The Long Ransom

Did you ever aspire to be Miss Marple? Yes? I deduce that you're already past 90. Sherlock Holmes, maybe, particularly if you like useless facts and hard drugs. But for sheer hardboiled detection, there is nothing to beat the gun-toting downtown denizen of the dumps, the deadbeat detective of Delhi. Successor to Bourne of the long-term memory loss. Meet your detecting alter ego. Me.

I hadn't paid the rent in weeks. The landlord only let me stay because I kept the rats out. Unfortunately, I'd no money left for bullets. Any day now, the rats would wise up.

I pulled my hat down and tightened my raincoat. Damn, no more notches. I put my feet up on my desk. It’s a spare table with two bricks under one of the legs, but I feel happy if I call it a desk, ok?

And don’t ask about the hat. You can’t have a detective without a hat. Even if it is only a raincoat hat.

I'd have gone home, except that I hadn't had a home in years.

So I was still there, with the lights out (saves electricity) when the door banged open and A Client gasped up to my desk.

I took my feet down from the desk and read him in a glance.

"Why did you do it?" I asked quietly but menacingly.

"I didn't!" he shrieked.

I said sharply, "Sit down. Face the light." I reached up and pulled the cord. 40 watts of incandescent yellow poured down on the sweaty face and popping eyes of my client. I need an LED lamp, but first, a client to pay for one.

I leaned forward and said, "Start from when you realised." Best to be mysterious till I knew enough.

"It was a dark and stormy night when I ventured into the forest," he said.

I looked out the grimy window. It still was. Dark and stormy.

“What forest?” I sneered, coming back to the matter at hand. Specifics. Always ask for specifics while it’s still fresh in the witness’s mind.

“The Ridge,” he quavered, and I waved a languid hand for him to continue.

What a wimp. Who calls the Ridge a forest, I ask you. All it has are wimpy keekar trees (thorny acacia to those of you who are foreign returned). Huh. Another dark and stormy night tickled my memory, then started to poke it rather hard.
I stared closely at the client, comparing his features with a shadowy face from that long-gone night. This seemed to make him nervous, because he went on in a rush.

"He said not to call the police. I left the bag at the well, just like he said. It took me an hour to walk back to where I'd left my scooter." He started sobbing.

"Twelve years!" he wailed. "Twelve years it took me to save the money for the ransom. And he still killed her. Oh, the blood!"

"And now I suppose the cops are after you?" I muttered.

"Yes! They think I kept her locked up in the well, and killed her when she escaped. Please! I'm innocent! You've got to help me!"

"It costs," I said bluntly. Well? Well? Well, well. At the Ridge. The key to the whole case was suddenly in my grasp.

He drew himself up. "Find the ransom, find the killer, the money's all yours. Without my sister, what do I have to live for?"

He slumped right down again. I immediately knew that he had watched one too many an old Hindi movie about undying brotherly and sisterly love. You’ll see later how I knew this for sure.

Blood may be thicker than water, and the pen may be mightier than the sword, but money is money. I pushed over a printed contract and made him sign it. With a pen. Where do you think I would get a sword from that late at night, anyway?

God knows why I got as many as 100 copies of that contract printed. There were hardly five or six copies that the rats hadn’t attacked over the years. And each one had the same spelling mistakes that the printer had added as a ‘special bonus’. Cheap printers who give you special bonuses are not easy to find, even if they insist on the Printers’ Rule of minimum order quantities of 100, so keep your thoughts about my financial acumen to yourself, please.

I sighed as I rechecked the section on payment carefully. “One bag of money, if and when recovered.” The fact that I had had to insert the ‘and when’ shows a sorry lack of trust on the part of the client. But at least he signed it.

I, on the other hand, and very naturally, had 100% confidence in my ability to solve the case. Just remember that the prospect of fees to the downtown denizen of the dumps, the deadbeat detective of Delhi, is as motivating as candy to a baby or as cocaine to Sherlock. Plus, as you shall see, I had secret information.

I knew exactly who the real culprit was, and exactly what he had done. It was only the blood that gave me pause. Where did all the blood come from? Now that’s a mystery for you and me to crack. The rest was as obvious as the nose, eyes and chin on my client’s face.

"Meet me at the police station in half an hour." I ushered my contracted client out, pulling my hat further over my eyes and turning up my raincoat.

Half an hour later, I was at the police station, shoving along a rat-faced individual at the point of my (empty) gun.

"He did it." I told the DSP at the police station. "Confess, you creep." The rat-faced guy fell to his knees, blubbering. “And all about the blood, for a start!” I snapped.

I was only snapping because I hadn’t guessed, deduced or otherwise worked it out until the rat-faced guy confessed all at high-speed minutes after he saw me at his door.

He’d tried to close the door in my face, but I was having none of that. I could smell mutton cooking in his house, and it made me very hungry. I had several years of pent-up anger over my relative poverty to take out on this wretch, and I kicked the door pretty hard, sending him over backwards. Then I pointed my gun in his face.

Remember, I had been conditioned to shoot rats over the years. It’s only the utmost self-control that made me hold off pulling the trigger. That, plus the lack of bullets. An empty clicking sound would have given away the secret of the bullet shortage.

However, he had squinted at the muzzle very satisfactorily.

He’d started blubbering away immediately. It took me twenty minutes of sharp questions and many wailed repetitions on his part to get the fairly short story of his nefarious plot unravelled. I even refused his bribes of mutton biryani. That’s the closest anyone has ever gotten to reaching my price, let me tell you.

But I was well motivated. Well motivated, I tell you. I was more angry on my own behalf by the time his confession was over, than on behalf of my sorry excuse of a client. Bribe me indeed. Wanted me to hide evidence, did he?

I hope he stays cross-eyed for life after staring at the muzzle for so long.

He blubbered to the police for at least an hour and a half before they formally arrested him and shoved him into a cell. You can clearly see how much more efficient I am than the police.

"How did you know?" my client and the DSP asked me later, respectfully standing beside me while I counted the cash in the ransom bag.

I finished counting in peace, then threw down my hat and addressed the DSP.

"That's my creepy cousin. He threw me in the well twelve years ago. I climbed out and escaped. But I'd lost my memory. When I saw my brother, it all came back to me." I hooked a thumb towards my client/brother.

"And the blood and clothes?" asked my brother, dazed.

"Weren't you listening?" asked the DSP. "It was a goat he killed."

He really got my goat, I thought sourly. Twelve years of saving for the ransom, and it would barely pay the rent for one year. Inflation, bah. Hmm, the well wasn't occupied yet.

I then had an even brighter idea about an unoccupied space to occupy.

“Bro,” I offered expansively, “would you like some mutton biryani?”

Grandfather’s kitchen beckoned as we puttered along on Bhaiya’s scooter to my new residence.