Death in Leamington (27 page)

In that split second of hesitation he felt the cold steel of the silenced barrel of an SV-99 at the back of his head. Instinctively he began to raise his hands, knowing he had only a moment or two to grab the barrel, twist and bring his hands down quickly to redirect the gun towards his assailant’s solar plexus while stamping his heel down on his foot to knock him off balance. But before his hands were even past his shoulders, the gun was fired. The shot took one side of his head off completely and his body fell to the ground, instantly lifeless.

*

The Sikh holding the gun was disguised as a police marksman. The silencer on the gun meant that the shot was executed without a sound. He was quick and efficient in packing Khand’s body into the boot of his black cab and drove away through the rapidly filling streets, turning off the ‘For Hire’ sign to avoid being flagged down.

An hour later, the park keeper in Jephson Gardens found Khand’s mutilated body as he was locking up. It has been dumped near the group of statues called ‘Elephants and Boy’, the monument to Sam Lockhart’s three elephants, the ‘Three Graces’. Every limb had been crushed with a sledgehammer and the remaining half of Khand’s ghoulish head was barely recognisable, balanced on the trunk of one of the elephants.

G. A. Natesan,
The Indian Review

*

‘It looks like K-Company has done our work for us,’ said Hunter, shaking his head when we arrived at the scene. ‘Let’s get this mess cleared up. At least maybe we’ll all get a medal now from the chief.’

‘Forensics have just arrived, Sir,’ I said.

‘Wait, before they start let me see Khand’s right hand,’ Hunter said, looking at the ‘bite’ on the web of the detached right hand between the thumb and forefinger. ‘As I thought, our friend the Browning,’ he added in satisfaction. Alice, already dressed in her protective suit, came up beside us with her forensics bag.

‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, ‘we do seem to be keeping you busy this week. This one’s a bit of a mess I’m afraid.’

‘Indeed,’ said Alice, grimacing at the sight of the crushed limbs and severed head.

Hunter pointed out the mark on the man’s hand to her and said, ‘I think we might have the man who fired the Browning, Alice.’

‘Maybe, but of course the Browning was not the cause of Troyte’s death you know.’

We both looked at her in surprise.

‘And in any case, it’s Rohit’s prints that are all over the stock and his footprints were in the garden, there weren’t any others.’

‘You mean, Troyte wasn’t killed by the Browning?’ asked Hunter. He looked anguished by this news.

‘No, we believe he died of a massive heart attack, I’d estimate it occurred at least an hour before the bullet wound was inflicted. He was already long dead when he was shot through the head, we can tell that from the way the blood flowed from the wound.’

‘So it wasn’t murder then?’ I asked, totally confused by the implications of this.

‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions about that,’ muttered Hunter, who also looked genuinely perplexed by this unexpected twist.

‘I guess it’s not surprising that Rohit’s prints would be on the gun if he stole it from Baxter,’ he deliberated. ‘We’d better get him picked up again all the same. Are there any more surprises for us in your report, Alice?’ he said, scratching his head. He was clearly irritated that his tidy explanation of events was unravelling with these new revelations.

Alice paused and brushed away the hair flapping around her face in the wind. ‘Well yes, the other really strange thing we’ve discovered concerns the condom we found in Troyte’s bedroom. The semen is Troyte’s alright; it’s a perfect match to his other fluids we tested. But there are no other fluids on the surface of the empty sheath; in fact there is no sign of any female or male contact. It’s almost as if it was never used in anger, so to speak.’

‘Why would anyone bother to use a condom if there was no one else involved, was it some kind of fetish?’ I asked. This was getting stranger and stranger. A thought came into my mind and I reminded the DI about the strange photographs we found in the box in Pearl’s safe.

‘I think you may be right,’ he said. ‘But the photos were all part of Miss Taylor’s elaborate revenge plot, so I think we’ve got a pretty full explanation for that now. Is there anything else, Alice?’

‘Yes, we got a lipstick and saliva sample from the rim of the champagne glass in Troyte’s house. We’ve run a DNA match and have a result.’

‘OK and what is that?’

‘There’s a match to one of the victims,’ her voice sounded somewhat triumphant as if she was proud of her own detective skills. I wondered what else she had up her sleeve, one of my best friends trying to upstage me again.

‘A match to Troyte’s DNA?’

‘No, interestingly there’s a match to Nariman. Whoever drank from that glass, and we have to reasonably assume from the lipstick it was a woman, must be a very close blood relative of his.’

‘Nadia?’ I asked, ‘How can that be? She was in the house all day.’

‘No not Nadia, Penny, remember there is another woman involved in this whole confused story,’ said Hunter. I could see by his changed expression that he was beginning to understand the significance of this new information. ‘All the same, I think we do need to get Nadia to give us a blood or saliva sample for Alice to test and it would be good to get something that we know belongs to Miss Taylor as a cross-check.’

‘I don’t understand. What’s Miss Taylor got to do with it?’ I asked, my mind racing over new possibilities, but I was by now completely confused.

‘I’m afraid that despite my earlier assurance to the contrary, Miss Taylor seems increasingly likely, albeit probably accidentally, to have the code to the whole enigma,’ he stated mysteriously.

*

After the police had taken Sir William away in handcuffs, Nadia asked the butler to lock the doors again and went back up to her room. She decided to take the bath that she had promised herself earlier. Despite the arrest of her husband, she felt both a sense of rage and a huge sense of relief at the events of the evening, however disturbing they were, especially once she had heard that they had found Khand’s body. Of course they had spared her the more gruesome details of that discovery; however she was still very worried about Rohit. After she had bathed and oiled her hair, she wrapped herself in a towelling robe and sat on the bed watching the unravelling news reports on the TV in her room. It was then that she heard the familiar but unexpected tap of Rohit’s signal on her window pane and she hurriedly opened the shutters to see him standing there, silhouetted against the flashing lights from the police cars. They were still searching the garden and lane behind for any further evidence of Khand’s flight and his attacker. She embraced Rohit, bursting into tears at the joy of seeing him again, released for a moment from the tension of the evening’s trauma.

Abraham Mariaselvam,
Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems

Unfortunately, this time he had been spotted as he made his way along the balcony and their lover’s sweet nothings were soon rudely disturbed as two large police officers arrived and were led upstairs by the butler to her bedroom. Nadia protested at the intrusion but Rohit calmed her, saying he had nothing to fear from the police and was quite willing to go with them peacefully. When Hunter arrived a few minutes later, they read Rohit his rights and then bundled him into the car to take him back to the police station for a second round of questioning, this time under caution. Hunter stayed back to speak with Nadia for a few minutes; he had been joined by Alice and another female officer.

‘Inspector Hunter, what on earth is going on? Why are you taking Rohit again? I told you he would never have harmed my grandfather,’ she said, sobbing.

‘I’m afraid this time it is nothing to do with your grandfather’s murder,’ replied Hunter, ‘there is something else that has emerged this evening that we need to question him about. In the meantime, we need to establish something else about your grandfather’s medical history. Would you mind terribly if Alice here takes a swab from your mouth as a close relative? It won’t hurt and will take only a second.’

*

After they had taken the sample, Hunter returned to the station quickly and went to the interview room straight away with one of his team. Rohit was sitting there with a duty lawyer. He looked calm enough. After the usual preliminary questions, Hunter quickly got to the point.

‘So Rohit, it appears you were not entirely straight with me before about what you were doing last Sunday,’ he said sternly. ‘You weren’t hiding in Coventry all day, were you?’

The lawyer whispered to Rohit to explain to him what he should and shouldn’t say. Rohit shook his head and indicated he wanted to answer the question.

‘I’m not sure what you mean, Inspector?’

‘You paid a visit to a Mr Troyte in Lansdowne Circus, didn’t you? We know because you left your prints. Now why would you have gone there, if it wasn’t to commit some sort of mischief?’

Rohit suddenly looked very concerned and began to bite his lip nervously. His lawyer turned to Hunter and indicated that his client would not answer the question. Hunter shook his head and looked again at Rohit, repeating his question. The lawyer went to intervene again but before he could stop him, Rohit broke down into sobs and started to answer anyway.

‘Inspector, please believe me, it’s not what it seems.’

‘OK, well I’m all ears,’ Hunter pressed him firmly.

‘I went to ask him about Nadia,’ Rohit replied, falteringly this time. ‘I’d found out from my research that he was friends with Mr Nariman at College about the time that Nadia’s mother was born and I wanted to know whether Mr Nariman was really her grandfather or not. You see I had my doubts, from the research that I had done, some things in the story just didn’t fit. I even had DNA tests done. They were negative; there was nothing, no match, no connection between them.’

‘And so what happened when you got to the house?’

‘He wouldn’t let me in at first. Something had scared him, but when I mentioned Mr Nariman’s name and told him that I used to work for him, he opened the door and reluctantly agreed to see me. We sat in his drawing room in silence, while he paced around the room. He was clearly very anxious about something. Eventually he sat down and asked me to tell him the whole story, as I knew it. After I had finished, he just looked at me like a guilty child. He told me it was all a very long time ago and he could not remember very well what had happened. Maybe there had been some sort of mistake, some sort of mix up. In any case, all he knew was that he’d done Mr Nariman a favour by sorting things out for him, but I could tell he wasn’t telling the whole truth.’

‘And is that when you pulled the revolver?’ Again the lawyer tried to stop Rohit saying any more but by now he was in full flow.

‘Inspector, I’ve already told you, I did not have the gun. It had been stolen from my room the night before.’

‘Well we’ll see about that. So what’s your story, what happened next?’

‘He suddenly went very pale and started clutching his chest. I realised almost immediately that he was having some sort of attack. I know I should really have called for an ambulance straight away, but I was so scared about what you would think if you found me there. So I got him off the settee on to the floor instead and loosened his clothing. I intended to make him comfortable while I went and called for an ambulance, but he seemed to be fading fast and I was afraid that it might already be too late. I felt his wrist, there was no pulse that I could detect and suddenly he wasn’t breathing properly either. He was losing consciousness rapidly. I tried CPR, I’ve done the training, but nothing happened. I must have tried for ten, fifteen minutes until I realised he was definitely dead. Then I really panicked, I pulled him back onto the settee, closed the curtains, unlocked and then left by the back doors into the garden. I did mean to call you and let you know about the body but I was so frightened I just rode off on my bike all the way back to Coventry and tried to forget the whole thing had happened.’

‘You expect me to believe all that?’ asked Hunter aggressively.

‘Inspector, it’s the truth, I was terrified.’

‘And what about the message?’

‘What message?

‘The ‘dancing men’ message?’

‘You found that?’

‘Yes, it was in the victim’s pocket.’

‘OK I didn’t put it there. It must have fallen out of my pocket but I certainly didn’t put it in Troyte’s pocket. I got the idea from that film crew, when I read up about what they were filming. It was just research for one of Baxter’s stupid assignments, just a joke. I never intended to give it to him.’

‘You really expect me to believe all this?’ said Hunter, shaking his head but quietly reforming again his view of the train of events that Sunday afternoon. ‘So how was Miss Taylor involved in all of this?’ Rohit looked aghast at the mention of her name.

‘How do you know about her?’ he asked.

‘Come on, do you take me for a fool?’

‘No, Inspector, of course not.’

‘I was wondering if you could tell me if you have another unbelievable explanation about how she came to know that Troyte was going to be in town this weekend. You tipped her off didn’t you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So what’s the connection? This one is intriguing me more than anything.’

‘It was pure chance really; I came across her name when I was trying to find out about Mr Troyte. It was a magazine interview she did just after her mother’s death; she was talking about her search for her natural father. She did not use his name but referred to an American architect living in Michigan. The article came up when I was googling to research Troyte. It was a pure coincidence really, but I got in contact with her and she recognised the name. It must have been then that I mentioned to her that he was coming to England soon and she got very interested.’