by Vish Dhamija
'Here we are.' Ron turned into their drive.
The house was a palace by Mumbai standards, furnished immaculately with artefacts and a few of Kim's photographs. She had shifted some of her belongings from her previous apartment and taken time to make this place as distinguished as her old one that was only a few blocks away. They all made themselves comfortable as Ron asked the men to choose their drinks and went to his bar in the corner to get them. Without detailing the scam that they had originally started investigating, they quickly came to the subject of Raaj's disappearance.
'Why do you even think Raaj's death was not an accident?' Kim asked, referring to their conversation left incomplete at the bar.
'Because he did not die…'
Kim looked stunned. 'What do you mean — he did not die?'
'Ms Kim, according to the file, Raaj died in the accidental fire in 1996 and I saw him in Frankfurt in 1998,' Kabir explained.
'What…?' Kim almost spat out the wine she had just sipped.
'I am serious.'
'How did you know Raaj?'
'I went to college with Raaj and Serena.'
'Oh my God… what a small world this is.' She made no attempt to hide her astonishment.
'I believe Serena has moved to London.'
'Yes.'
'Are you in touch with her?'
'Yes. She called me last month — she was getting married to a Greek guy on the same day as me — January 7th.' Kim became silent for a few minutes reflecting on her last conversation where she had told Serena to forget Raaj and get on with her life.
'So, she doesn't know about Raaj then?' Kabir did not know if he should have been excited that Serena was not involved in the crime, or unhappy that he had lost her a second time to another guy, but he did not want to show any emotion.
'Obviously not... Serena couldn't have known Raaj is alive. In fact she even asked me for advice about getting married to this Greek guy — she still missed Raaj, but I told her to move on with her life… officer…'
'Kabir…my name is Kabir.' Kabir displayed his friendly side, especially since Ron and Kim were being such courteous hosts.
'What do we do now?' Kim asked.
'Most importantly, why would Raaj have done something like this? All the insurance money was paid to Serena, so what did he get out of it?' Ron asked, he wasn't privy to the information about the other scam and the money involved in it.
'Let's just say there was another, much bigger scam that has been unearthed that could make the insurance payouts look puny. I am really sorry but, as I said before, I cannot let that cat out of the bag, not as yet,' Kabir explained again.
'That adds up. He forged his own death, escaped to another part of the world, and let Serena have the insurance money to be content with while he may have started a new life,' Ron surmised.
'That is likely, if Serena were not involved.' Kabir made it clear that he wasn't giving up on Serena yet.
'But, she's got married to some other guy,' Kim protested.
'We'll see. Could you give me Serena's number and contact address please? It will save me the bother of collecting it from her local office here.'
'Wait a minute.' Kim got up to go into the other room to get the details. Neither of the men missed the chance to see her walk the length of the room in her short dress and heels, while Ron picked up the glasses for a refill and went to the bar.
'She is agonisingly gorgeous,' Kabir murmured.
'You bet.'
The couple was back. Ron refilled the men's drinks, and Kim handed over a piece of paper with Serena's telephone number and email address scribbled on it.
'Do you want to call her now?' Kim asked.
As an instinctive reaction, both Kabir and Ron looked at their watches. It was getting to half past ten in the evening.
'How about dropping her a line?' Ron asked.
'Could I ask you for a favour, please?' Kabir requested.
'Sure,' Ron answered for Kim.
'Could you, as a friend, send her an email asking how the wedding was, to confirm if she is in town before we make any plans to travel overseas, please?'
'Now?' Kim asked.
Kabir nodded.
'Let's go into my study, we can frame the words together.'
Kabir had trusted Ron and Kim more than usual for a first meeting. Part of it came from the fact that Ron was connected to the CBI, through a blood relation, and in any case he hadn't given out anything on the scam. But he knew from experience that his instincts for trusting people had become a science over a period of time and had rarely let him down. He got up to go to the study followed by the faithful D'Cunha. Kim typed the email as agreed, with all the pleasantries, asking Serena about her wedding. She asked if they had firmed up the plan for a joint honeymoon as discussed. 'Let's see when she responds.' Kim clicked Send.
They got up without Kim logging off and had barely moved a step when a pinging sound announced a new email in Kim's inbox. Kim glanced back at the screen to see an Out of Office response.
'She might be away for her wedding. Everyone's not like Ron who has work right after marriage and has to postpone the honeymoon,' she affectionately complained, looking at Ron and sitting down to open the response.
'Please note that as of 21st December 2001, I have left the company and will no longer have access to my emails. You are requested to resend this email to Andrew Harrison for any matters relating to retail banking.
Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause.
Best regards,
Serena Kumar.'
The silence that followed shattered all four of them.
'She might have moved to Greece with her husband.' Kim was protective about her friend.
'Who knows?' Kabir was disillusioned.
'What are you thinking?'
'I cannot think.'
'Serena cannot do this…' Kim broke down.
'Calm down darling.' Ron put his hand on Kim's shoulder. She was still sitting in front of the computer.
'I am not saying she is involved in the crime, but something's not right here. When did she speak to you last?'
Kim pulled out her mobile phone and scrolled through the incoming calls, but unfortunately it had been a while ago and her phone could only store the last twenty calls. 'I am sorry. But... it was the last week before her Christmas break she told me… it was the Monday Ron was travelling for the Kodak shoot to Bangalore,' she recollected.
Ron looked at the calendar on his mobile. '17th December.'
'So your friend spoke to you on the 17th, gave you her number and forgot to tell you that she was quitting her job the same week?' Kabir did not want to make it sound like a question.
'Maybe she wanted to surprise me.'
The three men looked at her. She was either being naïve, or was being unthinkingly loyal to her friend.
'It could well be a coincidence, Ms Kim. But I would have imagined that this case had run out of its fair share of coincidences by now. That is not to say that I am accusing your friend of anything, but the fact remains that someone died in your friend's apartment on the night of August 18th 1996, and we need to go on with the investigation till we expose the truth. The only request I have for you both is...please don't talk to anyone about this case,' Kabir requested and got ready to leave.
'You have our word.' Ron promised for both of them and shook hands with the officers. 'My chauffeur is here, he'll drop you at the hotel.'
'That's so nice of you.'
'Thanks,' D'Cunha said.
'Good night.'
***
'What do you think of her?' D'Cunha asked softly in the car.
'She was used as a distraction, a consuming distraction,' Kabir responded without any ado. 'Do they have a flight to Jaipur?'
'I am sure there is. Why?'
'To reach the end, we might need to start from the beginning. Sometimes just the one thing you miss can haunt you forever… I do not want to leave anything to chance… coi
ncidence, if you will,' Kabir said mockingly.
'I will check the flights when we reach the hotel.'
'You can leave all the documents, in the file, back at the Worli police station but carry Raaj's passport.'
'Do you suspect anything?'
'Yes. Let's check it out.'
'Okay boss.' D'Cunha understood that Kabir had something in mind, but would only share when he was sure about it.
***
St. Xavier's School
Jaipur, Rajasthan
The elderly principal of St. Xavier's School at Jaipur warmly welcomed his guests. He had received a call from Kabir earlier, requesting a meeting to find out about an old friend. 'I was a very close friend of Raaj. Any help will be greatly appreciated Father,' Kabir, respectfully addressed the principal by his title in the Catholic school.
'It must have been in the eighties,' he responded in his old gruff voice after listening to Kabir's request.
'It should be the class of 1982.' Kabir had calculated back from FMS years.
Black and white pictures, of most of the student batches in their finishing year, hung along the hallway; they came across the 1982 class, merely a few metres down the aisle.
'There it is, now I remember.' Despite his fading memory, the principal, vividly, recollected Raaj Kumar from the photograph as one of the good all-round students and the head boy in his batch.
'Has he been here of late?' Kabir asked.
'I cannot remember that. But I recall he was an exceptional student and very good at tennis, debates and drama.'
He could have given a serious lesson or two to the bard in playwriting if you ask me, Kabir wanted to say.
Surprisingly, the name of Raaj's father was blank in the school records, but they got the address of the place where Raaj stayed during his school days, which was their second port of call. It wasn't a slum, but it wasn't far from it, explaining the hardships Raaj had mentioned to Kabir in the first term at FMS, when they were close friends. Only a few old neighbours remembered him and his mother as a nice incomplete, family. There was one old man who had met Raaj when the latter's mother passed away, but he hadn't seen Raaj since. He dimly remembered that Raaj had got married in the city some years later, but he was not invited to the occasion. No one had ever met, or seen, Raaj's father, which was in line with what Raaj had told Kabir, years ago, at college.
'There is only one more thing to do,' Kabir told D'Cunha.
'What is that?'
'You've got Raaj's details on the passport, let's go and check out the municipal office, first thing tomorrow morning, to confirm the name of his father. We might be able to reach the son through his affluent — departed — father.'
'But his father's name is on the passport?' D'Cunha asked innocently.
'You really want me to believe that?'
***
The municipal office that held birth records was the dirtiest place either of the two officers had ever seen in their lives. 'You will have to come tomorrow.' The only person present was immersed in the local newspaper, sitting at the front desk, and was certainly not used to helping without getting any monetary incentive from his visitors.
'Will this help?' Kabir put his hand in his pocket. For a moment the peon thought that he was getting some cash in lieu of the favour, but when Kabir pulled out his identity card he sprang up from his chair as if an electric current had passed through him.
'Come with me, sir.' He was already moving towards the room where the files were stored. Kabir and D'Cunha followed him to another misty and exceptionally filthy room where the files were kept in a disorganised manner. 'What year did you say, sir?' the peon asked, wishing to exhibit his efficiency.
'June 1964.'
'Here they are.' He pulled out a bundle of files for the year in less than five minutes, even in this dimly lit pigeonhole.
So there is a method even in this chaos. It would have taken the same amount of time to search out the damn thing on a computer, Kabir thought and smiled.
June 1964 had two files and Kabir and D'Cunha took one each. Kabir quickly turned the pages and there it was… their manna from heaven. D'Cunha took the file from Kabir, read and gazed into his supervisor's eyes and almost bowed in reverence. It only took him a second to comprehend the whole story. The conundrum was finally over.
'Did you know this?' D'Cunha asked.
'I had a doubt. Remember Agatha Christie?'
D'Cunha had heard about the queen of crime, but he hadn't read her books, and clearly didn't grasp what Kabir was referring to.
'The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances,' Kabir, eloquently, quoted Monsieur Poirot. 'I had an inkling of this after I saw the original DNA report in Delhi, the other day. I only wanted to see Kim to check if she was involved. In fact, there was another reason…'
'What?' D'Cunha wanted to know if he had missed something again.
'I wanted to see her.' Kabir smiled. 'She's gorgeous.'
'Should we see Mr Gill?' D'Cunha asked, after the initial euphoria was over.
'No. We are not reporting to him on this case, and the scam we're investigating isn't resolved till we find Raaj to substantiate it.' Kabir made it very clear. 'For now, only you and I know about this. I will talk to Mr Gill without troubling him with the intricacies of this investigation.'
'But how will you arrest them?'
'We need to get diplomatic papers processed for one of us to travel to London… or Greece to find him… or… them.' Kabir corrected himself twice in the sentence.
'I don't even have a passport.'
'That means only I will have a vacation.'
'London… then somewhere exotic in Greece…?' D'Cunha regretted having missed the opportunity.
'The guy is too smart to be in Greece.'
'Where will you find him?'
'I will only know after I reach London.' Kabir walked out of the dirty municipal office in Jaipur, followed by D'Cunha.
36
London
January 31st, 2002
It was a long and agonising flight for Kabir. Thirty thousand feet above the ground, his mind went back more than fifteen years in the ten-hour journey — the college years, their first few months of togetherness in the first term at FMS, Raaj proposing to Serena, him moving away from the couple to give them space, the painful parting... it had taken him an extraordinarily long time to let go of the past, only to be obsessed by it all once more. Some memories are never pleasant. He had never even once imagined — or desired — to meet Raaj and Serena again, much less as adversaries or in the circumstances in which they might meet now, after all these years. His prophecy of meeting them again, which he had discredited long ago, seemed to have had a reversal of fortune, albeit almost fifteen years late. He drank till midnight on the flight, and tried convincing himself he wasn't going after his friends; he had a job to do and his duty demanded that he did justice to it. But, it wasn't a simple switch that he could turn off.
It was only natural that his mind drifted from the crime, to Serena. He lamented having rushed into his first relationship. That had turned sour and led him to miss the second one because he delayed it just that little bit longer, to make up his mind on Serena. He hadn't lied when he told her to consider him if she declined Raaj's proposal, almost seventeen years ago. Against all the evidence, he still wanted to believe that Serena's marriage to the Greek guy, and her sudden move, was purely coincidental, that Nikos was a genuine Greek guy and Raaj was at large, somewhere else.
London was cold and wet, but the real gloom was in Kabir's mind. He kept trying to push the disquieting conclusion away. His heart compelled him to believe that Serena's marriage to the Greek guy could well mean that she was out of this felony; however he did not really believe that. Out of the airport with little baggage and a suitcase full of bittersweet memories, he got into a cab to go to the New Scotland Yard office of the Metropolitan Police at Broadway and report his arriva
l. The officer in charge, Julie Bird, had been through the case, in brief, before Kabir's arrival and was extremely courteous. She explained to Kabir that he could carry on the investigation, and all help required would be extended, but he couldn't use firearms in the country or make any arrests. And if extraditions were required in the end, it would be a matter of diplomatic debate, not a police function. He had been booked in a transitory studio accommodation in Docklands where he had to meet a few people.
Andrew Harrison was waiting for Kabir when he arrived at the bank. 'Hello officer… I am Andy,' he said, getting up and shaking hands.
'Kabir Singh.'
'How may I help you?' Andy asked politely.
'I am sure you are aware that I am a police officer investigating an old case, but I would request you to introduce me to others as Serena's friend, please.' Kabir wasn't insincere.
If Serena met me without knowing that I was in the police, she might meet me as an old friend.
'I can understand. We shouldn't malign anyone before the case is resolved.'
'You're right.' Kabir was happy that Andy shared his view. Both the men sat down. 'Tell me all you know about Serena, please.' There was no time to waste.
'She joined us early last year and I would have to say that we were extremely impressed with her work, the way she managed people, until she started dating this Greek guy, and as with all love-struck people, she got preoccupied with her emotions. That's not to say that she wasn't good at the work any longer, but her commitment had certainly lessened. She announced her wedding before the Christmas break last year and we all thought she would be back to work after that, but she decided to quit and move to Greece.' Andy summed up her appraisal, love life and relocation in a few brief sentences.
'Where was the wedding?'
'It was somewhere in Greece.'
'Did anyone from the office attend her wedding?'
'No. Paul was the one closest to her, but even he couldn't make it because it was immediately after the holiday,' Andy explained.
