Up in Flames (16 page)

             
‘Bit extreme for an April Fool jape.’

             
‘There’s nothing funny about a fundamentalist Hindu guy caught up in some religious rite. There was a kind of altar at this temple. It had a woman’s figure with a triangular brass head and a ghagra, an image of Durga, a female deity, astride a lion.’ She frowned. ‘Let’s see if I can remember this right - it’s been a long time. The dead woman apparently acquires the Shakti - the energy or life-force, I suppose, of Durga, who enters her and becomes the Sati Mata; a new, powerful goddess embodied in the two-eyed trishul. The two-eyed trishul represents the,’ she shrugged faintly, ‘metamorphosis, I suppose, of the woman Savitri into the goddess sati mata Savitri Devi.’

             
‘Not much consolation in becoming a goddess when you’re reduced to ashes.’

             
‘That’s what I said, but some of the Indian women I spoke to told me that Rajput females are amongst the most subjugated in the country. Few get any schooling. Once you become a widow there your life’s over. Widows bring such bad karma that the general drift I got from the women was that it was better for them to be a dead goddess than a living outcast. Many thought climbing on the fire would win out every time over a lingering living death. Strange country. Fascinating, too. You should go there.’ She smiled. ‘Might loosen you up’

             
Funny, thought Casey, but his mother seemed to have forgotten that he had been to India, much as she and his father had forgotten about him for days at a time when, as a child he had accompanied them on the hippie trail. Probably, all the drugs she had taken down the years had damaged her memory. Or maybe it had always been selective. And if she forgot he was there she could also forget how she and his father had left him to fend for himself.

             
‘The contrasts are like way out,’ she went on when he didn’t speak. ‘Barbaric practises like widow and bride burning on the one hand and a terrific growth in the hi-tech industry on the other.’

             
Casey nodded. He had read in the paper only the other day that lots of British firms subcontracted IT work to India. Not only were they world class in the field their computer nerds were also far cheaper than England’s.

             
As his mother said, a strange, fascinating land, vast and sprawling, full of contrasts such as modern hi-tech alongside barbaric medieval ritual.

             
And as he went to bed later that night, Casey’s only hope was that his doubts about Gough and Linklater’s guilt were unfounded. Because if they weren’t, he would  have to start investigating the Khan and Bansi families’ possible complicity in Chandra and Leela’s deaths. And after what his mother had told him, he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for the further delving into India’s culture that such an investigation would require.

Mr and Mrs Sanjit and Roop Bansi lived in a three-bedroomed semi on the outskirts of King’s Langley. The house would have been spacious but for all the clutter. Casey wondered whether their home was used as an extension to their business storeroom, as all sorts of Indian artefacts and materials seemed to be stacked around the house. He recognised several pitaras, traditional carved wooden chests dotted around the room. The chests had small doors in front which, as he remembered from Indian folklore, were designed to deter thieves from stealing too many items from the chest at any one time. These were no doubt considered good enough for the export market, but as he recalled, they were far inferior to the magnificent examples of wood artistry he had seen in some of the palaces in India.

              On top of the chests were piled bolts of fabric; mirrored Rajasthani embroidery, hand-worked Salma saris. Another pile contained crewel-worked Toran wall and door hangings. In the corner was a teetering pile of beautifully detailed Jali carvings.

             
Every wall was covered in pictures of a young man in his early twenties, whom Casey took to be the dead son, Magan. The pictures portrayed a good-looking, self-confident young man, verging on the podgy; the only-son-syndrome mentioned by Angela Neerey clearly evident in the well-fed cheeks and self-satisfied expression.

             
The quantity of photos of him indicated that the son now ranked amongst the Indian gods in his mother’s eyes, statues of which cluttered every flat surface not already occupied, and which had apparently spread out from the corner shrine. Casey remembered several of them; Ganesh, of course, the popular elephant god, his mother’s particular favourite, Krishna, with his crown of peacock feathers, Brahma, Vishtu and Shiva the Trimurti.

             
On the sofa, looking like a particularly well-fed Bhudda, sat Mrs Bansi with her husband squashed into a tiny corner beside her. Hard not to be reminded of Jack Spratt and his wife, was Casey’s thought. Mr Bansi was as thin as a beanpole, with a cadaverous face and desiccated looking skin, a bundle of twigs only held together by his clothing. She appeared as wide as she was high, with pendulous jowls that wobbled in tandem with the loose skin under her upper arms. She reminded Casey of the first - and only - children’s party he had attended at the age of five when he had seen a jelly for the first time - his hippie mother not being given to the provision of puddings - and had been so fascinated by the wondrous wobbling propensity of the jelly that his attempts to make it wobble still  further had caused it to wobble to the floor. He had never forgotten it or the swift slap his friend’s harassed mother had administered; the injustice still rankled.

             
There seemed no danger of the jelly woman collapsing to her carpet. Mrs Bansi looked as firmly set on the bright orange-floral settee as Queen Victoria had on her throne. Her voice was shrill and easily overpowered her husband’s low tones. She certainly seemed the more dominant personality.

             
Casey was thankful the couple both spoke English; he had half-expected them to plead ignorance of the language in order to avoid his questioning. Perhaps they might have, but presumably they had realised that the presence of the uniformed Shazia Singh precluded such a stratagem.

             
Casey began by asking about their dead son and offering his condolences.

             
This set Mrs Bansi off. ‘My beautiful boy. What a loss to a mother. And to lose such a one because of a randi.’ Beside him, he heard WPC Asian’s swift indrawn breath. But before Casey could glance at her, Mrs Bansi had clasped her be-ringed hands to her mighty bosom with such force that every bit of her began to wobble alarmingly; almost he expected bits of her to shoot off in all directions and go splat on the carpet. ‘Such a good boy.’ Wobble. ‘Such a hard worker.’ Wobble. ‘How could you know what a loss my son is to me?’ Wobble. ‘Who will now look after me in my dotage?’ Wobble, wobble.

             
Casey dragged his gaze from the human jelly to glance at the jelly’s husband. Squashed into a tiny corner of the two-seater settee he had scarcely uttered a word. At any moment Casey expected him to vanish altogether, his dry kindling body crushed to dust by the exuberant exertions of his wife. She had made no mention of her husband’s loss or of Chandra’s. Her words indicated that she did indeed blame Chandra for her son’s death, however unjustly. Grief such as Mrs Bansi’s didn’t allow for mercy or even fairness

             
Such grief and outraged passion in a mind as strong-seeming as Roop Bansi’s could be a dangerous combination, particularly as ThomCatt, with a speed and initiative that Casey had come to expect, had somehow managed to uncover the information that Chandra would, indeed, have received a healthy inheritance from her late husband. A share of the business had been given to the son as a wedding gift, and, as his widow, Chandra would have inherited under the intestacy laws, always presuming that her youthful husband had made no will.

             
Casey didn’t think such a situation would have suited Roop Bansi. He suspected that Chandra would have needed to recruit an entire court-ful of lawyers to get what was rightfully hers. From the little he had seen so far, he judged Roop Bansi capable of killing; her only difficulty would be finding the energy to heave her bulk from the sofa.

             
But there were two sides to every story and now, in an attempt to right the balance, Casey said, ‘I understood your son, Magan, died in a car accident?’

             
Roop Bansi’s small brown eyes were sunk into the flesh of her face, but still he couldn’t mistake the glint of malevolence in their kohl-ringed depths. ‘So? It was an accident that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been driving that lazy wife of his to the shops to spend more of our money.’

             
Casey nodded. Now he understood at least part of the cause of Mrs Bansi‘s anger. As both Catt and Shazia Singh had remarked, so many murders came down to money in the end. No doubt she had resented every penny spent by Chandra’s apparently besotted husband. At the risk of setting the jelly-flesh wobbling again, he asked, ‘You didn’t approve of your son’s wife?’

             
She made a pshawing sound. ‘Approve, disapprove. She was not the girl she had been made out to be.’ She gave her husband a reproachful glance before turning back to Casey. ‘My husband arranged the marriage. He and Mr Khan are business acquaintances.’

             
‘Partners, now,’ her husband murmured beside her. ‘Since the marriage.’

             
Mrs Bansi gave a less than delicate snort at this interruption and continued her condemnation of her daughter-in-law. ‘Even before the marriage I thought her too modern, too opinionated, too given to western ideas and the wearing of western clothes. I did my best to put a stop to that once they were married. A girl should be submissive to her husband’s parents.’

             
Casey guessed that only one person in this house was entitled to voice opinions. It certainly wasn’t her husband, who seemed cowed by his forceful wife. He was surprised that Sanjit Bansi had been permitted to arrange the son’s wedding. But perhaps that, too, had come down to money. Financially, at least on the surface, Mr Bansi had made a good  match for his son. No doubt that had appealed to Mrs Bansi at the time, which was why he had been allowed to get on with it. But maybe, as with the bride, doubts as to the ‘bargain’ made had begun to set in. It was only now, when all their hopes and dreams of the future affluence that should have flowed from the families’ union had ended, that she voiced her reproaches.

             
It was interesting to learn the men had been business partners. Surely it would provide Mr Bansi - or his wife - with ample opportunity to get hold of the keys to Chandra’s flat and have them copied? They were even conveniently marked ‘flat - front door’ and ‘flat - back door’, as he had noticed when Rathi Khan had fumbled his car keys from the ring.

             
But Mrs Bansi’s hearty condemnation of her dead daughter-in-law wasn’t indicative of guilt in her death; rather the opposite. Unless, of course, even the need for self-preservation was unable to curb her tongue.

             
He guessed that, in Chandra, Mrs Bansi had got more than she had bargained for. She would have found her vivacious, westernised daughter-in-law no mean opponent. Chandra wouldn’t have let herself be crushed by this weighty human jelly without putting up a fight.

             
Determined not to be crushed himself, Casey addressed his next remark to Mr Bansi. ‘And what about you, sir? How did you feel about Chandra?’

             
Before he had a chance to open his mouth, his wife answered for him. ‘What should he feel? I tell you the girl was not the good bargain she had been held up to be. Her extravagance would have beggared us all in time. These young, westernised Asian women are all the same. None of them concern themselves with their duties. It is always the laughing and joking with them.’

             
Casey thought it unlikely that Chandra would have had much opportunity for light-hearted behaviour in this house. Of course, he must remember they had lost their only son, a greatly beloved son if the number of photographs were any indication. But their personalities had been formed long before their son’s death. Mr Bansi wore the anxious look of one habitually in the wrong. Mrs Bansi‘s voice and manner were those of a bully who had had years to perfect her art.

             
She opened her mouth and was evidently about to begin another tirade, when her husband muttered something under his breath. Her gaze darted from Casey to Shazia Singh and back again and the expected tirade remained unspoken. Instead, she asked, ‘What for you are asking us these questions? She is dead and good riddance, but we had  nothing to do with it. It is not for you to cross-question us when we are weak from grief from the loss of our son.’

             
Mr Bansi was apparently not quite as ineffective as he appeared. For now he broke in. ‘My wife is distraught, Inspector. She doesn’t understand what she is saying.’

             
Casey reminded himself that although Sanjit Bansi seemed a meek creature in the presence of his wife, he must be fairly shrewd as he ran what was by all accounts a very successful and profitable business importing traditional Indian artefacts, which found a ready market not only amongst Asians, but also among besotted returned western travellers. They even had a website to cater for far-flung customers and had a mail-order arm, too. It would be a mistake to underestimate him.