Truth Lake (11 page)

In one diagram, he put the motive down as jealousy, conjured inside his head a picture of the foreign tourist confronting his erstwhile friend on a hillside, hitting him with a tree branch, the body rolling and rolling, until finally it stopped by the river. He had a vision of the two men running, one of them tripping, hitting his head against a rock, then lying still. Anything could have happened, but the most important thing was that Sara and Adam had
set out to deceive him
. He became more and more convinced that Cameron Croft was dead and that they knew it and had lied about the identity of the corpse.

Now he would have to find evidence that proved Croft had indeed stayed in the village. His identification would still be circumstantial but it would mean that the corpse had, for the time at least, a name.

He wrote till his wrist hurt, then lay in bed and shivered and ached for a comforting touch, his mind dancing back and forth over the imagined countenances of the two women he'd been close to. 

Neither of their features had resembled Thahéra's. Mrs. Letti's front teeth were broken, and her kisses had been firmly maternal, but she'd had beautiful hips and robust arms. Once he'd seen her pouring water over her head in her back yard, fully clothed, her neck bent forward in a graceful arc and he'd felt a swell of excitement that made him shake. Her funeral had been a solemn occasion; the small bequest she made him more than enough to cover the deposit on his apartment.

Tanya Hàrélal was daring and dishevelled and deeply spoilt, with huge dark lips, wide eyes and a mischievous chin. Everything about her irritated him, from her confident scientific explanations to her teasing smiles. That hadn't stopped him from listening to her complaints about her life or from thinking her sexy. When she told him she wanted to be a boy, to be a son, powerful and condescending, he'd laughed in her face. She didn’t realise that her money and connections were more potent than anything masculinity could have conferred on her.

They'd watched each other covertly throughout her teenage years, she pushing against him in doorways, he drawing back sharply, denying his lust; even when she was fifteen and he half a dozen years older, she'd inhabited more of his fantasies than he had ever been happy about. He was certain too that he had meant something to her: at twenty-one he must have seemed quite heroic to a passionate girl. The way she ran to the door when he called at her father's house would have been enough to give a less modest man hope. But knowing that she associated him with danger and action, with the world she felt she'd never inhabit, he'd put her enthusiasm down to interest rather than love and battled with his body and his heart.  Anyway, she was a rich girl, the daughter of his boss, and he didn't need any more trouble in his lifetime than he'd already had.

Thinking about Tanya he wondered why he, like so many humans, was attracted to unattainable people. He wondered if it was like that in other countries. In the flamboyant and unfettered garb of some young Europeans, was it possible to read their ease with themselves and each other, with family, work and world? Were they able to love where they desired and to continue desiring those they loved: not if their films were to be believed. And what about the veiled women he sometimes saw when he was on duty at the airport – their men, sociable and obese, or lean with fiery eyes, always slapping each other on the backs while the women gazed out through their window on the world: did their apparel circumscribe their passion, bounding it for those with legitimate rights, or did it simply fuel the curiosity which pushes one to rebel, to look where one should not, to open closed doors?

Who had the answers? Pleasure was a slippery eel, to be found in the torture of denial and in the easy gratification of one's wishes. Where had the pursuit of pleasure led the two young tourists and their erstwhile 'friend' Cameron Croft –
To death? To murder?

The coterie of jeeps bearing the Sinbari delegation wound its way up through narrow passes, steep roads, sprawling villages, dimly lit and sleeping. The air was laden with the smell of rain. Most of the passengers, including Sadrettin, had long passed a stage of terrified nausea. They now slept, propped against each other and drooling slightly. 

Rimi Charoot had tried without success to curl her voluptuous form around Sadrettin or to persuade him to rest his head upon her shoulder. Now she made sure that her thigh was squeezed firmly against his as he slept. Taylor and the others had watched her efforts with admiration, for Sadrettin was considered by most to be either dangerous – the boss's flunkey – or else in deep sexual denial.

Having travelled for sixteen hours by road, they were hoping to reach their destination, a village called Malundi, on the following day. By the time they arrived at the command outpost, the most civilised town in the area, Bhukta, everyone was asleep and there was no way they could persuade a gatekeeper to open the gates until sunrise.  So they all alighted and bundled into the local guesthouse where they were greeted with lukewarm food, scalding tea and damp straw mattresses. 

Their journey in the morning would be on foot, their host told them, before retiring back to his liquor and his children in the tiny back room which was his year-round home. Unable to sleep, the man listened to the alien sounds of the city folk and to the howling of the monsoon wind.

In Goa too the wind was rising, ripping tiny waves off the sea's surface and sending late swimmers towards the shore. Everywhere along Aguada beach stallholders were packing up their things or hauling tarpaulin and ropes along the sand.

Sara had finished telling DC Mazumdar about the time that she, Cameron and Adam took the young Vincent Sinbari under their wing and showed him their city. She mentioned the open invitation they had all had from his tycoon father to be guests in return, and the vouchers his secretary had sent them in the mail. When persistently questioned about each location she had visited with or without Adam and the dates for these visits, she feigned confusion and uncertainty. She wisely refused to speculate about any further dealings between her lover and Sinbari. Her head ached and she felt as if her body was disintegrating around her. The buzz of the local flies sounded louder than helicopters. But her heart felt lighter than it had before she spoke out. And she did not regret the decision.

She was allowed to return to her hotel, but told to stay in the vicinity and to phone the station at ten every morning. When she asked if Adam was a suspect she was told in no uncertain terms that they couldn't say. They would have to liaise with Hàrélal in Delhi before making up their minds. That might take some days. When she asked if Antonio Sinbari was a suspect, they said warily that everyone in a murder enquiry was a suspect but that this wasn't a murder enquiry. Yet.

*

When Inspector Ribera called him, murder enquiries were amongst the last things on Hàrélal's mind so he signalled to his secretary to take a message. This Mrs Méghé did, trying hard to comprehend the strange accent of the Goan officer and making numerous mistakes in her transcription of the message. At the conclusion of the call, she dropped her notes into her boss's in-try and continued with her previous work.

*

Hàrélal felt as if he was the only person in the world who was trying to get Tanya back. He had located her, late the previous evening, ensconced at the residence of Lal Bahuba Saané, one of his 'trusted' and elite guards to whom the task of following her around had been so confidently allocated five months ago. Now, all the girl's mother could say was 'Let the child rest a bit', as if the foolish ingrate had not been doing precisely that for the past sixteen days, leaving her mother to wither like a leaf and her father to call in more favours than anyone owed him and which had probably bankrupted him for life in the favour department. Yes, he'd found her, but that was only at the moment of despair when he had begun to feel that were it not for his need of revenge against that bastard Sinbari, he might have contemplated taking his own life. 

So, what possible excuses could the women dream up now? Sentimental, illogical, totally remorseless – they were. 

Number one, they were claiming that he'd driven his daughter to this insolent vileness by his overprotectiveness. Was there such as thing as overprotectiveness in today's society, he'd countered, reminding them of the Goongha girl who was seduced, then tortured and left for dead on the side of the Gopalganj flyover. The world is cruel. 

But the women were having none of it. 

By throwing Tanya repeatedly alongside this young man – who apparently had been detailed to guard her in the nights and had been left to do this
solo,
on occasion, due to staff sickness or unreliability – had he not created in her bosom an unreasonable attachment to Lal Bahuba Saané, displaced Maharastrian and erstwhile pugilist? After all, the only men who should be protecting a girl were her brother, her father or her husband. Thus spoke Mrs Hàrélal.

And Tanya herself? She would not justify or apologise or explain. She'd wanted Lal Bahuba. Recklessly. So what if she had flirted with Jimmy Parikh's son? Was there an engagement? What was the matter with her father? Did he think that Saané was less of a man because he employed him? Hadn't he once told her that Kailash Karmel was like a brother to her, a son to him, despite his family-bereft, casteless existence? Wasn't he always saying that mother's guru was the wisest man they knew? And
he
wore rags at least once a week! Couldn't they all just get along and stop arguing because it was not good for any of them.

Oh, and yes, she was pregnant. 

Chaos drifted into their habitually ordered home. Sulking, Hàrélal decided to sleep at the office. His clothes took on the slightly wilted look of one who is not getting them freshly starched each morning. His secretary tried to discuss the on-going Olympic games with him, knowing his weakness for athletics and his admiration for Italian athletes. But all she got for her trouble was a dirty look. 

After two nights haunted by visions of his daughter dying during childbirth – of which he had only the sketchiest understanding – he was ready to go home; but stubbornness made him refuse to see his daughter. The one time he had seen her, on the day she was located, he had wanted so badly to hug her, to hit her, to show her he cared.  She had looked so unfamiliar, yet so dear, with her pretty kurta that now hid a tiny bump and her designer maternity jeans. Ridiculous that she had kept secrets from him for so long; absurd that he had not suspected. And then images of Lal Bahuba Saané mounting his little girl flashed and he was all rage again, all bluster, and reconciliation seemed like foreign territory. 

He missed Kailash until his head ached.

He personally supervised a number of criminal investigations – stuff he hadn't handled for years. A woman fell from a tower block – newly married, known to have complained about her in-laws only weeks before. Did she jump or was she pushed?  And even if she did jump, could her husband's family still not be held morally accountable?  He had never thought like this before. He had never wanted to enter the mind of a woman or question the motives of his kind. 

In another landmark case, a bus driver was successfully prosecuted for failing to stop at a clearly marked bus-stop during rush hour. He did his sixty days in jail and then drove his bus at seventy kilometres per hour into an unsuspecting crowd of commuters near LC College. Most of them were young women. Their families were devastated.  The local ruling party were alleging that the driver was actually a terrorist, following in the footsteps of recent suicide bombers. The Police were forced to act. 

His whole family had been arrested, including his pregnant sister. She was stoned by families of the victims on her way to jail and lost first her baby and then her life. The papers claimed that the cops stood by and watched the woman die, chewing paan, chatting. One prestigious Daily alleged that the cops even joined in. The bus driver's family were lower caste; puzzled villagers in an alien setting. They didn't stand a chance.

Hàrélal couldn't take any more. He found tears in his eyes. Only action could abate such throes of conscience. He called in some more favours and discovered that a party of Sinbari's people had set off for an unknown destination in the north two days previously. So, he was sending a team up there to discredit the police department by discovering the body. He'd deliberately misled them all to throw them off the scent! He probably wanted to get one of his friends appointed as Chief Superintendent. Bastard.  Dirty rascal. Liar.
Chor.
Stealing from India and giving to Italy. If a crime had been committed, and it surely had, he decided that Sinbari was going to pay – in taxes or in some other, less fashionable way!

Meanwhile, entirely unaware of the fury he had engendered in Hàrélal's breast, Antonio Sinbari was calling in experts. He had rarely had cause to do so before, Sadrettin's multitalented labour standing him in good stead during the past seven years. Now, slaveless and angry, he tried to find the source of the leak in his company. His hands shook slightly as he puzzled over the meaning of the deleted files.

Who would have searched his mail with such success? Who would have tried not once but several times to find his correspondence and finally, accessing it, who would have deleted and perhaps copied the very files that he was most anxious to preserve?

The experts assured him that no one had used his machine to make copies of anything he'd written or else it would have been clearly shown on the data-log; from an external computer and using a modem to link-in, however, anyone canny enough could have accessed and copied his mail: codes and passwords were easy to break these days and by-passing them was big business. There were ways of accessing his computer's automatic back-up system and recovering those letters if he wished them to do it. No, he did not; he would do it himself if the need arose. Okay, then, we'll be off sir, if there's nothing more we can do to help you. Time is money, as you know.

Soaking in his hot tub later that evening, he tried to forget about the day's events.  His cook provided an excellent roast and he began to feel himself relax. Pudding was superb. But nothing could quite banish the spectre of the computer invasion from his thoughts. Someone had used his password, gone through all his files and, having wasted the chance to access important information about capital and mergers and bids, had settled on his correspondence with Cameron as the only data worthy of deletion. Who would have done that and why? For several hours Antonio Sinbari pondered this little conundrum and the more he thought about it, the more he saw it as a warning. Someone knew or suspected his plans. Perhaps they wished to prevent his expansion in the north; perhaps they had some less precise, some messier motive. Whom had he thwarted in the past few weeks? 

The list was long and worrying, even for a man with no conscience; his dreams that night were brief and unpleasant.