CHAPTER 9 Perfume Clue
Worli police station smelled of mildew, wet khaki and old paan, and at three on Saturday afternoon it was doing nothing to hide it.
Rain drummed on the tin awning over the veranda.
Inside, every leak had its own steady drip.
Reporters clustered at the gate under black umbrellas, and their voices came through the storm in pieces — merger, elevator, any comment.
Inspector Solanki's office had one barred window, one fan that had given up rotating and settled for shaking, and a desk whose paan stains had been there so long they looked like part of the varnish. He chewed, squinted, and slid a folder across the wood with two nicotine-coloured fingers.
"Forensics ka report aaya, saab. Sit, sit. You want tea? No? Good, tea here is a crime also." He waited until Raghav sat. "Not the kind of perfume you get fatafat in Dadar, this. Imported. Mint base. Expensive."
Raghav opened it. Grainy photographs of swabs from the shaft; notes in a mix of Marathi and English; one line underlined twice. Trace elements: menthol, mint oils. He thought of his jacket sleeve, hanging over a chair in his flat in Bandra.
"Lifts get all kinds of contamination," he said, and heard how fast it came out. "Staff, guests, executives, cleaners. Anyone who—"
"You are COO, saab, not the janitor. Don't over-explain.
" Solanki spat neatly into a tin and looked pleased with the shot.
"Ghost perfume in elevator shaft. Strange, na?
Bindaas ghosts, these. They leave scent before they leave footprints.
" He grinned. Then the grin went and his eyes stayed. "Turn the page."
Raghav turned it. A photograph, better lit than the others, of an evidence bag on a steel tray. In the bag, a curve of dull metal the length of a finger, bent nearly double.
"One industrial safety pin," Solanki said, from memory.
"Bent. Recovered from brake-sensor housing.
You know what is a brake-sensor housing?
Me neither. My forensics fellow explained it for twenty minutes and I understood only that it is a small place where a small thing can do a big job.
" He rocked the chair back. It screamed.
"Where does a lift get a safety pin, Mr. Malhotra? "
"I don't know."
"No. Neither does the lift company. Neither does your Head of Facilities, Dsouza — nice man, sweats a lot, gave me a certificate.
" He let the chair come down. "Funny thing about evidence.
Sometimes it points where it should. Sometimes it points where somebody wants it to point. My nephew learned that the hard way."
Raghav waited. Nothing followed. Solanki was looking at the rain.
"Your nephew—"
"Another day." Solanki pulled the folder back and squared it, badly.
"This report I am not giving you, by the way.
You have seen it. That is different from having it.
If Meera madam asks, you have seen nothing, and I am a lazy man who eats paan and waits for the lift company to write me a nice letter. "
"Are you? Waiting?"
"I am always waiting, saab. It is ninety per cent of the job.
The other ten per cent is tea." He worked the paan to the other cheek.
"But I will tell you what I told the lift company.
A pin does not walk. A pin does not climb forty-seven floors and lie down in a sensor.
Somebody put it there who knew where there was.
That is not a ghost. That is a person with hands.
And a person with hands was somewhere on Wednesday night, and everybody in your company was somewhere else, with photographs.
" He smiled with the red teeth. "It is a very well-photographed company. "
"We had a photographer."
"You had four hundred." He tapped the desk.
"One more thing, then go, your Meera madam is calling me every hour like a wife.
A car with a Trinity sticker was parked in Colaba all last night.
Constable noted it — nice car, wrong street, no driver.
He is a keen boy. I told him keen boys get transferred.
" He looked at Raghav's shoes. Both present. "You had dinner in Colaba, saab?"
"I had dinner in Colaba."
"Good place for dinner." He chewed. "Bad place for a Saturday. Go. Go and manage something."
◆
The drive back to BKC was flooded streets and headlights doubled in the standing water. He had the window up because the rain left no choice, and the car filled with the smell of his own wet wool and, faint, in the sleeve, the other thing. He did not lean towards it. He did not lean away.
At the Mahim causeway the traffic stopped altogether and he took the phone out and opened the folder for the fourth time since dawn.
Seventeen files. He had played the first six in the flat that morning through the laptop's speaker with the curtains shut — hiss, and under the hiss the pulse, and under the pulse, when the software finally gave it up, a scanned page: Mauritius Holdings LLC — Consulting Services — Invoice 001.
Then five more like it, with dates. He had stopped at seven because seven was the export licence and the word Riyadh had done something to his hands.
Eighteen and nineteen sat at the bottom of the list with their small red crosses.
Source unavailable. He had tried to remember Priya's list — payments, licences, contracts, a compliance note, her audit, the draft, the minutes — and it would not add up to nineteen in his head no matter how he did it, and he could not tell from the labels which two he did not have.
Check what's missing. He had checked. It was missing. That was as far as he had got.
The traffic moved. He put the phone away.
By seven the city had gone dark early under the rain, and Trinity had lost its power with it.
The building stood over BKC with its atrium lit at half-strength on the generator, and inside, the backup strips hummed at a pitch he felt in his teeth.
Security had a torch. The lifts were dead — all three executive cars this time, and the service bank too — and a laminated notice on the doors said so, in Facilities' font, with the time.
He saw her before he had decided to look.
Alisha leaned against a marble pillar. The half-light suited her: black dress, hair damp and curling at the shoulders, rain still on her collarbone.
Two juniors from Sales went past her with their phone-torches out and did not see her at all.
The perfume reached him before her voice did. Cool. Exact.
"You look pale, Mr. Malhotra." Head on one side. "Ghosts?"
He stopped closer than he had meant to. It came out harder than he had meant it to as well.
"Peppermint. Forensics found it in the shaft. Imported, expensive, not the janitor's." He could hear Solanki in his own mouth and pushed on anyway. "You wear it like a signature."
She looked at him for a moment. Waited, in case there was more.
"Are you accusing me?"
"Should I be?"
"I don't know. What did they find, exactly?
Mint oils, menthol?" She said it lightly, like a woman who had read a lot of forensic reports once and found them repetitive.
"It's in half the hand sanitizer in this building.
It's in the lozenges your Head of Legal eats.
It's in the throat spray the man at the security desk uses.
And it's on my neck." She tipped her head to show him where.
"Which of those did the shaft prefer, do you know? "
"You're saying it's nothing."
"I'm saying evidence is a story, and somebody's writing it, and you've just walked up to me in a power cut and read me the first line." She let it go. "Did you get your car back?"
That stopped him.
"How do you—"
"You told me you were driving to Colaba.
On Thursday. You told me with your face.
" The lights dipped and came back. She had not moved away; if anything the dark had brought her nearer.
He felt her breath at his cheek, cooler than the air.
"Maybe you like me dangerous. Have you thought about that?
It's a very common taste. It doesn't make it a good one. "
"Dangerous people," he said, and he could hear himself working to keep his voice level, "don't leave evidence."
Her fingers went to the earring and turned it once. "Who said I left it?"
The generator coughed. For one long second their reflections were pressed together on the wet glass of the atrium wall — two figures leaning in, blurred into one dark shape — and then the strips came up and the shape came apart into a man and a woman standing too close in a lobby.
"You should get some sleep, Raghav," she said, ordinary as a receptionist. "You keep telling everyone you're fine and it's making them nervous."
She went past him. Heels on marble, then the stairwell door closing behind her.
She did not look back. He stood there with Solanki's folder under his arm and no lift to get into, and one of the juniors from Sales, coming back the other way with his phone-torch, said, "Sir?
You all right, sir?" and Raghav said yes, fine, and the boy said, "Okay, sir," in the voice of somebody who would say otherwise later, to a friend.
◆
Eleven at night, and he had run out of ways to pace the flat, so he had a taxi take him back to Colaba for the car.
That was the reason. He held on to it all the way down the coast — the car, on its dry kerb, two streets from the hotel; a man was allowed to want his own car back — and it lasted until the taxi dropped him and drove off and he found himself walking not towards the car but the other way, round the side of the hotel, past the dark portico and the doorman asleep under his arch, towards the kitchen entrance and the eleven steps.
He wanted to know if they were still there. That was all. Two dark jackets and an umbrella. Whether they had been men or weather.
The steps ran with water like the night before. The lane was empty. No jackets, no umbrella, no cat. Only the rain, and, at the bottom of the steps, the Blue Note's door with its brass handle and its round porthole of glass gone yellow with the light inside.
He did not go down. He stood at the top with his shoulder against the wet wall of the hotel and looked through the porthole, at the angle the steps gave him, into the bar.
The mirror behind the bottles had been replaced or was simply gone; there was a blank of dark wood where it had been. Same red leatherette. Same trumpet, or another one, thin through the door. The heavy-set bartender polishing something. Two customers at the bar with a stool between them.
Vik Rane and Alisha Verma.
He knew Vik by the shoulders and the way he sat, forward, both elbows on the wood, hands going.
He knew her by nothing he could have named.
She was in something dark and simple, one hand round a glass she was not drinking, and she was listening — really listening, the way she'd listened to Arvind at a table of parallel cutlery — with her head on one side and her body angled to Vik by exactly as much as it took to keep him talking.
He was talking. From the top of the steps, through a door, Raghav couldn't hear a word, and didn't need to.
Vik's hands did the sentences for him: a flat sweep, twelve years; a jab at the ceiling, the old man; two fingers, the boy with the slide deck.
Now and then he laughed at himself and looked to see if she had, and she gave him a small dry thing with her mouth that was not a laugh and was worth more to him than one, and he went on.
He cracked his knuckles once and she looked at his hands while he did it, and he saw her look, and stopped, and put his hands flat on the bar.
She said something. Short. He could see it was short. Vik went still and then lit up — the man's whole face changed shape — and leaned in.
Then she touched his wrist.
Once. Two fingers, on the inside of the wrist where it lay on the bar, for the length of a sentence, and gone. Vik looked at the place afterwards. Raghav, forty feet away and one door removed, felt it on his own arm and hated that he did.
The bartender set a fresh glass in front of Vik without being asked. Vik drank. Alisha turned the earring and did not look towards the door, and Raghav was certain — cold, whole, ridiculous — that she knew exactly which pane he was standing behind and how wet he was.
He went back up the lane.
He found the car where he had left it, on its foot of dry kerb, one wiper lifted by some kind passer-by so the blade would not stick to the glass.
He sat in it with the engine off and his hands on the wheel and the rain running down the windscreen, and did not start it, and did not know how long he did not start it.
The phone lit in his pocket. Not unknown. A number he had saved on Wednesday night under a name and a single word — Verma, Strategy — with the neatness of a man filing a colleague.
You could have come in. He was only telling me about the promotion. He tells everyone about the promotion.