“And because the killer enjoys the affections of Nimboo Baba, and thus Munna, she also enjoys the protection of the Mumbai police, is that it?” spat Santosh.
“To be honest I couldn’t care less. It’s Baba’s lover’s thing, her pet project.”
Santosh shook his head. “And that’s why you left the room to call for backup. You weren’t calling for backup at all.”
Rupesh gave a sideways smile. “In a manner of speaking, I was.”
“You bastard. Nisha was there … Women are dying,” said Santosh with disgust.
“It ends tonight. Your man Mubeen will find two bodies.”
“Two bodies?” said Santosh.
“Gulati and your gorgeous assistant. That, I have to admit, is something of a loss to mankind.”
“So Devika Gulati isn’t the killer?” said Santosh quickly.
“Oh no,” said Rupesh.
The vultures, although they’d been agitated by the new arrivals, were now swooping closer and closer, leathery wings beating the air above their heads, their shrieking cries becoming louder and louder.
And then one dipped. It soared over Santosh’s head and he heard the rustle of air above him, flinched, hunched his shoulders, and saw as Rupesh went to ward off the vulture with his gun.
Santosh saw his chance. He drew his sword.
It was not the first time he had drawn the blade from the sheath of the cane. Most nights he worked the action. He often shook it close to his ear to listen for the telltale rattle common to cane-swords.
It was, however, the first time he had ever used the blade in anger.
But he was no swordsman. He carried the cane-sword because … Well, why not? He needed a cane, why not have it be a weapon as well? Who knows? It might come in handy on the off-chance he ever found himself staring down the barrel of a gun inside the Tower of Silence.
So he swung his blade wildly, grateful that at least it hit home.
Chapter 92
MUBEEN PARKED BEHIND Nisha’s Honda, jogged to the window, and cupped his hands on the glass to stare inside. Empty. He glanced across the road at the yoga studio, seeing a dim light inside, then crossed the road and tried the front door. Locked.
Where the hell were Santosh and Rupesh?
He pressed his face against the frosted glass and could make out the reception area, a desk, framed photographs, like wall smudges in the half-light …
But wait a moment. Something wasn’t right. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he could see that a large statue of Buddha in reception lay belly-up on the floor. Yoga mats were in disarray, chairs overturned and, in fact, many of the photographs that should have hung on the wood-panelled wall were on the floor.
And through the door to the studio, covered with a white sheet, he could just see something that looked suspiciously like a body.
With a curse he stepped back from the glass, delving for his cell phone in his jeans pocket.
Santosh. No answer. Shit.
He dialed again. This time, he dialed for the cops.
Chapter 93
RUPESH YELLED IN pain and surprise. As he whipped his wounded hand away from the blade, his gun dropped to the stone and skidded close to the edge of the pit. Bleeding, Rupesh fell to his knees, clutching at his wrist. He was momentarily unable to believe the turn of events.
Santosh, meanwhile, was off balance. The force of the thrust had taken him onto his bad leg and he’d pitched forward, and for a moment the two men faced each other, kneeling as if enacting some bizarre greeting ritual—surrounded by rotting corpses.
“You fucker.”
Rupesh was the first to recover. Hatred blazing in his eyes, he launched himself at Santosh, shoulder-charging him backwards before he had a chance to defend with the sword, then leaping away as Santosh swung from a sitting position.
The gun. Rupesh was going for the gun. With a shout of effort, pain lancing up his body, Santosh threw himself forward using the sword as a spear point and catching Rupesh on the calf. Rupesh screamed, fell, blood already gushing from the wound on his calf. He fell across the corpse of a child, half its face shredded by the beaks of vultures. He gave a cry of revulsion as he rolled away, then kicked out as Santosh pulled himself to his knees and swung once again with the blade.
Can’t let him reach the gun, thought Santosh. If he reaches the gun that’s it.
A cloud of disturbed flies billowed from a nearby corpse as Rupesh’s heels slipped on putrefying matter. Throwing out a hand to lever himself up, he plunged it through the ribcage of an adjacent body, ripping it back out, stinking and dripping, with a scream of nausea.
Rupesh’s flailing bought Santosh a precious half-second. Getting to his feet was too much of an effort, so he pitched forward from kneeling, swiping right to left with the blade and nearly catching Rupesh a third time.
Nearly.
Rupesh dragged himself to his feet. Blood poured from the wound at his wrist and his torn trousers flapped at the gash on his leg, but he left Santosh out of reach, marooned in a sea of rotting cadavers.
“You fucker,” Rupesh cursed again, but it was as though he were talking to himself now. With a Herculean effort he hobbled toward the gun and Santosh, stranded, watched him lurch away knowing he’d played his final card. Knowing he would die here and because of that Nisha and God knows how many bomb victims would die too. He had failed. He had failed them. Just as he had failed Isha and Pravir.
By now Rupesh had reached the gun and with a shout of triumph swept it up, and whirled to face Santosh …
And overbalanced. Lost his footing. Tumbled to the stone on the edge of the pit where his prone body seemed to teeter for a second and a look of absolute horror crossed his face as he realized what was about to happen.
And he fell. He fell screaming, landing with a sickening squelch in the rotted substance that lay in the bottom of the ossuary pits.
For a moment there was silence. The vultures had been scared off by the fight, but now it was as if they sensed the presence of a wounded animal in the tower and they began to caw, even more loudly than before, swooping into the pit to investigate.
Fingers scrabbling for the sheath of his sword, Santosh reassembled his cane again and used it to lever himself upwards, and moved carefully to the edge of the pit. In the cold, white light of the moon overhead he saw Rupesh below. He lay as though pressed into the ooze by an invisible hand, one broken leg at a hideously unnatural angle and the blood from his wounds gleaming darkly in the moonlight. A frightened, pleading look in his eyes.
The first, most intrepid of the vultures landed, its huge parchment wings obscuring the upper half of Rupesh for a moment as it pecked once, twice with its beak. Rupesh then began to shriek, and the bird took flight, a strip of his facial skin in its beak.
“No, no!” screamed Rupesh. His screams were wet, the most terrifying cries Santosh had ever heard. “Please, no …”
And he was still screaming as a second, and then a third vulture moved in, excited by the stink of fresh meat, and Santosh pulled himself away from the edge, the screams ringing in his ears as the vultures continued to feed.
Chapter 94
IT WAS TWO in the morning, and Yoga Sutra was a hive of police activity. Overall control of the crime scene had been given to Private, and Santosh and Jack stood over the body of Devika Gulati. She wore her loose kurta pajama practice clothes and her neck had the familiar yellow garrote tied around it.
There was no Nisha, which on the one hand was good news, because there was no second body. But on the other hand, it was bad news. It meant the killer had Nisha and she would die that night, the ninth victim.
And yet her death would be a footnote if the Mujahideen’s attack went ahead.
“Oh God, Santosh, you look like shit,” said Jack.
Santosh looked at him, his eyes tired and haunted behind his glasses. “You should have seen me before my shower,” he said.
He’d been home to change. The bottle of Johnnie Walker h
ad called out to him and he’d looked at it, known it would blot out the screams of Rupesh and the image of Isha in his arms.
But instead he’d chosen Nisha. He’d chosen Mumbai.
“I’ve spoken to Commissioner Chavan,” said Jack, his hands in his pockets. “The Rupesh business. They’re going to recover his body and obviously they’ll be launching a full investigation, but they’ve agreed to leave it twenty-four hours before they pull you in.”
Santosh nodded, grateful, as Jack added, “For what it’s worth, the Commissioner was not exactly blind to what Rupesh was doing. He told me as much over our round of golf. Truth be told, I arrived in Mumbai earlier at his specific request. I think you’ll come out of it well. Meanwhile the Commissioner assures me we have the full cooperation of the cops to find Nisha. You know Nisha—to know her is to fall in love a little bit and all these guys,” he gestured behind them at the cops moving in and out of the studio, “they all know her. Anything you want, Santosh, you shout.”
“A trace on her cell phone?”
“Done. But no dice. You need a working battery in the phone and either Aditi’s removed it or it’s flat.”
“And her RFID chip?”
Jack looked uncomfortable.
“What, Jack?”
“It’s inoperative,” said Jack quietly.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means Aditi’s probably cut it out.”
“Fuck”
There was a long pause as both men banished thoughts too terrible to contemplate.
“What about the other thing?” said Santosh in a lower voice. “Any news?”
Jack shook his head, spoke into his lapel. “Not yet. Old contacts at the Agency are working on it, but the problem is …”
“There isn’t much to go on. An international target in Mumbai …”
“It could be any one of a hundred.”
Santosh closed his eyes, wanting to open them and for it all to have been a nightmare. “Then we need to squeeze Munna. Nimboo Baba.”
Jack looked pained. “They’ll deny it, and we have nothing to connect them to it, apart from street gossip and the word of a bent cop who’s currently passing through the digestive systems of several vultures on Malabar Hill.”
“The killer,” said Santosh thoughtfully, waving the tip of his cane at the corpse by their feet. “Aditi Chopra. She’s the key to all this. If we can take her we can use her as leverage with Baba and Munna.”
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “Then find her, my friend. Find her.”
Chapter 95
AND THEN, MUCH as it hurt him, much as he hated to be inside when he should have been out combing the streets for Nisha, Santosh went back to the Private HQ, recalled Mubeen and Hari too, then retired to his office—where he closed the door, picked up the phone, and dialed Nisha’s home.
Sanjeev Gandhe became very silent when he realized his wife’s boss was calling. “I’m afraid to inform you Nisha is currently missing, whereabouts unknown,” Santosh told him.
He was some kind of stockbroker type, Santosh knew. “Oh God,” he said in a small voice. “Is it something to do with the case she was working on, the strangler?”
“Mr. Gandhe, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say, but you can be reassured we are doing everything we can to find her.”
He wished he were as confident as he hoped he sounded. But getting off the phone, he put his head in his hands as though to massage his brain into life and all he could see were vultures tearing at skin, Isha in the arms of Rupesh, Pravir wanting him to see his high score.
Think, dammit, think.
Devika’s face had been whitened with talcum powder and in one hand she had been made to clutch a small drum, the sort of instrument used by street performers all over India. She’d been made to look like the eighth avatar of Durga—Mahagauri, who was always depicted with a fair complexion and holding a drum.
Which meant that the ninth would incorporate references to the discus, mace, conch, and lotus.
Great. They knew what to expect when they found Nisha’s corpse. The trouble was the Durga reference had no bearing on the location of the crime. At their home, at their place of work—it was all the same to Aditi. The one difference being she was holding Nisha captive.
Aditi was Nimboo Baba’s lover: “So where did the happy couple meet?” mused Santosh. “Where did you go to, Aditi? From the arms of Lara Omprakash into the clutches of Elina Xavier at the orphanage, and then …?”
There was a knock at the door. Hari stood there—a reduced Hari, his shoulders stooped, his eyes averted, a shadow of the beefy, muscular guy he’d been.
“Hello, Hari,” said Santosh, wishing that he could speak to him, wishing there was something he could say—something to ease the pain of his ordeal.
“I’ve got something, boss,” Hari said, unable to meet Santosh’s eye.
“Tell me.”
“You asked me to check the name Aditi Chopra against clients represented by Anjana Lal when she was just a lawyer, not a judge.”
Santosh looked at him. “Yes? And?”
“Anjana Lal represented her.”
“Brilliant.” Santosh hobbled excitedly over to the magnet board and his fingers moved names around, completing another section. “Look, the story continues: after leaving the orphanage Aditi fell into the clutches of Ragini Sharma, where we can assume she was forced into prostitution.
“She’s busted by Nisha. Then represented by Anjana Lal, except Anjana Lal obviously fails her …” he moved names, “and she goes to prison, where … Does she meet Devika Gulati? Does she meet Munna? Hari, I need to know if those three shared jail time. Can you get that for me?”
“I think so, boss,” said Hari from the door. He hadn’t moved over the threshold.
“My bet is they shared jail time, but for some reason Devika Gulati fell foul of Aditi, whereas Munna did not. Perhaps it was Munna who introduced her to Nimboo Baba. They became lovers. What do you—”
He turned, but Hari had gone.
Chapter 96
THE CLOUDS IN her head drifted slowly away. The world gradually re-formed. And Nisha woke. Her jacket and sneakers had been taken, but otherwise she was clothed. White T-shirt and jeans.
She lay tied to an ancient, rusted four-poster bed, the kind of thing that looked as though it had been reclaimed from a dump site, her wrists and ankles secured to each corner using yellow scarves. She struggled. Then stopped and gasped as she saw what was attached to the posts by her hands and feet: a plastic frisbee was nailed by one hand, a rubber mallet with a rounded head hung near the other. On the posts near her feet were tied a conch and a lotus.
They were the four symbols—discus, mace, conch, and lotus—of the ninth and final form of Durga, Siddhidatri.
She felt a stinging on her upper back, the prickly sensation of surgical tape, and knew at once that her RFID chip had been removed. The bitch had taken it out while she was under.
Okay, okay, keep calm. They couldn’t locate her using the RFID chip but they could trace her—
Laid out on the bed by her hip was her cell phone, the battery placed neatly on top.
Bitch.
Instead Nisha tried to figure out her location by taking note of her surroundings. Above her were ominously high ceilings criss-crossed by rafters of rusting metal. She seemed to be in a massive industrial space, the hard concrete floor on all sides of the bed stretching into infinity, meeting up with exposed brick walls containing vast boarded-up windows. Huge ducts and pipes ran overhead, giving the place a creepy feel. A single naked bulb hung on a wire from an ancient beam overhead, casting an eerie glow over the bed, itself incongruous in the warehouse-like space.
She fought back tears as she remembered her adoptive parents, her husband, and her daughter. She tried not to think about them, but couldn’t help herself.
Four arms. A four-poster bed. A discus, a mace, a conch, and a lotus.
She’d been laid out here t
o die.
Chapter 97
COME ON. COME on.
The story of Aditi’s life was forming on the board in front of him but still there were names left: Priyanka Talati, the doctor, the journalist.
“How did they piss you off, Aditi?” mumbled Santosh. “Why did they deserve to die?”
And what connected them?
Okay. Cell phone records showed that Dr. Jaiyen and Bhavna Choksi had spoken to each other. In fact, they’d spoken to each other several times on the day of Dr. Jaiyen’s death. The next day, Bhavna Choksi was also killed.
“So was it something they were cooking up between them?” Santosh asked an empty room.
Dr. Jaiyen had been in Mumbai on a personal matter, according to her colleague in Thailand, Dr. Uwwano. Maybe she was mixing work with pleasure, granting an interview to the journalist at the same time.
“Boss?”
Hari startled him, skulking in the doorway.
“Sorry, Hari, come in.”
“You were right, boss,” he said. “The jail times coincide.” Again his eyes swiveled to the floor, as though he could hardly bear to look at Santosh.
“Are you all right, Hari?” Santosh asked him.
A smile flicked on and off. “I’m fine, boss, fine.”
“What you’ve been through—nobody should have had to suffer that. You need time to recover. Later, perhaps, try to rest.”
“No,” said Hari, so quickly and so sharply that Santosh almost flinched, “I’m not resting until we’ve caught the bitch.”
“Good man,” said Santosh. He went to clap Hari on the shoulder. He’d felt reassured when Jack had done it to him, that easy brotherly way Jack had. So American. And yet he, Santosh, couldn’t bring himself to do it and instead sounded like a relic of empire: “Good man, good man. It’s most appreciated.”
Private India: (Private 8) Page 21
