Doosra (9 page)

'You're right about the location, but whether Mr Jogani's murder was collateral damage to burglary or not is something we're re-evaluating, Anita.'

'No, I'm in town, and though I said I have no feelings left for Ron, I now think I should at least give him a decent send-off. How can I arrange to bring his body back?'

Rita noticed some moisture in the other woman's eyes. Maybe, the hurt of being cheated ages ago was over, maybe she was redeeming Ron. Who knew?

'That's nice to hear. I'll let the Belgian authorities know, and they shall be in touch.'

'Thanks.'

'Where is Mr Jogani's office?'

'He worked from home. The office is one of the smaller bedrooms.'

'We'll need to search the place, especially his computer for anything we can find that might lead us to the murderer.'

'Of course.'

'Have you been in the office yet?'

'Once, yes, but I'm not into computers or diamonds, so I had no reason to rifle through. Happy to let you guys in to search the place, whenever.'

Was there any point in sealing the place now before the team combed the place, bearing in mind that the chain of evidence had already been breached?

'I have some equipment in the car, Jatin.' Rita turned to Jatin who had been sitting quietly jotting notes on his pad all this while. He immediately got up.

'I'll get it.'

'We shall seal the office, at least.' She turned to Anita. 'Anything you remember after we go please call us immediately. The team that comes for the office search will also go through the whole house, just in case there's something that can provide us with any clue… hope you are OK with that?'

Nod.

'And I'd like to speak with whoever was living with Mr Jogani before he left for Brussels, whoever worked here.'

'Most of the people here are the ones who worked for him even before I walked out on Ron, they've been around for years and, if you ask me, none of them could have been involved.'

'I wasn't thinking about that, I wanted to know about people who visited Mr Jogani here, people who visited Mr Jogani in the last six months or so.'

'Oh, that? Of course. When would you want to do that?'

'I'll ask someone to organise that tomorrow.'

'I'm home, so no problem.'

'And please don't ask them anything about what we've talked about today. I don't want these people to be prepared.'

'Sure.'

Jatin, in the meantime, had fetched the police tape and sealed the office.

Before leaving Rita asked Jatin to leave a card in case Anita wanted to get in touch. As they walked out of the Jogani residence Rita wondered where her tête-à-tête, with the gold digging wife left her: nowhere. She might as well have spent time looking for UFOs. Could they possibly find something in Jogani's office so late into the investigation? Doubtful. But it was worth a try. And it was the procedure.

It was six. The sun had still not finished its shift, and the sky was still bright. Was there anything that they could accomplish now? They had given themselves two tasks for the day: Jogani's residence and office and his ex-wife. And they had struck both the proverbial birds with one stone.

'I have a request, ma'am,' Jatin said as they sat in the vehicle. 'I'd like to lead this search, and look into Jogani's computer.'

'Since when have you become a computer geek?'

'Always was, ma'am.'

'Great, let's see what we find.'

The mouse-sized guard gave them a salute as they drove out of the Jolly Maker building complex. As the motor wafted away, Rita looked at the city. Mumbai wasn't so big geographically, but it was extremely complicated. It was a corporate metropolis. The corporation was India and the challenge with India Corporate — Rita compared it to her Goa — was that everyone was someone or at least pretended to be someone. Maybe Guinness should have recorded the city with the highest VIP to common man population. She smiled.

S
eventeen. It took the best part of the day for Vikram and Rajesh Nene to contact a total of seventeen snitches between them. Seventeen police informers were not enough to cover every inch of Mumbai, but they had their own sources. It was like fuelling a fire in a maze; the flame would certainly find its way. Someone, somewhere always knew something. It wasn't funny how many cases had been cracked because someone squeaked, or sold out, or blabbered after a drunken night, or toasted to boast regarding the booty, or felt chicaned enough to report with an intention to relay the info. Endless possibilities. Unvarying result. It eventually seeped through to someone who could trade it for a favour or pay off a debt. The seventeen copies of Sishir Singh's grainy candid-shot would be reproduced umpteen times and travel into the corners of Mumbai that did not even feature on Google maps. Lane and dusty by-lanes that even Mumbai Police could not find, forget carrying on a search. This would all be undercover, of course. When — and not if — the guy was spotted, the orders were clear: just report his whereabouts, do not make any contact. Exhausted from making those calls personally, the two senior inspectors split for the day.

***

Teams were briefed and dispatched to Jogani fortress before Rita arrived in the office the next morning. Jatin turned out to be even more efficient than before. Essentially, all the three subordinates in her team — Rita had got Rajesh Nene signed off for the case — were competent. Good sign that no one consciously or inadvertently throttled the progress out of competitive jealousy or idiocy. Rita had been up late the night before, searching for archived news from the
METROTIME.BE
portal: news items available in Flemish or French, which Google Chrome effortlessly translated into English for her. She found nothing on the web that wasn't mentioned in Victor's report. Perhaps the dailies in Belgium didn't do much digging themselves and relied on whatever info the police provided them with to report or else the case wasn't significant enough to deploy their resources on a random, one-off murder in the city — a foreigner chilled during a heist wasn't exactly WW3.

Rita wanted to bond with the guys, rebuild the sodality with them after the brief break. She gave a shout and the three men were happy to join her for lunch. The foursome walked out to a nearby pav-bhaji, nothing fancy. Jatin left for Jogani's swanky residence after lunch.

***

Back in the Operations Room, Rita updated Vikram and Rajesh Nene on the interesting meeting Jatin and she had had with Anita, and that troops had now been dispatched to scour anything they could get their hands on after a significant gap of time, and numerous people that might have handled any possible evidence. In any event, a break in the chain of evidence would not be acceptable in a court. In short, counting on anything received from that search would be amateur. They should be content if they got some pointer. The two senior inspectors filled her in on the contacts they had made with several individuals. If Sishir Singh looked anything like the guy in the picture they had he should be identified soon.

Like a kid who had just seen Santa Claus, Jatin returned in a state of excitement. His exuberance was powered by the fact that the date logs on Jogani's computer had established that it hadn't been used after the evening he had flown out of India. And thus, he sounded confident that anything and everything that Jogani had worked on — emails, accounts, bank details, and airline and hotel bookings — could be traced even though the cache had cleared after thirty days as per Jogani's computer settings. He told Rita that most computer users didn't realise that deleted history from hard drive could be retrieved in three steps even by some dubious expert: search for it, copy the
.DAT
file, and using a specialised reader the entire web history would be revealed unless, of course, some expensive software had been installed to break the deleted files.

But why would Jogani have bought something like that?

Nothing significant was discovered in the interviews of the Jogani household staff conducted so far. They were still in progress, but Rita didn't have much confidence of achieving something that might break the case. Even under ordinary circumstances, Rita knew that very few witnesses could narrate anything consequential after a critical event. It's not that people intend to lie, but they falter, and the more serious the crime the more the duress and anxiety, and anxiety was a known bitch. It frequently lapsed memory. History is packed with victims who'd seen their own attackers close and personal but the trauma dwarfed their memory; where people failed to identify the perpetrator correctly, remembering the events or their sequence was a big ask. Police largely worked through the inconsistencies in witness statements; if they found a slight gap they jumped into it and ploughed in big enough holes for lying witnesses to be buried in but what were the odds that any domestic help in the Jogani's household would remember anything that could be of any authentic value over three months post the event? But it was the procedure and it had to be done. There's nothing that bothered bureaucracy like a miscarried procedure. Do anything but don't break the rules and procedures irrespective of how ridiculous or obsolete they were.

'So let's focus on what we know so far...' Rita began when all four were seated in the Operations Room. 'By all means Jogani had died where his body was found by police, no doubt about it. The Belgian Police investigated and documented that.' She pointed towards the red box file. 'The foremost doctrine of homicide — to look for the killer within the family — doesn't seem to hold here. Spouse. Siblings. Kids. Jogani isn't survived by any. Ex-wife, yes she is a flagrant gold-digger but this murder doesn't look like her doing. And before I forget, I need a watch put on her for at least a month. Who she calls, who calls her, where she goes, who comes visiting, everything.'

'What about acquaintances?'

Impatience was a virtue in investigation. It established confidence that someone else was thinking about the case too. Vikram already looked embroiled in the investigation.

'You're spot on. Business associates. Then friends. And then all acquaintances who could have had the information regarding his travel. We'll find people to look out and provide us with a list.'

Vikram noted it down in his usual fashion.

'What we also know is that someone knew about the big deal happening in Antwerp, and the hotel Ron Jogani was booked to stay in. It certainly doesn't look like someone broke into Jogani's hotel room at random and found the diamonds. All evidence points to a planned heist — the adjacent rooms booked, the locks and safe tampered with, the midnight call rousting him out of the room… what we need to figure out is where did someone get on to the trail of our victim? My assumption is that someone got on to him from India itself if Sishir Singh was the person identified in the hotel, and then at the airport on the flight back to New Delhi. Are we all in agreement on that?'

Nods.

'So the first question on the point we all just agreed on is how did that someone know the detailed itinerary?'

'Ma'am, we've got to figure out who knew about the travel.' Nene.

'Many… considering that Jogani was there to buy diamonds for a cartel, everyone but everyone who he was dealing for knew about his travel. And maybe even their associates.' Jatin.

'But, why would he have shared the exact itinerary with all?' Vikram.

'He may have or may not have and we have no way of knowing that unless he shared it by email and we go through that when the lab breaks into his computer.' Nene.

'However, even if he shared the travel plan there is no way he could have known the room number he was going to get allotted when he actually walked into the hotel in Brussels, would he?' Rita pointed out.

'I have a hunch that someone from the hotel was involved.' Vikram.

'That is, of course, one possibility.' Jatin.

'What is the other possibility?' Rita.

'There is always this chance that the Blackberry we saw with the killer in the picture actually belonged to Ron Jogani and he had called someone before his death that left a trace for the killer?' Jatin.

'You have a point… though he could only have known the room number he was allotted once he was already checked-in at the hotel, and that was too late. The rooms adjacent and opposite to him were already booked at midday. So says the Belgian report.' Rita brought Jatin's hypothesis to a halt.

'So maybe his BB was hacked into?' Jatin persisted.

'Same logic applies, Jatin. How did the killer or killers know the room number before Jogani checked-in, when Jogani himself couldn't have been aware of it?'

Jatin looked deflated.

'Have you guys got your teams ready?' Rita referred to the sub-inspectors that worked for both the Senior Inspectors. The foot soldiers. Unfortunately, Jatin had no team at the moment.

Nods.

'So here's how we divide the investigation: Mr Nene...'

'Ma'am, please stop calling me Mr Nene. You call Vikram and Jatin by their names, why should I be different?'

'I'm sorry, Rajesh.'

'I'd be happier if you called me Nene. That is what everyone addresses me as.'