by Vaseem Khan
Persis introduced the pair, then they followed Bhoomi into the autopsy room, the acrid smell of formaldehyde cancelling out all other odours. On consideration, she preferred it.
‘I have afternoon tea scheduled with one of my potential brides-to-be,’ remarked Bhoomi as he pulled on a bottle-green apron and gloves. ‘Do you think I should tell her what sort of medicine I practise?’
‘No,’ said Persis.
Bhoomi shrugged. ‘I shall trust your judgement. I’m rather inexperienced in such matters.’
He moved to an autopsy table upon which lay a body covered by a white sheet.
Pulling off the sheet, he revealed the truncated cadaver of the woman from the railway tracks. The lower parts of her legs were placed beside the body, making a ghoulish tableau.
She heard Fernandes cough uncomfortably beside her. She doubted he had attended the autopsies of many white females. For that matter, neither had she. The sight of the dead woman, her pale flesh made paler by the overhead lighting, filled her with a sudden sense of desolation.
They waited as Bhoomi’s assistant set up a camera and took photographs of the body, back and front. Bhoomi then painstakingly examined the woman’s outer clothing, blackened by soot from the railway sleepers, before cutting off her dress and bagging it. The naked cadaver was now photographed, followed by measurements of the body’s limbs, scribbled into a notebook.
Next the pathologist went over the body in fine detail, using his fingertips.
Having completed his observations, he went to his bank of instruments.
They waited in respectful silence as he carried out the autopsy, opening up the body with a practised hand, removing the internal organs, weighing and bagging them, and then turning to the head. Making an incision behind one ear, he drew his scalpel across the crown, then peeled back the scalp.
In moments, the brain was exposed, scooped out, weighed, examined, and set aside.
After a while, Persis became aware that Fernandes kept shifting from one foot to the other. She angled her head and saw that sweat glimmered at his temples, even though it was relatively cool in the autopsy suite.
Strange, she thought; she had never pegged the gruff, taciturn Fernandes as lacking the stomach for this sort of thing.
Then again, she hadn’t pegged him for a misogynist either.
The thought angered her and she returned her attention to Bhoomi.
Time crawled on, until finally the pathologist stepped away. His boots clacked on the tiles as he walked to the sink and ran water over his gloves.
When he returned, he rattled off a summary of his findings.
‘This woman did not die on the railway tracks. What I mean is that the cause of death wasn’t the result of trauma and blood loss occasioned by the severing of her limbs. She was dead before she was laid out on those tracks.’
‘Laid out?’ echoed Fernandes.
‘Yes. This woman died from ligature strangulation. Technically speaking, death was the result of compression of the windpipe leading to asphyxia and cerebral hypoxaemia. Her injuries bear this out. The hyoid bone has been fractured, the tongue and larynx are enlarged, and there is conjunctival and facial petechial haemorrhaging.’ He flashed a grim look. ‘Judging from the lack of rope fibres and the width of the ligature markings around her throat, I think some sort of wire was used.’
‘Couldn’t the bruises have come from a suicide attempt?’ Persis asked.
‘If she’d tried to hang herself, the ligature marks would exhibit a raised imprint, pointing in an upward direction as gravity pulled the body downwards.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid this poor girl was murdered. Brutally. And then her body was dumped on the tracks. My guess is the perpetrator laid her out with her neck on the rails, in the hope that the train would disguise his crime.’
Fernandes looked quizzical. ‘Then how is it that the train ran over her at the knees?’
‘Did you notice her dress?’ said Bhoomi, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief. ‘It was torn at the shoulders. I found bite marks on her clavicles and rear deltoids. Tell me, were there any stray dogs in the vicinity?’
Persis’s thoughts flashed back to a pair of eyes glittering in the darkness, and a wolf-like baying. ‘Yes.’
‘My guess is that they tried to drag her off the tracks – take her someplace where they might eat undisturbed. They only partly succeeded before the train came along.’
They contemplated this grisly image as he returned his spectacles to his nose.
‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help us establish her identity?’ asked Persis.
‘By my estimate, this woman was aged anywhere from twenty-three to late twenties. I’m sorry I can’t be more accurate but, with nothing else to go on, morphological determination of age is notoriously difficult. What I can say is that the five vertebrae of the sacrum are fused into a single unit – and that usually happens by the age of twenty-three, hence my lower limit. She was in good physical shape, but had suffered physical trauma in the past. There is evidence of scarring on her back, and a series of cut marks on the inner part of her left thigh. I’ve seen such marks before. My guess is they’re self-inflicted.
‘On her left breast, there’s a burn scar. Faint traces of a tattoo are visible through it – not enough to make out what it is, but enough to tell me she may have tried to get rid of it by scarring herself.’ He grimaced. ‘There’s another five-inch horizontal mark just above the pubic mound. At some point this woman had a C-section – a caesarean birth. This was a woman with a troubled past.’
‘An abusive partner?’ mused Persis.
‘Quite possibly.’
‘This is pure speculation, of course,’ continued the pathologist, ‘but she may have exhibited emotional or mental instability. The cut marks on her thigh might be evidence of self-harm. In which case, being a westerner, she may have visited with a medical professional. You may want to check around. There aren’t many psychiatrists in the city. We’ve always been rather backwards in our thinking about such matters on the subcontinent, tending to believe that mental distress is caused by divine curses, bad karma, and the like. It was only during the Raj that we got our first lunatic asylums – the British established them to lock up soldiers slowly going out of their minds with heat, dysentery, and malaria.’ He paused. ‘Thankfully, things have changed in recent years. In fact, a colleague of mine runs a diploma in psychological medicine here at the college. You might want to check with him.’ He stopped again. ‘There’s one other possibility. Having examined the woman’s sexual organs, I can state that she was very active in that area. In fact, unusually so. Not that I’m suggesting there is any usual frequency . . .’ He tailed off, and coughed.
Persis wondered why men found it so uncomfortable to discuss such matters around her when they seemed perfectly content to be obnoxiously direct about her career.
Bhoomi pushed his spectacles up his nose. ‘I once performed post-mortems on dozens of women who had perished in a gas leak in Calcutta. Brothel workers. This woman exhibits very similar characteristics of long-term trauma to her sexual organs.’
‘Are you saying she was a night worker?’ Fernandes seemed astonished.
‘It’s a possibility. I can’t be certain. She might just have been in a sexually aggressive relationship,’ said Bhoomi.
Persis turned to leave, then remembered something. ‘By the way, do you know what Tuinal tablets are for? It’s for another case.’
‘They’re sleeping tablets – sedative-hypnotics that use a barbiturate base. Very new. They’re manufactured in America by Eli Lilly.’
Back outside, she compared notes with Fernandes. He had been to see Augustus Silva, a military historian who frequented her father’s bookshop. Silva worked at Bombay University, where he taught courses on India’s military past.
‘Silva confirmed what you already told me,’ said Fernandes. ‘He phoned someone in England, a colleague of his. He gave him
a description of the woman, asked him to check if anyone like that had ever worked at RAF Wyton.’
She looked away, at a beggar beseeching a man entering the gate. The beggar was on a trolley. She wondered if it was the same one she’d encountered at the Asiatic Society.
‘I’m going to call him back and give him an updated description,’ continued Fernandes. ‘The photographs that Bhoomi took will be ready soon. I’ll take him those too. Or, at least, one of her face.’
She nodded, unable to fault his suggestions.
Privately, she continued to doubt that the woman had ever worked at RAF Wyton. She knew that all sorts of women had made it into the British war effort but if Bhoomi’s conjecture was correct and she was an escort working in Bombay, it would make such a scenario highly implausible.
She dwelt momentarily on the notion of a prostitute murder. Such crimes were by no means uncommon in a city as congested as Bombay, but the murder of a white escort? She couldn’t recall such a case.
Chapter 10
Erin Lockhart had requested a meeting at her residence, back at the southern tip of the city, a grand bungalow just yards from the Church of St John the Evangelist, better known in Bombay as the Afghan Church. The British had raised the church to commemorate the dead of the First Afghan War and the terrible retreat from Kabul in 1842 that had cost the lives of some sixteen thousand British soldiers and their families, forced to slog through the winter snows of the Hindu Kush in a doomed attempt to reach Jalalabad. Such was the shock of the debacle that the Governor-General of India at the time, Lord Auckland, had suffered a stroke upon hearing the news.
Lockhart’s bungalow was in the Navy Nagar cantonment, an area that housed senior personnel from the Indian Navy. A checkpoint had been established during the war and Persis was forced to present her credentials before entering.
The whitewashed bungalow glittered in the late afternoon sun, a navy pennant flapping from a red-tiled roof in a gentle breeze rolling in off the sea.
She found Lockhart on a wide, lush lawn that sloped down towards a rocky beach. Palm trees made regimented lines either side of the lawn, and a white picket fence marked its furthest boundary. A small white dog yapped after a ball.
The maid that had let her in returned to the porch as Lockhart stood in the sunlight examining an object set on a table before her – a spinning wheel, faded and cracked.
‘What do you think?’
Persis examined the wheel. ‘It’s seen better days.’
‘Wrong,’ said Lockhart. ‘As each day passes, this particular wheel gains value. It belonged to one Mohandas K. Gandhi.’
Like most Indians, Persis knew the story.
In 1932, Gandhi had been imprisoned by the British in Pune. During his incarceration, he had decided to begin making his own thread with a charkha, a portable spinning wheel. What started as a means of passing the time soon became a symbol of the resistance, with Gandhi encouraging his countrymen to make their own cloth instead of buying British cotton.
Now, the wheel was part and parcel of the Mahatma’s legacy.
‘Erin Lockhart,’ said the woman, sticking out a hand.
‘Persis Wadia.’
The American’s grip was firmer than she had expected, her hands rougher than her groomed appearance implied. Lockhart was a small woman, but clearly in good physical condition. She wore a sleeveless white blouse above khaki-brown slacks. Her arms were lean, the muscles of her shoulders sharply defined. Her blonde hair was almost white, contrasting with her tanned face and a splash of red lipstick.
‘I’ve just bought this from Gandhi’s estate,’ she said. ‘If I told you how much it cost, you’d probably faint.’
‘I never faint.’
Lockhart’s dark eyes rested on Persis’s face. ‘No. I don’t suppose you do. You wouldn’t get far as India’s first lady cop if you did, I suppose.’ She smiled. ‘May I offer you something to drink?’
They sat on the porch, drinks in hand – a gin and tonic for Lockhart, a lime soda for Persis. Quickly, she brought the American up to speed. ‘I’m told you were close to Healy?’
‘I was and I wasn’t,’ she replied, cryptically. Persis waited. ‘If you must know, I was sleeping with the man. I suppose that makes us close. But if you want me to tell you what was going on inside his head, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
Persis shifted in her chair. There had been no mention so far of Healy engaged in a personal relationship.
‘We kept it quiet,’ said Lockhart, as if reading her thoughts. ‘Or rather, John preferred to keep his private life to himself.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘At an Asiatic Society talk he gave three months ago. He was quite the most uncomfortable man I’ve ever met. Monosyllabic, no social graces. But the talk was fantastic. He led us through the priories of medieval England in a way I’ve never seen anyone else do. When he spoke about his passion, he was a different person.’
Persis sipped at her soda. ‘What are you doing in India?’
‘I work for the Smithsonian.’ She threw the name out there in typically American fashion, as if there was no possibility that Persis might not have heard of it. Fortunately, she knew quite a bit about the great museum, gleaned mainly from a book she’d discovered in her father’s shop as a teenager: Explorations and Field-work of the Smithsonian Institution in 1937.
The volume had captured her imagination with its account of archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all corners of the globe, in search of treasures to be taken back to the self-proclaimed ‘world’s greatest storehouse of knowledge’.
‘I’m working as part of a mission to catalogue India’s journey to independence,’ continued Lockhart. ‘We’re putting on a big exhibition next year and I’m out here to source exhibits.’
‘Do you think a spinning wheel can really tell you the truth of what we had to do to achieve our freedom?’
Lockhart tapped the side of her glass. ‘I sense hostility. Do you think we’re paying lip service to your struggle? Nothing could be further from the truth. America fought for its own independence from the British. Granted the scale and the history are different, but please don’t believe that I’m some sort of amateur explorer here to steal your soul with my picture box.’ She smiled but there was ice behind it. ‘Look, you want the truth? It’s simple. History needs to be preserved or it decays. In the hands of unscrupulous historians, it becomes malleable. How much of the past that we take for granted is actually true? How much has been exaggerated, distorted, shaped to meet the ends of its chroniclers? I’m here because I want to capture this important moment in your nation’s history. And yes, if that means taking some of your cultural treasures back with me to a place where I know they’ll be looked after and valued, then so be it.’ She raised a hand to still Persis’s protest. ‘Before you get on your high horse, take a look around. India’s cultural monuments are crumbling out of neglect. The British did little to preserve them, and the Indian government has bigger fish to fry.’
Persis bit back an automatic retort. The truth was that Lockhart was right. In the new India, the preservation of history was low on the government’s list of priorities.
She tacked back to the case. ‘When was the last time you saw Healy?’
‘That would be four days ago. We had dinner.’
‘No contact in four days?’
‘We’re not joined at the hip, Inspector. We’re both busy people. We see each other when the need arises, for dinner, a drink. We’re attracted to each other and we act on that impulse whenever we get the itch. But we certainly aren’t mooning around every second we’re apart.’
‘Did he mention anything about the manuscript?’
‘Do you mean did he tell me about his master plan to steal one of the world’s most valuable art treasures? No.’
Persis flushed. The woman was acid-tongued. She resisted the urge to return in kind. She’d been working hard to rein in her naturally combative tendencies.
A good detective needed guile, not anger.
She took out her notebook and showed Lockhart the inscription she had found in his bedroom.
‘You found this behind the mirror?’ Lockhart seemed perturbed. ‘I’ve spent nights in that room. I hated that mirror. And the Cross above it. Did you notice that? It’s almost as if John put it up there to annoy me. I mean, I’m not religious, but no one wants to think of Christ looking down on them while they’re in the throes of passion.’
‘Have you any idea what it means?’
She watched Lockhart’s lips as she read out the inscription. ‘Sundered from Alba’s hearth he came; To beauty’s bay, seeking Sinan’s fame; Enjoined to begg, his labours Empire’s pride; His infernal porta, a King denied; ’Neath Cross and dome, his resting place; Together we await in fey embrace.’ Her eyes rested on the page. ‘It’s a riddle. John loved them. Riddles, crosswords, literary puzzles.’
‘Why would he leave this behind?’
Lockhart’s eyes quickened. ‘It’s a treasure hunt.’
‘Please expand.’
‘I think John has hidden the manuscript and this is his way of leading us to it.’
‘Why would he do that?’ She decided not to mention that she had arrived at a similar conjecture.
‘That I can’t tell you. He must have had his reasons.’ She took up the notebook again. ‘Did you copy this out exactly as he left it?’
‘Yes. Why?’
Her eyebrows bent into a frown. ‘ “Beg” is spelled wrong. Enjoined to begg. John would never make a mistake like that.’
Persis absorbed this, then moved on. ‘Is there anything you can tell me at all that might help?’
She considered this. ‘John was a complicated man. You know he suffered terribly in the war? He was in a POW camp for a long time. I think they tortured him. Not just physically, but mentally. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, crying out. He refused to talk about it, but I knew. Nightmares, the sort that never leave you no matter how far you run.’
