by Vaseem Khan
Fernandes’s tone suggested that he found that highly unlikely.
Persis absorbed the information, as the big sub-inspector waited. ‘What next?’ he finally prompted her.
It suddenly dawned on her that something was missing from his demeanour. The anger. At the same instant, she realised that her own anger had been relegated to the wings while the problem of uncovering Francine Kramer’s murder had taken centre stage.
The undeniable fact was that she and Fernandes had worked well together.
The thought brought a colour to her cheeks. The missing anger returned with a vengeance.
‘Can’t you think for yourself?’ she snapped. ‘You wanted to lead this investigation, didn’t you?’
He stiffened, his expression momentarily startled, before flattening to a grim stare. He nodded, then turned and walked away.
Chapter 33
‘We must stop meeting like this, Inspector. People will talk.’
Raj Bhoomi grinned at her from behind the autopsy table, his hands buried inside the guts of another of his guests. The joke flopped on to the tiled floor, where it crawled away to curl up and die in a corner.
She watched him pull out the man’s intestines, then stride purposefully to a weighing scale on the counter. He spoke to her over his shoulder. ‘Give me thirty minutes. I’m running a little late. It wouldn’t be right to stop midway.’
She waited impatiently, watching the pathologist at work, her mind flickering over the Healy case, the Kramer case, and the increasing complications of her own life, like a radio hunting across the bands. Every few minutes, Zubin Dalal’s face flashed into her thoughts, rattling her heart around inside her chest.
What had he been doing at the bookstore last night?
The answer was obvious. He’d been following her around. The thought brought another swell of anger. She cracked her knuckles savagely, causing Bhoomi to look up from his work with a quizzical expression.
She ignored him.
Why? What could Zubin possibly want to talk to her about? Why send her flowers? And those lines from Byron’s poem . . . Her brain rebelled at the possibilities. The very thought of it made her want to take out her revolver, hunt him down, and shoot him in the kneecaps. It would be no less than he deserved.
He’d abandoned her. Having first ensured that she’d fallen so deeply in love with him that, in some ways, she was still falling. She likened it to diving from a cliff, into waters of unknown depth. She had no idea where the bottom was, but she had run out of breath a long time ago.
Bhoomi vanished through a door, then quickly returned, his round face abloom. The man was in excellent spirits. She noted that both his moustache and his hair had been recently trimmed. A change of pomade too, to something floral, and not entirely unpleasant, though it was hard to tell above the harsh odour of formaldehyde that permeated the autopsy suite. She chalked these improvements down to the young woman he was wooing. Things must be going well.
She couldn’t help the sudden resentment that clogged her chest.
Even a man who spent his waking hours elbows-deep inside corpses appeared to have a better grasp of the complex logic of romance than her.
It was a damning indictment.
‘I hear that you solved the curious riddle we discovered inked on our last customer,’ Bhoomi began. ‘Well done.’
He meant Healy. ‘The trail’s run cold,’ she said flatly.
‘I’m sure you’ll pick it up again. Archie says you’re like a terrier when you get your teeth into something.’
Her ears felt hot. She supposed it was a compliment, though hardly the most flattering thing to be called by a man.
She waited while Bhoomi’s assistant wheeled in the corpse of James Ingram, and transferred it to the autopsy table, having first removed the previous incumbent. The steel table was barely large enough to accommodate the tall Englishman.
‘I suppose we’d better get to it.’
She looked on as he searched Ingram’s clothing.
In the inner pocket of his trousers, he found a piece of paper with an address written on it in Hindi, and in Marathi, the state language. She’d seen foreigners not long in the city carry this sort of thing around. Something they could show to taxi drivers.
The address was in Opera House.
She assumed it was where Ingram had been staying.
The paper had been wrapped around a small key – a house key, by the looks of it.
She allowed Bhoomi to log the key, then pocketed it and scribbled down the address in her own notebook.
Next, the pathologist removed the man’s clothing, bagged it, and then proceeded to examine the body.
The bullet hole that had killed him made a prominent wound in his chest.
She realised that the thought of his violent end did not bother her as much as she had supposed. Seth had made a point of the fact that she’d already killed two men during her brief time on the force. Should she feel remorse for killing because she was a woman? Was that what was expected of her? A certain feminine sensitivity?
Well, to hell with that.
Bhoomi peeled back a bandage on Ingram’s right shoulder to reveal a recent stab wound.
Her mind flashed back to the man who’d attacked her outside the observatory. If she’d needed confirmation that it had been Ingram, she now had it.
‘Hello!’ remarked Bhoomi. ‘Inspector, come and look at this.’
She walked forward and loomed over his shoulder. He was examining the inside of Ingram’s left arm.
Some twenty centimetres above the crook of the elbow was a small tattoo, less than a centimetre in width, in black ink.
��
It seemed insignificant, but something about the mark had excited the pathologist. He stared at it, then stepped backwards, passing a sleeve over his brow.
‘Does this mean something to you?’ she asked.
‘I – I’m not sure. I could be mistaken.’ His sudden agitation perplexed her. ‘I’ve never come across it before except in the literature.’
‘Literature?’
‘Medical journals.’
She looked back at the enigmatic tattoo, then turned to Bhoomi. ‘Please explain.’
Chapter 34
Frank Lindley was not in his office. The departmental receptionist informed her that he was out lecturing – one of the duties he’d agreed to in return for a berth at the university.
The woman offered to provide directions, but Persis already knew the way.
Minutes later, she arrived at the Premchand Roychand lecture hall, slipping in the back and taking a wooden seat next to a semi-comatose male student, half asleep on his forearms.
Lindley was on stage, speaking at a lectern, a blackboard behind him. ‘In many places, empire ended with a bang, the colonialists expelled, their collaborators rounded up and stood against a wall. In India, independence has become something of a political minefield. The promise of future economic cooperation holds Britain and her former colony together, even as the tides of history attempt to push them apart. There are even some who view Britain’s time here as irrelevant. In the vast patchwork quilt of India’s past, the British era represents but a single thread.’
She found his sentiment unexpectedly candid.
Lindley, to her surprise, was an engaging and forceful speaker.
He reminded her of an English lecturer during her own time here, studying political discourse, one of only three female students in her class. That was during the war, of course, when Britain was promising Indians the sun and the moon and everything in between if they would only throw in their lot with the Allies. The rhetoric employed by her lecturer had exhibited a particularly bellicose flavour; he could as well have been a recruiting agent for the war effort.
When the lecture ended, Lindley found himself mobbed by students.
She was astonished. Contrary to all that was holy, the man was popular.
In the end, she was forced to wade in and drag
him away from his adoring public.
Back in his office, she showed him her notebook – where she’d made a crude effort at reproducing the tattoo found on Ingram – and quickly explained the situation.
He sat back in his chair, and looked at her with a flat expression. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’
‘You recognise this?’
He blinked. ‘Inspector, are you sure you found this on a dead Englishman?’
‘Yes. His name was James Ingram. He was a writer.’
‘And you’ve verified his identity?’
She hesitated. ‘No. I mean, until he attacked me, I had no reason to doubt what he’d told me.’
He pulled open a drawer, took out a fresh pack of cigarettes, opened it with clumsy fingers, and lit one.
‘That tattoo is written in Fraktur, a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet. Official Nazi documents and letters employed the font. Or they did until around 1941, when it was replaced by the more modern Antiqua script because of a perceived belief that Fraktur embodied Jewish influences.’ He puffed on his cigarette. ‘The tattoo on your man Ingram says AB. It’s a blood group type. Tell me, how much do you know of the Nazi SS?’
‘Only what I’ve read.’
‘The SS, the Schutzstaffel, was the paramilitary organisation that Hitler used to enforce the edicts of his regime, particularly his racial policy. The SS was responsible for the murder of millions of Jews and non-Jews, particularly through its administration of the concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler, one of the chief architects of that murderous campaign, was the Reichsführer-SS for sixteen years, setting up and overseeing the death camps. The Gestapo was a subdivision of the SS, tasked with enforcing Nazi ideology. The military branch of the SS was called the Waffen-SS, primarily combat units. It was common for Waffen-SS officers to have a blood group tattoo – a Blutgruppentätowierung – on the inside of their left arms. The purpose of the tattoo was to identify a soldier’s blood type in case he was injured and rendered unconscious in battle and a blood transfusion was needed. The tattoo consisted of blood type letters A, B, AB, or O.’
She stared at him. ‘Are you trying to tell me that James Ingram was a member of the Waffen-SS?’
‘I haven’t seen the tattoo, but if it’s genuine, then yes. I can’t think of another explanation. Those tattoos are a death warrant; no one would willingly put one on their arm. After the war, the Allies have been desperately pursuing Waffen-SS members due to the high volume of war crimes committed by their units. The blood group tattoo has been a principal means of identification. Many Waffen-SS members have been successfully prosecuted for war crimes; a good few have been executed.’
‘But if the tattoo is so dangerous, why would Ingram keep it? Why not get rid of it?’
‘For many, it’s a badge of pride. The only link they have to their shattered Nazi dream.’ He waved his cigarette in the air. ‘Besides, it’s not that easy to get rid of. Surgery, self-inflicted burns. Some have even tried shooting it off, if you can believe that. But the Allies cottoned on to that sort of thing early on. Now, it’s the first thing they look for. For a Waffen-SS member, it’s just as dangerous trying to disguise it as it is to keep it, so why bother?’
She was stunned. It beggared belief that Ingram could be a Nazi.
‘Let me guess. This Ingram spoke impeccable English?’ Lindley scraped his tongue over his teeth. ‘Following the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans were prohibited from establishing an intelligence organisation, but they did it anyway. The Abwehr became the primary Nazi espionage outfit. For most of its existence, the Abwehr was a bitter rival to the SS, but, having displeased Hitler when the tide began to turn against the Nazis, it was absorbed into the SS in early 1944. Many members of the Waffen-SS ended up serving in the Abwehr. Some of them were trained to infiltrate Britain, especially those who might have spent time in England before the war, or those with excellent language skills. They were provided with plausible cover stories.’
‘But why would Ingram be out here?’ The question was directed more at herself than Lindley, but the Englishman replied anyway. ‘It is unusual. Most Nazis have been on the run since the end of the war. Many of them fled to South America and the Middle East, enabled by underground escape networks. The Americans code-named one of these back in 1946, calling it Odessa. Whether or not Odessa really exists is irrelevant. The fact is that many Nazis continue to elude the authorities. We know for certain that hundreds ended up in Argentina, with support from Juan Perón, and, allegedly, the Vatican. Another escape organisation we know about is Die Spinne – the Spider – run by the man who acted as the last chief of the Abwehr, one of Hitler’s top commandos, a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer by the name of Otto Skorzeny.
‘Ingram, if he was Waffen-SS, was probably in touch with members of Die Spinne. Though why they’d send him out to India is beyond me. It’s not the safest place to lie low for a Nazi in hiding.’ The cigarette had burned down to his fingers, and he stubbed it out hurriedly on the desk. ‘Look, let me help. I have contacts in the British war crimes investigation team. They’re plugged into other Allied and Israeli organisations hunting Nazis. Let me see if I can find any information on your man. All I need is a photograph.’
The offer surprised her. ‘How much?’
It was his turn to look surprised. ‘No charge, Inspector. Not for this.’
As she left the university, Persis was reminded of a favourite saying of her father’s: never judge a book by its cover.
Chapter 35
The address that Raj Bhoomi had discovered in James Ingram’s pocket was just over two miles from the university, barely a mile north of the Bombay Asiatic Society.
She drove past the St George Hospital on Frere Road, and then the remnants of Fort George, a dark, brooding presence facing the sea. The vertical slits in the fort’s laterite façade always reminded her of a succession of eyes, peering malevolently out at passers-by.
Ingram lived in a small apartment above a tyre repair shop, accessed by an exterior staircase at the rear of the premises. She wondered why he’d picked such a seemingly low-rent place. It was certainly out of the way, but a tall blond foreigner would have stuck out here like a sore thumb.
The key Bhoomi had found on Ingram’s corpse fitted the lock on the door at the top of the iron staircase. She slipped out a pair of gloves from her pocket, then stepped into the flat and took stock of her surroundings.
The place was even smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside. Surely, a man as big as Ingram – if that was, indeed, his name – would have felt confined here?
The place was bare. A sofa, a small table in the kitchen area, a sepia-toned picture of Jesus on the wall, a sideboard. And that was it.
No TV, no gramophone, no radio.
She walked into the bedroom.
The bed was precisely made, as if by a practised hand. In the wardrobe, she found shirts, trousers, three pairs of shoes. A single double-breasted suit. A linen jacket.
She searched the clothing. Nothing in any of the pockets. But, as her hand brushed over the fabric of the linen jacket, she felt . . . something.
She took it out from the wardrobe and laid it down on the bed, then palpated the area just above the lashed hem of the right-side front.
Something was in there. Her fingers traced the outline of the hidden object –rectangular, slim – a piece of card, perhaps?
She took out her pocketknife, opened the jacket, and made an incision on the inner lining, before slashing downwards. Setting down the knife, she poked her fingers inside the slit and extracted the object, then held it up to the light.
A photograph.
Two men, casually dressed, standing in a small boat. In the backdrop, a lake, and a distant shore, dense with tall trees. One of the men was Ingram, smiling handsomely at the camera with his hands on his hips. He wore a pastel pink half-sleeved sports shirt and white golfing trousers. The man beside him was a few inches shorter, but heavier in build, with
jet-black hair and a moustache, caught in profile, seemingly addressing Ingram. He wore a plaid sports shirt above green waders. He was holding up a fish by a hook speared through its mouth; she had no idea what type of fish.
There was something ageless about the scene, two men, clearly friends, engaged in the most innocent of pastimes, a male bonding ritual as old as civilisation itself.
And yet . . . here was the man who had attacked her, not once, but twice. Possibly a Nazi, a member of Hitler’s murderous Waffen-SS, a man on the run.
She touched Ingram’s face.
Who were you?
Why were you here?
She turned the photograph over. There was a date on the reverse: August 1948. But no clue as to who the other man might be.
Her eyes lingered on the bucolic scene. Ingram had felt the need to sew this photograph into the lining of his jacket, presumably to keep it from being discovered by others. The implication was that there was something about it that he didn’t want anyone to see, particularly the authorities.
The second man.
Whoever he was, he was important to Ingram, important enough to hold on to a photograph he felt too nervous to display openly.
Her mind made the leap.
Another member of the Waffen-SS.
Lindley had spoken about an escape network, Die Spinne, helping spirit away former Nazis to safe haven. Might Ingram’s friend be another to have benefited from the network?
Two Nazis, on the run together.
And then one of them ends up in Bombay, and somehow becomes involved with John Healy and the theft of a priceless manuscript.
But why would a former Nazi care about stealing Dante’s The Divine Comedy? It was valuable, certainly, but why risk exposure? Why risk capture, trial, and, possibly, execution?