“But then someone stopped him,” cut in Singh. “Someone who knew he was alive.”
“Could be, Inspector. But we cannot discount the possibility the target was Professor Pandey and Dr. Jha happened to get killed also.”
A voice called from downstairs: “Inspector-ji? Star TV has reached!”
“Shit,” said Singh under his breath. “What am I meant to tell them?”
“If you will take one minute, Inspector, I have got one plan hiding up my sleeve.”
The plan went like this:
“Inform Star TV and all Professor Pandey was murdered. Tell them his driver was shot, also.”
“His driver?”
“Dr. Jha had been posing as Professor Pandey’s driver these past days. That is, after shaving his beard and putting black dye in his hair. Even I failed to recognize him when I paid Professor-ji a visit. Must be they had a good laugh at my expense.”
Puri got back to the point.
“Tell them Professor Pandey’s driver was wounded. Mention he was rushed to St. Stephens and his chances are fifty-fifty. Then tomorrow the hospital should announce he is very much stable – expected to make a full recovery but not conscious. Just he should be placed in a private room. No guard. Remember he is a driver, only, an everyday person.”
“But… who is
“One of my boys will play the part of Dr. Jha and we two will be present, also.”
“You’re expecting the killer to come?”
Puri nodded.
“But surely he’ll know that we know the driver is really Dr. Jha and suspect a trap.”
“That is a risk he will take, no, assuming Dr. Jha saw his killer.”
Singh smiled. “That’s ingenious, sir,” he said.
“Let us hope, Inspector,” replied Puri briskly.
His thoughts turned to Facecream. She had called him earlier in the day to say that Maharaj Swami had left the ashram, apparently for Delhi, and that she was planning to break into his private residence.
Perhaps she would be able to establish what the connection was between the Godman and Professor Pandey. It was the only piece of the puzzle that still didn’t fit.
Nineteen
Facecream lay on her bedroll staring up at the ceiling fan – it was a good two hours after the lights had been switched off in the dormitory. The mantra in praise of Shiva, which she and her fellow devotees had spent most of the evening repeating over and over again, was playing back in her head.
“Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shivaya…”
According to Maharaj Swami’s philosophy, repetition of such mantras would help awaken her spiritual life force, her Kundalini, as well as stimulate her chakras.
So far, though, all she had got out of the exercise was a splitting headache.
She tried to focus her mind on other things: her adopted eight-year-old son, Momo, who was being looked after by her ayah; her flat in Delhi, where the three of them lived together; the hungry street cats that perched on her wall and meowed and yowled until she fed them.
She sang herself one of her favorite Hindi songs, “Paani Paani Re.” But nothing worked. The mantra kept cutting back into her thought processes like a traffic update on FM radio. “Om namah Shivaya.”
Aaaagh! No wonder so many of the devotees wore eerie, passive-aggressive grins, she thought.
At three in the morning, Facecream crawled out from under her mosquito net and, chappals in hand, tiptoed silently from the dormitory.
The corridor beyond was dark and empty. Facecream made her way to the stairs and crept down to the ground floor. Upon reaching the bottom and hearing footsteps approaching, she ducked under the stairwell. One of Maha-raj Swami’s senior devotees shuffled past, clicking his bead necklace between his fingers, and exited through the front door of the residence hall.
Puri’s operative stepped out from her hiding place and made for the emergency side door, which was propped open and, like all such doors in India, never alarmed.
It was cooler outside. A light breeze played in the topmost branches of the Himalayan maple next to the building. Crouched beneath it, Facecream took several deep breaths to calm her nerves and surveyed the surrounding terrain.
The wide lawn in front of the tree ended at the edge of the driveway, which was lined with lollipop streetlights and statues of Hindu saints.
Off to the right stood the main reception building and behind this the darshan hall and Maharaj Swami’s residence, where there were only a couple of lights on.
Facecream spent ten minutes under the maple tree making sure that the coast was clear. Then she made her way to the darshan hall, keeping to the shadows and meandering between plinths, benches and trees. She reached a side door that was warped and didn’t close properly and slipped inside the building.
Although the lights were all off and no moonlight filtered in through the stained glass windows, there were still enough candles burning under the effigies for her to see her way up onto the stage.
There, she had to switch on Flush’s pocket-size flashlight in order to search for the trapdoor behind Maharaj Swami’s silver throne she was sure must be there. Facecream soon came across its outline but in the process bumped her head into something hard – a large pane of thin glass about ten feet across and at least twenty feet high suspended on ultrathin wires from the ceiling. Hanging at an angle of forty-five degrees over the trapdoor, it touched the stage at its base.
Puri’s operative felt her way behind the glass and discovered a second, smaller trapdoor. This one had a latch.
It lifted easily to reveal a set of concrete stairs.
At the bottom, Facecream found herself standing at the beginning of a passage.
On one side stood a door.
The room beyond was roughly ten feet square and twenty feet high. Its ceiling was the underside of the larger of the two trapdoors. Now she could see that it was designed to open downward on quiet rubber-lined tracks. A switch on the wall operated a mechanical pulley system like those used on automatic garage doors.
In the middle of the room stood a plinth with a light projector on top of it. The front of the projector was raised up on a block. It was pointing at a wooden platform built against the wall at the back of the room. The platform stood about six feet off the ground and could be reached by a ladder.
On the wall opposite the platform hung a large silvered mirror positioned at an angle of forty-five degrees.
There were only two pieces of furniture in the room: a chair and a dressing table. In a drawer of the latter, she found a rubber mask. Its face was that of a wizened old man with a thick, bulbous nose and pronounced frontal lobes.
Facecream recognized it instantly: it was the rishi oracle.
She spent a few minutes trying to make sense of how the illusion worked and thought she understood. An actor wearing the mask stood on the platform and the light projector was switched on. His brightly lit profile appeared in the silvered mirror and was reflected up to the pane of glass on the stage through the trapdoors, which opened on demand. Somehow – science was not her strong point – this created a ghostlike image. The smoke was an extra touch to make the illusion all the more spectacular.
The room also contained a hydraulic lift, which, according to the instructions on the control panel, could be
