get through this evening without them, she thought, her eyes dull as Rana described for the tenth time how he had fallen into a monsoon-created ditch last year and lost the keys to his brand-new BMW.
‘Look, Olga, the women have already transplanted half the field,’ said Rana, jolting her out of her daydreams. ‘They wait for the first monsoon showers and begin their work. The monsoon hits Kerala, then Goa and then slowly travels up to the north. It covers the entire country by the middle of July. It’s amazing how that happens. Let me explain it to you. The monsoon is caused by the difference in annual temperature over land and sea. But sometimes a factor called El Nino plays havoc and the monsoon fails.’ Rana’s nose twitched with excitement. Olga shut her eyes and thought about table decorations. Martina and she would learn to cut vegetables into flowers and which wine glasses were meant for which occasion. She would be Mrs Rana Hooda by then, and she could tell him to take his monsoon saga and go to hell.
Olga got up and went to the bathroom to wash her hands. She had to wash her hands at least twenty times a day. She was afraid of catching an infection in India if her hands became dirty. The skin on her fingers was peeling away but she kept scrubbing them with the strong carbolic soap she had brought with her from Moscow. She was very worried that her supply of soap would finish before her plans to become Mrs Rana Hooda materialized. Once she got this idiot to marry her, she could flee to England and she would not have to wash her hands any more. There were no lethal germs in clean and cool England. The only problem was Rana Hooda’s wife. His ugly witch of a wife who stood like a stone pillar in the way of Olga’s fabulous life.
* * *
Yuri wondered if he should tell the others about the photograph. But what if he had made a mistake? No, he would wait till he had seen Olga and checked the photograph again. He would definitely go to the villa tonight. Even if Rana was there, she could sneak him in.
‘Why did the boy point to you, Yuri?’ asked Prema, her eyes narrow with suspicion. ‘What was he trying to tell us, I wonder. Do you know that little boy?’
Cyrilo also looked at him but did not say anything. Sometime earlier, Deven had taken an autorickshaw and gone to the market. ‘I’m going to talk to some people there. It’s better I go alone. You people talk too much and disturb my thoughts. Hercule Poirot did not have to deal with a gaggle of confused minds,’ he had said and marched off.
‘We should work together and not be so secretive. We are a team,’ muttered Yuri, trying not to feel guilty about the photograph. He would tell them when he was really sure it was of the dead woman.
‘Look, let us not quarrel. Such a waste of time. So far we have not found out a single thing. I think we should go to the tea shop and ask around there. I have seen that people always talk a lot at tea shops.’ Cyrilo was keen to have a cup of tea since Deven had not let him finish his breakfast. What delicious cupcakes they had at that place. Each one with a different sugar candy on top, he thought with regret. He did not like all this rushing about. It was much better to settle down somewhere comfortable with a cup of tea or better still, a glass of chilled beer, rava-fried prawns and then talk to people. They would certainly find out a few interesting facts. Who was the dead woman? That was the main thing.
Prema suddenly gave him a nudge in the ribs and said, ‘Get out, slow coach. Always daydreaming. We are trying to catch a murderer to catch a murderer, not go on a holiday.’
Cyrilo slowly got out of the van, his knees creaking. He stood for a while to find his balance and Yuri came and stood by his side, rubbing his back. ‘Oh. This van creaking and whining always gives me a pain in my backside,’ he said loudly and winked at Cyrilo. They both kept a straight face as Prema glared at them. Her hearing aid was also whining loudly as if complaining to them.
The tea shop, noisy and filled with smoke, was crowded with men who had just come off the ferry. Baskets of vegetables and fish, bundles of newspaper, various odd bits of luggage and a huge pram filled with books stood blocking everyone’s path. They stepped over it and found an empty table near a window. Prema immediately picked up a newspaper and began wiping the table with it. ‘So dirty. I will not eat anything here.’
‘Go to a five-star hotel, then,’ said a voice next to them. They turned and found the owner of the tea shop standing at their table. He began to laugh. ‘Just joking, auntie.’ Cyrilo, Yuri and Prema stared at him. They could not believe their eyes. It was Tony. But he did not seem to recognize them. They all felt a bit hurt and looked away.
‘Hey, what is the matter? Don’t feel bad. I will get the table cleaned for you at once. Oi, come here you,’ he shouted and a small boy came running. ‘Go, clean, clean properly. Can’t you see these are high-class people?’ He gave the boy a nudge in the ribs and started laughing.
‘Not high-class. They are old folks from the Happy Home,’ muttered the boy, flicking a wet, stained cloth over the table as Prema wrinkled her nose.
‘How do you know, Mr Know-it-all?’ asked Tony, surprised.
‘They came for breakfast. Didn’t you see them, boss? Didn’t you see how much they ate?’ said the boy, grinning.
‘You were at the breakfast party?’
‘You have a very short memory, son. Must have it checked. Could be a disease, you know,’ said Cyrilo.
‘Early stages of dementia,’ said Prema, her eyes narrowing with malice.
Tony laughed. He slapped his plump hands on the table and laughed so loudly that everyone at the tea shop stopped talking and began laughing with him. ‘It has happened again. You think I’m ignoring you nice uncles and aunties? You think my memory has gone bad like old people who cannot remember if they ate breakfast or not, if they went to the toilet or not? Do you? Do you?’ He laughed. ‘I remember what you ate, what you were doing just one hour ago. I never forget a face though you three have forgotten mine.’
Cyrilo did not say anything. He was feeling embarrassed. Why was he going on and on? Why could he not just sit down at his counter and take their order?
Prema got up from the table and picked up her handbag. ‘I am going. This place is awful. How can we ever find out anything here? Look, they all seem to be asleep in their teacups. Look at him.’ She pointed to an old man who was dozing nearby. He was wearing a torn paper hat with ribbons, as if he had been to a birthday party. He, too, looked very familiar. Why was everyone looking so familiar in this dark, gloomy tea shop?
As he stared at the old man Cyrilo suddenly remembered where he had seen him. ‘He was at Tony’s breakfast party. I saw him throwing a bun at the dog,’ he told Yuri.
‘Yes, yes, we were all there. I am Tony’s twin brother, Roy. We both like confusing people, but this lady does not seem to like our little joke. Learn to laugh, auntie, otherwise life is a burden. Learn to enjoy what each day brings.’
‘There is no need to give me advice, young man. I am old enough to be your mother so keep your thoughts to yourself. If you are Tony’s twin brother, why did you not tell us before? Why play this silly game? Take my advice and grow up. Now bring us some tea in clean cups, please.’
Roy smiled and scratched his head. ‘Okay, mama. Right away.’
‘Do you know that little boy who works for Tony? His name is also Tony but he cannot speak. We wanted to talk to him.’
‘About the murde
r at the Happy Home?’ said a voice behind them. Cyrilo, Yuri and Prema quickly turned around.
The old man had woken up and was adjusting his paper hat and ribbons as if getting ready to party again. He looked at least ninety years old but his eyes were bright and alert and he was as slim as a young boy. Cyrilo wondered if he would look as fit if he lived to be ninety. He already had a paunch and a double chin. Maybe your looks improve as you age and by the time you are ninety, you look really good, he thought.
‘The woman was drugged, stabbed and then hung on the tree,’ the man said, turning towards Cyrilo. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if talking to a simple-minded person.
Roy pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘You really think she was drugged too? That’s something new. Who told you? I heard she was stabbed ten times. You saw the body?’ His eyes sparkled with curiosity.
‘We saw the body but no blood. Her clothes were clean,’ said Cyrilo.
The dead body loomed before his eyes. The clean white shirt, the baggy trousers and the expensive shoes. The red handkerchief around her neck. Why had she been dressed like a man? Who was she?
‘You want me to tell you, you keep your mouth shut and listen. Don’t jabber on. Learn some manners, young man. Lady, move your bag from the table.’ The old man wiped his chin with his hand.
Cyrilo noticed his nose was covered with sugar, as if he had dipped his head into the sugar bowl. For once, Prema did not rise to the challenge of being the rudest person in the room. She just stared at the old man, waiting to hear what he had to say. She has finally met her match. I should take this old fellow home. Maybe she can marry him and set up her own home and leave us in peace, thought Cyrilo.
‘Eric the undertaker is my younger brother’s son. He told me there was a wound on her neck. He told the fat policeman but he said, “Forget about it. She is dead; what difference does one small stab make when your neck is broken and you are dead. If you want me to check her blood pressure, her eyesight and her sugar too, I will do it.” A very stupid man. He must have paid a heavy bribe to get into the police. Robert, his constable, is much smarter. Anyway, why do you people want to know? Are you the dead woman’s relatives or just nosy people who like to poke their noses in other people’s business?’
Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged Page 6