Midnight at Malabar House (Inspector Wadia series)

by Khan, Vaseem

  Quickly, she outlined the reasons for her doubt. Why would the man wait to be confronted if he was going to confess so readily? Not even a whimper of protest or denial. Why smuggle the trousers out? It was a strange thing to do.

  Seth pulled off the napkin and wiped at his mouth. He had just lost his appetite. ‘Let me respond: why would an innocent man confess to murder?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re familiar with Occam’s razor, no doubt?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And yet you prefer not to accept what is in front of your eyes.’ He sighed irritably. ‘The man held a grudge against the British. He found a way into Sir James’s employ, waited until he had the lay of the land, then acted. What is so hard to believe about that? As for the trousers – he took them as a souvenir. Killers have been known to do that.’

  ‘It doesn’t explain why he didn’t confess right away. Or why he offered no resistance when I confronted him.’

  ‘How about this: he wanted an audience. It was a political killing. He waited for the newspapers to work themselves into a frenzy and then, when you confronted him, he stepped forward and said, “Here I am. I did it.” ’

  She hesitated. Seth made it seem so straightforward. Was she being unreasonable?

  ‘I received a call from Tilak,’ Seth continued. ‘He wished me to pass on his personal congratulations. Do you understand what this means, Persis? It’s not every police officer who is commended by the Deputy Home Minister. How do you think he will react if you now insist that Singh is the wrong man?’

  ‘What about the truth?’

  ‘Truth?’ Seth let out a loud bray. ‘Persis, for those in our position, the truth is merely a fortuitous side effect of what we do. You talk about missing trousers? Frankly, I don’t care if those trousers walked out of there on their own.’

  She sensed his past looming over them, the cynicism that had infected him since his fall from grace. Could she accept such a vision of the world?

  She drilled her eyes forward. ‘I request permission to continue with my investigations.’

  ‘And if I do not give it?’

  ‘Then I will continue anyway.’

  His eyes rested on her, and then, to her surprise, he chuckled. ‘You’re quite fearless, aren’t you?’

  ‘Fear has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I cannot give you my blessing, Persis. Not when the commissioner himself will shortly announce that the murder is solved. However, if you should decide to follow up a few loose ends – for the purposes of the official report – I don’t think anyone would begrudge you. You’re going to be a famous woman, Inspector. They will lionise you. Beware. Such adulation comes at a price.’

  Back at her desk she discovered a message written in Birla’s scrawling hand, stating that Augustus Silva had telephoned and wished her to pay a visit to his office as soon as she was able. Birla’s note went on, reporting on his investigation into the Indian engineer killed by crocodiles up in Faridpur. He had spoken over the phone to the journalist who had written the story. The dead man’s name had been Satyajit Sharma. There had indeed been a rumour that he had been involved with a British woman. But there was nothing to suspect her or her father of involvement in his death. The police had attributed the killing to local bandits.

  She pocketed the note, snatched up her cap, and headed for the door.

  As she hit the lobby, she encountered Birla on his way in.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

  ‘Seth has already reassigned me,’ he revealed. ‘I’m working on a very important case.’

  ‘What case?’

  He sighed. ‘Mrs Battachariya is convinced someone is following her around.’

  ‘Mrs Battachariya is senile,’ said Persis.

  He lifted off his cap and scratched at his head. His hair was matted with sweat and clung to his scalp. ‘Mrs Battachariya is also the sister of the Congress MLA for Colaba. She has made his life a misery and so he has generously passed her on to us.’

  ‘I’ve got something much more useful for you to do. But Seth cannot know about it.’

  A gleam of interest entered his eyes.

  ‘Last night I went to meet a man named Adi Shankar. He runs the Gulmohar Club on Churchgate Street. He knew Sir James Herriot; they had recently become acquainted. I want to know more about him. Apparently, he was sitting with the jazz band on the night of Herriot’s death from midnight until I got there. Can you check that out with the bandleader?’

  Birla nodded, scratching a note in his pad. ‘You want me to follow him around?’

  ‘I want you to find out as much as you can. Officially, the case is over. Singh’s confession is a godsend for the top brass. They can draw a line under the affair, try Singh in a kangaroo court, and send him to the gallows.’

  ‘You don’t think he did it?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m not certain,’ she said. ‘But if a man is to be hanged then I believe the least we can do is to be sure we’re hanging him for the right reasons.’

  Chapter 16

  The twenty-minute drive from Malabar House to Bombay University gave Persis plenty of time to reflect on the state of the investigation. Her frustration at Seth began to seep away. A man as compromised as Roshan Seth had long ago narrowed his field of view, until all he could see was what others allowed him to see.

  She dwelt on her interrogation of Singh.

  Something about him, about his confession and the manner in which it had come about – days after the murder – had infected her with doubt.

  She wondered how the papers would react.

  Seth had informed her that Channa had already been in touch for an interview with the detective who had cracked the case. He had asked for Oberoi. She had found her face turning scarlet, her body rigid with fury. Seth explained that Channa had somehow found out that Oberoi had proposed a nationalist as the killer right from the beginning.

  Found out? Persis thought. Or been told?

  Seth had reassured her that she would be named as the lead detective on the investigation. ADC Shukla himself had proposed that she be put forward for a commendation. Persis’s immediate impulse was to decline. Unearned merit was not worthy of a police officer. She did not deserve credit where credit was not yet due.

  The summons from Augustus Silva had directed her to his office at Bombay University. From there they ventured out to the Blue Danube, a coffee shop just yards from the campus, one of half a dozen in the area. The place was packed with students. Persis spotted a group of boys in cricket whites, hair gleaming with Trugel, patent leather Saxones on their feet, sly smiles and slinky moustaches on their faces. They were making eyes at a coven of young girls, casting saucy remarks their way and receiving calculated indifference in return.

  It was a game, one she had refused to play. Flirtatiousness had never been in her nature. The idea of stepping out with wastrels who could barely tie their own laces and whose idea of romance was badly recited couplets from Chaucer was anathema to her.

  There were moments, of course, when she would wonder if that had been a mistake, moments when she was taken by an inexpressible hunger, when the shadows of another life swelled around her. She saw the composition of that other life through a glass, darkly. A man, a partner, an eclipse of the heart. A valve would open inside her and those buried feelings would leak out, upsetting her equilibrium. In such moments, she would hold fast to the central dialectic that ruled her life: good versus evil, justice versus injustice.

  That was enough, for now.

  Silva ordered a brace of coffees, then recounted the results of his investigation into Madan Lal.

  ‘Your man Lal was indeed in Burma, attached to the 50th Parachute Brigade. How much do you know about that battle?’

  ‘Not a great deal.’

  ‘March 1944. It was a major turning point in the South-East Asian theatre of the war. The Japanese attempted to destroy the Allied forces at Imphal. Back then Imphal was the capital
of Manipur, a princely state in India's north-east. The troops barracked there were a mixture of British, Gurkha and Indian battalions. Lal’s Parachute Brigade was conducting advanced jungle manoeuvres north of the city.

  ‘When the Japanese attacked, Lal’s unit suffered heavy casualties. Lal himself was wounded. What happened next is a little hazy. The Japanese troops were bolstered by troops from the Indian National Army. If you recall, these were Subhas Chandra Bose’s men, fighting with the Japanese against British rule, as part of the Azad Hind or Free India movement.’

  ‘Weren’t a lot of their senior officers court-martialled back in 1946?’

  ‘Correct,’ beamed Silva. ‘The so-called Red Fort trials. They ended up dividing public opinion to such an extent that the British had to commute most of the sentences from death to imprisonment. As a footnote, one of the lawyers on the defence team was our dear Panditji.’

  ‘Nehru was on the defence counsel?’

  ‘It wasn’t so long ago that he was one of our most prominent lawyers. It’s what gives his rhetoric such a litigious flavour.’ He smiled. ‘To return to Lal: it seems that while he was stumbling around in the heat of battle, he somehow managed to capture three of Bose’s men. But rather than take them prisoner he ordered them to kneel down, then stood behind them, and put a bullet in the back of each man’s head. The act was witnessed by a fellow soldier who sat on it until after the battle, and then his conscience got the better of him.

  ‘Lal’s actions clearly put the brass in a quandary. Technically speaking, he had killed a trio of traitors. On the other hand, he had broken the rules of engagement. The British are sticklers for that sort of thing.

  ‘The decision was made to court-martial Lal. Somehow Sir James got wind of it. He intervened on Lal’s behalf and managed to get the charges dropped. The witness conveniently recanted his testimony, though a copy of it remains on record.’ He handed her a manila folder. ‘It wasn’t easy getting this.’

  She opened the folder and quickly scanned the papers as Silva sipped his coffee.

  There was a picture of Lal in military uniform, looking younger, every bit as neat as in his later years. She scanned his military record, a history of incremental progress up the chain of command. He had distinguished himself in a previous conflict resulting in a citation for valour, following which he had been raised to the rank of major. She finally came to the account of the incident at Imphal, including the eyewitness testimony of his killing of the three Indian soldiers.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she murmured.

  Believing the question to be directed at him, Silva answered. ‘What it means is that your man Lal is a killer. He murdered three men in cold blood.’

  She understood the implication. If it could happen once it could happen again. Could Lal possibly have had something to do with Sir James’s murder? If so, what would have been his motive? Why would he have turned on a man who had saved his life, a man he held up as a friend and mentor? A man with whom he had, according to one witness, fought on the night of his death.

  She picked up a list of names. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A list of all the men in Lal’s unit.’

  She scanned the list – and was immediately struck by a trio of names near the top. Madan Lal and two JCOs – Junior Commissioned Officers: Subedar Maan Singh and Subedar Major Duleep Gupta. She recalled that Sir James’s housekeeper, Gupta, had told her that her husband had died in the war. His name had been Duleep. Both names were common on the subcontinent, but this had to be more than a coincidence.

  She flicked through the folder. Silva had been thorough. The documents included enlistment photos of the men in the unit.

  There was no doubt. Maan Singh was one and the same.

  There was a note next to Duleep Gupta’s entry: K.I.A. Killed in action.

  In fact, Gupta had been killed on the same day that Lal had gone berserk. Had the death of his comrade sent Lal over the edge?

  ‘I need to know more about these two men,’ she said, tapping the pictures of Maan Singh and Duleep Gupta.

  Silva smiled. ‘I took the liberty of tracking down the unit’s commanding officer. He’s retired now, lives not too far from here as a matter of fact. He has agreed to speak to you.’

  She found the address without difficulty, a tenth-floor flat on Chowringee Lane, just five minutes away. Lieutenant-Colonel Ram Krishnan was white-haired at fifty-eight, walked with a cane, and lived with his son and daughter-in-law. He had retired honourably, at the end of the Second World War, but now had little to do except read the newspapers and complain about the state of the country’s politics.

  They sat on the balcony, Krishnan basking in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘Yes, I remember them. The three of them were fast friends. Lal, Singh and Gupta. Especially Lal and Gupta. When Gupta was killed that day, it hit Lal hard. They asked me at the court martial whether Lal had ever exhibited behaviour like that before. Conduct unbecoming. I told them no. But the truth was that Lal had a coldness inside him. A killer’s heart. Believe it or not most soldiers don’t have that.’

  ‘What about Maan Singh? What kind of man was he?’

  ‘A born foot-soldier. Too simple ever to climb the ranks, but there’s no one you’d rather have next to you in a scrap.’

  ‘Did he have a killer’s heart, like Lal?’

  ‘No. Not in that way. He was an honourable man. Honour meant more to him than anything. That’s why he left the army, in the end.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The men found out about something from his past. Something about his family. Just rumours. It was enough for Singh. He said he couldn’t serve with men who didn’t respect him. Quit. He’d completed his terms of engagement, so he was entitled to leave. I could have forced him to stay, but there was no point. I looked into his eyes and saw a broken man. To this day I cannot figure it out. What could break a man like Singh?’

  ‘What were the rumours about?’

  ‘I don’t know. When I asked the men, they clammed up. All claimed not to know. After Singh left, I chalked it down to a twist of fate, and forgot about it. Until your friend Silva called me out of the blue.’

  She paused, then: ‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’

  His eyes crinkled. ‘Well, there was the fact that Gupta was married to Singh’s sister.’

  She felt a current run through her. ‘Lalita Gupta is Maan Singh’s sister?’

  ‘Lalita. Yes, I believe that was her name.’

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’

  ‘No. Though Gupta did show me a picture taken on their wedding day. Pleasant-looking woman.’

  Persis described Sir James’s housekeeper.

  ‘Yes, that sounds like her,’ agreed the former soldier. ‘Though without a photograph I couldn’t swear to it.’

  Questions continued to plague her as, almost an hour later, she found herself navigating the jeep along the congested Sassoon Dock Road. At this time of day, vehicles – mainly trucks – moved in a noisy throng to and from the docks, ferrying out the last of the day’s catch before the final dregs of daylight fell from the sky.

  Madan Lal, Maan Singh and Mrs Gupta. The three of them, at the heart of a nexus of lies. If not outright untruths then, at the least, lies of omission.

  But why? Why had Lal kept their prior relationships hidden? Why not just be open about the fact that Singh had once served with him, and that Mrs Gupta had been the wife of their fallen comrade as well as Singh’s sister?

  If anything, this reinforced her belief that there was more to the story of Sir James’s death than Singh’s confession would have her believe.

  She had driven to Laburnum House but had found both Lal and Gupta absent. She had left a message, then turned the jeep around and come . . . here.

  She parked not far from the fish market that had been a fixture on the docks for decades; the stench of fish extended for miles around. In her youth, she had accompanied her father on numerous exped
itions to the Sassoon Docks, named after David Sassoon, the one-time leader of the Jewish community in Bombay. Whatever romantic notion Persis might have entertained about the place had swiftly vanished. The docks were no place for the weak-stomached. Overrun by cutthroat Koli fisherwomen, the narrow lanes awash with the blood and guts of dismembered sea creatures, she remembered those visits as loud, volatile and, at times, overwhelming.

  God knows what had possessed Archie Blackfinch to set up home here.

  She had tracked the Englishman down to a fifth-floor apartment further along the Sassoon Dock Road. Not quite far enough to avoid the smell radiating from the docks, but far enough away to escape the mercantile madness.

  He opened the door to her wearing a wide-collared sports shirt in windowpane checks, which he had rolled up to the elbows, and a pair of blue plaid trousers that clashed horrendously with the shirt. Such was the garishness of the outfit that it was a moment before she could speak.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she said. ‘But I wished to speak to you about the case. May I come in?’

  ‘No need to stand on ceremony,’ he said breezily. ‘Please.’ He waved a hand expansively into the space behind him.

  She entered and heard the door close behind her. A sudden nervousness fluttered through her chest. It had been a long time since she had last been inside a bachelor’s apartment.

  It was surprisingly neat. Clean floors, freshly painted walls, the absence of clutter on any of the surfaces. The colours were muted – whites and greys for the most part – but everything was pristine, tidy and in its place. Her limited experience of men, particularly the solitary kind, was that their habits tended to the slovenly. Clearly, Blackfinch was not of that ilk. Her eye was drawn to a bookshelf, the books neatly ordered, alphabetically, she noted, and in strict progression of height within those alphabetic rankings. A maniacal attention to detail. What had he made of the feverish tumult that characterised the Wadia Book Emporium? she wondered.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’