Vandita nodded. “He was coming from the house when he heard two men talking on a pathway nearby. One of the men tried to run, but the other man fired a laser at him. The man fell over and the other man fired again, at his face. Then the man walked away. After a few seconds the boy followed the man, perhaps a kilometre, and saw him go into a house. Then he left quickly and went home to the scrapyard near the spaceport.”
Rana swallowed. She tried to marshal her thoughts.
“Vandita,” she said at last, “do you know where the killer lived? Did the boy say?”
Vandita shook her head. “I didn’t talk to the boy. A friend of his told me. He didn’t say where the killer lived, but the boy saw the house he went into.”
Rana was nodding. Shiva… after all the work she’d done, all the complex reasoning, she might solve the case thanks to the testimony of a chance eye witness.
“Vandita, this is important. Can you tell me the boy’s name? I swear to you that I won’t tell him who told me. You’ve no reason to be afraid.” She paused. “You’ve got to tell me. We’ve got to stop this man killing again.”
Vandita nodded. “Ah-cha. The boy is called Ahmed Prakesh. You will find him in the old Tata scrapyard.”
Rana reached out and stroked the young girl’s cheek. “Vandita, you don’t know how important this is. I’ll see you later.”
Rana left the makeshift dwelling beneath the Howrah bridge and took a taxi to the spaceport. She considered contacting Vishwanath about the latest development, but decided against it. She would have to be very careful in her dealings with the boy. The presence of more than one police officer might provoke Ahmed to flight. She would handle this interview herself.
The Tata scrapyard was a vast area of tangled carbon-fibre parts neighbouring the spaceport. The mammoth carcasses of decommissioned spaceships reared against the lights of the port, arranged like the exhibits in some forgotten museum. Rana paid the taxi fare and squeezed through a rent in the polycarbon fencing. In the glaring overspill of the spaceport halogens, the scrapyard was transformed into a landscape of dark shadow and highlighted carbon fibre. Rana walked between the sliced and sectioned remains of ships that had once proudly made their way through the void, sad chunks of machines bearing the faded livery of lines long defunct.
She halted, stood quietly and listened. The only sound was from the port itself, the roar of a tug as it hauled a spaceship across the tarmac to a blast-off pit. The noise faded, replaced by silence. To her right, Rana detected the faint sound of music. When her eyes adjusted to the dark shadows, she made out movement—the figure of a young boy or girl, running towards the source of the music, no doubt to tell his or her friends of Rana’s intrusion.
Rana walked towards the bulbous shape of a derelict space-tug. The music stopped. Rana imagined a gang of street-kids, holding their breaths, watching each other in alarm.
She ducked through the entrance hatch of the old tug. Before her, half a dozen big-eyed urchins sat around the bulky shape of an ancient radio. A defective glow-tube provided stuttering half-light. A drooping stick of incense filled the old cargo hold with a sickly sweet stench.
Rana squatted on her heels and looked about the group of boys and girls. She smiled at the chubby, frightened face of a small girl. “Amita? Is that you?” she asked in Hindi.
The six-year-old smiled timorously. “Officer Rao,” the girl said. “We thought it was a security guard!”
Rana smiled. “Aren’t you going to introduce me, Amita?”
She glanced around the group, trying to detect the boy called Ahmed from his guilty expression. The difficulty was, their suspicion of the police gave them all expressions of guilt.
Amita looked at her friends. “Officer Rao works with children,” she explained. “Last year she gave me rupees for a new dress.” She glanced at Rana, smoothed her palms down the front of a dirty blue smock, and smiled proudly.
“Who are your friends, Amita?” Rana asked.
“This is Nadeen, and this is Sumar, and Kal, and Ahmed, and Ashok…”
Ahmed… a tiny boy in shorts and a ripped T-shirt that once upon a time might have been white. He was no older, Rana thought, than six or seven. He stared at Rana, a rabbit mesmerised by a cobra.
Rana nodded. “The thing is, you see, I came here hoping that you might be able to help me. I have a hundred rupees to give to anyone who can tell me something.” She paused and stared at the children. Their eyes bulged at the thought of so much money. “Last night a terrible murder was committed in the district of Raneesh, three kilometres south of here. A man was shot dead with a laser.” She glanced at Ahmed. He was staring at the ground. “I need information about this killing. I need to know where the killer lives, so that I can lock him up and stop him from killing again.”
The children looked at each other. One or two glanced furtively at Ahmed. The others, clearly not in the know, looked disappointed that they would be unable to claim the rupees.
“If anyone can tell me where the killer lives, they can have…” She reached into her pocket and counted out five twenty-rupee notes, laying them one by one on top of the old radio. The children stared, transfixed.
Rana picked up the notes and slipped them back into her breast pocket. She stood up and said, “I’ll be waiting outside. If anyone can tell me what I want to know, come and see me and I’ll give them all the rupees, ah- cha?”
She looked around the group of staring faces one last time, before ducking out of the old spaceship and standing, heart hammering, in the dazzling glare of a halogen spotlight. She could hear the frantic babble of high voices from inside. Then silence.
A minute later, appearing timidly like some hibernating animal fearing the presence of a predator, Ahmed emerged through the hatch. He stood shivering in the humid night before Rana, staring up at her with massive eyes.
“I…” He could hardly speak for fear. He gulped “I know someone who saw the killing,” he stammered. “The boy… my friend, he told me where the man lives.”
Rana knelt and took his hand. “Can you remember what your friend said?” she asked. “Can you remember where the man lives?”
Ahmed nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Ah-cha. My friend said he lives on Allahabad Marg, near Raneesh.”
Rana nodded. “Can you remember the number of the house?” Allahabad Marg was a long street that stretched for over a kilometre through the exclusive western suburbs.
The boy looked crestfallen. “No… my friend, he cannot remember.” He brightened. “But the house, it’s strange. It looks like this.” He moved to the flank of the tug and, in the dust that covered a domed engine nacelle, drew the shape of the house with his forefinger.
Rana watched the collection of odd shapes appear in the dust, a series of almost semi-circular cowlings. It was not exactly an architect’s scale drawing, but she recognised the shape. In the rich suburbs it was fashionable to have one’s house styled in polycarbon after famous world buildings.
This one, she knew, was the old Sydney Opera House.
She felt her stomach tighten in excitement. From her breast pocket, along with the rupee notes, Rana took the dozen pix of the computer-aged Madrigal laser killer.
“Ahmed, did the man look anything like any of these men?”
She showed him the pix one by one.
Ahmed frowned and shook his head. “I think he had a thin face, and silver hair.” He stopped, realising his mistake, and looked up at Rana. “I won’t be arrested?” he pleaded.
“Ahmed…” She took his fingers and kissed them. “I promise you that nothing will happen, ah-cha? Look, here are the hundred rupees.”
He reached out, slowly, and took the red notes. He held them before his eyes as if disbelieving his luck. Then he darted back inside the ship, chattering excitedly to his friends.
Rana slipped the pix back into her pocket. So the killer was thin-faced, with silver hair. It could still be the Madrigal killer, she realised, though prematurely aged. He might even have been in disguise.
She resolved to go immediately to the house on Allahabad Marg that looked like the old Sydney Opera House. She would claim that she was conducting routine enquiries, question the man about the recent killing in the area, and assess his reaction.
As she left the scrapyard and made her way to the spaceport taxi rank, she wondered whether correct procedure would be to contact Vishwanath first. But, she reasoned with herself, he had given her permission to
