The first sense the crime assails is smell. He could smell the burned meat, the oily, sweet choke of melted plastic from the lobby. The stench so overpowers all other senses that Mr. Nandha must focus to extract information from it. He opens his nostrils for hints, contradictions, subtle untogethernesses that might suggest what has happened here. An electrical fault among all the computers, the fire investigation officer had immediately suggested. Can he pick that unmistakable prickle of power out of the mix?
Sight is the second sense. What did he see when he entered the crime locus? Double doors forced open by fire department hydraulics, the outer the standard apartment block fascia door; the inner, heavy green metal, dogged and barred, the latches warped by fire service jacks. They could not open the door? They trapped themselves in their own security? The paint is seared from the inside of the inner door, blackened raw metal. Proceed. The short lobby, the main lounge, the bedrooms they had been using as their memory farm. Kitchen; skeletons of cupboards and racks on the wall, melamine peeled away but the woodchip intact. Chipboard survives. Ash and blackness, one thing fused into another. The windows have blown inwards. A pressure drop? The fire must almost have exhausted itself. It would have burned smoky and black. They would have asphyxiated before the windows blew and fresh oxygen kindled the fire djinn. Melted stubs of computer drives flow into each other. Vikram will rescue what is rescueable.
Hearing. Three thousand people in this apartment pile yet the quiet on the fire floor is absolute. Not even the chirp of a radio left burbling. The firemen have withdrawn their cordon but residents are reluctant to return to their homes. There are rumours that the blaze was a revenge attack by the Awadhis for the shatabdi massacre. The neighbours on either side only knew what was happening when the wall grew hot and the paint started to blister.
Touch. The greasy, coagulating smut of soot in the air. A black floating cobweb settles on to Mr. Nandha’s sleeve. He goes to wipe it, then remembers that it is ten percent human fat.
Taste, the fifth test. Mr. Nandha has learned the technique from cats, a flaring of the nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth, a rasping of the air across the palate. It is no elegance but it works for little hunters and Krishna Cops.
“Nandha, whatever are you doing?” Chauhan the State Pathologist bags up the penultimate corpse and slaps the despatch notice on the plastic sack.
“A few preliminaries. Have you anything for me yet?”
Chauhan shrugs. He is a big bear of a man with the callous joviality of those who work among the inner doings of the violently killed.
“Call by me this afternoon, I may have something for you by then.”
Vaish, the police inspector in charge, looks up, disapprovingly, at the trespass.
“So, Nandha,” Chauhan says as he steps back and his white-suit team lift the bag on to the stretcher. “I hear your good woman is rebuilding the hanging gardens of Babylon. She really must be missing the old village.”
“Who is saying this?”
“Oh, it’s all the word,” Chauhan says, noting down comments on the fourth victim. “Doing the rounds after the Dawar’s party. This one’s a woman. Interesting. So, green fingers then, Nandha?”
“I am having a roof-top retreat constructed, yes. We’re thinking of using it for entertainments, dinners, social get-togethers. It’s quite the thing in Bengal, roof gardens.”
“Bengal? They’ve all the fashions, there.” Chauhan regards himself as Mr. Nandha’s equal in intellect, education, career, and standing; everything but wedlock. Mr. Nandha married within jati. Chauhan married below subcaste.
Mr. Nandha frowns at the ceiling.
“I presume this place would have a halon fire extinguisher system as a matter of course?”
Chauhan shrugs. Inspector Vaish stands up. He understands.
“Have you found anything that looks like a control box?” Mr. Nandha asks.
“In the kitchen,” the inspector answers. The box is under the sink beside the U-bend, the most inconvenient place. Mr. Nandha rips off the seared cupboard door, squats down, and shines his pencil torch all around. These people used a lot of multisurface cleaner. All those hard cases, Mr. Nandha presumes. The heat has penetrated even this safe cubby, loosening the plumbing solder and sagging the plastic cover. A few turns of the multitool unscrews it. The service ports are intact. Mr. Nandha plugs in the avatar box and summons Krishna. The aeai balloons beyond the tight constraints of the under-sink cupboard. The god of little domesticities. Inspector Vaish crouches beside him. Where before he had radiated spiky resentment, he now seems in mild awe.
“I’m accessing the security system files,” Mr. Nandha explains. “It will take no more than a few moments. Ironic; they’ll protect their memory farm with quantum keys but the extinguisher system is a simple four-digit pin. And that,” he says as the command lines scroll up on his field of vision, “seems to have been their downfall. Do we have an estimated time of the fire?”
“The oven timer is stopped at seven twenty-two.”
“There’s a command from the insurance company—it’s certainly false—logged at seven oh five shutting down the halon gas system. It also activated the door locks.”
“They were sealed in.”
“Yes.” Mr. Nandha stands up, brushes himself down, noting with distaste the soft black smears of ten percent human fat where floating soot has gravitated on to him. “And that makes it murder.” He folds his avatars back into their box. “I shall return to my office to prepare an initial scene of crime report. I’ll need the most intact of the processors in my department before noon. And Mr. Chauhan.” The pathologist looks up from the last corpse, burned down to bones and a grin of bloody white teeth in black char. He knows those teeth; Radhakrishna’s impudent monkey-grin. “I will call on you at three and I expect you to have something for me by then.”
He imagines the SOCO’s smile as he quits the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. Like him, they have neither the money nor the patience to marry in jati.
At breakfast the talk had all been of the Dawar’s reception.
“We must have one,” Parvati said, bright and fresh with a flower in her long, black hair and the Fifth Test burbling in male baritones behind her. “When the roof garden is finished, we’ll have a durbar and invite everyone and it’ll be the talk for weeks.” She pulled her diary from her bag. “October? It should be looking best then, after the late monsoon.”
“Why are we watching the cricket?” Mr. Nandha asked.
“Oh that? I don’t know how that came to be on.” She waved her hand at the screen in the gesture for Breakfast with Bharti. An in-studio dance-routine bounced upon the screen. “There, happy? October is a good time, it is always such a flat month. But it might seem a bit of an anticlimax after the Dawars, I mean, it’s a garden and I love it very much and you are so good to let me have it, but it is only plants and seeds. How much do you think it cost them to get a Brahmin baby?”
“More than an Artificial Intelligence Licensing Investigations Officer can afford.”
“Oh, my love, I never thought for a moment.”
Listen to yourself, my bulbul, he thought. Babbling away, letting it fall from your lips and presuming it will be golden because you are surrounded by colour and movement and flowers every second of every day. I heard the society women you so envy and said nothing because they were right. You are quaint and open and say what is in your heart.