NISHA STOOD IN the street in Greater Kailash, gazing through the chain-link fence at the crime scene.
A call to the police had proved fruitless. Just as expected, the shutters had come down. As Santosh had warned her, no one in Sharma’s police department would help them now. Sharma reported to Chopra. With Chopra and Jaswal at loggerheads, working for Jaswal meant they would have no help from the police.
So she’d decided to pay Greater Kailash a visit.
The house and its grounds were just as they had looked online: neglected, unkempt, but otherwise an unremarkable home in a street full of unremarkable homes. There was one important distinction—the police presence. Uniformed officers guarded the door, while others stood near the polythene tape that marked out where the ground had given way into the grim scene below.
Careful not to attract the attention of those on the other side of the fence, Nisha began to take pictures, methodically working her way across the front of the house. At the same time she watched where she put her feet, knowing only too well that—
Ah.
Something the cops inside had missed. Nisha had quit the Mumbai Police’s Criminal Investigation Department to work alongside Santosh, and what she knew from her time on the force was that cops had a tendency to see only what was in front of them. It was one of the reasons she’d been so keen to work with an investigator like Santosh. A detective with the ability to think outside the box.
Or, in this case, look on the other side of the wire fence.
She bent to pick up a cigarette butt that seemed out of place among the usual detritus on the ground. The filter wasn’t the usual brown, but silver, plus it bore a beautiful crest in black.
“Can I help you?” came a voice from above. She looked up to see an older woman standing over her.
Nisha stood, held out her hand to shake, and switched on her most dazzling smile. “I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a ghoul,” she said. “My name’s Nisha. I run a Delhi crime blog. I wonder: would you be willing to speak to me? For my blog, I mean. Do you live around here?”
Something in Nisha’s manner seemed to have a positive effect on the woman. Her scowl subsiding, she said, “I do. Opposite. In fact, it was me who called the police.”
“Oh? What was it that made you raise the alarm?”
“A half-naked girl, would you believe? Screaming and running away from the house. By all accounts half the lawn had caved in and underneath it was this awful…graveyard or whatever it is they’ve found.”
“What was she doing there?”
“Most likely there with her boyfriend,” confided the woman. “Doing you know what.”
“I see.”
“And you know what?” said the woman. “There’s been absolutely no mention of this on the news or in the papers.”
“Well, exactly,” said Nisha. “I only found out via a contact in the police force.”
“It’s almost like they’re trying to hide something,” said the woman, drawing her arms across her chest and tilting her chin. She looked left and right. “I used to see a black van in the driveway.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. It was often there.”
“Make?”
The woman gave a slight smile. “The make was a Tempo Traveler, and I know that because we used to have one, many moons ago…” She drifted off a little, evidently revisiting a past with a man in her life, possibly a family too, and Nisha felt her nostalgia keenly, thinking of her own loss.
Regretfully Nisha pulled her new friend back into the present. “I don’t suppose you got a license plate number?”
The neighbor frowned. “Well, no, I didn’t. Do you go around noting down license plate numbers?”
Nisha conceded the point then added, “Ah, but what if they’re up to no good?”
“Well, I never saw anything especially unusual. It had a red zigzag pattern running across the side, which was quite distinctive. Other than that…”
“Would you draw it for me?” asked Nisha. She passed the woman her pad and pen, and for some moments the pair stood in silence as the woman concentrated on sketching the van’s paint job.
“My drawing isn’t very good,” she said with an apologetic shrug as she handed back the pad. “But it looked something like that.”
“Thank you. Did you tell the police about the van?”
“Of course I did. Not that they were interested.”
Which figures, thought Nisha.
They spoke for some minutes more, mainly with the neighbor complaining that the house wasn’t sufficiently well maintained, and how the police hadn’t taken her concerns seriously enough. “My late husband would have taken it further. He would have done something about it, but…” She fixed Nisha with such a pained, searching look that Nisha felt as though the other woman could see inside her—as if the neighbor knew exactly what it was they had in common—and for a second she thought it might be too much to bear.
“Thank you,” Nisha stammered, only just managing to control her emotions as the two said their good-byes and went their separate ways.