Dead Water (35 page)

As the months go by, David’s phoned debriefings of his daughter grow more detailed and more complex. His questions take longer to answer. They require research. Of course there’s something wrong. Of course Ester is afraid; but if she tore all this up now, what would she have left? A thirty-five-hour flight to Melbourne. Another room, another house-share. Evenings drinking sour beer, avoiding old boyfriends. Bodyboarding. Friends’ weddings.

Vessels sailed from Jebel Ali Terminal 1 as of Tue Mar 22 20:14:26 GMT+04:00 2005 201 items found, displaying 131 to 145

So she sits, rattling and mousing her way through another windowless day in Jebel Ali, each day a little more the true believer, dreaming of the day when everything will come right and Havard will know, and understand, and thank her for this great and secret service she’s performed, and together they will drive her very own sports car home through the world’s Eighth Wonder, past tallest towers and undersea hotels, surreal ice palaces and pink technology parks.

It is 2002. Five years have passed since Vinod Yadav absconded with Roopa’s car and ruined her plot to bring Yash Yadav to justice. Since then Roopa has been living in Mumbai: the plain, unsmiling single mother of a five-year-old son. Her policing days are over. These days she makes her living as a private investigator.

Roopa is one of only a handful of female PIs in Mumbai, and she is probably the best of them. On her fussy, Flash-ridden website, she explains that she is fluent in Hindi, English, Bengali and Punjabi. She handles her share of marital cases, but her primary focus is commercial. Her early career in the ACB has given her specialized knowledge and expertise in cases of industrial espionage, misappropriation of funds, breach of contract, inventory losses and employee-related theft.

Her reputation is good and her work has been growing lucrative. Come March 2002 she can afford a plane ticket and she returns to Firozabad in style.

Firozabad: city of chandeliers, of
satta
and cheap alcohol, city of debt. She dresses smartly and wears her best teeth. No one, glancing at her now, would know her for bright, smiling, eager Assistant Sub-Inspector Vish. In the central police station of the city of Firozabad she shuffles and barges with the mass, a civilian now, a supplicant. She’s come to speak to Nidra’s husband, Arun. She’s come to track down leads in her neverending hunt for Yash Yadav.

‘Roopa? Roopa Vish?’

Arun does not recognize her at first. When he does, he does not smile. He’s cool to her, but Roopa’s confident he won’t turn her away. The morning after her assault it was Arun and Nidra who turned up at her house to give her a lift into work. It was Arun who broke into her house and found her bleeding and toothless in the ruin of her mother’s furniture.

Arun’s an inspector now, tasked with lifting the Yadav family’s baleful influence over Firozabad’s law enforcement, long after Yash Yadav himself fled into the toils of the Mumbai syndicate.

‘You know this?’ Arun leans forward, captivated. ‘You know that Yash has gone to work for the Mumbai branch of the family?’

Roopa shrugs. She’s a civilian: her knowledge is her own, to dispense or retain at her leisure. After years of chain of command, the novelty of being a private citizen still pleases her. ‘When he fled Chhaphandi the family got him out to Singapore. I’ve seen paperwork there that connects him with the Wong crew in the months before MALSINDO started scouring the Strait. Since then Yash Yadav’s been writing
hawala
notes to pirate crews from Trincomalee to Hong Kong.’

She could tell Arun any number of tall tales. She’s spent years mapping the Yadav family’s activities along the Strait and in that time she’s had men come up to her claiming to be bulletproof. In Sumatra she tracked down one pirate gang, not one of them over sixteen, who said that with the right ritual they could make their RIB invisible. She’s spent weeks at a time on derelict fishing platforms or hiding out in orchid farms. She’s spent longer, truth be told, sitting in the waiting rooms of lawyers, officials, security experts and policemen. The stories they’ve told her are hardly less outlandish. How men disappear from jail. How bank accounts fill or empty on a whim.

The character of piracy has changed since her father’s day. Modern piracy has less to do with the ships themselves than with the blizzard of paperwork through which they sail. You can steal a ship with the right notarized form. You can operate a ship under the noses of its owners eight months of the year and no one any the wiser. With the kinds of profits you can make, you can afford to hire and pay the crew you’ve ‘captured’. It’s a white-collar crime now, as abstracted in its way as the shipping industry it feeds upon. Most hijackings aren’t reported. Most ships are returned without a ransom. Why steal a boat when you can borrow it? Nab a ship, use it to shift a drug cargo across the China Sea. Or don’t handle anything illegal: just lease the ship out to some desperate import-export hack with a letter of credit about to expire. When you’re done, hand the ship back to the owner with a nod and a wink. The less the company bemoans the seizure of its ship, the more affordable its insurance premiums, so nobody says anything.

‘And Somalia?’

‘Somalia’s a sideshow,’ Roopa sighs, enjoying this despite herself. ‘There’s only so much mileage to be had from a bunch of amateurs. They’re getting into gun battles on board Russian ships. Everyone knows this is beyond stupid.’ Russians and Israelis carry guns. You do not fuck with them. Not while the rest of the world and the International Chamber of Commerce are still telling themselves that you can defend a quarter of a million tons of container ship with axes and fire hoses. ‘The pressure will come on Somalia soon enough and then the pirate syndicates will move elsewhere, probably back to Malacca, or Hormuz, or even Brazil. Squeezing piracy is like squeezing a balloon. The people orchestrating this stuff work out of mobile phones. Half of them live in bloody Canada.’

Professional, multinational piracy runs under the surface, right across the Indian Ocean, from Karachi to Dar es Salaam, from Sur to Bandung. It’s a desk-bound business, reliant on newfangled skills: cryptanalysis and ADSL, network administration, even AI. Mumbai’s pirates recruit from universities now, from SIES and the Tata Institute. Its quaysides are as quaint and lifeless as Brooklyn’s piers.

As a port of origin Mumbai is an irrelevance, and even Mumbai’s reputation as a destination for stolen goods is only what one would expect from a megacity of its size. Mumbai’s an egg that’s long since cracked, dispersing crews and gangmasters around the globe. Only a very few old-style players remain in the city: has-beens who play nostalgic gutter games with home-made ammunition. Roopa has lost count of the number of threats she has received. Not long ago, a mafia shooter blasted away at her with a cottage-industry pistol that police later found in a nearby drain, its barrel fashioned from a Land Rover steering column.

She gives Arun to understand that she is working for a commercial client: a big shipping company. The Yadav syndicate has stolen one too many of its ships. They’ve set her on Yash Yadav’s trail once more: ‘Funny how these things come round.’ Every word of this is a lie. Not a day has passed that Roopa has not held Yash Yadav in her sights. Yash Yadav is her own business: something her other cases fund. She is her father’s daughter. Single-minded. Obsessed.

Arun has the files she needs. ‘The All India Bar Association say they have a file on Mohinder Gidh an inch thick,’ he says, pushing a much thinner file across the desk towards her: police notes covering the last eight years. ‘Mohinder Gidh is still practising in Firozabad and his paperwork’s clean. Since the garage murders and Yash Yadav’s disappearance in 1997, nothing’s arisen to suggest he has connections with the Yadav clan.’

While Roopa reads Arun leans back in his chair: it’s his turn to spin a tale. ‘Gidh’s from Mumbai. A middle-class kid who wanted to be a surgeon when he grew up. The nearest he ever got was a clerical job in his father’s law firm, selling medical certificates for a thousand rupees a time to people claiming to have come from the area affected by the Bhopal poison cloud. When the police caught wind of the scam, Gidh fled and washed up here.’

‘You think he still works for the Yadavs?’

Arun raises an eyebrow. ‘Round here, who doesn’t?’

Early the next evening, Gidh makes his approach. He won’t come inside Roopa’s motel. He doesn’t want to be seen. He’s phoning Roopa from his car – he sounds a million miles away – to tell her he’s waiting for her to meet him outside.

Roopa finds him in the darkest corner of the motel car park, draped over the steering wheel as though guarding it from thieves. He gestures her into the seat beside him. Arun has got him to agree to tell her everything he knows about the garage murders and the night Yash Yadav vanished from Chhaphandi.

Mohinder starts the car and pulls away with a tentativeness that cannot disguise the mashed state of the gearbox. He tells Roopa what she already knows about the Chhaphandi killings. That while Yash Yadav was riding a desk as the region’s counter-terror tsar, a country cousin by the name of Vinod Yadav caught him with his wife. How, in the row that followed, both Vinod and his wife Safia were killed.

Roopa doesn’t interrupt him. Her gums are hurting her today. There are shards of dentine, spars of bone, still buried in the quick of her jaw. They stir sometimes. Blade-sharp. They circulate. Besides, she wants to hear the story from Gidh’s mouth. She wants to know how much he genuinely wants to help her; how much he wants to take advantage of the moonlight to spin a ghost story. The account Gidh delivers is as unembroidered, puzzling and gap-riddled as the original police reports – and, for that reason, all the more chilling.

According to the police, this is the most likely sequence of events: Vinod, catching wind of Safia’s unfaithfulness, drives round to Yadav’s garage and surprises her in the arms of his cousin, Yash Yadav. In a jealous rage, Vinod shoots Safia. There is a struggle (the prints on the gun are hopelessly blurred) and Yash shoots Vinod. Yash panics and flees, leaving his lover and her husband bleeding to death on his bed.

They are halfway to Chhaphandi and the moon is newly risen above a black, unpeopled horizon. Mohinder Gidh is hunched forward over the wheel, peering into the dark. In the light coming through the windscreen only half his face is visible. It looks as though it was made of paper.

‘And Yash Yadav?’ She raises a hand to catch her spittle. ‘Have you heard anything from him?’

A Tata truck, running without lights, looms out of the shadows, blasts its horn and thunders by. The slipstream buffets the rickety little car towards the edge of the embankment. With surprising presence of mind, Mohinder presses smoothly on the gas, allowing the wheels to spin freely through the gravel. He tweaks the wheel, and the car wiggles its way back on to the Sher Shah Suri Marg. ‘Miss Vish.’

‘Roopa.’

‘As you like. Let’s not waste our time fencing. Of course I am in regular contact with Yash Yadav. You know this. Why else would you have come all this way?’ They crest a hill: off to the right is a stand of trees. Mohinder turns in at a dirt driveway, overlooked by a sign for Apollo tyres. They coast a couple of hundred feet along a narrow, sloping drive and into the forecourt of a two-storey house thrown together out of white-painted breeze blocks. There are no lights. The place is deserted. Mohinder leads Roopa to the door and reaches into his pocket for keys. As he fumbles through them he tells her: ‘Yash Yadav writes to me. He sends me regular amounts of money to spend on the boys.’

‘He has children now?’

‘Not his children. His lover’s. Safia and her husband Vinod had two sons.’

Roopa doesn’t trust herself to speak. It is painful for her to recall how badly she overplayed her hand. She as good as sent Vinod here. She as good as propelled him to his death.

‘I can’t imagine either boy will want to live here,’ Mohinder says, ‘but I maintain the place. When Shubi and Ravi are of age, they can sell it.’ Up these stairs is the room Yash Yadav left dripping with blood. ‘Meanwhile Yash pays for the boys’ education.’ He holds Roopa’s gaze a while. ‘Looking after the boys: this is all the business I do for Yash Yadav now. You should tell your client that. Tell me.’ Here it comes. ‘Why is your client interested in Yash Yadav? Is your client a shipowner?’

Anything Roopa says will, she is sure, get back to Yash Yadav. This is the moment for her to reveal absolutely nothing. God only knows why she says what she actually says: ‘It’s a personal matter.’