Midnight at Malabar House (Inspector Wadia series)

by Khan, Vaseem

  She looked at the names. Three Vishal Mistrys. All of the right age group, all of a background that matched the type of person Sir James might have associated with. She wrote out their details on a sheet of paper. Something occurred to her and she went back and looked at the listed occupation for each of the men. The owner of a cigarette packaging plant. A senior accountant in a shipping container firm. A dealer in antiques and heritage jewellery.

  Jewellery. Derrida said that he had seen something shiny on Sir James’s desk. Could it have been a piece of jewellery?

  She straightened. ‘I want you to check out the other two names. In fact, check out the other eight, just to be sure. I’m going to pay this jeweller a visit.’

  ‘It would save time if I asked one of the others to help. Perhaps Oberoi.’

  ‘Do this yourself.’ She caught his raised eyebrow. ‘I don’t trust Oberoi. I can’t prove it, but I get the feeling he would rather I failed.’

  He gave her a sympathetic look. ‘You may not believe me, but there are plenty of us rooting for you. The force needs new faces, new ways of thinking. The common man is fed up of cops like Oberoi. They want police officers they can trust. You have the chance to inspire a generation.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for that responsibility.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got it anyway,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Because of you my daughter is thinking of putting in her papers as a receptionist at the Taj and joining the force. Heaven help us if they actually let her in.’

  According to the census Vishal Mistry lived on the fifth floor of an apartment tower just a mile from Laburnum House. Or, at least, he had done a decade earlier. It was entirely possible that he had moved in that time, though the brutal realities of life in Bombay meant that once a resident of the city had climbed the social ladder sufficiently to afford a flat in an area as comfortable as Marine Lines, they tended to inhabit the place with a limpet-like tenacity, leaving it only as a wisp of spectral vapour.

  Persis drove there with dusk settling on the city, the call to prayer from a local mosque lilting over the road. At a set of traffic lights, she watched as a child beggar glued himself to the side of a peat-grey Buick. The passenger, a white woman, recoiled in horror. New to the city, Persis thought. An American, perhaps. In time her gaze would become deadened, able to take in everything yet not see anything.

  The sentry at Blue Jamaica Tower confirmed that the Mistry family did indeed reside there. He gave her an odd look, one that she took with her as she climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. The reason for his curious gaze became apparent only when she knocked on the door to apartment 501 and the door swung back to reveal a dumpy, middle-aged woman wearing a grey sari and an expression of exhausted belligerence.

  ‘At last,’ she grimaced. ‘You took long enough.’

  In the confusion that followed, a dog yelped over the woman’s shoulder, the tinny bark of a small animal.

  ‘You knew I was coming?’ asked Persis.

  ‘We were promised an update yesterday,’ replied the woman angrily.

  ‘An update?’ She felt her feet sinking into quicksand.

  The woman folded her arms and stared at her. ‘I know you. You’re the policewoman from the newspapers.’ She sniffed. ‘Well, at least they’re finally taking us seriously.’

  Persis straightened her shoulders. ‘Madam, I have no idea what you are talking about.’

  ‘You are here about the case, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am. But how did you know?’

  ‘How did I know?’ echoed the woman in disbelief. ‘My brother has been missing for over a day and you ask me how did I know?’

  It transpired that Vishal Mistry had been missing since the previous morning. The woman who had opened the door was his sister, Minnie Shanbag. Once the initial misunderstanding had been cleared up, she turned back into the apartment, flouncing ahead of Persis in disgust. ‘Typical!’ she said. ‘If the police were any more useless they’d be politicians.’

  The flat was modern, rather than lavish. Leather sofas, a dining table to one side, floor bolsters in the corner, a walnut sideboard upon which was perched a gramophone. On one wall were the obligatory pictures of Gandhi and Nehru; on the opposite wall, garlanded photographs of two elders, Mistry’s deceased parents. A small dog, a white Pomeranian, ducked in at Persis’s heels, yapping itself into a frenzy, as she was led to the sofa where another woman, older than Minnie, sat in a maroon sari. She had a patrician air, and a gaze that seemed to stare a few yards past the policewoman.

  ‘This is Varsha, Vishal’s wife,’ said Minnie, taking a seat beside the woman and waving Persis into a wing chair.

  Quickly, Persis explained the reason for her visit. ‘When did you realise that your husband was missing?’ she asked Mistry’s wife.

  Varsha stared at her. Before she could reply, Minnie answered: ‘My brother went to his office yesterday morning. He never got there.’

  ‘He went to work on New Year’s Day?’

  ‘Vishal never takes a day off, not unless he is severely ill. He’s been that way ever since we were children.’

  ‘When was he reported missing?’

  ‘My brother is a man of routine. Every day at lunchtime, Varsha sends the houseboy to the shop with a lunch tiffin. When he returned that day and told her that Vishal wasn’t there, that he had never reached the shop, she became concerned. It isn’t like him to wander off, not without informing her. She called me and together we went to the Colaba station to file a missing persons report.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘The idiot in charge told us that it was too early for the police to do anything. Vishal had probably just gone off on an unexpected errand. When we went back later, he suggested that perhaps my brother had vanished with the turn of the new year. Gone off to live a gala life somewhere else. I was so angry I could have slapped him.’

  Persis stared pointedly at Vishal Mistry’s wife. ‘Is there a reason Varsha cannot answer for herself?’

  ‘My sister-in-law has taken a vow of silence. She will not speak until her husband is found.’

  Persis absorbed this, then: ‘Was there anything unusual about that morning? Anything unusual about his behaviour? Did he say or do anything out of the ordinary?’

  Minnie was nodding slowly. ‘As a matter of fact, yes. As I said my brother is a man of exacting routine. And that morning he broke his routine. He left for the office two hours early, at around 6 a.m.’

  ‘That is early,’ muttered Persis. ‘Did you know that he was at Sir James Herriot’s house the evening before he went missing?’

  ‘Herriot? The murdered Englishman?’ Minnie exchanged glances with her sister-in-law. ‘No. We didn’t know that. He told Varsha that he was going out to meet a client.’

  ‘A client? On New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘My brother doesn’t care about such things. He lived for his work.’

  ‘His work as a jeweller?’

  She nodded. ‘He has a shop on Walsingham Road.’

  ‘Was he in the habit of paying house calls upon his clients?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Vishal is very old-fashioned. He believes in providing a discreet, personal service.’

  ‘Was Sir James a client?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Kedarnath.’

  ‘Kedarnath?’

  ‘My brother’s assistant. At the shop.’

  She caught Kedarnath just as he was closing up the shop, rolling down the steel shutter with a bang. The description of Vishal Mistry’s assistant had been accurate. A short, plump man in his forties, balding, bespectacled and with a prognathous jaw that gave him a permanently disgruntled look. He was dressed in a white kurta pajama and leather sandals. Black threads hung around his neck and at his wrists. A frayed moustache reclined limply above his upper lip.

  Persis asked him to roll the shutter back up. He did so with ill grace, then led her into the interior of the shop.

  It was small, but clean and neatly laid out. Three dis
play counters housed selected pieces of jewellery, coins and heritage artefacts inlaid with precious metals.

  She explained the reason for her visit. ‘Was Sir James a client of Vishal’s?’

  Kedarnath scratched his cheek. ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Do you know why he was visiting Sir James on the night of his death?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he tell you that he was due to visit Sir James that evening?’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘Does he usually tell you before visiting clients?’

  ‘We keep a record of every commission that we are working on. It is in the ledger. But there is no entry for Sir James. I would remember.’

  ‘Would you check for me anyway?’

  ‘I would remember,’ he persisted.

  ‘Please do as I ask.’

  Grumbling, he turned away and shuffled through a door at the rear of the shop, then returned with a ledger. Licking a thumb, he opened the ledger then began to riffle through the pages. ‘How far back would you like me to check?’

  She hesitated. ‘Six months.’

  ‘I shall go back a year.’

  Fifteen minutes later, he snapped the book shut. ‘Nothing,’ he said, with a satisfied grunt. ‘Sir James Herriot was not our client.’

  ‘And yet Vishal visited him that evening. What possible reason could he have had for that meeting?’

  ‘I do not know. But Vishal is a man of great knowledge. There is little he does not know about heritage jewellery. His family have been in the business of fashioning jewellery and jewelled artefacts for generations. Sometimes people come to him simply for advice.’

  On the journey home these new facts swam around Persis’s mind like shoals of distressed fish. Where was Vishal Mistry? Could it be a coincidence that he had vanished shortly after meeting Sir James Herriot, on the night Herriot was killed? What exactly had their meeting been about? And why had he kept that meeting a secret from his family and his employee?

  The case was winding itself around her.

  She had once chanced upon the skeleton of a monkey in the mangrove swamps that lined the Bandra promenade, its small, soft body strangled by creepers. Upon closer inspection, she saw that it had broken a leg and become trapped in the mesh of vines, inadvertently throttling itself. She had wondered at that moment how the poor dumb beast must have felt, thrashing futilely against its own fate, its struggles simply drawing it closer to its death. A small sense of that black dread had begun to seep into her and she found that, contrary to all expectation, she was afraid.

  Not of death or injury, but of failure.

  She had two further tasks before she could return home. The first was to meet an old friend of her father’s, Augustus Silva, a Goan Catholic and military historian. Augustus had spent his youth in the Indian Army, but taken early retirement following a battle injury that had left him with a pronounced limp. He’d spent the past two decades penning books about Indian military history, from the days of standing armies ruled by despotic kings, maharajas, emperors and nawabs, to the modern military apparatus, such as it had been under the British.

  Silva held a tenured position at Bombay University.

  She tracked him down to his office where she found him sitting behind a teetering barricade of essay papers. He greeted her enthusiastically, a shaggy bear of a man dressed impeccably in white shirt, dark trousers and a knotted tie, sporting slightly incongruous horn-rimmed glasses. Silva was a familiar sight at the Wadia Book Emporium, seeking out obscure military tomes, many of which had to be ordered in. A friendship had sprung up between Sam and the old Goan, though Persis sometimes wished that Silva would refrain from bringing along a bottle of feni, which he ordered by the crate from his native state. The fiercely strong liquor was distilled from the toddy palm and the pair would quickly drink themselves into a stupor.

  Persis explained her errand, sketching the broad outlines of the investigation into Herriot’s murder and her particular interest in his aide, Madan Lal. ‘He apparently served in Burma. I’d like to know more about what led him to leave the army.’

  ‘Can’t you approach the army directly?’ asked Silva.

  ‘I thought about that. But tell me, how much luck do you think I’ll have? A woman, asking for the military record of a man like Lal, a man who served his country and went on to serve a British VIP whose murder is now front-page news?’

  ‘I see your dilemma,’ said Silva. ‘Well, there’s more than one way to skin a camel. Leave it with me. It shouldn’t be too difficult to get hold of what you need.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Persis. She had known that Silva, with his network of contacts in the Indian military, would be able to help. ‘You must come around for dinner soon.’

  ‘I shall,’ he said. ‘But first I have a deadline to meet. I am working on a treatise about the Siege of Cawnpore. Indian soldiers of the Bengal Cavalry rebelled against their East India Company officers. Massacres followed on both sides, with hundreds of civilians, British and Indian, caught in the crossfire. In one incident almost two hundred European women and children were murdered by rebel sepoys and stuffed into a well in Bibighar. The British responded with the wholesale burning of villages. A particularly bloody episode.’

  The second errand took Persis to the Victoria Terminus railway station in Fort.

  She parked the jeep down a side street then walked back towards the station, swimming through the crowds clogging the narrow pavement. The station loomed ahead of her. Built in the Gothic revivalist style, a vision of turrets and pointed arches, the place had always conveyed a sense of Britishness that she found increasingly offensive with the passing years.

  She was not alone in her thinking.

  A statue of Queen Victoria sat beneath the clock, gazing out over what had once been her dominion. There was already talk of having it removed.

  She supposed that this was simply another demonstration of how the relationship with the country’s erstwhile rulers had entered a state of flux. Throwing off the yoke of oppression was not the same thing as cutting ties. As the Deputy Home Minister had pointed out, economic necessities bound India to Britain, and would do so for a long time to come. And then there were the memories, shared memories, many of them painful, but not all.

  She remembered Emily, dear Emily, one of the few to have readily befriended her at school.

  Emily had loved the bookshop almost as much as Persis. Her parents, civil servants both, had frequented the place, Persis’s father wearing their presence with a grace he refused to accord most Brits who came into the shop. At such times, the ghost of her mother would loom large.

  But she had never thought of Emily as one of those Brits.

  One day the pair of them had been wandering back from school and had come across a white policeman mercilessly beating an elderly Indian in the street. The sight had shocked Persis to a standstill. That a young man might rain blows down upon a frail, grey-haired woman seemed the stuff of nightmares. What sort of moral code could justify such villainy?

  Emily had not hesitated.

  She’d charged across the road and accosted the man. His face, red with exertion, had seemed shocked at the very notion that his actions might be challenged, let alone conceived of as morally repugnant. They had helped the withered old woman to a nearby hospital, Emily paying from her own purse for her treatment. It had been a defining moment for Persis, one of the reasons she had taken to the movement, and later made the decision to join the police force.

  In the years that followed, the four of them – Persis, Dinaz, Jaya and Emily – had attended many rallies together, Emily sometimes forced to go in disguise, dressed in a head-to-toe burka; not every Indian welcomed a white face at such gatherings.

  It had been a shock when Emily had announced that her parents had decided to return to London in the summer of 1946. With the end of the war, the situation had become untenable. Protests had become a daily occurrence, the threat of violence against Britishers
ever present.

  They had parted at the docks, a farewell of restrained emotions. Emily and her family had found passage aboard a troopship bound for Liverpool, one of a thousand families departing the country, a cross-section of those who had made their lives on the subcontinent: missionaries, office workers, tea planters, dressmakers, telephonists, typists, engineers and nurses. Some had been in the country five generations.

  They were as Indian as Persis.

  She quickly made her way to the station’s administrative offices, a journey that took longer than she had imagined. Then again Victoria station served as the headquarters for the Grand Peninsular Railway and was the principal exit point for those travelling from Bombay to virtually every part of the country.

  Here she met the man in charge, a Subosh Mazumdar. Mazumdar, an ageing walrus with a moustache that seemed to weigh down his head, absorbed her request. He took the ticket stub that she had found in Herriot’s jacket from her, and peered closely at it.

  ‘We will have to dig into the records,’ he informed her. ‘The serial number and series code should be enough to find the information you are looking for. Give me a day or two.’

  ‘I was hoping you could do this immediately.’

  He grimaced as if a fishbone had become stuck in his throat. ‘The station is running at peak capacity, madam. Searching for a single ticket log will take time. I cannot spare the manpower.’

  She arrived home to discover a small crate waiting for her on the dining table. Her father sat in the corner of the room, by the Steinway, a book in hand, reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose. The Steinway, a polished black affair, was a relic, gifted to Sam’s father by a Yorkshireman who’d left the country in a hurry during the Quit India years. The British had surrendered many pianos to India during their retreat.

  Persis had learned to play as a child. Her mother had taught her; she had inherited Sanaz’s musical chromosome, but with her passing the music too had died.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, setting down her cap.