Inspector Bose brought out a colour photo of the corpse with a smile reminiscent of a man on a pavement who had flashed her by parting his lungi a year ago.
Ira averted her eyes immediately by the same instinct.
‘You must look, madam.’
She forced herself to look again. She spoke up after a pause.
‘No, not at all. Perhaps if there was a normal picture of him, like, when he was alive. It’s so hard to tell with a face that horrible.’
‘And where will we find a normal photo if we don’t know who he is?’
‘Oh…okay, I forgot he didn’t have any ID on him.’
‘Hmmm… started collecting facts, madam? I must warn you not to publish this case. It will hamper the investigation.’ The man smiled, ostensibly to take the sting out of his words. Ira felt a little sick.
‘I’m not a reporter, so you need not worry about me writing it.’ But someone else at my paper is sure to. I just hope they keep my name out of it. That was something more to worry about later. A thought struck her. ‘Did he not even have a phone in his pocket then?’
The woman barked. ‘Miss Dutta, please just answer the questions we’re asking.’
‘He had nothing in his pockets, madam. Not a single thing.’
Inspector Lodh threw her colleague a look that should have cut him to shreds. She was trying to reign back her chatty partner, but with little success. There would be words once they left the flat, Ira suspected.
‘When will the results from the fingerprint analysis come back? What about other fingerprints on and around the body?’ Ira went on, finally feeling like she was back in her element.
The man smiled easily, enjoying the interaction, and shrugged. ‘See, madam, we have our process; such things take time. However,’ his face darkened momentarily, ‘your guards, probably bribed by some resident or out of their own interests of self-preservation, have tampered with the crime scene. Removed the body from the lift and wiped the floor clean―unheard of! Their explanation is that they were told the residents would be inconvenienced if the lift was out of commission, and that they were ordered to do so. A likely story! It is a punishable offence and we will see to it we find out why they did it.’
Both inspectors glared at Ira in accusation. Ira stared back.
Inspector Lodh stood up abruptly. ‘If you have something more helpful, call us on this number.’ Ira took the proffered card and rose as they let themselves out.
******
If the dead could talk: The dead man’s account of the day of the murder.
(Wednesday, 5th September 2014)
I stopped in the lee of a tree and looked at the ugly gate of Panorama Apartments. I had come by earlier today but it had been crawling with chattering women at the time. It seemed to have miraculously cleared now, as luck would have it. The last time I’d been here was probably a full decade ago, when the building was still spanking new. It had taken the passage of time badly. In the afternoon sun, I could clearly see how rain-stained it was, and how scraggly and dusty the shrubbery that lined the approach looked. It reflected the dusty souls that resided within, no doubt.
I ducked behind the tree when one of the two security guards slumped outside the gate on folding chairs looked in my direction.
My policy with everything was to leave as few tracks as possible. I was not about to sign in as a guest and have them call and forewarn the person I was here to visit. I would have to use some ingenuity.
I waited until a large group of people, obviously workmen, arrived. The guards immediately started checking their bags, for what? Weapons of mass destruction? From what I remembered, the residents were the dullest on earth, they would all die of boredom in their beds at ninety-nine―no one cared enough to murder them, that was for sure. It was a relief to relocate, if you ask me.
I sauntered toward the group, looking busily at my phone. I channelled my inner ‘Panorama Apartments resident and bored with it’ look and walked past them, tensing a bit when I heard a guard shout. But it was only at one of the workmen who hadn’t opened his bag yet.
Thank God for them. There is nothing better than a few of these people to take the focus off somebody like me―better dressed, well fed, and carrying years of privilege lightly upon me. Albeit up to no good.
I walked a little brisker now that I was past the gate. I had a packed day ahead.
*****
Part 2
5
Friday, 7th September 2014
Mrs Ghoshal felt unsettled. Routines should never be disrupted. In routine lay peace and good health. Her routine should be: wake up at 6, bathe, complete ablutions, make breakfast, and eat it with her son. Settle down with her sewing until it was time for her TV programmes. Instead, since yesterday, everything had been turned downside up. People coming and going, running up and down stairs, shouting, doors slamming. The maids had complained of lots of people with cameras camped outside the gates, making it difficult for them to pass; and now the police were in the living room, asking her son questions!
It wasn’t that she minded passing up the rerun of her favourite soap, Amrita-r Shongshaar. She watched both evening and morning, so she wouldn’t actually miss anything.
The police looked quite typically police. Both of them were large, even the woman, such as she was, and dressed in unnecessarily tight white uniforms. Mrs Ghoshal knew she might have enjoyed the drama of the situation in a different scenario, but as it was, she just wished they would get out of her house.
The policeman had asked her to leave the room, since she might get ‘frightened’.
She made her exit readily enough, though not from fear. Annoyed, disgusted, worried, perhaps. Never frightened. Kedar gave her a droll look as she passed, perhaps echoing his mother’s derision at the idea that such matters would upset her, or, in the knowledge that she would be eavesdropping anyway, tucked away out of sight.
The octogenarian stood in the lee of the entrance to the living room, listening to every word that was said after she left. Nothing wrong with her ears yet!
So far, Kedar had told them nothing new. He explained that he and his mother had lived in this building for fifteen years, right from the start. That he had never seen the man in the lift before. That he had heard a scream echoing in the corridor and had gone out to investigate and followed the hum of conversation several floors below. A floor down, with the idea of getting to the people quicker, he had pressed the lift button and heard what, he later realised, were cries of consternation. The lift doors opened to the sight of a body, at which he had cried out and run down the stairs to talk to his neighbours and understand what had happened.
Within a few minutes of his reaching the floor where his neighbours had congregated, his mother had called out to him from upstairs. Worried that his mother was out and about while a murderer was on the loose, he had run back up to take her home, and did not know anything further.
The policemen or police people, she supposed she had to say, then asked for his name and contact details ‘for their records’ and took their leave.
Kedar was always too damn upright to ask some questions back, otherwise she could have picked up some nuggets about what her other neighbours had told them already. She would just have to wait and get the gossip the old-fashioned way.
With fish chops and tea.
*****
Ira had had to abandon her usual spot outside the gates. The area bristled with cameras, microphones and hawk-eyed journalists waiting for any of the residents or staff to emerge so they could get their quote or sound byte. Instead, she stood hidden behind a wall of Wing 3, waiting for a call from one of the colleagues she carpooled with. She checked her watch, 4.02 pm, hopefully they wouldn’t keep her waiting for too much longer. She had her escape plan all sketched out, the moment they made the call, she would pop her sunglasses on, drape her scarf around her head, stride out before her fellow journalists even saw her and hop into the car. At least that was the plan. Her intimate
association with the press told her that it wouldn’t be as simple. All she could hope for was not to be recognised by one of the crime reporter colleagues from Kolkata Quill who was no doubt waiting out there along with the others.
While she stood there, shifting her weight from one leg to another, Ira toyed with the idea of having a word with the guards at the gate. She knew it was the night guards who had thrown her under the bus, but the day guards must have had a bit of a chat with them about the exciting turn of events by now. No, waiting a few days would be wiser. When those two constables, sitting near her wing were reassigned to a fresher case and hopefully the media too. She dug into her obese backpack instead and produced her Kindle that had slipped under her wadded-up scarf. Ira leaned against a grimy wall and tried reading a few lines from It by Stephen King, but the words just danced in front of her eyes. Who was she kidding? Her brain was abuzz with the events of the last thirty-six hours. She kept her head bowed over it nevertheless, to signal nonchalance to whoever caught sight of her―the guards, the constables, or her neighbours.
They all had it in for her.
Ira didn’t really ask why. It always boiled down to the same reason.
Fear of anyone different.
A man walked past her, presumably heading towards the gates. She had seen him before, a couple of times in the last two weeks, in fact. The back of his head was quite attractive. The breadth of his shoulders, and quickly now, the rest of him! The scan had taken her all of ten seconds, and she turned her eyes back to her screen, as he turned left and disappeared from sight. Her eyes wouldn’t have lingered long anyway. Experience had told her that it was always best to appreciate a person from afar (and preferably from behind) and leave the rest to the realms of imagination.
A few more sentences were read uncomprehendingly before a deep voice spoke close by and made her jump.
‘Ahem. I’m sorry to startle you. It is a complete mess outside, just crawling with photographers. I feel a little bit like Princess Diana. It’s the murder, over at Wing 1; I’m sure you’ve heard about it.’
Ira inclined her head slightly in assent. The man continued, ‘I was just wondering; because you look like you’ve been waiting here a while.’ His eyes flickered to her book and the solid way she leaned into the wall, like she expected to be there a while. ‘Did you book a cab too? Mine just cancelled on me, possibly because of the traffic snarls caused by the media vans. If we’re headed in the same direction, perhaps we could share a cab?’
Ira looked at his clean-shaven, brown face and even, white teeth. The nose that didn’t look like it would be better fitted on the head of a bird of prey and eyes that had an intelligent, good-humoured light in them. She felt glad to have been proven wrong for a change. Though the man was, by no stretch of the imagination, handsome; he seemed, for want of a stronger adjective―nice. She half toyed with the idea of going along with it―share a cab with him just to see what he was like. Her sense of adventure had been somewhat blunted by the last few hours and lack of sleep, however.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I’m expecting a colleague to pick me up.’
‘Oh okay, alright then.’ He looked embarrassed and began to move away.
‘Keep trying though, a cab is bound to pop up!’ She called out and pointed at his phone, hoping she hadn’t been too brusque.
‘Yes, yes,’ he flashed her a boyish smile. ‘Thank you.’
Ira’s phone rang. ‘Yes, I’m just walking out. Oh, didn’t I tell you? There’s been a murder here. Yes! Bloody journalists!’ She laughed and rolled her eyes at him, including him in the joke, though he wouldn’t really understand.
Ira took the phone away from her ear and mouthed to him, ‘That’s mine. See you around!’
She began to walk towards the gate, but turned around for a second before initiating her escape plan. Their eyes connected and she felt her cheeks warm as he smiled again and waved.
*****
The only upside of having a murdered body in your lift was it shook things up. It was already the afternoon of two days later, but the building buzzed with people murmuring and talking, and going in and out of each other’s houses like it was festival time. Not to mention the people who now found all the residents of Panorama Apartments endlessly fascinating, the media included. Nandana and her friends waiting for their children at the bus stop had been besieged by members of this profession both yesterday and today. It was only a pity that there wasn’t that much to say, considering that they didn’t know who the corpse was, or who did it; limiting the conversation somewhat. Still, some of her neighbours had rallied and had had a lively time coming up with theories; the mafia, the danger of malfunctioning lifts, but mostly barely concealed references to single ladies of dubious provenance. Of course, everyone old enough to know better kept their expressions sombre but it didn’t fool Nandana. Everyone was thrilled to bits about it.
It was easier to walk away from the media protesting a lack of knowledge. Her neighbours however were a different kettle of fish. Several bright-eyed neighbours had cornered her downstairs, barely managing to refrain from drooling, and asked whether it was true that she had first slipped on a river of blood on the corridor floor, or hadn’t she actually found the journalist girl standing over the body rather than the other way around?
Yesterday, her morning had been spent with the cops who seemed predisposed to dismiss all her theories offhand, and her husband who sat next to her for support hadn’t been much better. The children had been shooed away to their rooms on the suggestion of the police; but there had been an unspoken excitement in the air―a break in the routine. The whole family had quite enjoyed the rest of their ‘murder week’ as Kushal was privately calling it.
Nandana herself felt like the experience had been cathartic. This shocking display of human emotion unleashed―for isn’t that what a murder was? Somebody’s greed or anger finally exploding beyond socially acceptable expressions?―had made a mockery of the tightly bottled resentment she held over petty problems.
‘How about we go out for a movie today? “Thank God it’s Friday” and all that?’ Nandana spoke up brightly.
She rarely suggested plans herself nowadays, because long experience told her they would be shot down somehow. The few that survived long enough to be brought to fruition often had worse ends. If her plans went awry as they had a tendency of doing―the movie or restaurant unappealing, or people she’d invited for dinner not to the family’s liking―she would pay through her husband or daughter’s gentle jokes at her expense. This subtle pattern had made her resolve never to come up with a plan herself, and only go along with whichever plan her husband or sometimes even her children thought of.
But it was ‘murder week’ and she felt reckless. She also felt like taking a break from the building and all its bloodthirstiness.
‘There’s no good movie playing,’ her husband looked up from his phone to say.
‘Oh, you checked?’
‘Yes,’ he said, a beat late.
‘I see.’
Nandana decided to push it. ‘Then shall we go out for dinner tonight? How about some nice pasta?’
‘My tummy feels dodgy after dinner and drinks with the colleagues last night…’ Kushal noted her frown and added with fake heartiness, ‘…but let’s go anyway! I’ll eat bread and stuff, and come back and eat dinner.’ He looked back down at his phone, his thumbs wiggling over the screen relentlessly.
‘That’s really not necessary.’ Her voice came out louder than she intended. Why couldn’t he at least look at her when he was fobbing her off?
Even her kids, hypnotised by their rationed dose of evening TV, turned and looked, though not for long. The call of the screen pulled them back.
Kushal continued to look at his phone, but with a grumpy expression that said, ‘I’m being nagged but I only tolerate it because I’m a good guy.’
Nandana felt something red-hot blossom in her brain. It was telling her that shouting and screamin
g and crying would feel very, very good indeed. That these ingrates should know all the things they didn’t even realise they did to her, belittling her every wish, not seeing that she wanted to live her life too and had needs just like them.
To hell with it. It might be healthy for the kids to see their parents fight occasionally. ‘Why do you have to nix every plan I ever propose? Unless it’s your plan, it’s never a good idea.’ Nandana burst out.
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t do that. As I said, we’ll go, I just won’t eat.’ Her husband shrugged.
‘Oh just…’ She began to hiss, her face an unbecoming red. Kushal shot a warning glance at the kids who were now staring open-mouthed at them, ‘…go boil your head!’
Nandana stormed off and threw herself on their double bed. A small part of her worried that her seven-year-old might take her instructions to his father literally and attempt something even as she lay there.
Predictably enough, Kushal didn’t come after her like she would have liked. Those days were gone. Stiff silences broken by necessary discussions around plumbers, or who was taking the kids to which classes, were now the norm after the rare argument. Why they’d thought to stop talking in the first place got buried in time beneath the relentless business of living.
Nandana lay on her stomach, sobbing audibly. It felt good to be dramatic. At least she wasn’t entirely dead inside. Her little boy came in, biting his finger, a mannerism he’d started when he got nervous.
‘What’s the matter, Ma? Are you angry with me or Baba? Or perhaps Didi!’ he brightened, hopefully. ‘Or is the dead man in the lift making you sad? I know his head exploded and his brains fell out! His eyes were open like a zombie!’
A Killer Among Us Page 4
