The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

About the Book

Vish Puri, the gormandizing, spectacularly mustachioed sleuth finds himself on his most daring assignment yet, infiltrating the dangerous world of illegal gambling to solve the murder of a high-profile Pakistani on Indian soil.

During a post-match dinner the elderly father of a top Pakistani cricketer playing in a new multi-million-dollar cricket tournament dies. His butter chicken has been poisoned.

To solve the case, Puri must crack the continent's mafias, following a trail that leads deep into the heart of Pakistan - a country holding dark significance in Puri's own family history.

The answer to the mystery seems within reach when Puri discovers that there is one person who can identify the killer.

Unfortunately it is the one woman in the world with whom he has sworn never to work: his Mummy-ji.

About the Author

Tarquin Hall is a writer and journalist who has lived and worked in much of South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the US. Tarquin first went to India in the mid 1990s where he met his wife, journalist Anu Anand. They now live in Delhi with their two children. He is the author of several non-fiction works and two other Vish Puri stories, The Case of the Missing Servant and The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing.

Also by Tarquin Hall

From the Files of Vish Puri, India's Most Private Investigator

The Case of the Missing Servant

The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

Non-fiction

Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits:

Adventures of an Under-age Journalist

To the Elephant Graveyard:

A True Story of the Hunt for a Man-killing Indian Elephant

Salaam Brick Lane:

A Year in the New East End

The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken

From the Files of Vish Puri, India's Most Private Investigator

Tarquin Hall

For Ax and the childhood we spent together

ONE

STRIPPED DOWN TO his undergarments and tweed Sandown cap, Vish Puri stepped on to his wife's old set of bathroom weighing scales. He watched with apprehension as the needle jerked violently to the right and settled on 91 kilos.

'By God,' the detective muttered to himself. 'One extra kilo is there. She is going to kill me - certainly if not totally.'

He tried lifting one foot off the pressure pad and shifted his weight to see if it made a difference. It didn't.

'Well, nothing for it,' he said with a sigh, stepping back on to the floor.

Puri checked that the bedroom door was locked, picked up the scales and turned them over. He removed the bottom panel, exposing the crude mechanism inside. Then he squeezed the pressure pad between his knees. When the needle reached 90, he jammed a wooden peg into one of the cogs.

The scales could now register only one weight: 90 kilos.

'Hearties congratulations Mr Puri, saar!' he told himself with a smile after double-checking his handiwork. 'Diet is coming along most splendidly.'

Still the detective knew that he'd bought himself a week or two at the most. Eventually all the lapses of the past fortnight would catch up with him - for lapses read numerous chicken frankies; five or six kathi rolls (he had been on a stakeout; what else was he supposed to eat?) and a significant portion of the Gymkhana Club Sunday brunch buffet (the Pinky pudding had been irresistible).

He was going to have to lose at least a token amount of weight - enough to keep Rumpi and that bloody Dr Mohan off his back.

Fortunately, he believed he had found the answer to his prayers: diet pills. According to a flyer that had been stuffed under the windscreen wiper of his car, these promised 'miraculous and exceptional results!'

Puri fished out the flyer from his trouser pocket and read it again just to check that his eyes hadn't deceived him. 'Tired of being a big motu, but want to enjoy your gulab jamuns?' he read. 'ZeroCal is the answer! It contains a special fibre that absorbs fat molecules and converts them into a form the human system doesn't absorb. So now you can carry on getting your just desserts!'

Puri chuckled to himself. 'Just desserts,' he said. 'Very good.'

He stuffed the flyer back into his trouser pocket as footsteps sounded on the top of the stairs. They were accompanied by his wife's voice: 'Chubby? Are you ready? We had better get a move on, no? There are bound to be traffic snarls.'

The detective went to the door and opened it.

'What have you been doing in here?' asked Rumpi as she entered the room. 'Don't tell me you were listening in on the servants again with one of your bugs. You know I don't like it when you do that, Chubby.'

'Just I was weighing myself, actually.'

'And?'

Puri stepped gingerly back on to the scales, one foot at a time. They gave a creak, but the peg held.

'Hmm. Ninety kilos,' she read. 'So you've lost . . . three quarters of one kilo. It's something at least. But so far I don't see any improvement.'

She looked her husband up and down, scrutinising his stomach, which bulged out beneath his cotton undershirt like a lumpy pillow.

'You still look . . . well, if anything I would say you've got a little larger, Chubby.'

'Must be your eyesight, my dear.'

'There's nothing wrong with my eyesight, I can assure you,' said Rumpi, her voice thick with suspicion. 'I just hope you're keeping off those chicken frankies,' she continued with a sigh. 'It's for your own good, Chubby. Remember what happened to Rajiv Uncle.'

Ah, poor old Rajiv Uncle. Last month, he'd suffered a massive heart attack while at the wheel of his Mahindra Scorpio and taken out four feet of the central barricade of the Noida Expressway. The fact that he'd been fifty-four, only a couple of years older than Puri, had not been lost on Rumpi or his three daughters. Mummy had seen fit to comment on it as well - along with his three sisters-in-law, numerous aunties, and even a cheeky nephew or two. Indeed, given the great Indian family system in which everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone exercises the right to involve themselves and comment upon everyone else's affairs, the detective had recently found himself on the receiving end of a good deal of health-related advice. Most irritating of all had been the impromptu lecture from his seventeen-year-old niece, whose opinions on most things in life were informed by India's edition of Cosmo magazine.

Age still trumped youth even in today's changing middle-class society, so he had been able to tell her to put a sock in it. But over his wife, he enjoyed no such advantage.

'Yes, my dear,' he replied with a prodigious yawn. 'Now I had better get changed. You're right. It is getting late. And I would be making one stop along the way.'

'Please don't tell me you're working, Chubby - not today of all days.'

'Ten minutes is required, only,' he assured her.

Puri escaped into the bathroom to attend to his handlebar moustache, which was looking limp after the rigorous shampoo and conditioning he'd given it earlier. First, he groomed it with a special comb with fine metal teeth. Then he applied some Wacky Tacky wax, which he heated with a hairdryer so it became soft and pliable. And finally, he shaped it into a symmetrical handlebar, curling the ends.

'Pukka!'

He returned to the bedroom to find his wife sitting at her dresser, putting on her earrings. Her long, straight hair hung down her back over the blouse of her lustrous black and gold Benarasi sari.

Puri went and stood behind her, placed his hands on her elegant shoulders and smiled.

'Beautiful as the first day we met. More beautiful, in fact,' he said.

Rumpi smiled back at him in the mirror. 'Still quite the charmer, aren't you?' she said.

'Once a charmer always charming,' cooed the detective, and bent down and kissed the top of her head.

A thick January fog had engulfed Delhi and its unstoppable suburbs overnight. And when the Puris set off for south Delhi at midday - some eight hours before the murder - mist still veiled the imposing glass and steel buildings along the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway. Bereft of the sunshine usually gleaming off their futuristic facades, the beacons of the new India suddenly looked pale and subdued.

It was still bitingly cold as well. Not freezing, it had to be said, but the short winter always found the vast majority of the capital's inhabitants woefully ill prepared. With no means to heat classrooms, the city's schools had been closed for the past week. 'Load shedding' led to frequent blackouts. And the morning newspapers brought daily reports of a dozen or so deaths amongst the countless thousands living in Delhi's makeshift jugghis.

The languid figures Puri spotted through the fogged-up windows of his Ambassador, layered in chunky cotton sweaters, reminded him of Victorian polar explorers in the days before brightly coloured, mass-produced puffer jackets and fleeces. He spotted security guards standing outside the gates of a call centre huddled around an electric cooking ring, chins tucked on chests like disobedient boys sent to the naughty corner. Further on, a gang of labourers breaking rocks in a ditch wore scarves wrapped over the tops of their heads and under their chins, lending them a strangely effeminate look despite the arduous nature of their task.

Puri and Rumpi had spent yesterday afternoon volunteering at a local charity, distributing blankets to the city's poor. Many of those they'd encountered had been visibly malnourished, making them especially vulnerable to the cold. The experience had served as a sharp reminder that for all the growth in the economy, for all the fanfare about dazzling GDP figures and IT this and that, there was still so much need and want. Upon returning home last night, Puri had felt moved to write a new letter to the most honourable editor of The Times of India, pointing out that it was the duty of the 'proper authorities' to make improvements and the responsibility of 'ordinary citizens' to hold them accountable.

'With so much of change coming to modern society, it is of the upmost importance and necessity, also, that we continue to uphold the role of dharma,' he'd written. 'Dharma has been the underlying concept of our civilisation over so many of millennia. Let us not forget the meaning of the word itself. This most cherished and honoured of words comes to us from the root dhr meaning "to hold, to bear, to carry". For both Chanakya, founder of the Maurya Empire, and our great Emperor Ashoka, it meant "law, virtue, ethics and truth". Let us abide by these most honourable of principles, and with them firmly set in our minds, let us remember our collected responsibility to others and one another also.'

His message was evidently lost on the city's drivers. Despite the poor visibility, cars and trucks sped up behind the Ambassador flashing their headlights and honking their horns, and wove through slower-moving traffic like getaway vehicles fleeing bank robberies. Cocky hatchbacks, their side mirrors folded inward, squeezed between other vehicles, making three lanes out of two. The occasional, rusting three-wheeler suddenly came into view, puttering along in the fast lane. And sports cars rocketed past, vanishing instantaneously into the fog. Puri kept bracing himself, anticipating a screech of brakes and the boom of a high-speed impact, but they never came. Could this lack of carnage be attributed to divine providence, he wondered? Or had Indian drivers developed the heightened reflexes of demolition derby drivers given that they faced similar conditions?

Certainly the police played no part in keeping the traffic moving safely. Puri didn't spot a single patrol car along the entire route.

There weren't any hazard signs in place, either. And so it was with a sigh of relief that he greeted the exit sign for South Delhi and the Ambassador was delivered safely down the off-ramp.

A broad carriageway carried the car past the gated communities of the super-elite, where the tops of luxury villas peeked over high walls ringed by security cameras. They passed a series of identical concrete 'overbridges', which held aloft the city's new flyovers, and soon reached the AIIMS spaghetti junction. The detective found it impossible to pass the installation art steel 'sprouts' growing from the embankment without making some disparaging comment, and today was no exception. 'If that is art then my name is Charlie with a capital C!' he said, becoming all the more vocal when Rumpi said that she quite liked them.

She and Puri were still arguing, albeit it good-naturedly, when the car turned into Laxmi Bai Nagar.

'Number four oblique B, H Block, Lane C, off Avenue B.' He read the address from a text message he'd been sent on his phone. 'Behind all-day milk stall.'