Patang (24 page)

‘I’m from the police, and I’d like to speak to her. Please open the door.’

For several seconds, there was no response and the door didn’t budge. Rathod’s sharp ears caught someone breathing right behind the door.

‘What do you want to speak to me about?’ the husky voice finally said.

‘I’d like to speak to you about the disappearance of Shobhna Achrekar’s niece. I believe you…’

‘Leave me alone.’

The door slammed shut. Rathod waited for a few seconds and then rung the bell again. This time the door opened instantly.

‘I said leave me alone. What do you want from me?’

‘Listen, Ms Pande,’ Rathod’s tone was firm and steely cold. ‘I need to speak to you. You can either let me in now, or I can come back with a warrant. In any case, you’ll have to speak to
me. So why don’t we do this in a more civil manner? If you don’t mind?’

The door slammed shut again. Rathod shook his head and was about to walk away when he heard the safety lock being unchained with a clatter. The door opened with an ominous creak, and Rathod found himself staring into a black mass of darkness beyond the doorway. He stared into the apartment wondering who was in there and why she wasn’t showing her face. There was absolutely nothing visible within the flat, and all that the dim light in the corridor outside could manage to illuminate was an empty portion of a foyer wall.

‘Five minutes,’ the husky voice said from the darkness once again. ‘That’s all I can give you. You…you remember that!’

Soorti had said that the woman had become a recluse. Had she lost her mind too? Rathod hesitated to step into the darkness. Who knew what was lurking there in the dark? In the end, he shook off his fears and stepped into the flat. As soon as he did, the door slammed shut behind him, plunging him into total darkness. For several minutes, Rathod struggled to find his bearings. He extended both his hands in from of him, but neither of them touched anything. Twice or thrice, something or someone seemed to brush past him. The air inside the flat was rank and damp, as if the windows and doors hadn’t been opened in years. Rathod could hear hissing sounds all around him. The eerie sounds surrounding him grew louder and even more unnerving. And then he saw something that glued his feet to the floor in fear.

Eyes!

Several pairs of eyes…cruel, unflinching, beryl-green.

‘
Whaown
!’

The strange and eerie sound made Rathod shudder, but he
breathed a sigh of relief. The sounds, the eyes, were just cats, several of them, surrounding him in the room. The wretched woman was clearly crazy.

Suddenly, the room filled with a piercing bright light. All the cats hissed in unison, protesting this uncomfortable change in atmosphere, and Rathod covered his eyes with the back of his hands.

‘Hurry up, hurry up…I don’t have much time.’

As Rathod’s eyes slowly adjusted to the bright light, he saw that he was standing in the middle of a room surrounded by at least a dozen cats. Some of them were circling him, others were sniffing his shoes with suspicion and a few others were perched on bookshelves, almirahs and other items of furniture all around the room.

‘Emily needs a bath today.’

Rathod now looked towards the far end of the room. On a highback chair placed near a tree-trunk glass-top table sat a woman with a black-backed white-bellied Snowshoe cat on her lap. Rathod presumed that this fine animal was the one named ‘Emily’. What surprised him, though, was that contrary to the image he had formed in his mind, the lady in the chair looked astonishingly well-groomed. She seemed just past middle age, and it was quite evident that, in the past, she must have been an exceptionally beautiful woman. She was of medium height and build, her skin was milky-white and she wore heavy makeup. The dress she was wearing could only be described as a Victorian gown and it was decidedly made of the purest silk. Four of the five fingers on her left hand and three on her right were adorned with rings, each sporting a different coloured stone. Beneath the rainbow on her long, slender fingers, the cat purred and mewed in delight as she caressed its neck softly. Her nails were done
with finesse and her black hair was long, thick and shone with a healthy glow. Everything about her seemed ethereal and, yet, Rathod detected a tinge of artificiality behind the veneer. The red of her cheeks was a little
too
red; the white of her gown a little
too
spotless for comfort; there were one too many necklaces around her neck; and it seemed to Rathod that those expensive designer heels would prove to be too difficult to walk around in, especially in a dark room crawling with cats.

‘Were you a friend of Shobhna Achrekar?’ Rathod asked as he stood, uncomfortable under the gaze of so many animals. There was only one chair in the room, and the woman was sitting on it.

‘It would be wrong to say that we were friends,’ the woman said. ‘She used to work at a factory. She, along with 350-odd other women of various ages sewed garments in this factory. I once did a story on them for a local newspaper. I had interviewed a few workers, and she was one of them.’

‘But when her niece disappeared, she…’

‘Her niece didn’t disappear.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You heard me. Despite what she may have said, her niece didn’t disappear. I realized it, only too late.’

The woman continued to caress the cat fondly as Rathod frowned. ‘But, I thought…’ he began.

‘…that I was helping her, isn’t that what you heard? Well, it’s true. I was helping her because, like everyone else, I believed her.’

‘So…the little girl? What happened to the little girl?’

Even as several cats lifted their tails and hissed at Rathod, Mrinalini Pande remained quiet. Finally, she said softly, ‘The little girl died in an accident several months before that entire episode. Poor Dr Nayak had nothing to do with it. She was never admitted to his hospital.’

‘But why would her aunt say that she was raped and killed by the doctor when she was already dead?’

‘Because her aunt was insane! She had received a rude shock at her niece’s death. She herself was childless and her niece was everything to her. She gave her a good education, gave her good food, good clothes – things that were way beyond her capacity. And when the child died, she lost her mind. When she raised the hue and cry, I made the mistake of believing her.’ Mrinalini Pande’s face expressed her sorrow and her angst. ‘I was an idealistic and foolish young woman back in those days. I thought I could make the world a better place. I was too proud to take anyone’s help, too gullible to doubt a poor and destitute woman’s story. Oh, what a fool she made out of me.’

The frown on Rathod’s forehead deepened as the woman continued, ‘I ran from pillar to post, rallied supporters from the NGO that I used to work for, picked fights with police officials, hospital authorities, lawyers. For what? For what, I ask you?’

As her voice rose, several cats descended from their perches and began to gather around Rathod. It was quite obvious that they wanted the intruder to leave.

Rathod looked at the woman as she wiped her tears. ‘She conned me. I trusted her, I fought for her! And she fooled me. God knows I feel sorry for her. She lost the light of her life. But she duped me into doing things that I shouldn’t have done. Because of my actions, I left a blemish on the character of an innocent man, a good doctor, a saviour of lives. His reputation was tarnished, his family was shamed, his wife died!’ the woman sobbed.

‘Yeah, and someone murdered him!’

Rathod’s voice was so cold that the woman instantly stopped crying and looked up. ‘What!’ An expression of shock and horror flashed across her face.

‘Oh, didn’t you know? He’s dead. Someone left him naked, strapped high up in the sky, to die a slow, agonizing death.’

As the woman’s fingers began to tremble uncontrollably, her painted face slowly began to turn white.

‘Wh-who did this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rathod said calmly, ‘but whoever it is, he’s coming for you too!’

‘What?’ There was a distinct tremor in the woman’s voice.

‘You can fool the whole world, Ms Pande,’ Rathod continued, his eyes firmly fixed on the woman, ‘but you can’t fool me.’

‘Wh-what do you mean?’

‘What I mean is that I did my homework before I came to meet you, Ms Pande. It’s true that you used to be an NGO worker. But it’s not true that you were idealistic. On the contrary, you were ambitious and greedy. But you were broke. You used to live in a small pigeonhole of a PG out in Navi Mumbai. Your rent was due for several months, but you were busy partying. One month after the disappearance of the girl, you came to her aunt and offered to help her in her crusade against Dr Nayak. Would I be wrong to assume that you were
sent
to her? By none other than Dr Nayak himself? I am right in believing so, am I not? Because for ten months, you misguided her, you sent her running from pillar to post, giving her the impression that you would get her niece the justice she deserved. She trusted you. In those tragic moments of despair, she clutched at the only straw of hope that was available to her. And then, when the time was right, you silenced her too. It was easy for you to get a death certificate citing thrombosis as a cause of death, wasn’t it? A cardiologist was always there to help you, after all! And, with her death, that poor little girl’s story ended. You went underground, showing the whole world that you were so
devastated by your dear friend’s death that you have withdrawn into your own shell of despair.’

‘That’s not true…not true at all…’

‘Really? How, then, do you explain moving from a one-bedroom shared paying guest accommodation to a three-bedroom flat in Versova overnight? That too within one month of Shobhna’s death? You had no income, because you had given up your job at the NGO. Nor was your salary at the NGO so high that you could afford to buy this flat with your savings. No, Ms Pande, let me tell you how you got this flat. This flat – in fact, this entire building – has been constructed by Ritz Developers, a company that was owned by Imtiaz Raza.’

A sharp gasp escaped the woman’s throat as she shuddered.

‘Yes, Ms Pande, “
was
”, because Raza is dead too. The same Raza who had another business. HVAC. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. I heard this some time back when one of my colleagues told me about it, but at that point of time I didn’t pay much attention to it. It was only later that I realized its true importance, when I came to know that Dr Madhusudan Nayak was a surgeon. It was then that I investigated further and found that Raza’s company made speciality air conditioners and ventilation equipments for operation theatres. These equipments are specially built for operation theatres and are super sensitive to germs and bacteria – something that is extremely important for a room where surgery takes place. Because of his contacts, Raza knew Dr Nayak personally, because, let’s not forget, along with being a cardiac surgeon at Purvachal Hospital, he was also the chairman of the board there. Raza knew Dr Nayak, and the doctor also knew of Raza’s illegal businesses and his associations with the underworld. When the girl was brought in to the hospital, the doctor raped her. Little did he know that
the girl would die, but when she did, the doctor panicked. The first and foremost thing to do was to get rid of the body. And the only person that Dr Nayak could think of entrusting the job to was Imtiaz Raza.’

Rathod paused to catch his breath. The woman’s arrogant form had now transformed into a miserable shell and she was shaking uncontrollably. Her jaws had hardened and her eyes looked cruel. She was gnashing her teeth in an uncouth manner. In a sudden impulse, she wrapped her long and pale fingers around the throat of the cat on her lap and twisted it violently. As she did so, the cat made a desperate attempt to wriggle free. But the woman’s slender fingers turned out to be too strong for the poor animal. The cat was on the verge of choking to death when Rathod extended his hand and firmly grabbed the woman’s wrist. She shrunk back and let go of the animal, which fell on the floor, and immediately stood back up on its legs and hissed at its mistress. The other cats in the room also turned their heads and looked at her with shock and surprise.

‘Raza took care of everything,’ Rathod continued, unfazed, ‘in return for several favours – favours worth crores. He got rid of the body. He bribed the clerks in the hospital’s admin department to ensure that all records of the girl being admitted there disappeared overnight. His next job was to silence the girl’s aunt. But before he could get to her, she escaped from the hospital and went to the police. She raised a hue and cry, and it was then that Dr Nayak decided to send
you
to her. He compensated you, with what I would guess was an insane amount of money – so much that I can’t even imagine it, and so dirty that I don’t even want to – and you played your part. You befriended her, you won her trust, and the poor woman did everything you told her to, oblivious of the fact that you
were actually with the very people she was fighting. Slowly, and without any suspicion falling on any of you, Shobhna Achrekar was mercilessly removed from the scene.’

‘But I didn’t kill her…trust me…I didn’t…’ the woman howled.

‘I know you didn’t,’ Rathod said as he turned to leave, his face filled with disgust. ‘You are too weak to commit murder. No…it was Raza once again. But I am more than certain that you let him into Shobhna’s house that night. She trusted you, but you betrayed her trust.’

‘I…I didn’t mean to do…any of this…trust me…’

‘Of course you did,’ Rathod said in his steely voice as he walked towards the door. ‘You were greedy, you sold your soul to those monsters, and that makes you one of them.’

‘I’m…I’m really sorry…please help me…I can’t stay locked in this…this hell-hole anymore…’

‘It’s too late now, Ms Pande,’ Rathod opened the door and turned around one last time, ‘…far too late for apologies.’

Before Rathod shut the door behind him, he saw all of Mrinalini Pande’s feline friends closing in on her.

31

Rathod tore through the streets in his car and reached the Arthur Road Jail, where he insisted on meeting the warden on duty. After great difficulty, he reached the warden’s office.