Up in Flames Page 13

  He hadn’t even yet found time to start sorting out his parents’ debts. They would still be living with him by the time Rachel returned from her extended tour at this rate.

  So, when they got back to the station, even before he went in search of Catt to whisk him off to The Lamb, he got in touch with his bank. To his surprise he was told a limit had been put on loans for the current month. He was advised to get the credit on his card extended instead. Saying he’d think about it, Casey replaced the receiver. Extend his credit limit indeed - at the interest they charged? He really must get around to investigating one of the new, lower interest-charging credit cards, he decided. But it was one thing to pay off their debts. What he really needed to do was try to ensure they didn’t get into debt again. They didn’t have a bank account as they had been too irresponsible too often in the past which made them a bad risk so regular direct debit bill payment was out. But he remembered reading that some banks now offered accounts for the more impecunious and financially irresponsible customer. They didn’t provide overdraft facilities or cheque books, but they did allow the setting up of direct debits and supplied a debit card. That sort of account might be the answer. The difficult bit would be getting his parents to supply all the proofs of identity that banks nowadays demanded.

  He had taken a cutting of the article, unfortunately, his careful hoarding had been to no avail, as since his parents’ arrival, the cutting had vanished from its place of safekeeping. He half-suspected one of his parents of deliberately removing it so they could continue their comfortable, free, sojourn at his house.

  Shaking his head at his own undutiful suspicions, he decided he’d do a bit of ringing around after lunch and try to find out who offered such an account. He could worry about the paperwork when he had the relevant information to hand. His stomach rumbled and he went to find Catt and persuade him to accompany him to The Lamb. They needed some lunch, anyway.

  The saloon bar was full, but they managed to find an empty table in the corner. Once they were settled with plates of fragrant chicken curry in front of them, Casey told Catt of the interview with Chandra’s in-laws.

  ‘Formidable woman,’ said Casey as he began to eat. ‘It’s obvious who wears the dhotis in that house.’

  Catt emptied half of his pint of Adnams bitter. ‘I thought Asian men were firmly head of the household. Last bastion of male chauvinism and all that.’

  ‘Not in this case. She didn’t even pretend to wifely submission apart from when she realised her tongue was running away with her. Funny when you think of it, considering she thought Chandra too westernised, too opinionated.’

  ‘Case of them being too alike, perhaps? So what next?’ Catt asked. ‘If, as you suspect, he’s going to be disappointed over Gough and Linklater, BrownJob’s going to want to hear that we’re making progress in another direction.’

  Casey was well aware of it. It was something the superintendent had become increasingly emphatic about. He wanted somebody - anybody - anybody white, anyway charged in this case before it damaged his career. Hence the leaks.

  ‘No more convenient white, racist arsonists appeared on the horizon?’ Catt asked.

  ‘None that I’ve come across.’ Casey suddenly lost his appetite and he thrust his half-finished meal away. He didn’t mention to Catt his suspicions that Brown-Smith had been leaking to the Asian community. Catt could be impulsive and had already faced one disciplinary board about his ‘attitude’. Casey was anxious that he didn’t face another one.

  Perhaps it had been both selfish and unwise of him to insist on Catt assisting him on this case. Although he had kept an admirable low-profile, Casey often caught waves of simmering resentment emanating from his sergeant. He couldn’t altogether blame him. He just hoped this case was concluded before Catt forgot his vow of silence.

  ‘Someone must have seen something,’ Casey said quietly. ‘So far, we’ve only questioned Chandra’s neighbours. Maybe we ought to extend the house-to-house to the neighbours of the Bansis, given Mrs Bansi‘s vindictive attitude to her daughter-in-law. Maybe, if we find evidence that they’re lying, we might be able to move the case forward. Maybe the vociferous Mrs Bansi was going in for a double bluff, thinking that her very outspokenness against Chandra would stop us suspecting her.’

  Catt nodded. ‘Could be. If one of the Bansi‘s neighbours saw either of them around the vicinity of Chandra’s flat at the relevant time we might begin to get some sort of lever. All we need is a shred of proof that they’re lying and we can get them in for some serious questioning.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Casey. ‘I told you what Brown-Smith demanded. Kid gloves, ThomCatt, kid gloves.’

  ‘I know.’ Catt said, his expression suddenly surly. ‘But at least I can get the house-to-house organised. I’ll do it this afternoon.’ A person of mercurial, ever-changing moods, Catt’s surly expression was now replaced by pursed lips and a teasing glance. ‘Don’t worry. I must be getting as politically correct as Brian BrownJob because I’ll be praying we find nothing.’

  Casey raised his eyebrows at this.

  ‘All right,’ Catt conceded. ‘Perhaps I’ve a way to go on the PC front. Let’s just say I don’t fancy tackling the human blancmange. She doesn’t sound so sweet to me.’

  Casey muttered an ‘Ah’ of comprehension at this. ‘Had me worried for a moment,’ he said softly. ‘Thought you’d had a conversion. And you know what they say about converts.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Tara Tompkins had vanished. When Casey went round to the flat she shared with two other girls in the town, he was told that she had gone away. When he asked if they knew where, they denied it. Convinced that this news would prompt the superintendent to insist on going ahead with charging Gough and Linklater, Casey pressed them with more questions.

  Eventually, one of them admitted that Tara had left a note.

  ‘Where is it? Please let me see it.’

  ‘It won’t tell you anything,’ Amanda, the tall red-head told him pertly. ‘All it says is that she’s going away. Nothing about where or for how long. So you know as much as we do.’

  Casey was in no mood to be gainsaid. ‘Please, just give me the note.’

  With a flounce, Amanda turned and picked up her shoulder bag. ‘Here.’ She thrust a single sheet of paper at him. ‘I told you you’d be none the wiser. And before you ask, no, she didn’t tell us any more. We didn’t even see her. She was gone when I got back from college. Better for her if she stays away. That oaf, Wayne will go down, for sure without her. We could never understand what she saw in him anyway.’

  ‘Why do you say that he’ll go down for sure without her? Can she alibi him?’

  ‘Said she could, but really, I’ve no idea. She didn’t confide in us. I suppose we’ve had one go too many at attempting to get her to give Wayne up. She’s become very prickly about him. Tara must have a martyr complex to want to take him on.’

  Casey was inclined to agree. Disappointed that he had missed Tara by a few short hours, he headed back for the station. He could only hope that Catt, out digging amongst his assorted snouts, came up with something.

  When he got back to the office it was to find out that Catt had come up with something. Though whether it was a something the superintendent would want to hear was another matter. Catt had discovered that Rathi Khan was up to his eyes in serious debt to some very unpleasant moneylenders in India.

  ‘Rumour is they’ve been threatening his family out there. Maybe they were threatening his family here, too.’

  Casey stared at him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘They wanted their money, so would be unlikely to target Rathi Khan himself or his house in case their debtor died. But-’

  ‘But Chandra and her baby would be easy targets?’ Casey finished for him.

  Catt nodded. ‘And targeting them would make the loan-sharks’ points just as starkly. But even this cloud has a silver lining, because if that turned out to be what happened it would please BrownJob. No-one lik
es loan-sharks of whatever ethnic stamp, not even him. Their torching of the flat would have given Rathi Khan a very heavy warning not to mess with them again and made sure he could repay them from the fire insurance. Maybe, to muddy the waters, they even hired white thugs through intermediaries to do the deed.’

  Casey asked, ‘So how did you find out about these debts of Khan’s?’

  ‘Multi-cultural, me,’ Catt said airily. ‘My foundling upbringing might not have given many advantages, but one of the children’s homes I was in had several Asian kids. A couple of them have remained friends. They even supply me with information occasionally.’

  ‘Asian snouts?’ Casey was impressed. In his experience Asians weren’t much given to snitching to the police. Certainly not about members of their own community. He had a feeling that Superintendent Brown-Smith wouldn’t approve. But, on the principle that what he didn’t know would cause him no PC grief Casey questioned Catt further. ‘Are these snouts reliable? I don’t want to pursue yet another strand if it turns out they’ve supplied dud information.’

  Catt looked down his nose at this slur. If he’d had a tail he’d have whisked it high and stalked off. ‘Best snouts I’ve ever had.You know how industrious Asians are. Besides, I was brought up with these ones. I think you might find that we brats from the kids’ home stick together. What other loyalties did any of us have or have reason to have?’

  ‘Even though you’re now a copper?’

  ‘I’m a foundling copper. There’s a difference.’

  Catt had a fondness for the word foundling with all its Dickensian implications of deprivation and abandonment. It was as though he wanted to be sure to mention his background before anyone else could. Casey managed a tight smile at this. For all Catt’s ready talk of abandonment he didn’t understand what it was to be truly abandoned at all.

  During the months that Casey had spent as a child in India on the hippie trail with his parents, he had been abandoned more times than he could count. On the first occasion, they had been in the country for less than a week. Everything was alien, strange, frightening. He’d been not quite ten.

  His mother, spaced out as she had so often been in those days, had told him that she and his father were just going out to see some amazing local holy man they’d heard about and would be gone an hour or two.

  Three days later, when they had still not returned, Casey was frantic with worry. Not to mention dizzy from hunger. Eating had never been high on his parents’ priorities and the only food in the backpack was about an ounce of rice.

  That had been the first of many such abandonments. Gradually, Casey had learned self-sufficiency. After that, wherever his parents’ hippie wanderings took them he generally managed to find himself some sort of paying work; mostly running errands for other hippies or, preferably, for the more wealthy tourists who paid in cash rather than hashish. At least it meant he could feed himself. No, ThomCatt, with his three square meals a day children’s home fare, didn’t grasp the meaning of ‘abandonment’ at all.

  Strangely, Casey’s experiences hadn’t turned him into the street-wise urchin that he imagined Catt had been as a child. They had made him old for his years and more than a bit of a worrier. And more responsible, mature and self-sufficient than any ten year old should ever need to be. It was a time in his life he rarely spoke about even now.

  But now was not the time for such reflections. Not when Catt had begun to reveal something else.

  ‘As I said, I’ve found my Asian snouts reliable in the past. But, as it happens, I’ve had the same information supplied by another source.’

  Casey’s eyebrows cocked. ‘Oh?’

  ‘A disgruntled ex-employee of Mr Khan. My Asian snouts put me on to him.’ Casey wondered if he should remind Catt that he had been ordered to stay away from Asian witnesses, but decided to let it drop. ‘Seems Khan is not only in serious hock to these Asian Shylocks, but one of his other properties had a serious fire last year. Apparently, he made a successful insurance claim and got the loan-sharks off his back then. I’ve got on to the insurance firm and the information checks out.’

  ‘And you think, like our other arsonists, Gough and Linklater, that he might be beginning to make a habit of it?’

  Catt shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time. Insurance companies are regarded as fair game by most people.’

  ‘But his daughter and granddaughter were in the house,’ Casey protested.

  ‘Which brings us back to the loan-sharks being the arsonists.’

  Casey sat back. They had come full circle. ‘Very well. I’m going to pay another visit to Mr Khan. Find Shazia Singh, will you? I’d like her to accompany me. In view of this new information I want to check he was at the High Street shop last Saturday when Chandra’s fire was set. While I’m doing that, I want you to get back to your snouts and find out if they know anything more. And try that vicar again. If Gough at least is out of it as far as Chandra’s case goes, the sooner we get it confirmed the better.’

  The same racks of clothes still stood outside Rathi Khan’s High Street shop cluttering the pavement, still full of low-priced dresses and trousers. Funny, but Casey felt that in the interval since their last visit so much had happened that the entire stock should have changed.

  The weather was still warm, only now it was becoming oppressive. The shop door was open to let in some air and from the open doorway came the sound of Indian music, the ‘wailing’ kind as Dean Linklater would no doubt describe it. Casey stopped to listen. After a minute, he asked Shazia what the song was about.

  ‘What Hindi songs are always about,’ she told him with an amused glance from her bold tawny eyes. ‘Thrills and spills, love and passion, with a hero who is good to him mum and who always marries a virgin. The usual Bollywood stuff. Masala movies, they’re called because like a good curry there is a little bit of every flavour in one dish. Maybe you ought to try going to see an Indian film, sir,’ she suggested artlessly. ‘It would give you a glimpse beneath the surface of Indian life, if nothing else.’

  The suggestion had been made in that half-teasing, half-challenging way he had come to recognise. He wondered if she thought him too stuffy and conservative to take her up on her suggestion. He felt sufficiently challenged to mutter, ‘Maybe I will.’ There was a cinema just around the corner that showed mostly Indian films. A visit might provide him with an ‘in’ on an aspect of Indian culture that would give him a different perspective from the usual runaway bride scenario that was all that hit the headlines here. Perhaps he could ask his mother to go with him. She had spent a lot of time at the cinema whilst they were in India - when she wasn’t haggling at the bazaars or disappearing to spend time with fake fakirs.

  He’d forgotten what a jolt to the senses the shop’s interior was. The pastel shades of England outside on the street seemed wishy-washy when contrasted with the vivid colours of the sub-continent. Like splattering’s from an artist’s palette, brilliant bales of material: a deep rich emerald, a blue as deep as Indian summer skies, a wanton’s red, lustrous golden saffron, were stacked where they could fit. Pinned to the walls were the cholis or tight-fitting bodices worn under saris as well as a wide selection of jootis, the traditional Indian shoes with their exquisite, colourful embroidery and curled toes that his mother still favoured. He’d prevailed on her to only wear them about the house.

  Some of the chotis and saris were very ornate with extensive gold metal embroidery. They looked expensive even to Casey’s untutored eye.

  There was no sign of Rathi Khan at the shop today. Casey decided to stay, anyway, and question Mrs Ghosh. Govind Ghosh, the sole assistant, was busy with half-a-dozen Asian women of varying ages who all seemed to be together. They gesticulated excitedly, chattering like magpies, as length after length of material was spread out on the sideboard counter and pored over. More chatter ensued as the qualities of each material were discussed, until finally, one of the younger women fell upon the latest material displayed. And an even more ani
mated discussion broke out.

  Apparently, she wasn’t to be swayed from her choice. Hugging the gorgeous red, heavily-embroidered brocade proprietarily to her bosom with one hand she waved off objections with the other, talking vociferously all the while.

  Around the mid-40s, neat-figured and with bright, busy brown eyes that seemed to miss little, Govind Ghosh was evidently an excellent saleswoman, for she immediately bustled about and seemingly in seconds had produced the matching choli and an assortment of jootis, and other finishing touches and set about completing the sale before the bride could be persuaded to change her mind. Casey hoped she would prove as efficient when it came to answering his questions.

  He was beginning to recognise the particular lilt and cadence of Hindi even if he had yet to remember little of the vocabulary. ‘Why that one, I wonder,’ he murmured now as he nodded his head at the selected material. ‘What is it, anyway?’ he asked, nodding as the girl’s choice of sari was folded and wrapped. ‘Some sort of fancy party outfit?’

  Shazia Singh smiled. ‘In a way. It’s a wedding sari. Red for a bride. Unlike the western tradition, white is for widows, not brides.’

  Casey nodded. He recalled Shazia telling him that before; he wondered he hadn’t remembered it from his travels, but then weddings and their requisite accoutrements were not at the top of most ten year old boys’ lists of things to know. He’d spent most of his time in India making sure he had a bed for the night and finding work so he could buy food. ‘Strange how such different customs evolve.’

  The bride-to-be went off clutching her purchases, followed by her small army of advisors, and the assistant turned to Casey and Shazia Singh with a smile. She clearly remembered them from their previous visit for she apologised for keeping them waiting, then asked, ‘How is Mr Khan? Such a dreadful business.’

  Casey nodded. ‘He seems to be bearing up, Mrs Ghosh. He hasn’t been in today?’