Doosra (5 page)

'Then why murder Jogani?'

Rita had anticipated the question.

'At the end of the runway the pilot only has one choice — unless of course, he wants to commit suicide and take all passengers down too — and that option is to go airborne.
If
Jogani had seen the killers or intercepted them, they had no option but to off Jogani.'

'Interesting way to put it,' Victor said.

'But it's still a theory and it's still one big
if
...' Rita surmised. 'But then, all investigations have to begin with a theory. In time the theory could be proved correct. Then again maybe the evidence could cite that the direction was totally wrong. But we need to start somewhere.'

Victor nodded at the rationale.

'So, Mr De Smet…'

'I think we should let go of the formalities. Call me Victor.'

'Likewise Victor.'

'So, how, after over three months and change, did the Belgian police determine that Jogani's killer could be in India?'

'Very good question. In fact I was expecting it sooner. We got video footage from the hotel. You see, whoever masterminded this had planned for everything. They froze almost all the hotel cameras connected to the main control room and ran a film that was basically from the night before. When we juxtaposed the two footages they were identical…'

'Then how did you get this footage?' Vikram sounded interested.

'As I said almost all, there was a concealed camera in the elevator that wasn't connected to the control room. In fact even the hotel personnel didn't know about it. But the hotel chain's central office that had implanted it released it to us. We've been analysing it for weeks now. I'm carrying a copy, should we play the footage?' Victor took out a CD from his bag and handed it over to Vikram who put it into the computer and tilted the screen a bit so all three could see.

A camouflaged reminiscence of George Eastman's invention, albeit in moving frames, had done the trick in the elevator. The surveillance camera was obviously placed high and most of the shots were a bit blurry, grainy. The time count on the camera proved the pictures were in the time frame that the Belgian police had ascertained as the time of the murder. The Belgian police had done a professional job of cleaning it up, zooming and enlarging to make one perfect 6 x 8
candid-shot
from one of the frames.

However, if you showed the picture to a hundred people only fifty
might
have agreed that the guy was an Indian.

Rita and Vikram looked at the
picture.

A strikingly handsome man from what Rita could see.

A photograph would help in identification. But you've got to find the person first to identify him. Who was it?
Rita's mind was already churning.

'Our intelligence — and our government's sincere apologies that we didn't follow protocol and carried out investigation without proper authorisations from the Indian government initially — has not been able to track down the individual, and hence we need your help. Our experts estimate the person in these photographs to be male, height 6'2 or 6'3”, about a 100 kilograms, a head full of straight dark hair — the pictures are too grainy to discern the exact hair colour but who knows if he wasn't wearing a wig?'

'And he carried a Blackberry.'

'I must compliment you on your sharp eyes, Rita. Yes, that
is
a Blackberry he has in his hand.'

'Thanks Victor. However, looking at this footage alone, there is no certainty this man is an Indian. I mean… he could be anyone from Southern Europe, Northern Africa or even from the Middle-East.'

Recognition across races is known to be pretty appalling. Ask an Indian witness about a Caucasian or an African or a South-East Asian and they'll be at a loss. Wouldn't it be the same for a Caucasian in identifying an Indian? Didn't Ash Mattel tell her that every Indian girl looked like Shilpa Shetty to the Brits after she had won some
Celebrity Big Brother
in the UK?

'You have a point there Rita but, after we got this footage, the hotel front desk personnel confirmed they had seen the guy, spoken to him and he was positively identified as an Indian. After all, they had checked him in. He couldn't have eluded that. He checked-in with the name…' Victor scrambled through the pages… 'Sishir Singh.' He passed the papers to Rita.

Rita looked at them for a few minutes, and then passed them to Vikram.

Vikram looked at the papers. 'I can appreciate why you're here now.'

'I'm glad you both agree with me. Now, how do we find this guy?'

'Hold on a minute. Even if we concur that he is of Indian origin, that is no harbinger that the guy lives in India?'

'Well, the airport authorities gave us their surveillance tapes too. Let's look at them first.'

The guy who could possibly be Sishir Singh was on camera for a fraction of a second and then, poof, vanished. No other surveillance camera anywhere at the airport picked him up again. In the only spotting, the guy was of the same height and body proportions as Sishir Singh, and hence the possibility. The guy wore a baseball cap with the shade guardedly pulled down till it almost covered his nose. The airport cameras worked 360 degrees. They rotated such that each one covered the same spot every fifteen seconds. There was only a brief time when one camera arrested Sishir Singh when he went to the check-in desk. It was evident that the guy knew the location of airport cameras too. You had to know the camera locations and their movements in entirety before you could outfox it. Sishir Singh certainly knew the CCTV blind spots. There was no other way. He should be given full marks for the research.

'The image was dark and hazy, as you can imagine, but our experts after enhancing and enlarging it, have compared and confirmed with statistical confidence that the image was of the same person that was in the elevator,' Victor began after the short video ended. 'Moreover, our airport authorities confirmed that a guy named Sishir Singh flew from Brussels to Mumbai on the morning after the murder. That was the same flight Mr Jogani was booked on. Perhaps, if he had failed to get the diamonds at the hotel he had planned to take them someplace else. Who knows?'

'OK, that's too much of a coincidence to accept. That settles it, if Sishir Singh flew to Mumbai...'

'They hadn't thought the plan through. How do you steal diamonds from the merchants and sell them back to them in India?' Vikram questioned.

Rita could explain it but she let Victor explicate.

'In our experience, art, antiques, collectibles or merchandise, like precious stones over a certain value are stolen only after they are sold. The buyer is already there. The diamonds would have changed hands before our police got Mr Jogani's body bagged and tagged and got it out of the hotel. The buyer, of course, hadn't ordered blood diamonds, but who would have known about the murder when the deal was sealed?'

The hypothesis made sense.

'And in any event, selling the diamonds — I guess that worry would pale before the reward,' Rita explained more logically. 'And I know it's only an assumption but in my opinion it's a calculated hypothesis.'

'It's more than a hypothesis actually, as one of the diamonds stolen from that heist turned up in Antwerp again, and the origin of that stone was given as Mumbai. So, some of them have already changed hands once, at least.'

'And is there no way to track the last sale and then work on the chain backwards to its origin in Mumbai?' Vikram asked.

'No.' Victor wagged his head. 'The diamond trade is more guarded than you imagine: almost the same secrecy is awarded to it as to the drugs trade for some reason. Nevertheless, that aside we did try, but got nowhere. The search was futile.'

'How do you want us to proceed?' Rita asked.

'As I mentioned before, first of all we need to contact Mr Jogani's office, house, friends, and track down Sishir Singh before we can even begin. As the murder happened in a hotel, a public place, you can well imagine we have picked up more fingerprints — latent, impressed and patent — than in any other case that I've been involved in. We've ruled out all the hotel staff, and whoever we had on the file, but unless we find a match all that remains is unusable.'

Victor was correct. Finding prints in a hotel room was always a bitch, considering the number of people who'd have lived in the room before and touched the articles, equipment, walls, fittings and whatnot. And then, be it prints, hair, blood, skin residue, evidence per se was impotent. It had little value till it could be found. Once found — like Victor's team had — it should have been recovered from the crime scene and examined to establish its legitimacy, which Rita couldn't imagine could be the case in a hotel room. Nevertheless, even if there were, there should be something or someone that it could be compared to. Only then could it give any direction to the investigators. Otherwise, a drop of blood is only a drop of blood. Nonetheless, Rita was convinced the intruder — Sishir Singh or whoever — wouldn't have left any such evidence behind that could lead back to him. The whole incident was indeed a well-planned operation. And whoever masterminded it had enough IQ to recognise that was the first thing the police would look for: murder or burglary.

'Witnesses? Not a one,' Victor concluded.

'If Sishir Singh is in Mumbai, we will find him — it won't be easy, but it can't be impossible either.'

Reasonable assurance without a promise but what other surety could Rita offer at this stage?

'Thank you for the confidence exhibited. What do you need from us?'

'Could we have a copy of this surveillance camera footage and the pictures please?' Vikram asked.

Since Rita had known Vikram he had been a meticulous officer who was conscientious and focussed. He sounded like he was already imbibed into the case.

'Of course… we made a copy of everything, you can keep them.' Victor opened his case again and took out a red box file — in the manner he lifted the heavy file Rita could assess that it weighed a ton — and placed it on the table. Neither Rita nor Vikram rushed for it. It lay between them like an orphan. What was the rush? The file would be with them now and they could sink their fangs into it at their earliest convenience. 'I'm cognisant that you will have questions when you read the file,' Victor carried on, '…and watch the footage and picture a few times, so if you want to ask or discuss anything I'm in Mumbai until Thursday, then I need to return. However, I'll be contactable twenty-four/seven on phone and email should you need me.'

With a few other sundry details and a plan to meet the next day, giving the Indian contingent time to swallow the details and work on a blueprint, the briefing finished around 2
PM.
A police driver from the pool had been allocated to Victor for his stay in Mumbai and he left for the hotel. He had only flown in the night before, ergo he was well past his bedtime according to his body clock.

***

Vikram sat on the visitor's seat in Rita's office when Jatin came in. Inspector Jatin Singh had moved into Rita's team only since the last case that had brought the three of them together. He was just proving to be a prized asset when the misfortune of getting involved with some wrong people almost destroyed his career. But he was back. Rita appreciated his high levels of energy and his sharp intellect; he was much younger than Vikram and herself though. The fact that he succumbed to something stupid once did not alter Rita's attitude towards him. Hadn't they all been taken for a ride by the crafty murderer in the infamous Bhendi Bazaar case? Why, then, isolate poor Jatin for his recklessness? He had, after all, been her other Man Friday. Taller than Rita, but shorter than Vikram, Jatin was five-feet-eleven, and he was always well dressed. In her mind, Rita thought of him as eye candy: an innocuous pleasure of life.

He seemed irked. 'I'm very sorry ma'am. The flight was delayed.' he started.

'It's OK, Jatin. As per usual protocol we've allocated the most horrible tasks to the absent member.'

'Welcome back, ma'am.'

'Thanks. You too. How was the vacation?'

'Fantastic.'

'Vikram will brief you on the case. And then we have this huge file to go through. I think we should get copies made for all of us, as we can't lose any more time reading it sequentially.'

Vikram nodded, and in his usual manner jotted it down. He wrote down everything that Rita said. Sometimes she wondered if Vikram was as meticulous at home as he was here? Did he note down every task his wife asked him to carry out too?

'Is there anything you want to discuss about the case?' She got up to indicate the meeting was over. 'Please give the original file back to me after you make the copies. I'll try to read the case file tonight. We should come in and discuss our summaries and strategy tomorrow afternoon. Depending on the task at hand I'll see how many people we need in the team to manage this investigation. Have a good evening, you two.'

As she walked out and waited for the lift she observed that the phones rang more than they did before she went on medical leave or so it seemed. Maybe it was simple mathematics: there had been some redundancies in her absence and perhaps there weren't enough people to attend all the calls. She smiled at the irony. Not enough people to man phones in a police headquarters and here they were looking at a case that didn't even happen in their jurisdiction.
Welcome to shit extraordinaire,
she murmured.

She had paged the driver and he brought the car around. A constable had carried the heavy file for her and was putting it in the boot as she stood there mulling over the day.

Sishir Singh.
Not a common name.