The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (21 page)

The curious thing about Mahadevan Jacob’s office was that it had good, powerful, natural
feng shui
, every trace of which had been emasculated by bad design. Had an expert in
feng
shui
or a practitioner of Indian
vaastu
inspected the original location, he would have given it a thumbs-up. It was a light, bright, pleasant office, east-facing, comfortably proportioned, and had a good view of the Pallakiri main road and a small canal running to the east of the town.

But the view had been removed and the light turned into a grey glow by cheap, plastic film coating all the windows. The office furniture, clearly obtained second-hand, was all mismatched in style, size and design. The wiring of the various computers had taken priority, as literally dozens of charred cables could be seen lying under the remnants of the desks, chairs and computer equipment.

Wong and McQuinnie spent most of their second day in Andhra Pradesh painstakingly tracing each cable to its destination. Many of them went to a switching box in a locked cabinet to the left of the front door of Unit C. But there were a number of thick wires that appeared to be out of place. Particularly confusing was a bundle that simply disappeared into a tiny hole in the wall between Data Storage Systems Ltd and Lakshmi Sachdev’s office next door.

‘Maybe this is ghost,’ Wong said.

Meanwhile, Inspector Muktul Gupta had immediately followed up Joyce’s suggestion that the victim was a specialist in junk email killed by a booby-trapped tin of Spam—and it led him to a host of answers that neatly filled several gaps in his knowledge. Given a lead by police, local reporters had managed to ferret out more of the facts. By the third morning of their visit, the results were evident in the write-ups in the local papers.

MURDER VICTIM MAHADEVAN JACOB WAS THE SPAM KING OF HYDERABAD, the
Deccan Chronicle
reported that day. He had sent out millions of items of junk email over the past year. He had clogged up the email accounts of unimaginable numbers of people with unwelcome exhortations to buy software, purchase lawnmowers, improve their sex lives, embark on new diets, put their savings into investment plans and so on.

And he had done a lot of it using other people’s equipment. The I.P. addresses he had been using were eventually traced to their real origins. Yes, many came from the third floor of the Bodwali Building in the town of Pallakiri, as the police had confirmed from the I.P.-trace. But only one of them came from the offices of Data Storage Solutions. The others came from the servers of the other tenants of that floor: Sachdev Imported Fineries Ltd and Bharat Golden Investments Co. Ltd.

Mahadevan Jacob had quietly hacked into the computers of everyone he knew who had an Internet connection of reasonable bandwidth (and a penetrable firewall) and employed them, without their knowledge, to help him send out literally millions of junk email items.

By lunchtime that day, technicians from the Internet service providers had visited the building, and the ghost had been exorcised—or so Sinha said.

‘Not exorcised,’ Joyce corrected him. ‘Deleted.’

The Hyderabad job had been quick and easy. A report was filed with the police and the task was complete. A final meeting was held in the management office of the Bodwali Building. The representative of owner Nawal Kishore was an elderly man named Sharrifudin Azam. ‘T’ank you,’ the old man said, bowing.

Inspector Muktul Gupta was also grateful. ‘Yes, many, many thanks,’ he said. ‘You have been
most
helpful.’

There was a knock at the door.

It opened from the outside before anyone could reach it and a small, wizened man with sun-roasted skin wandered in. He had a wide grin revealing several gaps in his teeth, and he wore a baseball cap with the slogan
I have a big brian.

‘Hello,’ he said, cheerfully, tilting his head to one side. ‘Are you crack investigation team being mentioned in
Chronicle
, investigating death of late Mr Mahadevan Jacob, deceased former Spam King of Hyderabad?’

‘He is boss,’ said Wong, pointing to the police officer.

‘What can I do for you?’ Inspector Gupta said, thrusting out his chest.

‘I am Himanshu Mukherjee. I was merely wanting to express my very-very great delight at how all this turned out.’

The officer gave a short bow. ‘Our investigation is proceeding at good speed. Thank you.’

A thought occurred to him. ‘Are you a journalist?’ He pronounced it
jarnalist.
‘Are you looking for official statement? Because if so, I cannot be giving you one. Contact with press is all centralised these days. But I can give you the number of our press off —’

‘No, I’m not press,’ Mr Mukherjee said. ‘I am not a jarnalist. I am murderer. I killed Mahadevan Jacob. I sent him tin of meat with bomb in it. Spam. Mentioned in paper.’

Joyce gasped. A confession—live, at the scene of the crime. And they were right there, witnessing it.

‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Does that like
so
neatly wrap it up or what?’ She theatrically clapped the dust off her hands.

A junior police officer poked his head around the door. ‘Inspector, can I have a word?’

‘Just a minute, Nitish,’ Gupta said. ‘Important business is happening here.’

‘Quick interruption only,’ the young officer said. ‘Also important.’

Gupta looked sternly at the youthful sergeant. ‘The man in front of me, Mr —’

‘Himanshu Mukherjee,’ said the confessor.

‘Thank you. Mr Mukherjee has just confessed to the murder of Mahadevan Jacob. I will be needing to take a statement, as you can imagine.’

The officer at the door nodded. ‘Yes, sir. There’s a woman at the front desk, sir. She has also confessed to murder of Mahadevan Jacob. There may be bit of a row about who actually did it.’

Wong and McQuinnie were talking in a taxi on the way back to the hotel to collect their bags. The air-conditioner in the vehicle was not working, the car was stuck in a rush-hour gridlock, and they felt trapped in an inferno.

Wong had wanted to get away as quickly as possible, worried that unpaid extra work might be coming their way. ‘So they have two confessions. Not our problem.
Their
problem. They are police. They can deal with it. We cannot. This is not
feng shui
work. This is police work. We go now.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Joyce did not want to argue with Wong. Yet she was dying to find out who had actually done it. Especially since the person at the desk was a young woman—only in her twenties. Was there another story there? Perhaps the murder had been some sort of love triangle? Perhaps the woman and the man had done it together? Still, their plane left that evening. No doubt Gupta could be persuaded to keep them informed about what happened. After all, a senior police officer from Hyderabad must have basic email skills.

Then she remembered that Sinha had once told her that legal cases in India often dragged on for years or decades, so perhaps they wouldn’t find out the conclusion of the case for a long time, if ever. It was all rather unsatisfying, but what could they do? There was nothing for it, but to head home.

The car eventually arrived at the driveway of the hotel. ‘Yeah, I’m ready,’ Joyce said. ‘Let’s go. Maybe I’ll just make a phone call or two while you’re packing.’ She had Subhash’s phone number in a notebook in her bag and remembered how his big, soulful dark-rimmed eyes had stared into hers.

Three-quarters of an hour later, McQuinnie was standing in a queue in the lobby of the Roomy Inn. Subhash Reddy was standing next to her, keeping her company in her final hours in India. They were laughing together at nothing in particular.

Dilip Kenneth Sinha marched into the hotel.

‘Hi, DK,’ said Joyce. ‘You packed?’

‘I am not,’ the elegant astrologer said. ‘The investigation has taken a somewhat unexpected turn. I need to speak to Wong.’

She called to her employer. ‘CF! You’d better come here.’

Wong, who lay on a couch rubbing his stomach, not having eaten anything but a single bowl of plain rice in two days, looked up unhappily.

The young woman turned to Sinha. ‘He doesn’t look too good. Maybe we’d better go to him.’

The three of them abandoned their place in the checkout queue and sat down on the lobby sofas opposite the
feng shui
master.

‘So who was it?’ Joyce asked Sinha. ‘The weird toothy guy? Or the girl?’

‘Who knows?’ the Indian said. ‘It may have been one of them. Or it may have been someone else. While I was standing there with Gupta, six more people confessed to the murder.’

‘What?’

‘You heard correctly. Six more people have confessed to the murder. And as I was leaving the station, there were more people heading up the stairs. I suspect the number will have grown by now.’

Wong opened his eyes. He said: ‘So now are eight people who say they put bomb in tin of Spaniard meat?’

‘At least.’

‘Weird,’ Joyce said. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means that we are not getting on the plane,’ Sinha said.

Inspector Muktul Gupta was thrilled to see them back. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘This has never,
never
happened to me before. I am really most needful of your help in a very-very bad way.’

Joyce was about to make some quip about too many murderers spoiling the broth, but she looked back at the long queue of people lining up to be interviewed and decided that it might not be funny.

‘How many so far?’ asked Sinha.

‘We took statements from the first thirteen who confessed to the murder. Then, to speed things up a bit, we photocopied a murder confession and got people to sign it. About twenty-eight have signed that version. Judging by the queue out there, we’ve got another thirty to thirty-five to go.’

‘How many will that make altogether?’

Gupta scratched his chin. ‘That’s about seventy, seventy-five—but there appear to be more joining the queue all the time, so it will be difficult to tell.’

‘How can we help?’ Wong asked.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the police officer said. ‘That’s
very
easy. See this lot?’ He airily waved his hands over the crowd. ‘Find out who really did it. That’s all you have to do.’

‘Piece of cake,’ Joyce said, turning around to study the crowd.