Doosra (20 page)

The Moghul emperor Shah Jahan, most noted for Taj Mahal, had a court jeweller of Gujrati descent: Shantidas Jhaveri. Shantidas Jhaveri exclusively catered to the royal line-up of queens the emperor had, but generations down the line and anglicised over the years, Zaveri Brothers was still one of the biggest names in diamonds in the country. One of their oldest and most iconic stores was located in Connaught Place, New Delhi, and had suffered the same fate as the Pedder Road jewellery store before it. The robbery in New Delhi was almost ten months after the Mumbai jeweller, which meant — conjecturally again, as no one was brought to book yet — someone had taken the time off after the Mumbai larceny to let the proverbial dust settle and utilised that time thoroughly to plan the next one.

This heist was, again, dissimilarly similar to the one in Mumbai.

The lavish showroom had a spherical atrium that had rooms all around it on the ground floor and an elevator and staircase leading to the mezzanine floor. The mezzanine had a circular walkway overlooking the atrium that was double height with a stained glass dome that was apparently from another era, and provided the coloured gleam into the already classy showroom in the day. The high net customers who could afford to set foot in this palace of jewels were received at the reception in the atrium, then ushered into one of the requisite rooms after consultation. Some of the rooms on the upper deck were offices and vaults, and others — and one should award high marks to the creative genius here — were named as
gold-room, silver-room, ruby-room, emerald-room, diamond room, you have-too-much-cash-dumbo room.

A year ago, when the showroom opened for business on Saturday morning, someone had harvested the place. The diamond-room had been broken into, and several crores of diamonds had been filched. Now, unless one was to believe that the ghost of Marilyn Monroe was passing by and picked up her best friends, it was hard to argue that the gang had targeted diamonds and diamonds alone.

Sounded similar?

It didn't require Einstein to decipher why diamonds were being targeted: for one, diamonds yielded best in size to value ratio; a handful of diamonds could translate into crores, while gold or other jewellery, albeit precious, would be much too much weight to transport. Furthermore, it more than appeared that the gang who carried out the capers had identified how and where to dispose them of clandestinely.

Similar.

The doors were protected, the windows airtight, the walls intact. With no visible sign of routine break-in or forced entry, what predominantly baffled the investigators, for the best part of four days, was how the person or persons got into the prestigious store in the first place. How, then, did someone penetrate into the heart of the store and carry out the robbery? Answers never travel in a straight line from west to east or vice versa, do they? This particular puzzle got its manna from north. The intruder had come from the top. When they investigated closely, they apprehended that the stained glass done had been removed and the intruder glided south from the ceiling on a suspended rope. The whole dome, which was set into the concrete of the roof, had been dug out signifying it wasn't done in a day. Days of planning and effort must have gone into it. The police found a large metal hook fixed into the concrete nearby, which was apparently used to support the rope with a man's weight. Pure geometry at work. A pulley and cables were still there — wiped of all prints, naturally — that told the police a motor had been plugged in for the purpose and later taken away. An absolute
jhakaas
style, not some amateur stuff: strictly Bollywood. And like courteous citizens, the outlaws had, after exiting, put the dome back with strong glue so as to avoid it from displacement or damage by severe elements of nature. How considerate.

All security cameras had been drained of the tapes.

Similar.

The high-tech burglar alarm had not been deactivated. Nevertheless the expensive equipment didn't relay the break-in to the security guys like it was programmed to. That meant that the intruder had known the security system of the showroom well enough to somehow intercept the outgoing signal from the alarms. All security alarms worked on a generic principle: the sensors continuously scanned for movement or body heat or whatever they were encoded to. If any of the sensors picked up any unwanted motion, image or change in temperature, the signal was passed on to the main junction box located on site, which, using telephone lines or an inbuilt SIM, transmitted a SOS to the security office. Theoretically, all in real time. And the security personnel would attend the site within minutes. But every Tom, Dick, Harry and their cousins with a computer had been schooled that real time was never
real
time. There was always a time lag, albeit nanoseconds. But those very nanoseconds are the weakest link in the chain. And the intruder evidently knew that.

No security is ever fool proof. No technology is ever infallible. It is a common misbelief that all hi-tech gadgets were at the bequest of those who can afford them and deploy them when, in fact, they were at the mercy of those who can hack them. Computer passwords are cracked every day. They have even broken into the Pentagon. By contrast, and with no disrespect to either, how difficult would it have been to crack the security of a jewellery showroom in New Delhi or of a hotel in Brussels? Must be like going for a picnic in a manicured park.

Dissimilar to the Mumbai heist. Shades of similarity with the heist at Brussels where the gang had shown considerable computer wizardry.

No human being was hurt. No evidence was left on the scene.

No one was arrested. Check that. The police did not have a single suspect after fourteen months: exculpatory explanations aside nothing further was found in the files. The case, like many others, was in the deep freezer getting colder by the day.

Long story short, even if one wanted to overlook the similarities it would positively be difficult to argue there weren't any, and if some ombudsman decided to go after your negligence or deliberate pretermit you would have a harder time explaining than investigating the previous cases in the first place. Anyway, over a fifty percent similarity in the two cases warranted an investigation and Rita opened both the past cases. In her mind there was a common element there. Even if the burglar wasn't the same guy, the brains behind the operations appeared to be; the person or the outfit being sold the stolen diamonds might be. She followed the age-old maxim in police: follow the money.

Though one couldn't help but marvel at the ingenuity of the Mumbai robbery, what with hiding inside the store while it was closed for business and getting away without leaving a trace, the New Delhi heist was definitely one notch up. It was something straight out of a textbook. The stakes had got higher and the loot had got bigger. And then the Brussels one. All dissimilarly similar. Nevertheless, some things were blatantly unique. Precision. Planning. Timing. Executing. Improvising. Escape.

Three escapes.

The Australians call it
trifecta:
three victories in three.

Hat trick
is how any cricketer would have termed it.

There was no reason whatsoever to suppose why there wouldn't be a fourth one except for one hitch: Ron Jogani's murder. A murder might not have been accounted for in the original planning. The murder would, they must have been aware, set the hounds and wolves chasing.

The passengers on the Mumbai-Brussels flight had failed to recognise Sishir Singh in a photo line-up three months post the incident. Was there any point in subjecting the sales staff of a jeweller in New Delhi to the same drill after two years? Rita reluctantly approved the exercise.

However, no one recognised Sishir Singh.

R
ita parsed all that she had till now. One person could not have reconnoitred any place more than once. You can only visit the place inconspicuously — though even the second time is a massive risk; you go there a third or fourth time and someone will notice you, someone will certainly remember you specially in a closed place like a shop, albeit however large.

An interesting thing in line with the progression of robberies was that the group's daredevilry was also on the rise. They were getting adventurous. The first heist had been in Mumbai, which, evidently, was home turf. Furthermore, it didn't exhibit any technical proficiency either. The technical wizardry had skyrocketed after the first break-in, and so had the tenacity — taking several days to trench the stained glass dome from the concrete. And success in Delhi must have prompted them to plan an even bigger robbery abroad, in a hotel. Given the loot, Rita wondered where all the cash was now? If the police could get access to accounts, tracing unusually sizeable transactions on certain dates wouldn't be impossible, but how could the police get access to the accounts? But the money, in any event, might not even be in the killer's name. It could well be in an account of a shell company or false name.

Finding a clue in three robberies might be somewhat easier than one. Sheer probability. But, intuition, however infallible it might appear, could not be substituted for evidence. Rita needed evidence. She had some follow up thoughts and ideas evolving in her mind but nothing concrete.

The search for the travel agent who booked Ron Jogani's ticket came up empty. Not that anyone had expected otherwise. Someone had to be dumber than dumb to leave an electronic trail if they wanted to do something as ominous as armed robbery. The least they could have done is wipe all trails.

***

Nene had recapped the entire history of Honey Singh and family. His grandfather had been uprooted during Partition; he had arrived in Punjab and set up bicycle parts manufacturing in Amritsar. The next generation — Honey Singh's father — expanded the business manifold. Honey Singh was born in Sri Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, and his birth was registered in the local municipal office. No, there was no twin, neither identical nor fraternal. And as Honey Singh's father suddenly passed away soon after due to heart failure, there had never been any other sibling. Even if one hyperbolically assumed that his mother had copulated with someone clandestinely and delivered a baby somewhere what were the chances that the baby would grow up looking identical to Honey? Identical stepbrothers? A biological impossibility. Unheard of.

End of story.

Rita pondered a bit. Could it be that someone had a fair resemblance to Honey Singh? Nah! Too many coincidences rendered that theory weak, even inutile. The first and the most extraordinary coincidence was that two guys were lookalikes. Second coincidence they were in the same town. Mumbai was a megalopolis of 18 million people and thus, even if the two carbon copies were in the same city, it was more of a miracle than coincidence for one to find the other. Fourth coincidence: the evil guy — Sishir Singh or whoever — spots the simpleton and the simpleton didn't as much as have a clue about it. It was akin to pulling out four consecutive aces from a deck. The probability of the first ace is one in fifty-two: greatly probable. However, the probability of pulling out three more cards and they, too, happen to have a single pip on their faces was twenty-four out of over 6.5 million. Impossible if one also took into account the time frame. The surveillance on Honey Singh had been put in place days after Jogani's murder. So the evil twin did not know about the simpleton before the murder and found him in two days post it? Impossible. It was likely that they knew about Honey Singh already.

Then there was prosthetics that couldn't be ruled out. All that was needed was two guys who had the same height and similar body contours — merely a slight resemblance, a body double. And any good plastic surgeon worth his degree could perform some reconstructive surgery to make one look like the other. The challenge, in Rita's opinion, was could it be reversed? Would the guy be willing to look like someone else all his life? Or could there be a reversal — meaning the guy could undergo another facial reconstruction to not look like Honey Singh after all this was over. It sounded morose but, in Rita's experience, people had stretched way out on a limb for money. History was awash with instances of sons killing fathers for money and thrones and territories.

But where did that analysis lead her besides being just another fact of life? The police couldn't just go around snooping every plastic surgeon in Mumbai or India to check if someone looked like or was made to look like Honey Singh. And what if they even asked everyone that? There was no evidence to believe that the surgery was done inside the country.

All details of Honey Singh's travels had now been gathered and condensed by Vikram.

Result: Zilch!

He did not even have a valid passport; consequently he had never travelled outside India.

No international telephone calls made whatsoever from any of his listed telephones — mobiles or landlines.

The day Ron Jogani had been burgled and murdered there was no record of Honey Singh being out of Mumbai. His mobile phone records showed he had called two of his employees, received three calls from another two of them. It was business as usual for him.