The Masala Murder: Reema Ray Mysteries Read online

  The Masala Murder

  Madhumita Bhattacharyya

  First published in the Indian subcontinent 2012 by Pan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Second edition published worldwide in 2021 by Madhumita Bhattacharyya

  Copyright Madhumita Bhattacharyya 2012

  The right of Madhumita Bhattacharyya to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Contents

  1. Chapter One

  2. Chapter Two

  3. Chapter Three

  4. Chapter Four

  5. Chapter Five

  6. Chapter Six

  7. Chapter Seven

  8. Chapter Eight

  9. Chapter Nine

  10. Chapter Ten

  11. Chapter Eleven

  12. Chapter Twelve

  13. Chapter Thirteen

  14. Chapter Fourteen

  15. Chapter Fifteen

  16. Chapter Sixteen

  17. Chapter Seventeen

  18. Chapter Eighteen

  19. Chapter Nineteen

  20. Chapter Twenty

  21. Chapter Twenty-One

  22. Chapter Twenty-Two

  23. Chapter Twenty-Three

  Also By

  Preview of The Bollywood Affair

  one

  I wasn’t sure how I ended up here. But then again, if anyone tells you they know the truth about the cause and effect of their lives, they are probably lying.

  Reema Ray, Private Eye.

  Except, I was no longer really that. Now I was Reema Ray, Food Writer.

  I didn’t think it was who I was meant to be. But seeing as how I didn’t believe in destiny, I took what came my way, when it came my way. A girl’s gotta eat, and as long as that remains true, she might as well eat as well as she can.

  That’s not to say that I sold out altogether. I didn’t give up on being a detective; I couldn’t, hard as I tried. It’s just that I no longer expected to be paid for it on a regular basis. My agency was still stumbling along, in name if not in place, and I was part of what you could call a league of volunteer investigators, trying to keep the streets of our city safe on a pro bono basis. And we were doing it all without the help of a steady source of funds, clients or superhero powers.

  So, who is ‘we’?

  A little group I had come to think of as the CCC: The Calcutta Crime-Fighters’ Club. We had no formal name. This is most likely due to a lack of imagination on the part of my fellow members, though they insist it is because our anonymous status helps us stay under the radar. As far as I could see, however, it would take a fairly powerful tracking device to pick up on our existence, given how we had solved no real crimes together. We talk a good game, though.

  You might understand why a girl could get a bit desperate.

  So, when I found myself in a seemingly irredeemable slump, I baked. When I ran into trouble on a case, I baked. When I felt like nothing made sense, I baked. Baking, in fact, had seen me through a number of tight spots, so much so that I was forced to give away baked goods in order to reduce the strain on my waistline.

  And thus, I had arrived at the Pastry Principle. It was the only truth that seemed to remain constant in my life. There were numerous components to it, all quixotic enough to produce ready answers to just about any conundrum. They are as follows:

  Rule #1: If it tastes very good, it will most likely make foie gras out of your liver.

  Rule #2: Anything that is worth doing is worth doing yourself, whether or not your arms fall off in the process.

  Rule #3: The magic is in the hand that kneads the dough, as all the best recipes are short on ingredients and long on technique.

  Rule #4: As a corollary to Rule #3, the only rule I have ever found to have no exceptions—nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

  two

  The meetings of the Calcutta Crime-Fighters’ Club had taken on a certain sameness of late. This might have been because the city’s criminals were being kept indoors by the August rains that periodically turned the muggy streets into fast-flowing rivers. Or perhaps they were scared of us, the fearless CCC.

  I scanned the circle around me and tried hard to suppress an eye roll. Villains everywhere would be sure, when confronted by our forces, to tremble, but only because they would be busy laughing so very hard at our fearful symmetry. My companions, clockwise:

  Dinesh Dutta Gupta, criminal lawyer: DDG was the founding member of the CCC, which I had chalked up to his unrealized lust for power. He had the matching walrus moustache and belly to bolster this theory. He had influence as it was, but there was only so famous he was going to get as a corporate lawyer in Calcutta. The CCC was the product of his higher hopes and, to be fair, without him, his contacts and his funds, it would have stalled before it started. Yet, unable to see past his petty concerns, DDG was just this side of insufferable.

  Terrence D’Costa, fellow PI: he worked with one of Calcutta’s larger private investigation agencies. He projected a laidback-man-of-action vibe. My only problem was that he seemed to expect every woman within a three-kilometre radius to want to dive into his bed. With him in it. Me included.

  Prashant Ojha, Inspector, Calcutta Police: I wasn’t sure what he was doing in our midst. At 5’2” and 83.5 kg, he struck me as barely mobile. Apart from being a useful link to the cops and, more importantly, our all-access pass to the National Crime Database such as it was, he seemed to contribute little. He hardly even listened except when DDG did the talking.

  Santosh Mukherjee, lawyer: spent an awful lot of time defending people who were so guilty they almost locked themselves up. The rest of the time he championed the cause of the friendless, resourceless and hopeless, who repaid his help through eternal gratitude and little else besides. As a result, he had no money at all.

  Despite this awe-inducing rollcall, my CCC membership at least was evidence that I wasn’t the only one frustrated with the state of law enforcement in town. I was, however, the youngest and the only female, which seldom worked to my advantage. The only one of the gang who liked me, or took me seriously in any way, was Santosh da. Which could explain why he chose to introduce me to the group in the first place.

  I had Santosh da to thank for my solitary hour of detective glory, where my work had translated to criminal charges (real charges! with handcuffs!), and he had me to thank for the only paying case he seemed to have won in the past decade.

  It was about a year ago that Santosh da had come to me when he had been forced to seek outside intervention from someone with more experience handling tawdry affairs than he had. Lucky for me, at the time, Tawdry Affair was my middle name.

  He found me in my little office in a little north Calcutta lane teeming like a beehive with scores of nooks and crannies. I had found it in a pinch. Rent of Rs 2,500 a month made the price just right, and the security deposit was low. When I started out, it was about all I could afford on my savings. And then there was the little corpus I had built up over the years, gift money mostly from grandparents and the more sensible aunts and uncles on birthdays; my parents too when they were moved to generosity by some academic or extra-curricular success. When other girls went ou
t shopping, I hoarded like a packrat and wore the same clothes for as long as I could. They couldn’t understand it then, and they probably wouldn’t understand it now if they were to see what my paisa-pinching years had bought me.

  But I loved my little cubbyhole. That eight feet by eight feet space held everything I needed: desk, computer and filing cabinet, a couple of chairs for visitors, and my lifeline—a coffee maker. If my visitors wanted milk or sugar, they were out of luck. But one got biscuits if one was lucky. The gorgeous scent of coffee was enough to make me forget the walls that hemmed me in, grey and grainy and cemented over in a recent round of repairs during which no one had bothered with plaster or paint. In my only concession to interior decor, I had taken down the fluorescent tube and put up my own lampshades and imported my favourite reading light from home. It was a stark look to be sure, but during my optimistic moments, I managed to convince myself it was industrial chic.

  When Santosh da came by, I was sifting through photographs taken at the behest of one more in a long line of suspicious husbands. It turned out his wife was making regular post-prandial stops at a hotel in Sudder Street—which I had nicknamed Shudder Street thanks to the number of infidelity cases that led me there.

  The prints were a bit of drama I participated in with this sort of client. A CD would do, of course, but they wanted the hardest kind of proof, and I would give it to them.

  I put the pictures away in my drawer as Santosh da paused by the door and took me in as though he had expected someone—and something—quite different. ‘Reema Ray?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and you must be Santosh Mukherjee.’

  ‘Mrs Aarti Kumar sent me to you,’ he said as he took the dusty seat across from me.

  ‘Yes, she called to let me know you might be coming by. How can I help you?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer to that question. In one way or the other, everyone who came to me was out to get a cheater.

  ‘It is about a case involving infidelity. Mrs Kumar told me that it is what you specialize in.’

  Put that way, I wouldn’t let me get within ten feet of a husband—not even my own. ‘I do seem to get a lot of those sorts of cases,’ I shrugged.

  ‘Well, I don’t. I am a lawyer and I have never handled an infidelity case before. I tend to work more with human rights matters: child trafficking, dowry death and so on. I only took this case as a favour to a friend. And I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Why don’t you begin by telling me why you need a detective?’

  ‘My client thinks his wife is cheating.’

  He stopped, and I looked at him expectantly as he stared at a spot on the wall somewhere behind my head.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted.

  ‘He feels she has been trying to kill him,’ he spat out at last.

  And so, right from the get-go, it was a fair bit more interesting than the usual cases I got, most of which went as far as me trailing a cheating spouse with a camera and handing over compromising shots and information to their divorce-seeking ‘better’ halves. With the door thus opened for intra-marital arm-twisting—let’s call it that instead of what it really is (blackmail)—my job was usually done. It always seemed to be the same drill. With the exception of the pre-marital ‘character’ check, which had even more of an ad nauseum nature.

  ‘The wife has been having an affair with one of their mutual friends. Last month, my client ended up sick and is certain that it was some sort of poisoning. The pathological lab couldn’t find anything, but he believes his wife has been putting something in the food.’

  ‘Mr Mukherjee, without any evidence …’

  ‘I know, I know, nothing can be done. That is why I have come to you. Evidence is exactly what I need. My client doesn’t just want a divorce—he wants his wife proven to be an attempted murderess.’

  Santosh da was squirming in his seat so much that it qualified as a workout, but if he was expecting me to be shocked, he was disappointed. Poor Santosh da had no clue as to how much sleaze I had seen in my young career. And my parents wondered why I was still single.

  ‘There is no proof, only suspicion,’ he said with a frown. ‘It feels very dirty.’

  I had to agree with him there; the one thing you would always find when marriages fell apart was dirt. But business was business. ‘How would you like to proceed?’ I asked.

  ‘The husband can arrange access to the house for you. Perhaps you can look around for anything suspicious? Any traces of poison?’

  ‘Mr Mukherjee, without any idea of how the poison was administered, I would be going in blind. It would require a huge amount of testing, which might turn up nothing at all.’

  ‘My client understands that and is prepared to pay.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I shrugged.

  In the end, I got lucky. I snooped around, taking samples from everything the kitchen had to offer for testing. The cocoa—and a lovely Belgian tub it was too—had been laced with arsenic.

  Tasty.

  It wasn’t hard to establish that Santosh da’s client’s wife had indeed been cheating. But that had been her only transgression. It was the lover, sick of her insistence that she couldn’t get a divorce, who decided to take action. He had given the cocoa as a gift, knowing all along that the wife was allergic but that the husband loved the stuff. She made him a cup, but it didn’t contain enough juice to kill him at one shot, leaving him very sick—and highly suspicious.

  The husband duly filed for divorce; the lover was arrested for attempted murder. Santosh da got the only decent pay cheque he had received in what must be years, but was still generous enough to pass on part of the loot to me, which allowed me to hold on to my office for a few more months. Santosh da told me about the CCC soon after.

  There is so much of the PI’s job that has nothing to do with crime in the eyes of the law. People who need the kind of help that a police officer, doctor or shrink can’t provide. I suppose that is what drew me to the CCC—it was my one chance to step out of the sleaze and actually be of some use.

  And yet, it turned out that it is not so easy to identify hidden crimes and then find your way into them, and to the bottom of them. The CCC often got side-tracked by cases with no oomph, no human drama. The latest crime under consideration was a string of robberies which, in my view, the police were best placed to solve.

  But try telling that to my companions.

  ‘Did you read the details that have emerged about the latest dacoity at Picnic Gardens? It is very daring, very daring,’ said DDG, appearing even more bobble-headed than usual.

  ‘Yes, if that girl had not sent that secret text to her boyfriend, who knows what would have happened to the family,’ chimed in Ojha.

  ‘The police have a good description this time,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Has it been linked conclusively to the other crimes?’ asked Terrence, ignoring me.

  ‘No, but they are investigating a bandit named Chhote Jimmy, from Bihar, in this connection,’ said Ojha.

  ‘Won’t the CBI get involved, now that it has crossed state lines?’ I asked.

  They ignored me once again and I decided to sit back and listen to the four men with dreams of glory glistening in their eyes swap details gleaned from second-hand sources. Finally, Santosh da turned his attention to me. ‘Reema, you are very quiet today,’ he said. ‘What do you think of this case?’

  ‘It makes less and less sense for us to attempt interference. It is too big and, besides, it is so high profile that half of the force must be working on it. What additional skills do we bring to the table?’

  The silence that followed stretched for a few more seconds than was comfortable. DDG was the one to break it. ‘So do you have any other cases that might be of interest?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, there are a couple,’ I said. ‘One was the corporate matter I had mentioned last week.’

  ‘That SlimCo business?’ Terrence asked.

  ‘There are reports that it was they who incited the violence
at the Parsons Chemicals factory.’

  ‘That hardly seems big enough to merit an investigation.’

  ‘Five workers were hospitalized following the riot,’ I said. ‘And then there are allegations of industrial espionage; Parsons has apparently stolen SlimCo’s weight-loss product formula.’

  ‘That might be an interesting angle but if I remember correctly, your source in all this was dubious, at best,’ said Terrence.

  ‘I wouldn’t call him dubious.’

  ‘A journalist for the Kolkata Chronicle? Please,’ said DDG.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying not to snap, ‘if you aren’t interested in that, there was the alleged dowry death of Sunita Sharma, Lake Gardens. Santosh da mentioned it last week.’

  ‘It is a personal matter,’ said Terrence.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Without being brought in by the family, we’d make no headway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We can’t go snooping around in a home without permission. If you can get the victim’s family to cooperate, we could at least think of looking into it.’

  Despite my best efforts, I felt my shoulders slump. I knew he had a point.

  The men turned their attention back to the robbery. Ojha agreed to follow up with the group on any developments in the investigation and Terrence was going to reach out to the latest family that had been hit to see if they were willing to let us in.

  ‘If there is no other business, I need to get going tonight,’ said Terrence, rising from the circle and flashing a grin in my direction. ‘I have a date.’

  So, we adjourned, and I walked out of the little neighbourhood clubhouse Ojha had arranged for this meeting. I waited till the other men, save Santosh da, left.

  ‘How have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘I have been very well, Reema, thank you for asking. Very busy with a new case.’

  He looked as content as always, dressed in the same white shirt and black pants that were his uniform. Somewhere there must be a battered black jacket and tie to match to complete the lawyer’s look. Clean and well ironed, and yet faded and fraying at the collar and cuffs. I imagined he had a cupboard full of identical clothes, some of them older than me.