The Edge of Darkness

Book 0: The Malabar House Series

by Vaseem Khan

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Historical Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders from her superiors, Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective, has been exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous state of Nagaland. As India's first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Victoria Hotel, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in ruins.

But when a prominent local politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria Hotel, his head missing - a case appears quite literally on her doorstep. As the political situation threatens to explode into all-out havoc, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness...

The sixth rip-roaring thriller in the award-winning Malabar House novels and a perfect entry point to the series.

Release date: January 8, 2026

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

The Naga Hills District, Assam Province, 1951

The shriek came from the darkness between the trees, a howl so plaintive it returned her instantly to the streets of Bombay. A typical evening in India’s glamour capital, punctuated by the yells of fruitsellers, the shouts of rickshawwallahs, and the tortured cries of those discovering too late that not everything that glittered in the city of dreams was gold.

But she was a long way from home now.

‘It’s a capuchin. Whole troop of them, by the sound of it.’

Persis turned from the wooden railing to find the American, Oren Rake, approaching, cigar in hand. Rake, a cadaverous man in his late forties, with dark hair, greying in iron streaks, had the weathered quality common to men who had spent time in the tropics, battling the elements. In India that was a fight most men were bound to lose. The saner ones tended not to step into the ring at all.

But you couldn’t explain that to a foreigner.

Rake stopped beside her, the floorboards of the hotel’s rear veranda creaking softly beneath his feet. A tall man, well over six feet, and powerfully built. He wore a bush suit, in olive green, together with a revolver, holstered at the hip, as if he had swaggered out of a saloon in a low-budget western. She could smell his odour, a unique blend of a woody aftershave and his own rutting-stag musk.

Persis watched him fumble in his pocket for a cigar cutter, snip the cigar, then light it. The tip glowed dully.

‘So you’re a cop?’

Was she? She couldn’t be sure any more. Banished from Bombay, sent three thousand kilometres eastwards to the very edge of the country, to lose herself in these godforsaken hills, she was finding it difficult to reconcile past with present.

Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective.

How hollow those headlines now seemed! And how vainglorious the expectations such words placed upon her.

And yet. There was little doubt that she had earned her spurs. The cases that she had investigated back at the Malabar House station in Bombay – beginning, just over a year ago, with the murder of a prominent English diplomat – had catapulted her to national attention, a star at the tender age of twenty-eight. The fact that the station was populated by a contingent of the force’s most unwanted had done little to slow her rise. Her subsequent fame had brought out the best – and worst – in her fellow citizens. Plaudits from those who considered her apotheosis in line with the country’s post-independence march on progress; brickbats from those horrified by the notion of women abandoning their traditional posts and overrunning the manly edifices of the new regime.

Persis had put on a steely front. Having lost her mother as a child, she had been raised by her father – a man who would have made Attila the Hun seem a geisha by comparison – never to take a backwards step. But sometimes the strength it took to deal with prejudice – and idiocy – was beyond her.

‘Do you suppose I’m wearing this uniform for fun?’

Rake’s grey eyes, the colour of ash, held fast; then he set his elbows on the railing and leaned out into the night.

Beyond the perimeter wall the hillside ran steeply down into the jungle, a dense mass of trees that whispered thickly into the near distance. Sounds emerged from the shadows, not just the gibbering of monkeys, but the whine and whirr of insects, the eerie song of flying lizards, and the rustling of bats. Above, the sky was a velvet dome, stars gleaming with crystal-bright urgency. If there was a solitary compensation to being here, Persis thought, it was the startling beauty of the night heavens.

‘We haven’t been officially introduced. My name is Oren. Oren Rake. I run a mining outfit, a few hours north of Kohima.’

‘I know who you are, Mr Rake.’

‘Please. Call me Oren.’ He flicked ash over the railing. ‘I have a place in Kohima, but I spend most of my time out in the hills. These days, when I venture south, I tend to stay here, at the Victoria. It’s a little isolated, but that’s no bad thing. Kohima’s a real frontier town, now. You never know if you’re going to make it out alive.’ He flashed an easy grin.

Did she agree with him? Perhaps. Kohima was one of only two or three towns worthy of the name in the Naga Hills region, and the site of the police station to which Persis had been seconded. The place was growing fast, but with growth came the anxieties – and politics – of modernity. Following independence, the local Naga population had split into those who favoured continuing as part of the new India – with all that entailed – and those who wanted to go their own way.

Greater Nagaland. Nagalim. An independent nation for the Naga people.

The very idea had caused the prime minister, sitting in faraway Delhi, to choke on his morning grapefruit. The Centre’s response had been swift and urgent. Nehru had made it clear that there was as much chance of India letting go of the Naga Hills as there was of a tiger giving up a coolie clamped in its jaws. Soldiers had been despatched. Furious headlines had railed against the ungrateful eastern tribes out in the misty hinterlands beyond the ‘chicken’s neck’, that narrow pass that connected mainland India to the semi-tropical tea-growing regions of the north-east.

For Persis, still finding her feet in the region, it meant navigating a place where, increasingly, death and rhetoric had become opposite sides of the same coin.

‘How long have you been out here?’ Rake’s gaze remained on the jungle.

‘Just over a month.’

‘And what brought you here?’

What could she tell him? That any notion of choice in her presence here was laughable? That the powers-that-be had decreed her banishment, for reasons that she still found baffling? Her thoughts returned to Bombay, the sights and sounds of a city that, in spirit and aspect, remained a million miles from these forbidden and unknowable hills. Bombay, with its chaotic traffic, its thunderous advance on destiny, its overpowering essence. A city that had inspired a thousand songs, a thousand films, and a thousand stories, including her own.

Though, of late, her life had taken the sort of unexpected twists that even Bombay’s mercurial film directors might have balked at.

Living through the turmoil that had marred the end of the Raj had taught her that life was neither predictable nor fair. Since joining the force, the trials and tribulations of being the Indian Police Service’s only woman, at the mercy of male superiors – and peers – who often treated her as an abhorrent infection rather than a colleague, had only served to sharpen her defensive reflexes. But you couldn’t keep a good woman down. Not if she was standing over you with her foot on your neck.

Perhaps the American sensed her hesitance. ‘Well, whatever it was, I doubt you were sufficiently prepared for this.’ He nodded into the jungle. ‘They say the forests are haunted by dead soldiers. Englishmen and Japs. The Naga believe each star in the night sky is a warrior fallen in battle. They love a good death here.’

Rake’s assertion was not so far from the truth. Could anything have truly prepared her for the intrigues of a land all but cut off from the rest of the world? A Shangri-La of sunless forests and highland villages, mired in myth and war?

‘He’s out there, somewhere. Baba Dao. The great revolutionary. Apparently, his name means “father of daggers”.’ Rake examined the glowing tip of his cigar. ‘They say he’s vowed to kill every last one of us. Foreigners, I mean. That goes for mainlanders, too.’

She was saved from having to respond by the arrival of the night porter. The youth – barely into his twenties and dressed in a white dinner jacket monogrammed with the letters HV – Hotel Victoria – was flushed, eyes wide. ‘Madam. The manager has requested your presence.’

‘Where?’

‘Mr Sinha’s room. We have a problem.’

 

Persis followed the young man – she recalled that his name was Peter Jadonang – through the hotel, up several flights of stairs to the topmost floor. The floor was taken up entirely by the suite rooms of Mohan Sinha, the region’s governor. Sinha had been sent to the Naga Hills district by Prime Minister Nehru a year earlier. In that time, the man had made it his mission to stamp out the incipient rebellion. But for every fire he put out, he appeared to have started two more.

She had seen Sinha around Kohima, always with an armed escort, met him only the twice, the first time a day after she had arrived in town. Sinha had summoned her to his office at the commissioner’s residence, eager to make the acquaintance of the country’s only female police officer, a celebrity in her own right.

The governor had wanted to hear about Bombay. Bright lights, big city. He had spent almost the entirety of his life in Calcutta, Bombay’s dour older sister, had once dreamed of travelling the well-trodden path to India’s city of dreams, pursuing a career in film. But his father, a wealthy businessman, had had different ideas.

In that first meeting, Sinha had struck her as a man consumed by his own legacy. He had talked incessantly about his intent to pacify the region – by any means at his disposal – and then to advance upon Delhi as a conquering hero. He was a chain-smoker, with a penchant for expensive suits and French perfume. Rake thin.

It had taken her a while to see beyond the dandyish veneer to the political animal within. Sinha was an important man. He had made a name for himself in Bengal, the country’s richest state, where he controlled a large voting bloc. During the war years, that fame had grown, as he had pitched himself headfirst into the communal rioting that had erupted in Calcutta and her environs. Somehow, he had emerged from the carnage unscathed, and with a vociferous base at his beck and call. More than one commentator believed that the wily, Oxbridge-educated politico had the chops to make it all the way to Delhi, possibly as a successor to Nehru. In time.

Perhaps the prime minister had sensed this, forcing his hand in sending Sinha to the crucible of the Naga Hills. Here, it was assumed, Sinha would either prove his mettle or be swallowed by the jungle and forgotten.

 

She found the hotel manager, David Keishing, pacing the floorboards outside Sinha’s door like an expectant father.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Mr Sinha isn’t responding,’ said Keishing.

‘It’s late. Perhaps he’s asleep?’

‘No. He never sleeps before midnight. Peter goes in to collect his dining cart each evening at this time. He has never not opened the door before.’

‘Fine. So open it. Why am I here?’

Keishing, a short, round-faced Naga in a grey morning suit, patted his hands together nervously. In the tropical heat, the suit seemed both an extravagance and wildly incongruous. The man was practically swimming in his own perspiration. Persis knew that the uniform – along with much of the Hotel Victoria’s starched aspect – was dictated by the establishment’s idiosyncratic proprietor, Apeni Ao.

‘Mr Sinha is a powerful man. If I break into his room without permission . . .’ He left the thought unsaid.

‘But you think I should do it?’

‘You are a police officer.’

‘I’ll do it.’

Persis turned to find Rake breathing down her neck. The American had followed her from the hotel’s rear veranda. ‘Mohan is a friend. I’d hate to think anything’s happened to him.’

He stepped forward, but Persis stopped him with a raised hand. ‘If I need your help, I’ll ask for it.’

She turned to the door, examined it, then tensed herself. Focusing her energies, she aimed a kick at the lock, then another, and another. When she eventually burst through, she realised that the inner bolt, now displaced from its mooring, had been drawn.

She found herself in a spacious living room, a sofa arrangement – complete with a marble-topped coffee table – to one side. On a sideboard, a gramophone took pride of place. One wall was taken over by a portrait of Queen Victoria, set side by side with an image of Gandhi. The queen was po-faced. Gandhi appeared to be smiling at a joke only he understood.

She caught sight of her reflection in a gilt-framed oval mirror.

She had arrived back late from Kohima that evening, and had ventured out on to the hotel’s rear veranda, still in her khaki uniform, a moment of respite before the business of showering and changing for dinner. Minutes later, Oren Rake had interrupted her solitude, and then the night porter, Peter, had arrived to summon her. Her cheeks were dusty from the ride back from the city, and her nostrils twitched at the pungent note of sweat rising from her clothing. With her cap removed, her hair, thick and black, wound behind her head in a plait. She knew that she favoured her mother, dark eyes and features that men found attractive. At the police academy, she had expended as much energy batting away unwanted advances as she had in the gymnastics hall. In the years since, there had been only two genuine interactions with the opposite sex, one a brief liaison with an older man who had walked out on her, abruptly and without explanation, only to send her a card to his wedding a month later; the other, the unhappy state of affairs with Archie Blackfinch, a train wreck that had been slow in the making, but threatened to derail them both.

She shook away the thought, returned to the room.

Doors led off on all sides.

The others crowded in around her shoulders. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ she said.

Persis stepped through the door to her left and into a formal dining room. A mahogany dining table ran the length of the room, its surface mirror-bright with polish. On the table was a folded newspaper and a plate harbouring the remains of a meal, a glass half-filled with amber liquid set beside it. At the foot of the table stood one of the hotel’s wheeled dining carts, draped in a white cloth. Atop the cart was a bottle of whisky, and a steel cloche on a sterling-silver tray. A window in one wall was inset with mosquito mesh. Visible behind the mesh: a succession of iron bars.

Her nostrils twitched. Oren Rake’s unique musk made itself known, settling around her shoulders like a fox fur.

A cry of alarm sent them swiftly back into the living room.

Persis followed Rake and David Keishing through another door and into a master bedroom. The cry had come from the en suite attached to the bedroom. She saw Peter framed in the doorway. The boy’s face had paled; horror twisted his handsome features.

Persis walked past him and into the bathroom.

What she saw there sent her stomach into freefall.

Chapter 10

Persis’s next port of call was Kohima’s oldest church.

Here, she hoped to speak with the American Baptist couple, Florence and Christopher Danvers.

Her own relationship with religion had always been a fretful affair, taking its cue from her father. Sam’s approach to God had always been ambivalent. At times he was willing to concede that, indeed, there might be a greater power out there, a power beyond the ken of man, because – in his words – people were idiots and idiots could not be responsible for the manifest splendour of the revealed cosmos.

Sam’s attitude to the overtly godly, however, was a different matter.

Indians had fifty words for faith, all of them interchangeable with the word madness. There were more religions on the subcontinent – both homegrown and imported – than you could shake an olive branch at. Faith, in all its permutations, wrapped itself around every aspect of daily life, and many matters pertaining to the next one. For some, such dogmatic adherence to ecumenical lore provided stability and a means of belonging to something greater than themselves. For others, religion fomented factionalism and strife, blighting lives and trapping the powerless – for there was no faith yet invented by man that did not involve a hierarchy – into millennia of doctrinal servitude.

The Partition riots that had seen a million dead in the final years of the independence Struggle proving – if her father had ever needed proof – that all religions contained, within their unyielding dogmas, the seeds of their own destruction.

Perhaps it was no surprise then, that Sam Wadia harboured a particularly virulent hatred of missionaries.

Persis remembered one occasion, several years earlier, when a robed man had come into the bookshop intent on delivering to her father his particular version of the Good News. Ten minutes later, Sam had thrown the book at him. Literally. The thousand-page tome – a treatise on post-independence tax regulations in the agricultural sector – had concussed the poor chap to such an extent that he had not only forgotten the creed that he had been vociferously proselytising just moments earlier, but also his own name.

 

The Church of St John the Baptist comprised a squat and elongated building covered by a red-tiled roof and fronted by a central bell tower. The bell tower, framed against a sky of purest blue, soared above the church’s surrounding structures, a pair of cobblers, who, it was said, had been engaged in a bitter feud for over a decade. The Shoe War, as it had become locally known, had witnessed several casualties, with various gentlemen-about-town banned from one or the other establishment for the crime of fraternising with the enemy.

The chapel’s whitewashed façade glimmered in the late afternoon sun, casting a diamond-bright radiance back into the street.

Persis and James approached on foot. The church was set close enough to the hospital, along the town’s principal thoroughfare, for them to have walked the short distance between the two in mere minutes. The street was quieter than usual, the broiling midday heat holding many hostage indoors. Those that had business that could not wait scurried along both sides of the dusty road seeking scraps of shadow like soldiers dodging sniper fire.

Persis’s uniform was soaked by the time she reached the church’s arched front doorway. She had given up fretting about the state of her attire. Being lathered in perspiration seemed the natural state of affairs here. She glanced at her colleague who had momentarily stopped to cross himself and mutter something under his breath. He caught her looking and turned away.

They stepped into the church.

The interior, a cramped space crowded with ranks of wooden pews and lit by natural light falling in from sash windows, was only marginally cooler than the street outside. Persis saw several midday worshippers sweltering in the aisles. An elderly man in a dark suit turned his head. Tribal tattoos crawled over both his cheeks and across his forehead. The sides of his head had been shaved, leaving behind a tuft of dyed black hair at the crown, giving him the look of a badly sheared sheep.

A hymn was being played on a piano. Stone steps led up to a raised platform where several young Naga were mangling the words with a nasal local inflection. A wooden pulpit rose to one side, a reading desk at its base. A King James Bible lay open on a lectern, like a shot bird. Behind the choir, a teak cross loomed from the wall.

‘May I be of assistance?’

They turned to find a short white man, rotund beneath his robe, waddling towards them. His head was entirely bald and an aggressive shade of pink. A clerical collar, tightened around a bullfrog neck, seemed all but set to shoot off under the intolerable pressure. The man blinked. ‘James? Is that you? We haven’t seen you here for a while.’

The sub-inspector shot a sidelong glance at his senior officer, then turned back to the approaching minister. ‘Pastor Matthews. I – I’ve been busy.’

‘Too busy for God?’ The pastor waggled a disapproving finger. ‘It’s a good thing God is never too busy for you.’ He beamed at Persis, the smile transforming his features, putting her in mind of a giant baby. ‘You must be the new inspector I’ve been hearing about. A woman! My word, whatever will they think of next? Female priests?’ His features collapsed into mirth.

Persis bit down hard on her tongue. Her fingers twitched beside her revolver. ‘We’re here to see Christopher and Florence Danvers. I understand they’re meeting with the council.’

Matthews looked surprised. ‘Why yes. They are. What exactly is your interest in them?’

‘I’m afraid that’s police business.’

The man seemed unimpressed. ‘You’re inside a church, Inspector. Nothing is hidden from God’s eyes.’

‘We’re making routine enquiries,’ said James. ‘In relation to last night’s incident at the Hotel Victoria.’

‘By incident, I take it you mean Mohan Sinha’s brutal murder?’ Matthews crossed himself. ‘May he rest in peace. Though, I suspect peace in the afterlife is something that may well elude our erstwhile governor.’

‘Why do you say that?’ said Persis.

Matthews stuck out a belligerent lower lip. ‘Because Mohan Sinha was hardly a man of peace, Inspector.’ He expanded no further, instead turning on his heel. ‘Follow me.’

 

They tracked after him as he wobbled his way into the interior of the church, along a narrow hallway, and through to a small conference room at the rear of the premises.

As they entered, Christopher and Florence Danvers looked up from a large table. Florence’s expression was one of surprise. Christopher Danvers rose clumsily to his feet, face turning a shade of puce. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? We’re in a meeting.’

‘You were too tired to speak with me yesterday,’ said Persis. ‘So we will speak now.’

Danvers looked as if he might choke on his own outrage. Persis saw his wife lay a restraining hand on his arm.

‘This is highly irregular, Inspector.’ Persis focused on the man who had spoken, the third person in the room, the individual the Danvers had been meeting with. A slim, neatly pressed gentleman in a linen suit. Persis saw that he was of mixed ancestry: half white, half Naga. Just enough of each to be despised by both. That was how it often went with those whose genetic heritage condemned them to a cold welcome around two campfires, at least in Persis’s experience. Indians often seemed hellbent on punishing those of their countrymen who, through no fault of their own, evinced bloodlines of their former conquerors.

The man stood up. ‘My name is Simon Ruivah and I am the chief secretary of the Naga Hills Baptist Church Council. What is this about?’

Persis explained why they were there.

Ruivah looked troubled. ‘Yes. I was informed this morning of Sinha’s death. A horrific tragedy and one that, no doubt, will have enormous repercussions for the region.’

‘In what way?’

‘Come now, Inspector. You’ve been here long enough to understand the delicate balance between the various forces vying for power in the Naga Hills.’

‘By forces, you mean the central government, the army, local India loyalists, and those demanding Naga independence. And then there’s you, in the middle of it all.’

‘The church is a neutral entity. Our aim is solely to promote the message of peace, and to mediate where appropriate.’

Persis refrained from pointing out that, if history was anything to go by, the sort of mediation religious orders provided often came at the point of a sword.

‘At any rate, your enquiries are clearly of great import. I will leave you all to discuss the matter.’ Ruivah turned to the Danvers. ‘We will continue our conversation at a later time.’

Persis watched the man leave, dragging Matthews along in his wake. Turning back to the Danvers, she saw that Florence had retaken her seat while Christopher Danvers was still standing and seething. ‘Have you any idea how long it took us to set up this meeting?’

‘No,’ said Persis, and took a seat.

Danvers had clearly been expecting more, an opportunity for him to give vent to his outrage. But the enemy’s refusal to engage left him spluttering. He looked helplessly at his wife, and then his knees seemed to give way, and he collapsed back into his chair.

James sat down beside Persis. A ceiling fan moved above them, ruffling the collar of his dress shirt.

‘You certainly know how to make an entrance,’ began Florence. ‘How can we help you, Inspector?’

‘As I stated last night, it’s my belief that Mohan Sinha’s killer was a guest of the hotel—’

‘Ergo we’re suspects?’ interrupted Christopher. His sallow features were once again animated.

‘Let her speak.’

The American subs. . .