The Row House Murder

A long-ish short story

7:00 AM

The tea was still warm. I had already skimmed through the city pages of The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and Mumbai Mirror and the online edition of The Indian Express on my phone. It was the same old drivel. “Youth takes to arson after getting drunk”, “Hashtag wars at the hustings”, “Body found on tracks near Panvel”.

I was mildly pleased with how the desk had tackled my article on the murder – a double column over half a page. The rest of it had been fluff anyway. Angry neighbours complaining about the lack of police patrols in the area. Some wondering where all their “tax money was going”. I had not bothered to include the usual casteist and classist slurs. One lady had gone on about not being able to trust her children around “these low-class types.”

The other newspapers had barely given the story half that much space. I could imagine Suanshu in ToI not being particularly happy this morning. She had texted me a little earlier with a simple “Really, Idyll? Jackass much?” Reading those first lines again now, it did feel quite silly.

Having said that, the crime beat was a dead end anyway these days and all of us knew that. Nothing less than a sensational double murder would free up space for a crime story. Or a celebrity needed to be involved.

Then there were the bits Inspector Bharucha had told me off the record which didn’t make it into my report. Murders in Bombay are usually open-and-shut cases but this one was a head-scratcher. And it came close on the heels of another baffling murder just south of the check naka in Mulund. The murder of the old lady – smothered with her own pillow – at least had a clear motive. All her jewellery and money were missing. Nothing of that sort here. There wasn’t much money or valuables in the house to begin with. The victim was a well-to-do though simple middle-aged man with no apparent enemies.

Slurping down the rest of the tea, I looked at my calendar for the day. I had to call Bharucha for updates on the murder. There was the Enforcement Directorate press conference about the progress with the MFCB fraud case in the afternoon but I was fairly certain that they had uncovered nothing new and roped in the new trainee reporter to cover it. Unless a major robbery or murder was reported in the next hour or so, I could head straight to the office.

8:56 AM

Bharucha was already at the station when I got through to him. I could hear the loud humming of the ceiling fan and the cacophony of the corridors as he made his way out of the station to the take the call. We skipped the formalities.

“Amitji, this case has become a hot potato. The victim’s sister is the commissioner’s classmate from medical college. They will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of this.” On top of that, with elections three months away, the government could not afford to look weak on crime. “The SP is under a lot of pressure right now and I hear he is bringing in some detective to look at the case!”

This was interesting. I had heard of specialists being brought in to consult on various cases – usually financial, cyber or medical experts – but this was the first I had heard of a detective being employed. This had the making of a scoop. And the police must be at their wit’s end if things had come to this.

“Bharuchaji, this is interesting. Do you have a name?”

There was a pause at the other end. I assumed Bharucha was digging out a handwritten note. “John Panicker,” he said after a while.

I still had a few hours before the noon newsroom meeting, enough time to pay Mr. Panicker a visit. It wasn’t all that hard to get an address. All I had to do was google “John Panicker + Detective”. The first result was his website. I wasn’t sure what to expect – pre- and post-matrimonial surveillance services perhaps – but a blank webpage with nothing but an address and phone number was not it. The address was posh though, just off Carter Road, barely 20 minutes away. He must be good if he could afford an office there.

The address turned out to a bungalow, a big one at that. The nameplate outside said “James Panicker, Advocate, Bombay High Court”. This was accompanied by a “Beware of Dog” sign. I wondered how he was expecting clients to come in with that sign.

The gate opened into a path which led to a garage behind the house. Above the garage, I could see a sign which proclaimed it to be the office of “JP Detective Agency”. The path was grassy, the garden and the hedges were overgrown, and quite green. I could barely see the ground floor behind the shrubbery.

Hoping the dog was on a leash, I walked in. I didn’t close the gate behind me in case the dog was loose and came after me.

The door of the office was not locked, only latched from the outside. It opened to reveal an office that could, at best, be described as minimalistic, much like the website. There was a wooden table in the centre. On the table was one laptop – a Macbook Pro, from the looks of it which had been left open – and nothing else. The room was cool, the AC was on. The walls were bare except for a map of Mumbai on the right and a 50-inch TV on the opposite wall. Behind and in front of the table were three chairs, like the “ergonomic” ones we had in office.

Settling into one, I waited. If someone had left the air conditioning on, I figured I wouldn’t have to wait long.

I was right. Hearing footsteps outside, which I assumed were John Panicker’s and not another client’s, I stood up. I was in his office, without an invitation, some courtesy would be nice.

“Hello, Amit,” a soft voice trailed across the walls even before the speaker came into view. I found myself speechless as he did. An average sized man, about 5’ 5” or 5’ 6”, lean, almost athletic. He was wearing a blue and white check, fitted full-sleeve shirt and navy blue tapered trousers, both almost certainly made to measure. The face itself was angular but pleasant, friendly, as he grinned ear to ear at my surprise.

“Sorry to startle you but I do have sensors in the room which let me know when someone walks in. And that camera is always on,” he said, pointing to the laptop and then holding up his phone to show how he had been monitoring me.

“Yes…hello,” I managed to say after a second or two. “But that still doesn’t explain how you know my name.”

“Let me just say it is my business to know certain things. Considering the business we are in, I think it is essential to know the other players. And I do read the papers. It isn’t exactly a lot of work to find out a little more about you.”

All of that made sense at some level. Even if I ignored social media, I had come across several photos of myself the last few times I had searched my name on the internet. There was one from my journalism school’s alumni page, a few from the 2017 Swati Bahnusade journalism awards function, one on the Bombay Chronicle “Know our Team” page...

“I suppose you want to know what I am doing on the Row House murder case?”

The day was full of surprises. But I tried not to show it this time and stared blankly back at him. He carried on matter-of-factly.

“You know, this is not the first murder I have helped the police with. With your contacts across the force, I was expecting a call from you much earlier. A call though, I was not expecting you to drop in. What made you come by?”

“People divulge a lot more when they don’t have time to prepare, I suppose.” This was generally true but some people could clam up too. I also wanted a description of the person sometimes, it helped when writing a profile.

“So how long have you been working with the police?”

John was still smiling but his eyes were suddenly serious.

“You are taking a short-term view here. Think about it. Your work depends so much on the goodwill of the sources in the police department. You will be embarrassing the department if you wrote a story about the cops being a bunch of duds that they have asked private detectives for help. At the end of the day, despite all the infighting, they are a tribal bunch. You might find your sources drying up pretty quickly.”

“Maybe.” That was partly true. But I also knew I could wait for the right moment and play one faction in the department against another. Timing was everything. And it was never going to be as bad as he was making it out to be. Like my bureau chief loved to say to upstart reporters with original ideas which he didn’t particularly like, “this is not my first rodeo.” Besides, Bharucha would not have given me the name if he didn’t want the story to get out.

“Alright, what do you think I should do instead,” I wanted to see where he was going with it.

“Solve the case with me and you get a scoop, all the inside details and not what the police announce at a press conference. Of course, you will have to write the story in such a way to show the police cracked it all by themselves.”

I was silent for a minute. It wasn’t a bad idea. But I would not be reporting the full truth either. I couldn’t see myself being the police’s PR man.

“Okay. I will think about it.”

With his fingers almost unconsciously tapping the desk in front of him, his smile, still unwavering, he gave me a long look, like he was thinking about what I said while appraising me at the same time. It was a bit unnerving.

“What can you tell me about the murder then,” I thought it was best to change the subject.

“At the moment, not a whole lot. But I am heading to Thane now. Would you like to come with me?”

I glanced at my watch. I was not going to make it to the noon news meeting if I didn’t leave now. But this was way more interesting than listening to the editor drone on about all the spelling mistakes in today’s paper. I dropped a quick message – “Chasing a story, can’t make it for the meeting” – to the bureau chief and stepped out of the room with John.

11:08 AM

SI Bharucha met us at the entrance to the colony. He had parked his Gypsy at the police checkpost across the road and walked over.

“The SP asked me to assist in any way I can,” he told me. John nodded, I assumed he had already spoken to the SP about me.

“Is the post-mortem report in now? Are you able to build a timeline,” John asked.

“Yes, everything has come in now. Let’s discuss inside.” Bharucha stepped in through the side gate into the colony, indicating to us to follow him. The police presence was smaller today. Yesterday, the whole colony had been off limits to non-residents.

We could see the neighbours peeking through the curtains as we made our way to the house. Hidden for the most part behind a four-foot wall behind which stood a row of palm trees, house number 4 came into view slowly. It was a single-story building. The terrace was mostly a transparent conservatory but there was one room on the right. The walls were completely covered in vines. All the green made me think of a hobbit’s hole. Just next to the gate was a brass plate which declared the place to be “Ahuja Botanical Garden and Nursery.” I thought that was a bit rich but changed my mind as soon as I stepped in through the gate. There was a sense of wildness here. Wildness which had been controlled and contained to bring out a certain elegance, almost eagerness. Lightning in a bottle, that’s what came to mind. Ahuja had somehow managed to capture nature’s earnestness and beauty in a bottle! I couldn’t think of a garden so grand outside of the governor’s mansion. And that was just big. Size, I realised, was not everything when it came to gardens.

Bharucha was about to ring the bell when John called out after him: “Can we have a look at the neighbourhood first?”

Waving to a constable who had heard us and opened the door from the inside, Bharucha nodded and walked back to us. “Let’s start from the other end, from number 10,” he said. On our left was a narrow strip of green -- the colony's garden and a children's park. A small enclosed section had some swings, a merry-go-round and a slide. The whole colony ran parallel to the approach road to the school from the Vasant Vihar bus stop, separated by a five-foot concrete wall.

Seeing me looking at the wall, Bharucha commented: “Forensics places the time of death between 8 and 10 PM. Climbing that without anyone noticing at that time would have taken some doing. There is quite a lot of traffic here till the early hours of the morning.” Pointing back at the colony gate, he said, “and he would have had to do it without the colony guard or the checkpost policemen noticing.”

John and I nodded.

Number 10 was the only house that stood perpendicular to the other houses. Behind it was the public park maintained by the Thane Municipal Corporation. There were trees on both sides with stout branches extending over the wall. There was even a small gate between the two. It wouldn’t have been too hard for someone to climb in to the colony from the park. Bharucha waved at the elderly gentleman who had stepped out to greet us.

“Anandji, hello! We were just giving these reporters a tour of the area.” I introduced myself to the owner.

“Haan, yes. This has been a real sorry affair. Such a tragedy.”

“Were you close,” John asked?

“Yes, quite. He was like a brother to my wife and me. He used to come over quite often, have dinner with us. We were the closest he had to family here.”

“What about the others, the other neighbours? What did everyone think of him?”

“Nobody had a bad word to say about him. He was not the loudest person around but he was the most helpful person you were going to meet around here. Look there,” he said, pointing to the colony’s park, “that is his design. The resident’s association couldn’t be bothered to maintain it but he helped out whenever he could. Even this” he was pointing to his own yard, “he helped us with this. He said we needed a hobby in our retirement. We tried but it is backbreaking work. If I had been 20 years younger maybe…”

“It is very pretty, Anandji” I pointed out.

Mr. Anand smiled at that. “That’s what I am saying. He inspired a lot of us here. You should see Nariman’s garden. Nikhil really took Perizaad under his wing. What she has done there…what can I say, you need to see it for yourself. It’s all good for everyone in the colony. I am sure their gardens jacked up the property prices by 10% at least!

“And Perizaad is…” John asked.

“Perizaad Nariman in number 3, the wife,” Bharucha said.

“Mr. Anand, were you still up around 9 PM, 10 PM that night? Did you hear anything? Anything in the park behind your house maybe,” John asked.

“No, nothing. The park closes at 8PM. But we didn’t hear anything. We are up till late usually. Our son’s in California and he calls at night. We would probably have heard it if someone had tried to scale the wall.”

John nodded. “Mr. Anand, thank you for your time. You have been very helpful. And I am really sorry for your loss.” John and I shook his hand.

As we walked back towards Number 4, Bharucha added, “we have a few policemen scouring the Municipal park for clues anyway, just in case.”

“What about CCTV,” John asked.

“Not in the park, no. And in the colony, only Number 2 had a system installed. There was nothing in it.”

“Ok, so nobody scaled Number 1’s walls then.”

“Yes, and nobody would have come from behind the colony either. The apartment complex there has CCTVs which would have caught anyone trying to sneak in that way. The complex is at a higher elevation though. Those cameras cannot capture anything in the colony.” I couldn't see anyone making that 12-foot jump.

John nodded.

“Essentially, an outsider could only come in unnoticed from behind Number 10 or by scaling the wall from the main road,” I asked to confirm?

“Yes. Or they could sneak in hidden in the trunk of a vehicle coming in. This is not a mall, nobody checks the boot here,” John pointed out. Turning to Bharucha, he asked, “what can you tell us about the neighbours?”

Bharucha dug out a notepad. From the time I spent talking to people here yesterday, I had a fair idea of the crowd that populated this tiny enclave. There was a film star from the 90s who had delivered two hit films before fading into obscurity; Anands, the retired PWD engineer and his wife in Number 10, whose son was the CEO of an e-scooter startup in Silicon Valley; the general manager of the Voltas factory up the road. Two of the plots were owned by the same, fairly distinguished, Gujarati merchant family who had seen better days.

The owners of number 3 and 5, the next-door neighbours, were people I had run into a number of times over the years.

The Narimans in Number 3 came from old money. Mr. Nariman did anyway. Nariman’s father, the last owner-editor of The Bombay Gazette, was a legend among journalists. During the Emergency, while the editors of more established newspapers were “crawling when asked to bend,” the elder Nariman stood ramrod straight. Defying censors and even a violent attack on the newspaper office in Colaba, he continued printing as usual, reporting the horrors of the Emergency and official high-handedness till one day, New Delhi decided it had had enough. The police hauled him off to jail on bogus Maintenance of Internal Security Act charges where he spent the next three months and emerged a hero. He couldn’t publish the newspaper for the duration of the Emergency – the government controlled the supply of newsprint -- but it was back in business as soon as Indira Gandhi had been booted out in the election of 1977. Spurred on by his larger-than-life image, it was the largest selling English newspaper in Bombay within 10 years. He was such a stickler for the Queen’s English that two years with his newspaper could get you a job in any national newspaper, no questions asked. All the current editors of major newspapers in the country – from HT to ToI to Express – had cut their teeth in journalism under old Nariman.

The only son, Rex, realized early that the boots he was expected to fill were too big and announced he had no intention to stay in the family business.

Rex hadn’t done all that badly for himself though. After spending some time in Cornell trying to get an MBA, he returned to India in the early 90s and announced he wanted to be a writer. Turned out he did have a writer in him. By Indian standards, some of his books became “bestsellers”. His book about the history of Bombay, I thought, was one of the more authoritative works on the subject.

From the gate, I had caught a glimpse of his wife Perizaad yesterday. Impeccably dressed in a black salwar kameez, she was chatting with some of the neighbours who had gathered outside Ahuja’s house.

Perizaad and I had joined journalism around the same time, she at the Gazette while I was at the Times. We had some common friends who used to tell me stories about her. She had always been a looker with 10 guys after her at any given time, so there were always stories to tell. All those had stopped after she started seeing Nariman – she just moved in a different circle after that.

The occupants of Number 5 were about as seedy as the Narimans were respectable. That was my opinion anyway.

The Wagles were an elderly couple in their late 60s. Mr. Wagle had been an officer in the Indian Revenue Service who had been in the news around 2010 in the Darshan Housing Scandal. A 30-storey housing complex had been built in the posh Cuffe Parade area right next to the Naval Base flouting all kinds of land use norms and defence guidelines. Over a period of many months, it came to light that the who’s who of the state’s bureaucracy and politics had colluded to circumvent due process in exchange for flats in the building. But essential documents kept disappearing from the offices concerned and the case collapsed due to lack of evidence. The Supreme Court ordered the building demolished though. Mr. Wagle had two flats in the building together with his daughter, an Indian Foreign Service officer. The daughter, Priyanka Talreja, herself had been in the news after being caught shoplifting in Belgium.

I met Wagle for the first time at the press club soon after that incident. Much to the external affairs ministry’s chagrin, he organized a press conference to present his daughter’s version of the events after the shoplifting episode. A bunch of us had heard that he had also arranged lunch and turned up for that.

Priyanka was eventually fired from the Service for “material suppression of facts” – the rumour was she had been “honeytrapped” -- in a separate incident for which she should have been in jail. Wagle was able to use his influence to cover up the incident and reduce the punishment to a dismissal. She had been living with her parents here ever since. Their house was, by far, the most palatial of the homes in the colony.

12:29 PM

We were back at the Ahuja residence and Bharucha was wrapping up with what he knew of the other neighbours. I had chipped in with the bits I knew. John had taken it all in serenely.

“I need to check in with the team to see if they have found something. Shall we meet here in an hour,” Bharucha asked? “Talk to Patil if you need anything,” he added, pointing to the constable who had come out to the porch.

John nodded in agreement. “Time to get to work,” he said as we stepped in through the gate and actually started to roll up his sleeves. “I need some time to examine the garden. Do you want to stay? You could grab lunch…”

“I would like to see what you do,” I said and sat down on the porch.

John didn’t say anything. He started at the gate and slowly – carefully, rather – made his way along the edges of the garden. All he needed was a magnifying glass, a funny hat and another six inches and he could pass for Sherlock Holmes!

He was particularly interested in the garden, stooping often to take a closer look at each flower patch. He even took photos at times.

He bent over a lot lower as he reached the wall, his eyes on the ground. It had rained on the night of the murder, I assumed he was looking for footprints. Occasionally, he would stand up to look over the wall. Or at the top of the wall, I couldn't tell.

I quickly lost interest. I did not follow him as he made his way behind the house, assuming he will pop up from the other side after circling the compound. After a few minutes, I figured I was hungry after all.

Telling the constable to let John know that I had gone out for lunch, I walked out. There weren’t all that many options around but I eventually found a fruit cart. On my way back to the colony with a few bananas, a Police Gypsy stopped next to me. It was Bharucha.

Telling his driver to head back to the station, Bharucha got off, picking up his standard-issue tablet and a folder, to walk back with me to the house.

“What’s he up to,” he asked?

“When I left him, he was examining the grounds.”

Bharucha nodded. “What do you make of him?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t seen any brilliant deductions so far. But then, we have only been here a few hours. What do you feel about the whole thing?”

“The murder or John?”

“About bringing in a private detective?”

“The team hasn’t found anything so far. We are talking about a 10-person team which is working exclusively on this. It’s still early though.”

Bharucha and I had known each other a fairly long time now. “You haven’t answered my question,” I pointed out.

Bharucha smiled at this. “I spoke to a friend at the Bandra station who’s worked on a few cases with him. He thinks John is brilliant, he has a knack for this.”

“For solving murders?”

“Crimes, yes. I am not unhappy. I just don’t think he should be involved in police work.”

I nodded. Things were now starting to make sense. This is why Bharucha had given me the tip about John in the first place. If John’s involvement got out, the embarrassment would ensure that no detective is involved in police investigations for a while.

“What does the IG think,” I asked, referring to Inspector General Saxena, the previous Thane commissioner and Bharucha’s godfather in the force.

“He feels the same…,” Bharucha started before realizing his blunder and shutting up.

Bharucha had spoken to Saxena about this. More likely, Saxena had spoken to Bharucha about it. That was the final piece of that jigsaw. Saxena’s rivalry with the current commissioner was well known. Bharucha was doing as he had been told. I had suspected as much, it was nice to get confirmation.

1:33 PM

John was waiting on the porch, sitting where I had been earlier, chatting with the constable who was standing at attention.

“About time,” he said, “full tour of the house now,” and walked in ahead of us.

It was the sheer size of the drawing room that struck me as I entered the house. It was massive, bigger than my whole flat. The carpets and tapestry in the drawing room were plush without being garish. The sofa set, which did not seem to take up a lot of space, had an antique feel but looked extremely comfortable. The walls were the off-est of white, or maybe grey – I can never tell anything other than the primary colours. The fan was colour coordinated with the walls, a darker shade. One wall had three rows of elongated book shelves which were well stacked. I could have easily driven a car between the sofa and the bookshelves. Another wall had large painting, an inkwash, trees in the fog.

There was a bedroom on the left – “the spare bedroom,” Bharucha said -- which had an attached dresser.

“Was this here when you got here,” John asked pointing to the laundry basket of clothes lying on the bed?

“Yes, other than removing the body, nothing has been disturbed,” Bharucha said. That wasn’t exactly true though. The crime scene photographers should have shot the insides of all the drawers and cupboards. I am sure the police had also looked through them to check if Ahuja owned something valuable enough for someone to murder him.

“Is it okay to disturb things now,” asked John, but he was already reaching out for the pile. He picked up the clothes at the top and gave them a squeeze. He repeated that for the clothes from inside the pile. “These are still a bit wet,” he said, handing me a shirt.

I was a bit wary of touching anything at a murder scene. Bharucha had given a soft “yes” to the previous question, so I took it. The sleeves were still wet in places. I handed the shirt to Bharucha quickly. I wasn’t sure if cotton retained fingerprints but I didn’t want to take any chances.

“Ok, let’s go,” John said after he had felt up all the clothes.

The dresser had a clothes hanger stand on one side. “I assume Ahuja was planning on hanging the clothes on this,” John observed. At the end of the dresser was a bathroom which had another door that led right back to the drawing room.

The dining room was on the other side. I could see floor there was dark brown – Ahuja’s blood.

Before we got there, though, Bharucha turned left into another massive bedroom. From the three rooms we had been in, one thing was abundantly clear. Ahuja was a neat freak. Not only was the place spotless, the entire house reeked of efficiency and organization. The blades of the fans above were gleaming, like they had just come out of the packaging. The beds had been made like they are done in five-star hotels, with the corners tucked in tight. There was a large chair in one corner with a footrest in front and a table on the side. I could imagine Ahuja sitting here, every evening, reading a book and sipping whiskey.

Bharucha had to take a call and moved to the window. John walked into the massive study, poked through the drawers and shelves a bit and did the same in the attached dresser and the bathroom.

When Bharucha came back, John pointed out there was no computer in the study.

“This guy was a dinosaur. He didn’t have a computer or a mobile phone. He still uses a landline,” Bharucha said pointing to an instrument on the desk.

“What about his letters? Did you find anything?”

“Yes, we bagged it and sent it to the team at the station. I think they have scanned it by now. I can forward them to you if you want to take a look.”

“Yes, please.”

Once we came out, the way to the kitchen was completely blocked. The blood stretched from the wall to the six-person dining table. We had to go around it to get to the kitchen and the staircase that led to the terrace.

Bharucha had his tab out: “The body lay here,” pointing to the pool of blood. John rolled his eyes. After waving his hands to show the orientation of the body, Bharucha gave up and handed his tab to me.

“Ok, the body lay between the staircase and the bedroom. The blood had collected all the way from around the head to roughly below his waist,” I said after looking at the pictures.

Bharucha took the tab back. “The victim was stabbed eight times. Seven times in his abdomen and chest, all at a slightly downward angle, and once in his neck, severing the carotid artery. The murder weapon was likely a pair of scissors, the doctor thinks. See that perpendicular laceration around the wounds, they believe it was caused by the other blade,” he said, showing me the autopsy pictures.

“That’s a lousy murder weapon,” John noted.

“There is some blood splatter here,” I said pointing to the wall between the stairs and the bedroom door. The blood had splashed in a hyperbolic arc before flowing down.

“From the wound in the neck, the stabbings in the abdomen did not hit any major blood vessels,” Bharucha said, referring to a report on his tab. “Our forensics guys think the height of the blood spatter indicates the victim was on his knees when he was stabbed in the neck. He was stabbed in the torso first and when he fell to his knees from the shock, the killer went for his neck to finish him off.”

“No signs of a struggle,” continued Bharucha. “No skin or blood under the fingernails. It must have been over quickly.”

“Something doesn’t add up here,” John mused. “Didn’t you write the police think Ahuja knew the killer. Because there was no forced entry?”

“Yes,” I looked at Bharucha. That was something he had told me.

“If Ahuja was murdered by someone who he had let into the house, why kill him here of all places? If I had to guess, I would say Ahuja was killed by someone who was hiding on the stairs. Ahuja would have been coming from the drawing room. If he was coming from the kitchen, he would have had a good view of the stairs. He would have seen anyone coming down that way.”

“That makes sense,” I agreed. It was one of those open plan kitchens which was separated from the dining room by a high table with bar stools. If you were in the kitchen, you would have seen anyone on the first few steps. “So the killer could have climbed in through the roof?”

“Unlikely,” Bharucha interjected. “Even assuming the killer managed to climb up there, he would have had to cross two doors to get into the house – the outside door which allows the access to the concrete sun shades. And the inside door which lets you into the house. I don’t think both would have been left open. The maid confirmed the outside door is rarely opened.”

John shrugged. It felt like a “we will see”. For a minute there, I thought he was going to pull a rabbit out of a hat there, come up with an extraordinary explanation, but he had clammed up again.

Next to the kitchen was a small work area which had the washing machine and dishwasher, even a massive mixer-grinder. On the right was a door which Bharucha opened to the pleasant sight of the garden. John stood at the doorway and took the view in.

“Let’s have a look at the terrace now before we go into the other bedroom. I believe there is one more?”

Bharucha nodded and led the way up. “The other bedroom was locked. I don’t think it had been opened in a while, we didn’t find anything there.”

There were two doors at the top. The one on the left led to the bedroom. Bharucha went for the other one. I thought I knew what to expect, we could see a little bit of what was inside from the gate below -- Thick foliage mostly, a bit like the garden. The creepers were all outside the conservatory walls, growing out of elongated pots which circled the building, and following guide ropes to the ground.

We stepped into what was a large room. The nursery spread out in front of us. Flowering plants were all on the right, facing the back of the house. These were in small plastic bags that could be easily transplanted. To the left were the same plants that gave the garden that feel of the forest. Nothing was in a pot, and everything had been mixed up, giving the same effect that we saw below. Ahuja had cordoned off the entire section with rocks which meandered unevenly towards the other end of the conservatory.

That’s where the most striking thing was. The entire area had been partitioned off into three separate sections. Rooms almost. The one in the middle was obviously a workshop. A lab, rather. There was a small table in the middle with a microscope and host of other equipment. Like the ones in my Chemistry lab at school. I could identify test tubes, beakers and a Bunsen burner but couldn’t remember what the rest were called.

“What is this," John had been poking through the drawers next to the door and had come up with a register?

"That's his sales ledger."

"Those are some pretty good numbers," John handed the book to me.

It was true. The number of sales wasn't anything to write home about. They barely filled two pages for the last month. It was the size of the transactions that was a bit out there.

"Why would they cost so much," I wondered out aloud.

“Good question,” John agreed. He was at the far corner, examining what looked like orchids.

“This one’s been recently cut,” he said, pointing to a plant with purple and white flowers which was kept apart from the rest. I walked over to see the stub of a stem which was still raw.

“Isn’t that normal? This is a nursery, after all,” I asked.

John nodded.

The other two rooms seemed like the rest of the conservatory, except for the fact that all plants were in pots. There were stickers on the doors which announced this section to be “For Display Only”.

“This is more than a little impressive,” John was the first one to spell out what we all felt. Pointing to the thermostats by the doors, he said, “see that. Each room has its own temperature control. And it is not just that…” John whipped out his phone to check something. “Yes, this thing here…” he said, pointing to a piece of equipment in the shape of a large speaker system, “…is a dehumidifier connected to a hygrometer.”

“A what?”

“Something to measure humidity. It looks like Ahuja was essentially controlling the atmosphere in each room.”

“Sounds like a lot of work. And a lot of money.”

“Yes. I don’t think these plants are native to our climate. See this, even the soil is a different colour.” It was true. Against the brown we had seen outside, the soil in the first room really stood out in a shade of red.

“Take a look at this,” John called me over to one corner. “Isn’t this the same orchid, the one we saw in the lab?” He was bending over a pot in the corner.

“I don’t know. They all look a bit alike.” Native or not, the “botanical garden” bit was starting to make sense now. However, I couldn’t help but feel we were getting side tracked. For a while, it felt like John was on to something when we were downstairs. But ever since we got up here, John had gone all tree hugger on us. I couldn’t see how any of this was relevant unless John was keen on improving his garden. From what I had seen, it certainly could do with some improvement.

“I assume the maid cleans up here too,” John asked Bharucha?

“Yes, Bharucha confirmed. “Ahuja generally handled the cleaning up here himself but he would bring her up every couple of days to give the floors and windows a good scrub.”

3:49 PM

“Ok, let’s go through what we know,” John finally said. We were back in the drawing room.

I was happy to start with what I had gathered the previous day.

Born in Bombay to Sindhi parents, Ahuja spent his early years around Parel and Cotton Green. Ahuja’s grandfather had moved to Bombay from Karachi in the 1940s to set up a hub for the family’s garment export business. After Ahuja’s father’s death in the early 80s, the family had diluted or sold off their business interests. Ahuja’s sister, who was 10 years older to him, had already moved to the States to study.

“Is she coming for the funeral,” I interrupted myself to ask Bharucha.

“Yes, she is on her way. We have been talking to her.”

I continued with the history.

Ahuja majored in Botany and Zoology from Xavier’s before following his sister to the US for his masters and subsequent PhD. He had a stint with an agri-research firm but that didn’t last long. The corporate rat race was not his thing. Nor was he particularly happy with his time in the US. After travelling the world – aimlessly, the family thought – he had come back to Bombay in the late 90s. Saying he wanted space, he had bought the row house plot and built a house to specifications.

Bharucha nodded when I finished.

“That’s pretty much what we got from the family. They added they didn’t know much about what was going on in his life, whether he had any enemies, etc. But they also thought that unlikely. He wasn't the type. Nobody we spoke to had a bad thing to say about him.” He started swiping on his tab till he found what he was looking for.

“I don’t have a summary here but based on what we have gathered…let me see…okay, so he was well known in the neighbourhood…but only because he has been around so long…all the old shops know him, they deliver to his house…he rarely comes out anymore…no one has noticed any fights, no one could think of any reason for his murder. No rumours about possible affairs…no unpaid debts…nothing essentially…except,” Bharucha paused, as if digesting what he was reading.

“So the neighbours in Number 10, the Anands, did remember something odd. Ahuja had changed his lock a few weeks back. He said he had lost his key. He assumed he had dropped it somewhere.”

“Are they the ones who had the spare key?”

“Yes. The maid had one too.”

“Had?”

“Yes, it’s with us now.”

“That’s interesting. You give your spare to key to people you are closest to, whom you trust.”

“Mr. Anand said Ahuja was like a younger brother to him,” Bharucha was reading off the tab again.

“But Ahuja had not confided in him about any potential threats…”

“No, nothing of that sort.”

“What happened to Ahuja’s copy of the key?”

“With the murderer, we presume. We never found it. The door had been locked from the outside by the murderer on his way out.”

“Thank you, Bharuchaji. For Amit’s sake, could we also go through your other lines of inquiry?”

Bharucha nodded. “We have his bank statements going back a few years,” he started rifling through his folder, found what he was looking for and handed it over. I saw the balance on his savings account and let out a low whistle.

Bharucha smiled. “That’s just one of his three accounts,” he said, making a flipping-the-pages motion with his fingers. "The team is looking into any unusual transactions over the last year or so."

“Who inherits this,” I asked, picking up the papers and waving it around, pointing at the property. That seemed like an obvious line of inquiry.

“The sister put us in touch with their family lawyer who confirmed that Ahuja had left no will. I believe everything goes to the closest relative, the sister. But by all accounts, she is incredibly wealthy and this would be pocket change to her.”

“Maybe a new heir will emerge out of the woodwork…”

“Yes, we are trying to find out more about his friends from college and academia, his time in the US. I will let you know if something comes up.”

“What else?”

“They are going through his phone records to identify any unusual activity. If the murderer was known to the victim, he might have had an appointment…”

John looked unconvinced. Turning to me, he said: “The police are also casting a much wider net. They are looking at all the active mobile numbers in the Vasant Vihar area to see if there were any new ones. That will probably take a few days.”

“Yes,” Bharucha confirmed.

“What about the maid servant? What did she say,” I asked?

“We grilled her – Monica -- properly yesterday. She says she has never made a copy of the key. Nor has she ever let anyone else into the house. Other than the location of the house, she hadn’t seen anything to suggest that Ahuja was wealthy. We have checked her out. No criminal history. She has some family members who have been involved in some petty thefts but where she lives, I would be surprised if that is not the case. So far, there is nothing to indicate she was involved in any way. And she has an alibi for the night of the murder.”

“What did she do for Ahuja,” John asked, “when did she come in?”

“She visited the house in the mornings around 8 am Sunday to Saturday. She cooked his breakfast and lunch and cleaned the house, got the clothes washed, the usual. She would come back in the evenings around 6 PM to cook his dinner and wash the dishes.”

“And that’s what happened on the day of the murder?”

“More or less. She didn’t report anything unusual. She made breakfast and dusted the house. He had been at the dining table finishing breakfast when she left. When she came back in the evening, Ahuja had been up in the conservatory. She had left herself in. Before making dinner, she had put the clothes in the machine. She had taken them out and hung them on the clothes line behind the house on her way out. He had been watering the plants on the verandah then. It was getting dark but Mr. Nariman had seen the maid leave and also seen Ahuja watering the plants as she said. This was around 7 PM.”

“I think it is time to go speak to the neighbours. Can we do that now,” John asked after a while.

“It’s going to be a bit odd, explaining to them that a detective wants to speak to them,” Bharucha mused. “Maybe if you give me your questions…”

“Yes, that works,” John took out a notepad and pen and started scribbling.

“Where do you want to start?”

“Number 5,” John said.

Bharucha took a peek at the list John was preparing. “We have already asked most of these questions,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” confirmed John, “the idea is to spend as much time as possible in the houses. I want some time to look around.”

“Look around for what,” Bharucha was curious.

“Trust me for now. It might be nothing. No point accusing people without any proof.”

Bharucha raised his eyebrow but left it at that.

4:16 PM

We were in the drawing room of house number 5, Wagle’s house. Bharucha had apologized for the intrusion and introduced me as a reporter who was following the story. He did not bother to introduce John.

Mr. Wagle had that air of self-importance which comes from years of being the “fixer” for the who’s who of Bombay. His wife, though, appeared almost servile in comparison. While Wagle held court in the drawing room, he had asked her to get tea for everyone.

“It’s quite sad. In all my years in the service, I have never come across anything like this,” he was saying in reply to a question about what he could remember about the day of the murder.

“I am meeting the chief secretary next Saturday at Governor’s House. He is sure to get an earful, things have only gotten worse over the last five years!”

He was alluding to the time since he left the service. He should have retired at 60 but with all the politicians in his pocket, he had managed to get himself two extensions. Any longer and there would have been a revolt in the civil service.

“Yes…sir…” Bharucha gamely tried to get on with the questioning.

I glanced over at John. He was sitting by the door, reading something on his phone, like he couldn’t care less about what was going on. He glanced up and smiled briefly when Mrs. Wagle had brought around the tea but had gone back to his phone soon afterwards. Wagle had eventually turned to the subject of the murder.

“I had seen Nikhil only that morning. Commissioner Khurana had dropped me a text in the morning to say he was unwell, so I went alone for my morning walk.” Wagle was pathologically incapable of uttering a sentence without dropping names. “When I got back, I saw Nikhil pottering around on the terrace.”

“What time was this?”

“6 AM sharp. I walk for exactly one hour in the morning,” Wagle said before taking off on a tangent about the benefits of brisk walking.

“Did you notice anything odd recently, anything that stood out, anything suspicious? Over the last few weeks or months?”

“Mr. Bharucha, this is a high-class neighbourhood! I will not allow any hanky panky here. Anand told me about the missing keys – have you looked into that?”

“Yes, we are inquiring…”

“Have you questioned the maid? You can never be too careful with her types.”

“Yes, we are doing that,” Bharucha said and tried another tack. “What about Mrs. Wagle, or your daughter, have they noticed anything suspicious?”

Wagle glared at the officer and curtly said no, they hadn’t seen anything untoward.

“May I use the bathroom,” John piped up suddenly.

Barely containing his irritation, Wagle pointed to a door next to the kitchen and continued with his monologue.

A minute later, I saw John come out of the kitchen and instead of coming back into the drawing room, he turned and walked right into the kitchen. With his back to the kitchen, Wagle was too busy to notice.

He was expounding on his second theory for the murder – inter-state robber gangs – when John returned 20 minutes later, smiling, pointing to the door, indicating we could leave.

“What a pompous ass,” Bharucha hissed as soon as we were out of the gate. I couldn’t agree more.

Turning to John, I asked, “what were you doing in the kitchen?”

“Chatting with Mrs. Wagle, what the neighbours were like, whether Ahuja had any suspicious visitors and so on...”

“And…”

“And Ahuja may not have been the celibate saint everyone has been making him out to be.”

“Are you saying there is a love angle to the murder?”

“Possibly,” John’s reticence to divulge information was starting to get irritating. “Did you know Wagle’s daughter flew out to the US last night?”

Bharucha’s face contorted through a range of emotions ranging from disbelief to panic to rage before settling on a mild “what the fuck”.

“Mrs. Wagle told you that” he finally managed to ask?

John nodded.

“Give me a minute,” he said and walked off taking out his cellphone.

“Where is he off to,” I asked.

“To call his team and find out who he can blame for that fiasco! I would have assumed someone was monitoring the comings and goings from the colony.”

Bharucha was gone a full 15 minutes, time I spent calling and checking in with a few people to know what else was happening in the city. The crime sections of most news websites were still leading with the Row House murder. The opposition had raised the issue in Assembly.

His calm demeanour had returned as he joined us, “the SP will take it up with the commissioner, there is nothing to be done now,” Bharucha said.

“Well, with Ms Wagle, no, I leave that to you but I think we should continue digging around here, find out what we can. Can we go over to Number 3?” John handed over the notes he had been scribbling.

Bharucha’s eyes widened as he read through the list. “Sure about this?”

“Yes.”

5:30 PM

Only when we walked in through the gate did we get a good look at the garden. Bharucha and John stopped for a minute to admire it.

“It is something,” Bharucha said admiringly.

If I hadn’t already seen Ahuja’s, I would have declared it to be best in the greater Bombay region already. It was different too. Where Ahuja had a good mix of green and colour, a melody of trees, plants and moss, chaos under control, this was all colour, all flowering plants, all neat lines and order. There was even a fountain in the middle with a cobbled path leading up to it.

“I don’t know. I think Ahuja’s might be the better one.”

“Maybe. It is art, I suppose. It is about how it makes you feel,” John suggested.

The house itself was a more traditional two-storey bungalow. Where Ahuja had his terrace garden, the Narimans had their flowering balcony that ran around the house.

Nariman himself had opened the door when we rang the bell. He recognised me almost immediately. which was more than a little impressive, I thought.

Back around 2005 or thereabouts, when I had just moved to Bombay, I used to run into him occasionally at the Press Club. Pot-bellied and balding, he more than made up for his average appearance by being, as I was told, “a real charmer, much like his father.” That charm used to be on display at the Page 3 parties which I used to “cover”. Around the time I was getting sick of the beat, he too slowly disappeared from the circuit.

The professional editors who were brought in to run the paper after the elder Nariman's death could never match his missionary zeal. It showed. The paper had been in decline ever since. The launch of DNA in 2005 was the final nail, I suppose.

That launched a price war from which the Gazette never really recovered. It’s the 5th, or maybe the 6th largest newspaper in Bombay now. And it was losing money. It lost its elite status, its best journalists left in droves and the fall in revenues nearly drove the paper to bankruptcy. Nariman's wife, Perizaad, was the one who turned things around. All her friends knew her to be very intelligent but the consensus was that journalism was not for her. She had confided in one of her friends that she only took up journalism because she thought “it was cool.”

I couldn’t remember where or when she had met Rex Nariman. But she was married to him within a year of starting at the Gazette as a trainee and had moved to the Sunday edition where she occasionally contributed a fluff piece. She had only reluctantly stepped in once it became clear that Nariman did not have it in him to save the family business.

She got the “professional editors” and the entire board, old Nariman’s cronies, fired and laid off half the staff. She also managed to bring in some outside money which reduced the Narimans to minority shareholders. They had to sell their Napean Sea Road bungalow to settle the old debts and moved to Thane. Nariman had fallen off the map after that.

I still used to see both of them at an odd book launch or so. He was still his jovial self, but the old days were gone and he knew it.

Nariman and his wife were seated next to each other on the long sofa while Bharucha and I had seated ourselves opposite on another one.

“His garden and his plants, he was obsessed with them,” Nariman was saying, talking about Ahuja. Bharucha had asked him what kind of a person he was. “Always pottering around in the garden or the conservatory. He was brilliant but also manic about perfection, he needed everything to be in their place. I’ve not seen a more well-maintained house. Even the ones with 10 servants…”

Nariman was looking at me. He had asked about my ex-boss from ToI after Bharucha had explained that I was covering the murder.

“I didn’t mean that as criticism, though. He was the nicest person around.”

I kept a solemn face and nodded.

“Were you close to him,” Bharucha asked after Nariman lapsed into a comfortable silence.

“Yes,” it was Perizaad. “You could say that. He was very easy to get along with, he was that kind of a person.”

There was a pause, as if she was trying to remember something.

“Mrs. Nariman,” Bharucha addressed her directly now, “I know you have already answered most of these questions but I would like to ask again…”

“Never mind that, we are happy to help,” Perizaad cut him off and asked him to continue.

“Did you notice anything on the day or night of the murder that can be called suspicious? Did Mr. Ahuja have any visitors?”

“No, we didn’t see anything. We usually sleep a bit early, around 8-9,” she said, before turning to Nariman.

He met her eye and looked at us, shaking his head. “Nothing, there was no sound, we didn't hear anything.”

Bharucha was looking at his notes. Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, he tidied up the papers before asking: “Some of these questions are a bit intrusive but these are fairly standard questions that we do need to ask. Were you together the whole night?”

Nariman fidgeted a bit, looking sullen. Perizaad was the one who answered: “No, we don’t sleep together,” while her eyes bore into Bharucha.

Bharucha had been on the job long enough to not let a stare fluster him though.

“Ok, I understand, so which rooms were you both sleeping in then?”

“Rex sleeps in the downstairs bedroom while I sleep upstairs.”

“In which bedroom?”

“The one facing the front.”

“Okay. Did you have an affair with Mr. Ahuja?”

Perizaad eyed Bharucha coldly. No, it was more of an appraising stare, like she was trying to figure out what he knew.

“No,” she answered finally.

“What was the nature of your relationship with Mr. Ahuja, Mrs. Nariman?”

“We were friends.”

“Mr. Nariman, have you had an affair with Mr. Ahuja?”

The silence that followed was particularly excruciating.

“Yes.” He looked positively miserable.

“How long has that been going on?”

It was Perizaad who spoke up.

“I don’t see how that is any of your business but Rex and I have an open relationship. I know that he sleeps with other men. I know he has been with Nikhil. Five years at least, on and off.”

“Is that right, Mr. Nariman?”

Nariman simply nodded.

“Do you know if he had any other affairs?”

Nariman shook his head, mouthing a silent “no”.

Perizaad piped up again. “I am sure he had others. We didn’t think it was our place to ask. And Nikhil never volunteered any information.”

Bharucha nodded.

She continued: “Are we suspects?”

“At moment, we are exploring all possibilities,” that was a good non-answer from Bharucha. “Could we take a look at the Ahuja house from your first floor? We want another perspective, another view of the place, make sure we haven’t missed anything obvious.”

“Sure,” Perizaad got up and beckoned to us to follow her.

Bharucha and John, who had been sitting on one of the two smaller sofa chair by the door, got up.

“That’s a beautiful garden you have here, Mr. Nariman,” I said casually after the others had left.

“Ah, yes, that’s Rita’s pet project. She’s been at it these last five years at least. Nikhil helped a lot too. Most of the plants came from his nursery.” I assumed Rita was Perizaad’s pet name.

“You have been here five years?”

“It’s been a while. Let me see. I came back to Bombay in 1998…moved to thane in 2009. We stayed in a flat while the old house was demolished and they constructed this…so around 2011, I think. So closer to 10, I guess.”

“Why Thane though…? I used to hear stories of the after-edition parties at your father’s house…”

“Yes…some of them were wild! But it was never my scene. We sold the Napean Sea Road house a while back, we hoped we could use the money to invest in digital. Personally, I didn’t think it was going to work. We missed the bus. I like it here, it is a lot quieter. It was, rather. We’ve a murder next door, I think things are as bad as Bombay here now. I should probably move to Panchgani or Lavasa.”

Nariman lapsed back into silence. And I didn’t try to break it either. After a few minutes, he excused himself and retired to his bedroom. Not seeing the point of waiting in the drawing room, I followed the others upstairs.

Everyone was out on the balcony. John and Bharucha were walking up and down, sometimes circling the building, looking right down, sometimes standing at one spot and staring at the Ahuja house. At one point, they stopped on the side facing the Ahuja house and started pointing and talking animatedly. They were some way off and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Perizaad, meanwhile, stood there in front of her room, waiting for everyone to come around.

“What do you think they are up to,” I asked, trying to make conversation. By all standards, she was an extremely attractive woman, quite unlike her husband in most ways. Whereas her husband was well over six feet tall, she would have barely touched five foot five. With his round neck t-shirt and old joggers, he clearly did not care much for appearances, but she was dressed impeccably even for an evening at home. And she was fit. Her kurta was loose but it didn't do much to hide her toned body.

She shrugged.

Seeing that Perizaad was in no mood to talk, I walked out into the balcony. The balcony, a full walkway around the house rather, was divided into sections for a particular type of plant, much like how the garden below was arranged. I could imagine Nariman and Perizaad having their morning tea on the cane chairs kept on the balcony – there couldn’t have been too many better views to wake up to in the middle of Thane.

6:46 PM

Bharucha and John were done. It was completely dark outside.

“You have an exceptionally beautiful garden, Mrs. Nariman,” John commented as we headed down.

“Thank you,” if Perizaad was pleased by the compliment, she did not show it.

As we assembled in the drawing room, Bharucha asked if Mr. Nariman could join us. We had a few more questions, he said.

Once everyone had taken up their old seats, it was John who kicked things off.

“Mrs. Nariman, let me get straight to it. We know you killed Mr. Ahuja. You could make things easier for yourself if you confessed to it.”

Perizaad didn’t bat an eyelid. Coolly, almost languorously, she turned to her husband: “Can you believe this nonsense? Are you going to sit there and let them talk to me like this?”

Mr. Nariman seemed to show some signs of life. But before he could say anything, Bharucha held up his hand. We could hear the gate being opened. A constable came up to the door and handed Bharucha an envelope. Bharucha took out the letter and spent a minute reading it.

Handing the letter over to Perizaad, he said, “we now have a warrant to search your house.”

Nariman jumped in. “I won’t have this. I will not allow this. What proof do you have? Where’s the evidence?”

“We are hoping we will find the evidence when we search the house.”

“This is preposterous! I am calling the IG…Let’s see what he has to say about all this.” I had been wondering when the name dropping would start.

“I am calling our lawyer,” Perizaad chimed in.

“Sure, no problem, we will wait.” Bharucha would have seen more than a few of these tantrums in his 20 years on the force. He knew it was best to let it play out. He was not in a hurry.

The next five minutes was a scene I had seen play out a 100 times before. This happened every time someone with connections had come up against the wall that was Indian bureaucracy. It happened every time someone was reminded they may not be as entitled as they thought they were. Every time a flight was delayed by two hours, there would be that old uncle dialing the airport director and creating a ruckus, leading on the crowd of angry travellers. Every time a mildly self-important man found got a traffic ticket, he would be out on the road airing his past grievances with the police to whoever cared to listen.

The only time things went a bit off-script was when Perizaad started walking up the stairs as she was talking to her lawyer. Bharucha stopped her, “where are you going, Mrs. Nariman?”

Perizaad took the phone away from her face. “I am speaking to my lawyer. Do you mind!”

“Yes, I do. I will have to ask you to stay in the drawing room.” Bharucha hadn’t raised his voice but the tone was unmistakably severe, almost inviting Perizaad to test his resolve and see what happens.

She came back to her seat.

Mr. Nariman handed over his phone to Bharucha: “The IG wants to talk to you.”

A lot of “yes, sir” and “no, sir” followed. Handing back the phone to Nariman, he told Perizaad, “we would like to start the search now. Would you like anyone else to be present during the procedure?” Bharucha’s professionalism and restraint were impressive. If this had been a normal middle class household, Bharucha would have steamrollered the occupants to submission with the threat of obstruction-of-a-civil-servant-in-the-discharge-of-his-duty charges by now.

Perizaad seemed to have accepted that there was no stopping the search. Mr. Nariman had gone back to sulking, the IG had clearly not been as helpful as he hoped.

“Yes, I would like my lawyer to be present,” Perizaad said.

“How long will he be?”

“She is in Powai now. She will be here in 30 minutes.”

“No, I don’t think we can wait that long.” Bharucha had had enough of the drama. Going to the door, he beckoned to the team that was waiting outside.

“You can watch while we search,” he said to Perizaad. “Follow the gentleman here,” pointing to John.

John was up and on his way to the stairs, followed by the forensics team. Bharucha and Perizaad followed them. Since nobody said anything to me, I assumed I was free to go after them as well.

Everyone headed straight to the balcony, to the side of the house away from the Ahuja residence. Among a bunch of vines, he pointed to a stem that seemed to have been recently planted in a pot. “Please collect this. The dark stains on one side, that is blood. We need to test if it is the victim’s.” It was the same orchid that John had pointed to in Ahuja’s nursery.

I looked at Perizaad. Her haughty demeanor was gone, the coldness had been replaced by what could only be called resignation. She had the look of someone who knew her time was up. If someone would take her photo right then, that could have become the stock photo on Getty for “Guilty”.

The team got busy photographing the pot and preparing to pack it up. Somebody pointed out they didn’t have a plastic cover big enough to envelope the plant and the pot whole. Frantic phone calls were made to see if one could be procured. In the end, it was decided to uproot the plant and pack the pot separately.

Perizaad started sniffling loudly at this.

John was not too happy either. Bharucha, however, was more concerned if the evidence would still be credible if the stem was separate from the pot.

“I don’t see why not,” John replied. And team took that as the signal.

“Now the scissors,” Bharucha said. Turning to Perizaad, he asked, “would you be willing to tell us where you have hidden it?”

“It should be in her gardening kit,” John suggested, “probably in the toolkit we saw on the other side of the balcony.

Sure enough, they found a pair of scissors at the bottom of the kit.

“Do we need anything else,” Bharucha asked John?

“I don’t think we will get much from it but if you find any raincoats or wind cheaters…and shoes, bag those too. There would have been blood spatter on it but I expect it would have been washed a few times by now.”

The team went through the cupboards and almirahs in all the bedrooms and packed all the wind cheaters and winter wear they could find, just to be safe. Downstairs, John went over to the washing machine and opened it. “There is one here as well,” he said pointing inside and the team promptly came over and pulled out a rain jacket. Along with that, they found a pair of running shoes.

“Might as well pack everything in there,” Bharucha told the team. “Assume that would be everything,” this was directed to John again?

“I think so. I can’t think of anything else. If these doesn’t prove she was at the scene, I don’t know what will.”

Bharucha asked the team to do a final sweep and move out.

“Let’s go? I think we are done here,” John was already on his way out and pulled me along. I didn’t see the point of hanging around and followed him. We were quiet as we walked out of the gate towards the main road.

8:04 PM

“Do you want to eat something,” he asked as we came out of the colony.

I was quite hungry; Except for the bananas, I hadn’t eaten anything since morning.

“There is Trishna Lunch Home not too far from here.” I knew the place well – it was fairly expensive but their seafood was pretty good. “Yes, let’s go,” I agreed.

We didn’t talk at all in the rickshaw to the restaurant. I was trying to figure out what I had missed. From the corner of my eye, I could see John staring out blankly.

“So, what do you think,” John asked finally.

“I still don’t get it,” I admitted.

“Which part?”

“All of it? Actually, no. What is the deal with the bleady plant? Start with that! Are you saying she killed Ahuja for an orchid?”

“Ok, right. But first things first.” We had cornered a four-person table to ourselves. John called to a waiter: “Two Kingfisher Ultras – you will have one, right?” I nodded and he continued, “Surmai…” before turning to the waiter to ask what he would recommend as a main. “Try the pomfret, sir,” he was promptly told and John agreed. I ordered a naan and paneer butter masala. John made a face when he heard that.

“People don’t realise it but the paneer is actually very good here,” I tried to explain.

“Right,” he said though the crook of his lips mildly chided “wrong!”

“Okay, so...about the orchid, I am still not sure about it. I am waiting for some confirmation. But essentially, yes. I don’t think she meant to though, that was not the plan. She just wanted to steal the orchid.”

“Couldn’t she just buy it?”

“I don’t think he was selling. I think it was in the “For Display Only” section.”

“Still, murder is a stretch.”

“Try to place yourself in her shoes for a minute. You are married to a man who doesn’t love you. Who has never loved you, most probably. It was always a marriage of convenience. They had money but he squandered most of it. I am not saying it is his fault but his lack of interest is a factor. All of a sudden, you realise you can’t have the life you were used to. You move to far-off Thane, away from all the action, away from the parties, away from all the friends. Life sucks but you find a new hobby. You meet a man who pulls you into his world, teaches you the tricks, gives your life meaning again.”

“You mean Ahuja and gardening?”

“Yes. You saw her garden. It is brilliant. You said you preferred Ahuja’s to her’s. But Ahuja built that over 20 years. She did it in five. Her obsession was equal to his, if not more. Suddenly, people know you for what you have done, not because you married into the Nariman family. You are no longer in your no-good husband’s shadow. Once you have had a taste of that, that acknowledgement, that recognition, you want more. You want to be the best. But you can’t be the best as long as Ahuja is around. You can’t be the best when his garden has something yours doesn’t. Now I don’t know why Ahuja refused to sell the orchid. I suspect it was one of a kind. Or two. There was the one in the lab and there was one in the other, climate-controlled, room which was probably the original. Ahuja had somehow managed to grow a version which could survive in this climate. It was only planted in one pot. He didn’t have a spare. It was probably the jewel in his crown, his baby, something he had worked for the most, something he could not be parted from.”

“So she had to steal it?”

“I suppose so. I think we will know soon enough.”

“Yes. Okay, how did you know it was her?”

John had a go at the beer first.

“Let’s start with what we know. We know that the murder happened between 10 PM and 12 AM roughly. Forensics told us as much. Right?”

I nodded.

“So the two options are the murderer was already in the house on the day of the murder; or she came in at some point just before it happened.”

“Okay, yes.”

“The first option is extremely unlikely for two main reasons. Monica, the maid, cleans the house every day and it is obvious she does a thorough job of it. She also cleans the conservatory once in a while. Both are personally supervised by Ahuja at times, from what we could gather. It’s extremely unlikely that someone could have avoided detection while hiding inside the entire day, or for days. Then we have the visitor records and CCTV – that’s stored for a month -- at the colony gate. The police went through the full list of who’s visited Ahuja. They didn’t stop there either. They went through the full list of everyone who had visited the colony to see if there was anyone that was unaccounted for. This is the kind of grunt work that they are good at. Everyone was accounted for. That leaves us with the second option, that someone came in on the night of the murder.”

“Makes sense, yes.”

“That would have been tricky though, for an outsider. There are at least two routes she could take which would have avoided the CCTVs and security. One was by climbing the wall behind house number 10 – you just have to walk through the Vasant Vihar park to get to that and nobody is going to see you there. You can then take the path to Ahuja’s house or walk on the walls to the same point. Both are risky, and there is no guarantee you will not be spotted by one of the neighbours along the way. Not everyone sleeps that early. The other is by climbing the wall from the main road. Between 8 and 10 PM though, the road is still quite busy. There is still the risk of the guard seeing you climb the wall, or one of neighbours catching you as you make your way to the Ahuja residence, either on the path or walking on the walls again.”

“Okay, so it was more likely to be a neighbour then who could have made it to the house without being noticed.”

“Yes. At this stage, I just believed it was more likely but not impossible that no outsider was involved. Then we reach house number 4.”

“You spent quite some time walking the perimeter.”

“That was a dead-end. If there was any evidence there, it had been trampled on by Bharucha’s team in their initial frenzy. It was a real shame too. It had rained that night and the ground was wet. One just needed to know what to look for, I’m sure there would have been something there. But two more things became apparent from that. One, the side door was visible to anyone who was observing the Ahuja residence from house number 3; and the clothes lines was completely hidden from the side door. Monica told the police she had hung the clothes out to dry in the evening. And we found the clothes in the second bedroom, still wet. The clothes had to have been taken in at some point in the night by Ahuja. When it started raining, he would have rushed out to collect them through the side door. He would not have taken the front door which would have been twice the distance.”

“While he was out collecting the clothes, the killer had run in through the open side door!”

“Yes, the whole idea that someone came up to the front door and was let in…that would have been the case 99 times out of 100. And 98 out of those 99 times, the perp would have been caught on CCTVs or someone would have seen her. I had been brought in to think about what might have happened that 1 or 2 times out of the 100, what alternative sequence of events could have led to the murder.”

Complicated self-aggrandizement but I nodded him along anyway.

“Anyway, she came in through the side door and went up to the nursery. Actually, it is a little more complicated than that. She was prepared. She would have kept the scissors at hand. She would also have been wearing the wind cheater as soon as she heard the thunder. She had seen Ahuja leave the house to collect the clothes a number of times during the rains, she may even have recorded how long it took him to come back into the house. This was a household she was intimately familiar with, she had planned it out well.”

“Alright. Yes, go on.”

“Now she was in the house, in the lab, when Ahuja walked back into the house with the clothes. He went right past the stairs and into the second bedroom, to hang the clothes in the dresser. He dumped the basket on the bed and should have started hanging them to dry. Before he could do that though, something made him come back. If he hadn’t, Mrs. Nariman would have simply gone back the way she came and Ahuja would still be alive. He reached the stairs just as Mrs. Nariman was reaching the ground floor. The wall blocked their views, so neither saw the other. Or maybe she heard him and she didn’t have enough time to climb back up to the first floor landing before he saw her. But when they saw each other, she was the first to react. She stabbed him with the scissors. We saw the blood splatter on the wall. There was one splatter pattern that was higher than the others, that should have been from the first attack, when they were both standing. She kept stabbing him even after he fell to his knees.”

“You make it almost sound like it was an accident, that she did not have any plan to kill him. Then why was she carrying the scissors? If she just needed the stem, she could have broken it, or used the pair from Ahuja’s toolkit in the workshop.”

“No, they wouldn’t have done at all. Orchids are extremely sensitive. You have to use sterilized blades to cut them to avoid the risk of infection. So she couldn’t just pick any pair. And she certainly couldn’t have broken the stem off.”

“Sounds like a proper surgery.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” John smiled.

“Ok, so she couldn’t waste time disinfecting the scissors she found in the glasshouse.”

“Yes.”

“It still doesn’t add up though. Suppose she did make it to the side door. Or opened the front door and left that way. Ahuja would realise at some point that the door is open.”

“Yes. I am sure that is something Bharucha will be asking Mrs. Nariman. But let’s play out that storyline anyway. Ahuja comes back to find the door unlocked. Now even for someone as fastidious, probably bordering on OCD, as Ahuja, he will wonder if he just forgot to lock it as he was coming back into the house. To be sure, he might just go and check on the valuable things in the house. Maybe he will listen to his gut and even check out the greenhouse and find he has been burgled. He will find that out the next day anyway. So what does he do? He probably has a good idea who took it. I mean, only someone who realizes its value, someone he said “no” to already. That should be a really small list. Let’s assume he will know it is Mrs. Nariman. But what can he do about it? The police will laugh him off if he goes to them about the theft of a stem, forget a plant. Even if they agree to press charges, Mrs. Nariman can always claim that Ahuja gave it to her. It will be his word against hers. That’s why I think Mrs. Nariman was hoping she wouldn’t run into Ahuja, that she could make a clean getaway. The fact that she did not hesitate to kill him though, and the way she did it, probably suggests there is more to it, probably something to do with the love triangle between Mr. and Mrs. Nariman and Ahuja, if it can be called that. Who knows what kind of issues they have been having? The Narimans will probably tell all eventually.”

All the pieces were coming together rather well. There were still a few missing pieces.

“Ok, so you already suspected Perizaad at this point. How did you go from there to proving it?”

“That’s not entirely accurate. I didn’t suspect Mrs. Nariman specifically at that point, I just believed that the killer came from their house. They had the window of opportunity. But once you see the occupants of the house and realise who was likely to be more interested in the plant, it was easy to see who the murderer could be.”

“Alright, fair. Continue?”

“Ahuja had just been stabbed. At this point, it was important to know why Mrs. Nariman had gone up to the greenhouse. She couldn’t have gone up to take a look around. It had to be to get something. You remember I had showed you the orchid?”

“Yes, you said it had just been cut.”

“It was obvious that Ahuja took great care of his nursery and his plants. There were quite a few valuable plants in there. We just had to see the sales in his register to see how expensive some of them were. Now the orchid was not the only plant that had been trimmed. But cutting off a stem is quite different from cutting off some leaves. And if you are cutting off an orchid stem, unless it was dying, you would have replanted it, especially when you are running a nursery. We didn’t see any replanted orchid stem though. And you don’t sell an orchid stem. You never know if it will catch, whether it will grow roots. Orchids are quite tricky that way. Even if we assumed the stem had been sold, there was no record of the sale. And we saw from his register that Ahuja maintained records of his sales meticulously. So what could someone have broken in for? It had to be the orchid. She couldn’t very well put it in her pocket after she had cut it, the thing is fragile. So she had to hold it lightly in her hand as she went down the stairs where she ran into Ahuja. She could have dropped the stem when she attacked him but considering all the trouble she went to to get it, I would say she held on to it as she attacked Ahuja with the scissors. That was her mistake. With so much blood everywhere, it was almost impossible that some of it did not end up on the stem. Even if it had not happened then, it would have happened when she had to free one hand to, say, open the tap to wash some of the blood away; or to lock the door behind her.”

“So you knew what you were looking for when you went up to the Narimans’ balcony.”

“Well, yes, but we didn’t want Mrs. Nariman to be too suspicious either. So Bharucha and I made a show of looking at the Ahuja residence from a few vantage points.”

“You told Bharucha?”

“I gave him the essentials while we were on the balcony. It was important that he knew what we were aiming for. I had already spoken to the SP and asked for a search warrant.”

“How did you get a search warrant that quickly? You had nothing, no basis for a search warrant at that point.”

“True. That’s why their confession about the affair was so important. Once that happened, we could say that the Narimans – both of them -- had a potential motive. It could be jealousy or a lovers’ quarrel, take your pick. To make sure we were not restricted to searching for the murder weapon, the SP had added “articles of clothing or other objects with potential DNA evidence” to what we were looking for. But no semi-intelligent magistrate in Bombay would have authorized a search if we couldn’t at least show motive.”

“How did you know they were having an affair?”

“Guess?”

“Mrs. Wagle?”

John smiled. He gulped down the rest of his beer and nodded.

“We were never going to get anything from that idiot husband of hers. For all practical purposes, she is locked up in that house, bored out of her skull. The only fun…” – John made air quotes with his hands -- “…she had was to watch the world through her windows. She clearly saw enough to suggest Ahuja and Nariman’s relationship was more than platonic.”

I had barely touched the food as John went about the story. John, though, had no compunction about talking with his mouth full, and was finishing off the fish.

“What happens now,” I asked him?

“Now we go home. I think Bharucha is going to have a long night. If Mrs. Nariman has already confessed, he has a lot of paperwork to complete. The stem and all the clothes should have been sent to the forensics lab in Hyderabad and it will take a while to get the results.”

It was nearly 10 o’ clock when we paid the bill – John insisted on paying though I noticed he was a lousy tipper. The early edition would go to press in half an hour, it was too late to file a story for that. But I could still file something for the City edition. John had called a taxi and as we waited, I started typing on the phone itself.

Just as we were reaching Santa Cruz, John’s phone buzzed. He spent a minute looking at it and handed it over to me. It was an email.

“Scroll down and read my email to her first,” he advised.

The correspondence was with a Dr. Griet van Ruud.

“It’s pronounced “Greeth”,” John added. He really was a know-it-all. I nodded.

Dear Griet,

I got your email address from the correspondence found at Mr. Ahuja’s house. I believe you may be unaware of this -- Mr. Ahuja died at his home last night. He was murdered.

As part of the subsequent investigation, I am looking into the possibility that the motive for the murder may have been the botanical research that Mr. Ahuja had been conducting, specifically related to an orchid he was growing. I attach a picture of the orchid with this email.

Considering your correspondence with Mr. Ahuja where you have referred to this research on numerous occasions, I was wondering if you could shed some light on the subject to assist us with the investigations. In particular, would you be able to enlighten us on the nature of Mr. Ahuja’s research and your opinion on the theory that the motive might be the theft of the orchid; if the orchid could be the reason, how valuable or rare is it?

If there is anything else you could think of, please let us know. I would be happy to answer any questions you have at this point and can call you if that is easier.

Yours sincerely,

John Panicker

This email had been sent at 5:08 PM, when we were with Wagle. Griet had replied:

Dear John,

Thank you for your email and letting me know about Nikhil’s death. As you can imagine, this has come as terrible shock to me. I am yet to come to terms with it, I don’t know how to process the news.

You are right about the orchid. I wouldn’t be able to put a price on it. It is, however, one of a kind and is a product of around 20 years of research by Nikhil. It is actually a derivative of the incredibly rare Kalanaman Purple orchid. Till the turn of the century, there was an active black market for its stems which sold for around $5,000 back then. That is, till Indonesia and Malaysia clamped down hard on the trade. But all attempts to grow it outside the mountainous region where it came from had failed. Nikhil had spent an year and a half in Borneo back then, studying the orchid. When he left, he had managed to smuggle out one of the stems. As far as I know, he was the only person who had successfully managed to grow it outside Borneo. He never told me how he did it but did say the orchid would not be able to survive outside his glass house.

Over the last 20 years, he had been trying to introduce elements of other orchids to the stems to make them more resistant, to allow them to grow in an urban setting. He did not have much success till last year when a cross-pollination effort with an orchid found in the western ghats appeared to have been successful. We had to wait till the orchid took root and flowered before we could be certain though.

I hope that helps? I would be happy to elaborate on this if required.

Can I call you in an hour for more details? There are a number of colleagues across the world who would like to know how they can offer their condolences to the family. Would you be able to assist with their enquiries?

Yours truly,

Griet

I handed the phone back to John. “That settles it, I guess.”

A thin smile playing on his lips, he shrugged: “We’ll see.”

We had reached my house. John got out of the car with me, extending his hand. “Great working with you Amit,” he said, before opening the front door and sliding into the seat besides the driver.

“Oh, and my friends call me JP.” And they were off while I tried to figure out whether he was implying that we were friends now.

Afterword

I had called ahead and given the chief and the editor a brief summary of what had transpired, with the suggestion that this was Page 1 material. Finishing the draft just 20 minutes before the deadline, I emailed it directly to the desk. Ben at the desk told me later that they had kept a single line, half-page, space empty for the story on Page 1. That was barely enough for a tenth of the word count, so they had to hold the two stories on Page 2 to make space for the rest. It was all quite frantic in the end and the desk had to fire off multiple iterations to the press as more typos were discovered in proofing.

I stayed up for another half an hour in case the desk had any questions. I had given Bharucha credit for the whole thing and did not mention JP at all in the story, and I still wasn’t sure if it had been cogent with all those omissions. It was still a scoop, nobody else had all the details and the SP would not be giving a press conference till tomorrow afternoon to share the details. With all these thoughts running through my head, I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep but I was more tired than I realized. I slowly drifted off with the phone besides me.

“The Blood Orchid: Thane Murder Solved”. As happy as I was with the placement of the story in the morning, the unimaginative headline was a real downer. It really made it sound like a B-grade movie title. I figured that’s what one gets when you are given 10 minutes to come up with a headline.

I got a bunch of texts in the morning from old friends who, quite unsurprisingly, were shocked to hear about Perizaad. I couldn’t be bothered to pick up the calls. But I did give Bharucha a call later in the morning and was surprised when he picked up. He had slept a bit at the station, he said. I could hear the happiness in his voice, I am sure he had been fielding calls all morning on a very successful investigation. He owed me one.

They had also arrested Nariman as an accomplice but he didn’t think there was much there to begin with – he would probably be released on bail soon.

Perizaad’s lawyer had been at the station half the night and had left saying she will be filing bail applications all the way to the high court as soon as possible. If Nariman had any friends in high places, they were, thankfully, keeping a low profile for the moment and letting the police do their work.

“And JP,” I asked, “have you heard from him?”

“Who?”

“John Panicker, the detective.”

“Ah yes. No. But I don’t know what else he can do now.”

“Alright, you will let me know if something comes up?”

Bharucha agreed. I thought of giving JP a call but couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I could give him the latest, tell him what Bharucha had told me but I suspected he would already know. This was all over the news on TV anyway.

So I made my tea and went to the balcony with the newspapers.