The Case of the Love Commandos by Tarquin Hall Read Free Book Online

pictures weren’t the best quality but good enough.
    Within a couple of minutes they’d been forwarded to Rumpi’s phone and then on to Chubby.
    His reply read, “Bingo!”

Four
    Puri arrived at Lucknow’s magnificent Charbagh railway station at five thirty in the morning, groggy after half a night’s sleep in the air-conditioning. He’d been tormented by a recurring nightmare in which his humiliation at the hands of the pickpocket had been exposed on national TV. While facing the glare of the cameras, he’d looked down to find that he was naked apart from a nappy. Mummy had then appeared, telling the press that her son needed his daily dose of iron tonic. “Bed rest is required for tension purposes,” she’d informed the hacks as the detective had started howling like a toddler.
    He was still trying to shake off the sensation that the dream didn’t belong entirely in the realm of the subconscious when he found Facecream in the station car park. Their mutual choice of greeting was a formal handshake rather than a namaste or the side-on hug commonly observed between Indian men and women. It denoted a certain professionalism and mutual respect.
    “You’ve heard anything from the boy?” asked Puri as they both squeezed into the back of the hatchback she’d hired.
    “No word, sir. No trace.”
    Facecream had traveled from Agra through the night and slept no more than a couple of hours. Her complexion, which was usually aglow, had lost its luster. The worry showed in the creases around her eyes and the way in which she ground her molars together. And yet her natural dynamism hadn’t waned.
    “One thing you should know, sir: Vishnu Mishra left Agra on the highway headed this way at midnight,” she said.
    “He will go directly to Ram’s village,” reasoned Puri. “His daughter has absconded—and if, as you say, he is not in possession of the boy, he will take someone hostage.”
    “Ram’s parents?”
    “Definitely.”
    Facecream looked skeptical. “But if anything happens to them, he’ll be the prime accused. Ram registered a complaint against Mishra after he threatened to kill him. Also, Tulsi called him again and told him not to touch Ram’s family, not if he ever wants to see her again,” she said.
    “Think a Thakur type will worry about such details? Believe me, he will stop at nothing to get his daughter back. It takes a father to know.”
    They passed along dark empty streets where stray dogs roamed and litter lay awaiting the reed brooms of sweepers. It had been three or four years since Puri had last been in Lucknow, once celebrated as the Constantinople of the East. In the dim, expiring light, he could see that the crush of contemporary India was slowly taking its architectural toll on the city. Malls and office blocks, about as imaginatively designed as cardboard boxes, now cluttered the place. Building sites appeared around every corner, with concrete superstructures cloaked in bamboo scaffolding.
    Vestiges of this once-great center of culture and learning remained, however, in the domes and towers of palaces andmosques etched against the somber sky. The British influence remained conspicuous, too. They passed a church with a spire that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Cotswolds village, and the old Residency building—scene of some of the bloodiest fighting during the 1857 First War of Independence (“the Mutiny” to the Britishers)—its brickwork still pockmarked by cannon fire.
    The driver turned on his radio. When the newsreader spoke of the burning of Korans in Afghanistan and subsequent rioting in Kabul, Puri noted similarities between that conflict and the one of 1857. The ramifications of colonialism always proved disastrous. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most lawless states, was yet to recover from the legacy of the Britishers in the detective’s opinion. The British Empire had destroyed the fabric of the indigenous economy as well as the old nawab culture,