Doosra (6 page)

I
t had been a long day. More than the case — though the case, Rita could tell, would turn out to be a real pig very soon — the routine of being in the office for long hours once again had drained her. Chugalugging a generous sip of Jim Beam from the bottle she went up for a shower.

As she changed after the shower the images of blurry film footage that Victor had shown ran thought her mind. She had an eidetic memory. Nothing escaped her mind. Image. Sound. Names. Scent. She was born to be a detective. Something bothered her. Had she missed anything that could provide a clue to the person in the elevator? Sishir Singh was definitely an alias. One didn't need to be a Sherlock to tell her that. But that was logic, not evidence. No one would have given their real name at the hotel where they were about to steal diamonds. Which also meant that the perpetrator had access to fake documents. Not an impossibility either.

Catching a criminal is like one side playing the game with ever changing rules. The police have to adhere to the guidelines, the criminal can change course any time: name, identity, MO...

Jim was beginning to take the weariness of the long day away. It was only seven and the day was still bright. She thought of going out for a bite, but dropped the idea. She didn't know anyone close by to go out to dinner with, and sitting in a restaurant alone was not something she was in the mood for.

She knew Jim, her best friend, was always there for her but she also understood that a few more intimate kisses from the bottle and he could easily become her worst enemy. She had seen her own dad — an alcoholic, though he never admitted it. Who does? — kissing the enemy to death. History, it is often quoted, had a penchant of repeating itself by calling itself genetic and Rita knew when to stop. Good night Jim. She had three drinks and went into the kitchen to raid the refrigerator.

She thought about reading some material that Victor had given, but she was exhausted and it was the weekend.

Tomorrow,
she promised herself and switched off the lights.

***

Birds sang. The sun rose. The leaves were still green. The ground was wet from the overnight showers. Rita was savouring the breakfast of eggs, toast and baked beans when her mobile rang. She finished the large morsel in her mouth as the caller ID showed up: Commissioner Saxena. She looked up at the clock: 6:30. Wow, impressive
Sexy!

'Good morning, sir.'

'A very good morning to you too, DCP Ferreira. I was wondering if you had some time to update me on the Belgian case.'

There was hardly any update. All they had had was the briefing from Victor less than twenty-four hours ago.

'We've just got the files now, sir. Give us a day or two please.'

'No worries. When you're in office please come by to see me.'

The line was dead before Rita could respond.

***

No one was in office when she arrived at work; it was still only 7:30. Coffee in hand, she settled in her office and took out the video footage DVD and put it in the computer.

After so thoroughly planning the operation how had the murderer missed this lone camera in the elevator car?

Next she slid the red box file towards her. It was indeed bulky. But unlike body weight, in a murder investigation it was better to have more than not enough. As always, Rita's next step was to discern what fat to cut when she didn't know what could be rewarding and what was unavailing. But because there weren't enough hours in the day ever, every detective had to make a choice based on the preponderance or imbalance of evidence. Oh yes, of course everything could go wrong with that choice. She sifted through the papers for over an hour. Reports. Memos. Tips. Witnesses consulted and cross-referenced; alibis corroborated by friends, associates and acquaintances. Most of the documents were what Victor had narrated, the documents were detailed, analysed and evaluated. Everything hinted it was a big case for Belgium where homicide rates were low and they took them seriously.

Subsequently, she focussed on photographs and maps of the crime scene. Jogani lay in a pool of congealed blood. The hotel personnel only became aware of the murder when Jogani didn't respond to the early morning alarm he had requested to catch the flight to Mumbai that he was booked on. The hotel employees obviously got worried when the cabbie arrived and Jogani had neither responded to the alarm nor come down to settle his bill. They called the police.

The night porter who had attended to Jogani when he had come down for a fake call from reception had given his account to police. He explained to the police that Jogani appeared stressed and that he had raced back once he found out that no one from the reception had actually called him down.

That was unquestionably a ploy to get the quarry out of his room.

Adding up his evidence and the postmortem report, the Belgian police had narrowed down the time window of death. Then the time stamp on the concealed camera in the elevator confirmed the
lone
murderer leaving.

The time of death was thus further contracted down to a precise period between those fifteen and twenty minutes. There was nothing in the crime scene photos that gave anything away. The police had summed up that the bag was missing. Two things fascinated Rita in the documents. One that the lock on the entrance door to Jogani's hotel room had been tampered with, and second — even more bizarre — the safe in Jogani's room had been replaced with another one. The police had discovered the original safe from the room in the adjacent room, which was one of the three rooms booked by Mr Sishir Singh. Victor had forgotten to mention that Sishir had booked three rooms, but no one in the hotel had seen any other guests but him the whole time.

How was that possible? Did they manage to give a slip to the receptionist? Surely, they should have been caught on the solitary camera in the elevator at some point or did they never use the elevators at all?

The floor plan of the hotel strongly suggested that whoever was along with Sishir Singh in accomplishing the caper had used the fire escape, the stairs that were at the opposite end of the lifts and they had — for health and safety reasons — an unlocked exit directly leading to the street.

Even transcripts of the interviews carried out by Belgian police had been included in the box file, which Rita decided to delve into later. She wanted to mull over the info she had consumed so far. Bite sized processing.

Sadly in an investigation, she knew, questions and answers did not come in a sequence. Sometimes you got some answers first that you had no use of. Later came in the questions that bridged the gap. It was like putting the scrabble tiles in the box again and juggling them. You never knew when the winning word would pop out. You had to keep looking at all that you've found before, whenever you got some new material. Put together it might make sense. Conscious of all that, she made mental notes as she processed the gen she captured from the file. Jogani must certainly have friends and business associates in Mumbai. And what about his home, his company, his employees? Did he operate alone? Shouldn't someone in Mumbai be the first point of contact? Perhaps someone knew Sishir Singh or someone who looked like the guy who called himself by that name. That the burglary was the principal plan and unfortunately culminated in murder was one theory — most palpable one too, possibly — but there could be numerous other motives for murder. Finding diamonds in the room might have been like winning a lottery without buying the ticket though it didn't appear so: the murder might have been an improvised plan, the break-in was indeed thought-out. Well thought-out. Eliminating Jogani with a gun didn't require changing the safe in the room or tampering the lock of the hotel room; it could have been accomplished by whacking Jogani in the street.

But she was at a major disadvantage she realised. Most homicide investigations started with a dead body. Here they had a picture of one. She looked at the photographs of Ron Jogani's stiff again.

Rita concluded that someone had followed Jogani to the hotel. It was mere gut feel: nothing to support it, nothing to dismiss. How else would someone have known about the diamonds, the precise hotel room number and the call that was made to Jogani in the middle of the night to get him out of the room? But from where — from somewhere local in Brussels, from Antwerp or did someone trail him all the way from India?

And how had Ron Jogani — carrying diamonds worth millions missed being shadowed? Wouldn't he have taken due care not to divulge his plan? Maybe someone knew the itinerary. And how could someone know that? Every case, in Rita's experience, was a series of endless conundrums. Sometimes, all one needed was to untangle one element and, like the weakest link in the chain, the rest of the mystery was laid bare. Not always, but there was always a good probability.

She was convinced someone evidently knew Jogani's itinerary. The question was: who? And how?

Despite being aware that Sishir Singh was, in all probability, his
nom de guerre,
Rita logged into the central information database to look for Sishir Singh. Dozens of them in Mumbai but none — not a single one — had any conviction or police cases filed against them. They would have to loan this one out to snitches to snoop around. There existed — and always would remain — an ironic symbiosis between the police and criminals. Without criminals there would be no need for the police and without police the criminals wouldn't be in any kind of check. The mutualism didn't end there. Far from it. More often than not snitches were petty criminals at one time if not currently. Having been caught out or being on the police radar after a few warnings, some snitched for favours, some snitched to save their own skin, some others snitched for vendetta or jealously: to let police handle whom they weren't equipped to button down themselves. She went over to the scanner-cum-printer and took a few printouts of the candid shot of the alleged Mr Sishir Singh.

Picking up her Blackberry, she walked around the desk to close the office door and called Senior Inspector Rajesh Nene. She knew she would have to speak to her superiors to engage Nene full time, but she didn't bother waiting for the approvals at this moment.

Rajesh Nene sounded happy to hear from her.

It was a quick conversation and Nene simply wanted a couple of hours before he came in with the list of best snitches for the task at hand.

When Rita put the phone down she was confident Nene would be in her office before the two hours ran out.

The case was all menacing and threatening her now. What with
Sexy
wanting an update in less than twenty-four hours after the team was briefed. But a threat can work two ways: it could either shut you down due to fear or it could concrete your resolve. Until only a few days ago when she had been asked to report at Mumbai, Rita had anticipated she'd need to make a few enquiries — it being a cold case of a homicide in a foreign land — but as she read the file and got to grips with the whole incident, the case had begun to get under her skin. She recognised she wasn't brought back in to nidificate and lay eggs; she was entrusted with a case that carried the national pride. Bring it on
Sexy.
She was ready.

Vikram arrived before Jatin. He had bloodshot eyes that indicated to Rita that the man had been up all night and read each leaf in the copy he had made of Victor's colossal file. She could have asked him to write an exam and he would have passed. There was no question in Rita's mind that part of her success was due to the dedicated and loyal team she had.

'I am confident you've read the file cover to cover,' Rita mused.

'You're correct, ma'am.'

'I have a meeting with Mr Sanjay Saxena first thing this morning. He wants an update.'

'Already?' Vikram seemed as surprised as she was when
Sexy
had asked for it.

She just rolled her eyes. 'He's the boss.'

'Anything you need from me for the meeting?'

'No, I guess it will only be a preliminary one with him to outline what we know so far and what chances we have in cracking an old case like this before he goes ahead and communicates to the powers that be.'

'What time is the meeting?'

'As soon as he's in.'

'He's in. I saw his car when I came in.'

'OK, here I go.' She got up and walked out from behind her desk, out of her office and towards the elevator.

Rita was a Goan, Portuguese ancestry, born a Catholic, but she was a deist — she believed that God or the higher power did not intervene with the functioning of laws of nature. He wasn't there to get you the next promotion or invoke rainfalls or stop fires or accidents or murders or burglaries or to help catch the perpetrator or solve office politics or save you from
Sexy's
wrath or questions. That wasn't
His
role. She looked at her watch. It was nine when she walked into
Sexy's
opulent office and offered a proper salute.

Sanjay Saxena, the Commissioner of Mumbai Police, of course, had asked her to see him this morning.
Sexy,
customarily, didn't ask for people to do something because he didn't need to; he just demanded what he wanted. He had been a right arse when Rita had taken up the case of Mumbai's first serial killer, and had shown no signs of warming up to a female IPS officer up until she cracked the tangled case. Since then, despite Rita's attempts to include her line manager,
Sexy
repeatedly disregarded the chain of command and involved her directly in cases that weren't even remotely connected to her. And he had, once again, asked her to see him without Joshi, her immediate supervisor.

Sexy,
like his several generations of forefathers, had been born with a complete set of silver crockery in his mouth. Educated at the prestigious Doon School, his English teacher had made him absorb the entire dictionary. Ergo, his communication was always peppered with some of the biggest words there were in the language; adjectives and adverbs he hurled at his subjects to forever stretch their vocabularies.