Murder In The Ashram

Book 0: Ruby Jones

by Kathleen McCaul

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Ruby Jones has moved to Delhi to pursue her dreams of becoming an international news journalist. But when the body of Stephen Newby, her flatmate and best friend, is pulled from the Yamuna River - and the mystery around his death becomes more and more mysterious - she puts her investigative instincts to good use as she tries to uncover who's responsible. Ruby's questions take her deeper and deeper into the world of Indian policing - and into the heart of a yoga ashram. She discovers that the yoga world isn't always the calm, spiritual place advertised, but that beneath the breathing exercises and dog poses lies something sinister - something that she's certain points to dark, hidden secrets that could have huge repercussions for all involved if discovered . . .

Release date: April 7, 2011

Publisher: Piatkus

Print pages: 319

Sample

The train horns woke me up early again. I didn’t mind so much. It’s cheap, living round the railway and at night, when I can’t
sleep, those trains keep me company, calling out to one another like whales. It’d been a night of strange dreams: helicopters,
bottles of wine, friends and betrayal. Friends that turned into other friends, an uneasy sense that some people I trust I
shouldn’t, a frustration with the world and everyone in it.


Sunlight seeped through my thin curtains. Drops of sweat were already forming in the small of my back and sliding down my
thighs.


It was my birthday. I was twenty-six. I felt bad about turning twenty-six. I had made a big five-year plan for my future on
my twenty-first birthday, but nothing had worked out the way I had thought it would.


It was too hot to lie in bed. I rolled off the mattress and into the bathroom. It was steamy in there before I even turned
on a tap. The water was scalding. I peered at myself in the mirror. I was completely naked; I couldn’t sleep with anything
on in this heat.


So what had twenty-six years done to me? I turned round to inspect my bum. I’d had a tattoo of a Celtic cross done in a Cardiff
Goth parlour when I was fourteen in a fit of Welsh mysticism. It was so tacky. I hated it. But it did provide an interesting
way of weight watching. It stretched when I had been eating a lot of sweets and cakes, which sometimes I did. At the moment
it was rather a skinny-looking cross. I had lost my appetite in the summer. And I was always going to be small however much
the cross bent and bowed.


My hair was a short red mess behind my crumpled, bed face. I was very brown on my face and my hands and my feet but everywhere
else I was deathly pale. It’s not a good place for all-over sunbathing, Delhi.


I wanted a coffee but knew it would screw me up, make me hyper all morning. I’d have a milkshake instead, a treat for my birthday,
to cheer myself up. I could have my mango too; it was just ripe yesterday, perfect for this morning.


But in the kitchen, every surface was black and moving. Ants swirled thickly over the surfaces and swam along the floor. Slamming
the kitchen door in shock, I wiped my forehead. Stephen’s fault, I thought darkly. How many times did I have to tell that
guy not to leave food out in this heat? There was only one thing to do; go in, boil water, kill the buggers.


Actually, I enjoyed sluicing the scorching water over their marching trails, seeing them sweep along the surfaces like little
broken boats. Destroying their whole world made me feel quite empowered. It did occur to me that this was murder, but they
were so small and insignificant, it didn’t take much to push that to the back of my mind. By the sink was a ball of writhing
black, an ant Mecca. As I killed more and more ants, the mass thinned out and dirty yellow began to show through. After my
last kettle of hot water I inspected the centre of the massacre. It was my mango! Stephen had taken my mango! He knew I’d been saving it! And then he’d just left it out! There were only a few strings of yellow flesh still
clinging to the skin, peppered with ants so greedy they’d got stuck. I was pleased – they deserved it.


I threw open his door but he wasn’t there. It was just his unmade bed as usual; clothes all over the floor, his guitar, the
fan still going, wasting our electricity.


‘Stephen!’ I shouted, flipping off the switch.

I wandered into the lounge and the newspaper flew past me, lobbed through the balcony doors by a boy on his bike, like every
morning. It hit our one palm, messing up the spiky shadows on the wall. I opened up the Hindustan Times. Twenty-sixth of March. Elections. Heatwave. Delhi hits fifty. A fucking heatwave. In India. Nine o’clock in the morning
and I was already slippy like a snail trailing sweat across the marble floor. Gross.


I flicked through the news, looking for a story I might be able to follow up. Nothing. I threw the paper on top of the dusty
pile I stored under our coffee table. I don’t know why I bothered storing them, I never once looked at them again. I felt
depressed. I had no story to work on today. No ideas. No commissions. Nothing at all to do but contemplate the failure of
my five-year plan.


I’d had such a great start as a reporter, fantastic. I’d been sent out to cover the courts on my first day of work experience
at the Cardiff Echo as a fresh graduate.


I went with Stew, a veteran reporter who dressed in winkle-pickers and drainpipes and had a cover band that played Queens
nightclub every Saturday. We dropped in briefly on the big trial of the guy who’d raped and killed a teenage girl in the woods
a few months earlier, but after Stew got a couple of quotes from one of the solicitors on the case he told me to go home because
he had a gig rehearsal.


So I went to the bus stop and smoked a cigarette while I waited. Some bum with a dirty Welsh rugby shirt on came up to me
to cadge a fag. I gave him one but he coughed and didn’t inhale. He didn’t seem as completely out of it as most tramps around
the bus station. Some of them were so flamboyantly fucked they made White Lightning cider seem like a positive lifestyle
choice. This guy was young and awkward.


I asked him if he had had any sleep. He shook his head.

‘Are you OK? I mean, you don’t look like you’re used to this. Do you need a cup of tea?’

He started crying. I patted him on the shoulder. Eventually he confessed he had been living rough for nearly a week, had lost
his memory and had no idea who he was other than his name was Rhys Williams. He was petrified. I got my first story prickle.
Rhys Williams was the young Welsh rugby captain who’d gone missing after ten pints on the town last Friday. The whole country
was trying to find him, his fiancée had been on TV constantly, sobbing and wailing. I peered closely at him. Yes, that was
Rhys, a load more hair, not looking at all his clean-cut self, but that was him. The tramps wouldn’t have been able to focus
closely enough to report him.


‘Don’t worry, I know who you are. I’ll look after you,’ I said.

I put my arm round him and we walked over to the police station, with a quick detour to the Cardiff Echo office for a photo and an interview. I was offered the job of trainee reporter at the end of the week.


This seemed the best job in the world for someone as nosy as me. I just had to talk to people all day, about their lives,
their problems. I had seemed to have a talent for getting stories out of people. I looked too innocent to judge them, I think.
Or maybe too dumb.


My editor told me I could do whatever I set my mind to. I believed him and made a plan. I told everyone I would be a foreign
correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in five years.


But five years were up and I wasn’t working for the Telegraph. I wasn’t a correspondent for them or anyone else. I was living in Delhi, trying to scrape a living as a freelance journalist
and not die in the summer heat.


I cranked up our clunky old computer to check my emails and got a little rush of optimism. Maybe today I’d get a good article
commission. Your birthday should be a lucky day. And yes – there was an email from Vogue! They’d responded to my pitch! But no. They didn’t think a feature on Indian fashion designers was right for their next issue.


There was another email from Guy Black, on the foreign desk at the Telegraph. I’d had a coffee with him before coming to Delhi; he looked after South Asia and was keen on picking up new stories not
on the wires. He was around my age; we’d got on quite well. He said he envied me going off to freelance, but really we both
knew he was better off with a staff job on a national. He’d be a correspondent in no time.


I got another little spell of cheer as the computer loaded his email up slowly. An article for the Telegraph would be way better than working for Vogue, any day. They did real stories about people, not just frocks.


But Guy didn’t think my piece on Delhi sewage workers was right for the Telegraph either – they’d liked the pitch but they weren’t going to commission it as a full story. He’d give me a call later to go
through it. I sent him a cheery note back trying to sound carefree and easy.


I was anything but carefree. I’d been freelancing in Delhi for months now and was having real trouble selling articles. All
the national newspapers had correspondents. I’d done a few things for Asian magazines but nothing that really mattered. I had some savings but these were running out fast. India wasn’t as cheap as it once had been. The whole thing was
exhausting; it gave me a gnawing feeling that perhaps the future wasn’t going to be as fulfilling or as important as I had
thought. That maybe I wasn’t better than the Cardiff Echo; that maybe I shouldn’t have quit my job there. That maybe local journalism was really all I was cracked up for.


I thought maybe I would have some emails from my friends back home, wishing me happy birthday. But they seemed not to have
remembered. I was amazed at how quickly I’d lost touch with everyone. After the first few quick notes saying ‘Good luck!’,
‘Miss you!’, ‘Let me know how you’re doing!’, all contact seemed to have faded away. I was out on a limb here.


My best friend from school had written though, Beth. Of course she’d remember today. She gave me a big happy birthday in capital
letters and then moved swiftly on to her promotion and pay-rise. I was jealous. She had a boyfriend and was going on holiday
to the Maldives. Scuba diving. I’d sneered at her when she said she was going to be a solicitor but her life was going great
now.


There was an email from my dad.

Ruby love,

Happy Birthday. I hope that the sky is bright and blue in Delhi to celebrate your birthday. Here in Wales it is grey, like
it was on the day you were born. But that day I soared high above the low clouds and will do again today just with the memory.
There is a book in the post for you. I know your mother has sent you something too.

Love,

Dad

I rubbed my nose, feeling a ripple of distant affection. I could just see him there writing it, in his reading glasses, his
lips loose with concentration as he peered at the computer screen. He’d be running his hands through his hair, which was going
grey at the temples now, as he looked out of the window to check the sky.


Dad was very sensitive to the sky – he was dangerous when there was a low orange sunset and tired in the grey. When it was
blue he was happy, he was wistful. He’d be happy just staring into the blue for hours – he saw things in it. He was very romantic
for a physics teacher.


There was no email from my brother. I wasn’t surprised. He was kind of wild and didn’t think about things like birthdays.
He was four years younger than me and had inherited the bits of my parents I hadn’t. He was pale and tall like my mother,
but had my dad’s black hair and eyes. I was short and olive skinned like Dad but with Mum’s red hair. I wished it had been
the other way round. Rhys was lethargically romantic and took over the world from his bed while I was just kind of impish
and healthy looking and always worked hard. Not cool.


There was no email from Mum either. She’d get round to it but it would take a day or two for her to work out the date.

There was an email from Stephen. I was still mad at him for eating my mango but I knew straight away it would be the best
email of the day.


Ruby Jones, you harlot, happy birthday …

I imagine you’ve just got up and are grumpy because it’s hot and you haven’t got any article commissions and it’s your birthday
and you think you look like shit.

I laughed.

Well, I can’t do anything about the heat – sorry – it’s hot here – get used to it.

See ya tonight lovely,


S.x

P.S. It’s the day before your birthday – I’m in the lounge, going out now – might be back tonight – dunno. If I don’t see
you before this evening – I’m taking you out to the Oberoi for cocktails. Don’t worry about money – I got this one. And I
made you some mango milkshake – in the fridge …

P.P.S. You don’t look like shit. You’re beautiful.

P.P.P.S. I can’t believe this email won’t have cheered you up – but if I haven’t managed to work my magic on you – practise
your headstand.

I smiled and rolled my eyes. So I would get my milkshake after all. What a flatmate. He was the only friend I really had at
the moment – but he was so funny and crazy and cool that one was all I really needed. He really looked after me. He was subtle
about it too; didn’t let on he knew how much I relied on him here in Delhi.


I’d been at Oxford with Stephen; we’d both done English. We hadn’t been friends though. I’d seen him in lectures and always
thought he’d looked so full of himself, in his cracked leather jacket and cashmere scarf.


But I’d met him again in Delhi at a yoga class in my first week here. A couple of Swedes who were staying at my hostel kept
raving about Shiva yoga and I’d tagged along to see what the fuss was about, and for a bit of company. There was already a
crowd shoving and jostling to get into this famous class by the time we got there. These two blondes had thrown themselves
into the fray but I hadn’t been so enthusiastic. I hung back. And that’s when I’d found Stephen, smoking a cigarette, leaning
against the wall of the ashram, in his old leather jacket.


I’d been incredibly glad to see a face I recognised. The city was a jam-packed struggle of cars, dogs and humans with nothing
in the writhing mass that cared about me or even knew me. I gave him a big kiss.


He didn’t react to this. Just gave a half-smile and looked at the smoke blowing out the corner of his mouth. But I think he
was pleased to see me too.


‘People say Oxford’s glory days are over and I’m inclined to agree. But it does teach you manners,’ he said, nodding over
to the elbowing yogis.


He gave me a cigarette and we chatted. He’d been over here for about six months, doing a PhD on a Fulbright scholarship. It
turned out he had a spare room in the flat he’d been living in. He gave me the address and said I should come and have a look
if I was sticking around the city. Nizamuddin Shrine. I said I’d take the room there and then. I had no other choices and
I liked accidents like that.


Nizamuddin Shrine, a centre of Sufism, known throughout the Muslim world. It had sounded idyllic but I thought I’d landed
up in some kind of pilgrim hell when I first got there. My Hindu rickshaw driver wouldn’t even attempt its muddy lanes so
I’d struggled on foot through open-air butchers, men selling dirty garlands of roses and little fires where paraplegics, druggies
and the most miserable immigrants hung round waiting on scraps of Muslim charity. It was a bit like an Islamic Glastonbury.


The strains of ‘Little Wing’ floating down from my new home did nothing to reassure me. I was not into Jimi Hendrix.

He opened the door.

‘Hey – I’m in the middle of something – make yourself at home – the room’s there,’ he said, turning back to the living room.

My new room had been grimy; the window sill silted in dust. I’d felt flat in the room’s grey light. I wandered out into the warm yellow lounge, where I found this strange guy standing on his head tapping his toes to ‘Purple Haze’.


‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said.

‘Do you mind; I’m trying to meditate,’ a mumble came from his squashed throat.

‘What? To Jimi Hendrix? Come off it.’

‘It’s my headspace – don’t kill it.’

I shrugged and turned to go back to my room. What a weirdo. Who the hell had I moved in with? I’d never liked him in uni,
why did I think he would have changed?


‘I bought some English scones for you from the embassy. Make a cup of tea, I’ll be done in a minute,’ he mumbled again.

My ears perked up. I loved scones, loved cakes and biscuits too. I’d tried the Indian sweets but they were too brash a sugar
hit for me, left your teeth aching and your appetite dead. I wondered if he had remembered the iced bun I always brought to
the modernism theory lectures to get me through the boredom.


Making a cup of tea for us both settled me in; Stephen would have known that instinctively. I took a nose through his cupboards
too.


The kitchen was empty apart from a congealed bottle of soy sauce and some dusty cornflakes, but my new flatmate had bought
cream and jam for today. Such effort for a stranger made me want to cry. I let myself feel a little homesick for the first
time while the kettle boiled.


He rolled up a spliff after tea. I pulled out my bottle of gin from duty-free, which made him really happy. He ran down to
the pilgrim hotel on the ground floor to get some cans of tonic water and some tiny round lemons. It was late by the time
we went to bed, the shrine lights were off and packs of dogs were barking in the dark. We’d become friends. I’d even agreed to give yoga another try, to join the Shiva centre Stephen told me had saved his life at university.


I learned later his tendency to overdramatise, in dress and stories. Yoga hadn’t quite saved his life; more helped him negotiate
a difficult growing up period. Stephen had been a lonely fresher, struggling with his identity and his sexuality. He was half
Indian and half English but knew nothing about his Indian side; didn’t know his father at all. New friends, constantly asking
where he was from, rammed home to him the fact that he simply had no idea. Trying out Shiva yoga had been a first attempt
to learn something about the country that claimed half his blood. And then he found it calmed him, gave him space alone to
be himself. He told me it made him realise he didn’t need to answer anyone’s questions, said he had enough of his own to worry
about.


His PhD research subject is ‘Homosexual tantra in the Vedas and beyond – a comparative analysis of male love in Hindu literature’.
He fashions himself as some kind of gay-pride Hindu guru, with a pink om T-shirt and long hair. He tells people he has yogic
blood in him and always ends up chatting in a headstand at parties. He is such a show-off. He went to Eton and Oxford, not
some levitation yoga school in the clouds. He’s ashamed of that part of his background, I think. He had a rough time with
his parents both gone – his grandparents brought him up. They send him parcels and I’ve seen photos of them. They seem nice,
old, but he doesn’t mention them much. Not exciting enough for the myth of Stephen, probably.


Despite my reservations about Stephen’s status as a spiritual leader, I took his advice. I tried to flip myself up into a
headstand. After falling down a couple of times, I gave up and did it against the wall. The streams of sweat did a U-turn,
running down my legs and my stomach and my throat into my mouth and eyes. They tasted salty like tears. Just as I was calming down, my phone went. I swore; collapsed in a heap.


The number coming up was Shiva yoga centre. It would be Rani, our teacher there. I couldn’t believe he was phoning. I stared
at my mobile. Maybe today really would turn out to be a lucky day.


Rani was another reason – maybe the biggest reason – I was feeling bad this morning. I was interested in him. No, wait, that
is an understatement. I was completely infatuated with him. I’d spent the past few weeks mooning in bed, dreaming of our life
together. How happy we’d be when Rani finally plucked up the courage to leave the ashram and sweep me off my feet. I had had
it all planned out. He wouldn’t be a yogi completely any more because he would have to break his ashram vows to marry me.
But once we were married I would give up journalism and we would move to Goa and set up a yoga centre/guest house and live
there in some kind of shanti hippy sexual nirvana.


It hadn’t worked out like that at all – the whole thing had been a bloody disaster.

Stephen said that I should get over it; that my utter dedication to Rani was simply a bad case of Orientalism.

‘You only like Rani cause he’s exotic, Ruby. He represents the dusky, sexual East which will release you from your fettered
English upbringing. You’re like one of those bloody memsahibs,’ he’d said to me.


‘I’m Welsh. You’re the one with the dodgy English schooling, not me. I was going to raves and taking pills while you were
probably getting buggered in the toilets of your dorm.’


‘No need to be rude about a good education, Ruby. I’m just saying you should analyse exactly what you see in the guy.’

‘Apart from the fact he’s the most gorgeous guy I’ve ever met?’

‘Look, that’s true, he is incredibly hot, but you shouldn’t get so obsessed with someone just cause of what they look like.
There’s got to be more than that, Ruby. What is it? What do you see in his soul?’


‘Oh shut up with that spiritual bollocks.’

‘The Rig Veda says that thought gives rise to desire. Think.’

‘I don’t know! He’s charismatic. He’s got this energy all round him that makes me crazy. And he’s so lost-looking; no one
can get near him because he lives this life of a monk. I thought that I could help him, that I could change him and make him
happy.’


Stephen had rolled his eyes at this.

‘I’m going to have to murder you for your inane female tendencies,’ he’d said and rammed his pillow over my face.

I’d really had to fight to get him off me. I laughed at the memory as I picked up the ringing phone.

‘Hey, Rani,’ I said as casually as I could, hearing the nerves tighten round my voice.

‘Ruby.’ He sounded choked.

‘What?’

‘It’s Stephen.’

God. Always Stephen.

‘What?’

‘Stephen …’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Stephen … The police have been here …’

‘Oh, what the fuck? Has he been caught with drugs? Shit – typical – on my birthday too.’

‘No, it’s … it’s …’

I heard his phone clatter to the floor.

‘Rani?’

‘Ruby – it’s Swami Shiva.’

I got a lurking feeling. There must be something going on if Swami Shiva had deigned to talk to me.

‘Swami, what’s going on?’

‘Ruby, I’m sorry. The police have just been to the centre.’

‘Why?’

‘They pulled a body out of the Yamuna River today and they found Stephen’s yoga membership card.’

‘No …’

‘Is Stephen with you now – at the flat?’

‘No … but he said he might be out.’

‘I’m sure it’s not him – I’m sure he’s fine – but we need to go and do an identity check on the body. I’m sorry.’

‘I just got an email from him, it’s not him.’

‘Yes, yes, he is probably fine, but we need to do this. We’ll let you know as soon as we know it’s not Stephen.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘I’m coming – I can’t wait here.’

Swami Shiva paused. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Next to Nizamuddin Shrine. Do you know it?’

‘Of course. We’ll pick you up on the way – we’ll be about an hour.’

I lurched out of the room to the balcony. I called Stephen several times. His phone was turned off. I tried Rani. He didn’t
pick up. I called the centre. It was engaged. I threw my phone on the floor and it clanked loudly.


I left it where it was; went back inside. I sat on our sofa and watched the phone, still and small in the morning sun. I picked
up a cigarette packet. Took one out, put it in my mouth. Put it back. Got up. Sat down again. The doorbell rang. I didn’t
answer it.


My hands were shaking but I wasn’t really worried. I knew Stephen was still alive. He had such a powerful presence I could feel him wherever he was in the city. I would have known
instantly if something bad had happened to him. I began to pray, murmur some pleadings to a childhood God. God was with Stephen.
H. . .