Out of Sight

by Paul Gitsham

  Vasava sniffed and wiped her nose with a tissue handed to her by her solicitor. ‘The thing is, Anish was respectful. He didn’t “parade around town”. He just quietly got on with his life. It wasn’t that he was ashamed or anything, he just didn’t want the hassle from Dad and his brothers.’

  ‘Do you think he hoped to reconcile with your father one day?’ asked Warren.

  ‘I think so. Despite everything, family was important to him.’

  ‘You showed me a copy of the will,’ said Warren, moving the topic back to the matter in hand. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘I guess it sort of made sense that Dad would be angry that Anish was trying to get around those hateful clauses … and I thought that maybe he was angry enough to kill him.’

  ‘And now? Do you still think that he was angry enough to kill him?’ asked Warren.

  Vasava was quiet for so long, Warren considered repeating the question, before she finally replied, her voice like that of a small child.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Her answer hung in the air.

  ‘How did your father know about Anish’s plans to get married?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, if he knew that Anish was trying to circumvent those clauses, he must have known that Anish was planning on getting married and having a baby,’ said Sutton. ‘How did he know?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You said that Anish and your father hadn’t spoken to each other since he moved out, and Anish hadn’t formally announced his engagement yet, so how did your father know of his plans? Did you tell him?’ asked Sutton, staring hard at her.

  Warren opened the file in front of him and removed a collection of stapled sheets.

  ‘This is the copy of the will that you brought to me. You helpfully highlighted the clauses that your father added the week after Anish moved out.’

  Vasava nodded.

  ‘Remind me what these new clauses stipulate?’

  Vasava cleared her throat again. ‘That in order to inherit his share of the business, Anish needed to be married to a woman and to have had a child with her.’

  ‘Which presumably meant that at the time that your father changed the will, Anish believed that he had, to all intents and purposes, been disinherited?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did Anish tell you that he had met a woman willing to marry him?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘Early summer, I suppose. June maybe? I can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘And you’ve never met this woman?’ asked Sutton. ‘Do you know her name?’

  ‘Latika, that’s all I know,’ said Vasava. ‘Why? Do you think she’s involved in his death?’

  ‘Do you know when they actually first made contact?’ asked Warren, ignoring the question.

  ‘No, it was sometime earlier in the year.’

  ‘What did you and Anish speak about when he phoned you on May 2nd?’ asked Sutton.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vasava. ‘It could have been anything.’

  ‘That wasn’t when he told you about this Latika?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  Sutton opened the folder and removed a folded print-out. ‘Well it’s strange, because on that day, about an hour or so after you finished your call with Anish, you friended Latika on Facebook; it must have taken you a while to figure out who she was on Anish’s friends list, but I suppose the date they became friends helped. Of course she didn’t know that you were Anish’s sister. He never told her your married name and Reva is a common enough first name, but you came up as mutual acquaintances, so she accepted. We didn’t make the connection immediately, because like a lot of teachers she doesn’t use her real name on social media. Neither for that matter do you.

  Vasava looked away.

  ‘The two of you got on pretty well,’ continued Sutton. ‘Well enough that you started following her on Twitter and Instagram. Why would you do that, Reva? Keeping an eye on the future sister-in-law? Perhaps you were hoping to pick up a bit of dirt that you could use against her? Maybe keep her in line later?’

  ‘No comment,’ said Vasava eventually.

  ‘Let’s go back to the changes in the will,’ said Warren. ‘Even if Anish was going to get married to Latika, they still thought they needed to have a child.’ He pulled another collection of stapled sheets out of the folder. ‘Is that why you decided not to tell Anish that your father changed his will again on February 15th this year? To remove the stipulation that you had to have children to inherit?’

  ‘I didn’t …’ Tears pooled in her eyes.

  ‘Don’t try and claim you didn’t know,’ snapped Sutton. ‘Your father says he changed it because you begged him to.’ His voice softened. ‘You and your husband can’t have children, can you?’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ she said, with a sob.

  Warren hardened his heart, pushing away the empathy he felt for someone in a situation so similar to his own. ‘He agreed to remove the need for you to have children, but you still have to be married.’

  ‘Which means that you can’t divorce your husband, even though you want to. It would bring shame on the family, and we all know how your father feels about that. I bet you must really hate him sometimes,’ said Sutton.

  ‘You see, this is what I think happened here,’ said Warren, taking over again. He could see Vasava wilting under the dual onslaught. ‘I think that you used your knowledge of Anish’s plans with Latika to keep up the pressure on him to continue his little business with Jaidev. Obviously, when you finally persuaded your father to alter his will so that you and your husband didn’t need to have children, you kept that to yourself. Clearly if Anish were to have children, he would need medical assistance, especially if they didn’t want to risk passing on the faulty gene that he inherited from his mother. Genetic testing and IVF is expensive if it’s not offered on the NHS, and you wanted Anish to continue feeling under financial pressure.’

  Vasava’s lip started to tremble, but she said nothing.

  ‘Now, here’s where it gets interesting,’ said Warren. ‘There was no need for you to show that outdated copy of the will to us. You could just as easily have brought in the latest version; it still says that Anish has to get married. But I think you realised that if we tracked down Latika, we would soon realise that she and Anish were only aware of the earlier version of the will and we might start asking awkward questions about why you hadn’t told him that things had changed.’

  Vasava remained silent, the tears starting to return.

  ‘I think there is also another reason,’ said Warren. ‘You hate your father. Whether you truly believed that he killed Anish or not probably doesn’t matter, you wanted to cause him pain. But you also loved your brother and felt guilty about the way that you had used him and the way he had been treated by the rest of your family, but especially your father. By pointing a finger at him, even if he wasn’t convicted, you knew his reputation would be ruined. His friends and business colleagues, whose respect he so craved, would see all his dirty laundry – at least as he sees it – hung out in public. Anish is dead, so it can’t hurt him anymore, so why not punish your father?’

  ‘No comment,’ whispered Vasava.

  Undeterred, Warren continued. ‘And I think there’s yet another reason. You hoped that directing our attention towards your father might steer us away from your brothers. Do you think your brothers killed Anish or arranged to have him killed?’ he asked.

  ‘No! They wouldn’t,’ said Vasava. ‘I’ve told you where they were that night.’

  ‘Yes, you have. You’ve also given us a compelling reason why they might have wanted to have him killed on their behalf,’ said Sutton.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

  Warren ignored her and reopened the folder. ‘Forgive the crudeness of a spreadsheet, but you only gave us your brothers’ mobile phone numbers a couple of hours ago.’ He spun the sheet of paper around so she could see i
t clearly.

  ‘This is location data for Jaidev’s burner phone and Anish’s phone. As you can see, they converge at this spot on the A506 for seven minutes at 19:55 on Saturday November the 7th of last year. I’d say that’s plenty of time to transfer two large boxes of cigarettes from the back of Jaidev’s Range Rover to Anish’s Mercedes, and hand over five hundred pounds in cash, wouldn’t you?’

  Vasava looked over at her solicitor. She’d already confirmed that was how the arrangement had worked, but Warren could see the frantic calculations going on behind her eyes. She had to wonder what else Warren was planning on hitting her with, and how Warren knew how much money had switched hands.

  Eventually she nodded.

  ‘The same thing happens again, on January 30th this year,’ said Warren. ‘Was it the same arrangement as before? Two boxes, in exchange for five hundred quid?’

  Vasava agreed.

  ‘April 24th. Same again?’

  ‘About then.’

  ‘So roughly every two or three months, five hundred pounds each time?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Vasava’s tone was resigned.

  ‘So, when did it change?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said. Warren could see that she did.

  ‘You should know that a few minutes ago, I called Latika. She was well aware of the money that Jaidev was handing over to Anish every few months and wanted no part of it. She’s something of a high-flyer and ambitious. She wants to be a head teacher by forty. The last thing she needed is a husband with a conviction for handling illegally imported cigarettes, no matter how peripheral his role was.

  ‘Was that why Anish phoned Jaidev on July 10th, an hour after he had promised Latika that he would stop? To tell him that the deal was off? Slight mistake that, calling Jaidev’s personal mobile phone, not his burner. Latika says he agreed to keep on looking after the cigarettes that he already had, but he didn’t want any more.’

  ‘No comment,’ said Vasava.

  ‘You see,’ said Sutton, ‘that could be seen by some as justification for killing someone. How much profit did Jaidev make from each of those cartons Anish was storing? He was happy to hand over five hundred quid for your brother to just stick them in the bottom of his wardrobe, so I imagine he was doing OK out of the deal.’

  ‘No comment,’ said Vasava finally.

  ‘But of course, that wasn’t the end of it, was it?’ said Warren. ‘By my sums, you must have pretty much used up the cigarettes that you had by the end of July. Which left Jaidev with a dilemma. Did he stop the scam or find somewhere else to store them?

  He leaned back in his chair. ‘Stopping the scam wasn’t really an option, was it? Quite aside from the money, he’d have to think about the logistics of hiding the sudden change in the books. Your father might have left the day-to-day running of the shops to your brothers, and he put Manoj in charge of the accounts, but he still kept an eye on things. When Jaidev first came up with this plan, I imagine he ran down the orders from the wholesalers over time, claiming that people were smoking less, and substituting his own packs for the ones that you were no longer buying legitimately. It’s probably easy enough to hide those off-the-book sales on your old manual tills.

  ‘Eventually it must have reached the point where you had too many contraband cigarettes to safely store in the shop. Was that when Jaidev decided to enlist Anish?’

  Vasava ignored him.

  ‘Anyway, the problem is if you stop selling the illegal cigarettes, how do you suddenly ramp the legitimate sales back up again without it being noticed? Customers will start to complain pretty quickly if their favourite brands keep on selling out, but your dad would be suspicious if orders to the wholesaler suddenly doubled.’

  ‘So that means that if Anish stopped storing them, you’d need to find somewhere else to keep all those cigarettes,’ said Sutton. ‘Jaidev hasn’t got enough room to swing a cat, and Manoj is too scared of the missus; hell of a problem. So, what happened? Did Jaidev offer Anish more money?’

  ‘No comment.’

  It was clear that Vasava had decided to stop digging her hole any deeper.

  ‘Did you know that Anish and Latika were planning on announcing their engagement at Christmas? After all, he proposed in September. You and he had a special relationship,’ said Warren. ‘He felt he could tell you things that he couldn’t tell anyone else.’

  The flash of pain and guilt in her eyes told Warren he’d hit a nerve.

  ‘Did Anish want more money?’ asked Sutton. ‘I hate to stereotype, but Indian weddings have a reputation for being no expenses spared. I know that’s traditionally paid for by the parents, but with the image that Anish cultivated there would be an expectation that the engagement ring would be something special; it’s not like he could ask his dad for the money. Did you offer him more cash to continue storing those cigarettes behind his fiancée’s back?’

  ‘No comment,’ whispered Vasava.

  ‘Which leads us back to a motive for Anish’s killing,’ said Warren.

  ‘If Jaidev refused to give Anish more money, then that doesn’t leave Anish with too many options,’ said Sutton. ‘Except one.’

  ‘Did Anish threaten to tell your father about the illegal cigarettes unless he got a better cut?’ asked Warren.

  Vasava looked away. Her lip trembled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘But they didn’t kill him. I know they didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’ asked Sutton. ‘You can’t know what your brothers were up to twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘I just do,’ she said.

  ‘A little earlier, you said that neither you nor your brothers had any link to the Easy Break Hotel,’ Warren pushed a photograph across the table. ‘This is an image from a traffic camera showing your brother Jaidev’s Range Rover in the vicinity of the hotel; a journey he makes once a month. Why would he be in that area?’

  Vasava’s eyes narrowed. ‘No comment.’

  ‘Well, here’s the thing Reva. We know that the catering company that you run – Suniti’s Sundries – supplies the Easy Break Hotel. We also know that when Jaidev does his deliveries, he doesn’t use their loading bay, or come through reception. Which suggests that he knows all about the CCTV blind-spot on the fire exit. The same fire exit that Anish’s body was removed the night that he was murdered. So you can see how that looks to us.’

  ‘No comment,’ she whispered once more.

  Both officers could see in her eyes how close she was to breaking. Sutton looked over at Warren, who nodded. It was time to ask the question that both men had been pondering ever since her opening statement, hours earlier.

  ‘Why did you say “They’re trying to protect me. And because of that, they’re going to go to prison. I can’t let that happen”?’ asked Sutton.

  Vasava’s hands tightened.

  ‘Does it have anything to do with the night of Sunday the 14th of August,’ asked Warren. ‘The night that Jaidev turned up at Anish’s flat to try and persuade him to continue storing cigarettes?’ He pushed over another sheet of mobile phone location data, a third number highlighted. ‘The night that you accompanied Jaidev?’

  Seconds ticked by. Eventually Vasava let out a breath. ‘Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? They are protecting me because I’m their little sister.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they do not want me to go to prison.’

  ‘And why would they think you are going to go to prison?’ asked Warren, although he already knew the reason why.

  Beside her, her solicitor stirred, but Vasava ignored her.

  ‘Because the whole bloody idea to make money from selling those damned cigarettes was mine,’ she snorted. ‘My brothers are many things, but businessmen they are not. I found the suppliers and I worked out how to adjust the sales figures to keep Dad from noticing what was going on. Jaidev nearly brought the whole thing crashing down when he screwed up and got raided by Trading Standards but whose idea do you think it was
for us to blame it on our dopey cousin?

  ‘And you’re right, Jaidev does deliver our food to the Easy Break Hotel. He uses the side door, because we have a deal with the chef. He forges an invoice for thirty per cent more than I report, and we split the difference,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly worth it.’

  ‘And what about the cigarettes? Is Leon Grime your supplier?’

  She frowned. ‘No, I don’t know that name.’

  ‘He works at the Easy Break Hotel. Were you picking up your cigarettes from him?’

  ‘No, it’s completely separate. Jaidev met a man at the nightclub.’

  Now there was bitterness in her voice. ‘Those brothers of mine are bloody idiots. They’re so arrogant. They’re convinced that they can’t possibly go to prison for Anish’s killing, so they’re saying nothing. All my life, they’ve protected me, their little sister. And I love them for it, I really do. But they should have told the truth. I’m a big girl; I knew what I was getting into.’ She looked Warren and Sutton squarely in the eyes, one at a time, before turning to her solicitor, her tone almost apologetic. ‘I know that I’m in trouble,’ her voice trembled. ‘And even though you’ll do your best for me, I’m probably going to end up in court – or worse. But I can’t let Manoj and Jaidev risk prison for Anish’s murder to protect me.

  ‘I persuaded Anish to continue storing the cigarettes for us, and yes I offered him more money – from my cut of the profits, before you ask, seeing as it was my idea to get him involved anyway.’ She looked away briefly, shame creeping into her voice. ‘And yes, I did threaten to tell Latika’s family about the true reasons for their relationship.’

  She took a shuddering breath. ‘So as far as Manoj and Jaidev were concerned, I’d sorted the problem. They had no reason to kill him. You’ve said it yourself that losing Anish has caused us more headaches. Why would they have murdered him?’

  ‘And your father?’ prompted Sutton.

  ‘Dad was angry at Anish after he moved out, but again he’d had his revenge, effectively cutting Anish out of his will. And if Anish decided to get married and have a kid to make himself eligible for his inheritance, then so much the better; nobody need know that he was gay and we could all go back to ignoring the elephant in the room.’