On this visit, Sinha had spotted one thing he hadn’t seen before. Signs on the walls offered NO DEMOLITION VAASTU. In other words, practitioners of the Indian equivalent of feng shui would come and examine your premises with a cast-iron guarantee that the spirits would not decree that your house needed to be pulled down and a new one built in its place. Feng shui with an opt-out clause designed to keep costs low. Even Mr Wong hadn’t thought of that one.
Never mind the technological revolution: India remained India.
The room was black. It was so uniformly stained that it was difficult to believe that it had ever been any other colour. Only the presence of thin stripes of yellow wallpaper visible behind burned cabinets revealed that it had once been more brightly coloured.
‘Waah,’ Wong said.
‘Phew,’ Joyce agreed.
Sinha merely nodded in response. ‘The bomb itself was quite small. But the conflagration it started, as you can see, was sizeable. It caused the complete destruction of almost everything in the room. It turned this space into an instant furnace.’
‘Yuk,’ said the young woman, her face a mask of horror as she stepped gingerly onto a soft, mushy floor. Underfoot, a layer of moist ash was speckled with indistinguishable chunks of charred material. Eeee. Was any of it human remains? ‘And were there many . . . like people in here at the time?’
Sinha shook his head. ‘Fortunately not. From what I’ve heard, just the sole victim, Jacob. And he would have been killed more or less instantly. In that sense he was a lucky man. There’s a fact worth remembering: if you are going to die from being blown up, make sure you are as close as possible to the bomb. Better a quick end than being maimed and dying in slow agony. As the countdown on your nearest timebomb heads for zero, run, don’t walk, directly in the direction of the bomb itself. Then you can be cleanly vaporised.’
Joyce crinkled up her nose. ‘Thank you for that pleasant thought.’
She remained a single step in front of the doorway, but the feng shui master walked boldly past her into the middle of the room, raising clouds of ash as he walked. He pulled out his lo pan and scanned the room from its centre, taking careful mental note of the positions of the windows and doors.
A pot-bellied man in a green uniform slipped in behind Joyce and walked with careful high-toed steps to stand nervously beside Wong. ‘What are you thinking, Mr Wong? Can you find it? Is the ghost here?’
The newcomer’s name was Inspector Muktul Gupta, although he was called Mukta-Gupta by his friends. He was in charge of the police investigation. He carried a black stick and there was a large, walrus moustache underneath his pockmarked, bulbous nose. His bottom jutted out backwards almost as much as his stomach protruded forwards, giving him the look of a badly assembled mannequin.
The feng shui master shook his head. ‘Need to do some work first. Tell you later.’ His small, dark eyes continued to crawl across the remaining surfaces. There was a burnt-out desk, a blackened cupboard and the remnants of the chair that Jacob had been sitting on when the bomb went off.
‘It is kinda spooky,’ admitted Joyce.
The police officer nodded. ‘Especially when we are taking into consideration the alleged presence of the alleged ghost and all that.’
Suddenly, Wong’s eyes widened. ‘Oh,’ he said, his body straightening, as he stared into the middle distance, towards the remains of a filing cabinet.
‘What is it?’ Joyce asked.
‘Must leave. Excuse me.’ There was real fear in his voice. The geomancer’s face had acquired an expression of intense alarm. His eyes were glazed and staring. His spine had stiffened and he seemed about to spring.
‘Must go,’ he added in a low voice, and raced out of the room.
Joyce moved out of his way as he hurtled past. His clattering footsteps could be heard racing down the stairs.
Wong’s retreat had seriously alarmed the police officer. ‘I am thinking I’d better see how my men are doing,’ Gupta said. His hands clasped behind his large behind, he strode swiftly out of the room, not looking back. Seconds later, the echoing stairwell reverberated to a fat man galloping as fast as he could on his hind legs.
Sinha remained in the blackened office. ‘How very curious,’ he said. ‘I wonder what Wong noticed that I can’t see?’
He stepped over to stand in the precise spot where the feng shui master had stood—it was easy enough, since Wong’s small footprints were easily visible in the carpet of ash. ‘Is there a ghost here? I am usually quite sensitive to that sort of thing.’ He closed his eyes and tried to feel a presence.
Then he opened them again. The tall Indian astrologer scanned the scene carefully from Wong’s point of view. ‘Can’t get anything. No vibes at all,’ he said. He turned to Joyce, whom he noticed was smiling. ‘So what do you think upset your master so badly?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, with an embarrassed giggle. ‘Except what affects a lot of people who travel. He’s been to the toilet three times already today. I think he’s got the trots.’
An hour later, they regrouped at a snack bar called X=Coffee. It was oddly dark for a daytime eatery and was playing Indian pop music at an unsociably loud volume (candy-sweet female voices warbling up and down minor keys with thundering disco-sitar backing). But Inspector Gupta had selected the venue, so the others deferred to their host. Sinha managed to persuade the manager to lower the sound level slightly, as they sat to discuss the case at a stained formica table over strong, sweet, pink tea.
The officer put on his best ‘official police statement’ voice for the purpose of recapping the story.
‘On the morning of November 9 at 11:15 am, an emergency call was received informing the constabulary concerning the desirability of them attending an explosion and accompanying conflagration at the Bodwali Building on the third floor of a small office building here in the town of Pallakiri, Hyderabad West District,’ he said in a single breath. ‘Since we had officers patrolling that side of Ranga Reddi, it did not take them long. They arrived to find it burning most merrily. But fortunately, the fire had not spread to neighbouring houses but was contained in unit C only.’
‘How come?’ Wong asked. ‘If it was like such a big fire?’
‘Both doors to office C were sealed with special airtight doors. Because of the large number of computer-things in the room. They had a lot of air-conditioning to keep the computer-things cool.’
‘Computer-things?’ Wong looked at a police document that included a sketch of what the room looked like before the bomb went off. ‘On this picture, only two computer.’
The officer nodded. ‘I don’t really understand this stuff. There were just two computer screens, there, as you say. But there were lots of er, computer things, computer boxes you know, around the room. Different sizes. Just boxes with no screens.’
Sinha turned to Joyce. ‘You are good at all this technology stuff. What do you call those things?’
‘Oh yeah,’ the teenager said. ‘They were probably like mainframes, or servers, or something like that. How big were they?’
Wong looked at the sketch and indicated a height of about a metre above the ground.
‘Servers,’ said Joyce. ‘Definitely servers. Probably.’
To her consternation, the police officer wrote her words down in his notebook: Definitely probably servers.
Inspector Gupta continued: ‘Anyway, the late deceased gentleman—what was remaining of him—was found in the office once the fire had been extinguished by the trusty fire services of this locality. He was positively identified by his dental records as being one Mahadevan Jacob, forty-three, merchant of 11/c 15 Jabalpur Court, Nagarjuna Sagar Road. He had rented the office eighteen months ago, and ran his own business there, under the name Data Storage Solutions Hyderabad Ltd. He led a lonely life at work, since he was managing director and all the staff. There was no one else. He had used a temp for a secretary and was sharing the cleaning lady with the rest of the offices in that building.’
> ‘What did the company do?’ Sinha asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ the officer said. ‘Data storage, I suppose. He hadn’t hired any temporary secretaries for a year—this town, as you can see, is being rather on the smallish side, and there were only two ladies who regularly offered their services for typing in the English vernacular. He had no wife or family that we could trace. A bit of a loner. Apparently a lot of computer experts are being like that.’
‘What about friends? Or business associates?’
‘Since his records were all destroyed by the fire, we were not finding any lists of those either. We assumed that some would come out of the woodwork, but none did. After the report in the newspaper, we found a few people who had been at college with him, or had met him at a computer club a few years back, but we couldn’t get much detail on him or on what Data Storage did. It did not seem to be a particularly successful company. For a start, there were no complaints from people whose data had been stored, which was presumably what the firm did.’
Joyce interrupted. ‘Geeks get like that. Having no friends. I know a few. They just do email.’
Gupta agreed. ‘Anyway, we immediately started an —’ He stopped abruptly as a woman in a sari opened the door of X=Coffee and looked in. ‘This way, Mrs Sachdev,’ he shouted over the Hindipop.
The others politely scrambled to their feet as a confident- looking woman in her mid-thirties strode across the cafe and took a seat at their table.
‘These are, er, Mr . . .’ The policeman gestured with his arms as if he were about to make introductions but it was evident that he had forgotten all their names.
Joyce took over. ‘This is Dilip Kenneth Sinha, that’s CF Wong, and I’m Joyce McQuinnie. Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, never been good at names,’ said the officer, with a grateful nod to Joyce. ‘Thank you. And this is Mrs —’ ‘Sachdev. Call me Lakshmi.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Sachdev. Mrs Sachdev occupies the office next to Data Storage Solutions Hyderabad Limited. I asked her to join us today because you may be most interested in her evidence.’
‘If I can help in any vay, I vould be delighted to.’ She spoke with a clear, crisp voice, given musicality by a south Indian accent which turned ‘w’s into ‘v’s and vice versa.
‘I’ve told them about the explosion ten days ago. Could you tell them your side of the story? About the so-called ghost?’
‘Of course.’ She looked at her listeners. ‘About maybe three or four days after the explosion ve got an email from Mr Jacob.’
‘The dead man?’ asked Wong.
‘Correct.’
The feng shui master was constantly amazed by the miracles of technology. ‘Email can be used to talk to dead people?’
‘Apparently yes.’
‘It said what?’
‘Nothing. At least, nothing interesting. It was really just an ad, urging my company to use the services of Data Storage. You know the sort of thing.’
Joyce piped up. ‘Oh yeah, junk email, I get tons.’
Lakshmi continued: ‘Anyway, I happened to mention this to a friend, and he said that he had also got a similar email. I checked with more friends—every single person I checked with had got this email. Isn’t that strange? Four days after his death?’
Joyce shook her head. ‘But it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean there was a ghost or anything. It just means that his junk mail is on a server somewhere that is still churning it out. Might go on for months.’
Sinha leaned back in his seat and put his arms behind his head. ‘Thank God you’re here. This is all rather technical for me.’
Inspector Gupta leaned into the conversation. ‘Correct, Ms McQuinnie. We thought the same thing as you. We too are most Internet-savvy. So we got an Internet expert to trace where the emails were coming from, and he sent us the address of the ip.’
‘The what?’ Wong was struggling to keep up. ‘Ip? This is person or technical term?’
‘I understand it is indeed a technical term,’ said Gupta.
Joyce’s brow wrinkled. ‘How do you spell that?’
‘I.P.’
She smiled. ‘Ah. The Internet Protocol. I see. It’s not really pronounced ip.’
‘It is in India,’ said the inspector, wounded.
‘Oh yeah, maybe. But it’s like—it’s the address that the original signal came from. The address of the actual computer.’
The policeman nodded. ‘Yes. This is what it identifies. Anyway, the ip indicated that it came from the late Mr Jacob’s computer. Which was a bit odd, because the computer in question was a charred metal box by that time. It was not even plugged in. So people started talking about a ghost.’
Silence descended as this bit of information was digested.
Inspector Gupta continued. ‘People got lots of messages over the next few days from the late deceased personage’s computer.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything weird or ghostly about this,’ said Joyce. ‘The email was just bouncing around a bit. Through a network of proxy computers or something. It probably came from Mr Jacob before he died and bounced around a bit before getting to you. Or perhaps it went viral? That’s why it got to Lakshmi and all her mates.’
Wong’s brow furrowed. ‘Went viral?’
‘Yeah. Turned into a virus sort of thing. Like a germ. A bug.’
Her answer left him no wiser.
‘I think I have gone viral,’ he said, wearily getting to his feet and heading for the toilet.
Wong, McQuinnie and Sinha had been summoned to investigate the explosion because the Bodwali Building was one of a portfolio of south and central Indian offices owned by a property developer named Nawal Ajit Kishore, a Singaporean Indian. Kishore served on the board of East Trade Industries in Singapore, and had decided to exploit the connection to augment the work of the local police.
Wong had agreed to the challenging assignment on the basis that Mr Pun pay a larger-than-usual daily stipend and cover the cost of their being accompanied by Dilip Sinha, who had spent a significant portion of his childhood in Hyderabad.
And he had always enjoyed curries. But not on this trip.
Sinha went to talk to some Hindi-speaking witnesses while Wong and McQuinnie trekked across town to see the munitions specialist used as an expert witness by the police department of Hyderabad for all incidents involving explosions. They found him in a back office of a glass-walled building near the Osmania University. Despite the modern exterior, his office was in a musty suite of rooms with lines of old wooden desks.
Finding the right room after some difficulty, they discovered that the expert was a surprisingly youthful man named Subhash Reddy. He was a slightly chubby geek of about twenty-six, with thick hair, a solid moustache and a twinkle in his eye. His lashes were so thick Joyce wondered whether he was wearing make-up.
Reddy had been educated for five years in the United States, and he and Joyce immediately hit it off together. The young woman declared that she loved New York and Subhash explained that he hated it—and somehow the conversation brought them together.
‘I just hated Central Park,’ said Subhash. ‘And those uptown buildings where the rich live.’
‘Yeah. It’s such a majorly cool place. We saw John Lennon’s house.’
‘And those silly tourist types who think it’s cool to go round in a horse-drawn carriage.’
‘Yeah. My sister and me went twice. It was so neat.’
‘New Yorkers are just all really weird.’
‘Totally. We had the greatest time.’
Wong impatiently dragged them back to the question at hand. ‘Please tell us about explosion in Pallakiri town.’
Reddy reluctantly took his gaze off Joyce and twirled his seat around to open a cabinet and find a file on the case. He flicked through the sheets and pulled out a typewritten report. ‘It was plastic explosive, tightly packed in a small metal container. He opened the container and the thing exploded. Si
mple as that.’
‘Biscuit tin?’
‘Smaller, maybe just three or four inches high. More like a tin of tomatoes or something. But not tomatoes—there would have been traces.’
‘No tomatoes?’
‘No. There were traces of some meat we haven’t been able to identify yet. Possibly pork, possibly beef.’
‘Religious motive?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. We also found some silver foil that could’ve come from a chocolate bar wrapper, and some peanuts. The impression I got was that he had been having breakfast or lunch at his desk when he opened the tin containing the bomb.’
‘His food kills him. Very not nice,’ said the feng shui master. He had Cantonese blood, and the idea of an exploding meal deeply upset him.
‘Not nice. Bombs are never nice,’ said Reddy. ‘Presumably you have some questions for me?’
Joyce looked at the man’s dark eyes. ‘Yeah—are you wearing mascara or are your eyelashes natural?’
‘I am quite convinced that Delhi belly is all in the mind, Wong.’
An hour had passed, and they were taking a lunch break in a small restaurant. Lazy ceiling fans sent down waves of air that mussed their hair rather than cooled their heads. Sinha had ordered a large repast, much to the annoyance of his digestion-challenged colleague. Within ten minutes of ordering, an aromatic array of six curries was spread in bowls across the table.
Sinha waved his large hands around as he spoke. ‘Foreigners expect to get upset stomachs here, so they do. Now look at Joyce. She’s young. She has not yet acquired the prejudices of adulthood. So her stomach is fine. Yet what has she eaten? She has surely eaten exactly the same things as you have. The same airline food, the same hotel dishes, the same breakfast. If there were germs in it, you would have the same germs. As for me, I have never felt better in my life.’ He took a deep breath, waving his hand theatrically, as if to wave more air towards his large nose.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 13
