by Vish Dhamija
'I have a feeling something else is at work here.'
'Like what?'
Ash went quiet again. Rita waited him out.
'Something doesn't add up. Someone wants to know enough about Honey Singh, but we don't know who it is and why he is interested in him. And for the love of God, I can't think why the killer would want to know that. If the killer wanted to know more about Honey Singh he would have studied the subject prior to the robbery, not after it. You with me?'
That is why she admired Ash; he made her think, he made her organise her thoughts better, word them, think the reverse and the obverse.
Ash nodded. 'As a matter of fact, the killer needn't be in the picture here. Think about it. The killer — for the time being, at least — has got away with the diamonds and the homicide. Why should he care if we arrest or hang Honey Singh? Him tracking Honey Singh might only lead us back to him if he makes some mistake. So the question is why would someone keep tabs on Honey Singh at all?'
'Someone else who thinks Honey Singh is the killer. Someone who has a vested interest in the diamonds that were stolen—'
'Hold on a minute,' Ash interjected. 'The surveillance was set up after the murder, and as you rightly pointed out in your summary, most probably as a consequence of the murder.'
'But how does the guy who hired Handlebar know that the guy who murdered the diamond merchant in Belgium looks like Honey Singh?'
'That is what you need to find out. I have a feeling that's the answer to most, if not, all of your questions. Want my hunch?'
'Go on, tell me.'
'The killer or killers knew about the existence of Honey Singh before the caper. Honey Singh wasn't discovered after the crime. Have you met Mr Honey Singh yet?'
'Not yet, but very soon. I wanted to know everything about him and around him before approaching him. We didn't want him to get alerted before we completed our searches. If he knew we are looking into him we might get a tainted picture.'
'Makes sense.'
They talked till they ran out of possibilities, and also became mindful they were attempting to twist facts to fit their theories when some facts never fitted existing theories. Moreover they had incredibly few facts still.
'Could I have some coffee please?' Rita requested.
'At this hour? How would you sleep after caffeine?'
Coffee was her magic potion. Just how the same coffee could wake her up in the morning and help her relax enough to sleep was something she wondered at times too. But hey! If it worked, it worked.
'Don't worry about me.'
They switched off the lights at two in the morning. The silver moonlight flushed the room. The sky was clear; the stars were visible through the glass. Smiling, twinkling, happy.
'You know why stars shine?'
Rita turned and gave him a befuddled look: what the F... is wrong with you? 'So are you just going to tell me some inutile facts at this hour of the day or are you going to make love to me?'
Ash looked dumbfounded.
'Why, what's wrong if I want you to? Hurts your male ego too much?'
'Nah—'
'Then take me.'
***
'That was great,' Ash said later.
'Thanks Freud.'
'Eh…?'
'I love teasing you. It was great. Good night.' She put her head in the crook of his arm and closed her eyes.
Rita drove home early in the morning. She didn't wish to turn up to work in the same clothes as the day before. Not that someone would ask — maybe the men wouldn't even notice — but why tease the tongues?
She realised she walked sprightly when she got to Sheesh Mahal. She was happy. The body clock was ticking, and she was always engaged in high-pressure cases like the one she had now. Criminal cases were hardly ever calm and relaxing. The subconscious was stressed, but today it seemed that some part of the private puzzle had been sorted. The mind was at ease.
She decided to do yoga. She was blessed with a great metabolism, but being slim did not necessarily mean being fit. She exercised for agility, for strength, for flexibility, for stamina, for body synergy. Later she showered, put on new work clothes — shirt and jeans, S&W, thin jacket to cover the gun — and left for work early. The team had been working around the clock, and she knew she would have loads to read. All that the team had ferreted out would have been summarised for her.
***
Irrespective of whatever anyone has ever told you, via various channels of media — television, movies or detective books — investigation is not an exact science. What works for one case does not necessarily work for another. Of course, all ground rules need to be followed: dig this, dig up that, but there are no sure shot victories. The only method to increase the chances of success is to be thorough, to explore all possible avenues, spare no one, trust nothing till you've checked and cleared it. Rita and her team were doing exactly that.
The records showed that one Mr Sishir Singh had cased Ron Jogani from Mumbai to Brussels. However, his image had not been captured by any of the hundred plus security cameras at the airport. He was either in disguise or somehow keenly avoided every camera.
Out of the other 197 passengers that boarded Jet Airways 9W 228 from Mumbai to Brussels at 0210 hours on the 2nd of April, no one was even tenuously associated with the diamond trade. 144 of them were Indians or of Indian origin. The ruled out the fifty-three foreign nationals, as it was out of the Indian Police's jurisdiction — even if they requested Sexy to intervene — to scrutinise them. Nene and team eliminated women and families travelling with children. Not that it didn't have any precedent, but sheer common sense made them assume that people travelling to commit armed burglary did not travel with children. Disregarding them and the transiting passengers — those had onward flight connections or took trains to other European locations the total count of people in the latent suspect pool was reduced to seventy-three. Fifty-nine men, including Sishir Singh, and fourteen women. Eleven were further jettisoned from the list, as they weren't Mumbai residents. It wasn't that only Mumbai denizens looted or murdered, but it was a process of elimination, and including someone from Valsad was regarded ludicrous, at least in the first round. Nene's team visited each one of them, spoke to them but it was unavailing.
The police carried out a photo line-up. As some were NRIs who never returned, all the 110 people who were in India were independently shown a set of five photographs each — one of them being the honourable Mr Sishir Singh's — and probed if they could recognise anyone as a co-passenger on their flight to Brussels. Some recognised Sishir Singh, but then some others recognised other people from the same photo line-up when some other photographs were of police personnel. Even the two people who they knew from airline records had sat on 29B and 29C — Sishir Singh occupied the window seat: 29A — failed to identify him
A similar exercise was performed on passengers who flew to Brussels from Mumbai three consecutive days before the flight that carried Ron Jogani. Nothing conclusive could be derived. It was physically impossible to check on every flight that left for Belgium from various other Indian airports. It was an exercise to check enough, if you were lucky something might stick. There is nothing like too much information in an investigation.
The flight attendants, too, were scrutinised.
The report was condensed and provided to DCP Rita Ferreira who smiled at how certain axioms were proved true every single time. Witness memories were acknowledged to be pathetic around the world. Most people couldn't have recognised Sishir Singh in a photo line-up two days after they had flown with him, forget identifying him after three months. Rita was still unwavering that there was indisputably a second person, and probably a third, near or perhaps even at the scene of the crime. No doubt about that.
***
Oxymoron (noun): a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. Painfully delightful, chaotically structured, are just as realistic examples as dissimilarly similar.
&nb
sp; In the digging up of past burglaries, Rita and her team found a dissimilarly similar robbery at a jeweller in Mumbai only a couple of years back.
Dissimilar, because the modus operandi was starkly different.
Similar, as it was done at a jeweller where at least three crores worth of diamonds — and only diamonds — were robbed by someone not yet nabbed by the police, since even that burglary had been carried out with equal caution.
The evening before the robbery was discovered, it appeared that a lone man — it was all conjectural until someone was actually arrested, and convicted, and the case closed — had come to the jewellery store at Mumbai's affluent Pedder Road, impersonating a customer. Witness reports described him as someone who looked from a moneyed background, given his attire and mannerisms. Tall, pleasant looking, fair complexion, expensive clothes had all added to deliver that impression to the unsuspecting staff at that point. He was believed to be looking for a diamond ring to propose to his fiancée, and as such looked at quite a lot of expensive rings. He seemed acquainted with diamonds; he knew that seeing a diamond already set in a ring jaundiced its colour, and hence asked to see unset diamonds before he placed an order. He had finally selected an expensive diamond — with over 2.8 carat, a princess cut solitaire — then decided on the design of the ring from a catalogue, paid a five percent deposit in cash before his bladder made him enquire about customer toilets in the jewellery store. As he had completed all the sale formalities, the salesgirl who had attended him had moved on to assisting another customer and did not notice him leave. In fact, no one saw him leave the premises because, as the investigators later found out, he never did.
Given the plush nature of the clientele the customer toilets weren't simple urinals: the flooring was Italian marble, the taps were gold-plated, the towels were Egyptian cotton, and there was even a shower cubicle. Who has a shower at a jewellery store? However, over the shower enclosure was a false ceiling created to plumb the geyser and keep it out of sight. The expensively dressed customer — after placing the order for the engagement ring — walked into the luxurious toilet, apparently somehow climbed into the space above the shower and parked himself out of sight for the night. When the store closed for business that evening, the watchman had taken his usual round. Once convinced everybody had left, he switched on the night-lights, set the alarm and, lo and behold, the alarm's junction box was situated inside the toilet. He locked the store, handed the keys to the manager and took position as the night guard in a little hutch besides the main entrance outside the store, with another guy.
At some point in the night — again all conjecture till proven without reasonable doubt — the unseen customer climbed down, disalarmed the outlet and set about looting all the diamonds he could by breaking into the display cabinets. As the investigators by and by discovered, the customer-turned-filcher had attempted tampering with the big safe — its lock and arm were found damaged — but in some way fathomed that the safe was separately alarmed; he abandoned it at the last minute. A total of INR three crores of diamonds were reported missing, which, assuming that most jewellers never declared all their inventory and certainly not the correct value, meant, they were, at least, four or five or six crore's worth. The guy had then sliced the iron bars, using some kind of a mini hacksaw, in the toilet window and slipped away.
The robbery was discovered the minute the store reopened the next morning what with the broken glass cabinets and some merchandise trashed on the floor.
The offender was aware the premises were covered with security cameras and he had remembered to take the videotape along with him, ergo, no recording of him was ever found.
Sounded similar.
Sounded dissimilar.
The local police suspected insider foul play. It was deemed impossible for someone to just walk in from the street, know where to hide inside the shop at closing time, then switch the alarm off in the premises and escape with the loot all by himself. There had to be some assistance provided from someone. That or someone had visited the store on more than a few occasions to recce the place and plan. As the recording cameras recycled every twenty-four hours, there was no way that could be conclusively ruled out either way. Nonetheless, the police grilled all employees and what was common amongst witness statements was patchy at best.
Someone definitely assisted him; at least, in the escape in the night. Some vehicle?
Everyone agreed that the guy who came to buy the diamond for the engagement ring was tall. Tall by Indian standards for a male was anyone over the height of five-ten.
Most agreed the man's age was somewhere in the vicinity of thirty.
There was disagreement about what he wore — his shirt ranged from white to cream to faded pink. Most agreed on blue denim jeans. No one remembered the shoes.
Almost all remembered the Rolex on his left wrist. The guy had been sharp enough to be aware all sales staff at a jeweller would recognise that watchmaker. But the police couldn't trust if anyone would have made out if it was genuine or fake. Probably fake to dupe people into thinking they were dealing with someone loaded.
Interestingly, the cash bill was in the name of his so-called fiancée who he had ordered the ring for: Chandni. Thankfully, no one had contacted Mr Boney Kapoor to ask if he had gone shopping for his gorgeous wife, Sridevi. Maybe because he wasn't in his late twenties or maybe since the Bollywood pair had already tied the knot by then.
After months of going around in circles, absolving everyone who worked in the store, the police came up with, well, nothing.
Similar.
Which meant the culprit or culprits were still at large, which meant the case was still open, which meant it could be the same group, bearing in mind their penchant for diamonds. And their kinship with someone in the local diamond trade to palm off their loot.
Similar.
The jewellery store caper wasn't an armed robbery.
Dissimilar.
But.
Perhaps that was only because it wasn't required?
Indeed, nothing as abominable as murder occurred, but there was no reason to believe that the burglar was unarmed. No one intruded in his game plan, ergo he didn't have to use any weapon. Had Ron Jogani not intruded at the wrong moment, perhaps the robbery at the hotel at Brussels might have also featured as an unarmed robbery?
Similar.
No trace evidence, no biological evidence, no prints whatever.
Similar.
***
A burglary report only shines — slightly ironical to use shine, but — in the annals of the police when either the robbery is of a considerable amount (not too many people would delve too much into a bicycle robbery) or when the burglar has been successful — again, the paradox of using successful — in getting away with the loot. And in those archives of police files Rita's team uncovered another burglary.
The Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, most noted for Taj Mahal, had a court jeweller of Gujrati descent: Shantidas Jhaveri. Shantidas Jhaveri exclusively catered to the royal line-up of queens the emperor had, but generations down the line and anglicised over the years, Zaveri Brothers was still one of the biggest names in diamonds in the country. One of their oldest and most iconic stores was located in Connaught Place, New Delhi, and had suffered the same fate as the Pedder Road jewellery store before it. The robbery in New Delhi was almost ten months after the Mumbai jeweller, which meant — conjecturally again, as no one was brought to book yet — someone had taken the time off after the Mumbai larceny to let the proverbial dust settle and utilised that time thoroughly to plan the next one.
This heist was, again, dissimilarly similar to the one in Mumbai.
The lavish showroom had a spherical atrium that had rooms all around it on the ground floor and an elevator and staircase leading to the mezzanine floor. The mezzanine had a circular walkway overlooking the atrium that was double height with a stained glass dome that was apparently from another era, and provided the coloured gleam into the already class
y showroom in the day. The high net customers who could afford to set foot in this palace of jewels were received at the reception in the atrium, then ushered into one of the requisite rooms after consultation. Some of the rooms on the upper deck were offices and vaults, and others — and one should award high marks to the creative genius here — were named as gold-room, silver-room, ruby-room, emerald-room, diamond room, you have-too-much-cash-dumbo room.
A year ago, when the showroom opened for business on Saturday morning, someone had harvested the place. The diamond-room had been broken into, and several crores of diamonds had been filched. Now, unless one was to believe that the ghost of Marilyn Monroe was passing by and picked up her best friends, it was hard to argue that the gang had targeted diamonds and diamonds alone.
Sounded similar?
It didn't require Einstein to decipher why diamonds were being targeted: for one, diamonds yielded best in size to value ratio; a handful of diamonds could translate into crores, while gold or other jewellery, albeit precious, would be much too much weight to transport. Furthermore, it more than appeared that the gang who carried out the capers had identified how and where to dispose them of clandestinely.
Similar.
The doors were protected, the windows airtight, the walls intact. With no visible sign of routine break-in or forced entry, what predominantly baffled the investigators, for the best part of four days, was how the person or persons got into the prestigious store in the first place. How, then, did someone penetrate into the heart of the store and carry out the robbery? Answers never travel in a straight line from west to east or vice versa, do they? This particular puzzle got its manna from north. The intruder had come from the top. When they investigated closely, they apprehended that the stained glass done had been removed and the intruder glided south from the ceiling on a suspended rope. The whole dome, which was set into the concrete of the roof, had been dug out signifying it wasn't done in a day. Days of planning and effort must have gone into it. The police found a large metal hook fixed into the concrete nearby, which was apparently used to support the rope with a man's weight. Pure geometry at work. A pulley and cables were still there — wiped of all prints, naturally — that told the police a motor had been plugged in for the purpose and later taken away. An absolute jhakaas style, not some amateur stuff: strictly Bollywood. And like courteous citizens, the outlaws had, after exiting, put the dome back with strong glue so as to avoid it from displacement or damage by severe elements of nature. How considerate.