Midnight at Malabar House (Inspector Wadia series)

by Khan, Vaseem

  A postscript was scrawled at the bottom of the letter.

  P.S. I have arranged a meeting for you with K.P. Tilak, the Deputy Home Minister. He is presently in the city celebrating the new year. Tilak will be able to outline for you details of Sir James’s work in India. Please report to South Court, Malabar Hill at thirteen hundred hours. A word of warning. Tilak is one of those rare politicos who respects punctuality.

  She checked her watch. Almost nine. Plenty of time to get to the office, report in, and then head over to Malabar Hill.

  She suspected it was going to be a long day.

  Chapter 4

  The station house was a short drive from the bookshop. She took the jeep, navigating the morning traffic – cycle rickshaws weaving in between double-decker buses and rattling trams, hordes of suicidal handcartwallahs vying with the glut of post-Partition automobiles, everywhere the bustle of a city that had rolled up its sleeves, intent on meeting the future head-on.

  The war years had made Bombay leaner, she reflected, but now, following independence, migrants were flooding in, forcing the city into a conflict of identity. Always the most cosmopolitan metropolis in the country, it had yet to shed the image of itself that it held most dear. The city of jazz and good times. Of nightclubs and the hedonistic imperialism of the Raj. Thousands of foreigners continued to live the life they had become accustomed to, even as the foundations of that life crumbled around them. Social unrest, protests, a tumultuous push towards Nehru’s socialist vision. The ones who thrived now were the ones who had adapted to the new order. For the most part opportunists, though there were genuine sympathisers too. Americans and Europeans, and the occasional Brit willing to stake their claim in the new reality. The Bombay she had known, a city that mixed Portuguese roots with British architecture and native culture, was changing. She wasn’t yet sure that the changes were to her liking.

  She parked on the main road, before walking along the bustling street towards Malabar House, craning her neck as she approached her home of the past months.

  The building was a four-storey Edwardian affair, neoclassical in look and ambition. Built by Scotsman George Wittet – the genius behind the Gateway of India monument – the front façade was a sea of red Malad stone, broken up by a series of horizontal grooves and casement windows. Balustraded balconies fronted some of the windows, and here and there the ugly rear-ends of air conditioners overhung the street. A succession of spouted gargoyles looked down on to passing traffic from the edge of the roof; where water had poured from their mouths, the façade’s stonework was discoloured an unsightly yellow. On the ground floor, an arcaded front entrance, emblazoned with the words MALABAR HOUSE, was guarded by a uniformed doorman.

  The building housed the only police station in the Malabar Hill area, an affluent enclave overlooking the Back Bay. The region had become home to many Brits when the old Bombay Fort had been demolished a couple of decades earlier. Now it was an acropolis of wealth and power, its inhabitants largely insulated from the whorl of history unfolding around them.

  She walked in through the entrance, the doorman salaaming her smartly.

  In the lobby – a vision of white marble, terrazzo, lacquered wood and endlessly spinning ceiling fans – a trio of dogs raised their heads, then went back to reclining in the shadows. The dogs were strays who had wandered in one day and made themselves at home. Now, they had become Malabar House’s unofficial mascots.

  Six months after moving in, it continued to astonish Persis how easily they had fallen into the rhythms of the place. It was as if they were a spoke inserted into a moving wheel or a gasket into a running engine. The building was located on the relatively sedate John Adams Street, owned by, and headquarters to, one of the country’s great houses of commerce. Indeed, it was only thanks to the generosity of that particular corporation’s patron that they had been given the building’s basement as a temporary HQ for their new crime branch unit, set up to handle some of the more sensitive cases overflowing from the state’s overworked and under-resourced criminal investigation department, the much maligned CID.

  At least that was the story they had been told.

  They all knew, of course, that the real reason they had been sent there was because no one knew where else to put them. They were a ‘menagerie of misfits’, to use the phrase one newspaper had coined. The unwanted and the undesirables. If such a label bothered her, she tried not to show it. She had always known that life as the force’s first female police detective would be a trial of prejudice.

  She recalled her initial interview at the police recruitment office in Fort. The astonished clerk had at first laughed, and then when he understood that she was serious had led her to a small office. Here she had waited for hours until a senior officer had arrived. As she had explained herself, he had listened intently, then lit a pipe. ‘You’re not the first woman to have made her way here. Most vanish once they understand what they are up against. What makes you think you would be suitable for such a role?’

  She had listed for him her capabilities, her sterling education, her physical strengths, her eagerness to pursue justice. He had smiled at her, not unkindly.

  ‘Persis, I don’t doubt your enthusiasm. But the fact is that there has never been a female officer in the Indian Police Service. How do you think you will fare in such an environment?’

  She had set her jaw defiantly. ‘Wouldn’t a better question be how will the Indian Police Service fare with me?’

  He had stared at her then burst into wild laughter.

  Three months later she had taken the IPS entrance exams, qualifying in the top one percentile of the country. The physical too she had passed with flying colours – she had spent years in a martial arts class run by a friend of her father’s; she was a swimmer, thinking nothing of hurling herself into a hundred laps each morning at the Breach Candy Club pool near her home.

  The two years of training had been less of an ordeal than it might have been for another in her shoes. Years of self-reliance and a stubbornness bordering on mania had prepared her well. She had, for the most part, ignored the open hostility.

  She made her way down a marbled staircase to the basement, and into the offices of the police unit, where she was pulled up short by the sight of her colleagues already at their desks. She checked her watch.

  Impossible.

  ‘What are you all doing here?’ It was unusual for her not to be the first in, and even more unusual to find them so alert this early in the day.

  ‘Perhaps you can tell us, ma’am,’ said Sub-Inspector Karim Haq, peering up from his desk. A plate of samosas sat under his nose. Haq’s breakfast – a daily affair – went some way to explaining his generous waistline, currently straining the buttons of his khaki shirt. ‘The SP called us in. He said for you to go straight in.’

  Persis wound her way between the desks and knocked on a door at the very rear of the room.

  ‘Come!’

  She entered, closing the door behind her.

  Superintendent of Police Roshan Seth looked up from the manila folder open on the desk before him and stared at her, glassy-eyed.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said, and then, as an afterthought, ‘Happy New Year to you.’

  Seth winced. ‘Not so loud, for God’s sake.’ He sat up straight, picked up a glass of water, dropped a tablet into it, then drained the fizzing mixture with an expression of grim distaste.

  Persis said nothing. It wasn’t the first time she had arrived at Malabar House to find her commanding officer the worse for wear. She stood there, rigid-backed, radiating disapproval.

  Roshan Seth was an enigma to her. In the time she had served under him, she had come to appreciate his finer qualities. It wasn’t so long ago that Seth’s star had shone brightly within the Brihanmumbai Police Service, a man being groomed for the top. And then independence had happened, and Seth – a tear-gas-and-lathi-charge officer, a man who had toed the British line, believing his duty to his uniform to supersede
his duty to the cause of his countrymen – had fallen from favour. Not quite labelled a collaborator, he had, nevertheless, been deemed worthy of censure by the mandarins who had taken over from the British. The slide had begun, ending in the transfer to Malabar House. A man who had once commanded the very best was left with those no one else wished to work with. The drinking had soon taken over.

  ‘So,’ he began finally, ‘you appear to have landed us in the dung-heap.’

  She stiffened. ‘I’m not certain that I follow.’

  ‘Sir James Herriot. I received a call this morning. At my home. ADC Amit Shukla wished to congratulate me on my initiative in taking up the investigation into Sir James’s murder. Wanted to know when he might expect me to put the matter to bed. A very sensitive situation, as he was at pains to point out. A political landmine. I could still hear his laughter when I put down the phone.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He stared at her. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’ The fingers of his right hand drummed the desk. ‘Persis, this isn’t just another murder. A case like this generates newsprint. Headlines. One wrong move could end our careers, such as they are.’

  ‘I’m confident we can solve this, sir.’

  ‘Are you?’ He looked at her sternly. ‘Have you any idea why they called us? Allow me to explain. Whatever it was that James Herriot was doing for our government, it was a matter of some secrecy. I have made a number of calls this morning – I still have a few friends left – and no one seems to know what he was up to. Do you understand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It means that he was involved in something unsavoury, something few people knew about or wish to talk about. Your friend Lal could have called anyone. He could have woken up the commissioner himself and had a crack team sent over from Patnagar’s unit.’ Ravi Patnagar. Head of the state CID, a former friend of Seth’s, now turned bitter enemy. ‘But he did not. He called us. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’

  ‘What should I have done, sir? Told him that our dance card was full and directed him elsewhere?’

  Seth pursed his lips. ‘Do you remember the day Gandhi was shot? I was with a Muslim colleague when we heard the news. He practically swooned into my arms. Because, of course, he, like the rest of us, thought that the assassin had to be a Muslim. Can you imagine the terror that would have unleashed? It was a relief to us all when word began to spread that the killer was, in fact, a Hindu. But then, all the Hindus began to panic that it was one of their own. Their caste, their tribe, their community. We are a country of a million factions each more than ready to point the finger of blame elsewhere.’ He sighed. ‘These are turbulent times, Persis. Uncertainty makes people anxious. No one wants to be left holding the baby. And you have just brought the baby home with you.’

  Persis stiffened. ‘All I ask is that I be allowed to do what I have been trained for.’

  ‘You’re an ambitious woman. But ambition has been known to sink whole nations.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Is ambition a virtue in a man and a vice in a woman?’

  Seth’s eyes softened. ‘I did not say that. I have three daughters. India is changing, Persis, but it is not yet ready to be told that it is wrong. At least not by a woman.’

  Persis did not trust herself to speak.

  The silence stretched and then Seth rose to his feet.

  ‘Call in the rest of them. We may as well let them know what they’re in for.’

  One by one the team filed in. Persis’s fellow inspector, Hemant Oberoi; the trio of sub-inspectors, George Fernandes, Pradeep Birla and Karim Haq; and the two constables, Suresh Subramanium and Rabindranath Ray. They entered in silence, but she could sense their curiosity and trepidation.

  She waited for Seth to say something, but he moved to one side. ‘You have the floor, Inspector.’

  She took a deep breath and quickly summarised the case for them.

  When she had finished, they turned as one to look at Seth. A flash of annoyance burned through her.

  ‘This is a political case,’ remarked Fernandes, frowning. ‘High profile. Why have they given it to us?’

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ replied Seth woodenly.

  ‘Nothing good will come of it,’ muttered Birla darkly. ‘Mark my words.’

  ‘Why did they take his trousers?’ asked Haq, ever to the point.

  No further inspiration was forthcoming on the matter of the missing trousers. Oberoi, who had not yet spoken, turned to the SP. ‘She shouldn’t be heading this investigation.’

  Persis narrowed her eyes.

  Hemant Oberoi represented everything that was wrong with the force. The very worst aspects of male arrogance, ignorance and privilege distilled into the body of a single man. He hailed from a wealthy Brahmin family, the scion of a former royal, according to one rumour. He certainly acted like it, swanning about the place as if he were some exiled Balkan aristocrat merely passing time on an island prison before being returned to his rightful throne. Tall and blessed with the looks of a matinee idol – complete with a head of lacquered hair and a rakish moustache – he had washed up at Malabar House thanks to an indiscretion, stepping out with the sister of a high-ranking civil servant, a liaison that had ended badly. A career destined for the top – nepotism, after all, favoured the sons of the rich and powerful – had been unceremoniously curtailed, leaving Oberoi in a fury of seething resentment.

  ‘She took the call,’ said Seth. ‘It’s her case.’

  ‘She is standing right here,’ said Persis coldly. ‘Anything you have to say you can say to me.’

  Oberoi turned to her. ‘You don’t deserve this case.’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘I’ve been in the service longer than you.’

  ‘Just because a cow stands in a field all day doesn’t make it a philosopher.’

  Haq sniggered. Oberoi’s face bulged with fury; a smile stretched the corners of Seth’s mouth.

  ‘What about our other cases?’ asked Fernandes, his expression troubled.

  ‘What cases?’ said Seth, raising an eyebrow. There was an embarrassed shuffling. The fact was that Malabar House was, quite possibly, the least utilised of the city’s police units. And the cases that did come their way were hardly the kind to make headlines.

  Persis knew that George Fernandes was a good policeman. He had only ended up at Malabar House because of the sort of tragic error that might have happened to any police officer.

  George Fernandes had shot the wrong man.

  A raid on a smuggler’s den had led to a chase. Fernandes had pursued his quarry down the back alleys of Colaba, eventually cornering and shooting the man. It only later became clear that he had shot dead an innocent bystander who had seen Fernandes hurtling down the road at him waving a revolver and had simply taken off. In the confusion, Fernandes had lost sight of the man he had been chasing and continued to run down the civilian. Smuggler and civilian had both been wearing red shirts that day, one of those fateful cosmic coincidences that no one could legislate for.

  ‘What motive could anyone have had to murder Herriot?’ It was Birla who had spoken.

  Of all her colleagues, Pradeep Birla was the one Persis found hardest to fathom. A quiet man, Birla was a deeply religious individual who began each morning before the makeshift temple he had set up at the rear of their basement premises. The scent of sandalwood and incense would choke out the office as Birla joined hands respectfully before the various idols crammed into his diorama. The smoke and Birla’s voice raised in prayer would inevitably rouse Karim Haq to irritation. In some ways, the two men mirrored the resentments that continued to seethe below the surface of the new republic. Hindu and Muslim were ostensibly equals in India, but the truth was that the bitterness instigated by Partition still echoed in the hearts of millions across the country.

  Birla’s comment seemed to release the tension, and one by one they began to apply themselves to the task at hand.

  ‘Did he have any enemies?
’ asked Fernandes.

  ‘None that anyone was willing to tell me about,’ replied Persis.

  ‘It’s really quite simple,’ remarked Oberoi. He gave her a haughty look. Persis dug her nails into her palms. ‘Sir James is an Englishman. There are still plenty of agitators who believe that every last Britisher should have been cast out in 1947. Many of them wouldn’t think twice about slipping a knife into a man like Herriot. And who’s to say they’re wrong?’

  ‘Your family did well enough under them,’ muttered Haq.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ bristled Oberoi.

  The two men glared at each other, but Haq said no more. There was little love lost between the pair. Then again, Oberoi had a habit of rubbing most of his colleagues up the wrong way.

  Persis wondered if the man had a point. Could someone bearing a lingering grudge against the British have picked Herriot as a target?

  Following the briefing, she divided up the task of calling on those who had been in attendance at Sir James’s ball but had left before she could interview them. She gave each man a set of names and addresses and a list of questions she wished them to ask. She stressed the importance of persistence. ‘These are wealthy and powerful people. Don’t let them brush you aside.’

  In truth, she hated the idea of handing over this aspect of the investigation. But there were simply too many names and not enough time to chase them all over the city. There was no guarantee they would all remain in Bombay for long. Many of Herriot’s friends belonged to that elite social circle with interests and homes around the country. The type who summered in Shimla and shopped in Paris while multitudes starved on their doorsteps.

  Oberoi was, as she had expected, less than enthusiastic. ‘If you think I’m going to run around the city as your personal errand boy, you are mistaken.’

  She stared at him stonily. It was pointless asking Seth to intervene. Oberoi was a law unto himself; it had always been the slimmest of probabilities that he would agree to work under her direction.