Midnight at Malabar House (Inspector Wadia series)

by Khan, Vaseem

  They had met at a society ball. Sam had sneaked in with a friend, and it was on the dance floor that he had encountered his future wife. To hear him tell the tale, it was love at first sight. Realising that no ordinary approach would work on a woman in such demand, Sam mounted the stage and bribed the band to play his favourite ragtime melody. He had been quite the dancer, by his own account. The stunt had worked and before long Sanaz and Sam were an item, much to the horror of her father, who had forbidden the match. Undeterred, the pair had eloped.

  Sanaz had been promptly cut out of her father’s will.

  When she died, old man Poonawalla had slipped into a precipitous decline and followed her into the fire.

  Persis wished she could have known her father then; that, indeed, she might have witnessed the dance that had won her mother’s heart. To see him now, trapped in his wheelchair, was almost more than she could bear.

  She decided not to disturb him. It would not be the first time he had slept down in the shop. It was a haven for him as much as for her. The one thing he had always been willing to share with her was his love of books, or, rather, her mother’s love of them. It was Sanaz who had persuaded Sam to make a go of running the place, her passion that had ignited his lukewarm commitment after the passing of his father. Her mother had loved the written word, had fancied herself a writer in the making. She had not lived long enough to see any of her work published, but the fact that this was the star she had chosen to follow somehow added to her enduring mystery.

  Persis had asked her father if any of that work still existed. He had been evasive; she suspected that it was something he wished to retain solely for himself. As a girl she had begrudged him this but now she understood. She knew that Sam would willingly have given what remained of his broken body to bring her mother back. Sadness had infected him, like gangrene; yet he could not cut out his heart to save himself, for that was where Sanaz Wadia continued to reside, preserved like a fly in amber.

  She leaned forward and gently pressed her lips to his forehead. His eyelids fluttered, a murmur escaped him, but he did not wake. A shaft of moonlight falling in from a porthole window struck the top of his balding head, illuminating the network of small scars that had, over the ticking of the years, been rudely exposed as his hair fell away. Her heart swelled with a curious melancholia. She understood that it was only in dreams that her father truly became himself, that as he sailed on those fantastical oceans of night, he was once again with the only woman he had loved and lost.

  Chapter 8

  2 January 1950

  Her father had been the first to slap a newspaper down in front of her, at the breakfast table, grimacing but not saying a word. By the time Persis arrived at Malabar House the place was alight with the news. Seth had been right. Herriot’s murder had commandeered the front pages. She wondered briefly if the senior echelons of the service would continue to leave matters in the hands of the Malabar House team. A fierce determination smouldered inside her. This was her case. She would not give it up without a fight.

  A photograph of Laburnum House graced the front of the Times of India. Inset was a picture of Sir James Herriot speaking at a lectern. The headline:

  TOP BRITISH DIPLOMAT

  MURDERED AT NEW YEAR’S EVE BALL

  She scanned the article. There was little information, merely a sober profile of Herriot and his demise. Thankfully, she could find no mention of the Partition investigation he had been engaged in. The piece ended by stating that the case was now being investigated by a police unit based at Malabar House, led by Inspector Persis Wadia. The Indian Chronicle was not as restrained:

  BRITISH POLITICO SLAIN AT MARINE DRIVE

  RESIDENCE AS BOMBAY ELITE DANCE ON

  The journalist, Aalam Channa, painted a grisly picture of Herriot’s killing, speculating freely on the motives of the murderer. An unnamed witness confirmed that Sir James had been discovered ‘in a pool of his own blood and in a state of undress’. Alongside the obligatory photograph of Herriot was a smaller photograph of ‘Inspector Persis Wadia, the female police detective given charge of the case’. Channa mused on the wisdom of handing over such a high-profile investigation to an officer with such little experience. He did not explicitly bring up the matter of her gender, but the implications were unflattering.

  She rolled up the paper and threw it into the waste bin.

  The remainder of the morning was spent in this way, with interruptions from journalists pursuing the case; a couple even arrived at Malabar House demanding that she meet them. After a while of being ignored, they went away. She did not doubt that they would return. Vultures rarely flew far from the carcass. A Parsee, more than anyone, understood this.

  Persis continued to collate her notes, sifting through the new information for further lines of enquiry.

  She pulled out the curious note she had found in Herriot’s jacket with the name, BAKSHI, and the string of characters. PLT41/85ACRG11. The paper itself, she was certain, was headed stationery.

  She focused on the line: By a pool of nectar, at the shrine of the sixty-eight.

  Something about those words now raised the flag of memory.

  She called Pradeep Birla over, handed him the note. His homely features creased in concentration. ‘Means nothing to me. Though . . .’ She waited. ‘Well, the shrine of the sixty-eight. For us Hindus, devout ones, at any rate, we believe that there are sixty-eight key places of pilgrimage in the country. Going to each one confers different spiritual benefits. For instance, a pilgrimage to Ayodhya absolves your sins. A dip in the Panchganga at Varanasi frees us from the cycle of rebirth. And so on.’

  ‘Are you suggesting Herriot went to these sixty-eight shrines?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Completing such a task is difficult even for Hindus.’

  She was pleased, at least, that he seemed genuinely willing to help.

  Of all her colleagues at Malabar House, Pradeep Birla was the only one who had made any real attempt at acceptance, the closest to an ally that she had. The others had reacted to her arrival with indignation, antipathy or outright embarrassment, regarding her presence among them as the final proof of their fall from grace. Birla was phlegmatic. ‘Madam, you’re the only one of us who is here through no fault of her own. That has to count for something.’

  At the age of fifty Birla’s was a career distinguished by mediocrity. Nevertheless, he had successfully navigated the upheavals of the Partition years – until a single incident had put him in bad odour with a senior officer. ‘The man wanted to marry my daughter,’ he told Persis. ‘She told him she’d rather marry an ass. He took it badly.’

  Birla was not unintelligent, she had discovered, far from it. His approach to police work was methodical and, in its own way, effective. Given enough time, he tended to gravitate towards a solution, though she found him wholly lacking in imagination. Perhaps this was due to his religious convictions, which tended to colour his decision-making.

  He had grown up in the Maharashtrian hinterlands, moving to Bombay as a child. Brought up in poverty, educated out of necessity, he had never quite lost his rustic way of framing a problem. Nevertheless, Persis was glad of his presence. He, at least, treated her with a semblance of respect, though sometimes she felt this was less because she outranked him and more because she reminded him of his daughter.

  She regarded him now, a small man, with dark, pitted cheeks, thick eyebrows, a moustache that looked as if it had been cut from a rug and glued on to his lip, and a head of short peppery hair. Birla had a store of religious sermons at his fingertips and would often illustrate his point by dipping into the Vedic scriptures. It was the one aspect of his personality that never failed to irritate her.

  An hour later she left Malabar House to make her way towards Byculla and her lunchtime date with Herriot’s corpse.

  The Grant Medical College, as one of the oldest medical institutions in the city, exuded a sense of self-importance that Persis had always found mildly patronising. Es
tablished in 1845 to teach Indians of the Bombay Presidency the theoretical and practical aspects of western medicine, its very existence promulgated the notion that India’s own brand of ancient therapeutic care was both irrelevant and somehow outdated.

  She discovered the pathologist, Dr Raj Bhoomi, in the autopsy suite on the first floor, tuning a new Bakelite to All India Radio as he ate noisily from a steel plate.

  Bhoomi, a small, round man, with messy whiskers and half-moon spectacles perched on a bulbous nose, stood to greet her, the tray slipping from his lap and scattering rice and lentils on to the white-tiled floor. ‘Apologies!’ he said brightly and bent down in an ungainly manner to attend to the mess. As she watched the man scooping glutinous handfuls of his lunch back on to his plate, Persis could not help but feel a sense of loss for Bhoomi’s predecessor, Dr Galt.

  John Galt had been everything a pathologist should be. A cadaverous Englishman, he had approached the business of dealing with death in the manner of an accountant, precisely and with a sense of sobriety that was wholly missing from his successor. She had only met Galt the once, during an investigation into the death of a man cut down in the street by a runaway circus elephant, and had been impressed by him. Following his recent death, the younger man had taken on the role of chief pathologist for the city. She wondered how he had achieved this rank at his age; nepotism, she reasoned, must extend even to such a grim profession as this.

  Bhoomi set his tray down next to the radio, which continued to squeal and hiss like an overwrought infant. ‘Can’t get the damned thing to work,’ he said, thumping the instrument. ‘I was hoping to catch Bombay playing Baroda in the Ranji Trophy.’

  Persis leaned forward and switched the radio off. ‘Perhaps we can attend to the matter at hand.’

  Bhoomi glanced at her in surprise. Noting her expression, he nervously pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘Of course, of course.’

  He turned and led her deeper into the suite where, on a metal autopsy table, lay Sir James Herriot. His body was covered by a white cloth, but his face, slack in repose, was open to the elements.

  She waited as Bhoomi washed his hands.

  The acrid stench of formaldehyde expanded to fill the room. Her nose twitched. The sight or smell of death had never bothered her, but there was something inherently mawkish about an autopsy room that set her teeth on edge. If the notion of souls be true, it was here that they must be most at a loss. Tied and yet no longer tied to their erstwhile earthly forms. Like being thrown out of one’s home, clattering around the gates, hoping to be let back in, before gradually realising there was nothing for it but to turn and face the darkness.

  The door opened behind her.

  Turning, she saw the Englishman Archie Blackfinch flapping his way into the room. He wore the same suit as he had worn on the night she had first encountered him, his tie once again inexpertly knotted. His face shone with sweat, his brilliantined dark hair straggling over his forehead, dishevelled by exposure to the blowtorch of the midday sun.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ he said, pushing a hand through his hair. ‘There was a problem with my driver. He, ah, managed to run the car into the back of a bus. I had to catch a rickshaw.’

  ‘Archie!’ Dr Bhoomi returned to the fray, clad now in a bottle-green apron and gloves.

  ‘How are you, Raj?’ Blackfinch held out a hand which Bhoomi cranked up and down enthusiastically as if he were pumping water from a well.

  ‘Couldn’t be busier. The citizens of Bombay appear to be dying with alarming regularity.’

  ‘It’s called mortality, old friend. How did the Galt autopsy go?’

  ‘Stupendously,’ beamed Bhoomi. ‘Mr Galt appears to have died of unaccustomed physical exertion. Hardly surprising. I was called over to Madame Gabor’s at two in the morning. Who knew the old goat had it in him? Dropped down dead in the middle of a particularly strenuous demonstration of the lotus—’

  Blackfinch coughed, cutting his eyes towards Persis.

  Bhoomi stuttered to a halt, realisation flooding his homely features. ‘Of course, of course. A lady is present. My apologies. At any rate, there are not many pathologists who can claim to have autopsied their immediate predecessor. I shall dine out on the tale for years.’ He turned to the body of Sir James Herriot. ‘A powerful man, from what I can gather.’

  Bhoomi waited while Blackfinch set up his photographic equipment.

  The pathologist moved to the autopsy table, grabbed the white cloth covering Herriot’s body, glanced at Persis once, then yanked it away in the manner of a magician’s reveal. Blackfinch photographed the body from the front, then waited as Bhoomi – with the help of a mortuary assistant – turned it over, and took further pictures of the rear.

  The body was once again turned unceremoniously on to its back, the fleshy arms slapping on to the metal. Persis resisted the urge to wince. She had not known Herriot, but to see his corpse manhandled in this fashion brought home to her, once again, the evanescence of life. Like it or not, she was now the custodian of all that Herriot had once been, his past and her future now inextricably linked.

  She hoped she might do justice to them both.

  Bhoomi began by noting the basic physical details of the body and then proceeded to take various measurements, before conducting a fingertip search over Herriot’s skin, face bent close to the cadaver, searching for anything out of the ordinary. His assistant duly recorded his observations, scratching them into a leather-bound journal. Blackfinch continued to take photographs, the flash popping with eye-watering brightness in the low-ceilinged room. Bhoomi took extra care while examining the wound under Herriot’s jaw, the entry point for the knife that had killed him.

  When he had completed his inspection, he straightened and provided a summary. ‘Other than the principal knife wound, there are no cuts, bruises or abrasions; nothing on the hands that might indicate defensive injuries.’

  This tallied with Persis’s own observations on the night.

  Bhoomi now returned to his bank of instruments, picked up a saw, twanged the blade theatrically, set it down, picked up a knife instead, then bent to the business of opening up the body.

  Persis glanced at Blackfinch. The man seemed unperturbed. She recalled her first autopsy, during her training at the academy. A number of her fellow cadets had turned green; one had emptied his stomach on to the pathologist’s shoes, another had fallen into a dead faint over the cadaver. For her part, the grisly procedure had raised no real anxiety. Dead flesh was hardly something to be squeamish about. Of far greater interest to her were the rituals men invented to deal with their post-mortal remains. Burying, burning and, in the case of her own community, leaving the dead to be consumed by vultures in Bombay’s notorious Towers of Silence. Such mindless adherence to ceremony had always seemed to her the most desperate expression of mankind’s ultimate ignorance. Her failure to exhibit the appropriate levels of empathy in such matters had only added to her reputation as a cold fish.

  She watched now as Bhoomi extracted Herriot’s internal organs, set each on a scale, and called out the weight to his assistant. He packaged those of the organs to be sent for further analysis, then placed a body block under Herriot’s head. Making an incision from behind one ear, across the crown, to a point behind the other, he peeled back the scalp. Next, he took a saw and hacked out a cap of bone. Pulling off the cap he exposed the brain, before scooping it out, weighing it, then setting it down on a steel tray. Returning to his tray of instruments, he selected a scalpel, then, carefully, cut into the mass of brain tissue.

  Finally, he stepped away, and ran a sleeve over his brow. Turning, he walked to the sink. They waited as the sound of water trickled over his bloodied gloves. ‘My understanding is that the case is somewhat political,’ he sang over his shoulder.

  ‘That’s an understatement,’ said Blackfinch, as he packed up his photographic equipment. ‘Did you catch the newspapers this morning?’
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  ‘Indeed,’ said Bhoomi, making his way back towards them. He had divested himself of the gloves and was rolling down the sleeves of his shirt. ‘I shall endeavour to get the report to you by tomorrow. Essentially, it will repeat what I have already told you. Death was caused by exsanguination. Both the carotid and jugular arteries were cleanly severed. The wound profile in the neck appears to indicate a long blade of approximately nine inches, and slightly curved.’

  ‘A curved blade?’ said Persis, in surprise.

  ‘Yes. It’s unusual, but not unduly so. I’ve seen the like before. Carving knives, Mughal hunting knives, ceremonial khanjars from Persia.’

  They thanked Bhoomi, then made their way back to the college’s forecourt where Persis had parked her jeep.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could give me a lift, could you?’ said Blackfinch as they walked out into the sun.

  Persis hesitated. ‘Where do you wish to go?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m rather hungry. I was going to have lunch. In fact, would you care to join me?’

  She blinked. ‘I – ah – I have work to do.’

  ‘Surely you have to eat? Besides, there are a couple of things about the case I’d like to go over.’

  She considered the proposal. She was hungry, and he was right in that there were matters that needed to be discussed. ‘Very well.’

  Half an hour later they were seated inside Britannia & Co, a Parsee restaurant that Persis and her father frequented. The place had been around since the twenties, run by an Iranian Zoroastrian, a smallish affair on Sprott Road, situated beneath drooping willow trees, with an open frontage, red-checked tables and a distinctly heritage atmosphere. On the walls were pictures of King George and Gandhi, side by side, a British flag set above the green, white and saffron pennant of the new republic. The juxtaposition of the two flags was demonstrative, she had often thought, of how some still viewed Britain’s time in India.