Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  ‘With sensational results on both counts. When was the last report you got from the guy?’

  ‘Days ago. Don’t ask me how many. I’ve more or less given up waiting for him to call.’

  ‘Then I think it’s time we had an update,’ Ben said.

  ‘Want me to call him?’

  ‘I was thinking we could drop by his office and say hello. You know where it is?’

  ‘I’ve only been there, like, eight times. I think I can remember the way.’

  ‘Then let’s pay Mr Prajapati a visit.’

  The offices of the P. P. Detective Agency were on the second floor of a dirty building on a busy pedestrianised precinct in Janakpuri District Center, between a shop advertising LAPTOP AND DESKTOP REPAIRING and a boutique selling cheap knockoffs of designer-name jeans.

  ‘Classy location,’ Ben said. ‘If this guy’s the top private eye in the city, imagine the worst.’

  ‘He did come highly recommended,’ Brooke said. ‘He spent thirty years with the Delhi police.’

  ‘What better recommendation is there?’

  She led the way inside the building. ‘I always take the stairs. The lift makes creaking sounds like it’s going to stick. And it smells as if someone’s been keeping chickens in there.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Ben thought the whole building and the street outside smelled pretty bad too, but maybe he just hadn’t been in the city long enough to get used to the ambient aroma that hit the olfactory sense like a mixture of pollution, sewage, sweat, cooking fumes, decaying vegetation, tropical flowers and incense that had been mulched up together in a giant cauldron and stewed for a couple of thousand years.

  One thing he was getting used to, and fast, was Brooke’s company. The tension between them had melted away and being with her felt more natural and comfortable with every passing minute they spent together. He had to keep reminding himself not to touch her as they walked.

  On the second floor a placard outside the offices read proudly, The Prateek Prajapati Detective Agency specialises in cases relating to anonymous letters and suspicious telephone calls, pre-matrimonial investigations, divorce and adultery, kidnapping and missing persons, extortion, financial crimes and cheatings. Fully licensed and qualified.

  ‘A man of many and varied talents,’ Ben commented. Brooke knocked, walked in, and he followed her through the door. The small reception area was full of artificial plants, with a desk in one corner behind which sat a small, middle-aged Indian woman in a bright blue sari. Opposite the desk was a cramped waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs. A pair of internal doors led off from the reception area, one marked BATHROOM and the other plain. The receptionist frowned at them over the top of a Dell monitor as they approached the desk. The plastic monster plant next to her needed dusting. If there was any air conditioning in the building it didn’t seem to be working.

  Brooke rested her hands on the desk and gave the woman a polite smile. ‘Brooke Ray, to see Mr Prajapati? It’s concerning the case of my husband, Amal.’

  The receptionist checked her screen, spent a moment tapping and scrolling, frowned a bit more and said, ‘You do not appear to have an appointment. Mr Prajapati is very busy. If you do not have an appointment he cannot see you right now.’

  Ben said, ‘Oh, I think he’ll see us.’ Before the woman could react or hit the intercom button on the phone in front of her, he stepped towards the unmarked door and pushed straight through without knocking.

  Delhi’s top private detective was lounging on a sofa with his feet up and a sports magazine in his hands. He was a large, jowly man in his late fifties, with jet-black thinning hair and a bushy moustache that were obviously dyed. Dark rings around his eyes gave him a panda-like appearance and his mound of a belly strained at his shirt buttons. At Ben’s sudden entrance he launched the magazine up into the air and almost fell off the sofa in alarm.

  Brooke stepped into the office behind Ben and stood with her hands on her hips. ‘It’s good to see you so hard at work finding my husband, Mr Prajapati.’

  Jumping to his feet, Prajapati straightened his rumpled shirt and crooked tie and smoothed his hair and began to bluster indignantly about the need to make an appointment, and how he was just taking a short break in a hectic day. Ben eyed the remains of a large takeout lunch on the desk. Pretty obvious how the busy super-sleuth had spent the last hour or so.

  Brooke said, ‘I’ve been hoping you might call to keep me updated on how your enquiries are progressing. Perhaps you lost my number? Anyhow, I just happened to be in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d stop by.’

  Prajapati shot a deeply suspicious glare at Ben, pointed a thick finger his way and said, ‘Who is this person?’

  ‘I’m your new assistant,’ Ben said. ‘Come to work with you on the Ray kidnap case. It’s a real honour for me.’

  ‘I have no need for an assistant.’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to manage on my own,’ Ben said. ‘Shame.’

  Brooke said, ‘This is Mr Hope. He’s travelled to India to assist me, doing what it seems nobody else here is willing or able to do. That is, to find my husband and bring him home safely.’

  More collected now, Prajapati walked over to the desk and perched on its corner with one leg dangling, like a link of sausage. He laced his fingers together over his belly and looked at Ben with flat cop eyes. ‘You are wasting your time, my friend.’ To Brooke he said, ‘Mrs Ray, please let me remind you that locating your husband is, under the circumstances, a very difficult business.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. That’s why I hired you, on the understanding that you were the best person for the job. Are you saying you’ve made no progress at all? And have you heard anything from the police inspector in charge of the investigation? Because I haven’t. All this waiting for the phone to ring starts giving you the strangest idea that nothing’s actually happening.’

  ‘In fact I was intending to call you today,’ Prajapati replied gravely. ‘Mrs Ray, you need to prepare yourself for bad news. Please, take a seat.’ He motioned at the pair of fabric director’s chairs the other side of the desk.

  Brooke didn’t sit down. Her face turned pale and her jaw tightened. ‘You’ve heard something. You’re going to tell me that Amal’s been found dead. Is that what you’re going to tell me?’

  Prajapati shook his head, and his jowls wobbled. ‘No, Mrs Ray. It isn’t. Your husband has not been found. But in such a case as this, where no ransom demand has been made and the motivation for the crime is obviously something other than financial, a revenge attack perhaps, the chances of a happy outcome are very slight. Very slight indeed. That is why I say you should prepare yourself. The call I had been intending to give you, which now you are here in person is no longer necessary, was to inform you that after much consideration I am resigning from this case. Because in my professional opinion it is almost one hundred per cent certain that your husband is no longer alive, and at this stage we are looking for a corpse.’

  Chapter 14

  But Prajapati was wrong. Because Amal Ray was still very much alive. For the moment, at any rate – though for how much longer, he was too petrified to contemplate.

  Amal could still see the last look on Brooke’s face as they ripped him away from her. Could still hear the echo of his own voice yelling, Run, Brooke, run! Then the van door slamming shut, and the start of the nightmare journey into the unknown. He remembered the van stopping. Sounds, footsteps, voices. Then a sudden flood of harsh light making him blink as the back door was wrenched open. A glimpse of brickwork in the background: had he been taken to a garage or a warehouse of some kind? Then the terrifying sight of one of his kidnappers, the one in charge, his face masked like a terrorist’s, coming up to him with a hypodermic needle in one gloved hand and an evil glint lighting up his eyes.

  After that, there was a gaping hole in Amal’s memory. Whatever sedative they’d pumped into him could have rendered him unconscious for minutes, hours, he had no idea. The next thin
g he’d known was awakening in this place, head aching, feeling nauseous and utterly afraid.

  And he’d been here ever since. Long enough to have examined every square inch of his strange new environment a hundred times over.

  His prison was thirty feet square, a figure he’d paced out accurately over and over, back and forth and round and round like a zoo animal in a caged enclosure. It was lit by a single naked bulb in the middle of the ceiling that burned around the clock, so that it was impossible to tell night from daytime hours and hard to keep track of the days passing. His captors had taken away his watch, along with his wallet and shoes. Why the shoes, he’d wondered at first. Maybe to make it harder for him to run away, in the unlikely event that he managed to escape this place. Or maybe to prevent him from hanging himself with his laces.

  Not that there was anywhere to hang himself from. The ceiling was more than six feet above his head, and the three silver duct pipes that ran across it from end to end were too far up to reach. The ducts looked industrial, making him wonder about the kind of building he was in, and what might be above the ceiling or beyond the four walls that surrounded him. The walls felt like solid concrete, and no matter where he tapped and thumped he could produce no hollow sounds. They could have been a mile thick.

  The absence of any windows and the feeling of total insulation from the outside world had led him to conclude early on that he was below ground. Deeper down than a basement. More like a cellar, or some kind of underground bunker. The flight of metal steps that led steeply upwards to the only entrance tended to confirm that impression.

  But the cellar wasn’t some dank, stinking hole full of rats and filth. Amal understood that his captors had gone to certain lengths to make his stay here reasonably comfortable. The walls had been painted white to reflect more light, obviously in a hurry, judging by the crude job that had been made of it, and obviously not long ago, judging by the smell of fresh paint. The bed they’d provided for him was narrow and basic, like an old-fashioned hospital bed with a creaky iron frame, but the mattress and pillow were new. He had a plastic chair to sit on, and a small table, which, likewise, he understood were luxuries not necessarily afforded to most people in his predicament.

  The same was also true of his toilet arrangements. His kidnappers could have just given him a bucket. Instead, they’d provided him with his own little separate bathroom, albeit a makeshift affair set up in the corner opposite his bed and consisting of two plywood sheets for walls and one for a ceiling, with a doorway sawn out. Inside the bathroom was a chemical toilet, a plastic basin on a stand and a water pipe that was cemented into the wall and protruded a couple of feet with a tap attached to its end. He wouldn’t have drunk the water, but it seemed okay to wash with. He had a toothbrush and toothpaste and spare rolls of toilet paper. They’d even left him some pieces of cheap soap and a couple of towels.

  All the comforts a man could wish for, apart from the basic freedom to walk out of here.

  The cellar door was the one feature that kept reminding him of what this place truly was, a prison cell. It was solid timber, not ply. No visible hinges, no interior handle, no keyhole, no peephole or window. Only a small trapdoor hatch near its base, about eight inches square, which looked to Amal like a cat flap, except it opened only outwards. It was too small for him to poke his head out of, on the rare occasions when it wasn’t bolted shut, which was when his unseen captors brought him his meals and drinks.

  His diet consisted mainly of tinned beans and stewed meat, warmed up and served on disposable paper plates with a plastic fork and spoon to eat with. Each meal came with a litre bottle of water, more than enough to keep him hydrated with a little left over for brushing his teeth. All of which seemed like an excess of consideration on the part of his kidnappers, who seemed oddly prepared to go the extra mile for his wellbeing. They’d even provided him with a fresh T-shirt and jogging bottoms the right size, enabling him to change out of the stale clothes he’d been wearing the night of the kidnap. They were evidently intent on keeping their prisoner adequately nourished, reasonably healthy and clean. For which he was thankful, under the circumstances. But why?

  It was the coffee that perplexed him the most. It was served in paper cups along with his food and water. Instant decaf, lots of milk, lots of sugar. Exactly how he drank it at home.

  How on earth could they possibly know that?

  Amal couldn’t shut those bewildering questions out of his head. He’d sit for hours by the hatch, waiting for it to open so he could scream through the hole, ‘WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?’

  But he never got the chance, because the trapdoor only ever seemed to open when he was sleeping. He’d awaken, look up the steps and there would be his next meal waiting for him by the locked hatch. He’d shuffle up the steps to collect it, then shuffle back down to his living quarters, slump in his chair at the table to go through the motions of refuelling his body, then carry the empty plate and cup back up to the hatch when he’d finished. Next time he awoke, they would be gone.

  With no chance of escape and nothing else to do, Amal had had no choice but to settle into the mind-numbing routine of eat, sleep, pace his cell, wear himself out fretting, and then fall into his rumpled bed to try to lose himself once more in sleep. His mind felt so scrambled and befuddled that he feared he was losing his grip on reality. In the more lucid intervals between spells of anguish and dread, he had plenty to think about. And although he had no idea who was keeping him prisoner like this, from the moment he’d been kidnapped he’d had a strong feeling that he knew why this was happening to him.

  It was all about the secret Kabir had told him. What else could it be? By its very nature, it was the kind of thing that could get people into terrible trouble. That much had already proved true for Kabir himself.

  It was on the third day of his incarceration, as far as he could tell, that Amal’s suspicions had been confirmed. And from that moment, his nightmare had truly begun.

  Chapter 15

  Brooke was visibly upset after the visit to Prajapati. As they drove away she was angrily saying, ‘What’s he talking about? A revenge attack? Revenge for what? What has Amal ever done to anyone? He’s the gentlest person I’ve ever known. This summer we found a baby bird injured in the garden. It must have fallen from a nest and been mauled by a cat. Amal had to put it out of its misery. He was inconsolable for two whole days afterwards. That’s the kind of man he is. So what’s this idiot saying about a revenge attack?’

  Ben replied, ‘Maybe he thinks the brothers were into something.’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Into what?’

  ‘Something illegal, presumably. Something that would entail running with a bad crowd. And invite certain risks and reprisals, even if they were only peripherally involved.’

  ‘Crime? Are you serious?’

  ‘There is the matter of the gun,’ Ben said. ‘I mean, who keeps a nine-millimetre pistol handy by their bedside unless they reckon they have good reason to need it?’ He shifted in the driver’s seat and felt the hard lump of the Browning trapped against the small of his back.

  Brooke turned in her seat to stare at him, incredulous. ‘You actually think that?’

  He shrugged. ‘It had crossed my mind.’

  ‘Then you’ve got your head up your arse just like Prajapati, and I’m the only one who can see things properly. Jesus Christ!’

  ‘I said it crossed my mind. I didn’t say it stayed there very long. Got to consider every possibility, Brooke. Even if it’s just trying it on for size to tell what doesn’t fit.’

  Brooke threw herself back in her seat and closed her eyes. Ben fished in a pocket for his pack of Gauloises, tapped one out and lit it, rolled down his window to let the smoke out and went on driving in silence.

  After a pause Brooke said in a softer tone, ‘I’m sorry I lashed out at you just then. It was wrong.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. It’s that id
iot and the things he said. He made me so angry.’

  ‘Maybe I should have shot him. We could go back, if you like.’

  Brooke gave just a flicker of a smile, and fell silent for another long pause. Then she said, ‘The thing is, though, the reason he touched such a nerve is because I must think, deep down, that he’s right.’ It was just like her to analyse everything psychologically, even at times like this.

  Ben replied, ‘You can persuade yourself rationally that Amal’s dead. But do you feel it? Do you believe it in your heart?’

  ‘I’m so tired I don’t know what to believe. What do you think?’

  ‘I think Prajapati seemed very sure of himself, considering he seems to have damn all proof to support his opinion.’

  ‘But what if it’s true? How do we know it isn’t?’

  ‘We have no reason to suppose it is.’

  Her lips tightened. ‘You don’t have to humour me, Ben. I’m not a child. Let’s say Amal’s not going to make it out of this. Or he’s dead already, like Prajapati says. What then?’

  ‘The usual things. You’d bury him, mourn him, and move on. Like everyone does.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean, what then?’

  ‘Then we’d move on to the next phase. The hunt would switch gears and become about finding the people who did it. But it’s too early to start talking this way.’

  ‘And if they could be found? You’ll take them down?’

  Ben looked at her and saw the seriousness in her eyes. She wanted them dead, no mistake. He nodded slowly. ‘You said it yourself, Brooke. Whatever it takes to make this right.’

  ‘You’d do that for me?’

  ‘And for Amal,’ Ben said. ‘He’s my friend too.’

  She reached out and touched his hand where it rested on the wheel. Her fingers lingered for a moment, then she drew her hand quickly away. ‘What about Kabir?’