by Leena Nandan
New Delhi, 6 February
He had not thought the body would be discovered so quickly. He had put his best man on the job, but apparently that guy was not good enough. The rage was building up and he tried to control it, breathing hard as if he had been running. That itself would be an object of attention and he could not at any cost afford to be noticed. Everyone around was busy at their computer terminals and he alone was listening to the news. Abruptly, he switched off the television, realising that his concentration on a seemingly innocuous crime report would arouse needless curiosity, were anyone to glance his way.
The real challenge loomed large. Had the trail been covered well? And where was the final report? Did he need to go to Dr Maken’s office to look for it? The questions buzzed around in his mind like a set of angry bees and without thinking he made a swatting motion—to find the others looking strangely at him. He tried to smile, but it felt more like a grimace. He had to leave while there was some semblance of control. So he pushed his chair away, made a vague gesture as if dying for coffee and then walked away with as fast a stride as would not give rise to more querying looks. She had been of no use to him whatsoever—dead, she posed a real threat. He could cheerfully have strangled her with his own hands. He found himself involuntarily flexing his fingers till they looked like talons and stopped himself with a herculean effort. He needed a breath of fresh air…
Inspector Krishan Khanna and Sub-Inspector (SI) Ajay Menon came by to Vikram’s office and this time there was a marked change in Khanna’s attitude. He was respectful and anxious to show his awareness of Vikram’s achievements, neither of which endeared him to the latter. They had drawn a chalk mark around the position of the body and it was pathetic to see how small Celia had been. Dust was scattered over the furniture—a euphemism for the misshapen filing cabinet and mismatched sofa set—to pick up fingerprints, and the young SI was assiduously going through the CDs and matching them with the inventory list. So far, he had not stumbled upon anything significant that was missing, and they had no clue as to the true motive of the assailants.
‘Sir, it certainly was a random act of violence; there was no brutality towards Celia other than strangling her,’ said SI Menon.
‘Go on,’ said Vikram encouragingly; he thought the young officer had promise.
Menon went on, ‘What is clear is the fact that he was a stranger to her. He had probably come with a plan to steal something, but murder was not pre-meditated. That she was strangled by the telephone means that the perpetrator had not come armed with a weapon.’
Vikram pondered over that without responding. Celia had been a simpleton, and to fool her would have been quite easy. The door had been locked when he had reached, which meant it had coolly been pulled to when the murderer left. There were no security cameras because he consistently downplayed the importance of the unit; with a twinge of guilt he wondered now whether his contemptuous attitude was partly to blame for the whole thing.
He said, ‘The lock was a basic one, easily picked by anyone with a mind to do it. So the man need not have been a professional thief.’
Inspector Khanna started feeling quite sore at being left out of this intellectual discussion. With a nasty look at his SI he said, ‘Young man, you have a long way to go. How have you assumed that it was a stranger? It could have been someone else in this building who knew Mr Batra was away and the girl was alone, so he attacked her. She must have resisted him so he ended up killing her and all that ransacking is just a cover-up to mislead us into thinking that the motive was theft. In fact,’ warming to his theme, he said, ‘I’m sure it was a sex crime. I’d put my money on the caretaker any day.’
‘You’ll lose it sir,’ said his subordinate emboldened by the close attention Vikram was paying. ‘There was just one intruder, and he definitely wasn’t the caretaker. The unknown footprint on the carpet here is of Bata size ten—whereas Sir here and the caretaker, both wear size seven.’
His boss was showing markedly less enthusiasm about the deductive powers of his junior and asked aggressively, ‘Well if you’re so smart, how come you haven’t found anything at all so far? You wasted all morning going through the CDs. Do they have video games or pornographic clips? Just joking, sir,’ he added hastily as Vikram gave him a cold look.
Luckily, there was still some enthusiasm for real policing left in this cynical world. Ajay Menon, undeterred by the exchange, continued on his fact-finding mission. Suddenly, with an exclamation, he reached down below the cabinet and pulled out a bit of paper that had been wedged between the cabinet and the wall. A chill of apprehension ran down Vikram’s spine as the paper was held up for them to see. There was no name written on it, just a number in his handwriting. Even without glancing at it, Vikram knew it only too well. It was Leila’s number.
Trained to show impassivity in the most trying circumstances, Vikram took the piece of paper without so much as a flicker of an eyelid and said, ‘Oh, so that’s where it had vanished, and I’ve been wondering why Celia kept insisting she had passed the scrap of paper to me. She never was systematic in maintaining phone records, God bless her soul. But I wish your guys had been more thorough in their initial search. They shouldn’t have missed anything.’
The inspector, as expected, was put on the defensive by the implication of slipshod investigation. In any case, this was not going to be his ticket to promotion because he was up against a blank wall. His initial suspicion of Vikram had been founded on the fact that the guy was a good-looking male and peculiar enough to have opted for cyber crime work—veritably the Siberia of policing—instead of a field assignment. Who knows when he might have decided out of sheer boredom to get some kicks by becoming involved with his secretary and then bumped her off when she started blackmailing him? He would have loved to interrogate Vikram—he rather fancied himself in the tough, nononsense role. His boss, the DSP, was in favour of summoning Vikram to the police station and giving him a hard time, but the taxi driver who had driven Vikram to and fro a meeting had given him a water-tight alibi. Mehra was beginning to nurse a grudge against the victim who seemed to have had as drab a life as the office she worked in. Her relatives were located in some far-flung rural hamlet and there were no family tensions, nor any jealous boyfriend to conveniently pin the rap on.
He took out his notebook and said importantly, ‘Not to worry, sir. I will personally be supervising this case. I’ve decided to get a warrant of arrest for the caretaker, as he must have made a sexual attempt on her. She resisted, so he killed her. I know how to get the truth out of these guys. I remember a rape case I was assigned to once. You can’t imagine what the guy had done. It was nothing but torture by a sadist. The girl’s body—’
‘Spare me the gory details,’ said Vikram curtly stemming the flow of eloquence.
The inspector, quite affronted, said stiffly, ‘Very well, sir,’ and turned to issue fresh instructions to his subordinate to get an arrest warrant out for the caretaker. There was complete disbelief on SI Menon’s face as he took a step forward and blurted, ‘But sir, the evidence does not point towards the caretaker. He is right-handed and the knot on the cord used to strangle her indicates a left-handed grip. Besides, he wheezes so hard the whole building hears him when climbing stairs and he was unwell that very day. I think the crime is related to some official work that Mr Vikram was doing. Can we have details of your last case, sir?’
Inspector Khanna felt the last warm and fond feelings for the SI ebbing rapidly. Not only was the fellow guilty of insubordination and impertinence, he seemed hell-bent on showing Khanna in a very poor light. ‘Don’t be overzealous and jump to conclusions,’ he hissed, ‘You’re off the case and on duty from tonight for night patrol.’
The young man’s face fell and Vikram, having noted his name, SI Ajay Menon from Vasant Vihar Police station, decided privately to put in a word—both against the pompous ass who called himself an inspector and in favour of Ajay Menon, who had proved to be smarter than Vikram had given h
im credit for. In fact, Ajay glanced back as he left, both at the paper and at Vikram who held it, and there was a frown on his face.
Vikram felt more at sea than ever. It was too much of a coincidence that the murder took place when he had gone to meet Leila. Was there a link to Dr Maken and also Vikram’s own, highly forgettable connection with the latter? After all, his meeting with Leila had taken place at the same time that Celia was killed. But then, that meeting took place out of the blue. Had someone been keeping an eye on his work? No one came into his office as a rule, but whoever had perpetrated this crime seemed to have known that he was away, or else they wouldn’t have taken a chance. But why had Celia come back after office hours and let herself in with the duplicate key when he wasn’t around? Or was it simply another coincidence and she stumbled over some petty thief who killed her in panic? The questions went round and round in his mind but no matter how hard he thought, the answers were nowhere to be found.
He went back to the inventory of CDs that the policeman had been studying. Maybe the whole thing was linked with the call centre. Or maybe it was connected with Leila, like he was—a connection which would not break no matter how hard he tried. God knows, he thought about her all the time. Her voice, her touch, the soft perfume she wore, the way she smiled, the way her eyes lit up when in an animated conversation…he slammed his hand on the table just to feel the pain, so it could drown out all other thoughts, all memories, and deaden him to real feeling.
Suddenly, he remembered that he had promised to meet Leila in the city at five, in Cool Cat, the coffee shop where they had always met for cappuccino. She had once drunk it from the straw given only for stirring the concoction and scalded her tongue. ‘Cool Cat’s got your tongue,’ he’d teased her. At the memory of it he laughed. And realised with a start that he had almost forgotten how to. His own voice sounded like that of a stranger. He would call Tushar and Benoy to the place as well, but a traitorous voice inside him whispered ‘after half an hour’. So he fixed up the rendezvous with them at the coffee shop at half past five and, locking the door to his office, drove away in his car.
THIRTEEN
6 February
SI Ajay Menon wasn’t a happy man. Increasingly, he was getting a feeling that things were snowballing out of control and no one was reading the signs. Take the sudden death of the scientist, Dr Maken, followed by the murder of Vikram’s secretary. Local police was convinced that though the scientist was part of the conspiracy to sell the call centre’s secrets to rival companies, his sudden death was simply due to a heart attack brought on by stress. But it was too glib an explanation. The unexplained disappearance of the scientist’s report was something no one wanted to dwell upon. Then Celia Martin, the personal secretary to Vikram, the man investigating a case in the same call centre, was bumped off and everyone was bent upon treating it as a crime of passion despite no evidence of this kind. The poor victim had no close friends or family and had led a lonely life, so it suited everyone to brush her murder under the carpet by pinning it on a hapless soul who had no alibi—but no motive either.
In the normal scheme of things, it could have been treated as two unrelated incidents. But the personal secretary’s murder had thrown a very interesting light on the matter in the form of Vikram who, unknown to everyone, seemed to be connected in some way with both.
Ajay did not really suspect Vikram. But his explanation of the scrap of paper with the number had been too quick. Not for nothing had Ajay acquired the nickname ‘Bulldog’. He had glanced at the paper, memorised the number and even though technically off the case because of his pompous boss, had checked it out through a contact in the telephone department. It was the scientist Dr Maken’s daughter’s number. And the redoubtable Inspector Khanna was clueless about this strange connection between Vikram, Dr Maken and Celia.
This made Ajay go off on a tangential thought. When it was a known fact that Inspector Khanna didn’t exactly set the house on fire with the sheer force of his intellect, why had he been assigned the case by ACP Naveen Kumar? One thing you could not accuse Khanna of, was brilliance. His sole claim to fame had been cracking a series of car thefts where he painstakingly bumbled his way around, following false leads till finally he caught the culprits when they crashed into a police barrier. He had a monumental ego and normally could be flattered into agreeing to just anything.
In fact, Ajay had tried to be very humble and contrite and mollify him just to stay on the case, his first after completing training, but the Inspector craftily put him on night duty in the name of an anti-narcotics crackdown. Having always been hot-headed, Ajay proceeded then to freely express his views on Inspector Khanna and his incompetence; he knew that now he had an enemy who made up in meanness for what he lacked in intellect. He managed to put his foot into it every time, thought Ajay, shaking his head with annoyance at himself.
Just then, the walkie-talkie emitted a squawk and he hastily responded. All those connected with the cyber crimes case were to report to headquarters ASAP. As expected, the radio duty were unaware that he had been summarily taken off the case. Should he cheekily call his boss to ask whether the command held good for him? He dismissed the thought even before it had taken shape. Far better to try slinking back into the case, and get something, anything, solid to work on instead of wasting time on scouting around for the junkies and prostitutes which the dark underbelly of the city revealed in the dead of night. It would not do to attract attention, so he decided to meekly take the extreme right chair in the second last row—they always missed that one—and he would keep his head lowered, lest his boss the duffer suddenly develop a hawk eye.
He need not have worried. Inspector Khanna was feeling far too important to waste time looking around for small fry. He cleared his throat, shuffled his notes, then pulled out his glasses and began reading aloud. ‘I received the information about the sad demise of Celia Martin at half past six, put on my cap and got the keys to the patrol jeep…’
There were sniggers all around and Sub-Inspector Avinash sitting next to Ajay muttered, ‘The good inspector immediately called up Radhika the Iron Lady to ask what vegetables he should buy on his way back,’ a reference to Khanna’s wife, a harridan of the first order, of whom he was mortally afraid.
Noronha added, ‘He omitted to mention that he then rushed to the loo.’
Subdued laughter now; the Inspector was getting red-faced and ACP Naveen Kumar was drumming his fingers on the table, always a dangerous sign. His voice showing tremors of nervousness, Inspector Khanna went on to apprise everyone of how the jeep did not start in the first instance because though he’d complained to Admin several times, they’d not sent it to the garage to check out the carburetor, but he still managed to reach the place in record time. The explosion, long awaited, now came.
‘For heaven’s sake, Khanna,’ said Naveen Kumar, bringing his fist down on the table, ‘we don’t want to know the tragedies of your life. What is your surmise about the murder—who did it and why?’
‘Sir, the caretaker of the building takes a walk every evening, but he didn’t go that day and he has no alibi for the time of the crime. My junior officer, Menon, who was part of the investigating team, also agrees that there was no forced entry. He should have submitted his report but he always derelicts duty. My conclusion is that it was a sex crime. She had just come back from the parlour and had a lot of make-up on, so he attacked her. I have a lot of experience of sex crimes and…’
All intentions of keeping a low profile went out the door as Ajay Menon shoved his chair back and stood up. ‘I object, sir, to both the statement about me and the assumption about the motive. I think there was a break-in and the theft has to do with the call centre 24x365 which Mr Vikram was investigating in a cyber theft matter and…’
‘What are you doing here? You’re no longer handling the case,’ snapped Khanna. ‘This is flagrant disobedience, sir, you cannot permit it. You cannot just let him sit here in this meeting.’
Ajay was delighted. Challenging the pugnacious DSP was like showing a red rag to a bull, and Ajay would no doubt be put back on the case by Khanna’s outraged superior.
‘Yes, I agree with Inspector Khanna. This has nothing to do with the cyber crime case. And as for you, Menon—you need to learn discipline—leave the room at once. A repeat of this and you will be out of the force for good. Khanna, get an arrest warrant for the caretaker and since it is a sensitive issue, insist that we get a remand,’ said Naveen Kumar and left.
Ajay was stunned. It was surreal—the complete mishandling of a case and the blatant attempt to kill all serious investigation. Like Hamlet, he felt that something was rotten—in fact he could smell the stink a mile away. First, assigning a prize ass like Khanna to the case and then letting him run amok. Ironically, everyone was patting Khanna on the back for cracking the case in record time. No one near Ajay wanted to catch his eye, neither Noronha of the ready wit nor Prabhu of daredevil fame. The establishment had conveyed its strong disapproval and a safe distance was the best policy for his colleagues. But he would not be discouraged—no sir. Not for nothing was he called bull-headed, pig-headed and worse. He resolved to follow up the lead of the telephone number on his own.
Umadhar, the steno of the police station, came up. He had a greying and frayed look about him and fretted perpetually. While not a bad sort, he had no endearing qualities either. Coupled with the fact that Inspector Khanna always chose him to deliver all the unpalatable news that he never had the guts to convey personally, it was small wonder that the steno was in no danger of winning a popularity poll. Except if the sole other contestant was the inspector himself, thought Ajay sourly. Umadhar reached out and took his walkie-talkie.
‘What the…’ began Ajay, to be forestalled immediately.
‘Sorry sir, you’re posted at headquarters now for updating pension records. I have to pass the equipment to your substitute.’ He took the set and scuttled away like a crab.