Blood Money (23 page)
‘I threw him out,’ said Alex. ‘Back at a junction somewhere.’
‘Ah, that explains a phone call we got on Sergeant Chopra’s mobile. So who was driving it after that?’
Alex hung his head sheepishly. ‘I was.’
‘Well, sahib,’ said the policeman, ‘your driving is diabolical.’
33
C
ORNERED
ORNERED
When the policeman found him under the tarpaulin, Hex had given himself up immediately. You couldn’t argue with a man who had a gun. So he stood up and put his hands in the air. In one hand was his mobile.
‘Now you’re thinking straight,’ the policeman had said. ‘Whatever you’ve done, it’s not worth getting shot for.’
Sergeant Chopra came over. Hex looked at the fat, lumbering figure with hatred. Three officers stood around him: the one with the gun and two others.
‘This man is a crook,’ said Hex acidly.
‘Enough of your mischief,’ said Sergeant Chopra, laughing off Hex’s remark. ‘I think we’ll get you safely under lock and key. This building site is private property and you’re trespassing. You’d better tell your little bouncing friend to join us. Unless you’d like us to shoot her for resisting arrest.’
Hex waved the hand that held his mobile. ‘I’ll call her.’
Sergeant Chopra nodded and smiled pleasantly. When he was in control of a situation he liked to appear a paragon of reason and politeness.
Hex hit a key on his phone and turned it round so the officer with the gun could see the screen. It showed Sergeant Chopra on the phone to Trilok. The policeman’s voice boomed out of the speaker: ‘Trilok, you kidnapped that girl and I’m trying to clean up after you. Sometimes it gets messy. That’s what you pay me for. And by the way, I’m thinking of putting up my prices.’
Sergeant Chopra had gone a curious grey colour. He made a grab for Hex’s phone, but the policeman with the gun cut him off. The sergeant found himself looking into the barrel.
‘With respect, Sergeant,’ said the officer, ‘is that you?’
For a moment it looked as though Chopra would deny everything. Then he heard a click. Another policeman behind him had got out his weapon and taken off the safety catch. He was surrounded.
He nodded slowly.
Hex felt a glow of satisfaction as Chopra finally had to own up to what he’d been up to. But he couldn’t relax until he knew the others were out of danger. ‘Am I still under arrest?’ he said.
The officer shook his head vehemently. ‘No, sahib, of course not.’
Hex brought out his palmtop. ‘In that case, I need to find out what the sergeant has done with my friends.’
With the help of Hex’s tracking devices, it had been easy to pinpoint where the others were, and officers were sent to rescue them.
Alpha Force were reunited at Chennai police headquarters, a modern building with air conditioning – very different from the tatty local station presided over by Sergeant Chopra. They had been examined by the police doctor and now sat giving statements around a big table in a plush office. Li and Hex had stopped off at the hostel on the way to collect the suitcase of documents. Now they spread them out on the table, file after file of evidence.
‘This is terrific,’ said the investigating officer. ‘Everything’s here – all the people Trilok’s been bribing, all the people he’s been cheating. How did you get hold of all this?’
‘We found it lying around,’ said Hex quickly. He couldn’t very well tell the police they’d picked the lock of Trilok’s flat and gone snooping. This was often the difficult bit of an operation: covering up the dubious means by which they had brought the villains to justice.
The investigating officer gave Hex a look. Then the police doctor came in – and if the officer had been going to say something, he soon forgot about it.
‘Mind if I join you?’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve examined Bina and she’s OK – just a bit hung over.’
‘Have a look at these files,’ said the investigating officer. ‘See what you make of them.’
Alex was looking at Amber and Paulo with concern. They were slumped back in their chairs, watching the proceedings with bleary eyes. Amber had been wide awake when they were examined by the doctor but now she looked deflated.
Alex touched the doctor on the arm. ‘Er, Doctor, have you seen . . .’
The doctor looked at Amber and Paulo, then said: ‘They’re fine. They were given diazepam and it often stays in your system. You think you’ve recovered and then you get another drowsy period. That’s probably why they used it on Bina; so that if she came round a bit early or they didn’t give her the next dose in time, she’d go off again all by herself. It’ll wear off.’ She looked at Paulo. ‘By the way, you were lucky you didn’t kill Amber with that adrenaline. Give the wrong dose and you could have stopped her heart.’
‘
Dios
,’ said Paulo. ‘I don’t think I’ll do that again.’
Dios
,’ said Paulo. ‘I don’t think I’ll do that again.’
Li took the strange pair of scissors she had found in the morgue out of her backpack and handed them to the doctor. ‘We found these on our travels. What are they?’
The doctor picked them up and turned them over. ‘Enucleation scissors.’ He was met by blank looks so he translated: ‘For taking out eyes.’ He put them down again.
Amber, although half asleep, still registered what the doctor had said. ‘Ewww. Put them away.’
Hex picked them up and flew them past Amber as if they were a toy plane. He snipped the jaws experimentally.
She swatted his hand. ‘Pack it in. I may be nearly asleep but nightmares make me violent.’
Hex grinned and put the scissors down again.
The doctor was looking at them. ‘That’s quite a specialist piece of equipment. Doctors don’t usually carry them. Where did you find them?’
Li couldn’t say she’d picked them up in the local police morgue. ‘They were dropped in the street,’ she said. ‘By that man with the cool box.’
The investigating officer pulled over another file. ‘We checked Sergeant Chopra’s phone. He was making regular calls to Vikram Medical Supplies. It coincided with whenever an unidentified body was brought into the morgue. He was selling the eyes.’
Alex, Hex and Li exchanged a meaningful look.
Hex indicated Trilok’s files: ‘We can’t find anything about that in here, though.’
‘No.’ The investigating officer shook his head. ‘It’s not connected with Trilok. But Sergeant Chopra’s confessed. He was selling to the eye bank and receiving payments from Trilok to protect him. When you turned up looking for Bina, he called his friends at Vikram and had her put in one of their vans. So he’ll be arrested for corruption and abetting an abduction.’
Paulo yawned. ‘Where is Trilok?’
Li grinned. ‘The police tracked him using his mobile. He was in Mount Road but when we looked out in the street we couldn’t see him. So I called his number and waited to see where the sound came from.’
Hex was grinning too. ‘He was right outside the General Medical Ethics Committee building. In a dustbin.’
They all laughed. Even Paulo and Amber chuckled quietly. ‘Very appropriate,’ drawled Amber in what was almost a whisper.
Hex found it strange to have her operating at half volume. He patted her head. ‘I rather like this new, quiet Amber. She’s like a pussycat.’
‘Watch out,’ said Amber sotto voce. ‘I may be cute but I bite.’
The investigating officer told them, ‘We’ve got Trilok downstairs in the cells and those files will be very useful.’ He looked at the doctor. ‘What do you make of them, Doctor?’
The police doctor looked up. ‘The test results are rather interesting. There are a lot in one kind of handwriting that are complete nonsense. They can’t have been done by anyone with medical knowledge.’
Li replied, ‘We think he was looking for people who had been refused transplants. He’d tell them he would find them a kidney and get them to keep paying for tests until they died.’
The doctor’s face was grave. ‘Yes, that could well be what was going on here. How despicable.’ The contempt in his voice was clear.
‘What I don’t understand is why he kept them,’ said Hex. ‘All those reports in his own handwriting are incriminating.’
‘I think I can help with that,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s faking the names of the donors, so he has to make sure he doesn’t duplicate them. Otherwise the patient might spot that they’ve already paid for a match test with, for example, a Mrs Patel of Egmore Road.’
Alex looked at the investigating officer. ‘What will happen to Trilok and Chopra? Will they go to jail?’
The officer shrugged. ‘Chopra definitely. He’s confessed. The committee members will probably be struck off and fined. But Trilok . . . he’s saying nothing, he’s demanded to talk to his lawyer. With all this evidence, we can make a good case. But he’s a rich man and he has rich friends.’
Alex smiled wryly. ‘And he obviously knows about bribing government officials.’
The investigating officer nodded. ‘We’ll do what we can.’
The doctor was riffling through papers. ‘Interesting,’ he said loudly. ‘Look at these.’ He spread the papers out so everyone could see.
The pages were from a private hospital. In the space that said ‘Patient’s name’ was written ‘Tagore Trilok’.
Having looked through so many similar papers, Hex had an idea of what they might be. He looked at the doctor. ‘Are these tests done on Trilok?’
The doctor nodded. ‘These are kidney function tests. Genuine ones – I know the consultant who’s signed them. It looks like Trilok’s suffering from kidney disease.’
Li turned to Paulo. ‘You found that drug wrapper,’ she said. ‘And you said he didn’t look well.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Looking at these it’s not surprising. Within a year, he’s going to be very ill indeed. Whether he’s in jail or not he’s going to need all that money he made.’
34
E
ND OF A
L
ONG
D
AY
ND OF A
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D
AY
Alex, Li and Hex opened the door to their room in the hostel. A few hours earlier they had brought Bina, Amber and Paulo back so that they could sleep off the effects of the drugs properly.
Alex peeked in. The room was dark. He turned back to the others. ‘They’re still asleep,’ he hissed.
As if to confirm this, a loud snore came from the room.
‘That’s got to be Paulo,’ said Li.
‘I bet it’s Amber,’ said Hex.
‘Lazy louts,’ said Alex. ‘They’ve had a couple of hours.’ He, Li and Alex had spent the time at the police station, helping the officers sort through all the evidence and providing other evidence of their own.
‘So what shall we do, put the light on?’
Suddenly the lights came on on their own. There was a great chorus of ‘Surprise!’
Alex, Li and Hex whirled round. Standing behind the door – and very much awake – were Bina, Amber and Paulo.
But they weren’t alone. Bina’s whole family were there – Mootama, Naresh, and her sisters Radha and Sami.
Naresh stepped forward and shook Alex solemnly by the hand. He didn’t say anything, just gave his hand a firm shake and held it for a moment. Then he moved on to Hex, shaking his hand and holding it before releasing it.
Li expected she would be next and went forwards to offer her hand, but Amber gave her a look that said No. Li remembered. There were strict rules about when Indian men could touch women, and that included shaking hands.
Naresh let Hex go and stood in front of Li. He didn’t need to shake her hand; his eyes said it all.
Alex recovered from the surprise first. ‘How did you get here?’
Amber answered. ‘I wasn’t tired, so I made some phone calls. Paulo had the number of the phone in Nayla and they got a message to Mootama.’
Mootama took up the story. ‘Pradesh was coming into town to pick up materials. He offered to bring us in and pick us up later.’
Amber sniffed. ‘What’s that smell?’
Alex and Li fetched a couple of large baskets from outside the door. ‘We brought a takeaway. The police recommended a restaurant.’
‘Not the one Sergeant Chopra goes to,’ added Li quickly with a shudder. Her four friends laughed.
Amber’s eyes lit up. ‘Fab.’ She clambered across the bed and opened one of the baskets. Inside were smaller baskets, their contents wrapped in napkins. She unfolded one and saw little chunks of marinaded lamb. It smelled delicious. Another contained a porcelain bowl with a fragrant dish of lentils and spices.
Li hefted another two baskets in from outside the door. ‘There’s plenty here,’ she said to Mootama and the others. ‘Do please join us.’
Naresh looked at his eldest daughter. ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to leave for a while anyway.’
Bina looked as though she would swoon with bliss. ‘I haven’t eaten proper food for days.’ Now she had got rid of the surgical gown and the police had found her a clean sari, she looked like a normal, healthy teenager again.
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