Up in Flames (6 page)

             
‘It’s seems a possibility,’ Casey admitted. ‘That’s why I need to know as much about her life as you can tell me. Did anyone threaten her?’

             
Mr Khan hesitated, then said slowly, ‘Chandra did mention something. Two white youths hassled her only last week outside the flat. She was putting the rubbish out. Called her — well the usual racist nastiness. My Chandra is — was,’ bleakly, he corrected himself, ‘a spirited girl. She never meekly accepted abuse from anyone, even when it might be more  sensible to say nothing. She told me she called them a pair of ignorant idiots and that they should go back to school and learn some manners.’

             
‘Did they assault her?’

             
‘She said one of them tried to grab her arm, but she was too quick for them and got the gate between them and her. Told them that if they didn’t go away she would call the police. After shouting more obscenities, they left.’ He shrugged. ‘That was all there was to it.’ His troubled gaze met Casey’s. ‘Do you think they might have done this dreadful thing?’

             
‘We don’t know, Mr Khan. It’s early days. Tell me, when exactly did this exchange between your daughter and these youths take place?’

             
He frowned as he thought back. ‘It was on Thursday morning. Just a couple of days ago.’

             
Today was Saturday. A short enough distance in time for any of her neighbours who had observed the youths to remember their behaviour. ‘Did your daughter describe them to you?’

             
He shrugged. ‘Skin-head yobs is all she said. These aggressive, shaven-headed youths all look so alike, don’t they? Do you think they could have come back and set the fire? From such little provocation?’

             
It was Casey’s turn to shrug. ‘We can’t rule anything out at this stage, Mr Khan. Obviously, we’ll speak to your daughter’s neighbours. See if any of them saw these skinheads. We might get a fuller description. It’s possible they’re known if they’re local.’

             
The little boy’s chatter broke into the pause in their conversation. He was standing by Shazia Singh’s knee and had obviously taken to her. He had raised the sleeve of his shirt and displayed a bandaged arm with all the pride of a wounded warrior as he chatted in Hindi.

             
His grandmother called to him, quite sharply, ‘Kedar, come here. Not to bother the police lady.’

             
Although Shazia told her the child was no trouble, Kedar’s grandmother was insistent. Obediently, Kedar went and perched on her lap. Once settled, he lost interest in everything but his bandage and gazed at it with a pleased smile on his otherwise serious little face.

             
Rathi Khan’s mother suddenly paused in her desultory brass-rubbing and spoke to her son in Hindi; softly at first and then with a growing sound of demand as he apparently tried to evade her questions. He must finally have given in and broken the news to her because her hands flew to her face. She let out a terrible wail, stood up and staggered. The brass ornaments she had been cleaning crashed to the floor at her feet, creating an appalling cacophony that set Casey’s teeth on edge.

             
Rathi Khan caught his mother and half-carried her back to her chair. She collapsed into it, tearless as yet, but with a lost, hollow look in her eyes, she began to chant the names of her granddaughter and the baby over and over again.

             
‘My mother is not well,’ Rathi told them quietly as Mrs Khan’s cries upset the little boy and started him sobbing all over again. ‘It is best she doesn’t know all the details. I have told her only that they are dead. It is enough. For now, at least.’

             
His mother plucked at his sleeve. Her voice had turned querulous; even Casey caught the note of reproach although he failed to understand the Hindi. With a glance of apology for his visitors, Rathi Khan excused himself and half-dragged, half-carried his mother from the room.

             
He returned after five minutes. ‘I have given her a sleeping pill,’ he told them. ‘It is better that she sleeps. She might bear her grief more calmly after a rest.’ He sighed softly, gazed at his quietly weeping wife, and grandson and observed, ‘No amount of weeping will bring them back.’

             
He had called his son during the drive from the shop. And now, as Casey heard another car pull up on the forecourt, he guessed it was the son. He glanced out of the window and saw a sharp-suited Asian man in his mid-twenties slam the car door and hurry to the entrance. Footsteps approached the door, and after a single glance that took in the little tableaux of police, parents and grandfather, he crossed immediately to his mother and embraced her.

             
‘My son, Devdan,’ Mr Khan explained by way of introduction.

             
Apart from saying, ‘Dan,’ in correction of his father in what seemed to have become an automatic Anglicised adoption, the younger man simply nodded in acknowledgement of their presence, but said nothing. He was a good-looking young man, with a straight, classically sculpted nose, firm lips now tightly-pressed and highly-planed cheek bones. Tall, with his father’s features and light skin, he carried himself well. His plentiful hair blow-dried in a sleek style, he looked modern, totally English in a way his parents would never be. He sat on the other side of his mother, lifted the little boy from her lap and onto his own and took the hand that still had a death-grip on the material of her sari. Casey began his questioning again.

             
‘I understand that your daughter and her baby lived alone. Isn’t that a little unusual?’

             
Rathi Khan’s hand gripped his wife’s other hand more tightly as he told Casey, ‘It was a temporary arrangement only. Just until I could organise something better. My daughter was recently widowed,’ he explained. ‘Naturally, I wanted her back home with her family, but we are bursting at the seams here at the moment. As you see, I have my mother and father over from India on an extended visit, my son, his wife and two small children, as well as my younger daughter and my wife and myself, all living here. The house may look large, but it still has only four bedrooms.’

             
Casey nodded, but he still thought it odd that room couldn’t have been found for the widowed Chandra and her baby. How much space did  one young woman and a small baby take up, after all? But then, as he recalled all the paraphernalia expectant colleagues had bought in preparation for a new infant he thought Mr Khan might have a point. Even so, and especially given the series of local arson attacks it seemed foolhardy for him to have left his daughter alone in a flat in a rundown part of town.

             
He wondered where the son’s wife and the younger daughter and granddaughter were. They must be out or all the commotion would surely have brought them running. ‘I understand that Chandra had only lived at the flat for a short time — you own it, I believe you said, Mr Khan?’

             
‘Yes. It is my flat. Of course, until her husband died, my daughter lived with her in-laws.’

             
At this, the son burst into a sudden torrent of Hindi. His father waved his hand at him and glanced at Shazia Singh as if to remind him of her presence. He seemed to be doing his best to shut his son up. But the son shook his head vehemently, turned to Casey and in unaccented English, told him, ‘My sister’s in-laws threw her and the baby out of the house. She—‘

             
‘It is not necessary to tell the police this,’ his father broke in. ‘It is not relevant and—’

             
‘Why should we keep it secret?’ Devdan Khan demanded. ‘It is their shame, not ours.’ Devdan — or Dan, as he seemed to prefer to be called — over-rode his father’s objection and turned back to Casey. ‘My sister had not borne a son, you see. She was a disappointment to them. And then, when Magan, their son and Chandra’s husband, died, they blamed my sister.’

             
Casey sat forward. Although he had already learned this from Chandra’s neighbour, it was as well to get the more intimate, family version. ‘Why was that?’ he asked. Was it possible that Chandra and the baby had died as a result of a family feud? Such things weren’t unknown. It seemed that one of her family, at least, might suspect such a possibility.

             
‘It was nothing.’ Rathi Khan broke in again. ‘It was just that they were distraught, grieving. My son is too young yet to understand that the pain of bereavement can make people hasty and unthinking.’

             
‘I, too, am grieving,’ Dan pointed out to his father. ‘Their grief is no excuse for what they did.’ He turned back to Casey. ‘Chandra and her husband had had an argument the day before he died and—’

             
‘My daughter could be a little wilful,’ Rathi told them. He sighed. ‘It is the western influence. She was too out-spoken for a young woman.’

             
‘Anyway,’ Dan broke in. ‘Her husband wanted to make up, so to please her, he gave her money to buy new clothes for herself and the baby. He dropped her and Leela at the shops. He had an accident on the way back.’ He paused, then added, ‘A fatal accident. Her in-laws blamed my sister. When they arrived back home from the hospital Mrs Bansi, her mother-in-law, began to scream at Chandra. Told her she had brought bad karma to their family.’ He sighed. ‘All the usual religious mumbo-jumbo was used as an excuse. Anyway, they threw her out, her and the little one. Told her she should take herself to Varanasi or Vrindavan and try to behave like a dutiful sorrowing widow.’ He broke off to explain to Casey and Catt, ‘They are two towns in India where unwanted widows go to live out the rest of their days mourning their husbands.’ His voice thickened as he added, ‘Chandra and Leela would still be alive if it wasn’t for their cruelty. She would have been safe at their house, not alone at the flat and vulnerable.’

             
Was that the closest any of the family would come to an accusation? Casey wondered. He also wondered why Rathi Khan was so keen to play it down. Perhaps it was a generation thing? Or perhaps, as well as the marital connection, there were also business connections between the two families. Asian families tended to tie interwoven threads of kinship. No doubt he was concerned that he might suffer business loss on top of his personal bereavement. Was he, in that fatalistic Indian way, saying that life must go on? It wouldn’t help this practical aim if his son spread his anger amongst the wider Asian community. Besides, at this stage there was no evidence to point the finger at Chandra’s in-laws. Anyway, hadn’t Dan Khan said that his sister would have been safe if she had remained at the home of her in-laws? The use of such a word scarcely implied that he suspected them of being the cause of Chandra’s death.

             
But it was for him to investigate this and every other possibility. And as there would never be a better time than now, while they were unguarded and outspoken in their grief, to discover if there was any such evidence, Casey probed a little deeper. ‘So there was bad feeling between your families?’

             
Dan Khan shrugged. ‘They had been saying unkind things about Chandra. Untrue things. Making all kinds of accusations. They even—’

             
‘That is enough, Devdan,’ his father insisted. ‘What’s done is done. It was their grief talking, I am saying, nothing more. Like your poor sister, it would be more seemly if you kept a respectful tongue in your head, my son. Remember to whom you are talking.’

             
From Dan’s silent, but simmering expression, Casey guessed he would get no more information. At least, not in the presence of Rathi Khan. Now he changed the subject and asked Mr Khan, ‘Was Chandra security conscious?’

             
‘It is these skinhead yobs you are thinking of, yes?’

             
Casey, wary of being pushed on to one particular track, said cautiously, ‘The skinheads are one possibility. But they’re not the only ones. There were no obvious signs of a forced entry, you see.’

             
Rathi Khan nodded absently at this, as if it was something he had expected. ‘I told her she must keep the doors and windows locked. She said she would.’ He shrugged. ‘But the young are careless about such things. Maybe she was slapdash and with the warm weather...’ His explanation tailed off, then he added, ‘Of course, if she left the back door or windows open or unlocked anyone at all could have got in. Is that what you are thinking happened, Inspector?’

             
Casey nodded. ‘It seems a likely possibility. I’ll need to speak to your daughter’s in-laws. Could you let me have their address and full names?’

             
‘What for do you want to speak to them?’ Rathi Khan asked anxiously. ‘I told you they can have had nothing to do with this business. They are decent, honest merchants, no matter what my son may say.’

His son didn’t seem keen for them to pursue the matter either, only his reasons were rather different. ‘They will only poison your mind against Cha
ndra,’ he told them. Suddenly, he seemed to be backtracking. Casey wondered why and what Chandra’s in-laws might reveal.