The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (22 page)

They mounted the steps and made their way along the riverbank. Ritu moved slowly, rocking from side to side like a Weeble toy, stopping periodically to give change to the beggars with crippled limbs pleading for alms.

They were nearing the footbridge, the one where Mummy had shaken off Chubby's man that afternoon, when a black cat ran across their path. Ritu recoiled automatically as if she'd come face to face with a king cobra, grabbing Mummy by the arm. She insisted they take three steps backwards before continuing. A moment later, four or five bricks came crashing down on to the path in front of them. Mummy looked up; they had fallen from the top of a half-constructed building to their right.

A crowd gathered, demanding the labourers on the scaffolding climb down and explain themselves. It was an accident, they insisted, apologising profusely and promising they would be more careful in the future.

Ritu was still shaking when they got back to the hotel. And Mummy felt jittery herself, although she was in no doubt that it had been an accident. Forgoing her supper and getting into bed to write her diary, she thanked God for Ritu Auntie. She'd saved their lives. Her and the cat.

It was five in the morning when hawala broker Mihir Desai's Range Rover pulled out of the gates of his Surat mansion. He drove himself, speeding through the empty residential streets of the City Light District, one of the city's wealthy new suburbs. A motorbike appeared behind him but, at the junction with Canal Road, peeled away to the left.

Desai headed east into the city, making short work of a route that during the day, in the gridlock of Surat's traffic, would have taken an hour or more. When he reached Chowk Bazaar, a Muslim-dominated area since the massacres of 2002, he pulled up outside one of the drab, narrow buildings that lined the claustrophobic lanes. A man carrying a satchel soon appeared from a doorway and climbed into the front passenger seat. Desai promptly made a U-turn, heading back the way he'd come, and joined the Dumas Road.

New shopping malls appeared on the outskirts of the city - 'Come Fill Up In Happiness!' Apartment complexes picketed the horizon. He passed the Grand Bhagwati, 'India's first five-star vegetarian hotel', and took the next right towards the shipyards. Cranes stood silent against the faint dawn sky. The hulk of a half-built ship loomed closer. At the end of a long line of corrugated iron shacks where labourers slept out in the open on charpais, Desai joined a muddy track that skirted the high fence encircling the shipyards. It led down to the banks of the Tapi River.

The Range Rover finally stopped near a coal barge anchored in the water. Desai flicked his high beams. Presently, three men appeared on deck. A long, narrow plank was extended to the bank. Two figures walked along it, balancing like trapeze artists, to reach the shore. They wore filthy clothes, their hands and faces also black with grime and soot. For this reason, perhaps, Desai failed to shake hands with them when he dismounted from his vehicle.

A few words were exchanged and then one of the men knelt down, reached up inside his trouser pocket and pulled out a small packet. This he handed to Desai, who in turn passed it to the short man sitting in the Range Rover.

A good ten minutes passed as the contents of the packet were examined.

Finally, Desai retrieved a bulging plastic bag from the back seat of his vehicle. This he handed it to the two men who promptly headed back to the barge.

'Dirty business,' whispered Chanel No. 5.

He and Tubelight had watched the whole transaction through binoculars from behind a rusty old goods container on the edge of the docks. The Range Rover, a magnetic homing device still attached to the back door, turned and pulled away.

'Our man Desai is buying blood diamonds,' he added.

'From Africa?' asked Tubelight, watching the barge as its engine puttered into life.

'First smuggled to Arab countries. Then by sea to India.'

SIXTEEN

PURI STOOD ON the flat roof of his mock-Spanish villa looking down, in more ways than one, at the new home on plot number 23/B. It had been built over the past seven months, a constant source of hammering, banging, and voices raised over the sound of loud machinery, but was now, mercifully, finished. The owners had spent lakhs of rupees on the facade, a cross between the White House and the Taj Mahal with reflective silver windows and a portico large enough to support a helicopter pad. The building's sides, however, were windowless and bare - just big, tall slabs of poured concrete. Given that the plots around were empty and there was no garden surrounding the property, it looked as if the house had been scooped up by a hurricane and randomly dropped by the side of the road.

The owner was a local Jat farmer who, by the looks of him, had spent most of his life in the baking sun dragging a wooden plough across mustard fields. That is until the local government, effectively working on behalf of a major property developer who wanted to build a mall or perhaps a new office block, had offered him several lakhs per acre for his ancestral land.

The fact that a Jat farmer could now live wherever he chose was progress of a sort, reflected Puri. Money now spoke louder than caste, at least in India's 'metros'. The new Indian suburbia was populated by people of different backgrounds, ethnicities and, to a lesser extent, religions.

Not that there was much of a sense of community. Few of Puri's neighbours knew one another. And even if they did, they rarely interacted. The high walls and gates of their mansions and villas were hardly conducive to neighbourly chats.

Puri certainly had no plans to welcome the family into the colony. They were not his type. Despite the luxurious pile they had built for themselves, the family (great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and a big brood of children) spent their evenings sitting on a couple of charpais outside the front gates of their home. They drank rot-gut desi sharab, told raucous jokes, sang bawdy songs and picked lice out of each other's hair.

'Delhi hillbillies,' Puri called them. Most definitely not his type at all.

He turned away from the edge of the roof and stepped into the small greenhouse where he kept his chilli plants during the winter. It was nice and humid inside, the perfect temperature, and his Naga Vipers were flourishing. Some of the fruit was already shiny and plump and he could hardly wait to pick them. The seeds had come from Cumbria in England, hardly chilli-growing country. However the friend who'd smuggled them into India on his behalf claimed they produced the hottest chillies in the world. An incredible 1,381,118 SHU!

The detective had yet to eat a chilli that was too hot for him; his taste buds were as anaesthetised as an Indian bureaucrat's conscience. The fact that these were Angrezi chillies made the challenge all the more appealing. Nothing short of national pride was at stake.

The same could be said with regard to the Faheem Khan murder case.

Former Deputy Commissioner Scott had called from London last night, concerned that another bookie had been murdered and wondering how he could have been poisoned while Puri was with him. The detective explained that the assassin was a professional - 'not your average five thousand rupee a pop goonda' - and had disguised himself as a paan seller.

'As in pots and pans or porn, Vish?'

'Paan, Sir Jaams. It's a kind of Indian snack with betel nut. We suck and chew on it, actually.'

'Right. And the killer was serving it.'

'Correct. The real paan wallah was himself found strangled few hours later.'

'Any leads?'

'Not as of yet, sir. That one I'm leaving in the hands of Inspector Jagat Prakash Singh. He's a most capable officer - that is, when it comes to straightforward tasks such as locating individuals.'

'Right. Well I'm sure you know what you're doing, Vish.'

He didn't sound convinced, however, and Puri hung up the phone feeling that sense of inferiority again - as if somehow the gora knew better, that as an Indian he was not to be altogether trusted.

Seven hours' sleep hadn't cured him of this lingering feeling. Nor had his morning cup of bed tea. And so he had come up on to the roof, the one place where he could be alone - with his chillies.

He spent a few minutes feeding his plants with his special blend of liquid feed, which was high in nitrogen and phosphorus with a few drops of the Indian elixir neem oil for good measure. Then he washed the leaves, spraying them with water and gently wiping off the thin layer of dust and pollution that had formed in the past twenty-four hours. Finally, Puri pollinated his Ghost Chilli plants, something he had to do manually during the winter because the local bees couldn't find their way into his greenhouse. It was but a few minutes' work rubbing the tip of a soft cotton bud inside one flower, then rubbing it inside another and so on.

Soon he felt better, ready to face the full day's work ahead of him, ready to prove his worth - and that of Indians in general.

That morning Rumpi had served pomegranate seeds yet again, so Puri decided to leave the house earlier than he'd intended, to get a proper breakfast. As the Ambassador was heading through the outskirts of south Delhi, Handbrake noticed they were being followed by a silver sedan. Despite its tinted windows, he could make out two occupants.

'Number plate has a missing digit,' the driver also reported in Hindi.

'Very good. Don't let him know you've spotted him,' instructed Puri.

Twenty minutes later, they reached their destination: East Block Eight, Sector One, R.K. Puram, a government administrative complex. Handbrake turned in through the gate and found a vacant space in the car park. The silver sedan, meanwhile, stopped on the main road.

Puri ignored it as he approached a banyan tree that grew to one side of the building. Beneath the tentacled roots hanging down from its branches, he found Lakshman, who made some of the best aloo paranthas in Delhi. His 'kitchen' comprised a wooden platform mounted on the back of a bicycle with a small gas cooker and iron skillet, a little rolling pin and board, and a few stainless steel containers for the dough, potato mix, flour and ghee.

The detective ordered three paranthas, watched Lakshman prepare them with a swiftness and efficiency that any five-star restaurant chef would find hard to match, and ate the hot potato-stuffed bread with some home-made garlic aachar while standing up.

His appetite fully sated, the detective ordered a cup of chai, swallowed his diet pills and turned his mind to the murder case. Something was now clear to him. In the past six months, a dramatic change had come to the world of illegal cricket gambling. New technology had been introduced and two major bookies and a player's father had been bumped off.

Had the new technology made them redundant? Or was there a turf war raging among Aga's 'soldiers'?

He started to refer back to his notes from the past couple of days, looking over the list of suspects. He was now down to seven, having decided to cross off foul-mouthed public relations woman Neetika Sahini (no fewer than eight witnesses confirmed that she hadn't moved from her seat while Faheem Khan was away from the table).

The remaining suspects were:

Satish Bhatia - 'Call Centre King'

Jasmeet Bhatia - elderly mother of Satish Bhatia

Sandeep Talwar - politician, President of the ICB, crook

Mrs Harnam Talwar - elderly wife of above

Kamran Khan - son of murder victim

Ram Dogra - industrialist, known as the 'Prince of Polyester'

Mrs Megha Dogra - elderly wife of above

Puri had one lead to follow up: the piece of paper he'd taken from Full Moon's farmhouse, which he planned to drop off at Brigadier Mattu's later in the day. He'd also managed to arrange a viewing of the CCTV footage from the match day at Kotla Stadium.

What else? He was due to pick up his visa from the Pakistan High Commission. Not something he was looking forward to in the least.

Puri's phone rang. It was Aarish, the man in Haridwar he'd tasked with watching Mummy.

'Very, very good morning to you, saar!' he said.

'Tell me.'

'Your dear mummy-ji and auntie have been doing timepass in the city. Last night they scattered ashes at Har ki Pauri. Later, they reverted to their hotel. A nice establishment next to--'

'You kept Mummy in your sights whole day, is it?' interrupted the detective.

Aarish hesitated. 'In the morning, sir. And evening, also.' Another hesitation, then a clearing of the throat. 'See unfortunately after lunch your dear mummy . . . Well, sir, there were some monkeys and it was very much crowded . . .'

'Monkeys?'

'So many, sir. Very aggressive.'