A Cut-Like Wound (45 page)

How much of their relationship was role-playing, he
wondered. This thing with him. Was it like slipping into another role? The one that went with meeting an old flame?

He clenched his jaw. He wouldn’t allow his mind to go down that road.

Instead, he began walking towards Kamaraj Road. He would tell her to meet him at the mouth of Commercial Street.

‘What’s wrong?’ Urmila asked a little later.

Gowda shook his head. ‘Nothing, really.’ He shrugged. Then he changed his mind and said, ‘Santosh hasn’t been in contact for the last two hours. And I can’t get through to him.’

‘He is a grown man, Borei.’ Her lips twitched.

‘But an inexperienced investigator. I asked him to trail someone. I shouldn’t have. He could be in trouble.’ Gowda leaned against the dashboard and knocked his head against it gently again and again.

‘Don’t do that. Your nose will start bleeding again. Borei, he’ll be fine. This is Bangalore, after all…’ she said quietly.

‘We were investigating a murder. I should have told Stanley what we were planning. I had no right dragging Santosh into it. And now he’s gone missing,’ Gowda said, still with his head against the dashboard.

‘Where do we go now?’

Gowda straightened. ‘Keep driving. I’ll tell you. I’m going on a mere hunch, you see…’

The road was crowded. All the diverted traffic and the rain hadn’t helped. As they inched their way towards Wheeler Road, in the narrowest part of the road where Sabapathi Lane intersected Kamaraj Road, a small truck laden beyond capacity braked abruptly. One of its back tyres had burst.

There was no room to pull out, so Gowda and Urmila sat in silence while people gathered, scratched their heads and decided what had to be done.

Gowda tried Santosh’s number again. Unreachable.

8.21 p.m.

Santosh felt the breeze whip at his face. Where were they going?

‘You haven’t told me your name,’ he said.

‘Neither have you,’ she replied, throwing him one more of those sidelong glances she specialized in.

‘Santosh Ignatious,’ he improvised.

‘Kamakshi,’ she said.

He frowned. Gowda had said her name was Bhuvana. So she was making up a name as he had. Was he being reckless? If she could lie so easily, she would be capable of anything. Then he saw her finger twist a hanky. And he relaxed. Maybe she was called Kamakshi at home.

‘How far is your home, Kamakshi?’ he asked.

‘Yes, madam, where are we going?’ the auto driver chipped in.

‘Keep going. When you get to Nagawara, I’ll tell you,’ she said.

‘It’s not my home. I live with my brother and his family,’ she said, turning to Santosh. And then, after a pause, ‘You know how that is…’

He nodded.

Gowda was completely wrong about her, he decided.

‘They didn’t want me to come to the car festival, but I didn’t want to break what I had begun … so many years ago,’ she said, and then to the auto driver, ‘turn left.’

The autorickshaw turned into a narrow alley of shops. A huge apartment block loomed above the rest of the buildings in the street.

A pack of dogs stood beside a rubbish bin. Two of them stared at the autorickshaw and chased after it, barking.

‘Bloody nuisance, these dogs!’ the auto driver growled. ‘If you had told me you were coming this far, I wouldn’t have taken the trip!’

‘Stop complaining,’ Santosh snapped. ‘It’s your job!’

‘All very well for you to say that! I am the one who has to return all the way back with an empty backseat!’

‘I’ll take a ride back till the Ring Road. That satisfy you?’ Santosh said, and watched with surprise as she shook her head.

‘But you can’t go. I want you to meet my brother,’ she said.

Santosh hid his smile. This was getting interesting.

Suddenly, he was struck by a thought. What if it was the brother? But why? The murders had been random and not for gain. Could there be a deeper, darker motive? Organ robbery? But all the victims had their kidneys and livers in place…

Santosh remembered Gajendra talking to him of Umesh Reddy. They had been looking at a criminal case together. Of a man whose hands had been hacked by a rowdy. That’s when Gajendra mentioned Jack the Ripper. That was the name the media had given the serial killer. His victims were mostly lower-class women. Robbing their homes after the act was simply his way of misleading the police. He was sick in his head. ‘Pure psychopath. He killed for the sheer pleasure of it. Those are the ones we should fear,’ Gajendra had added as Santosh stared at him in amazement.

Santosh decided he would ask the auto driver to stay. It was also time to let Gowda know where he was.

He pulled his phone out. He saw that his message was still in the outbox. Gowda would be frothing at the mouth, he thought unhappily.

He tried calling Gowda but it wouldn’t go through. It was a low-signal zone. He sent the message again and decided he would key in another one quickly, the moment they reached their destination, wherever that was.

The auto turned another curve and Santosh realized that they had reached the garment factory from the other side.

In the darkness, it stood like a brooding monster from hell. His mouth went dry.

‘Is this where you stay?’ he asked quietly.

‘Don’t be silly. It’s at the end of the lane. My brother’s the watchman.’

‘Who? Manjunath?’

She looked at him curiously. But her tone was flat when she spoke. ‘So you know him.’

‘I met him once,’ Santosh said, cursing under his breath. ‘I came here with the contractor,’ he added.

‘So, you’ve been here before?’

He nodded.

‘Stop,’ she told the auto driver. He obliged with a screech of brakes.

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Santosh said.

He got out and waited for her.

‘Here,’ he said, drawing a hundred-rupee note from his wallet. ‘I’ll pay you a hundred when I get back as waiting charge. Just fifteen minutes. I’ll be back before that.’

The auto driver looked at the note. He took it between two fingers. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

She led the way. He followed, punching the keys on his phone.
Garment factory
.

She turned and smiled. ‘This is a no-signal zone … you’ll have to wait to get back to the main road for your phone to work.’

Santosh saw the message had gone. So he smiled and said nothing. He couldn’t have even if he wanted to. His tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth.

She knew he had been here before. She knew he had recognized the factory. She knew he was walking behind her, reining in his fear. This was a new thing. Usually, the fear factor came at the end, when they knew what she had decided for them. But this was even better. Fear from the start.

Had he known from the moment he had seen her and had he been playing along? Or had he realized only now? She would ask him in a bit. He would tell her. Fear would prod his mouth open and form the words. Fear made people do many things.

She opened a gate and led him in. ‘I don’t think anyone’s home,’ she said. ‘I wonder where they went…’

He didn’t speak. She could sense the way he held himself, in readiness for whatever swung in to attack him.

‘Listen, I have the key to the side room in the factory. If we go in, I can switch the lights on. I could wait there till my brother comes. You can leave. No point in keeping the auto waiting,’ she said.

‘Here,’ she continued, fishing out a key from her bag and handing it to him.

She held up the phone so he could see the keyhole in its light.

She watched him wrestle with the lock. It took only ten
seconds to pull the sock-wrapped ball from her bag and another ten seconds to swing it at his skull.

A fierce crack, a soft thud, the perfect note of a ball struck.

He crumpled to the floor.

9.10 p.m.

Gowda’s phone beeped. He stared at the screen. ‘Just as I thought,’ he said. ‘He’s with her.’

‘But where did they go?’ Urmila asked, negotiating yet another speed breaker on the road.

The rattle of metal against metal. Gowda craned his neck curiously. ‘What’s in the back?’

Urmila’s mouth twitched, ‘My golf kit. I played at the BGC this morning.’

‘Good game?’ Gowda asked. He didn’t know a thing about golf and didn’t even know if it was appropriate to use the word ‘game’.

‘All right … my usual caddy was unwell so I had an old relic. Ijas. He wouldn’t stop talking. According to him, he was not just caddy, but conscience keeper too, to everyone who is anyone in this city.’

‘What does a caddy do? Doesn’t he just lug the clubs around?’ Gowda’s eyes were on the traffic as he spoke.

‘That he does … but he is also someone who has insights about the course and can tell me how to play it best, given my handicap.’

Gowda licked his lips. He didn’t understand a word of what she was saying.

‘By the way, he said something very interesting. Did you know that your Corporator Ravikumar used to be a caddy at the BGC? Ijas took him in as an apprentice.’

Gowda felt his head spin. Everything around him seemed to slip away.

The missing bit in the jigsaw. There before him all along and he hadn’t seen it. He had known that Corporator Ravikumar had once been called Caddy Ravi but he hadn’t ever asked why.

The eunuchs in the house. The pearl earring. The Scorpio parked at the corporator’s home. The Ravi Varma prints. The counterfeit currency. The old factory. The fractured skulls. Ranganathan many years ago, and then the more recent victims. What had Dr Khan said? And later Dr Reddy?

The pattern almost always resembles the weapon used. Something heavy, with a small striking surface, was used to inflict a tangential blow. It’s a localized fracture. Enough to disorient a man. Something hard, small and rounded … a hammer would splinter the surface differently. Imagine a coconut being swung against a man’s head. But this isn’t anything as big as a coconut. A ball of some sort is my initial reading
…

A golf ball as a cosh. Someone who knew the exact force required to inflict injury. A weapon that could be easily hidden in a handbag when the murderer set out seeking her victim.

The corporator would never pass as a woman, no matter how much he tried. At best, he would be a mannish woman. But his younger brother. That little runt with his smooth cheeks, dainty steps and diamond earrings. He would make an alluring woman. The educated brother who saw himself as one of the women in the Ravi Varma prints he favoured. The pearl earrings were his. That was who Bhuvana was: small, lethal and perfectly trained to throw a man twice his height and weight.

Fuck, fuck, fuck … why hadn’t he seen it? Fucking rum had addled his brains. He was never going to drink again. And Santosh was with her now, god knows where. He had to find the boy before she…

His phone beeped again. He stared at the message and said, ‘Fuck!’

‘What?’ Urmila asked.

‘Can you make this go any faster? That bloody fool’s with her at the factory. God knows what she’ll do to him before we get there…’

Urmila pressed her big toe down on the accelerator. The speedometer swung up. ‘Faster?’ she asked.

‘Faster,’ he said.

9.19 p.m.

When Santosh regained consciousness, she was sitting by his side. He tried to raise his head and a streak of excruciating pain seared through him.

‘It hurts less if you don’t move,’ she said.

He lay back on the Rexine sofa. ‘You bitch,’ he said, even though it hurt to even speak the words.

‘What did you think, Sub-inspector Santosh?’ she asked. ‘Did you think I am a fool?’

He closed his eyes.

‘All you men are the same. All you men. You think you are smarter than us women?’

He opened his eyes and said, ‘But you are not a woman, are you? Much as you may think you are.’

She slapped him. A man’s blow.

‘I’m better than any woman,’ she said, furiously. ‘Do you want me to give you a blowjob? What my tongue can do to
your cock will make you forget any woman. No woman will suck you off like I could. No woman will let you fuck her like I could let you.’

He stared at the half-crazed creature pacing the room. As long as he kept her talking, she wouldn’t do to him whatever she had planned. Would the auto driver come looking for him? Would Gowda come in the meantime? He had to keep her talking.

‘That still doesn’t make you a woman,’ he murmured. She stopped and slapped him again. ‘Don’t say that,’ she snarled and began her furious pacing.

Santosh reached for the mobile in his trouser pocket. The last person he had called was Gowda. His fingers fumbled. He began punching the keys.

She stopped mid-stride and said, ‘You think you are very smart!’

She groped in his pocket, drew out the mobile and flung it on the table.

‘My brother’s the same,’ she said. ‘He thinks I am a silly performing animal who can be taught tricks but isn’t capable of a single independent thought.’