Valley of Death. Scott Mariani

talk to me. Backtrack. Start at the beginning. Every detail you can think of.’

      Brooke took a smaller sip of scotch and leaned forward in the armchair with her elbows on her knees, getting her thoughts together. ‘Did Phoebe tell you about Kabir?’

      ‘Amal’s younger brother. The archaeology professor. She told me that it all started with him.’

      Brooke nodded. ‘What else did she tell you?’

      ‘That Kabir and his two colleagues were attacked three weeks ago while on a field trip to some remote country area. They were killed. He’s missing.’

      Brooke gave a sigh. ‘More or less, in a nutshell. It happened in north-west India, near a place called Rakhigarhi. It’s very remote. They flew there by helicopter.’

      ‘Charter aircraft?’

      She shook her head. ‘Kabir’s own chopper. He’s a licensed pilot. Or was.’

      ‘What were they doing there?’

      ‘I’m not quite sure. It’s to do with some big archaeological project that he’s spent years on. Sai and Manish were two of his graduate students at the Institute. It’s not unusual for Kabir to fly out to remote locations for his work, but he always stays in touch with his office. He was supposed to have been back after two days. When he didn’t make contact or return, alarm bells started ringing and the local police were called in. The helicopter was found abandoned, raided and stripped of parts. The police discovered the bodies of Sai and Manish a few hundred yards away, but no trace of Kabir himself.’

      Ben digested the details, and remembered what Brooke’s sister had told him. ‘They’d been shot?’

      ‘To pieces, pretty much. According to the police report. They found scores of cartridge cases lying a short distance from the scene.’

      ‘Implying multiple shooters. It doesn’t take that much shooting to take down two or three unarmed targets.’

      She nodded. ‘Using military weapons. The cases were surplus 7.62 NATO stuff.’

      ‘Ex-military,’ Ben said. After many years of being issued home-grown copies of the old L1A1 British infantry rifle, the Indian Army had switched to smaller-calibre INSAS weaponry in the eighties. INSAS stood for Indian Small Arms Systems. A backward step, in Ben’s opinion, because the L1A1 with its more powerful cartridge had been one of the best combat weapons ever made. The change had caused a flood of decommissioned but still perfectly usable arms to hit the market, a vast amount of which had inevitably ended up in the hands of irregular forces like guerrilla armies, terrorist organisations and criminal gangs all across Asia and eastern Europe. Along with even vaster quantities of the now-obsolete ammunition, crates of which traded hands for a song. Hence, a lot of very trigger-happy killers on the loose. The kind of morons who’d shoot folks to pieces just for the hell of it. If Kabir had encountered a bunch like that, the chances of his survival didn’t look too promising.

      Ben said, ‘Which would tend to support the police’s theory that armed bandits were responsible for the attack.’

      ‘That’s their take, and they’re sticking with it. The man in charge of the investigation over there is a police captain called Jabbar Dada. He calls himself “the dacoit hunter”.’

      ‘Dacoit?’

      ‘Outlaws, bandits, gangsters, whatever you want to call them. Apparently that whole region is overrun with marauding criminal gangs. Captain Dada and his police task force are on a mission to wipe them out. Sounds like he’s got his hands full. So on the face of it, the bandit theory seemed like a likely explanation.’

      ‘And I gather your Mr Prajapati shares that opinion, too.’

      Brooke seemed surprised. ‘Phoebe told you about Prateek Prajapati?’

      ‘Just that he’s supposed to be the best private investigator in Delhi.’

      She shrugged. ‘So they say. It was Amal who hired him initially.’

      Ben asked, ‘Why would Amal hire a detective?’

      ‘Because he still wasn’t satisfied, and he was frustrated that not enough was being done. He thought that Dada was too eager to run with the bandit theory, instead of trying to come up with proper evidence. If Kabir was shot along with Sai and Manish, why was there no body?’

      ‘How did they account for that?’

      ‘They just assumed that it must have been dragged off by wild animals,’ Brooke said. ‘Wild dogs, wolves, jackals, maybe even a tiger. Even though the other two bodies hadn’t been touched, as far as we knew. It didn’t seem to make any sense that some hungry scavenger wouldn’t have had a go at them, too. They’d been pecked by vultures, nothing more.’

      ‘Nice.’

      ‘So after endless days of going nuts in London, Amal decided he had to fly out to be here in person, and he jumped on the first plane.’

      ‘You didn’t come with him?’

      ‘No, I had a conference I couldn’t get out of. I came out to join him a few days later.’

      ‘Did Amal go to Rakhigarhi and visit the spot where it happened?’

      Brooke shook her head. ‘You know Amal. He wasn’t made for roughing it. He freaks out any time he ventures more than ten miles from a major city. He stayed here in Delhi while making a thousand phone calls to Captain Dada’s office. Then he went to see Prajapati and employed him to travel out to Rakhigarhi and visit the crime scene on his behalf. Prajapati spoke to the law enforcement officials there and came back satisfied their take on the situation was probably right, and that Kabir had almost certainly been killed along with his two associates, and that it was time to accept it, close the case and move on. Shit happens, basically.’

      ‘Nothing like thorough police work,’ Ben said.

      ‘Amal called me that night. He was very upset. He wouldn’t accept that his brother was dead. Kept insisting that Kabir must be lying injured somewhere, and the police had just missed it, and they weren’t trying hard enough and needed to widen the search. He had a big argument with Samarth about it.’

      ‘The eldest brother.’

      ‘Samarth had already spoken to Captain Dada on the phone and believed he must be right. Amal was furious with him.’

      ‘What about you?’ Ben asked. He could see the questions in her eyes.

      Brooke clutched her drink in one hand and raised the other in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I didn’t know what to tell him. The police had searched the whole area and found nothing. Their conclusions seemed to make sense to me too, at the time.’

      ‘At the time,’ Ben said. ‘But now you’re not so sure?’

      ‘Neither are you,’ she replied. ‘Or you wouldn’t be asking me all these questions about Kabir. First one brother goes missing, then the other. It can’t be just a coincidence, can it? You see it that way, too, don’t you?’

      ‘I’m only trying to build a picture in my mind, Brooke. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe the police are right, and the incident in Rakhigarhi was nothing more than just a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that we need to look in a totally different place to figure out why this thing has happened to Amal.’

      ‘Or maybe they’re wrong,’ Brooke said. ‘In fact, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that there’s more to this.’

      Ben looked at her and could see she was resolute. ‘Based on what?’

      ‘Based on something Amal said to me, the night those bastards took him.’

       Chapter 10