Doosra (31 page)

'Maybe they did, but did not realise it. We don't know where the other one lives. Maybe they live under the same roof, which only confirms my hypothesis that they're colluding.'

'So you think Mrs Lucky Singh knows this?'

'Kitty Varghese would definitely know that, I am certain.' Rita could also feel the theory leading somewhere.

'All this while we had assumed that the Honey Singh lookalike was actually Veer Singh; his murder, obviously, eliminates him from that theory totally. But she can't be living with two identical men. That's not possible. It would be too confusing,' Vikram said.

'Remember what Sherlock Holmes said,' Rita reminded them,
'“once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Two identical men residing in one apartment is not impossible — neither in Kitty's apartment nor Mrs Lucky Singh's. How else could the informers miss that? However, what I cannot get my head around is if they live in one place, what was the need for Honey Singh number two to visit Honey Singh number one's office and give himself away?'

The triumvirate was silent again. The moments passed like years, slowly, ominously. Nothing in the case seemed to give. All their theories so far had been fractured.

'Jatin, did you get the pictures from Mr Handlebar Raja's phone?' Rita cracked the stillness.

'Yes ma'am.' Jatin got up and picked the folder he had put the blown-up photographs he had recovered from Handlebar's phone.

Handlebar's zoom was admirable. It had captured the face of both Honey Singhs pretty well. Identical faces. The apparently fake one was standing so his height-weight-build looked the same as the one Rita had met. For the one sat in the moving car, they could only see the face and that was a one hundred percent match too. So was Kitty in the many frames. Jatin had taken the time from Handlebar's phone and stamped it on the reverse of the photographs. The two were spotted moments apart it suggested. First the alleged fake snooping around and then the original one leaving with Kitty. Then the
supposed
fake one leaving the office building and once again the real one returning to his office, in that order. The only reason attributed to the original one being the original was that he was with Kitty Varghese.

'They know each other ma'am,' Jatin voiced again.

Nene was back after the calls and updated that he had asked the Kerala Police to establish and authenticate Veer Singh's ID as soon as possible. Rita in turn updated him on what the three had discussed in his absence.

There were still too many unknowns in the case. Who was Handlebar's client and how was he connected or what was his motive for having Honey Singh followed for months? It must be significant for the client to pay Handlebar and on top of that then compensate another set of eyes to keep tabs on Handlebar. Why… and then Ash's words echoed in her brain.
“Mr Honey Singh missed being followed by Mr Raja who in turn missed being followed by your police guys who in turn missed being followed by another party? That's three groups of people who failed to spot a tail...”

'You know what we missed guys? The guys following our undercover guys when they were following Honey Singh and Handlebar might be none other than Honey Singh number two.' Nene left it there to see how the others reacted.

It was undeniably a new conjecture that they hadn't thought of before. The room was so silent they could have heard a leaf drop on the ground floor in the building.

'Which is even more worrying, if you ask me…' Rita started and left it mid-sentence. 'Do any one of you have a cigarette?'

The three guys looked bewildered. Aghast actually. Like they had inadvertently walked into their parents' bedroom and seen them make out.

'What? I'm an adult.'

'But you don't smoke,' Vikram responded.

'I did till about five years ago. And in moments like this… you know what they say, once an addict—'

'Bullsh...' Vikram realised his
faux pas
after the word had already slipped out of his mouth.

'What?'

'I'm extremely sorry ma'am.'

Stopping your boss from doing something stupid or harmful is one thing, saying bullshit to her in any informal corporate office may be, perhaps, acceptable too, but in the police and armed forces where a commanding officer is never questioned on their authority or requests…?

'I'm really, really sorry ma'am,' he apologised again.

'It's OK. I know your intentions were right,
da'ddy.'
Rita stretched out the daddy for effect.

A paroxysm of hysterical laughter ensued.

'Is there something we should know?' Jatin asked, looking at Nene.

'Yes.' Rita gestured to Vikram to share the episode at Mrs Lucky Singh's apartment when she had presumed that Vikram was her brother or father.

Humour at such times, when nothing seemed to be going your way, was a relief. A segue from the usual, routine morose life that police officers live and face every day.

Jatin and Nene looked at Vikram and said in unison:
'Daddy.'

'OK, so where were we?'

'You were looking for a cigarette.'

'No. Before that.'

'Nene said that Honey Singh number two was the tail that our undercover guys missed.'

'Thanks, yes. What's even weirder is how could our guys miss a tail that resembles their target? He should have been spotted from a mile off; the face should have registered as familiar.'

'Maybe he was disguised.'

'Wow. So first he gets plastic all over his face to look like Honey Singh and then he disguises it to not look the same?'

'Only to follow Handlebar so that Handlebar doesn't know.'

'That is possible, of course. But that, kind of, proves that Honey Singh number two has to be Handlebar's mystery client, which also means he knew Handlebar would see the double when the double appeared.'

'So how is Veer Singh connected? He had to be, why else would he be murdered?'

'Let's build on this hypothesis: our premise here is Honey Singh knows about his doppelgänger. They've managed to, somehow, carry out the burglaries; it's Jogani's murder that puts them under the lens. As one of you mentioned earlier, they get one of the Honey Singhs followed to see if the local police have picked up the scent. They further encourage the missing Veer Singh theory and that has worked to their advantage, because, let's admit it, we succumbed. By letting the doppelgänger be sighted by Handlebar in the hope that we'll think that it is definitely Veer Singh because that's who we thought was the duplicate —
plastic-ed
enough to look like his adversary Honey Singh, snooping around for something? Presto! All is worked out till they find out that the real Veer Singh is back in the country, and that could be disastrous to their plan. They couldn't let him meet us to be ruled out as the suspect? Once we saw him we'd know he wasn't a doppelgänger, right? Hence, they had to get him eliminated. The timing wasn't the best because, regrettably for them, he had already made the call to us before his death, which they might or might not be aware of at this moment. So, first things first, Nene please ask whoever is heading the investigation in Kerala to stop the police there from letting the names of the victims out to the media. If required we'll ask Commissioner Saxena to make the call.'

'But if they are the ones who got Veer Singh killed, they would have already received the confirmation that the job has been done, wouldn't they?'

'But they don't know that we know that. It's more about them believing that we are still in the dark, which might make them live in the false confidence that we're still chasing him. If Veer Singh's name is all over the papers they'll know that we have that info and we'll dig afresh. We have to act like we don't know about Veer Singh's murder — this is perhaps the only chance for us to be ahead in their game.'

'Got it.' Nene walked out again to make the calls.

He was back in five minutes to say that Kerala Police wasn't agreeable to keeping the double murder under wraps merely because Mumbai Police had requested it; there had been some bumpy incident in the past between the two constabularies.

It so happened that five years earlier — a full
quinquennium
previously, if you let
Sexy
voice half a decade in his words — Mumbai Police had declined some insignificant request that had come from down south. And five years, albeit a long time, wasn't so far back in the past to have been forgotten by the police machinery. There was no reason for them to decline Rita's request but it was tit for tat politics.

Those on the outside frequently call it a dirty game, but if you observed closely, hard politics is an extremely funny game. Friends in the daylight are vicious foes by night; foes today are friends tomorrow; bed partners change faster than the bed sheets; adversaries by day, lovers by night. Embittered today, mellowed tomorrow. Pawn guarded the queen, queen sacrificed the pawn. It was a relational kaleidoscope. However, all that could only work as long as you did not come between the lioness and her cub. The commissioner of Mumbai Police, Sanjay Saxena was furious when he was told that someone down south actually refused a request that had gone from his office. That too, on a case he was overseeing and which had an international agency involved. It took two calls and eleven minutes to the chief of Kerala Police and the local police superintendent called Nene back to apologise and retreat from the previous position. The local police there would only talk about the double murder but not disclose the identity of the victims to the media for now.

***

'OK, here's the plan,' Rita started when they reconvened after an hour. 'I want all the trees shaken, forests brought down if need be but I want to know the whereabouts of this second Honey Singh. Ideally,' she stalled for a minute, organised her thoughts and continued, 'we should put a totally different set of informants on the ground... ones we didn't use last time around. Give them the same candid-shot from the elevator we originally received from Victor — not the ones of Honey Singh number one that we've collected from various sources — and let them go hunting. Let's see where the second search leads us. We might get lucky.'

Nene and Jatin nodded. Vikram, in his usual manner, noted it down.

'Nene, I want you to handle that please.'

'Yes ma'am.'

'Please ensure to select the guys who wouldn't speak to any media bodies. We don't want this to leak to them. If they find out we are searching for the same person a second time, it will cause more damage than last time.'

'Got that ma'am. It won't happen again.'

'Thank you Nene. And Jatin, I want the entire buildings in the vicinity — at least the apartment complexes Lucky Singh and Kitty Varghese live in — canvassed. Our guys should meet every single male personally before eliminating him from the enquiry. The duplicate has to be somewhere close enough to be undetectable for so long. We have to find him.'

'Yes ma'am.'

As Ash had elucidated, murder investigations were never simple. Rita sat evaluating after the guys had left — unless the killer was caught in the act or it was witnessed by someone or the killer had left his calling card behind in the way of clues or a piece of him: hair, blood, semen, prints, skin residue or some DNA that could be decoded — this case rattled her in an altogether dissimilar manner. She still wasn't getting that feeling that she was on the right track. The Ron Jogani murder case dossier had gotten even heavier now. The Kerala Police Department could run their enquiry into Veer Singh's murder however they deemed appropriate and deduce whatever inference they regarded as pertinent, Rita couldn't care less. She was all but convinced that it was linked to her case.

Nevertheless there was still a smidgen of apprehension, which was expected given that there were still so many unknowns. Was Ron Jogani's murder indeed a burglary related homicide and then Veer Singh's assassination carried out only to cover up the tracks? Or was it something else altogether, something a lot more sinister that she and the team had overlooked or disregarded and that might come back to bite them? Whatever it was, it now looked unlikely that it was some vendetta-avenger-picking-a-bone thing as they had previously thought after meeting Kitty Varghese and discovering that Miss Kitty had had a short fling with Veer Singh.

Thankfully the news of Interpol and Mumbai Police looking for a killer locally had slid from the front pages, first into the local pages consuming far less column centimetres than it had threatened to initially, then completely failing to make any news whatsoever.

The truth is that the media and police force are two alpha males that never got along. They, at best, politely tolerate each other, and that is how it should be: one's negatives highlighted and checked by the other. The truth, also, is that the media conferences added nothing. Yes, the public had a right to know, but not hear everything over loudspeakers or in bold highlighted text. And the public didn't need to know something if no harm was to come to them, did they? Why scare the living daylights out of the common man who was already carrying the load of an uncomfortable existence in most cases?

Sexy,
Rita knew, would have carefully choreographed the press conference and fed the scribes his manicured vocabulary. Or possibly he served them a generous dose of superglue in the only press conference they had managed to organise and they went quiet. Maybe, due to the cold shoulder given by the police, the sources of stories and alleged expert views on this murder had dried up or perhaps the media had lost interest. They had shut up. And that reminded her she hadn't submitted the weekly log for
Sexy
for the week. It was Saturday today, and it was long overdue.

Rita realised she had been cinching her jaw so long that it ached, like she had being chewing gum for a few hours till Nene called her to say that a new set of informants had been corralled and briefed with the candid-shot of Sishir Singh / Honey Singh from the elevator. He was expecting some results in a day or two.