The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star

Book 3: A Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation

by Vaseem Khan

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals; Private Investigators

Synopsis

The enchanting new Baby Ganesh Agency novel sees Inspector Chopra and his elephant sidekick investigating the dark side of Bollywood.

Mumbai thrives on extravagant spectacles and larger-than-life characters.

But even in the city of dreams, there is no guarantee of a happy ending.

Rising star and incorrigible playboy Vikram Verma has disappeared, leaving his latest film in jeopardy. Hired by Verma's formidable mother to find him, Inspector Chopra and his sidekick, baby elephant Ganesha, embark on a journey deep into the world's most flamboyant movie industry.

As they uncover feuding stars, failed investments and death threats, it seems that many people have a motive for wanting Verma out of the picture.

And yet, as Chopra has long suspected, in Bollywood the truth is often stranger than fiction...

Release date: July 18, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

On the day that he was due to retire, Inspector Ashwin Chopra discovered that he had inherited an elephant.

‘What do you mean he’s sending me an elephant?’ he said, turning in astonishment from the mirror in which he had been adjusting the collar of his uniform to face his wife Archana, who was hovering anxiously in the doorway, and who was known to friends and family alike as Poppy.

‘Here, see for yourself,’ said Poppy, handing him the letter. But Chopra had no time for that now. It was his final day in office and Sub-Inspector Rangwalla was waiting for him downstairs in the police jeep. He knew that the boys at the station had planned some sort of farewell celebration, and, not wishing to ruin their surprise, he had been feigning ignorance of the preparations going on around him all week.

Chopra stuffed the letter into the pocket of his khaki trousers, then headed for the door with Poppy in tow, her heart-shaped face pulled into a pout. Poppy was annoyed. Her husband had not even noticed that she had worn a new silk sari for this special day, that fresh lotus flowers garlanded the silky black bun of her hair, that kohl had been expertly applied beneath her almond-shaped brown eyes. A frown now sat above her small nose and two spots of colour glowed on her milkmaid-fair cheeks. But Chopra’s thoughts were already at the station.

What he couldn’t know then was that the day would hold another, entirely unanticipated surprise–a murder case, the final case of his long and illustrious career, the case that would rock the city of Mumbai to its foundations and herald the birth of its most singular detective agency.

‘It will be one hundred and four degrees today,’ remarked Rangwalla as they juddered along the potholed access road leading out of the Air Force Colony within which Inspector Chopra lived. Chopra could well believe it. Already his shirt was sticking to his back, a rivulet of sweat snaking down from under his peaked cap to drip onto his nose.

It was the hottest summer in Mumbai for more than twenty years. And for the second year in a row the monsoons had failed to arrive on cue.

As usual the route to the station was clogged with traffic. Auto-rickshaws buzzed through the dusty urban maze, a menace to man and beast alike. A low-lying cloud of pollution curdled the heat, stinging Chopra’s nostrils as he leaned out of the rickshaw and squinted up at another of the numerous giant hoardings that had sprung up around the city since the start of the elections. A labourer in shorts and a tattered vest was balanced precariously on bamboo scaffolding painting a moustache onto the grinning face of a well-known politician.

Chopra leaned back as the local market slid by and the air became hazy with spice particles and the smell of rotting vegetables. A line of roadside food sellers added to the noxious miasma: iron-stomached construction workers queued for early-morning rations sizzling on giant frying pans heated by butane cylinders.

Further along they saw an elephant lumbering down the road, a mahout perched on its back, a bamboo sun hat pulled down low over his ears. Chopra watched the beast sway past. ‘An elephant!’ he muttered to himself, recalling his recent conversation with Poppy. Surely there had to be some mistake!

A crowd had gathered in the station’s courtyard. At first Chopra thought that this was the ‘surprise’ the boys had been planning for him… and then he realised that the gaggle of sweating citizenry was of the type that seemed to materialise, as if by magic, at the scene of any altercation on Mumbai’s pavementless streets.

A loud voice could be heard emanating from deep within the bovine press of bodies.

In the centre of the crowd Chopra found the plump, sweating form of young Constable Surat being loudly berated by a short, dumpy woman in a dun-coloured sari.

‘My son is dead, and they won’t lift a finger!’ the woman was shouting. ‘They are only here to serve their rich masters! I won’t let them get away with it!’

A number of purse-mouthed clones of the woman muttered encouragement from the edges of the circle.

Chopra immediately noted that the woman’s eyes were red and swollen as if she had been crying. Her greying hair had escaped her bun, and straggled around her sweating forehead, on which a red bindi had run, adding to the overall impression of derangement. Confronted by Chopra’s uniform, and stern expression, the woman momentarily stopped shouting.

Chopra knew that he cut an authoritative figure. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a handsome head of jet-black hair greying only at the sideburns, he had aged well. His brown skin was as yet unlined. Dark soulful eyes beneath thick eyebrows gave him the aura of a serious man. Beneath those eyes sat a nose that his wife assured him had ‘character’. Privately, Chopra was proudest of his moustache, a bristling, well-groomed affair like a double-handed salute held steady beneath his nose.

‘What is the matter, madam?’ asked Chopra, severely.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ She pointed at Rangwalla, who swivelled his eyes away from the woman’s accusing finger and towards Chopra.

‘Look!’ howled the woman to her crowd of followers. ‘He hasn’t even told the inspector sahib! If I came here in a big white Mercedes they would be jumping around me like pye-dogs! But for a poor woman and her poor son, there is no justice!’

‘Enough!’ barked Chopra. He was pleased to see that everyone, even the woman, fell silent. ‘Rangwalla, explain to me what is going on.’

‘What will he explain?’ exploded the woman. ‘I will explain! My son, my precious boy, has been killed! His body has been lying in your police station since last night. Until now, not even one officer has come to my house to take a report. Whole night I have waited, crying for my dead son.’

‘Rangwalla, is this true?’

‘It is true that we have a body, sir.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the back, sir.’

‘Madam, I must ask you to wait here. Rangwalla, come with me.’

Rangwalla followed Chopra into the rear of the station, where the cells and the storage facilities were housed. In the cells a brace of drunks slept fitfully, and a local thief, well known to Chopra, salaamed as he strode past.

In the storeroom, on a stack of banana crates, lay the body.

Chopra pulled aside the white sheet with which it had been covered and looked down at the bloated, greying face. The boy had once been handsome.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was your last day. The boy was dead anyway. Clear case of drowning.’

‘The world hasn’t stopped because it is Inspector Chopra’s last day,’ said Chopra sternly, then: ‘Where was he found?’

‘In Marol, where the pipeline ends. He must have fallen into the sewage creek. He certainly smelled like it.’

‘The creek must be almost dry,’ frowned Chopra. ‘There’s been no rain for months.’

‘It seems he was drunk. A whisky bottle was found beside his body.’

‘Who found him?’

‘A local raised the alarm. They sent a boy over to tell us. I had the body brought here, and sent Surat along to ask a few questions, but no one had seen anything.’

It was funny, thought Chopra, how, in a city of twenty million, where it was virtually impossible to enjoy a moment of privacy, his fellow citizens so often managed to see absolutely nothing.

‘Why was the body brought here?’ It was unusual for a corpse to end up at the station. Usually it would be ferried straight to the local hospital.

‘We contacted the hospital but there was some trouble going on over there. I believe some lunatics had set up a roadblock and were harassing vehicles going in and out. I thought it would be better to pick up the body ourselves and keep it here until the morning.’

Chopra understood. The ongoing elections were a heated affair. Up and down the country ordinary people–the ‘lunatics’ Rangwalla referred to–were making their voices heard. It had been a particularly busy time for Mumbai’s police officers. Indians, on the whole, did not believe in demonstrating quietly.

‘Do you have a panchnama?’

‘Yes.’ The panchnama was prepared by the first officer at the scene and countersigned by two local people of ‘good standing’ who attested to the fact that a body had been discovered and that the police had been duly summoned. Rangwalla had done well. In many areas of Mumbai, finding two citizens of good standing was harder than finding the killer, Chopra had often reflected.

‘How was the body identified?’

‘The boy was carrying a driving licence. We contacted his family. The mother came in last night and confirmed the identity. She made quite a scene. I had to send her home.’

Losing a son, thought Chopra. What a terrible shock that must have been! No wonder the poor woman seemed unhinged.

‘Look, sir, don’t take this the wrong way, but… this will soon be Inspector Suryavansh’s problem. Let him deal with it.’

Suryavansh was his successor at the station. Chopra hesitated, but then realised that Rangwalla was absolutely correct. It was a matter of protocol, after all. In a few short hours he would no longer be a police officer. He would no longer be Inspector Chopra, just plain old Ashwin Chopra, another member of the billion-strong aam junta that made India great.

He was suddenly overcome by a deep feeling of melancholy.

The day passed quicker than he could have thought possible.

After Rangwalla had taken the woman’s statement, she had finally agreed to be driven home. Chopra had then settled into the well-worn wooden chair behind his desk to complete the various formalities of his last day in office.

Above him the creaking ceiling fan ladled the hot air around the room, while the Times of India wall-clock counted down the final moments of his career. To Chopra the clock sounded like a ticking bomb.

At lunchtime he opened his tiffin-box and sniffed his food. It was a ritual. Chopra was fiercely allergic to ginger–in the presence of which he would sneeze uncontrollably–and had made a longstanding habit of authenticating his meals, even though he knew his wife rarely forgot his aversion. Today Poppy had made him a meal of aloo gobi and chapatti, still warm inside the tiered tiffin-box. But he had no appetite.

He pushed the steel containers aside just as Poppy called to remind him to take his pills. Dutifully, Chopra removed the bottle of tablets from his pocket, shook two into the palm of his hand, then gulped them down with a glass of water and a shudder.

The ritual depressed him greatly.

At three o’clock Chopra was surprised by a call from Assistant Commissioner of Police Suresh Rao. Chopra had been reporting to Rao for years–the Sahar station was one of three that lay within ACP Rao’s remit. He and Rao had never seen eye to eye. Rao had once run the nearby Chakala station and Chopra had found him to be a mealy-mouthed thug; a round-faced, pot-bellied little dictator known for his cronyism and exuberant use of police force. In the way of things in the Brihanmumbai police, Rao had been promoted whilst Chopra himself remained in post.

Briefly Chopra wondered if Rao had called to gloat. The ACP had been on cloud nine ever since he had discovered that Chopra was being forced into early retirement. But Rao surprised him by launching himself in another direction altogether. ‘Chopra, it has come to my attention that a body was discovered in Marol last night.’

‘Yes,’ Chopra said. ‘That is correct.’ He could not bring himself to punctuate his sentences with ‘sir’ when talking to the ACP.

‘Can you tell me by whose authority the body was taken to your station, instead of the hospital?’

Chopra hesitated, then said: ‘By my authority.’ He had no wish to see Rangwalla on the carpet. ‘What exactly is the problem?’

‘Well, it is not procedure, is it?’ the ACP whined. ‘At any rate, make sure the body is sent to the hospital right away. Remember, Chopra, this is your last day. Your interest in matters is at an end.’

‘My interest in matters ends at precisely 6 p.m. this evening,’ Chopra said.

‘Always pig-headed!’ Rao said, losing his temper. ‘Well, let me tell you, Chopra, your days of insubordination are done.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Get that body to the hospital. That is an order!’

‘And the autopsy?’

‘What autopsy?’

‘The boy’s death may have been the result of foul play. I will be authorising an autopsy.’

‘You will be doing no such thing!’ Rao exploded. ‘The case is open and shut. The boy drowned. There is no need of any autopsy.’

What is going on here? Chopra thought. ‘How do you know the boy drowned?’

Rao seemed to splutter on the end of the line, then said, ‘I make it my business to know. That is why I am an ACP and you are not. Now listen to me very carefully. There is to be no autopsy. The boy drowned. Case closed.’

‘Perhaps I will decide for myself,’ Chopra said hotly.

‘By God, man, who do you think you are!’ Rao exploded. ‘I’ll have your badge—!’ He stopped as he realised what he was saying. Then, ‘Just get that body to the morgue.’

Rao banged the phone down.

Chopra stared at the wall for a long moment before finally returning the receiver to its cradle.

I have come to see you, Khun Ladarat, about a matter of the utmost urgency.”

The comfortably built man sitting on the other side of the desk paused, and shifted his bulk in a way that prompted the little wooden chair underneath him to register a subdued groan of protest.

“A matter of the utmost urgency,” he repeated, “and more than a little delicacy.”

Ladarat Patalung began to suspect that this Monday morning was going to be more interesting than most. Her conclusion was based in part, of course, on the formal designation of the matter at hand as one of the “utmost urgency.” In her experience, that didn’t happen often on a Monday morning. Despite the fact that she was the official nurse ethicist for Sriphat Hospital, the largest—and best—hospital in northern Thailand, it was unusual to be confronted by a matter that could be reasonably described in this way.

But Ladarat’s conclusion was also based on her observation that her visitor was nervous. Very nervous. And nervousness was no doubt an unusual sensation for this broad-faced and broad-shouldered visitor. Solid and comforting, with close-cropped graying hair, a slow smile, and gentle manners that would not have been out of place in a Buddhist monk, Detective Wiriya Mookjai had been an almost silent presence in her life for the past three years. Ever since her cousin Siriwan Pookusuwan had introduced them.

Ladarat herself didn’t have much cause to meet members of the Chiang Mai Royal Police Force. But Siriwan most certainly did. She ran a girlie bar—a brothel, of sorts—in the old city. So she had more contact of that nature, perhaps, than she would like. Not all of it good.

Khun Wiriya was that rarest of beings—an honest policeman. They did exist in Thailand, all reports to the contrary. But they were rare enough to be worth celebrating when one was discovered. In fact, Wiriya was something of a hero. He never talked about it, but Ladarat had heard that he’d been injured in a shoot-out several years ago. In fact, he was a hero to many younger officers who aspired to be injured in a similar way, though of course without unnecessary pain and with no residual disability.

She’d met him before at the tea shop her cousin also owned, although he’d never before come to see her at work. Yet now he had. And now he was sitting across from her in her little basement office in Sriphat Hospital, with just her little desk between them. And he seemed to be nervous.

How did she know that the detective was nervous? The most significant clue was his tie. Khun Wiriya was wearing a green tie. He was wearing a green tie, that is, on a particular Monday, the day of the king’s birth. Today almost everyone in Thailand of a mature age—a category that included both the detective and herself—would honor the occasion by wearing something yellow. For men, it would be a tie.

Ladarat herself was honoring the day with a yellow silk blouse, along with a blue skirt that was her constant uniform. They were not particularly flattering to her thin figure, she knew. Her late husband, Somboon, had often joked—gently—that sometimes it was difficult to tell whether a suit of clothes concealed his wife, or whether perhaps they hid a coat hangar. It was true she lacked obvious feminine… landmarks. That, plus oversize glasses and hair pinned tightly in a bun, admittedly did not contribute to a figure of surpassing beauty.

But Ladarat Patalung was not the sort of person to dwell on herself. Either her strong points or any points at all. Those people existed, she knew. Particularly in Sriphat Hospital. They were very much aware of their finer points, in particular, and eagerly sought out confirmation of those points. These were people who waited hungrily for compliments, much as a hunting crocodile lurks in the reeds by the edge of a lake.

If she were that sort of person—the sort of person who dwells on her talents and wants to add yet another to her list—it might have occurred to her to think that her deduction regarding Khun Wiriya’s nervousness revealed the hidden talents of a detective. She might have reached this conclusion because she noticed things like the doctor’s behavior. And not everyone did.

But she was most emphatically not the sort of person to dwell on her talents. Besides, her perceptiveness wasn’t even a talent, really. Not any more than being a nurse ethicist was a talent. Anyone could do it, given the right training. Ladarat herself was certainly nothing special.

Being an ethicist was all about observing. And that was more of a… habit. Anyone could do it. You just had to be quiet, and listen, and watch. That’s all.

It was a habit that was a little like finding forest elephants in her home village near Mae Jo, in the far northwestern corner of Thailand. Anybody could see an elephant in front of her nose, of course. But to sense where they might be, back in the undergrowth, you had to be very still. And watchful.

In that moment, as the detective fidgeted and his eyes skittered across her bookshelves, Ladarat resolved that she would be very quiet. She would be watchful. She would be patient as her father taught her to be when they went looking for elephants thirty years ago. She was only a little girl then, but he taught her to pay attention to the world around her. That was what this moment called for.

She settled back to wait, sure that the reason for Khun Wiriya’s nervousness would emerge just as the shape of an elephant would materialize from the overgrowth, if you were patient enough. After all, Khun Wiriya was an important detective. His was a very prestigious position, held by a very important man. This was a man who had no time for social visits, and therefore a man who could be counted on to get to the point quickly. So Ladarat looked expectantly across her desk at the detective, her pencil poised above a clean yellow notepad that she had labeled with today’s date.

She hoped she wouldn’t have to wait long, though. She, too, was busy. She was the nurse ethicist for the entire hospital, and she had a full docket already. And the Royal Hospital Inspection Committee would be coming to visit next Monday, exactly one short week from now. And not only did she need to impress the committee, she also needed to impress Tippawan Taksin, her supervisor. Khun Tippawan was a thin, pinched woman with a near-constant squint who held the exalted title of “Director of Excellence.” A title that was due in no small part to the fact that she was a distant relation of the Thai noble family. And what did that title mean exactly?

Anyway, impressing the inspector was one thing, but impressing the tough Khun Tippawan would be something else altogether.

She had so much to prepare. Even if she worked twenty-four hours every day for the next week, she would never please Khun Tippawan. So hopefully the trouble—whatever it was—would emerge soon. And it did.

“I mean to say…” the detective said, “we may be looking for a murderer.”

Ladarat nodded but suspected that she did not entirely succeed in maintaining a calm, unruffled demeanor. It wasn’t every day that she had such a conversation about murder. In fact, she had never had such a conversation.

At least the case of the detective’s nervousness had been solved. This was Chiang Mai, after all. A small city. A safe city. Where the old Thai values of respect and courtesy still flourished. A murder here would be… well, not unthinkable. But very, very unusual. Of course Khun Wiriya would be nervous—and excited—thinking that he might have discovered a murderer.

At a loss for words, she wrote: “Murder?” She looked down with new respect at her humble yellow pad, which had suddenly become very, very interesting.

“We received a call last night from a young police officer—a corporal—working at the emergency room of this hospital,” Wiriya said slowly. “He called about a patient whose wife had brought him there. When they arrived, the man was quite dead apparently.”

Ladarat wrote: “Woman. Man. Emergency. Quite dead.”

“It seems that he had been dead for a little while—long enough, in fact, that there was nothing at all they could do for him. So they called the emergency room doctor to fill out the death certificate.”

Ladarat underlined “Quite.”

“But this corporal thought perhaps he recognized the man’s wife,” Wiriya continued. “He thought… he’d met her before at another hospital. But he wasn’t certain, you understand?”

Ladarat wasn’t at all sure she understood. She nodded anyway.

The detective paused, choosing his words carefully. Ladarat waited. Thus far she wasn’t seeing the need for an ethicist. But she would be patient. You must never approach an elephant in the forest, her father told her. You must always allow it to approach you.

“So the corporal asked the doctor in charge, you see. To share his concerns.” He flipped open a small spiral notebook and checked. “A Dr.… Aroon?”

He looked inquisitively at her, but Ladarat shook her head. It was no one she knew. But then, doctors were always coming and going. They’d work for a year at this government hospital, then they’d move to one of the private hospitals that paid much more. It was a shame.

“But here it is,” Wiriya said. “This woman? Who he thought he’d met before? You see, the last time they met was in the same exact circumstances. She’d brought her husband into the emergency room after he died. In both circumstances, the men had been brought in too late to help them.”

She wrote: “Two deaths. More?”

He paused, and they both thought about what this coincidence might mean. Nothing good.

“Some women are… unlucky in this way,” Ladarat suggested. “It was a tragedy, to be sure, but this man, was he… an older man?”

Wiriya shrugged. “He was not a young man, it is safe to say. Neither was the other man. About forty-five, perhaps. That is not too old, is it, Khun?”

She supposed it was not.

“And what was the cause of death?”

“For the first, the corporal didn’t know.” He shrugged. “But for this one, the woman, she said it was his heart.”

“His heart? Of course it was his heart. Your heart stops and you die. That’s not an explanation, any more than saying a plane crash happened… because the plane, it hit the ground.”

Wiriya looked suitably chastened. “Well, that’s why I came to you, you see? You have this special medical knowledge. And, of course, you think like a detective.”

A detective? Her? Most certainly not. That required skills. And penetrating intelligence, and cunning. She herself had none of those attributes. She would leave detecting to others who were better suited for the job.

“But,” she said, thinking out loud, “if he did have heart failure, for instance, there might have been signs that the doctor noticed. Those would be documented in the medical record.”

“The corporal said that the doctor didn’t write anything. He didn’t want to admit the patient because that would mean more paperwork. So he just signed the death certificate.”

“I see. Well, then for two marriages to end in death, it is unlucky, to be sure. Still, it doesn’t sound suspicious, does it?”

Wiriya was silent. Obviously he thought this situation was suspicious, or a busy man like him would not have wasted his time visiting her. Unless… perhaps this was just an excuse for a social call? Highly doubtful. He was a careful, methodical man, to be sure. Most important, a good man. And not unattractive.

But what was she thinking? He was here to ask for her help in a murder investigation. Her, Ladarat Patalung, nurse ethicist. And here she was thinking crazy thoughts.

Still the detective said nothing. He leaned back slightly in his chair and studied the ceiling above his head very carefully. He seemed to be thinking.

About what?

What do detectives think about? Real detectives. They look for patterns, don’t they? They look for facts that fit . . .