Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

by Vaseem Khan

  Chopra had been prepared for this. “My instincts tell me that there is something here. We must get to the truth.”

  “The truth?” said Mallory, chuckling down the phone. “My God, Chopra, you are priceless! A true man of faith. I, on the other hand, don’t really believe in the ‘truth,’ not in the way you mean it. Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said that there are no facts, only interpretations?”

  “I have a quote of my own,” countered Chopra. “‘Morality is the basis of all things, and truth is the basis of all morality.’ Do you know who said that?”

  “Elvis Presley? Mickey Mouse?”

  “Gandhi,” said Chopra stonily.

  Mallory sighed. “I am really not sure how I can help you.”

  “What if I told you that Burbank was in India at the express invitation of a British company, Gilbert and Locke, the world’s largest auction house? It would be a shame if the media got the wrong end of the stick, and were to embroil Gilbert and Locke in the controversy. I expect that with Anglo–Indian trade being part of your portfolio you might find the press beating a path to your door.”

  Mallory hesitated, then gave another chuckle, though one that was less generous this time. “I see that you’re picking up some of the arcane skills of statecraft. However, your scenario is far-fetched, to say the least. I doubt that anyone will care about Gilbert and Locke’s involvement in this American’s death. Even should they, it is hardly a matter for the British government.” He sighed. “Nevertheless, I am a man who likes to hedge his bets. I’ve got enough on my plate already without having to wade into another PR disaster between our nations. I’m still trying to smooth ruffled feathers over the whole Koh-i-Noor fiasco. I’ll see what I can find out. I make no promises though. I know everyone who matters in Delhi, but it doesn’t mean they’ll dance to my tune. Your politicos, I’m afraid, are a law unto themselves.”

  “Thank you,” said Chopra, and ended the call.

  Mallory called back two hours later, as Chopra was finishing a hurried lunch snatched from a roadside vendor, a simple meal of steamed rice cakes. “So,” began the commissioner, “the chap running the Ministry of Corporate Affairs is a friend. Given how closely we have to work together to promote Anglo–Indian trade, that’s only to be expected, I suppose, but it just so happens that we are in the middle of negotiating a multi-billion-pound trade deal in the armament sector. I implied to my friend that the wicket could become decidedly sticky if he didn’t help me out.

  “Of course, he was mystified as to why I was interested in a defunct company from the eighties. I had to make up a story. I rather believe I gave him the impression I was some sort of amateur historian, writing a book on foreign trade in India during that period. Not that he bought a word of it.

  “But he’s a smart man. He’s gained a little leverage over me, and that has made him eager to cooperate. He’s emailed me a file of scanned documents. I’m going to forward them to you.” He hesitated. “I have to warn you. There’s a lot of black ink in there—and there is absolutely nothing I can do about that. If my friend has access to the unredacted versions of these records, he didn’t admit it to me.”

  Half an hour later Chopra was sitting in the business centre of the Grand Raj Palace printing out the documents that Robert Mallory had emailed him.

  The British High Commissioner had not exaggerated.

  Much of the information in the records had been blacked out. It was impossible for Chopra to determine if that information had been redacted recently, or in the past.

  In particular, details concerning the dissolution of the company had been all but eliminated.

  All that he could make out—reading between the lines of blacked-out text—was that the company had been wound up abruptly in late 1985, following a special resolution of its board. This had been in response to an incident whose nature was not clear to Chopra—largely because it had been redacted from the reports. Whatever had transpired, it had not only been serious enough to lead to the winding up of the company, but had also led to the sealing of the firm’s records.

  Chopra leafed through those scant records that had escaped the censor’s pen.

  The company’s financial accounts appeared to show a healthy trading profit for the four years the firm had been in operation. Boisterous statements from the company’s chairman—a Mr. Dharmender Gill—introduced the annual reports, embellishing a tale of solid performance and above-average growth. The company’s future seemed bright.

  And then, overnight, it had all come to a shuddering halt.

  What had happened? Why had Fermi Engineering shut down? And what had any of this to do with Hollis Burbank?

  Chopra found himself one step closer to the answer in a document titled “Personnel Roster.”

  This was what he had been looking for, and he was relieved to discover that here the redactor’s zeal had been curbed. Inside the roster—which contained employee information from the company’s inception through to 1985, the year it had ceased operations—he found profiles of the organisation’s key employees, each profile accompanied by a small photograph.

  Quickly, he ran his finger down the pages, examining the pictures, until, three pages in, he discovered Jared Faulkner.

  There he was, staring out from the white sheet, a half-smile on his handsome lips. The accompanying profile declared him to be the company’s Deputy Chief Engineer. A short background puff stated that he had obtained a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from the University of Stanford in America, and had previously worked for an American firm called Titus Engineering Solutions, a mining outfit based in Colorado.

  Somehow, he had ended up in India.

  Chopra continued through the document.

  Just two pages later he froze.

  The photograph facing him was of a dark-haired man, in his thirties, blue-eyed, with a hard, almost hostile expression. The hair was slicked back, the eyes piercing and the jaw set square. The face, like something familiar seen through water, triggered a motor inside Chopra’s brain. He had never seen this man before, and yet he knew him. The ravages and attritions of time could erode much, but the basic essence of an individual would always remain, like a ghostly echo of what had once been.

  In that echo Chopra recognised the man he had come to know as Hollis Burbank.

  And yet, this younger version of Burbank went by a different name.

  The profile attached to the photograph stated that this man was Roger Penzance, Chief Engineer for Fermi Engineering India Private Limited. Like Faulkner, Penzance had been born in the States, had obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering—his was from Baylor University in Texas—and had subsequently worked for a number of engineering firms in America.

  Chopra’s gaze lingered on the photograph.

  Could this be the vital breakthrough? Could the real motive for the American’s murder lie in the mystery behind his connection to Fermi Engineering? One thing was now certain. Hollis Burbank—and Chopra found it easier to continue thinking of the man as Burbank, rather than Penzance—had gone to great lengths to conceal his past. He had changed his name, possibly even changed some aspects of his physical appearance—the face of Roger Penzance was subtly but noticeably different to the face of the American billionaire, different in a way that could not be explained simply by the effects of ageing.

  Why had Burbank changed his identity? What had happened in India that he had felt compelled to eliminate Roger Penzance, and don the guise of Hollis Burbank?

  At least this explained Burbank’s rabid commitment to protecting his privacy.

  Clearly, the American wished to draw a veil over his past.

  Indeed, Chopra strongly suspected that Burbank had fashioned a false past for himself—he must have realised, as his wealth and fame grew, that it would be impossible for him to remain completely beyond the reach of those who wished to pry into his background. By putting out a false trail he had successfully managed to keep the fact of his true identity as Roger Penzanc
e a secret.

  Once again, it all came back to why? Why would Burbank have taken such a drastic step?

  Chopra continued to work his way through the Personnel Roster.

  In short order, he found two of the three other individuals in the photograph discovered inside the lining of Burbank’s suitcase. There had been four figures in that photograph, their surnames scribbled on the reverse: Faulkner, Murthi, Sen, Shastri.

  Narayan Murthi was now revealed as another engineer employed by Fermi. His background profile stated that he had qualifications in advanced chemical synthesis, and had worked in southern India for two decades before joining Fermi Engineering. Further down the same page was Ravinder Shastri, a chemical scientist, recently graduated from the University of Baroda in the state of Gujarat. He had joined Fermi Engineering only one month prior to the photograph being taken.

  There was no Sen, the only woman in the photograph—assuming that the name on the back of the picture did indeed refer to her—listed.

  Chopra’s eyes lingered on the photograph.

  Why was she missing from the roster? Had she simply been omitted? Or, as seemed more likely, did this mean that Sen was not an employee of Fermi Engineering? In which case, why was she wearing a white lab coat like the others? What was she doing with them in this photograph?

  He completed his trawl of the documents.

  There was nothing else that immediately caught his eye—or at least nothing else that hadn’t been blacked out. His palms itched at the fact that the information he needed was possibly right before him, yet there was no means by which he might access it.

  And yet, all was not lost. He was not without a lead to follow.

  If Narayan Murthi and Ravinder Shastri were still alive, there was a good chance they were in India. And if that was the case, then Chopra might be able to find them, and through them discover more about Jared Faulkner and Hollis Burbank.

  THE HANGING GARDENS

  Desk research had never been one of Chopra’s strong suits.

  During his years on the force, he had always maintained an image of himself as a man of action. This image had been harder to sustain after he had been promoted to run the local station in Sahar and, as a consequence, found himself tied to his desk for more hours than he would have cared to admit.

  And yet, even then, he had managed to engineer opportunities to get out into the streets, to visit crime scenes and get his hands dirty in the interviewing of witnesses and suspects. As time went by, he realised that real police work—in contrast to the bullets-and-bash-em-up police method so beloved of Bollywood—was often made up of hours and hours of dull, painstaking and methodical effort, chasing up minor leads and sifting through stacks of routine information.

  And yet, as tiresome as this was, time and again Chopra had found that it was this method that ultimately led to success, the discovery of a seemingly inconsequential thread of evidence that turned the key and broke open the whole investigation.

  Now, as he sat in the business centre of the Grand Raj Palace Hotel, he found his old instincts awakening.

  His task, on the face of it, was simple: locating Narayan Murthi and Ravinder Shastri, the two men who he could, with a degree of certainty, link to Hollis Burbank’s secret past as Roger Penzance.

  To a man without Chopra’s unique experience, the job of locating two Indians in the midst of a billion might have seemed daunting to the point of impossibility. But the former police officer had spent a lifetime finding those who did not wish to be found. Even in a place as congested, as seemingly disordered as modern India, it was still difficult to remain invisible. And, at this point, there was no reason to suspect that either Murthi or Shastri were attempting to conceal themselves.

  Chopra’s starting point was official records.

  The one thing India had imbibed from her colonial overlords that had persisted long after they had been hounded from the subcontinent was the rabid adherence to record-keeping. The British—in their desire to ensure that not a single nugget of plunder escaped their attention—had kept meticulous records. In some regions, particularly the richer pocket kingdoms of India’s regal families, British record-keepers had been deputed by the colonial capital in Calcutta to note down every single rupee that was taxed, collected and spent in the region. Enormous hide-bound ledgers could still be found in old record rooms, itemising every possession and detail of each family in the kingdom, listing their contribution to the local tithes and thus, ultimately, permitting an assessment of the region’s contribution to the British coffers.

  The administrative organs of modern India had kept alive this tradition of meticulous bureaucracy, something Chopra had been thankful for on numerous occasions. Census records, election records, birth, death and marriage records, land and property deeds and now, in the modern era: phone records, utility records, computer records and even social media footprints… To the seasoned investigator there were a plethora of means to track down elusive individuals.

  Chopra began with a basic Internet trawl.

  Although the trawl turned up nothing about Murthi or Shastri—other than a seemingly endless list of possible Murthis and Shastris, which were common enough Indian surnames, after all—when Chopra added the words “chemical engineer” to the search, at the top of the page, in the paid adverts section, was a link to the website of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, the country’s leading professional body for the industry. According to their website, any chemical engineer worth their salt in India was a member, or had been at some point in the institute’s illustrious seventy-year history, stretching back to its inception in the very year of Independence.

  The institute’s headquarters were in Kolkata, on the far side of the country, though there were branches across the subcontinent.

  Chopra phoned the HQ.

  He had decided against presenting himself as an investigator. He knew that, particularly with larger organisations, this sometimes led to a wall of silence being erected against the perceived intrusion. Instead, he claimed to be a senior editor for a topical news programme wishing to commission a documentary on chemical engineering in the country, cataloguing the way the industry had helped shaped modern India. As part of this glowing tribute he was keen to interview a couple of stalwarts from the eighties, whose names he had been given by an expert. A Narayan Murthi, and a Ravinder Shastri. They had worked for an organisation called Fermi Engineering, among others.

  He was shunted between departments at the institute until he ended up with Alumni Records. A keen young woman asked him to hold the line while she delved into the records.

  When she came back on the line, her voice carried both sadness and a hint of excitement. The sadness came from the fact that she was forced to report, with great regret, that Shri Narayan Murthi had passed away in 2004, at the age of seventy-five. The institute had published an obituary in its monthly journal.

  Her voice brightened.

  With Murthi’s demise dealt with she could now report the good news: her search for Ravinder Shastri had been successful. He had retired just two years earlier after an illustrious career with one of India’s largest petrochemical companies. The institute had run a piece on him following his retirement, felicitating him for his achievements.

  Chopra asked her if she had contact details for the great man.

  She was delighted to report that she did. (Chopra guessed that life in the Alumni Records section of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineering was not quite all it had been cracked up to be. His enquiry was possibly the most exciting thing that had happened to the young woman in a long time.)

  He noted down the details, thanked the girl, then looked at the address she had given him with a sense of things finally falling into place.

  Ravinder Shastri lived right here in Mumbai, not half an hour from the Grand Raj Palace.

  THE STATION FORMERLY KNOWN AS VICTORIA TERMINUS

  There were many things that the British had been guilty of durin
g their long stay on the subcontinent. Profiteering, exploitation, systematic abuse; even, on occasion, government-sanctioned murder. And yet there remained, dotted about the vastness of the subcontinent, innumerable monuments to the British legacy that were still viewed with something approaching fondness by many in India. Among these cherished institutions was the vast railway network that the British had overseen—at the expense of thousands of Indian lives—and which had provided the foundation for a colonial system of governance and looting, but later served as a springboard for India’s own progress towards modernity. Love them or loathe them, the British had left their mark, and the great Indian railway system was now the country’s biggest employer, as well as one of the world’s largest and busiest rail networks.

  And the very first train of that mighty network had, on 16 April 1853, departed what would become the station known as Victoria Terminus.

  VT Station—as many locals continued to refer to it, despite the fact that it had been renamed back in 1996 after the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji—was one of the busiest railway stations in the world, frenetically shunting more than three thousand trains a day. A grand building designed in the High Victorian Gothic style, the station’s spires, turrets, pointed arches and signature dome concealed a bewildering internal layout that, to the uninitiated, became a frantic maze designed to grind down the human soul.

  As Poppy entered the station, moving swiftly to keep pace with the wheelchair of Anjali Tejwa’s grandmother, she glanced up at the statue of Progress atop the dome, a female figure holding aloft a flaming torch and a spoked wheel. It was her favourite monument in the whole of Mumbai, and never failed to lift her spirits.

  As it did her fellow Mumbaikers, VT Station held a special place in Poppy’s heart.

  Not only had it become one of the earliest symbols of Mumbai—as opposed to the old colonial outpost of Bombay—it was also the one place that almost every citizen of India’s dream city could identify with. It was the common man’s meeting point, a watering hole shared by Indians of all castes, creeds and classes, the backdrop to countless Bollywood films, the starting point of innumerable friendships, and a million Mumbai stories.