Midnight at Malabar House (Inspector Wadia series)

by Khan, Vaseem

  She hesitated, formality pressing on her lips, but then something rebelled. It had been a long and trying day. ‘Yes. A whisky. Neat.’

  Minutes later they were sitting at the kitchen table, Persis’s peaked cap on the checked tablecloth, Blackfinch hunched over a gin, staring at her with disarming curiosity from behind his spectacles. A fan whirred softly above them.

  ‘I suppose congratulations are in order,’ he began, raising his glass. ‘To the woman who solved the “case of the decade”.’

  She scowled, unable to tell if he was making fun of her. ‘I didn’t solve anything.’

  ‘That’s not what the papers will say tomorrow.’

  ‘You seem like an intelligent man. Then again, my father has always maintained that looks can be deceiving.’ She bit her tongue the moment the words were out of her mouth.

  Blackfinch stiffened, then gave a soft chuckle.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

  He sipped at his drink. ‘I have to confess, I’m not certain what the problem is. I can sense something is bothering you, but . . .’

  ‘Does it not bother you?’ she said sharply.

  ‘You don’t buy it,’ he sighed. ‘Singh’s confession.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘No,’ she confirmed. ‘I do not, as you say, buy it.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Something about Singh’s story doesn’t ring true.’

  ‘A feeling,’ he intoned.

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Are you calling me irrational?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he replied mildly. ‘I’m merely pointing out that if you do not have clear evidence that he is not guilty, then any feeling to the contrary must be based on something other than logic.’

  A silence followed in which Persis’s uncertainty merely grew. She found it difficult to peg the man down. What was he really thinking? What did he really think of her? And why had that question become so important to her?

  ‘There’s a reason I came here,’ she said. She told him about Lal’s past, his connection to Singh and Gupta. ‘Did you know?’

  He seemed shocked. ‘No. I mean I knew he was in the war, but I had no idea about the court martial or his connection to Singh. Frankly, I’d never met Singh or Gupta until the night of Herriot’s death.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, surely you don’t believe Lal had anything to do with Sir James’s death?’

  She offered no reply to this.

  ‘You’ve worked with him before?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Not exactly. When I arrived in India a year ago, Sir James was an adviser to a committee tasked with improving the policing infrastructure. I met Lal at one of the committee meetings. We got talking. I found him to be well informed, charming. He’d spent time in England and had an astute sense of British as well as Indian politics.’

  ‘Did you see him socially?’

  ‘No. Frankly, I’m not much good at that sort of thing. Besides, I had my hands full setting up the lab.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s strange. The currents that run inside people. I’d never have believed Lal capable of the things you say he did in Burma.’ He lapsed into silence, staring at her.

  His scrutiny made her uncomfortable and Persis turned away, pretending to look out of the window. The curtains were open and she had an uninterrupted view to the docks and the sea beyond. Dusk was falling and the mast lights of boats twinkled like fireflies out in the bay.

  She wondered again why he had chosen to live here, in such close proximity to the docks. There was a certain perversity to it at odds with the picture of him that she had begun to form. Her father had told her on innumerable occasions that she had a habit of leaping to judgement. It was a weakness of character, she knew.

  ‘Why are you here, Persis?’ It was as if he had read her thoughts.

  ‘I can no longer rely on assistance from my colleagues at Malabar House. You, however, are independent. I believe that someone from my team is talking to the newspapers. With the case the way it is, I would not want whatever I do next to be broadcast.’

  ‘Is that the only reason you want my help?’

  She blinked. The air had changed in texture. ‘What do you mean?’

  He continued to stare at her, then looked down at his glass. ‘Nothing. I meant nothing.’

  She noticed again the clean line of his jaw; the pleasing disposition of his nose, the small scar above and to the right of his upper lip. And his eyes, the liquid way they held the light, a gentleness in them that complemented his obvious intelligence.

  She found herself on her feet. ‘This was a bad idea.’

  She whirled about and stepped smartly to the door. As she reached for the handle she heard him scrape back his chair.

  ‘If it helps, I could have a look at the trousers?’

  She turned and looked at him, her eyes moving downwards.

  ‘Not my trousers,’ he said. ‘I meant Sir James’s trousers. There might be forensic evidence on them.’

  She hesitated, then nodded curtly, before turning and vanishing into the stairwell.

  Chapter 17

  5 January 1950

  The papers were predictably raucous. Maan Singh’s photograph – a still from an identity card – looked out fiercely from the front page of every broadsheet, his stern gaze seeming to underline the accompanying headlines.

  Murderer.

  Killer.

  The conclusion: Singh, a crazed fanatic, had ended the life of a blameless Englishman, a long-time ally of the subcontinent.

  Malabar House was subdued. Persis’s fellow officers wandered by her desk to offer their congratulations, all except Oberoi, who shot her a sour look. A copy of the Indian Chronicle was prominent on his desk. She knew that it referred, as Seth had warned her, to an early hypothesis by a ‘detective within the investigative team’ that the killing was motivated by a misplaced and belated nationalism.

  Yet a night spent turning over the problem had convinced Persis that the truth lay elsewhere.

  Setting aside Singh’s confession, there was Herriot’s unsettling behaviour in the weeks before his death. By all accounts he’d fallen out with his supposed friend, Robert Campbell. If so, over what? A business deal gone sour? Did the Indian entrepreneur Adi Shankar have something to do with that? He claimed that Herriot was to have become his new partner; yet he also claimed the same of Campbell. Perhaps Campbell hadn’t liked the idea of sharing Shankar with his former business partner. But enough to kill him? It seemed far-fetched.

  What about Madan Lal? Why had he lied about knowing Singh? Or kept hidden the fact that Herriot’s housekeeper was Singh’s sister and the wife of a fallen comrade from his war years? How was he so readily able to swallow Singh’s confession? Surely, the holes in Singh’s story merited further investigation.

  But Lal had washed his hands of the affair, drawing a terse line under matters.

  Her thoughts circled back to a remark Seth had made at the very beginning.

  Why had Lal called Malabar House instead of a more senior branch of the service? She recalled too that Lal and Sir James had been witnessed in heated discussion on the evening of his death. But Lal denied that such an argument had ever taken place. And now she knew that Lal was a man capable of the very darkest crimes. Had, by all accounts, murdered three men in cold blood out in the jungles of Imphal. Herriot had saved him. Lal was indebted to the Englishman. Is that how he had ended up as his aide?

  There was also the matter of Vishal Mistry, the jeweller who had paid Herriot a visit on the night of his murder and who had now vanished. Why had Mistry been visiting Herriot?

  And, finally, there was the investigation by Herriot into crimes committed during Partition. Were the ashes found in his fireplace evidence of destroyed documents from that investigation? If so, who had burned them?

  Persis could not be certain of anything; a quiver full of doubt did not add up to a single solid lead that might overturn the version of Sir James’s death cement
ing into place around her, namely that the Englishman’s manservant, Maan Singh, had murdered his erstwhile employer. He would be condemned, hanged and then consigned to history, a footnote in the great nationalist struggle.

  She knew that she had to speak to Lal, but her calls that morning had gone unanswered.

  She passed a quiet hour re-examining her notes. Nothing new leaped out at her.

  A courier arrived with a letter from the station-master at Victoria Terminus. Inside she found a short note stating that the ticket stub she had found in Sir James Herriot’s jacket had been for a rail journey from Bombay to Pandiala, a small town in the state of Punjab. The train had departed from Bombay on 24 December and returned to the city on 28 December. Travelling to Punjab from Bombay took a day. This meant that Herriot had arrived in Punjab on the 25th and stayed till 27 December before taking the train back. Two days. What had he been doing out there?

  She unlocked her drawer and hauled out more of the Partition files she had brought over from home. Looking through them, she took out the ones pertaining to Punjab, locked the rest away, then moved to the interview room and locked the door behind her.

  It wasn’t until the ninth file that she found her pulse quickening.

  The account was patchy and missing vital details. The witness, unnamed, had been vague about the location, saying only that it was a village near Pandiala. The witness claimed that a local Muslim zamindar – a feudal landowner – together with his entire household, had been murdered in cold blood during the Partition rioting. The murderers were not named, merely described as locals. The family had consisted of fifteen individuals, including the man’s wife, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren and two servants. They had died in a fire that had consumed their ancestral home. The authorities had labelled the fire accidental; the witness insisted it was murder. He also insisted that the true motive for the killing had been theft. The landowner had been looted; a fortune in ancestral jewellery had vanished with the murderers. Here the witness became animated, describing a number of the treasures supposedly taken from the victim. Her thoughts snagged on a description of one of the items, a necklace.

  The description sounded familiar. But she couldn’t place it.

  Why had Sir James been so interested in this case? It was likely that his trip out to Pandiala, just days prior to his death, had been to pursue this matter. Was any of this connected to his death? Or was she simply complicating matters?

  Sighing, she returned to her desk and locked away the files.

  Sub-Inspector Pradeep Birla arrived, chewing on a sandwich. She pulled him to one side.

  ‘I have another task for you.’ Quickly, she explained to him her discovery of the connection between Madan Lal, Maan Singh and Mrs Gupta. ‘I want you to find out more about Gupta.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you going near Lal, and Maan Singh isn’t saying anything right now.’

  ‘I meant why are you continuing to pursue this? We have our killer.’

  She hesitated, then quickly explained her doubts. Birla was possibly the only one at the station who might listen to her with an open mind.

  He put down his sandwich. ‘The man confessed.’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’

  He examined her for a moment then seemed to resign himself. ‘Where do I start? With Gupta, I mean.’

  ‘She told me that she has a son, at a boarding school in Panvel. See if you can track him down.’

  ‘What exactly am I looking for?’

  She hesitated. Should she voice the suspicion that had grown ever since meeting Edmond de Vries? ‘Herriot was a man with no scruples. He used women. I’m curious as to why a man like him would pay for his housekeeper’s son to be educated at an expensive boarding school.’

  Birla made the leap right away. ‘You think it might be his child?’

  ‘It had crossed my mind.’ She paused. ‘By the way, did you find out anything about Adi Shankar?’

  ‘There wasn’t much to find. I visited the agency that brokered the sale of the Gulmohar Club. Shankar bought the place in good faith. All above board. I also went to his home, cornered his driver, asked him a few questions. Shankar doesn’t have any family in Bombay. Enjoys the high life, throws money around, is good to man and beast alike. Well connected, well liked. Frankly speaking, he’s just another wealthy Bombay socialite with too much time on his hands.’

  ‘Did you contact the bandleader? From Herriot’s party?’

  ‘Yes. He confirmed that Shankar was on stage with the band from midnight until you turned up. If you had any suspicions about him, you’ll have to think again. He couldn’t have killed Herriot.’

  Her phone rang.

  ‘Inspector Wadia?’

  The voice was male, gruff.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Inspector Biswas, Colaba station. It is my understanding that you have an interest in the whereabouts of one Vishal Mistry? Or so I have been informed by his family.’

  ‘That is correct. Have you found him?’

  ‘In a way. He is currently at the morgue.’

  She entered the basement of Grant Medical College to the familiar series of pips that began the All India Radio broadcast. ‘This is All India Radio . . . The news read by Mohit Bose.’ She stopped and listened for a moment, as Bose launched into a summary of the Herriot case, ending with the conclusive assessment that his killer, a Sikh by the name of Maan Singh, had murdered the Englishman out of a latent nationalist hostility.

  The broadcast was interrupted as a power cut shuddered through the morgue. Never infrequent, such power cuts continued to inflict upon the city an intermittent inconvenience that some carped was symptomatic of the country’s slide into ruin since the departure of the British. Such sentiments could, in part, be put down to the anti-Congress feeling rising from the middle and feudal classes bracing themselves for the centre’s planned reforms. Many had grown fat on the British teat and Nehru’s lack of empathy had drawn their ire.

  She heard the pathologist Raj Bhoomi cursing in the darkness, the tinkle of steel on concrete, further curses, and then the lights flickered back on.

  She made her way into the autopsy room where she discovered the young pathologist scraping tools from the floor, a half-carved cadaver on the autopsy table. He reacted with surprise to her presence. ‘Inspector Wadia. Did we have an appointment?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I came here for Vishal Mistry.’

  He seemed mystified, then memory caught up. ‘Ah, yes. Elderly gentleman. Knife murder.’

  She hesitated. That, at least, answered one of her questions. ‘Have you autopsied the body?’

  Bhoomi stared at her in stupefaction. ‘You cannot be serious?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Inspector, we have a system here. I cannot just autopsy the first body that arrives through those doors. I will get to Mistry, but it will take a few days. I am backlogged as it is.’

  ‘But you conducted Herriot’s autopsy immediately.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘Because he was British?’

  ‘Because he was important,’ said Bhoomi. ‘And because orders came down from on high.’

  ‘Every death is important. And I am ordering you to carry out Mistry’s autopsy.’

  He gave a gentle smile, as one might to a mentally deficient elder. ‘I’m afraid your authority doesn’t quite cut it.’

  She glared at him. ‘I see. So unless the dog is kicked by its master it will refuse to fetch his slippers.’

  He reddened in the washed-out light. ‘You cannot speak to me like that.’

  ‘Hello! Perhaps I might interject?’

  They both turned to find Archie Blackfinch advancing into the room. ‘Persis, a word, if I may?’

  Still glaring at Bhoomi, she followed the Englishman out into the corridor. She had called him before leaving for the morgue.

  Blackfinch observed her with a look of mild re
proof. ‘You can’t insult a man and expect his cooperation.’

  ‘I’m merely asking him to do the job that he is paid to do.’

  ‘Raj is a fine pathologist. But he’s understaffed and overworked.’ His eyes lingered on her, the set of her jaw, her flashing gaze, her fine nose flared in anger. ‘You’ll have to apologise.’

  ‘Apologise?’ The notion hovered in the air like a wasp.

  Blackfinch nodded. ‘Yes. If you want Raj’s cooperation.’

  When they returned, she stared woodenly into the middle distance. ‘If I have caused offence, it was unintentional.’

  Bhoomi looked somewhat mollified.

  ‘Look, Raj,’ began Blackfinch, ‘this really is important. Persis thinks there might be a connection between the Mistry killing and Sir James’s murder.’

  ‘But Sir James’s murder has been solved,’ Bhoomi protested. ‘She solved it. You both did.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not quite as cut and dried as that. I’m speaking off the record, of course.’

  Bhoomi’s brow became troubled. ‘You have no official sanction for continuing your investigation?’

  Blackfinch gave a disarming smile. ‘None whatsoever.’

  Bhoomi broke into a wide grin of his own. ‘Well, why didn’t you say so? If a rule is worth breaking, then it’s worth breaking properly.’

  An hour later the autopsy was complete. Running his hands under the tap, Bhoomi gave them his analysis. ‘He died of a knife wound to the chest that penetrated the thorax from the seventh left intercostal space beside the sternum and punctured the right ventricle of the heart. Death would have been swift. I cannot be completely certain but the wound profile appears similar to that sustained by Sir James. It may very well have been the same weapon.’

  ‘Where did they find the body?’ asked Persis.

  ‘It’s in the police report,’ replied Bhoomi. ‘I have a copy of it here.’

  He removed his gloves, went into a back office and returned with a copy of the report, reading from it as he walked. ‘About half a mile from his home. On a walking route running through the wooded section at the southern edge of the Bori Bunder maidan. Apparently, he used to walk through there every morning, from his home on Wallace Road, on his way to the Marine Drive promenade. He’d pay his respects to the sea then double back towards his office on Jamshedji Tata Road.’