Capital Punishment (28 page)

Silence from D’Cruz. The stress chiselling lines into his forehead by the moment. He knew he had to reveal something now; the escalation of brutality in the kidnap demanded it.

‘Look, Charles,’ he said, both confessional and conspiratorial, ‘before I was a businessman I was an actor, and before that, yes, I had a dodgy early career in the 1970s and 80s to pull myself out of poverty. I was, what
you
would call, a gangster. As far as I was concerned, that was just a name. I was taking advantage of a stupid situation, which is what all smugglers do. The government controlled the importation of gold into India. As you probably know, Indians are obsessed with gold jewellery—it’s part of our culture. By smuggling it in fishing boats from Dubai, I made a good living and a lot of friends in high places, who wanted to buy my product. In order to operate, I had to have the backing of a gang and so ... I became a gangster. If I’d tried to do that work naked, I’d have been killed.’

‘And the members of your old gang have connections to terrorism?’

‘Even you, as an outsider, must know that terrorism has connections in all worlds: business, political, criminal, religious, scientific,’ said D’Cruz. ‘I am in a unique position in that I have been a criminal, I am in business, I am politically connected, I am outside the religious argument, with friends in all camps, and I’m even in the scientific world, since I’ve been asked to advise on Indo/Russian nuclear reactor projects. I am what you would call “plugged in”.’

‘So in what way have you been unhelpful and obstructive?’

‘I move an enormous amount of money and goods around the world. I have all the necessary resources to launder large amounts of cash and distribute, let’s call it equipment, globally. I could do that for the people I used to be connected to in the underworld, but I don’t. I refuse to do it.

‘I am politically well-connected enough to be given valuable intelligence on matters of state. These nuclear reactors, for instance, are vital if India is to keep up the level of growth to raise millions out of poverty. There are people who would like to know how to ruin this project and send India back to the dark ages. I tell them nothing.

‘I also do not react to their religious pressures because I am a Catholic, and a lapsed Catholic at that. So, you see, there are all sorts of ways I would be expected to be helpful but I am not. But recently I have been treading a fine line because I have accepted favours, primarily to ensure that my steelworks did not fail. These are people who expect favours to be returned. When they are not, I could be considered not just unhelpful but obstructive as well.’

‘And taking Alyshia is the only way they can apply pressure and show their disapproval?’ said Boxer.

‘This is the least obtrusive and the most personal,’ said D’Cruz. ‘If it’s who I think it is, I’m expecting it to get much worse. They are smacking me into line and they are from a culture where a smack draws blood.’

‘It sounds as if you’re ninety-nine per cent certain who these people are?’

‘I am awaiting confirmation, but that is part of the game. They are bringing me to the edge of my seat,’ said D’Cruz. ‘They have always been good at this. This charade of Alyshia’s psychoanalysis and goading me with her dress and diamonds is no surprise to me. They have a deep understanding of what makes people tick. The only thing that puzzles me is that they have still not asked me to do anything specific for them. They are applying pressure, but I don’t know what for. What this “demonstration of sincerity” is, I have no idea, but I have to try to find out.’

It was six o’clock. D’Cruz had left, which was for the best under the circumstances. Boxer knew that Amy would be at his mother’s flat in Hampstead by now. She was still refusing to take his calls or respond to texts. After Alyshia’s farewell speech and mock execution, he had a powerful need to reconnect with her. He wondered what Amy’s speech would have been like had she been in Alyshia’s place. He went upstairs and made the call, looking down into the empty square.

‘Hello, Esme.’

‘Charles.’

‘Is Amy there?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘Can I speak to her?’

‘Hold on.’

He hung on for a minute.

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ said Esme.

‘I know that but I want to talk to her.’

More silence.

‘She still won’t take the phone.’

‘Make her, Esme. Make her.’

The phone went dead. He called back.

‘What happened?’

‘She cut the line.’

‘What’s going on, Esme?’

‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t had the chance to talk to her.’

‘Ask her just to listen. She doesn’t have to talk. It’s just three words.’

He hung on.

‘Here she is,’ said Esme. ‘She’ll listen only.’

‘I love you,’ said Boxer.

The line went dead again.

He didn’t call back.

A car pulled up on Aubrey Walk. Mercy came to the front door below him. More trouble, he thought, and went downstairs to let her in.

‘Where’s Isabel?’ asked Mercy.

‘Swimming. There’s a pool in the basement.’

‘Why aren’t you down there with her?’

‘I’ve been trying to talk to Amy,’ he said, not rising to it.

‘Any luck?’

‘I spoke, she hung up.’

Mercy shook her head. He led her into the living room, said he had something from the kidnappers she should see. Mercy briefed him on the Grange Road killings. Boxer turned on the DVD player. Mercy watched, hardly daring to breathe. The shot came. She gasped and dropped her head into her hands. Boxer nudged her back up and they watched to the end.

‘My God, how did she take that?’

‘Badly at first, as you can imagine, but anger’s brought her round. She’s mad at Frank D’Cruz.’

‘So she’s tough, too,’ said Mercy.

The door opened. Isabel stood there in a white towelling bathrobe, drying her hair with a towel. Isabel smiled. She was pleased to see Mercy, who crossed the room and, without a word, embraced her. Mercy felt all Isabel’s strength and vulnerability pulsing under her fingers and now knew for certain that she’d lost Charlie to this woman.

Armed with a photo of Deepak Mistry, Roger Clayton was sitting in Leopold’s café in central Mumbai with an ill-advised Kingfisher Premium beer in front of him. It was 10.30 p.m. and he was waiting to be taken to his contact in Chhota Tambe’s gang, the Hindu breakaway outfit from the infamous D-Company. He was nervous, which was the reason for the beer, and it was ill-advised because he could feel the
pav bhaji
being horribly transformed in the excessive acid of his stomach.

Other things played on his mind. The situation had become more complicated in London. Simon Deacon had called back later on to ask him to follow up on the police report about the break-in to the warehouse storing the electric car prototypes at D’Cruz’s factory. Deacon had also fleshed out more details of the lead-up to the kidnap, the profiler’s report on the kidnapper and the fact that he had staged a mock execution of D’Cruz’s daughter. Finally, Deacon told him that he’d spoken to the CIA about Amir Jat’s protégé, Mahmood Aziz. Their primary concern was that he was ambitious, that after more than twenty years in the field in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, he now had Western targets in mind.

Agents in Pakistan were now looking at the network of people around Lt General Abdel Iqbal and his links to Amir Jat and friends. Pressure had been applied on the Indian Research and Analysis Wing to help find any connections D’Cruz might have to other ISI officers with terrorist sympathies. They were on the hunt for information from Dubai. Clayton couldn’t help but feel that a lot of this activity had been generated by his brilliant source: the idiot Gagan and his sublime fish tarts.

A taxi driver came into the café, signalled to him and saved him from the last of his beer. He was taken to the Bandra Fire Station and pointed into a black and yellow auto rickshaw. For once he was glad to be in one of these infernal machines, whose loud and obnoxious exhaust was marginally more toxic than his own. He rapidly gave up trying to work out where they were going and sank back into the enclosing darkness of the canopy, from where he could secretly observe the lurid city lights, which stamped back-lit vignettes onto his retina.

Half an hour later, the rickshaw driver stopped in a narrow lane of even more squalid squalor than usual and pointed to a green door with a red light behind it. He made a sign for Clayton to batter it with his fist. Clayton wiped the sweat from his face and put his foot daintily on an invisible black mush, which skidded away from him, and he landed awkwardly on the floor of the rickshaw, twisting his knee. He clawed his way up and out and hung onto the rickshaw’s black canopy in agony. The driver took off and he just saved himself from ending up face down in the sludge that had reignited his old croquet injury. As the blatter of the engine receded, he heard an animal sound: the lowing of water buffalo, the stamping of their impatient hooves.

It’s a bloody game, isn’t it? he thought, as he limped towards the green door.

He hammered on its planks; the cracked paint stuck to his fist. The red light behind pulsed. The door opened onto an empty corridor. A girl in a lime green sari appeared through a curtain of muslin, beckoning him forward, and he thought he might be lurching into a dream.

The door creaked shut behind him. A hood of evil-smelling hessian came down over his head and was tightened at the neck so that he choked. His knees were kicked from behind and he went down heavily on the smooth cement floor, grunting with pain. His arms were pinned behind him and tied together at the elbows by a thick band of cloth, while some plastic flex was wrapped around his wrists.

Two men hauled him to his feet and the effort resulted in a monstrous fart, followed by a beat of silence and uncontrollable giggling. They said something in a language he didn’t understand, not Urdu, and laughed again. They dragged him down the corridor, through the curtain and out into a courtyard, where women were chattering and there was the smell of frying food.

They ricocheted down another corridor, out into the open air and stuffed him into a car. It was a tight fit, so that the two men sat with a buttock on each of his thighs, their smell coming through his hood—soap, sweat, spice and something sharp on their breath, like
paan.
Another fart, this time low and growling, protracted and inaudible, as his fear multiplied the horrors of his guts. His two minders made exaggerated protests. Clayton was dismayed to find that the first remotely exciting thing he’d done in his two years in Mumbai was descending into farce.

Fifteen minutes later, he was dragged out and rushed in a loose ruck into another building, up some rough steps and more doors. A long corridor. He was handed over to someone else using the same incomprehensible language. The solid grip and presence of a big man guided him into a room. He was released from his constraints and pressed down into a small sofa. The hood came off with a flourish, as if he was the main dish at a restaurant with ideas above its station.

There was a man sitting in front of him on a wooden chair. He was wearing a white
kurta
over jeans, with pointed black leather shoes by which, Clayton thought, he would not like to be kicked. Littered around the room, on a mixture of low-slung chairs and benches, were an assortment of young men. They looked at him with eyes that were quite dead, either drugged or consumed by weariness at the prospect of further murder. The heat in the room was suffocating but no one seemed bothered by it. The sweat poured from his chest, trickled down his stomach and flanks.

‘Who are you?’ asked Clayton.

‘I’m Yash,’ said the man in the pointy shoes.

‘Where’s my friend?’

‘I’m your friend’s boss,’ said Yash. ‘He said you were looking for somebody.’

‘I’m trying to find a man called Deepak Mistry,’ said Clayton.

‘Why?’

‘I’m not entirely sure, strange as that may seem. He’s a missing piece of the jigsaw. I hope that by finding him it will complete the picture and make things clearer.’

‘Make what clearer?’

‘Well, this, too, might seem odd, but I’m not entirely sure of that, either. I think his disappearance may have something to do with Frank D’Cruz and possibly...’ said Clayton, going for the big guess, ‘something to do with his daughter, Alyshia.’

‘Who do you represent?’ asked Yash.

Clayton had thought about this. HMG’s MI6 was not a card to be tossed lightly onto the table amongst this bunch of
goondas
. But he needed a cover that they could not easily check.

‘Alyshia’s mother’s lawyer, in London. He didn’t give me a very full picture for good reasons, I’m sure. I was just asked to locate Mr Mistry and put some questions to him.’

There was a prolonged exchange between Yash and another young man sitting next to him on a low chair, which Clayton didn’t grasp, as they were speaking what he thought was probably Bambaiya, a strange blend of Hindi, Marathi, oddly pronounced English and slang.

‘Why would a lawyer in London want to know where an exemployee of Frank D’Cruz is in Mumbai?’

‘It sounds to me, Yash,’ said Clayton, looking him hard in the eye, ‘that you know where Deepak Mistry is and that you’re protecting him. So why not let me talk to him direct?’

‘Only if you tell me what it’s about.’

‘It concerns Alyshia and that is all I am prepared to say.’

There was another exchange during which Yash did not take his eyes off Clayton. It was now apparent that the men were all nervous. The dead eyes were suddenly livelier in their heads. Rapid talk flashed around the room. Yash made a call, put his hand up and the cacophony stopped. He spoke rapidly and listened before closing down and making a small motion with his finger. The hood was fitted over Clayton’s head again. They pulled him to his feet and cuffed his wrists. They led him back to the car. Forty minutes drive, the sweat coming out of him in stinking cobs. Shirt drenched, trousers and underpants too. No one spoke.

The car came to a halt and he was bundled out. The unmistakeable noise and smell of slum came through the hessian. He wondered whether it was Dharavi, which he could see from his offices in the Bandra Kurla Complex, across the stinking Mithi River, with its mangrove swamps being slowly destroyed by the industrial effluent and the combined detritus of the millions who lived along it.