by Vaseem Khan
McTavish waved a hand at the activity behind him. ‘Can ye no’ see, man? We’re going over the place with a fine-tooth comb. I’ve brought the whole kit and caboodle with me. By the time I’ve finished in here I’ll be able to tell you what the old professor had for breakfast last week.’
Chopra wondered which professor McTavish meant, but then guessed that the Scot was referring to the learned historian who ran the museum.
‘Have you discovered anything useful to the investigation?’
‘Depends what you mean by useful. Here, put these on.’ McTavish pulled a pair of plastic overshoes and latex gloves from the pocket of his boiler suit. Chopra slipped them on then followed the man across the room.
McTavish led him past the shattered display case to the rear of the chamber. They stopped in front of the eight-foot-tall sandstone sculpture of Kali that Chopra had noticed the previous evening. The sculpture, which had probably been torn from the façade of one of India’s numerous ancient temples, resembled a figurehead from the bowsprit of an old wooden sailing ship.
McTavish beckoned Chopra around to the side of the sculpture. ‘Take a look.’
Chopra’s eyes followed the curve of Kali’s back as it flowed down to the gallery wall… and then he spotted the hole.
‘My guess is they chiselled that cavity out months ago,’ said McTavish matter-of-factly. ‘Then they put the gas canisters inside and cemented a thin sandstone shell back over.’
‘How do you know the canisters were in there?’
‘Microscopic paint chips from the canisters. We found them inside the cavity.’ McTavish patted Kali on the shoulder. ‘Our thieves knew she wasn’t going anywhere. On the day of the robbery all they had to do was break through the shell. Easily enough done with a fist.’
Chopra reflected on this. ‘You are saying that this crime was planned a long time ago.’
‘No flies on you, I can see,’ McTavish said. ‘Come on.’
He led Chopra next to the shattered display case in which the crown had been housed. ‘This is reinforced ballistic glass. You can bounce bullets off it. It’d take a sledgehammer to break through it, and I’m pretty sure there’s no’ enough space in that hole for one of those.’
‘Then how did they do it?’
‘I don’t know. Not yet, anyrood. To be frank I’m no’ so sure they broke the glass.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have a theory… but I need to conduct more tests first. Come on.’
Chopra followed McTavish to the gallery’s rear door, where a swathe of debris was being hoovered up by a forensic technician. Looking through the gaping hole in the very centre of the door Chopra saw another technician out in the corridor, similarly vacuuming the floor. Noticing his gaze, McTavish said, ‘They used enough charge to blow that hole through, but not enough to damage anything else in the gallery. Standard plastic explosive, C4, packed inside a copper focuser. Detonator and blast-cap set-up. Professional work. There seems to have been a bit of blowback into the corridor.’
‘Is that usual?’
McTavish shrugged. ‘Well, explosions aren’t my speciality, but I believe so. Something to do with shock waves and negative-pressure blast winds.’ He scratched the back of his skull with a gloved finger. ‘At any rate, the current thinking is that our villains came up through the fire exit stairs, into yonder corridor, blew a hole through this sealed door and ducked straight into the gallery. They recovered the gas canisters from the statue, put everyone to sleep, smashed the display case, grabbed the crown and went back the way they came. The whole caper couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes from start to finish.’
Chopra looked through the gaping hole again and into the marbled corridor that stretched from the Tata Gallery to the Jahangir Gallery on the east wing. He knew that the corridor had been off limits during the exhibition, another security precaution that had backfired as it now meant that there were no witnesses. Halfway along the corridor, double doors led onto the fire exit stairwell. The media had surmised that the thieves had used these stairs both to infiltrate the corridor and then later to make their escape.
‘How did they get the plastic explosive into the building past the Force One Unit and the scanners?’ Chopra asked. ‘And if they had a way to do that why did they need to hide the gas canisters in the statue beforehand? Why didn’t they just bring them in on the day of the heist, like the explosive?’
McTavish gave a wolfish grin. ‘Top marks, Chopra. Who says Indian polis cannae find their own bottoms without a map?’
Chopra frowned. ‘I do not know. Who says this?’
‘What?’ It was McTavish’s turn to frown.
‘Who says this? About Indian officers and their bottoms?’
McTavish opened his mouth, then closed it. ‘It’s just a saying. To answer your question: we might assume they hid the plastic explosive in another part of the museum, inside another statue perhaps, one accessible outside the Tata Gallery.’
‘Did they?’
‘Not a chance,’ replied the Scot briskly. ‘We’ve gone over everything. Every exhibit. Every nook and cranny. No sneaky hiding places. Nothing.’
Chopra’s frown deepened.
‘Little things, Chopra,’ continued McTavish. ‘You ever read that story about the princess and the pea?’
‘What has that—?’
‘There was this prince,’ interrupted McTavish, ‘on the lookout for a princess. Only he couldnae be sure the ones he knew were the real McCoy, if you get my meaning. But then along comes this wee lassie he likes the look of. So he decides to put her to the test. Sticks a pea under her mattress. Twenty mattresses, actually. And guess what? That pea kept her up all night. That’s me, right there.’
Chopra was bewildered. ‘Are you saying you are a princess?’
‘What?’ McTavish coloured. ‘No, man, I’m saying that little things like that pea bother me. That’s what we have here. Lots of little peas.’
Chopra considered this. Aside from the matter of the plastic explosive there were other things bothering him too. ‘How did the thieves avoid the effects of the gas?’ he asked, eventually.
‘Nose filters would be my guess. Either they brought them along or they were also inside that hidey-hole in the Kali statue.’
‘What about prints? Did they leave them on the canisters? Or anywhere else?’
‘You think they’d be so sloppy?’ McTavish waggled his finger as if at a child who has got an answer wrong in class. ‘They wore latex gloves, I’ll wager. Either had them waiting in the statue or smuggled them in on the day of the heist. You can roll them up to practically nothing. Stick them in the heel of a shoe, or the lining of a jacket. Easy enough for those Force One ninnies to miss.’
Chopra suddenly noticed the fish-eye camera peering down at him from above McTavish’s shoulder. ‘What does the CCTV footage show?’
‘I wondered when you’d get around to that,’ said McTavish. ‘The answer is: not a damned thing. It cuts out seconds before the heist. The CCTV was only installed a few weeks before the exhibition. The museum has never traditionally gone in for that sort of thing, you understand. They picked one of these modern, fully digitised systems, everything controlled by computers. As best as we can figure it, a day before the heist some sort of computer algorithm – let’s call it a virus – was installed on the system. This virus was designed to kick in at a pre-planned time and shut the system down. Which is precisely what it did. We havenae any footage of the thieves before, during or after the heist.’
Chopra was not, by nature, technologically inclined. ‘Is that sort of thing even possible?’
‘Ever hear of the Stuxnet virus?’ replied McTavish. ‘Made headlines a wee while back. A virus so canny it took a year to work out what it did. And what it did was infect computerised networks running industrial programmable logic controllers – specifically those that ran Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. It made the centrifuges tear themselves apart. Did a damned good
job of it, too.’
‘How did the thieves install this virus?’
‘I’m guessing the same way they put those gas canisters inside the statue.’
Chopra arrived at the inescapable conclusion. ‘They had someone on the inside.’
‘For a wee long while, would be my guess. It must have taken time to scrape out that cavity.’ McTavish absentmindedly tapped the sides of his thighs. ‘I hate to say it, Chopra, but these guys were good. We’re looking at a gang that is patient, sophisticated and well financed.’
An urgent thought that had been beckoning for attention now forced itself to the front of Chopra’s mind. ‘Why didn’t the Force One guards stationed outside the gallery stop them?’
‘Because as soon as they got inside the gallery our thieves locked the doors – from the inside. Those wee doors were specially installed for the exhibition. Six-inch plated steel. Once the thieves locked them our Force One friends couldnae break in. And the powers that be always assumed that any attack would come from the front of the gallery, so that even if the Force One buffoons were overpowered, the Beefeaters could batten down the hatches and wait for reinforcements. By the time they discovered the hole in the back it was too late.’
Chopra shook his head. ‘They went to all this effort. And yet they stole only one item.’
‘Because that was the plan, Chopra. They spent months dreaming up this caper, all with one goal in mind. To steal that crown.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
‘The Koh-i-Noor.’
McTavish nodded. ‘Which leaves us with the million-dollar question… Where did they go once they left this room? As soon as the display case was broken the museum went into lockdown. According to Jha everyone in the museum was rounded up and searched. And every corner of the place was turned upside down with metal detectors. The man may be an idiot but I’m sure he would have found the crown if it had still been anywhere on the premises.’
‘But how could they have just vanished?’
‘That’s the big mystery, isn’t it? Maybe when we find our inside man we can ask him.’
Chopra cast his mind back to the previous evening. The motor of memory hummed, focusing in on the faces of those around him in the gallery. Recalling that only twenty visitors were allowed in at any one time, he concluded that there had been twenty-three people in the room. That included the two Beefeaters and the guide, Kochar. He remembered the bangs he had heard, and the cloud of fast-moving gas. And then nothing until he had found himself swimming back to consciousness, his face still buried in the red carpet onto which he had swooned. How he had looked around woozily and seen the at-first incomprehensible sight of the shattered display case. And then rough hands were pulling him to his feet as the Force One guards poured into the gallery from the hole in the rear doorway.
He paused his memory and then rewound from that moment.
He remembered entering the gallery, Poppy’s silk sari rustling beside him, the gust of her perfume in his nose. He remembered Kochar’s long-winded spiel, the bored looks on the faces of the two Beefeaters when they thought no one was paying attention. He remembered flicking through his guidebook and bending down to take a closer look at the Koh-i-Noor…
And suddenly there was a face in his mind, the face of the man he had thought he recognised just moments before the explosion. With the face came a name, dredged from the deepest pit of memory.
Bulbul Kanodia.
Chopra had one more call to make before he could leave the museum.
The office of the museum’s director was located behind the Curator’s Gallery on the first floor of the east wing. He knocked on the door and then entered without waiting for a reply.
He found Professor P. K. Patnagar sitting behind a teak desk with his head in his hands.
The desk was an apocalypse of paper. Towers of leather-bound tomes teetered at its corners. From the whitewashed walls a gallery of framed diplomas and certificates glared down. A ceiling fan rattled noisily above. A harried-looking assistant wearing spectacles on a silver chain fluttered around the professor like a distressed moth.
‘But, sir, I did ask him. Mr Jha was most rude! He told me that if I ever showed him my face again he would arrest me and hang me upside down in a cell and beat me on the soles of my feet!’
‘I told you, Gaekwad! Didn’t I tell you? I said no good would come of this!’
‘But, sir, I distinctly remember you saying that exhibiting the Crown Jewels would be most auspicious for the museu—’
‘We are ruined, Gaekwad, ruined! Why did you ever suggest that we agree to this madness! You are a damned fool, a first-class imbecile!’
‘But, sir, it was you who—’
‘Gaekwad, I am getting a headache. Go fetch me a lime water.’
The harried assistant seemed about to argue and then nodded. He hurried from the room, leaving Chopra alone with the despondent academic.
Chopra coughed. ‘Professor Patnagar?’
The professor looked up.
He had a long domed forehead, like a latter-day Shakespeare, over which had been combed a handful of desultory grey hairs. A limp moustache lay dying above moist lips.
Patnagar rose to his feet. His body resembled a collection of coat hangers clothed in a dark suit many sizes too big.
‘Who are you?’ he bristled. ‘Another of Jha’s goons? If so, I have nothing more to tell you. I am not one of your Chor Bazaar pickpockets, sir. I am a BA, MA, PhD, FRIS and former DG of the ASI. I am an alumnus of the University of Guwahati and an honorary professor of the Lebanese Institute of Mankind. I am a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London. I have written three books, sir, and one of them was even published. So do not think you can intimidate me. I have told you all I know. You cannot wring blood from a stone, my good man. And that is that.’
‘Professor, I am not with Jha’s Force One Unit. My name is Chopra and I am investigating the theft of the crown in my own capacity. I must ask you some questions.’
‘Questions! Questions!’ exploded Patnagar. ‘My very existence has been reduced to questions. First, Jha’s endless interrogations. And then the media! Is it open season on honest men, sir? Do you know that I cannot even set foot outside these walls? Those carrion-eaters from the press are waiting for me. They are camped outside my home. They will not rest until they have gnawed every scrap of flesh from my bones. And for what? I am a man of letters. I do not consort with jewel thieves and I do not know where your damned crown is.’
‘I do not want to ask you about the crown, Professor. What I want to know is whether anyone new has entered your employ in the months since you announced that the museum would host this exhibition.’
Patnagar’s glistening forehead creased with consternation. ‘You suspect foul play from one of my people? An “inside man”, as they say?’
Chopra nodded.
‘Impossible! They were all thoroughly vetted.’
‘Nevertheless…’
‘Well, you will have to ask our personnel department for the records but we have taken on quite a few new staff recently. You see, after years of neglect, once New Delhi agreed that we would host the exhibition they could not throw enough money at us. The museum was to be the face of India, sir. A glittering vision of our ancient heritage. A veritable jewel in its own right. Prized footage for those foreign newsreels, you understand.’
‘I understand, sir. Could you please authorise your personnel department to provide me with a list of all those who began work here after you announced the exhibit?’
The door opened behind Chopra and the harried assistant returned with a glass of lime water, which he handed to the professor.
Patnagar collapsed back into his seat and morosely eyed the mint leaf floating on top of the glass. ‘I honestly believed this exhibition would be a shot in the arm for the museum. Youngsters these days have no respect for the past. They have no idea how venerable their heritage is, if only they could b
e bothered to glance up from their masala movies and their nightclubs and whatnot. And as each day passes their memories become narrower and narrower. Do you know the other day I overheard one teenaged oaf asking his friend what all the fuss was about the “little bald fellow in the bedsheet”? Is this what we have come to, sir? Is this the price of becoming a superpower? Oh, what a magnificent ship of fools!’
‘Professor?’
Patnagar waved a hand at his assistant. ‘Gaekwad here will get you what you need.’
Chopra arrived back in the Central Gallery to discover a crowd of McTavish’s scene of crime officers gathered around Ganesha, laughing. The crowd parted as he approached.
Ganesha had settled onto the marble floor in front of the royal waxworks. Curled up in his trunk was the head of Prince Charles.
Chopra looked up and confirmed that the wax Prince of Wales had indeed been crudely decapitated.
‘Ganesha!’ he scolded sternly.
‘Relax, Chopra, it was an accident. No need to fill your breeks.’
He turned to see McTavish bearing down on him. The ginger-haired man was sipping from a can of Coke. ‘Your young beastie here was just trying to ken Bonnie Prince Charlie’s face. Little bairn doesn’t know his own strength.’ McTavish squared up to him, his expression suddenly serious. ‘By the way, I just took a shufty at the list of visitors in the Tata Gallery when it was robbed. Imagine my surprise to find one A. Chopra on that list. Why didn’t you tell me you were there when it happened?’
‘You didn’t ask.’
McTavish grimaced. ‘Chopra, I’m a straightforward man. But if you want to play silly buggers, then so can I. For instance, I could ask our Force One friends to take another look at that identity card you showed me. Or I could ask you to hand over those papers you’re holding in your hand there.’
Chopra stared at McTavish, a burst of blood colouring his cheeks. Then he nodded. ‘You are correct. I should have been honest with you. I apologise.’
McTavish gave Chopra the eye, then grinned. ‘Apology accepted. Now tell me something… I had a look at the interview transcripts from yesterday. A number of the visitors in the gallery reported hearing a high-pitched whine just before they passed out. Did you hear it, too? Only you didnae mention it in your interview with Jha.’
