A Cut-Like Wound (36 page)

The man smiled. ‘You see, the beauty of it is that the quarry belongs to Anna too. Once everything’s functional here, he’ll close it down.’

Gowda could see the beauty of it. As long as the quarry worked, no one would buy the factory and the land. The owners must have gone down on bended knees to thank the corporator when he made them the offer. He must have got it for almost nothing, the bastard, Gowda thought, surveying the acreage from the doorway.

He followed the man into a veranda from which a warren of rooms opened. Once, it must have housed the administrative part of the business. A thick sheath of dust covered the floor. The whine of the stone crusher filled the room. Dust rose as the man opened a window. Gowda coughed. He pulled out his handkerchief and covered his nose. The man led the way through a central corridor onto the factory floor.

The false ceiling beneath the asbestos roofing was broken in parts. Remnants of ceiling lights were still attached to beams rigged expressly for that purpose. The windows were latched shut and there was an odour of mustiness and rodent urine. Manjunath pushed open a window. A rat scuttled from a pile of rubbish and disappeared into what was once a built-in rack system.

Gowda looked around him.

It was empty except for a lone sewing machine and a heap of wooden planks, a broken chair and parts of sewing machines.

‘There used to be three hundred workers in this room,’ Manjunath said. ‘Imagine!’

Gowda shuddered. Three hundred workers in a room that could hold two hundred. No wonder he had chosen to locate his factory so far away. It had been a sweat shop.
Probably the sweat from one brow running down to the arm of another. How had they borne it?

‘What happened to the machinery?’ Santosh asked curiously.

‘The daughter sold it after her father’s death,’ Manjunath said. ‘If it had been a son, he would have continued his father’s business. What can a daughter do?’

Gowda hid his smile. If Urmila were to hear him, she would probably impale him on a spike with a sternly spoken ‘this is what daughters can do, you sexist oaf!’

On the other side of the factory floor was a door that led to the packing and dispatch section. ‘And this was the office room,’ Manjunath said, leading them to a room with sheet glass for a wall.

Gowda frowned. The rest of the factory was wreathed in dust and giant cobwebs. But this room was clean. There was a table and two chairs, and an old maroon-coloured Rexine sofa-cum-bed.

‘Where does the door lead to?’

‘To the car park. The owner didn’t like using the main entrance. He had his own entrance,’ Manjunath said.

‘There, that’s him.’ He pointed to a series of framed photographs mounted on the wall.

Gowda moved closer to peer at them. In one, the man was in a suit in a busy street in some foreign city. In another, he was shaking hands with Venkatasubbiah Pendekante, governor of Karnataka. In the last one, he sat flanked by his family on either side. Daughter. Son-in-law. Grandchildren.

‘I think his name was Ranganathan,’ Manjunath said.

Gowda didn’t respond. He stared at the photograph, again remembering the body on the mortuary table; the grieving daughter, the son-in-law and his important connections.

‘You know something, sir,’ Manjunath said. ‘Anna’s father used to work here as a watchman. And Anna used to come here as a boy with his father. Isn’t it destiny that a mere worker’s son is now lord and master of all this?’

Gowda stared at the man unseeingly. He reached across and pulled at the cord. The Venetian blind clacked down smoothly, shutting the factory floor out. Gowda looked around the room again.

Someone came here regularly, no matter what Manjunath claimed. Someone who used the side entrance door. Someone who had wiped the dust off surfaces, opened and closed the blind. ‘Where’s the key to the door?’ he asked.

‘I think Anna has it. Have you seen what you wanted to?’ Manjunath asked, glancing at his watch.

‘Not yet…’ Gowda began and paused. From the corner of his eye, something had caught his attention. In the crevice between the sofa back and seat was a pale-brown fleck attached to a small line of black. He bent down and used his handkerchief to extract it.

A hairslide and, attached to it, a withered jasmine. Gowda wrapped his handkerchief around it and slid it into his pocket thoughtfully. Someone had been here a few nights ago.

He stood gazing at the photographs again.

‘So did you find what you were looking for?’

Gowda turned around abruptly. The corporator stood before him and, as always, a few steps behind was his runt of a brother. When had they crept in here? But Gowda was adept at camouflaging his feelings and retorted in a clipped voice, ‘It depends!’

The corporator nodded as though that was the answer he would have expected anyway. Gowda saw the younger
brother’s eyes narrow. He was very protective of his anna, Gowda had heard.

‘I have had this place only for two months now, Inspector. You can hardly hold me responsible for what happened here before that…’ the corporator said with a smile. A disarming smile, if I didn’t know better, Gowda told himself.

‘But you know this place well enough,’ Gowda said quietly.

‘What are you insinuating, Inspector?’ It was the brother who spoke up.

Gowda looked at him in surprise. The boy had spoken in English, unlike his older brother, who could speak only Kannada, Tamil and Dakhani Urdu.

‘Ramesh went to college,’ the corporator said, throwing a fond look at his sibling, who seemed to be bristling on his behalf. ‘I never went beyond the fifth standard. But he is an MA, the first in our family. And he has a black belt in karate. Are you a postgraduate, Inspector?’

Gowda held up his hand to stem the corporator’s eulogy of his brother. ‘Enough,’ he snapped. ‘I didn’t ask for your brother’s bio-data. All I asked was if you were familiar with this factory.’

‘We both are,’ Chikka said. ‘Our father used to work as a watchman here. We came here when we were children. So we know this place well.’ He went to stand by his brother.

‘When did you come here last?’ Gowda asked.

The corporator frowned. ‘A week ago, I think. The engineer who’s going to help convert this factory into a dairy farm came with me. Why?’

‘I hear you have grand plans for this place. An old-age home, an orphanage…’

The corporator met his brother’s glance. ‘Someone’s been talking, I can see!’

‘I told you, Anna, there was no need for you to discuss your plans with Manjunath. He has a mouth like a pot without a bottom,’ Chikka muttered.

‘Is it wrong to help the destitute, Inspector?’ The corporator smiled again, opening his hands out in a gesture of not knowing.

Gowda ignored the corporator and turned to the younger brother. ‘So Mr Postgraduate, tell me about all those Ravi Varma prints in that mansion you two live in.’

Santosh stared at Gowda, amazed. What was he doing?

The young man bit his lip as if to control his fury. Then he spoke carefully, imitating, it seemed, his older brother’s silken tones. ‘Is it a crime to hang up Ravi Varma prints?’

‘Did I say that? I was just curious.’

‘Well then, I like them. I like art, Inspector, and Anna gave me a free hand to choose what to put up on the walls. Does that satisfy you, Inspector?’

Santosh hissed. Gowda grinned. ‘I like you, Chikka.’

‘I don’t think I can reciprocate the emotion,’ Chikka snarled. ‘I don’t like men like you. Full of yourself. Full of how superior you are to the rest of us. Full of answers even if you don’t know an ant from an arsehole.’

‘Hush, Chikka.’ The corporator put his hand on the young man’s arm. ‘What is all this about?’

‘Hot-headed, is he?’ Gowda asked, putting on a concerned expression. ‘Not good at all. You must advise him.’

‘What do you want, Inspector? What is it you are looking for?’

‘I would hardly tell you, would I, Caddy Ravi?’ Gowda
walked to the door. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find out your street name?’

‘That was a long time ago, Inspector. We don’t always stay in our past.’ The corporator’s eyes alone gave away the extent of his fury.

‘I can see that,’ Gowda said, his gaze falling on the car parked outside. A brand-new Honda CRV. In the sunlight, its whiteness gleamed. Leaning against it, with his arms crossed, was a boulder of a man. Anna’s driver and bodyguard. He had a name. Godzilla? No, it came to him now. King Kong.

People like the corporator made him furious. It seemed to him that they knew precisely how to work the system to their advantage. They knew which holes to plug and which knots to untie so the system worked for their benefit alone. People like the corporator made Gowda feel even more like a loser.

Not this time though. Gowda was getting tired of being the loser.

‘So that was a dead end,’ Santosh stated as they drove back. ‘I don’t understand this case at all, sir. It seems all in bits and pieces with nothing to hold it together.’

Gowda took his handkerchief out and laid it open. ‘See this,’ he said, gesturing with his chin to the hairslide and withered flower.

‘The corporator claims he was there a week ago. This flower is not that old. Besides, why would he or his engineer have a hairslide or flowers on them? Someone else was in there. Someone with flowers in her hair. Someone who could be our murderer. And that someone is connected to our corporator’s household one way or the other,’ Gowda
said, tucking the handkerchief back in his pocket. ‘Stanley will have to process this. I’ll call him. You will have to take it to the forensic lab right away,’ he added.

‘If only we could haul in the old eunuch and start the interrogation,’ Santosh said.

‘If only,’ Gowda agreed. ‘But Stanley won’t allow it.’ He retreated into his thoughts again. If he didn’t push it too hard, it would come to him. The missing link.

I
n the world of informers, no one is above a price. Information can always be bought. The only difference is in the coinage. One man’s price may not be another’s, but every man has a price. And when that is placed before him, he’ll sing as sweetly as a pet mynah. This is the fundamental premise of working with informers.

As Ibrahim walked down Tannery Road towards the butcher’s shop he liked to buy from, a Tata Sumo drew to a halt near him, almost running him off the road into the ditch alongside the road.

‘Maa ki choot,’ Ibrahim shouted in a rage, shaking a fist.

Two men stepped out of the vehicle. Ibrahim walked towards them, glaring. ‘Where the fuck do you think you are going?’ he shouted. His heart still beat in his ears.

The two men looked at each other.

Then they strode towards him wordlessly, grabbed him by his arms from either side and pushed him towards the car.

At first, Ibrahim was too astonished to even scream. Then he tried to pull his arms out of their vice-like grip. ‘Let go, you lund ke baal. Who the fuck are you? Let me go. What do you think you are doing?’ A torrent of abuse followed.

A few people turned and looked. But something about the men, their impassive faces, their short hair, muscular bodies and their silence unnerved them. They turned their heads away and hurried down the street.

‘Shut up,’ one of the men finally barked out. The menace in the words sent a shiver running down Ibrahim’s spine. He shut up. Who were these men? Nanoo’s? Or Shabir’s? A scramble of names in his head. But there was no reason for any of the gang lords to pick him up. Anna had made sure of that. Anna’s omnipotence made that possible. Some of the Bombay men were moving in here, he had heard. But why would they wait to pick him up? He wasn’t anyone important.

He allowed them to push him into the rear seat of the car and watched as they sat on either side, hemming him in. He saw the almost opaque tinted windows slide up, cutting him off from the rest of the world.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, injecting a note of deference into his voice. ‘What do you want?’

The man on his left snarled, ‘Good. That’s the tone we approve of.’ He stuck his little finger in his ear and wiggled it.

The other man, the one on the right with a birthmark the shape of India on his jaw, smiled. ‘Why? You’ve run out of abuse, have you?’

They didn’t speak after that. Ibrahim felt a knot of fear grow in him as the minutes sped by. Then, abruptly, the car braked to a halt.