The Disappearance of Sally Sequeira

by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

The waves still crashed against the rocks. The moon still bathed the sandy beach with its light. And the piano still played on. But, amidst all this, just like that, Sally Sequeira had disappeared. With its pristine beaches and clear turquoise waters, the picturesque hamlet of Movim in Goa seems like the perfect holiday spot for detective Janardan Maity and his friend Prakash Ray. But when the father of a local teenage girl receives a letter asking for a large sum of money in exchange for his daughter, Maity and Prakash find themselves in the thick of an unlikely mystery. For, they discover, the girl has not been kidnapped at all, and is safe and sound in her house. As they begin to investigate, the duo encounter the mysterious characters who inhabit the tiny village, each hiding a secret of their own – not least the frail and shy Sally Sequeira, who keeps to herself but steps out at night to dance to the notes of a piano. What truth does Movim hide? And how will Janardan Maity solve a crime that has not yet been committed?

Release date: June 25, 2018

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 256

Sample

TONY’S STORY

Five hundred and twenty-four steps. Tony knew. He counted them every single time he came up here. He counted them because doing so gave him a sense of purpose, an estimate of the task that lay ahead. Father Dias had once told him that mountaineers are advised never to look up at the peak they are trying to climb – apparently because it tends to weaken their resolve. The lighthouse on top of the small hill in Movim beach was no less than the peak of a mountain, at least for Tony, who had lost his left leg to polio at a very early age. And yet, he had always felt that if he counted the steps of the spiralling stairs that took him to the top, it would ease the pain of the climb. More than anything else, it would give him hope. Hope! For that was one thing that was severely lacking in his insignificant and miserable little life.

Pressing his palm softly along the wall to his right, Tony climbed the stairs, minding the half-empty bottle of toddy in his other hand. The wall itself was coarse and had sharp, pointy stone chips jutting out. The air was moist and laden with saltwater, and through decades of exposure to the salty air, the walls had become forbidding and hostile. It was said that this lighthouse was more than two hundred years old, and it was a miracle that it was still standing tall and guiding sailors and fishermen. Of course, renovations and repairs had been done a few years ago, and apparently new machinery had been installed as well, but no one could deny its glorious vintage and unsurpassable beauty.

Tony reached the top and stopped for a few seconds at the doorway that led to the observation deck, which the locals, including him, simply referred to as ‘the balcony’. The toddy was beginning to hit. He gave it time. As his breathing became normal and his pulse slowed down, his mind went back to a fair little face – pretty as the full moon that shone beyond that door up ahead over the dark blue sea. A face that had given him hope in his otherwise hopeless life. One that had, for the first time since he had realized that he was a cripple and an orphan of the church, made him want to live a long and fulfilling life. Tony shut his eyes, and a small teardrop rolled down his coarse and pockmarked cheek.

A strong gust of cold wind blew in through the open door up ahead and hurriedly brought him back to his senses. Tony stepped out in the open and took a few seconds to find his bearings. The toddy had taken full effect by now. Tony shut his eyes hard and opened them again, shaking his head hard to try and steady his vision. The railing of the balcony did not even reach up to his waist. It was a sheer drop all the way down to the rocks below, where the unrelenting vanity of the white frothy waves was being mercilessly crushed by the immovable boulders. The tingling feeling in his shin bones suddenly made him realize that he had wandered too close to the railing. He took a couple of steps towards his right and placed his elbow on the wall for support. The wall pricked his skin, and he quickly withdrew from the spot, tripping a little as he went. A few metres above his head, the beacon rotated silently in a glass enclosure – two tiny pencils of light passing through a strange-looking contraption to come out as two powerful beams that would be visible to seafarers even from a great distance. It was the light of their lives, just as that dainty little face was the light of his.

Would she come tonight? Would she dance with wild abandon once again? Free as a doe? Devoid of all fears, of all bindings? Taking a couple of big swigs out of his bottle, Tony staggered dangerously towards the northern side of the balcony, the one that overlooked the crescent length of the beach. Once he had covered a quarter of the arc, he collapsed on the floor, barely managing to save himself from falling face-first. He grimaced in pain, and then laughed out loud. The bottle of toddy had survived! Small miracles in a cruel world. Above his head, the full moon watched him roll on the floor as he laughed. And then, all of a sudden, he stopped laughing, grabbed the wall for support and perched himself up on his elbow, because the sweetest and most wonderful sound had come riding the soft sea breeze from the sandy beach on the north.

The professor was playing his piano! Any minute now!

Like a moth that pulls itself towards the flame, Tony dragged himself along the coarse and uneven floor towards the railing, on reaching which, he stuck his face out of the gap between the arched iron rods and looked at the moonlit Movim beach down below.

‘Sally!’

A soft whisper escaped Tony’s lips as his tears continued to stream down his cheeks. Down below, like a speck of pristine white on a barren grey, like a thirst-quenching oasis in the middle of a heartless desert, like a tender bud shivering moments away from full bloom, stood the girl he loved. Although he was several hundred yards away from where she was standing, Tony knew in his heart that she was smiling as she raised her hands above her head and swayed to the music floating in the air. Her sweet little face was washed by the moonlight as she looked up at the lighthouse against the dark sky, not knowing that the man who loved her so, so dearly was watching her from up there. She would never know. Because Tony would never tell her. No matter how much his heart ached for her, he couldn’t tell her that he was in love with her. He knew he was too ugly, too miserable, too lowly for someone like her. He knew this the first time he had laid eyes on her, when her veil had come off at Dilton Brook’s funeral. She was an angel. And he…?

No! This was enough for Tony. He wept in joy and for his unrequited love as he watched his angel dance to the tune of the piano on the moonlit beach from the top of the lighthouse. A strange sense of contentment filled his entire being, a feeling he had never experienced before, and he buried his face in his palms and wept his heart out. The toddy had broken all the barriers and dams of restraint, and his tears poured forth like a deluge in the hills. The piano played on. The waves crashed against the rocks. The moon watched the proceedings in composed silence. After a time, Tony looked up with a smile on his lips and tears in his eyes.

What just happened? Where had she gone? She had been there just a moment ago!

With a frown, Tony tried to pick himself up from the floor to have a better look and, in doing so, accidentally kicked the bottle off the balcony. It fell for a long time, till a faint sound of it crashing against the rocks below reached Tony’s ears. Without paying any heed to it, however, Tony staggered like a madman along the arc of the railing that faced the beach. With trembling fingers, he wiped his tears to clear his blurry vision and narrowed his eyes to focus on the beach.

The waves still crashed against the rocks. The beacon still rotated with grave dignity and unwavering devotion. The moon still bathed the sandy beach and the grove of palms beyond the shore with its magical light. And the soothing piano still played on. But amidst all this, just like that, Sally Sequeira had disappeared.

1

‘You know something, Prakash? Psychologists say that there are two kinds of people in the world.’

Janardan Maity and I had just settled down in our armchairs under the canopy of swaying palm leaves above our head, I had just taken a sip of the refreshing welcome drink that the young caretaker fellow had brought us, and a cool gust of wind had just blown in from the direction of the sea in front of us and washed away all the exhaustion from our long journey, when Maity sank deeper into his chair, put his hands under his head to form a cushion and made that comment.

‘The first are those who stand in front of a vast thing such as the ocean and feel that they are the conquerors of this world, that nothing is impossible for them, that they are unstoppable. They borrow from the vastness, so to speak. It rubs off on them, it gives them strength and power, and they feel invincible. Then there’s the second kind – people who realize how small and insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things. Vastness humbles them; it makes them aware of and, more importantly, grateful for their own existence. They halt on their march, to think, to reflect. They begin to realize the futility of such things as war, of man’s insatiable greed, of his hatred towards his own kind, and the sheer ludicrousness of the assumption that he is the king of this world.’

I took another sip of the delicious kokum drink, noticed that Maity hadn’t touched his own drink yet, and asked, ‘Is it safe to assume that you belong to the second kind?’

Maity didn’t reply. Instead, he looked around, took a deep breath of the fresh sea air, and said, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

He was not wrong. Right in front of us, stretching as far as the eyes could see on either side, was a pristine beach of sparkling white sand. The sand was powdery, not grainy, and the beach was remarkably clean. From beyond the 200-metre width of the beach, the mighty waves of the Arabian Sea came accosting the shoreline, leaping in bounds to hug land and dissolving in a warm embrace soon after. The white sand, the turquoise sea, and the deep azure of the cloudless sky combined to soothe my mind. Gazing at it for a long time made me feel sleepy, and I had to sit up and shake off my drowsiness. As far as I could see, there was not a single soul on the beach. Towards the right, the beach stretched on for a couple of miles, before ending at the foot of a large, verdant hill. Towards the left, it went on for a little over a mile to meet another, much smaller hill, with a pretty-as-a-picture lighthouse on top of it. Even from where we were sitting, I could see what looked like a goat path running up from the beach to the top of the hill. I wondered if one could get to the top of the lighthouse, as it promised a terrific view from above.

I said as much to Maity, but before he could reply, we heard a sound behind us and turned. An old lady, possibly in her mid-seventies and dressed in a dark blue skirt with tiny white polka dots and a white shirt with its sleeves rolled up to her wrinkled elbows, was hobbling with a walking stick in hand down the path that led to the guest house behind us. Her grey hair was tied in a loose bun, her face looked flushed, and she was breathing heavily as she navigated the sloping path, dodging fallen coconuts, small twigs and the occasional filth.

‘Ah, Mrs Mascarenhas!’ Maity called out. Mrs Mascarenhas was to be our host for the next five days, as the owner of the guest house we had booked for our trip to Goa – a trip we had impulsively planned only the previous evening over tea and roasted pistachio nuts at my South Kolkata residence. I had just finished my new novel and had sent the manuscript to my editor; it would be at least a month before the proofs would be returned to me. Maity had consciously given me my space while the novel was being written, but had promptly showed up with a packet of dry fruits as soon as I had finished it. Our plan was made on an impulse, but Maity stuck to it, and arranged everything in a matter of a few hours. We couldn’t find seats on a direct flight, so we had to go all the way to Delhi and take another flight from there to Dabolim. Even so, we had arrived at the guest house early, and its caretaker, a young chap named Raghu, had told us that we would have to wait for an hour or so before we could check in, as he was still cleaning up the place. We had just two small suitcases with us, so we left them in the bedroom and walked down to the beach behind the house, where Raghu had brought the welcome drinks and told us that our host would join us soon.

‘Welcome, welcome!’ said Mrs Mascarenhas, with a forced, short-lived smile on her face. It was evident that she was having trouble walking down the slope. Maity and I rose from our chairs and hurried up to help her because, by now, she had reached the sand.

‘Oh, Mrs Mascarenhas, you shouldn’t have,’ Maity said apologetically. ‘You could have sent word and we would have come in.’

‘No, no, no.’ The old lady shook her head vehemently. ‘I couldn’t rob you of the pleasures of this marvellous view. And Lord knows you must be more exhausted than I am. Why, I have been sitting and listening to the radio all morning! A little bit of walking would only do me good.’

We helped her to a chair, and with a firm jerk of her wrist, she struck the pointed end of her walking stick deep into the sand, making it stand upright all by itself. Then she smiled at us warmly and requested us to take our seats. ‘I hope you’ve noticed the speciality of our little beach here. Movim is a small village – a hamlet, if you will. Only about fifty-odd families live here. The beach itself is kind of sandwiched between three hills on the three sides. You see, not many people know about this little paradise of ours. Which is why you’ll hardly find any tourists here – thank God for that! Umm…don’t mind my saying so.’

Mrs Mascarenhas blushed in embarrassment, but Maity quickly assured her that he totally understood the nuisance created by a deluge of tourists, especially irresponsible ones.

She continued, ‘We have our own little community here, you know. Our own church, a good school, a working hospital, a tiny market, even a fairly decent-sized library – we have everything we need. People hardly venture out. Most people are retired anyway. A long time ago, this entire area used to be covered by thorny bushes and washed up seaweed, with foxes, mongooses and wild cats roaming around. The only evidence of civilization you could see around here was that lighthouse. And then the sea started receding, and the sand showed up. It was then that people started building their own tiny hutments on the slopes of this hill that you see behind us. Today, those hutments have become bungalows and cottages, but we have managed to maintain the purity of the village, if you know what I mean. You’ll still find jungles out on the big hill over there, to the right. We call that hill the Eagle’s Perch. Many years ago, there used to be a small chapel there, but it’s all broken down now. Nothing but poisonous snakes up there. Sometimes a bear loses its way and wanders out of the woods, but the beach itself is safe. You can roam around as much as you like without a care in the world.’

‘It’s beautiful, Mrs Mascarenhas,’ Maity remarked, and waited respectfully for the lady to speak, who obviously, and understandably, was taking great pride in extolling the beauty of her village. I watched her as she spoke. She had a grandmotherly aura about her, with a sweet smile and deeply expressive eyes, and it was quite evident that she must have been an exceedingly beautiful woman in her youth. On our way from the airport, Maity had told me that she had been widowed a few years ago and that she now rented out the ground floor of her bungalow to select guests. An old acquaintance of Maity, along with his family, used to come and stay here every winter, and it was he who had introduced Maity to our host.

‘Now, if you two gentlemen don’t mind,’ said Mrs Mascarenhas, ‘let us get the formalities over with, shall we? I will need your ID cards please – anything that carries your photograph and address…ah, yes, this will do nicely, good…and this too, thank you. I’ll give them back to you this evening after Raghu has made photocopies. Now, this here is a rough map of the area that my late husband had made a few years ago, and nothing much has changed, thankfully! Except for this small restaurant here, which was opened only recently. I have been told that the food is edible, and that the tuna, in particular, is not bad. Apparently, there’s a bar in there as well, if you gentlemen are given to that vice. You’ll also find a mini mart here, and another local grocery store here, right at this T-junction. There’s only one ATM in the village, right over here, next to the hospital. But I must warn you, you won’t find any cash in that wretched machine half the time. If you walk up this path, you’ll reach the church. It’s an old building – more than 150 years old, in fact. You can’t miss it, of course, what with the steeple and all. It has a lovely little garden at the back that looks out onto the sea. And …hmm…what else? Oh yes, the mobile phone signal is a little, well, shall I say, whimsical around here, and it does not exist on the beach at all. I say that’s for the best, eh? I’d hate to see my guests wandering along the shore like hunchbacked zombies, if you will pardon the expression. Oh, and here are the keys to your flat. There are two of them. The large one…’

‘…opens the bedroom door,’ Maity chimed in, ‘and the small one is for the front door.’

Mrs Mascarenhas looked quite taken aback. After a moment’s silence, during which a pronounced frown appeared and stayed on her wrinkled forehead, she asked, ‘How do you know?’

Maity smiled politely and said, ‘Well, it’s not very difficult to infer, you see. The lock on the front door is a large one, and the one on the bedroom door is much smaller. And, it is natural for your guests to think that the large key would open the large lock, and the small key would open the small lock. Which is a mistake, as evident from the abnormal abundance of scratches around both the keyholes. Would I be wrong to assume that your guests often tend to miss this vital piece of information that you give them while checking them in?’

‘They hardly listen!’ Mrs Mascarenhas threw her hands up in the air and shook her head in frustration. She then gave Maity a knowing smile. ‘But I see now that Mr Gupta wasn’t exaggerating at all. You do have a keen pair of eyes. You are a detective after all, aren’t you?’

Mr Gupta was the old acquaintance who had introduced Maity to Mrs Mascarenhas. I smiled and glanced at Maity to find him visibly annoyed at his friend’s indiscretion. I knew how much Maity disliked being called a detective.

‘Oh, no, no, ma’am!’ Maity quickly raised his hands and registered his protest. ‘I assure you, I am not a detective at all. I…just like to keep my eyes and ears open.’

‘Hmm!’ Mrs Mascarenhas was now looking at Maity speculatively. Her expression then turned sombre. ‘Well, perhaps Father Dias would like to meet you once. The Lord knows we need a man with a cool head in the village right now. Because the police…well, they just won’t listen. Who knows, perhaps the Good Lord himself has sent you to us.’

‘Father Dias?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he is a reverend from the local parish, you see. Assigned to the church here for over a decade now. A kind and benevolent soul, we all look up to him. You could say he is the leader of our community, for all practical purposes. A father to us all. I think you ought to meet him.’

‘We’d be delighted to,’ Maity said, as we exchanged glances in affirmation. ‘I’m assuming we can find him at the church?’

‘Yes, of course. But he will be here later this evening. The four elders of the village are congregating at my place to discuss the…situation. I happen to be one of them.’

The slight hesitation in Mrs Mascarenhas’s voice didn’t escape my attention, and certainly not Maity’s. He asked, in a gentle voice, ‘May I ask what this situation is, ma’am?’

Mrs Mascarenhas once again hesitated, and I thought I saw her shiver a little, though it may have been because of the cool breeze that had just blown past us. I realized that the old lady’s hesitation wasn’t unnatural. Clearly, she wasn’t sure whether to open up to a couple of stran. . .