Last Victim of the Monsoon Express

by Vaseem Khan

  Also by Vaseem Khan

  The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

  The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown

  The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

  Inspector Chopra and the Million Dollar Motor Car

  (Quick Read)

  Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

  Last Victim of the Monsoon Express

  Vaseem Khan

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Vaseem Khan Limited 2019

  The right of Vaseem Khan to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 529 38734 6

  audio ISBN 978 1 529 39790 1

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  The Monsoon Express

  All aboard

  Evening dress only

  A case of insomnia

  Dead man’s cabin

  First steps, first principles

  Less than a gentleman

  The right man in the wrong place

  A shrewd judge of men

  A woman to watch

  The lowest form of life

  A shot fired in the night

  Women who mean business

  The chess player

  An Emergency situation

  The romance of the railways

  The Monsoon Express

  The death, when it came, happened late at night, a silent affair – certainly no one heard anything at the time – yet one that detonated so loudly in the cold light of day it almost brought two nations to the brink of war. Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) would later reflect that in many ways this particular death had been travelling towards its victim for years, much like the train within which it took place. Perhaps, no matter how far a man might run from his past, destiny always found a way to catch up.

  Of course, it was only for the most tenuous of reasons that Chopra found himself aboard the train at all.

  Like most of his fellow countrymen – and those of neighbouring Pakistan – he had followed the developing story of the Monsoon Express for over a year, never believing that the rhetoric would subside long enough for anyone to actually do anything about it. It was a genuine shock when his old friend Dr Homi Contractor, noted cardiovascular surgeon and pathologist, called to invite him aboard.

  ‘They need an on-call doctor,’ Homi had said. ‘I was the natural choice.’ Homi’s modesty, Chopra had long ago learned, was a rare and shy creature, unlike the man himself. ‘They asked me if I wanted to bring anyone along and so I thought of you. What could be more perfect for a circus like this than a grown man who wanders about with an elephant in tow?’

  Chopra gritted his teeth. His friend meant nothing by it, of course, but sometimes . . .

  Just over a year ago he had arrived home – an apartment tower in the suburb of Andheri in Mumbai – to discover a one-year-old elephant on his doorstep. The animal had been sent to him by his long-vanished uncle for reasons he had yet to fathom, with the simple instruction that he care for it, no small request of a man who lived on the fifteenth floor.

  Chopra had, that same day, retired from the Mumbai police force. Three decades of diligent service had been brought to an abrupt end by a bout of unstable angina. The sudden derailing of the life that he had known had left him disoriented, a man flapping around in a sea of confusion. Perhaps this was why, the very next day, he had made the fateful decision to pursue a case that was not only no longer his responsibility, but one his seniors had expressly forbidden him to investigate. His subsequent unmasking of a major criminal enterprise in the city had spurred him on to establish his own detective agency, for the one thing that hadn’t changed following his retirement was his commitment to the cause of justice.

  During this initial investigation he had discovered that his young elephant ward was remarkable in ways that he had not at first understood. A flurry of further cases had only enhanced his appreciation of the creature. Not that the elephant was, in any sense, his partner in the agency. But he had fallen into the habit of taking his new companion around with him; Ganesha needed the exercise and his presence gave Chopra a sense of reassurance he would have been hard put to express in words.

  Ganesha’s arrival had also gained the fledgling detective agency a certain degree of fame. Even in India the notion of a former policeman navigating the city with an elephant by his side had fired the imagination. Chopra had ignored it all, quietly getting on with things, beholden only to his own sense of mission. For he knew that modern India was a country of such vast inequalities that the notion of justice itself had become malleable, often at the mercy of those who had wealth, power and influence.

  All aboard

  The Monsoon Express was scheduled to depart late in the afternoon from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus – still stubbornly referred to by most locals as Victoria Terminus or VT Station – a Gothic colonial-era building that commanded status as a world heritage site. VT station was also one of the busiest train stations in the world.

  Chopra battled his way through the hordes of his fellow citizens scrambling in a dozen different directions, a mad dance of Brownian motion, towards the station’s outermost platform. Along the way, he found himself accosted by beggars, eunuchs, bootboys, dragomen, runaways, pickpockets and sellers of everything from coconut water to windscreen wipers.

  Negotiating the security protocol that had been laid on for the journey, he found himself on the platform proper, herding Ganesha along to the far end of the train. Here he met with a steward, sweating in a heavy formal uniform complete with gold piping and a pillbox hat. In the blistering April heat the man appeared on the verge of passing out. He looked at Ganesha, then back at Chopra. ‘That is an elephant.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chopra. What else was there to say? It was not as if you could mistake an elephant for anything else.

  The man consulted a clipboard.

  ‘There is no elephant on my list. Sir.’

  ‘There must be some mistake. This has all been cleared.’

  ‘There is no elephant on my list,’ repeated the man.

  ‘Is there a problem here?’

  Chopra turned to see a tall, late-middle-aged white man, dressed impeccably in a cream linen suit.

  The porter straightened his shoulders and pulled in his gut. ‘Yes, sir. The problem is that that is an elephant.’ He pointed his clipboard accusingly at Ganesha, who merely flicked away a curious fly with his trunk.

  ‘Remarkably observant of you,’ said the newcomer, in a crisp English accent. ‘I still don’t see the issue.’

  ‘There is no elephant on my list, s
ir.’

  The Englishman turned to Chopra. ‘Now you wouldn’t be trying to smuggle an elephant on board, would you, old chap?’

  Chopra bristled but then realised the man was smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You have caught me. That was precisely my intention.’

  ‘Excellent. Better to make a clean breast of it and promise never to do it again.’ He stuck out a hand. ‘James Fairbrother. British liaison to the delegation. You must be Chopra.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chopra. ‘And this is Ganesha.’

  ‘Remarkable creatures, elephants,’ said Fairbrother. He extended a hand in Ganesha’s direction. The calf wrapped his trunk around it and shook. Fairbrother addressed the porter: ‘Please make sure our little friend is taken care of.’

  The man appeared ready to protest, but then nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Chopra waited long enough to ensure that Ganesha was settled comfortably in the goods car, then headed towards the passenger carriages at the front of the train, together with Fairbrother. The platform was filling up with the handful of delegates fortunate enough to have been invited on the momentous journey. A heaving mass of press, held at bay by a cordon of security staff, snapped photographs and lobbed a never-ending barrage of questions into the fray. One or two had been allowed beyond the cordon to interview the passengers.

  For the first time, Chopra got a close look at the train aboard which he was scheduled to spend the next two days.

  He knew the story, of course; by now it had been replayed so often in the media that even beggars in the street could repeat it in their sleep.

  Before the cataclysmic sundering of Partition, the Monsoon Express had charted a course between Calcutta in the far east of then-undivided India, all the way to Quetta in the west. In late 1947, as Muslims were forced to flee India to the newly created Pakistan, the train had found itself caught up in the national outburst of sectarian rage that had seen it stopped, literally in its tracks, and set ablaze. Thousands of passengers had died in their seats in the worst religious violence the country had ever seen. Nor had it been a solitary case. Many trains, flowing to and from both sides of the border, had become victims of the madness; tit-for-tat killings that remained an indelible stain on the souls of both nations seventy years later.

  ‘She’s a thing of beauty, isn’t she?’ remarked Fairbrother as they made their way through the press of bodies.

  Chopra could only nod. He had quickly discovered that Fairbrother was one of the chief architects of the mission. A senior diplomat at the United Nations, for the past three years he and an American colleague had worked behind the scenes to convince the Indian and Pakistani governments to move towards détente. The two countries had been at loggerheads for years, ever since a spate of terrorist bombings in India led to accusations that Pakistan’s military intelligence had covertly encouraged the killers – a claim vigorously denied by the Pak government. Things had deteriorated to the point that the two nations had suspended cricketing relations; in other parts of the world this might have been tantamount to declaring war.

  Fairbrother, whose grandfather had served as a railway engineer on the subcontinent, had proposed recovering the burned hulk of the Monsoon Express, restoring it to its former glory, and running the train between the two countries in a symbolic journey aimed at bringing this ‘Cold War’ to an end. After much horse-trading in the senior echelons of both governments the plan had been greenlit.

  It had taken over two years to get the Monsoon Express up and running.

  But the results were worth it.

  There was something uniquely appealing about a train such as this, Chopra felt, eyeing the new maroon-and-mustard paintwork gleaming in the tropical sun. A sense of romance and revived grandeur, an echo of something once thought lost salvaged from the ravages of time and history. The train’s very existence, after all that it had seen and suffered, seemed to ennoble the mission to which it had been entrusted. It was a sad but singular fact of the world that where people often failed a convenient symbol might prevail. In his heart, he believed that the people of India and Pakistan were, to all intents and purposes, one and the same. The tides of history had drawn them apart. It was high time they made the effort to seek each other out again.

  Evening dress only

  Dinner was served at precisely eight. Ten minutes before, Homi Contractor knocked on the door of Chopra’s private cabin. Upon entering, he took one look at his friend and said: ‘What the hell are you wearing?’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Didn’t you read the invitation? Dinner is strictly evening dress.’

  Chopra was mystified. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why would we wear evening dress for dinner? It’s a train.’

  ‘It’s not just a train. It’s the Monsoon Express. You’re a pagan, Chopra. Wait here.’

  Homi returned five minutes later with a dinner jacket and tie. ‘Luckily, they brought some along for those who couldn’t follow a few simple instructions.’

  Chopra struggled into them, muttering under his breath.

  They made their way along the carriage, through the connecting doors, on through the lounge carriage and then into the dining car. Here Chopra was astonished to discover a grinning Indian in a white tux playing a baby grand piano set beside a well-stocked bar.

  Homi ordered a gin and tonic; Chopra stuck to ginger beer. ‘Loosen up,’ said Homi, knocking back the gin. ‘Live a little.’

  They moved down the car, carpeted in thick blue shag, and tooled out in polished mahogany, sumptuous upholstery, and lovingly replicated antique fixtures. The windows sported velvet drapes, the tables parasol lamps. Everywhere there was an attention to detail so assiduous that Chopra could only marvel.

  He wondered briefly about the fidelity of the reconstruction.

  The original Monsoon Express, after all, had been a passenger service, shuttling ordinary Indians around the country. It was unlikely to have been fitted out with such extravagance. Indeed, Chopra’s own experience of trains was a far cry from such opulence. In Mumbai, the local commuter trains were so crowded that people had been known to suffocate to death between stops, unable even to raise a cry for help, so rammed in were they by their fellow citizens. But on the Monsoon Express there was a dizzying sense of space. He had to fight the urge not to sit on the same side of the table as Homi and squeeze him into the corner to make room for others.

  The dining car began to fill up and they were joined in short order by a tuxedoed James Fairbrother and an attractive middle-aged blonde in a shimmering evening gown whom he introduced as Ellen Howe, the American diplomat who had helped negotiate the détente.

  With introductions out of the way, they settled down to apéritifs. Chopra allowed Homi to handle the conversational load. He had always considered himself a rather club-footed socialite. His years on the force had been notable for his singlemindedness in pursuit of lawbreakers; he had left socialising to those of his colleagues bent on ingratiating their way up the ladder. He listened with half an ear as Fairbrother casually boasted about the effort that had gone into organising the ‘reconciliation crossing’, as it had been dubbed in the media.

  ‘You have to understand the politics behind the politics,’ said the Englishman, sipping a spicy vermouth. ‘The whole India–Pakistan stand-off isn’t really about national interest; it’s about individuals. Who has what to gain by keeping the charade of antipathy going.’

  ‘It’s more than a charade,’ remarked Homi. ‘We’ve had four wars.’

  ‘No. You’ve had four skirmishes. Let’s be frank. India is a nation of one point three billion; Pakistan has barely two hundred million. India is economically, technologically and militarily superior. Should India ever fight a real war with Pakistan, it wouldn’t last very long.’

  ‘I doubt the Pakistanis would agree. They are both nuclear powers after all, and that tends to even up the battlefield.’

  ‘Of course they w
ouldn’t,’ said Fairbrother. He nodded down the carriage to where a table of boisterous men – and a lone woman – were ordering dinner. ‘That’s the Pak delegation. Imran Reza, Moeen Elahi and Rabiya Baig, all high flyers in the Pakistani government. They’re being led by a man named Hassan Sher Agha; he’s a cult political figure in Pakistan. He’s spent his career badmouthing India, and done very well out of it. Yet here he is. Some say a few years from now he’ll be ready for a tilt at the Pakistani prime ministership.’

  ‘What is his particular problem with us?’ asked Chopra, turning in his seat to note the thickset Pakistani with the impressive moustache.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ said Ellen Howe. ‘When you distil the facts from the rhetoric, you find very little for either side to actually get angry about. And yet, sometimes, if things aren’t going so well at home, the easiest way to distract attention is to point the blame at the noisy neighbours.’

  ‘Do you think we Indians are that gullible?’ bristled Homi.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ said Fairbrother. ‘As are your Pak brethren.’

  Chopra noticed Ellen place a warning hand on Fairbrother’s arm. Her index finger brushed the back of his hand, a curiously intimate gesture. She had said barely a word, not that Fairbrother had given her much chance. He wondered if he had dominated the negotiations in the same way.

  ‘No brethren of mine,’ muttered Homi.

  Chopra gave his friend a curious glance. Homi had always been opinionated, yet had rarely expressed antipathy towards Pakistan. Perhaps the fractious atmosphere Chopra had detected aboard the train had infected him. The idea of reconciliation, he guessed, was easier to accept in theory than in practice.

  He noticed a smart-looking elderly gentleman in a double-breasted jacket with a much younger woman seated near the Pak contingent. ‘Who are those two?’ he asked.