The Gateway of India stood out like a tombstone against the ripples on the moonlit bay. Miss Colah’s chauffeur drove on past, and a few yards later, turned in to the entrance to the Taj Hotel, the car falling in nicely beside the Rollses and Bentleys parked nearby.
A doorman, bearded and dressed in a stiff-fanned turban and pristine white uniform, strode promptly down the red carpet and opened my door. I gave him a nod, then walked into the hotel as though it were my second home.
The lobby was a definite step up from the Far Bengal. I skated across the marble to the front desk and approached a morning-suited concierge who offered me the sort of gracious welcome that a suit like mine was apt to receive. One of a series of clocks behind him, the one set to Bombay time, read half past eleven. Miss Colah had intimated that the party at the racecourse would not get properly into its stride until at least half past ten. I assumed Irani would stay for a good hour and a half, more likely two, and would require another thirty minutes to return to the hotel. I calculated I had the best part of an hour, maybe more, before he’d be back.
‘You have a guest here by the name of Irani,’ I said. ‘I need his room number, please.’
The man was happy to oblige, furnishing me with the number of a suite on the second floor. I thanked him and headed for the inner atrium and to the grand staircase which led to the first floor before splitting and snaking off to both left and right.
I took the stairs at pace, bounding up to the first floor and then, instead of continuing to the second, I headed left, along the balconied corridor of the west wing until I found a door leading to another, smaller stairwell, this one utilised by the hotel staff. Removing my jacket and tie, I sprinted downwards, past the ground floor and to the basement. There I walked past the laundry, where the bedsheets from what I assumed were several hundred rooms were collected, past a deserted mess hall, and eventually found what I was looking for.
If the hotel’s upper storeys were a palace, then the changing room for the staff was an army barracks, its walls lined with battered metal lockers in place of oil paintings and the chandeliers upstairs replaced by naked bulbs of dubious brightness. The scent of fresh flowers was also gone, obliterated by the pungent tang of male sweat. The room, though, was blessedly empty, which was not surprising given the lateness of the hour, but it still came as a relief.
There was no time to waste. I rattled a row of lockers till I found one containing the white jacket of a porter and, replacing it with my own own jacket and tie, removed it and slipped it on. From there I took the stairs back to the second floor and located the small supply pantry where were stored fresh linen, cleaning aids and, most importantly, the master keys which provided the chambermaids with access to all rooms on the floor.
Availing myself of one such key, I hurried back along the corridor until I found room 214, Irani’s suite.
With my heart thumping in my chest, I knocked gently.
‘Mr Irani?’
From inside came nothing but silence.
I knocked again for good measure, then slipped the key into the lock and turned it.
The room was shrouded in the pale grey light of the moon falling through a muslin screen to the balcony beyond. Closing the door softly behind me, I reached for the light switch, illuminating a marble-floored sitting room with the sort of solid furniture that was either fashioned in situ or broke the backs of a dozen men transporting it to its destination.
The room was spotless, the floor polished almost to the point of reflection, with not so much as a mote of dust on the coffee table or the teak desk in the corner. The bedroom was similarly pristine, the sheets on the four-poster bed turned down and tucked in with military precision, and in the attached bathroom the mosaic mirror and golden taps glittered like a votive offering at the shrine of Varuna, god of the oceans.
Back in the sitting room, I began my search, going through the desk drawers, lifting the cushions of the sofa, checking the gaps between the furniture and the floor, in a fruitless search for something, anything that might provide a clue as to what Irani’s business might actually be. I found nothing, save for a layer of dust beneath the sofa which restored my faith in human nature. It seemed the chambermaids at the Taj were apt to cut the same corners as our manservant, Sandesh, back home.
The process took longer than I had anticipated, what with the need to return every cushion on the sofa and sheet of paper on the desk to its rightful position. It also proved fruitless. Only when I was satisfied there could be nothing hidden in the sitting room did I realise that I should have started in the bedroom. If there was something to find, it would surely be there, among Irani’s personal possessions. I started with the wardrobes: floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, not the short, stand-alone almirahs that most hotels and houses had. Opening the first of them, I stopped dead. It was empty, save for two hangered shirts and a briefcase and suitcase resting in one corner. Gulmohamed had said that Irani had been residing at the Taj for several months, and yet it looked as if he had hardly bothered to unpack. I wondered if I’d stupidly been searching the wrong room, but I had checked the number on the door, and I doubted the concierge would have made the mistake of directing me to another guest’s suite. This had to be Irani’s room. I’d invested too much already for it not to be.
I pulled out the briefcase, an unblemished brown leather affair, what the British call a Gladstone bag, and tried the clasp but it was locked. I considered attempting to pick the lock, but time was short and my objective was to get in and out without Irani suspecting anything. Instead I turned my attention to the suitcase, laid it on the hard marble floor, pressed the button to release the catch and unsnapped the clasps. Opening it, I was hit by the camphorous scent of mothballs. I slipped my hands inside and gently felt for anything with shape and form, anything that might not be clothing, and eventually pulled out nothing more incriminating than a tin of talcum powder and a small bag that contained a shaving kit. Closing the case, I returned it to its nest in the wardrobe, then turned my attention to the bedside tables. Again they were empty, save for an alarm clock which informed me it had just struck midnight.
I moved on to the bed and began to struggle with the mattress, heaving up one corner and all but collapsing under its weight. Inch by inch, I ran my hands under it, searching the space between it and the bedframe, and finding nothing.
Releasing the mattress, I collapsed on the floor beside the bed, panting and wondering just what it was I had expected to find. Irani’s room was clean, almost surgically so. Other than the shirts in the wardrobe and the dust under the sitting-room furniture, it was as though the room had been hermetically sealed. Out of instinct, I ran my hands along the floor under the bed frame behind me and made to stand. As I rose though, I noticed something odd. The fingers of one hand had come back coated with grey dust. Those of the other had come back clean. I raised both towards my face and stared at them, and then dropped down to the floor. In a frenzy I pulled the torch from my pocket, flicked it on and shone it under the bed. Sure enough, amid the thin field of dust was a track of clean marble running from the edge to the middle of the bed frame.
It could have been a coincidence, a channel cleared by a stray stroke of a cleaner’s mop, but that seemed unlikely, given how far under the bed the channel ran. There was only one way to find out. I squeezed into the narrow space beneath the bed frame and aimed the torch at the underside of the bed frame. Then I saw it, taped to the bed was what looked like a folder. I slid forward and reached for it, carefully detaching the tapes that held it in place. It dropped to the floor with a slap, and with my heart racing, I dragged it out and placed it atop the bed.
It was a manila folder, no different to those I’d discovered at Irani’s office, and I opened it to find forty or fifty sheets of paper. The first few were records of some sort, handwritten in blue ink, and looked like ledger entries in some sort of code. The rest appeared to be pamphlets, the type of flimsy flyers that were found pasted on walls and lamp posts in the poorer parts of towns. They were printed in a plethora of languages: Hindi definitely, possibly Maratha and Punjabi and several South Indian scripts. I rifled through them, and thanked the Fates when, towards the back, found one written in Bengali. It was a copy of the one that had been plastered all over the Muslim sections of town the day immediately after Mukherjee’s murder, when the Hindus had begun their rampage.
I flicked back to the handwritten pages, hoping to make sense of the code when I heard a noise from the sitting room and froze. I wondered if I’d imagined it, but a split second later I heard it again, and this time it was unmistakable. A key was turning in the lock.