by RV Raman
‘Are you sure, Nilay?’ she persisted.
‘Yes, I am.’ Nilay looked up from his plate. ‘Why?’
‘It just seems a bit…odd. What kind of patterns was Moin looking for?’
‘The stolen data file had some September orders, but not all. So the question was: how were orders selected? Were they selected randomly or was there some logic to it? That was what Moin was investigating.’
‘What did he do?’ Vibha’s expression was grave.
‘He sorted the file using different parameters, like product categories, delivery pin codes, payment types, etcetera, and tried to see if any patterns emerged. Were the orders pertaining to some categories of products? Or were they to be delivered to certain pin codes?’
‘And he didn’t find any pattern?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Nilay,’ Vibha said softly, ‘don’t you find all this a bit odd?’
He frowned, coaxing his tired mind to exert itself. Was Vibha seeing something he had missed? If so, this would not be the first time. Finally, he shook his head.
‘No. Why should it be odd?’
‘Remember, you had once analyzed TezShop’s data?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why had you analyzed it?’
‘I suspected something was amiss at TezShop. I suspected that a large portion of the new customers were fake. Bots were enrolling new customers – fake customers who didn’t exist.’
‘The data you had analyzed pertained only to TezShop, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Analysing TezShop’s data would unearth something meaningful, only if there was something rotten within TezShop, not anywhere else.’
‘Of course. What are you driving at?’
‘Similarly, analyzing MyMagicHat’s data can only unearth deception within MyMagicHat, not elsewhere. Now do you see what I’m driving at?’
Nilay did and it didn’t augur well.
‘So,’ Vibha continued, her voice barely more than a whisper, ‘if Moin did find something amiss in MyMagicHat’s data, the deception has to lie within MyMagicHat, not outside.’
She let that sink in before continuing, ‘Now do you find something odd?’
‘Yes,’ Nilay said hoarsely. ‘Yes. That means…’ He found himself unable to speak.
‘That means,’ Vibha completed his unspoken thought, ‘there is something amiss in MyMagicHat that is worth hiding…worth killing for.’
‘No!’ Nilay groaned. ‘No, not again! Vibha, I…’ Nilay’s voice cracked. He had gone pale. ‘Vibha, is it TezShop all over again? Oh, Lord!’
‘No, Nilay,’ Vibha protested feebly. ‘Don’t jump to that conclusion. It’s too early yet.’
‘No, Vibha.’ Nilay shook his head dejectedly. ‘Think about it. It won’t take long for the Inspector to figure this out. There was something fishy at TezShop when I was there. Now if there’s something fishy at MyMagicHat, who would be the obvious suspect? What is the one common thing between the two?’
Vibha remained silent. Her usually cheerful face was drawn, as Nilay answered his own question.
‘Me.’
Chapter 22
Vibha awoke early next morning and glanced at Nilay, fast asleep beside her. After tossing and turning for a while, he had finally been overcome by sheer fatigue and the effects of sleep deprivation. After two sleepless nights, he had finally found much-needed rest. Unlike her husband, Vibha had the enviable ability to switch off her problems and fall asleep. And when she woke up after a restful night, it was usually with a clear head.
She now put that advantage to use, reviewing the previous night’s discussion with her husband. Dawn was just breaking outside the window. Her Sunday morning routine was unhurried. She had all the time to think.
The entire train of thought last night had hinged on the basic assumption that Moin was killed because his analysis of the stolen data file had unearthed something inconvenient for someone. But what if that was not the case? What if he had been killed for some other reason?
For instance, what if Moin had figured out who had created the transaction file and how it had ended up on the tape cartridge? Everyone was certain that no such file existed anywhere in MyMagicHat’s systems, either at the front-end or the back-end. From where had it come and who had created it? Two questions that were worth killing for.
She filed away the unanswered questions in a corner of her mind and turned her thoughts to Puneet. The only piece of information she had at her disposal was that Puneet had wanted to discuss ‘something important’ with Vikram just before he disappeared. Nilay had overheard him say as much. And it was now established that the data room where Puneet had uttered those words had been bugged. The person at the other end of the listening device would have overheard his conversation with Vikram and everything that had preceded it. Within an hour, Puneet had disappeared.
Puneet had been analyzing MyMagicHat’s sales data. That meant that he too – like Moin – had been looking at the orders fulfilled by the company. Had they both got a whiff of the same thing? Had Moin subsequently followed Puneet’s trail and paid the price for it? If so, why had one been killed and the other spared? Another unanswered question.
Now where did all this disjointed analysis leave her?
First, MyMagicHat’s sales data might have something hidden in it, something incriminating somebody. Second, the source from which the data file came might be revealing in itself.
Wait! What had Moin said to Najeeb a day before he died?
‘I’ve figured out where the data on the tape came from and why it is only a part of the September transactions.’
That was roughly what the Inspector had said.
Vibha found herself turning cold with apprehension. Now everything pointed to the probability of the culprit being inside MyMagicHat. In the police’s eyes, the obvious suspect would be Nilay. He had access to the data. He was a computer scientist. And he had all the opportunity and time. To top it all, there were rumours of him being involved in something similar at TezShop.
She tried to keep her feelings in check and look at the matter objectively. As far as Nilay was concerned, there were only two possibilities – either he was guilty or he was not.
She did not give much consideration to the former possibility. Her gut told her that her husband was not capable of such deceit or violence. Nothing would have induced him to have Moin killed. Yes, he was ambitious, very ambitious. But his moral fibre was intact. Otherwise, she would have sensed it. There were a hundred different ways in which it would have shown up at home. What remained, then, was for her to proceed on the conviction that he was innocent.
The inescapable conclusion was this: if Nilay had nothing to do with the nefarious activities they were now being forced to confront, someone else at MyMagicHat must be guilty. Vibha was now determined to do everything she could to clear Nilay’s name.
The logical way forward was to follow Moin’s trail. Nilay should pursue it at MyMagicHat, while she pursued it at the data centre. By virtue of the access privileges she enjoyed as the head database administrator, she could explore every nook and cranny of the data centre’s servers. It could be dangerous, if what had happened to Moin and Puneet was any indication. But then, she and Nilay were now forewarned. They would take every precaution possible and not talk to anyone about it.
She would start right away. The load on the server would be low on a Sunday morning. Vibha rose and shut the bedroom door noiselessly behind her.
Ten minutes later, she was at her laptop, connected to the server in the data centre on which Moin had copied the stolen data file. Over the next twenty minutes, using her access privileges as a database administer, she executed a number of commands. She then initiated a series of operations to prepare the data for rapid analysis. These operations would take a little while to complete. Leaving them to run uninterrupted, she went about her morning routine.
Three hours later, she and Nilay, each at their laptop
s, sat at the dining table. She was connected to the server at the data centre, while Nilay had logged into MyMagicHat’s query interface.
‘I’ve converted the data file into a database and copied it on an SSD,’ Vibha said. SSDs, or solid state drives, were very high-speed data storage devices. ‘That alone should speed up the analysis tenfold, if not more.’
‘Great!’ Nilay said, rubbing his hands. ‘That should make our life easier.’
‘I have also generated indexes on all the major fields. We can now execute most queries without having to read the main database. Indexes on solid state drive will be lightning-quick. Now what is the first analysis you want to carry out?’
‘First off, let’s see how many of these million orders were cancelled. E-tailers sometimes create a large number of orders and cancel them in order to inflate the Gross Merchandise Value.’
‘That’s because all orders are included in the GMV, but cancelled orders are not subsequently deducted, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Fine.’
Vibha’s fingers flew over her keyboard, typing out a query. Three minutes later, she and Nilay were staring at the result on the screen.
‘Only 33,454 cancelled orders?’ Nilay exclaimed. ‘That works out to 3.35 per cent!’
‘Is that low?’ Vibha asked.
‘It’s way below industry average and our own benchmark.’
‘How could it happen?’
‘Beats me. If at all, I would have expected the cancellations to be higher than the average.’
‘To inflate the GMV?’
‘Yes. Check how many of these orders have been completed – paid for and delivered.’
‘I checked that simultaneously,’ Vibha told him. It’s 95.5 per cent.’
‘Hmm… And returns?’
Vibha scrolled through the result of her query. ‘Returns are…12,733 orders – 1.3 per cent.’
‘Too low.’ Nilay frowned and scratched his chin. ‘But for the life of me, I can’t see how this data can be fudged – these are actual transactions that have taken place. Moin already confirmed that. If 95 per cent of them have been accepted and paid for –’
‘What if they were fake? What if someone had just created these orders?’
‘Fake customers won’t pay, silly. For the simple reason that they don’t exist. If money has been paid, it can’t be a fake customer. The money we have received is real.’
‘Okay. What next?’
‘Let’s look at customers. How many unique customers are there in these million orders? Count each customer only once, even if he has made several purchases.’
‘I know what “unique customer” means, Nilay,’ Vibha said patiently. ‘I’ve already generated the counts of several fields – customer ID, product category, pin code and so on.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
Vibha pointed to a line on her laptop screen. ‘A little over two lakh twenty thousand unique customers.’
‘Two lakh twenty… Then each customer, on an average, has placed about 4.5 orders. That’s very high!’
‘Yes, isn’t it? Considering that this data is only for September, it means that the average customer is buying once every six days! That’s impossible!’
‘Hmm… Low order cancellation and return rates, on the one hand, and high customer purchase frequency, on the other,’ Nilay observed pensively. ‘Normally, I should be delighted at this. But it’s too good to be true. I know that we don’t do this well. The order cancellation rate, in reality, is much higher and so are the returns. Nowhere in the world does the average customer buy something every six days. Something is clearly wrong.’
‘But these are genuine transactions, Nilay,’ Vibha said. ‘You said so yourself. MyMagicHat has actually collected money for all of these.’
‘Yet the parameters reflected in this file – cancellation rate, returns and customer purchase frequency – are unrealistic.’
‘Let’s look at other fields.’ Vibha scrolled down her laptop screen. ‘The number of unique pin codes to which products have been delivered is a little under three thousand.’
‘That sounds all right. Slightly on the higher side, but not very much. What about products?’
‘Over a lakh unique products have been delivered. An average product has been purchased by ten customers.’
‘That seems okay too. Sellers?’
A frown furrowed Vibha’s brow. ‘This can’t be right,’ she observed, looking at her laptop screen. ‘How many sellers do you have at MyMagicHat?
‘Tens of thousands. Why?’
‘The seller count here is a mere 37.’
‘Only 37 sellers? You sure, Vibha? Check your query again.’
‘I just did. The query is fine.’
‘A million orders fulfilled by 37 sellers? Something is definitely wrong. Can you bring up the seller codes?’
‘I’m on it.’
A few minutes later, Nilay was entering the first of the 37 seller codes into his laptop. An instant later, the seller details flashed on his screen.
‘SM Retail, Dadar, Mumbai,’ Nilay murmured, as he studied the seller details. ‘They are one of our top sellers. Looks okay at first sight. Give me the next seller code.’
Vibha read out the next one and Nilay fed it into his laptop.
‘Supreme Electronics Limited, Kolkata…another major seller… this seems okay too. Next seller.’
Vibha gave him the next seller code.
‘New Horizon Traders, Bengaluru…this too seems fine. Next.’
In the next half an hour, Nilay and Vibha scrutinized each of the 37 sellers. They were from different parts of the country and selling different baskets of products. While some sold a wide variety of products, others offered a narrower range. All of them had good seller ratings at MyMagicHat and excellent customer satisfaction scores.
‘They are fine, Vibha,’ Nilay said at length. ‘These are some of our first and second quartile sellers – no complaints or performance issues that I can recall.’
‘The only troubling fact is that a million orders have been serviced by a mere 37 sellers. Right?’
‘Right. Now let me see where these 37 figure in our seller list. Let’s see the top 20 sellers for this year.’
Minutes later, he had a list of 20 sellers on his screen, sorted in descending order of sales value.
‘Eleven of them figure in your top 20 list, Nilay!’ Vibha exclaimed. ‘Surely, they must be above board.’
‘That’s what I was saying. The top 20 account for the lion’s share of our business. They would surely figure in any list of a million orders. Let’s see how many figure in our top 50.’
Shortly, another list came up on his laptop screen.
‘27 out of the top 50,’ Vibha murmured. ‘Not surprising, I suppose.’
Nilay shook his head.
‘This is to be expected,’ he said. ‘Let’s look at the Top 100… here it is…all of them are in the Top 100. The last of them has a seller rank of 77.’
‘This leads us nowhere, Nilay,’ Vibha sighed.
■
Like Vibha, Dhruvi too had begun her Sunday morning by reviewing the situation with a clear head. For the first time in several weeks, she was not starting her day with a Sudoku puzzle. The real-life puzzle was far more compelling. Within fifteen minutes, she too had reached the same conclusion that Vibha and Nilay had arrived at the previous night: there was something rotten within MyMagicHat.
And if that was the case, someone inside the unicorn was the culprit. Someone who had unrestricted access to its operations. While Gautam, Sundar, Mervyn and a couple of others were possible suspects, Nilay was the obvious one.
She was pondering over her next step, when her mobile phone rang. It was Alex.
‘Good morning, Alex,’ she said, answering the call.
‘Good morning, ma’am. We have a new development.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Nitya, alias Nefertiti, is missing.’
‘What! I thought you had tracked her down last evening? Your people were keeping an eye on her house, weren’t they?’
‘You’re right. We had tracked her down and were watching her house. But she was not at home when our people reached the place. She had already left home by then.’
‘Give me the whole dump.’
‘This is what we got from her father: Nitya got a call around 11.15 a.m., after which she went out, saying that she was going for a meeting. The meeting was at 12.30 p.m. and she left home just before noon. She had said that she would eat lunch out that afternoon. So her parents didn’t expect her back till evening.
‘But when evening turned to night and there was no sign of her, they began getting worried. Her phone was switched off. Around 11 p.m., a couple of neighbours went out in search of her, but in vain. They didn’t call the local police station, as Nitya had done this a few times in the past and had returned home in the wee hours. We understand from the neighbours that she has some… er…unhealthy habits.’
‘What habits? Alcohol? Weed? Drugs?’
‘All.’
‘Go on.’
‘When she hadn’t returned by dawn, they called the local police station. Our men were watching the house the entire time, but didn’t approach it, despite the obvious commotion there. Their instructions were to watch and not interfere till Nitya returned home.’
‘Do they know where she went for the meeting?’
‘No, ma’am. Nitya didn’t tell her parents. If she had planned on a 30-minute journey, it would be difficult to surmise where exactly she went. The area is, unfortunately, quite extensive. I’ve asked for a track of her mobile phone location.’
‘Okay. Now here’s an important question for you: what exactly did the cyber cell guys discover at Tau Squared? Only Nefertiti’s name?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Was there any mention of her real name?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Sure, Alex?’
‘Absolutely sure.’
‘In that case, you came to know her real name only after I gave it to you?’
‘Yes, ma’am. You said that Nilay had given it to you. That was a little after 1 p.m.’
‘Whom did you share that information with?’
