Also by Vaseem Khan
The Malabar House series
Midnight at Malabar House
The Baby Ganesh Agency series
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra
The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown
The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star
Inspector Chopra and the Million Dollar Motor Car (Quick Read)
Murder at the Grand Raj Palace
Bad Day at the Vulture Club
The Dying Day
Vaseem Khan
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Vaseem Khan 2021
The right of Vaseem Khan to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Maps by Rodney Paull
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 529 34107 2
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
This book is dedicated to all those who love a good puzzle. And, so . . . If you can tell me which Indian artefact the below riddle refers to, your name shall go into a lucky draw. The winner will feature as a character in the third book in this series. If you’re not sure of the answer, enter anyway! I’ll pick a second name from those who guessed incorrectly to use in a short story featuring the characters in the series.
Once the seat of kings refined
From whence an empire was defined
Lost in war and invasion bold
And precious stones of countless hue
Rara aves among the curlicue
It lives on now in myths of yore
Sought in vain forevermore
To enter the competition, please visit my website:
www.vaseemkhan.com
Contents
Map of Bombay
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
The dog watched her as she toiled up the steps. Thirty steps, shimmering in the late morning sun. At the summit a security guard was attempting to shoo away a limbless beggar strategically positioned at the base of one of the portico’s Doric columns. She wondered how he’d made it up the steps.
The guard raised his lathi but then caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. Something in her expression stayed his hand. Or perhaps it was her khaki uniform and the revolver at her hip. His milky eyes widened. Like many in the city, he had yet to absorb the fact that there was now a living, breathing female police inspector among them. At times, she felt like a mythical creature, a mermaid or a fabulous Garuda bird.
She watched as he melted back towards the Society’s foyer.
The dog twitched its ears, lolling on its forepaws. There was something knowing in its gaze, world-weary and cynical.
Persis turned back to look for her colleague. Birla had stopped a dozen steps below to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief, his dark, pockmarked face shiny with sweat. Behind him the vista opened out on to Colaba Causeway and the Horniman Circle Gardens. The road was alive with traffic: cars, trucks, bicycles, a red double-decker bus, the side of its upper deck pasted with an advert for Pond’s talcum powder. Tongas ferried passengers at a leisurely pace while handcartwallahs moved load around the city. Below the steps a row of wizened men sat on the pavement beneath black umbrellas selling everything from fruit to wooden dolls.
Birla caught up with her. ‘It’s just a missing book,’ he muttered. ‘Why does it need two of us?’
Not bothering to answer, she turned and headed into the building. The beggar salaamed her as she walked past and she realised that his arm had been hidden under his ragged shirt while he feigned disability.
The Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland had been around in one form or another since 1804, when James Mackintosh, a chief justice of the Bombay High Court, had established a literary group in the city. In the century and a half since, the Society had evolved into both an impressive storehouse of rare books and manuscripts, and a hub of intellectual endeavour, serving, for a time, as Bombay’s Town Hall. The building itself had been fashioned from stone transported from England. Despite the British having been shown the door more than two years earlier, the place continued to exude a sense of its colonial upbringing.
Persis had visited on infrequent occasion. Her father, Sam Wadia, sometimes came across books that, in good conscience, he could not sell on in the family enterprise. His donations to the Society were always gratefully received, even if the bill that accompanied them was not.
The Darbar Hall was as she last remembered. Whitewashed walls, dark wooden flooring, cast-iron pillars topped by ornate capitals, and Gothic chandeliers in which pigeons routinely roosted. Light flooded in from lead-lined windows to illuminate a succession of marble busts of the great and the good. Mainly white men, but the odd Indian had snuck into the parade. Steel cabinets hugged the walls, jammed with books. Ceiling fans affixed to the tops of the pillars served only to stir the heat from one end of the room to the other.
They introduced themselves to a portly man with a scrappy moustache lurking at a counter. He held up a finger as if testing the wind, then vanished through a side door, returning swiftly, with a white woman in tow.
She was tall, late-middle-aged, slightly stooped, with intense blue eyes and grey hair worked into a bun behind her head. Her features were patrician and put Persis in mind of the stone vultures that adorned the façade of her father’s bookshop. She was dressed in a starched suit, in formal grey, with an A-line skirt, flaring out from broad hips
to just under the knees. The cut and cloth were expensive. Sensible shoes.
Something in her expression reminded Persis of a picture of Agatha Christie that she’d recently seen in the Times of India.
She introduced herself.
‘Yes, I recognise you.’ The woman regarded her with a steady, unblinking gaze, like that of a stuffed bird.
Persis wondered if, like many who had read of her recent exploits, she was assessing whether the young woman before her could really have merited such praise. For many, she was a publicity stunt, a trick dreamed up by post-independence liberals aimed at portraying an India thundering towards the future now that it had thrown off the British yoke.
‘My name is Neve Forrester. I’m the Society’s president. Please come with me.’
They followed her through the hall towards a wrought-iron Regency staircase leading down to the basement levels, Forrester’s heels clacking loudly on the iron steps. Persis recalled that she’d briefly met the woman once before, years ago, with her father, not that she expected the Englishwoman to remember.
Forrester spoke without glancing back. ‘How much have you been told?’
The question returned Persis to Malabar House, an hour earlier, when she’d been summoned to Roshan Seth’s office. The SP, usually morose, seemed agitated. ‘I’ve just got off the line with Shukla. He’s asked us to handle a tricky situation. Apparently, those oddballs at the Asiatic Society have a problem.’
She’d considered Seth’s words. Any matter that warranted the involvement of Additional Commissioner of Police Amit Shukla could not be dismissed as trivial. When Seth explained, she almost burst out laughing.
‘I was told you’ve lost a book,’ she now said.
Forrester stopped, turned, and held her with another low-lidded look.
Persis wished she could rephrase her words. She, better than most, understood the value of a book.
‘I felt it best not to reveal the exact nature of our loss,’ said Forrester eventually. ‘It’s a politically sensitive matter.’
Politically sensitive. That explained much, including why Shukla had diverted the call to Malabar House. In spite of Persis’s recent success in investigating the murder of a senior British diplomat, the fact remained that the small force at Malabar House was considered a standing joke by the rest of the state’s police apparatus. A handful of misfit cops in bad odour, stuffed into the basement of a corporate building that had stray dogs in the lobby and a dearth of air conditioning below the first floor. Persis had been parked there because no one knew where else to put her. Such was the antipathy she’d faced following her passing of the Indian Police Service exams that, for a while, it seemed her career would be stillborn.
But recent events had changed all that.
For better or worse, she’d arrived in the national psyche.
‘We are a treasure house, Inspector,’ continued Forrester. ‘Stored within these walls are priceless artefacts: books, coins, manuscripts, records. It would be a mistake to dismiss the importance of our work.’ She turned and continued down the staircase.
Birla rolled his eyes, then shuffled off behind her.
They arrived in the basement and passed through a reading room: tiled floors and reading lamps, the familiar, comforting smell of old volumes. Here the bookcases were polished Burma teak. Plush reading chairs and sprung sofas were dotted around the place, some occupied; an elderly white man dozed in a leather wing chair.
They arrived at a dark wood door, manned by a guard sitting on a wooden stool. An engraved plaque was bolted above the door, bearing a Latin inscription – AN VERITAS, AN NIHIL – below it, the English translation: The Truth, or Nothing.
The guard leaped to his feet as Forrester loomed into view.
‘Our Special Collections room,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘We call it the Crypt.’
They found themselves in a large, well-lit room, double-heighted, with a sunken floor.
Around the room were numerous glass cases and steel cupboards. A series of long, polished tables ran through the centre of the room with reading aids – magnifying glasses, manuscript blocks, spring callipers – laid out along their length. Anglepoise lamps were positioned at regular intervals. The air was ripe with the rich, solid smell of learning.
A marble counter was set on the room’s eastern side behind which lurked an Indian male. Persis could see a steel door behind the counter but other than that there were no doors or windows save the one they’d entered through.
Neve Forrester waited for them to finish taking in the scene. ‘We have almost one hundred thousand artefacts at the Society but here is where we house our most valuable treasures. A five-tola coin from Emperor Akbar’s reign; a wooden bowl reputed to belong to Gautama Buddha himself; ancient maps from around the world, manuscripts so old they are written on palm leaves. We have in this room a Shakespeare First Folio dated 1623 – there are only about two hundred known copies in the world; we have a copy of both volumes of A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World by James Cook, and a two-hundred-year-old History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘But our most priceless artefact is a copy of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia – The Divine Comedy – one of the two oldest copies in the world. It’s been dated back more than six hundred years. And now that manuscript is missing.’
Birla gave a small puff of annoyance. ‘How valuable can an old book really be?’
Forrester’s gaze threatened to annihilate the sub-inspector where he stood. Persis didn’t need an answer.
She recalled now the last time the manuscript had made headlines.
It had been put on display just after the war when a noted Dante scholar from the London branch of the Società Dante Alighieri had arrived in the city to deliver a lecture. The talk had ended in chaos – rioters, in the grip of independence fervour, had attacked the Society. They’d stopped short of torching the place or looting its treasures, but the British expert had had to be smuggled out by a rear entrance and whisked back to the airport, his ardour for Dante forgotten in his desire to flee the manifest perils of the subcontinent.
In the aftermath, the newspapers had rehashed the old rumour that Benito Mussolini had offered one million dollars to the Indian government for the manuscript back in the 1930s, a staggering sum. The offer had been quietly refused. Mussolini was no longer around to make another offer, having been hung by the heels in Milan at the end of the war, though the new Italian government continued to insist that the ancient manuscript be returned to its homeland.
She understood now why Forrester had described the loss of the manuscript as politically sensitive.
‘Tell me what happened.’
Forrester pursed her lips, her expression grave. ‘Almost two years ago the Society hired a new Curator of Manuscripts. A scholar by the name of John Healy. Have you heard of him?’
Persis shook her head.
‘John Healy is something of a celebrity in the world of palaeography. He studied at Cambridge before securing a research position there. He made his name working on thirteenth-century manuscripts ascribed to a monk known as “the Tremulous Hand of Worcester”. This particular scholar is believed to have sat at Worcester Priory – in England – and worked on numerous manuscripts, annotating them in a distinctive fashion: the notes – or glosses – that he produced are leftward leaning and written in a “shaky” hand. John produced the definitive work on the Hand’s extensive career, even conjecturing as to his identity – something that had remained a mystery till then. The work brought him worldwide attention in the scholarly community, and he seemed set for a stellar academic career.
‘And then the war intervened. John was a patriot. He signed up to fight and somehow ended up on the front lines. He was captured in North Africa and spent almost a year in a prisoner of war camp. Following the war, he returned to England a hero, and shortly thereafter resumed his career.’ She paused. ‘You can imagine our delight when he contacted us in the
winter of 1947 to express an interest in coming to Bombay. He wanted to spend some time working with our copy of The Divine Comedy. I discussed it with the board and persuaded them to offer him the role of Curator of Manuscripts – the previous curator had recently passed away. I never expected him to accept. But he came out here, stayed for a month, and decided it was to his liking. I was delighted when he agreed to take up the position.’
‘What was his interest in The Divine Comedy?’
‘John is one of the world’s foremost Dante scholars. It became an obsession for him after the war. He was producing a new English translation. John was a linguistic historian, among his other talents.’
‘He worked here?’ Persis indicated the room around them.
‘Yes. We do not permit The Divine Comedy manuscript to leave the Crypt – unless it’s for a public exhibition. But we haven’t had one of those since that unfortunate incident in ’46.’
‘When did you realise it was missing?’
Her eyes clouded over. ‘Frankly, it was John’s absence we noted first. He failed to come into work yesterday. This was unusual, to say the least. John is a workaholic and rarely deviates from his routine. Each morning he’s here at the opening of our doors – at precisely seven a.m. He’s never late and he takes only one day off a week – Sunday.
‘Nevertheless, we did not try to contact him. He was more than entitled to time off and I had no wish to intrude on his privacy. But when he failed to show up again this morning, I decided to call his home. No answer. I became worried and so I sent one of the peons around. There appeared to be no one there.’ She stopped. ‘I’m not a naturally suspicious person, Inspector, and, heaven knows, John has never given us any reason to doubt him. But when you’re responsible for such treasures as I am, one cannot help but be overcautious. I asked Mr Pillai, our strongroom librarian, to check on The Divine Comedy manuscript. That was when we discovered it was missing.’