Up in Flames

by Evans, Geraldine

  A week ago, Casey wouldn’t have been tempted to agree with him. But he was tempted now. More than tempted to hope that Catt was right and that the hellish prospect waiting in the wings had flown out with them.

  As they paused at the entrance to the drive for a break in the traffic, a middle-aged and expensively dressed white woman knocked on Casey’s window. He lowered it and looked enquiringly at her.

  ‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ she confided. ‘You’re the officer investigating the death of Mr Khan‘s daughter. Were you looking for Mr and Mrs Khan?’

  Casey nodded.

  ‘Only they’re all at the hospital. The old man was taken ill. He went off in an ambulance with Mr Khan. His wife and the rest of the family followed in the son’s car.’

  ‘When was this?’

  The woman considered. ‘Getting on for an hour ago. It’s very sad. To think I saw Mrs Khan out with her grandson when I was walking the dog on the very day her daughter died. Poor woman, who would have thought that only an hour later she would suffer such a tragedy as to lose a daughter. And now this. They say tragedy comes in threes, don’t they? I wonder what else they can expect.’

  Casey didn’t have to wonder. He knew.

  ‘That family has certainly had their share and more than their share of trouble lately. Why I remember-’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Casey interrupted. ‘But what was that about Mrs Khan?’ His fuzzy brain had been trying without success to compose arguments to support his conclusions and amongst all the woman’s chatter Casey nearly missed what she had just told them. ‘You saw her, you say, on the day of the murders? Why didn’t you mention this to one of my officers when the house-to-house team questioned everyone in the neighbourhood?’

  He threw a questioning glance at Catt, who could only shrug and shake his head. But the woman answered his question readily enough.

  ‘I didn’t tell them anything because I wasn’t here. I left for the South of France for a short holiday the morning after it happened. Felt rather guilty, actually, to be sunning myself on a beach when the Khans had suffered such a tragedy. But it wasn’t as if I knew anything that might help.’

  Unfortunately, she had known something. It was information they could have done with much earlier in the investigation. Casey took a calming breath, belatedly noted her glowing tan and said, ‘You mentioned seeing Mrs Rathi Khan on the day of her daughter’s murder. What time was it exactly and where?’

  ‘Why?’ The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Surely you don’t think that she–?’

  ‘Please, just answer the questions.’

  The woman thought for a moment or two and then said, ‘I saw her near that parade of shops on the corner of Ainslee Terrace. It must have been about 12.30, 12.45. She seemed a bit distracted and didn’t even acknowledge me when I said hello.’

  Casey nodded, got Catt to note her details and thanked her. For a moment he thought what the woman had told them would change everything, would turn his conclusions on their head. But then he realised that in addition to means and motive he now also had opportunity. The woman’s information confirmed his suspicions rather than contradicted them.

  Catt pulled a face once Casey’s window was safely wound up and the woman had crossed in front of them and entered her drive. ‘No flit then. Pity.’

  Casey made no comment. He just asked Catt to ring St Luke’s on his mobile to find out where they would find Rathi Khan’s father and, presumably, the rest of the family, before they set off for the hospital.

  To reach the hospital they had to pass The Lamb and as Catt drove past, Casey could see the weeping willows in the pub garden. Their boughs, previously held high and proud, were now heavy with moisture and the lower limbs drooped forlornly to the ground in a deep curtsey of dejection. Casey knew how they felt.

  The Khan family were all sitting huddled in a corridor adjoining a side ward when Casey and Catt arrived. Apart from Mr Khan Senior’s wife whom Casey glimpsed through the glass of the side ward sitting by her sick husband’s bed, the rest of the family were all together.

  Casey belatedly realised that in his rush he had forgotten to pick up WPC Shazia Singh. But it was too late now to worry about such niceties. Instead, he sat companionably in a spare chair beside Rathi Khan and apologised for the bad timing. ‘But I expect you can guess why we’ve come.’

  Frozen-faced, Rathi Khan stared at him, then shook his head. His voice pitched higher than normal, he quickly denied it. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’ After a quick fiddle with his tie, which, for once, was not immaculate, he added, ‘How could I have?’

  So that was how he was going to play it. The acting was good but not in the Emmy class. In his spare time Casey had attended a course in body language. There he had learned of the various ways in which the body betrays the liar: the over-honest expression, the frank meeting of eyes, the pauses between sentences, the raised pitch of the voice, amongst others, were giveaways to Casey, even if he hadn’t already learned most of them during myriad interviews with suspects.

  Casey glanced at Catt and then at the other members of the family; Chandra’s brother Devdan and sister Kamala, her mother, her sister-in-law, little Kedar and the other child. Each face but the children’s was tight with apprehension and the determination to say nothing.

  Before he could pose any further questions, a piercing scream broke the tension.

  Casey leapt to his feet in alarm. Confused, for a few brief, vital seconds, he was unable to locate the source of the scream. As he hesitated, Chandra’s mother rose to her feet, her face a mask of horror, and pointed a shaky finger towards the glass screen around the side ward. She tried to speak, but although her mouth opened, nothing came out.

  Casey turned, his glance followed the pointing finger. For a few moments, he, too, was frozen in horror at the sight that met his eyes. Then he leapt into action. Grabbing a conveniently situated fire extinguisher, he shouldered his way through the small crowd that the scream had attracted and pushed open the door of the side ward. As he thrust aside the frantic but uselessly arm-waving student nurse, he banged down the plunger and aimed the thick stream of foam at the writhing figure on the bed. Its cloak of fire was almost immediately extinguished. All that was left was the pungent aroma of cooked flesh and a few lingering petrol fumes.

  He felt the press of witnesses at his back and only became aware of the few seconds’ eerie silence after an hysterical hubbub broke out. He closed his ears to the noise.

  Neither body on the bed stirred. Although the brief but searing heat had fused the two bodies together in an eternal embrace, Casey was just able to recognise the two corpses - for corpses they were - in spite of his best efforts.

  Rathi Khan’s parents, Mr and Mrs Ranjit and Shrimati Khan would now be together in Paradise, just like Chandra and her husband. Or so the old lady had believed. How much of this was due to the growing dementia the family had been at pains to conceal and how much to an unswerving religious belief Casey didn’t hazard to guess.

  He stood aside as the crash cart was wheeled into the room, swiftly followed by a second. Any attempted resuscitation was likely to be hopeless, Casey thought. And so it proved, for after a futile ten minutes of exhaustive activity, the crash teams stood back.

  It was only then that Casey became aware of the sobs of the little boy just behind him. He turned. Kedar’s eyes were huge and terrified, unshed tears clung to his lashes and he clutched his father’s leg as though scared that he, too, was about to burst into flames.

  ‘For God’s sake, take that child out of here,’ Casey commanded hoarsely. ‘Do you want him to have nightmares for years?’ He was too late, of course. Any damage to the little boy’s psyche was already done. He had seen it all. Every horrifying second. Much like his Great-Grandmother must have witnessed similar scenes in her impressionable youth. Wasn’t that what had brought all this tragedy about?

  Abruptly shocked back to some semblance of normality, Dan Khan’s gaze smouldered briefly, resentf
ully, at Casey, before he turned and without a word, strode from the room, lifting little Kedar in to his arms as he went.

  As though only the movement of one of their party could galvanise the rest, they all turned and followed, Mrs Rathi Khan and Kamala, her younger daughter and now her first as Rathi Khan had so indelicately phrased it, sobbing quietly. Only Rathi Khan looked back at the blackened bodies of his parents on the bed, then he sighed heavily, shook his head, and followed the others out of the room.

  It was some hours later. The two bodies were now safely enclosed in their metal shrouds in the mortuary. Both post-mortems had been speedily performed by a grim-faced Dr Merriman. There had been no surprises there, either. Mr Khan Senior, had died from the effects of a second stroke which had swiftly followed the one that had put him in the hospital. His death had prompted his Alzheimer-afflicted wife to commit sati. She had died from the effects of the fire. The slim flask of petrol she had concealed beneath her many shawls had been more than sufficient to ensure the flames took hold swiftly as she had thrown her flaming body on to what had to stand, in her damaged mind, for her husband’s funeral pyre.

  The other members of the family were finally willing to talk. After all, as Casey reminded himself, the murderer was now safe from any earthly retribution. He had discovered her guilt too late to save her from her sick mind. The old lady, Chandra’s grandmother, wasn’t mad, or bad, not really. She was certainly sad and dangerous to know, though, certainly for the widowed Chandra and her baby.

  An old lady, already having her ‘good’ days and her ‘bad’ days when she arrived from India, her son presumably hadn’t been told that in her growing dementia, his mother had developed an unhealthy obsession with sati and might be dangerous.

  As Casey sat in the living room which had become so familiar to him during the case, he wished he hadn’t simply assumed that Mrs Khan senior’s ill-health had been physical. It would be as well for him to remember in future what dangerous things assumptions could be.

  Now he asked Rathi Khan, ’So when was it you knew that your mother was responsible for the deaths of your daughter and granddaughter?’

  Rathi Khan raised a pale and haggard face. ‘I didn’t know. Not for certain. But it would have been shortly after it happened. My son rang me at my High Street shop and told me my mother had been out and had come home with nasty burns on her hands and forearms.’

  Casey nodded. When he had first spoken to them, directly after the deaths of Chandra and her baby, the old lady had been wearing long rubber gloves as he had remembered in the drug-induced clarity of the previous evening. He had thought nothing of it at the time as, upon their arrival, she had been engaged in the warmly domestic but dirty business of cleaning brasses.

  ‘My wife told me that my mother had seemed exultant when she returned and kept on saying that Chandra was a goddess now. She suspected immediately what had happened. The dementia was getting worse all the time, harder to conceal. I believe the sati she witnessed in India in ‘87 obsessed her, an obsession only increased by reading about another well-publicised sati of a Dalit village woman in Uttar Pradesh in 1999.’

  ‘Dalit?’ Casey questioned.

  ‘What were once called Untouchables. They are so no longer, at least officially, what with the government reserving places at colleges, etc, for them; even in India, you see Inspector, change is possible.’

  Casey nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I believe those two prominent recent cases, together with the satis she witnessed or read about in her youth must have deeply affected her.’ His voice broke. ‘The worse thing is that what she did she did out of love. The thought of Chandra suffering the usual unhappy fate of Hindu widows back home preyed on her mind. She really believed that Chandra would join her husband in Paradise. She believed she would become a goddess.’

  Rathi Khan gazed blankly at him, then said, ‘But, of course, you know nothing of this.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. Believe me, I do.’ Casey turned to Mrs Khan. ‘And what about you, Mrs Khan? Did you also suspect your mother-in-law had killed Chandra and the baby?’

  She nodded. Her English was suddenly surprisingly fluent. ‘Normally, I never let my mother-in-law out of my sight. We were so afraid, you see, of what her obsession might lead her to do. She kept on and on about my Chandra being a widow and how she should now commit sati.’ She broke off to explain, ‘It’s Sanskrit and means virtuous woman or faithful wife. She tried to get her to pray and chant daily to Krishna, to shave her head and to smear her forehead with ash so as to mark herself as a disciple of Krishna, the protector of widows. She started referring to her as Mrs Dasi, the name adopted by widows who travel to Vrindavan, the City of Widows and the dwelling place of Krishna.’

  Casey nodded. Now he remembered something that Govind Ghosh, Rathi Khan’s assistant at the shop, had said. More to herself than to him, she had revealed that Chandra had died on Krishna’s birthday; a day, presumably specially chosen by her grandmother for its auspiciousness.

  ‘That is why my husband moved Chandra and the baby to the flat. We didn’t think my mother-in-law even knew about the flat, but she could be sly, you see.’ She shot a reproachful glance at her husband. ‘I said we should have locked in her room so that I could get out, but my husband wouldn’t hear of his mother being subjected to such treatment. He told me it was my duty as his wife to look after her and my father-in-law and to keep Chandra safe from her obsession.’

  Her voice broke. ‘But it was impossible to watch her every minute. The day it happened, I was alone in the house with little Kedar and my mother-in-law. Devdan had dropped my father-in-law at the temple and gone off somewhere and my daughter-in-law and the girls were shopping. Kedar was playing in the garden when he fell over. He gashed his arm badly. I couldn’t stop the bleeding. Kedar wouldn’t stop screaming. My mother-in-law was in our shrine room, praying to the gods, oblivious to it all or so I believed. Usually she prays and chants for several hours at a time and I thought it was safe to slip out to take Kedar to our local chemist who is a man of much skill. The shrine room has never had a key, but even if it had and I used it, my husband would never forgive me if he discovered I locked his mother in.

  ‘Obviously, it was impossible for me to take Kedar to the local Casualty Department - I didn’t dare leave my mother-in-law alone for the time that would take. Even so, I was gone no more than twenty, thirty minutes, but when I returned she was nowhere to be found.’

  A sudden torrent of tears gushed from her eyes, streaking her cheeks with kohl. ‘I was frantic. What was I to do?’ she appealed to them. ‘I was alone in the house with Kedar and - and-’

  ‘You had no choice,’ Casey reassured her. He glanced at her husband. ‘We all appreciate that. Please go on.’

  Mrs Khan took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘When she returned she had burns on her hands and scorch marks on her clothes. All she would say to me was that Chandra was happy now. Happy in Paradise with her husband. I couldn’t contact Rathi, so I rang Devdan on his mobile and he rushed over here.’

  Her words revealed that he had been told another lie; so where had Dan Khan been when it was claimed he had been at home? Wherever, it was, as Casey glanced obliquely at the tight, unhappy face of Rani, Devdan’s wife, it was clear she had her suspicions as to where he had been.

  ‘Rathi had arrived in his High Street shop by the time Devdan got here. For some reason he was concerned that the call might be traced and thought it better to ring the shop from a public phone. He went out to do so and told his father what I thought his mother had done.’

  Casey nodded. He had checked the phone records and they had shown that important phone call had been made from a public box. He had thought it odd at the time. Now he knew the reason for it. He turned back to Rathi Khan. ‘And that’s when you rushed from the shop?’

  ‘Yes. I ran first to the Chandra’s place, saw the flames shooting from Chandra’s flat and watched the firemen as they worked. I listened to the crowd outs
ide, hoping desperately that she and the baby had been rescued in time. But according to the onlookers, the fire crews found both Chandra and Leela dead when they arrived.’ His voice broke as he added, ‘Both burned beyond recognition.’ He paused, gulped in several deep breaths, before he flatly added, ‘I came back here then and we thought of what we should say. My mother was subdued by then. I knew I could shortly expect a visit from the police, so I set her to cleaning the brasses. I have found that giving her a simple practical task calms her mind, gives an element of normality. The rubber gloves also concealed her burned hands. Her face was only a little bit burned at the side and a shawl soon covered that.’

  Casey nodded. No wonder, with painfully burned hands, her brass cleaning had been so desultory. But a lifetime of doing her duty, her dharma, of pleasing her menfolk, had brought ready acceptance of a task that would cause her pain.

  ‘How did she get into Chandra’s flat? Your wife said you didn’t think she even knew about it.’

  Mrs Khan broke in, ‘She must have taken the extra set of spare keys that my husband keeps in his desk. I noticed they were missing. We’re also missing a vacuum flask. And her favourite Krishna image is gone from the shrine room.’

  Casey nodded and asked what colour was the flask.

  ‘It was red.’

  The flask discarded amongst the rubbish bags in the alley to the rear of Chandra’s flat had been red. It had reeked of petrol and there had still been some petrol in the bottom. They had had no luck in tracing it to its source as it was at least ten years old, made in their thousands and sold up and down the country.

  ‘Do you know what she told me when she returned?’ Mrs Khan’s haunted eyes met Casey’s. ‘In her demented state she was so pleased with what she had done that she wanted me to share her joy. She told me she had insisted that Chandra chant to Lord Krishna before her immolation. And Chandra, no doubt desperate to give the drugs you told us she had fed the baby time to work, was forced to join in this macabre ritual as she waited to die. I can hear her voice all the time in my head. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna, till I think I shall go mad.’