I can tell immediately which of the two is Jaya, the headmistress, because the other woman is none other than Riya Kapoor, the detective who so recently put me in my place. Great. I take a breath and stride over, holding out my hand and introducing myself to Jaya. In my mind, I’d painted the headmistress as stern and ancient, but the reality is that she is probably late thirties, no more than five feet tall, somewhat round, and carrying so much nervous energy that even while she just sits here, it feels as if the edges of her are slightly blurred. Her eyes are rimmed with red, probably from exhaustion and crying.
“So marvelous to meet you, Jessie-ma’am,” Jaya says. She grasps my hand firmly and has a ready smile. “And I am so deeply, deeply sorry that this tragedy has occurred, and on my watch.”
“It’s not your fault,” I assure her. “And I’m sorry for your loss. The girls . . .”
As tears spring to her eyes, Jaya looks for distraction and turns to her companion.
“This is Detective Kapoor,” she says, introducing us.
“We’ve met,” the detective says to her before turning to me. “And, you can call me Riya.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, deadpan. “I don’t want to rush our relationship, you know, if you’re not ready. . . .”
Riya tosses out a tight smile before fixing me with a focused stare. “What are you doing here?” she demands.
“I have some questions for Jaya,” I reply.
“Great. I’d love to hear them,” Riya says, pulling a notebook from the inside of her suit jacket.
Suppressing a sigh, I sit down beside her, so that we are both opposite the headmistress, who’s keen to offer me a beverage. I decline, politely. Nevertheless, small glasses of milky tea appear before us within minutes. Riya picks hers up and knocks it back quickly, while I focus on Jaya.
“Can you tell me if there was any maintenance done at either school recently? Like, annual checks or any equipment that needed servicing . . .”
Jaya nearly bounces out of her chair. “Yes, yes, there was. The detective just asked me the same. There was a plumbing company that came to the school just a few days ago.”
I don’t feel I ought to whip out my purloined photos of the contract right in front of Riya, so I ask Jaya for the company name. No surprise, it’s the same one that I found the paperwork for.
“Is this a company you used before?”
She nods. Not that using an established firm means anything at all. It would be the easiest thing in the world to pay off the contracted workers to go and have lunch while someone else dressed in their overalls got access to the schools. Or for any company to hire in a temp worker.
Jaya looks stricken. “It didn’t connect for me as a problem. Till now.”
“It still might mean nothing,” Riya reassures her.
“Did your staff take any copy of an ID for the maintenance men?” I continue.
“It was only one man, and yes. Our practice is to take an ID copy and a cell phone number for anyone who enters the building where the girls are. It’s routine but we always do it.”
Riya looks at me, as if she’s just ever so slightly impressed that my opening questions were not completely idiotic. I take a sip of my tea, which is a troubling combination of scalding hot and tooth-achingly sweet.
“They scan the ID and store it digitally on the desktop computer in the office,” Riya says. Clearly, she’s decided she may as well save me the same line of questioning she’s just gone through. “I sent our tech guys in there just now to find it but the folder it should be in doesn’t have anything new from the past few weeks.”
Jaya wrings her hands. “I hope the administrator didn’t fail to follow procedure,” she says.
“I’ll talk to your admin person next,” Riya tells her. “Unless you want to?” she adds dryly, looking at me.
“Nice of you to ask,” I comment. “Does this mean you’re starting to trust me?”
“Not in the least. I was being sarcastic,” she returns.
I feel like she’s always got me on the defensive. She’s still watching me, and somehow her gaze makes me self-conscious. I pull out my phone and ask Riya to let me know what she finds out. Whether she will bother to keep me updated or not, I can’t be sure yet, but I give her my temporary Indian cell number, one that no one else contacts me on. To my surprise, she gives me hers in exchange.
“In case you turn something up,” Riya tells me. She glances down at the table for a long moment and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are dark and serious. “Those girls have had their futures taken from them, brutally,” she continues. “Their families will never recover from the loss. I want to do everything I can to find the people who did this and to make sure they don’t do it again.”
Across from us, an audible sob escapes from Jaya. I pass her a tissue and she blots away the tears in her eyes. I watch Riya, who looks younger now, even vulnerable. Her earnestness feels honest and it makes me like her more.
“Please know that I feel the same way,” I assure her. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything.”
7
IT’S NOT GREAT THAT THE maintenance man’s ID scan appears to be missing, but I’m hopeful that Amber might have found it somewhere, maybe misfiled on the hard drive. Or it could be that she’s tracked down the plumbing contractor and we can trace the guy from that. While I’m stuck in traffic on the way back to my hotel, I check in with Amber. She sounds animated, the way she does when she’s got something up her sleeve.
“Good timing,” she says. “I was getting ready to call you.”
“The police say the plumber guy’s ID is missing,” I tell her.
“Utter nonsense. I found it within ten minutes, sitting in a folder on the computer’s desktop, which has a hundred other pieces of crap in it,” Amber replies. “Someone was just too lazy to file it.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“Because the ID is all but useless. The name on it is fake.”
That’s hardly surprising, but still, it’s a letdown and I sigh, looking out of the window. In the distance, row upon row of slums whip past as we drive by. Closer to me, blurs of color strobe, attracting my attention: clusters of women in technicolor saris walking along the road; massive billboards advertising the latest Bollywood blockbuster movie.
“However,” Amber continues, “the cell number the plumber gave the school, though no longer in use, was once connected to a social media account. And that account belongs to the man in the ID photo; so the same guy. I imagine he couldn’t resist checking his feed even while doing something dodgy. His real name is Hassan Shah.”
“Great! Did you find him?”
“Well, there’s good and bad news. The bad news is, Hassan Shah there is like the name John Smith here. There are hundreds of them in Mumbai alone.”
I get the impression, just from her tone, that she’s already cracked this problem, but the thing with Amber is, she delights in giving you every little detail of how she did it. I try my best to be patient.
“And the good news?” I ask.
“Our Hassan’s social media account shows that he has two kids. A fourteen-year-old son and a younger daughter. Now, the son’s got a social profile that geo-tracks him, you know, so his friends can find him when they go out. . . .”