Doosra

Read Doosra for Free Online

Book: Read Doosra for Free Online
Authors: Vish Dhamija
known to be pretty appalling. Ask an Indian witness about a Caucasian or an African or a South-East Asian and they'll be at a loss. Wouldn't it be the same for a Caucasian in identifying an Indian? Didn't Ash Mattel tell her that every Indian girl looked like Shilpa Shetty to the Brits after she had won some Celebrity Big Brother in the UK?
    'You have a point there Rita but, after we got this footage, the hotel front desk personnel confirmed they had seen the guy, spoken to him and he was positively identified as an Indian. After all, they had checked him in. He couldn't have eluded that. He checked-in with the name…' Victor scrambled through the pages… 'Sishir Singh.' He passed the papers to Rita.
    Rita looked at them for a few minutes, and then passed them to Vikram.
    Vikram looked at the papers. 'I can appreciate why you're here now.'
    'I'm glad you both agree with me. Now, how do we find this guy?'
    'Hold on a minute. Even if we concur that he is of Indian origin, that is no harbinger that the guy lives in India?'
    'Well, the airport authorities gave us their surveillance tapes too. Let's look at them first.'
    The guy who could possibly be Sishir Singh was on camera for a fraction of a second and then, poof, vanished. No other surveillance camera anywhere at the airport picked him up again. In the only spotting, the guy was of the same height and body proportions as Sishir Singh, and hence the possibility. The guy wore a baseball cap with the shade guardedly pulled down till it almost covered his nose. The airport cameras worked 360 degrees. They rotated such that each one covered the same spot every fifteen seconds. There was only a brief time when one camera arrested Sishir Singh when he went to the check-in desk. It was evident that the guy knew the location of airport cameras too. You had to know the camera locations and their movements in entirety before you could outfox it. Sishir Singh certainly knew the CCTV blind spots. There was no other way. He should be given full marks for the research.
    'The image was dark and hazy, as you can imagine, but our experts after enhancing and enlarging it, have compared and confirmed with statistical confidence that the image was of the same person that was in the elevator,' Victor began after the short video ended. 'Moreover, our airport authorities confirmed that a guy named Sishir Singh flew from Brussels to Mumbai on the morning after the murder. That was the same flight Mr Jogani was booked on. Perhaps, if he had failed to get the diamonds at the hotel he had planned to take them someplace else. Who knows?'
    'OK, that's too much of a coincidence to accept. That settles it, if Sishir Singh flew to Mumbai...'
    'They hadn't thought the plan through. How do you steal diamonds from the merchants and sell them back to them in India?' Vikram questioned.
    Rita could explain it but she let Victor explicate.
    'In our experience, art, antiques, collectibles or merchandise, like precious stones over a certain value are stolen only after they are sold. The buyer is already there. The diamonds would have changed hands before our police got Mr Jogani's body bagged and tagged and got it out of the hotel. The buyer, of course, hadn't ordered blood diamonds, but who would have known about the murder when the deal was sealed?'
    The hypothesis made sense.
    'And in any event, selling the diamonds — I guess that worry would pale before the reward,' Rita explained more logically. 'And I know it's only an assumption but in my opinion it's a calculated hypothesis.'
    'It's more than a hypothesis actually, as one of the diamonds stolen from that heist turned up in Antwerp again, and the origin of that stone was given as Mumbai. So, some of them have already changed hands once, at least.'
    'And is there no way to track the last sale and then work on the chain backwards to its origin in Mumbai?' Vikram asked.
    'No.' Victor wagged his head. 'The diamond trade is more guarded than you imagine: almost

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