The Taj Conspiracy Read Free Page A

slashed wrist?
    She bent down and peered. A thin trail of blood led to his right thigh where a penknife lay. Mehrunisa recognised the little folding knife Arun carried in his pocket; the perfect utility tool, he called it, as he used it to open letters, cut cardboard boxes, trim fingernails. Had Arun cut his right wrist to draw blood to write with his left hand because his right hand was bound? But why not draw blood from another part of the body that would be less painful?
    Mehrunisa bit her lip and moved the torch in a circular sweep around the body. The left pant leg had ridden up, revealing a swollen ankle and purplish flesh— Arun had taken a severe beating. She came to a pause near his feet, encased in white Nike sneakers, where she could see some writing on the marble floor. It was of uneven thickness, a scrawl, but legible. Three words in Hindi and the ink—blood—had exhausted twice, once after the first word and again at the third, for the last letter in each was faint.
    Chirag tale andhera.
    The dark beneath the lamp. Mehrunisa was a linguist, fluent in six languages—still, it was baffling. Which lamp? She glanced above at Lord Curzon’s bronze lamp beneath which were the two cenotaphs—the ‘dark’ being referred to?
    It was all so bizarre. A dying man sketching, using his blood as ink, his index finger as implement, trying to convey something. And convey what?
    As the riddle zapped through her mind, a putrid smell assailed her and the realisation that Arun Toor, her friend and the Taj’s caretaker, was dead hit her. She recoiled in horror, staggering.
    The next instant the entrance door was flung aside as a man darted in. In the shaky beam of her torch, Mehrunisa saw a luxuriant moustache unfurling outwards from under a slim nose, in stark contrast to the clean-shaven chin. The compact body was dressed in a policeman’s khaki uniform. The outstretched arm held a pistol levelled at her.

Agra
    M ehrunisa was in custody in a police station. She had been there for a couple of hours. Her back ached from sitting upright in a wooden chair and her backside was sore. Her stomach was queasy from lack of food and the worry gnawing her insides. In the eyes of SSP Raghav, the man who had barged into the mausoleum and brought her in for questioning, she was a suspect.
    He’d woken early that morning, he told her, and as he drove by the Taj Mahal, he’d seen a lone car parked in the complex. Suspicious, he’d headed inside when a scream shattered the air and he raced in to discover a bleeding corpse. And Mehrunisa standing over it.
    It took a lot of will for Mehrunisa to project calm, regurgitate the same answers to questions that had been repeated in one form or another since dawn. She licked her lips and reminded herself to breathe deeply even as she pretended not to notice the curious glances directed at her from the policemen lounging about. SSP Raghav headed an Anti-Terror Squad—the nameplate on his table said so—and he had hinted darkly about increasing terror attacks, and the Taj Mahal being a prime target.
    Leading her out of the mausoleum, he had shouted rapid-fire instructions to Inspector Javed who was watching the action from the door. ‘Call your constables and order them to guard the place. Also, delay the entry time to the Taj Mahal until noon—provide some official-sounding excuse. That will give us enough time to secure the crime site and gather evidence.’
    Deep breathing did not seem to be helping, for her senses were assailed by the stench of sweat and piss that permeated the police station. She was swivelling her neck slowly to relax the muscles when a voice behind made her head snap up.
    ‘I walk in and see you crouching over a dead body, blood spilled on the floor. It appears to be a crime scene.’ SSP Raghav rounded the table and stood in front of her, one thumb hooked in his belt loop. ‘If the body on the floor is the victim’s, who is this other person? Did the murderer