Death in Mumbai (25 page)

‘He's my fiancé,' she told the watchman, caressing Emile's face. Satish Kumar Singh had smiled and saluted smartly as the car drove out of the gates of the building.

‘So Maria,' asked Inspector Raorane with endless patience, ‘tell me, did you really go shopping with Emile in a taxi to Dadar?' He made sure that as she answered, she could see the watchman being interrogated in the next room from across the window.

‘By then I was sure that something drastic had happened to Neeraj. In all these days he had not bothered to get in touch with anyone, and all these lies that we had caught, they had to lead somewhere,' said Inspector Raorane.

‘Monu, happy birthday, my darling.'

It was Maria's twenty-eighth birthday on May 17. It had been ten days since Neeraj had gone missing. Had everything been well, she would have celebrated with Neeraj and his friends, as she had told them, or had a rendezvous with Emile, as she had also promised him. But Neeraj's friends had all turned against her after Rakesh Maria's statement, and Emile, her lifeline to sanity, was at the
naval base from where he tutored her every day on how to deal with Inspector Raorane's questions. Thrust and parry, both sides planned well.

When she told him about Unit IX questioning the Dheeraj Solitaire watchman Satish Kumar Singh, Emile knew he had to call on his back-up. He had already phoned his friend Jitesh Saini in Mumbai. ‘There's a problem, boss, I need your help.'

‘Abe teri kitni problems solve karu life mein,' Jitesh had joked, referring to a previous occasion when he had sat up an entire night finishing the drawings for one of Emile's engineering assignments. Both remembered the night well. While he had worked furiously to meet the deadline, Emile had kept him supplied with endless cups of chai made in the room using an immersion rod.

‘This is a bit more serious than some drawings. If anyone asks I need you to tell them that Monica and I had borrowed your car on May 7.'

‘That's it? Consider it done. But what were you doing in Mumbai?' Emile explained how he had come to Mumbai that day to see Maria without taking prior permission, and for which he was now facing an enquiry.

When she had realized that the watchman in Dheeraj Solitaire was being questioned, Maria changed her statement about the taxi and told Inspector Raorane that they had actually borrowed Emile's friend Jitesh Saini's car on the 7th evening. ‘I had forgotten,' she said awkwardly.

She gave the police Jitesh's name and not Kiran's, because Emile was confident that his friend and course mate would weigh in for them, and tell the police whatever they asked
him to say. The first inkling Jitesh had of police involvement was when Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar called him to ask about his car. Jitesh bought time by telling him he was busy and that he would revert in a couple of days. On her birthday, soon after he had spoken to her, Emile called Jitesh and gave him Maria's number. ‘Yaar, talk to her, she is very troubled, it has something to do with her friend Neeraj Grover going missing, that's why you'll have to say you gave us your car.'

‘I don't know why these things are happening to us, we've done nothing,' Maria told Jitesh when he called. Affected by her troubled voice, he promised to deal with the matter and to also meet her the next day to understand why he needed to lie to the police.

Another course mate of Emile's recalled that when he spoke to Maria to wish her on her birthday, she sounded tense and said to him, ‘Yaar, please pray for us.'

‘I said to her, “C'mon, your good times have just begun. Emile returned from Mumbai the other day and told me that you guys have decided to get married.” To which she said, “Arre yaar, there are lots of problems here, tu please pray karva that this year is good for us.”'

Like a scorpion stinging itself to death when caught in a circle of fire, Maria had begun to make suicidal errors under pressure. Jitesh Saini told her two irrefutable facts when he came to meet her at home the next day. There was no record, if the Crime Branch were to check, of either her or Emile calling him to borrow his car on the 7th. Second, more pertinently, he did not own a Santro. His car was a Maruti 800. Maria was shattered. She immediately
called Emile. Jitesh told another friend, ‘I didn't sleep that night wondering what I should be doing, until finally I decided that I could not lie to the police.'

Jitesh also received an unexpected call when he returned to Navy Nagar from Maria's house. It was Maria's brother Richard calling to apologize for all the inconvenience. ‘I had no idea that it wasn't your car she used to go out that day. We'll see to it that you do not get into any trouble with the police,' he promised.

The investigation had now taken a more urgent turn. Maria retreated into a shell, talking obsessively only to Emile, and refusing to share anything with her family. Richard felt his judgement cloud. He no longer knew what to believe. The younger sister he thought he knew had turned into a dissembling stranger. ‘I was beginning to get worried. I thought she knew something about Neeraj going missing.' Inspector Raorane was no longer the amiable interlocutor they had first met. There was now a rough, contemptuous edge to his talk. ‘Maar khayegi kya?' (Would you like to be beaten up?) More than once Richard heard him say this to his sister. Instead of just talking, Raorane had also begun to coax Maria to give her answers in writing, put things on record.

When Inspector Raorane ordered Richard to ensure Maria told them the truth, he could only look at his sister helplessly. ‘Pray, Moni, and ask God to give you the strength to remember if you have forgotten something.' The perfect crime lies not in the execution, but in the cover-up. Maria was about to blow hers.

‘Sir,' she called Inspector Raorane a couple of days later, ‘I'd forgotten that we did not borrow the car from Jitesh
Saini as I mentioned earlier. It slipped my mind but actually I had borrowed it from my friend from Bangalore, Kiran.' After lying about the taxi this was the second time she was changing her account. Suddenly the car had become an important accessory in this mystery.

Maria had already warned Kiran about just such a call, so he was not unduly startled when Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar phoned and asked him to come to the Unit IX office. ‘Sure, I said. At about 9.30 pm that night I parked the Santro outside the unit IX office and told my assistants who were travelling with me that I'd be back in fifteen-twenty minutes, and I went in running,' said Kiran.

It was the start of a four-hour ordeal for Kiran. ‘They took me to a room, sat me down, and began questioning me. They seemed infinitely patient as compared to my impatience, asking me how I knew Maria, what my relationship with her was, about my car, etc. Then another officer came and asked me exactly the same set of questions, then another and another. I didn't know what was happening and I kept repeating myself. I still couldn't quite connect Maria with what was going on. We are normal people and our friends cannot be criminals.

‘That evening, eight policemen asked me the same set of questions, again and again. Your name, father's name, what do you do? And I kept saying, “Sir, is there anything I should be worried about, please tell me what has happened,” and they would turn around and say, “Why don't you tell us what happened? She is after all your friend.” And when they told me to get the car in the compound, I got really scared. Finally at 1.30 or 1.40 am they said, “You can go
home but leave your car behind. Behave with Maria as if you haven't spoken to us at all.” But I was so hassled that the minute I got home I called her and told her the Crime Branch guys had called me. “What have you done, Maria?” I asked her. “Did you do anything in my car?” Until this point I had no idea what had happened or even who Neeraj was. She kept saying “Nothing” but sounded very stressed and panicky, and she also told me that she was very scared.'

Forensic examination later yielded blood samples from the back seat that matched Neeraj's sample. By now Inspector Raorane was sure of not just Maria's involvement, but of Emile's as well—he knew that he had been with Maria all through the day Neeraj went missing, and he had been calling her all through the investigation. But Emile was a naval officer—he could not be touched by the civilian police without concrete evidence, so Maria was his only hope. He could see she was at breaking point. The overconfidence had long evaporated, leaving a shrunken wreck of a woman. The dark circles under her eyes seemed accentuated, and there was a nervous tremor in her voice, which had thickened with exhaustion.

When she walked into the Unit IX office the next day, May 20, Maria saw the familiar blue-grey Santro parked in the small compound, and blanched. Inspector Raorane, observing her wan face, decided to play his trump card. She entered the room and as usual put her mobile on the table. He waited for the phone to buzz as he knew it would. It was Emile. As she bent forward to pick it up, he leaned back in his chair. ‘Maria, don't answer the phone.'

It was the first time since her interrogation began that he had stopped her from taking calls. They spoke only intermittently after that, both sets of eyes remained trained on the phone that now throbbed every few minutes as Emile grew more and more frantic in Kochi. ‘All I did that day was to keep her in the office and not let her answer the phone; I also wanted Emile to get desperate.'

At 10.30 pm Richard, who had been waiting in the corridor of the Unit IX office all day for Maria to emerge, heard his sister cry out loudly. He rushed to see her weeping and Inspector Raorane telling her that he would hit her if she didn't open her mouth. ‘He saw me and said, “Just get her to talk,” and with that he let us go.' Maria reached home and immediately called Emile. According to Richard, they were on the phone for over an hour.

He had let her go all right, but Inspector Raorane was in a dilemma. He knew that Maria was ready to confess—to what he still didn't know. Could he risk giving her the leeway to talk to Emile and plan further, or should he press home his psychological advantage and get her back again? He debated it with his colleagues over dinner, as it turned out for the final time in this case.

Inspector Raorane took a quick vote: Uske ghar ki apne ghar? (Her house or ours?) Sub-Inspector Shivalkar was of the view that nothing would be lost if they waited till the morning; most others concurred. Then Sub-Inspector Sanjiv Gawade spoke. ‘If we are going after her, why not now?' There were no formal charges against Maria, he pointed out. What if she decided to leave town overnight?

It was a tough call for Inspector Raorane. There's a Bombay High Court directive against bringing women
suspects to a police station after sunset and before sunrise, though a later amendment in the Criminal Procedure Act allowed for such an arrest in exceptional cases provided they were carried out by a woman officer, after taking permission from a magistrate. Inspector Raorane said of his decision, ‘By now I was sure something serious had happened to Neeraj and felt that since we were this close to a confession, we should get her that night itself.'

At 2.30 am a team of six Crime Branch cops, including the required lady police, rang the bell to Maria's flat. Maria's sister Veronica opened the door within seconds. The entire family was awake in the living room. ‘I looked at her and said, “Come on Maria, we have to go.”'

Richard intervened. ‘At this hour? We just got back.' But Inspector Raorane insisted it was urgent. Maria turned to hug her mother and left, accompanied by Richard and Veronica. She broke down as soon as she got into the jeep. ‘I heard her tell Roni, Neeraj is no more, Emile killed him and burnt his body,' said Richard, claiming that was the first time he got to know of what had happened. ‘My thought was, oh God the inevitable has happened.'

At the Unit IX office, Inspector Raorane offered him a seat inside and told him, ‘Don't worry, let her reveal everything, and we will help you.'

‘Are you comfortable?' he then asked Maria. His tone had softened now that Maria was ready to confess. ‘No,' she couldn't stop crying, eventually bracing herself to start talking. ‘As she spoke, my mind went blank, I no longer knew what to believe,' says Richard.