‘But of course! This is going to be best. The absolute best.’

  I can’t help smiling, because I know she’s absolutely right.

  Dorothy Koomson is the multi-award-winning author of seventeen bestselling novels and has been making up stories since she was thirteen. Her books include: All My Lies Are True, The Ice Cream Girls, Tell Me Your Secret, The Brighton Mermaid, My Best Friend’s Girl and The Chocolate Run. Both The Ice Cream Girls and her Quick Reads book The Beach Wedding were World Book Night titles. After living in Australia, Dorothy now lives in Brighton.

  Blind Justice

  by Vaseem Khan

  ‘A blind man? How can a blind man rob a bank?’

  ‘He didn’t rob the bank. Not in the sense that you mean.’ Irritation flashed across Joshi’s glistening brow. ‘And we’re not a bank. Not exactly.’

  Not exactly. Chopra looked thoughtfully at the man opposite him. Joshi was a bear, dressed in a navy safari suit, saddlebags of sweat under the arms. The air-conditioner was out again and the office was sweltering. May in Mumbai, just before the monsoon. The rains were late and the city broiled in the heat.

  ‘We’re a lending agency,’ clarified Joshi. ‘We lend money.’

  ‘Who do you lend it to?’

  ‘Whoever needs it the most.’ There was something evasive in the man’s manner, Chopra thought. Thirty years on the police force had left him with a sense for such things. The only difference between that job and this: you could choose your clients in a private detective agency. Nevertheless…

  ‘What exactly did Imran Mirza take?’

  ‘Documents. Valuable documents.’

  Chopra watched him swat away a fly. ‘And why do you suspect him?’

  ‘Because I terminated his position at the agency a month ago. He was… unhappy.’

  ‘Revenge?’

  ‘Revenge,’ nodded Joshi, emphatically.

  * * *

  The lending agency was housed on the ground floor of a rundown, whitewashed concrete bunker on the very outskirts of the city. Paint flaked from the exterior walls, and a lopsided banner hung over the front door. Dogs dozed in the shadows.

  It had taken an hour to drive through Mumbai’s mid-morning traffic, a chaos of blaring horns, buzzing rickshaws, suicidal motorcyclists and the occasional bullock cart. Urban India in the twenty-first century, a gridlocked vision of Dante’s hell.

  Chopra parked the jeep and turned off the engine, and with it, the rattling air-conditioner. He cracked a window for his young ward, shuffling around impatiently in the back.

  Almost ten months after the one-year-old elephant had arrived on his doorstep, Chopra continued to marvel at the surreal nature of the situation. Here he was, a retired policeman in his late forties, driving around the city with an elephant calf in tow. Anywhere else in the world it would be ludicrous. But this was India. There were far stranger sights on the streets of a place like Mumbai. That was the thing about a city of twenty million souls – there were just as many tales to tell.

  He got out and walked into the premises, his shirt sticking to his back.

  * * *

  Joshi had left it to a junior to show him around.

  There was little to see.

  A warren of tiny offices, kitted out with ancient furniture, wobbling ceiling fans, dented steel filing cabinets and a sense of hopelessness radiating from the bare walls. What had he expected? He’d already guessed that the agency was the way station of last resort for those in desperate need of funds. There were many such operations around the country catering to those that fell outside the regular banking system. In the old days, the same function would have been fulfilled by ruthless feudal moneylenders – in villages up and down the country, it still was.

  ‘Where were the files stolen from?’

  The flunky introduced himself as Peter Fernandes then led him through to a room populated exclusively by steel almirahs, at least a dozen of them. He pointed at one of the tall cabinets. ‘He took the documents from that one.’

  To Chopra, it looked identical to the rest. He moved closer and examined the almirah, focusing on the lock. He noticed something and brushed his fingers over the galvanized steel.

  ‘The lock wasn’t forced,’ added Fernandes. ‘We think he picked it.’

  Chopra raised an eyebrow. ‘So a blind man somehow broke into this place, found his way to this exact cabinet, and picked the lock?’

  The man had the decency to look embarrassed.

  ‘Who has the keys?’

  ‘Only Mr Joshi. When we need a file, we take the keys from him, then return them immediately.’

  Chopra paused, his thoughts ticking over in the silence. ‘How long did Mirza work here?’

  ‘Fifteen years, I think.’

  ‘Why was he sacked?’

  Fernandes’s pencil moustache twitched. ‘Perhaps you should ask Mr Josh—’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Well, ah, I believe it was incompetence. He just wasn’t very good at his job.’

  ‘And yet they kept him around for fifteen years.’

  * * *

  Mirza lived a short, ten-minute drive from the agency’s offices.

  Chopra slurped on a Coke as he waited at a set of traffic lights. Any time now he expected the air-conditioner to surrender to the rising heat. A trunk snaked from the rear of the van and curled itself around the can.

  ‘Are you thirsty, boy?’ He watched in the mirror as the little elephant upended the can into his mouth.

  The elephant had been sent to him by his long-vanished uncle. Beyond that he had managed to learn very little about his new charge. Neither had accommodating the beast into his life proved an easy task, but his wife, Poppy, had been insistent. In the end, he’d put him into a walled compound – complete with mango tree and mud wallow – at the rear of the restaurant he’d opened following his retirement from the force. The restaurant now doubled as the offices for his fledgling detective agency, which he had named after the animal: the Baby Ganesh Agency.

  One thing he couldn’t deny: Ganesha had proved a lucky charm on the various investigations he’d taken up since opening the agency.

  ‘What do you think?’ he mused. ‘Could a blind man really have done it?’

  Ganesha threw the empty can over his shoulder, then reached over with his trunk to poke at the radio dials.

  The little elephant had a fondness for music.

  * * *

  Imran Mirza, in the flesh, was a small man with sunken cheeks and tufted grey hair like a hatchling. His bungalow was tiny, but clean, and neatly appointed.

  They sat in the living room. The ceiling fan ruffled Chopra’s moustache.

  ‘They didn’t sack me because I was incompetent,’ said Mirza. ‘They sacked me because I went blind.’ His knuckles tightened on his white cane. ‘I began to lose my sight a year ago. When it eventually became clear to Joshi that I would become almost completely blind, he decided to let me go. Made up a story about incompetence, even though I was still perfectly capable of doing my job.’

  ‘What was your job?’

  ‘I was a loan officer. People – mainly from the villages – would come into the agency needing money. I would explain what we could do for them, then lead them through the formalities. The more I could get them to borrow, the higher my bonus. I was very good at my job.’

  Mirza’s self-loathing was evident. Chopra didn’t need intuition or a policeman’s instincts to understand that this was a confession, of sorts.

  ‘Why did Joshi really sack you?’

  The edges of Mirza’s mouth curled upwards. ‘How would you like to go for a little drive?’

  * * *

  In the jeep, Mirza allowed Ganesha to run his trunk over his face.

  In return, the elephant calf stood still as the blind man twisted around in his seat and ran his hands over his knobbly skull and gently flapping ears. ‘You know, in foreign countries they use guide dogs to help people like me. I wonder if anyone’s thought of using elephants?’

  Chopra smiled. The elephant had proved to be a sound judge of character over the past ten months. If Imran Mirza had painted a favourable impression with his young ward then it was a good bet the man was not the villain Joshi had made him out to be.

  His smile vanished as a man herding goats drifted nonchalantly into the middle of the road, instantly inciting chaos. He hammered the horn, cursing under his breath.

  * * *

  They arrived in the village twenty minutes later, a collection of whitewashed huts slapped together out of brick and mud and thatch, no different to a dozen such hamlets dotted around the city’s periphery. Fields of wheat, turned brown by the blowtorch of the sun, hazed into the distance.

  A bullock sat under the shade of a tamarind tree, slapping flies from its rump, looking on curiously as he parked the jeep.

  Chopra and Ganesha followed Mirza as he tapped his way across a dusty quadrangle, curious eyes following the little party.

  Mirza led them to a hut at the very outskirts of the village. Beyond, Chopra could see a barren field, collapsed levees and the relic of an ancient plough.

  Inside the hut, a woman crouched beside a stove, sari hitched up to her knees, blowing at the embers of a fire under a steel pot. A young boy squatted beside her. On a rope charpoy, a small baby cried in staccato bursts.

  The woman shot to her feet in alarm as Mirza and Chopra entered, Ganesha pausing at the door.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, Parvati,’ said Mirza. ‘This is a friend.’

  Friend, thought Chopra. A strange way to characterize the man trying to assess your complicity in a crime.

  The woman said nothing, waiting, seemingly for further instruction from Mirza. The blind man waved a hand at the inside of the tiny hut. ‘Take a good look, Chopra. This is how hundreds of millions still live in this new India of ours.’

  Chopra wondered what the man’s point was.

  The sap now flowing through India’s veins had yet to make its way to every section of society, that was simply a fact of life. The unholy trinity of globalization, outsourcing and westernization may have transformed urban India, but the hinterlands still laboured under the legacy of millennia-old inequalities. That wasn’t about to change overnight.

  ‘This is Parvati,’ continued Mirza. ‘Her husband, Rajesh, was a farmer. A tiny plot, just enough to feed his family. He bought the plot using money that we lent him. That I lent him. A year ago, I foreclosed on his loan. He’d had a run of bad crops. Dry weather. Pestilence. The land out there now belongs to Joshi. But he has no wish to farm it. He’s waiting for the price to go up so he can sell it. As Mumbai continues to grow, no doubt soon it will swallow this village and someone will try to build a mall here.’

  He fell momentarily silent.

  Chopra’s eyes followed the boy – he could have been no more than five – as he emerged from behind his mother and skipped out of the hut to play with Ganesha. The elephant picked up a stick and began duelling with him. Squeals of laughter erupted from the child.

  ‘After I took his land from him, Rajesh came to our offices. He poured kerosene on to his clothes and set himself alight. He died from his burns.’

  Another silence, broken by the sounds of the boy’s laughter and a soft bugling note from Ganesha.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Chopra, and realized that he meant it. He saw that the woman was silently weeping.

  Mirza stirred, then tapped his way to the corner of the room. He bent and reached inside a steel trunk, then came back with a bundle of manila files wrapped in string. He dropped the files at Chopra’s feet, raising a small puff of dust.

  ‘Two hundred files in total,’ said the blind man. ‘Two hundred lives. If I could have carried more, I would have.’

  ‘You planned it for a long time,’ said Chopra. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say you took the keys from Joshi well before you were sacked and made copies. Keys to the office and to the filing cabinet. You knew which cabinet to target on the night you snuck back in to take those files because you left marks around the lock. Little dents. A sort of Braille.’

  Mirza flashed a humourless smile. ‘Joshi sacked me because I asked him to act in good conscience. After Rajesh died I asked him to help Parvati and her children. Instead, he took her land.’

  ‘And now what? Do you think that by stealing these files you can save her? Save all these people’s farms?’

  ‘Joshi doesn’t trust computers. These files are the only record that any of them owe the agency a thing. If I destroy them, I will set two hundred families free.’

  Chopra stared at him, and then, because he understood the urge that powered Imran Mirza’s actions, a desire to balance the scales, to seek justice in a nation where justice so often eluded the poor and the powerless, because he understood what it meant to light a candle in the darkness, he smiled.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to take this case, after all.’

  He turned and headed back outside where a young boy and a young elephant played beneath the late afternoon sun.

  Vaseem Khan is the author of two crime series set in India, the Baby Ganesh Agency series, and the Malabar House historical crime novels. His first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was a Times bestseller, now translated into fifteen languages. In 2018, he was awarded the Eastern Eye Arts, Culture and Theatre Award for Literature. Vaseem was born in London, but spent a decade working in India.

  A Slightly Open Marriage

  by Helen Lederer

  The cream cheese on the carrot cake was the first chance at sensual pleasure Mary had enjoyed for weeks. The more frosting that went into her mouth, the easier it was to manage her anger about Gary. Not only had her husband managed to spill his Chinese takeaway over a curtain she’d made for a client, but he’d lied about it as well.

  Gary had slammed out of the house before she’d finished shouting, leaving her no choice but to follow him out on to the drive in her slippers. She might still be there now, screaming at the back of his motorbike, had Sandra not lured her next door with the offer of a gratis cake at her coffee morning.

  Given her raised blood pressure, the very least she could do was get a bit of succour from the tasty cream-cheese icing. She found herself holding the cake stand in one hand in case anyone else had the same idea.

  ‘It’s very moreish, isn’t it?’

  A woman in a pinafore dress had walked round to Mary’s side of the cake table. ‘What is?’ asked Mary.

  ‘The frosting – that was on top of the cake?’

  Even Mary had to admit the top of the carrot cake was now looking quite bald. But she didn’t appreciate being made to feel guilty by a stranger. She wondered if she should let Sandra know that one of her friends had just made her feel that she’d shoplifted from a food bank. But Sandra was still outside in the garden, forcing paper napkins on her guests who didn’t appear to want them.

  ‘I’m Clara. I live two streets away.’ Clara held out her hand.

  Mary felt obliged to wipe a frosted finger on one of Sandra’s napkins, before accepting it.

  ‘I’m Mary. I live next door.’

  Mary was surprised at the length of Clara’s plait, which seemed a bold choice for someone over six foot tall. There might be a danger of whiplash if she turned round quickly.

  Clara suddenly lowered her voice. ‘I’m a therapist. Well, counsellor, really.’

  And without waiting for a reply, Clara took the cake stand out of Mary’s hands and placed it high up on top of the fridge behind her, and out of reach.

  Mary wanted the cake back. Quite badly. Instead, she said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Owning a problem is the first step to freedom, Mary.’

  Clara looked pleased. As if she’d met a new friend or, at the very least, a client.

  It was time to leave. The carrot cake was way too high to get at now, and it would look undignified to jump.

  As Mary hunted for her bag under the mound of tote bags and buggies in the hall, Sandra rushed in from the garden to thrust a business card into her hand.

  ‘Clara’s very good, Mary. Especially if you and Gary ever want to…?’

  Mary had a quick look at Clara’s card. It was handmade, which might be a slight worry, but the services of a ‘cut-price relationship counsellor’ held particular appeal right now. Even if it had been written in glittery letters with a few typos.

  * * *

  Back at her own kitchen table, Mary wondered how Sandra had known her husband’s name. Then she remembered she’d been screaming it quite loudly as Gary had ridden off on his motorbike.

  She knew she needed help. Sometimes, Gary’s insomnia could get so bad, he’d have to drive into town for a late-night takeaway, eat it in their kitchen at two in the morning, and jog round the cul-de-sac to burn off the calories.

  He was as miserable as she was. It was counselling or a dog, and Gary was allergic. She’d make an appointment with Clara for a week’s time, which would give her space to make a replacement curtain and possibly salvage her career.

  * * *

  ‘Do sit.’ Clara waved at a wicker chair that looked as if it had just been brought in from the garden.

  Mary was grateful for the additional small cushion. She didn’t want the wicker to leave marks on her thighs.

  Subdued sounds of a TV could be heard from the room above. This didn’t feel very professional somehow. On the other hand, they both knew it wasn’t Harley Street. This was cut-price counselling that had come at a good time.

  ‘Well done for getting here.’ Clara offered a small smile.

  ‘Thank you.’ Mary felt strangely pleased. Although she had navigated the two roads without much difficulty.

  ‘I think we should put the carrot cake business behind us, Mary.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8