The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown (3 page)

The man seemed to notice his scrutiny and looked up with a guilty start.

Chopra's own brow furrowed.

It seemed to him that he had seen this gentleman before, but before he could place him the man turned and shuffled quickly away towards one of the exhibits lining the walls of the gallery.

Chopra looked back at the crown, resplendent on its velvet cushion. His eyes were automatically drawn, once again, to the Koh-i-Noor. The display lighting had been set up so that it accentuated the legendary diamond's beauty. Truly, he thought, it deserves its name: Koh-i-Noor – ‘mountain of light'.

And suddenly there was a feeling inside him, like a whispering in his blood. Here was a living tie to the ancient India that he so cherished. He wondered what it would feel like to hold that enormous jewel in his fist, just as the greatest monarchs of the subcontinent had once done. Would he sense the ghost of Babur hovering on his shoulder? Would he know Shah Jahan's misery as he looked longingly at the prize taken from him by his own flesh and blood? The Koh-i-Noor, which, for centuries, had set man against man, king against king, legion against legion…

A loud bang jerked him from his reverie.

Instinctively, he turned and looked for the source of the noise. He heard another bang, then another. Alarm tore through him as he saw a dense cloud of smoke swiftly expanding around the room, engulfing everything in a choking miasma of white. The world began to spin around him, the room sliding away into a gentle, sighing darkness. Another noise now, just on the edge of hearing, a thin high-pitched whine that he couldn't identify.

As he slumped to the floor and into unconsciousness, the last image that came to Inspector Chopra (Retd) was of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, spinning in the heart of a white cloud, rays of light shooting from it in all directions, incinerating everything in their path…

Chopra completed his account and focused on Jha.

The Force One commander had stood up and was now pacing the small, airless room. Jha had purposely left the air-conditioner off – an old and well-worn interrogative tactic – and the room was as hot as a sauna. Sweat poured down the commander's haggard face, drenching his moustache, but he made no move to wipe it away. He had more pressing concerns.

Jha whirled on Chopra and began peppering him once again with questions: what purpose did you have in coming here today? What time did you arrive? Who else did you know in the jewel room?

These were all questions that Chopra had already answered, but he knew that repetition was another key weapon in the interrogator's arsenal. Jha was trying to force Chopra into changing his account, to reveal some thread that he could use to unravel a dishonest tale. But Jha had forgotten the obvious flaw in this technique: when an interviewee told the truth, his answers would stay the same, no matter how many times you asked your questions.

As Chopra watched Jha fumbling, his mind whirled with questions of his own, questions brought about by some of the revelations that Jha had inevitably disclosed during his interrogation. How had the thieves managed to smuggle the gas canisters into the museum with which they had incapacitated Chopra and the other visitors? How had they shattered the supposedly impregnable reinforced glass of the display case? How had they then achieved the miracle of vanishing from the crowded and heavily guarded museum with their stolen treasure?

By the time Jha wearily dismissed him, Chopra had come to the private conclusion that this was a mystery that would prove beyond Jha's ability to solve, a mystery that would swiftly become a national scandal.

What would the Indian government do then?

Some hours later, when Chopra arrived at the restaurant after dropping Poppy back at their apartment complex, he found the place in its usual state of regimented chaos. The harrowing events of the afternoon had left him in need of a quiet hour or two with his own thoughts and so he had come to the restaurant just as he usually did at about this time each day.

The dining area, with its chequered tablecloths and glitzy chandeliers, was a cauldron of animated chatter and beguiling smells. He picked his way through the crammed tables, accepting greetings from regular patrons, many of whom were old police friends, but not stopping to converse.

Quickly, he made his way to the rear office of the establishment he had opened following his forced retirement from the police service earlier in the year.

Once inside his office, he flicked on the air-conditioner, only to hear it gurgle and wheeze to an untimely death.

Cursing, he picked up the phone and ordered a lime water and a dampened handkerchief from the kitchen.

He then slumped back in his padded chair and allowed his thoughts to return to the tumultuous events at the Prince of Wales Museum, going over the details Jha had let slip during his ham-fisted interrogation.

The robbery had been immaculate.

The thief or thieves had entered the Tata Gallery from the rear, blasting a hole through the unguarded, sealed door at the back of the gallery with a shaped explosive charge. Once inside, they had rendered the occupants of the gallery unconscious by using pressurised gas canisters. The thieves had then somehow broken through the reinforced glass of the display case housing the Crown of Queen Elizabeth, as well as shattering some of the surrounding cases. Puzzlingly, they had taken only the crown and, with this single prized possession, had fled the scene through the destroyed rear door. The door led to a passage that connected the Tata Gallery to the Jahangir Gallery in the east wing of the museum. The thieves, it was presumed, had taken the unguarded fire exit stairs, halfway along the passage, down to the ground floor… where they had promptly vanished into thin air.

Clearly, the ring of Force One guards stationed around the perimeter of the museum had not spotted anyone fleeing the scene. The instant that the glass display case had been shattered an alarm had gone off, placing each commando on red alert. Not even Houdini could have slipped through the net. The museum had been instantly locked down and every single person in the building had been rounded up and searched, as well as every corner of the museum premises.

Nothing.

The sound of a truck backfiring on the main road returned Chopra to the present.

He stood up and made his way through the restaurant's kitchen to the compound at the rear.

The generous space was lit by a single yellow tubelight around which a cloud of midges roiled. The compound was walled in on three sides by crumbling brick walls topped by a confetti of multicoloured shards of bottle glass. A narrow alley ran from the compound back along the side of the restaurant and out on to Guru Rabindranath Tagore Road.

The noise of late-evening traffic drifted in, punctuated by the occasional blood-curdling scream as a pedestrian came too close to the passing vehicles.

Chopra walked to the rear of the space and lowered himself into the rattan armchair that he had installed under the tubelight. The light was suspended from a line strung between the compound's single mango tree and a TV antenna on the roof of the restaurant. It swung gently in a sudden breeze that leavened the muggy December heat.

Beneath the mango tree, a grey shape stirred.

A flush of warmth moved through Chopra as Ganesha raised his trunk and gently ran the tip over his face. ‘How are you, boy?' he murmured.

The moment lasted only an instant before the elephant turned away huffily and hunkered back down into the mudbath in which he had been wallowing.

Chopra knew that Ganesha was upset with him. It was just another sign of the young calf's burgeoning personality.

When he had first been sent the baby elephant by his Uncle Bansi Chopra had not known what to do with the creature. What did he, a retired police officer, know about caring for an elephant? But gradually, as Ganesha had accompanied – and then actively helped – him in solving the murder of a local boy, he had come to realise that there was something mysterious and unique about the little creature. His uncle's words, set down in the letter that had arrived with his strange gift, had come back to him then: ‘remember… this is no ordinary elephant'.

Once a sceptic, Chopra was now a believer.

There was something improbable about Ganesha, something quite beyond Chopra's ability to slot him into the neat little boxes of rationality and logic that he had lived by his whole life. There were depths to the elephant that he had yet to fathom. And, of course, there was the mystery of the creature's past, upon which he had singularly failed to shed any further light.

Ganesha: a riddle inside an enigma wrapped inside an elephant.

Often, when he looked into Ganesha's gentle brown eyes, he would think he saw his Uncle Bansi staring back at him. The same mischievous uncle who had grown from a rascally boy into a white-bearded wandering sadhu, disappearing from their Maharashtrian village for years at a time only to return with tall tales of magical encounters in faraway lands that he would share with his callow nephew and credulous kinsmen.

Chopra knew that one day he would get to the bottom of the mystery, but for now he had barely enough time to count his blessings, as his wife took pains to regularly remind him. After all, not only had the restaurant got off to a flying start, so had the second venture that he had embarked upon following his retirement.

Chopra had been a police officer for more than thirty years. For thirty years he had awoken, put on his khaki uniform, taken the police jeep to the nearby Sahar station and settled down behind his desk knowing that he was about to embark upon his allotted duty in life. For thirty years he had been a man with a purpose, one that was perfectly suited to both his disposition and his talents.

And then, one day, following a heart attack that had dropped on him out of a clear blue sky, a doctor had told him that he was the victim of a curse called ‘unstable angina' and that the next time the attack might be fatal. To his despair Chopra had been forced to leave the police service and ordered to avoid stressful activity.

This had been easier said than done.

The murder that Chopra had subsequently solved had opened a can of worms in Mumbai, implicating senior politicians and policemen in a nationwide human trafficking operation. The scandal had done wonders for the new Baby Ganesh Detective Agency and they had been inundated with cases ever since.

And yet… the cases that now came his way were hardly the same as those he had tackled as head of the Sahar police station.

Take the past few months. Chopra had spent endless days trailing errant husbands and delinquent children. He had tracked down missing wills. Companies engaged his services to check up on the backgrounds of dubious employees; political parties paid him to uncover potential skeletons in the closets of election hopefuls. He was even approached by worried parents wishing to discreetly verify the bona fides – and assets – of aspiring sons-in-law.

It was all steady work.

Yet the truth was that such cases did not quicken the pulse the way a solid police investigation did. There was no sense of the greater good being achieved.

Chopra had always believed in the ideal of justice. He knew that sometimes justice was a malleable notion, particularly in India where money and power often tainted the application of due process. But this did not alter his view that the books of the cosmos could only be balanced when good and evil fought and good came out on top.

He shuffled around in the rattan chair, seeking a more comfortable position. His right hip hurt from where he had slumped onto the floor at the Prince of Wales Museum.

‘Come now, Ganesha, be reasonable,' he said to the elephant. ‘I could hardly have taken you with me. They would never have let you into the exhibition.'

Ganesha snuffled noisily and hunched further away.

Chopra sighed. It was bad enough, he thought, to be burdened by a temperamental wife, but to also have to adjust to a temperamental one-year-old elephant was sufficient to try even the patience of a saint.

He decided that young Ganesha would be best left alone until he had overcome his fit of pique.

Pulling a sheaf of papers from the leather document folder that he had carried out into the compound with him, he excavated a calabash pipe from his pocket and set it into the corner of his mouth.

Chopra did not smoke. The calabash pipe was an affectation that he employed to promote clear thinking. He had long been a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes – in particular the incarnation portrayed by Basil Rathbone in the 1940s – and the calabash pipe gave him an instant sense of stepping into the great detective's shoes.

He settled his spectacles onto his nose and began to read.

Soon he was engrossed in his work. A mosquito hummed by his ear and he swatted it away without lifting his eyes. Smells and sounds drifted out from the restaurant kitchen: the nose-crinkling odour of frying onions and seared garlic; the chilli haze of innumerable exotic spices; the spit and sizzle from Chef Lucknowwallah's giant copper pans; the growl of the clay tandoor.

He sneezed as a waft of ginger tickled his nose – he had always been fiercely allergic to the stuff.

The smells from the kitchen mingled with the undercurrent of elephant dung in the backyard. The odour was somewhat leavened by the sweet scent of ripe mango and jacaranda blossom floating in from the neighbouring Sahar International Cargo & Freight Company compound. The on-off breeze carried with it a raga from an old Bollywood movie playing on a nearby radio.

After a while Chopra realised that Ganesha had turned back to him and was watching him work. He peered at his young ward over his spectacles. ‘Something extraordinary happened today. There was a robbery at the museum. They stole the Koh-i-Noor. It is going to be a big scandal: mark my words.'

To his credit, Ganesha did indeed seem intent on his every word. Chopra reached out and patted him on his knobbly skull.

When Ganesha had first arrived he had been undernourished, quite the frailest elephant Chopra had ever laid eyes on. In his letter, Uncle Bansi had given no clue as to where Ganesha had been born or in what circumstances he had been sent to Mumbai and to Chopra.

It had taken a long time for him to earn the little elephant's trust.

He was not by nature a sentimental man, but there was no doubt that the bond that had grown between them meant as much to him as any human relationship. In a way, Ganesha was now the child that he and Poppy had never been able to have. Poppy certainly treated their ward as if he were a member of the family, doting on him and spoiling him with treats such as the never-ending supply of bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate that Ganesha was addicted to.

There was something universally endearing about the elephant calf. Certainly he was much loved by Chopra's friends and the staff at the restaurant, with the notable exception of Poppy's bilious mother.

He turned back to his papers. They comprised his handwritten notes on the various cases that he was currently working on as lead and only detective of the Baby Ganesh Agency. They all seemed so mundane in comparison to the theft of the Koh-i-Noor. Now
there
was a case! He felt a sudden pang of envy for the officer who would land that investigation. Envy, and sympathy, too. The whole world would be looking over the poor man's shoulder.

The rear door leading from the kitchen swung open, its fly-screen cracking vigorously against the whitewashed clapboard wall.

Chopra watched as young Irfan emerged into the moonlit compound.

For a second the boy stood on the creaking veranda beneath the cantilevered porch roof. Below the veranda, bullfrogs chorused a late-evening dirge. The boy knelt down and lit a mosquito coil, the acrid smoke adding to the panoply of smells in the compound. Then he straightened and came trotting over the knobbly grass, the steel bucket in his hand clanking by his side.

Chopra turned as Ganesha lumbered to his feet. He couldn't help but note the sudden sparkle in the young elephant's eyes.

Ganesha greeted Irfan with an exuberant bugle.

Irfan set down the bucket and rubbed the elephant on the crown of his forehead and then tickled him behind his ears. A smile split the young boy's features. Ganesha wrapped his trunk around the boy's thigh and attempted to haul him off his feet. Irfan guffawed loudly.

Chopra watched the pair horsing around and felt happiness flower inside him. Ganesha and Irfan had become firm friends and he knew that this was good for both of them.

He recalled the day six months previously, just a week after he had opened the restaurant, when Irfan had walked into his office.