A Cut-Like Wound (28 page)

His phone rang. Gowda grabbed it with the fervour of a drowning man clutching at anything he can find. ‘Yes, Santosh, tell me,’ he said. He saw Urmila edge closer.

‘Sir, nothing to report yet. The corporator and his brother left at about four forty-five p.m. Should we continue the surveillance now that they have gone?’ Santosh’s voice emerged tinny, flat and clearly audible.

‘No, let the surveillance continue. Are you there?’

‘No, I am at the commissioner’s office. I thought I’ll take a look at the SCRB and go back by 6.30.’

Gowda saw Urmila’s eyes sparkle with interest. He glanced at his watch. ‘Give me a call when you get there.’

‘What’s SCRB?’ Urmila asked.

‘State Crime Record Bureau,’ Gowda said, slipping the
phone into his pocket. He shoved his fists into his pockets and took a deep breath. He cleared his throat.

‘I need to go, Urmila. I am in the middle of a case. I’ll call you,’ he said firmly.

F
or a while he had thought he would have to abandon the evening’s plan. He couldn’t be seen going into the house. Then Bhuvana, or was it the goddess, sometimes they sounded alike, had whispered in his ear: Remember the other gate.

He had slipped back into the house by the side gate. Whoever was watching them hadn’t thought of posting a man there.

‘Do you think I look all right?’ she asked.

‘You look beautiful.’ Akka smiled. ‘What’s with you today? I’ve never seen you like this. All fidgety and restless.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said and leaned back in the chair. Then she looked at the elderly eunuch and said softly, ‘Akka, I have to go out in a little while.’

Akka frowned. ‘It’s just a little past seven … are you out of your mind?’

She shook her head. ‘You think I don’t know that? But I have to be somewhere by eight. It’s important.’

The elderly eunuch frowned. ‘What’s going on? What are you up to?’

She tossed her head. ‘Nothing’s going on. Can’t I go out on my own?’

‘It’s not safe…’

‘I’ll be careful. One hour is all I need. One hour and I’ll be back,’ she pleaded.

‘I’ll go with you,’ the elderly eunuch said.

She nodded. ‘Yes. But to a point. After that I have to go alone. I’ll meet you at the Muthayalamma temple in one hour and we can return together.’

S
antosh sat up as he saw two women leave the corporator’s house. He narrowed his eyes to see better. The tall one was definitely a eunuch. Of the other he wasn’t so sure. She looked like a real woman.

Santosh slapped a fifty-rupee note on the table and slid out of the teashop. ‘I owe you only thirty-four rupees, but I don’t have time to collect the change. I’ll be back,’ he told the bemused teashop owner as he hurried down the steps into the street.

Ahead of him, the eunuch and the young woman hurried towards Seppings Road. If they took an autorickshaw, he would be stuck. His bike was parked elsewhere. But he could follow them on foot if they continued to walk.

The eunuch paused and put her hand on her companion’s shoulder, speaking earnestly. But the young woman seemed unwilling to listen. Was the eunuch a pimp? Santosh wondered. Was that what it was all about? Using the young woman to trap men and kill them to steal their possessions? He dismissed the thought almost instantly. That had been Gowda’s first theory, but he seemed to have changed his mind.

Kothandaraman, the pharmacist, had been found with all his jewellery and money on him. The murder had a more sinister angle, Gowda had said.

Santosh waited in the shadows to see which way they would go. He still wasn’t familiar with many parts of
Bangalore, but he would worry about that later. For now, he would tail them and see where they led him to. At a temple on Seppings Road, the eunuch and the woman paused again. Once again, it seemed to Santosh that the eunuch was pleading with the young woman, who just patted her hand and walked on.

Santosh sighed with relief when the eunuch entered the temple. He crossed the road and positioned himself by a shop and prepared to wait.

G
owda stared unseeingly at the TV. A tight close-up of a shrub, the narrator’s drone, but Gowda couldn’t focus on the life and times of Walking Stick Insect.

Last week, when Roshan was home, he had wanted him to watch something called
CSI
. ‘It’s all about how crime scene investigation is done in America, Appa,’ Roshan had said, his eyes not straying for a moment from the screen as men and women worked with equipment that looked more space-labish than forensic. Do our forensic people even know about these techniques? Gowda wondered.

Gowda watched for a bit and then yawned.

‘Appa, don’t tell me you are bored,’ Roshan had said.

‘You don’t really think all of this is true, do you?’ Gowda asked, standing up.

‘Of course it is!’

Just then, as if to vouch for Roshan’s statute of faith, a CSI info bit came on: Did you know that
Crime Scene Investigation
has been marked as a problem for real-life crimes? It was dubbed as the ‘CSI Effect’ or ‘CSI Syndrome’ for raising the expectations from forensic science.

Gowda smirked.

‘It’s only because it’s so realistic that criminals know what to do now,’ Roshan defended his favourite TV show. Gowda looked down at his son and marvelled at his naivety.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But you know something, we don’t use the yellow tape to cordon off the crime scene area here, nor do we even put on gloves at times; we may not have such sophisticated equipment or methodology, our policemen are out of shape and mostly lazy, but the percentage of cases solved in India is far higher than in the West.’

‘That’s what you claim,’ Roshan said, as the credits came on.

‘It’s the truth,’ Gowda said, reclaiming the remote and switching channels. He paused as a programme on dolphins came on. Gowda dropped back into his chair.

Roshan stood up. ‘I’m off to bed,’ he said.

Gowda liked watching the nature programmes. He enjoyed picking up little nuggets of information; interesting facts about the world that these programmes were filled with. There were no untidy emotions to deal with; no chance word or thought that led his mind down alleys he wished to avoid. Nature was what you saw and knew. These shows merely enhanced knowledge.

‘I really don’t understand why you find these shows on animals and insects so fascinating,’ Roshan called out from the door.

‘Details, my boy, details and not drama. That’s what gets me,’ he said.

Tonight, too, it was a detail that niggled at him. He knew he ought to remember it, but it just wouldn’t rise to the surface of his mind.

The case worried him more than any case had done in a long while. There was no such thing as a perfect murder, but
it became one when no one was looking for the murderer. Gowda was certain that all four homicides, including Liaquat’s, had been perpetrated by the same person. A serial murderer was at large. No one seemed to realize that. No one seemed to care. What would it take for things to hot up? The death of someone related to someone important? On his own, with just Santosh and Gajendra, he wouldn’t get very far. What this needed was a full-scale investigation and a set of IOs who would use paranoia as a device, who would leave nothing unturned and examine every crevice and open end.

Gowda didn’t think ACP Vidyaprasad was inclined to work this case. He would rather have Gowda in charge of the Evangelist meeting that was fixed for a week from now. ‘Leave all this criminal investigation to the CCB. That’s what they are there for,’ he had admonished Gowda earlier that day.

DCP Mirza had made sure that ACP Vidyaprasad’s leave was cancelled and the ACP was a furious man seeking to vent his ire on everything that came his way, most of all Inspector Gowda.

In the background, the narrator in that monotone so distinctive of nature programme voiceovers intoned:
In nature, to stand out is good only if one is a) poisonous or b) a predator. And even if a predator, blending in helps when stalking prey. The stick insect is a master of camouflage, giving itself away only when it moves. No wonder its name Phasmatodea is derived from the Greek phama, meaning phantom or apparition
.

Gowda watched the stick insect as it moved away from the habitat it had chosen to camouflage in. That was the key, he thought.

This predator too would have to be forced to make a move.

Her heart hammered in her chest. This was the first time she was seeing him after that first night. They had talked every night for a week now. She thought she knew everything there was to know about him. The cold, bare facts. Height, weight, education, family, his favourite colour, the vegetable he hated, his dog’s name, the number of rooms in his family home, but when they met, he would be more than an assemblage of detail. He would be Sanjay. Her Sanju, as he said he was.

The autorickshaw spluttered to a halt near Komala Refreshments on Wheeler Road. He was seated on his bike outside the restaurant.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he said.

She smiled and moved into the shadows. Street lamps had a merciless eye, she knew. ‘There was some extra work at office, so I had to stay back,’ she said.

He smiled at the way she held herself back. The shy glance, the half smile, the shrinking… you hardly saw girls like her any more, he thought with infinite tenderness. Especially in Bangalore. Some of the girls he had seen on the street set his teeth on edge. The deep, deep necklines with half the breasts visible, the short skirts, the low-waisted jeans so when they sat on a chair or on a bike, the underwear could be seen. How could parents let their girls wander the streets dressed like that?