THE BUTCHER OF BENARES Read online

  ‘Actually,’ Hawa Singh explained, ‘Eva had written the word “Sparrow” on the same paper on which she wrote your number, along with that of Suryadev Singh and the Kashi Naresh. What could be the connection?’

  ‘Maybe she planned to meet Manvendra Singh.’

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Ruby.

  Shastri smiled. ‘Manvendra Singh is one of the top scholars of the Vedas and Vedic astrology, and is also the younger brother of the Kashi Naresh. It was a case of a genius losing his mind. He lost his mental balance, and was admitted to the Sparrow institute two-and-a-half years back.’

  ‘But we met with Abhay Narayan Singh, and he never mentioned it,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Kashi Naresh has cut off all relations with Manvendra since he went off and started living with the Aghoris on their cremation grounds. Manvedra wanted to learn tantra-mantra and all the secret knowledge of the Aghoris. He ate flesh from human carcasses with them. Slowly, he lost his mind. There were rumours that he had turned cannibal.’

  ‘This Manvendra Singh is the key. We need to find him,’ said Hawa Singh, after thanking Pandit Vishnu Shastri.

  ***

  The TV media had splashed the news all over the city from its many local channels. From there it was picked by the national news channels all around the country.

  The media had coined a name for the killer—‘Butcher of Benares’.

  The Butcher was now stalking the Ghost.

  CHAPTER 14

  He stood in the dense fog with his arms spread out wide. He felt invincible. He loved the name that the media had given him—the Butcher of Benares. He would have preferred to be called the God of Death, but this was close enough. Now people would talk about him, and speak his name in hushed whispers. They would spin stories around him. Experts would meet in panel discussions to analyze motives. He would definitely go down in history. He had an identity.

  Not that anyone understood what he was doing. His motives were different. His purpose was big.

  He had seen the tall police officer and that young FBI girl walking out of BHU. He knew they’d got his message. It was he who was making them run around in circles. Let them call him the Butcher; one day he’d tell them what was what. The story they had never heard.

  He looked at the shining knife in his hand. It had a long, slender blade with an ivory handle, and had a Cross stamped in gold on it. It was a Russian knife, one that the KGB, the Red Army and now the Russian mafia used. This was one knife you could not buy. You had to earn it.

  But he had neither bought the knife, nor earned it. He had it all right, and he was going to use it on the man with a bullet in his head—no ordinary knife would do the job. No one survives a cut from a Russian knife.

  He planned to hold him by his neck, give it a slight twist, place the knife against his throat and slowly make a deep cut from left to right in the shape of a crescent moon. The heart would do the rest, pumping out blood in spurts.

  It would make for great news, too. What would they call him then? Not that he had anything personal against the police officer—none whatever—but he was getting in the way. Deflecting him from his purpose.

  His purpose.

  The fog was really thick. It felt like ice. Thick and hard. Opaque. It gave him a perfect cover. The knife was ready. It positively danced in his hands.

  Hawa Singh, walking through the fog, took out his broken cell phone preparing to inform the SSP about the importance of the date ‘30 January’. Ruby walked alongside as they moved away from the main road onto a narrow street. The Butcher was waiting for them.

  He had seen the girl and liked her. He wondered whether he should kill her as well. Well, one at a time. First, the policeman had to go. He was a hindrance to the Butcher’s lofty plans and had to be eliminated.

  ‘Yes, Hawa Singh,’ the SSP said as he answered the call.

  ‘Sir, we have discovered something very important. The killer had left a message in the form of that horoscope chart. He will kill again.’

  The Butcher could feel them coming towards him. He fingered the blade of his knife—perfect! Sharp enough to cut through the fog.

  Hawa Singh came closer. Suddenly a fist hit his face. The phone fell from his hands and clattered away. Another blow to the jaw brought him to his knees.

  And then he felt the long, sharp blade touching the base of his throat. Hawa Singh was no martial arts expert but he had wrestled in the grounds of top akharas in Delhi. There were a couple of tricky moves he knew well. And there was one rule he lived by—attack!

  It was in a fraction of second that Hawa Singh grabbed the hand and twisted it. There was a pained cry and the knife around his neck lost its edge. It gave him enough time to haul himself up and whip out his .45 Colt.

  He pointed the Colt in the thick air, blindly. One pull on the trigger could release a bullet that tore through the blanket of fog and hit its target.

  He called out to Ruby to stay back. He sensed—rather than perceived—the knife slashing through the condensation towards him. He stepped aside but the Russian piece found a place to cut through. The knife gashed open the leather jacket and found his shoulder. Blood spurted out.

  Hawa Singh felt warmth around his arm but didn’t immediately realize he was bleeding. He waved the Colt in front of him frantically. He could hear the sounds of a bicycle bell. Must be a vendor or a milkman, he thought. There was also the laughter of children playing on the street. A housewife shouted from a balcony somewhere above to a vegetable-seller. A mother called out to her child to come home.

  One wrong move of his finger on the trigger could prove disastrous.

  The Butcher stood at a safe distance from him. He knew that his intended victim was taller than him, and more powerful. It was better to keep out of his range and pounce on him at a moment when he was caught unaware of the direction of his attacker. The fog was his ally. He smiled to himself. The Butcher had made his first cut.

  Ruby called out, standing helplessly in the fog, ‘Singh, are you okay?’

  The Butcher grinned when he heard her squeaky voice—to him she sounded like a frightened mouse. Being a member of the FBI didn’t make one immortal. There was a time to live and a time to die. And anyway, everyone finally died.

  He had to make his move. It would be difficult to target the throat. But he knew there was another part of the body that was irreplaceable. The heart.

  It is said a kitchen faucet would need to be turned on all the way for at least forty-five years to equal the amount of blood pumped by the heart in an average lifetime.

  A cold wind came floating from over the Ganges, bringing more fog, what could be called a white darkness. Blindness.

  This was the moment. The Butcher made his move, his knife poised. His was a practised hand and knew precisely the place that would let the slender knife move in without hindrance from the ribs.

  The move was swift, with the arm stretched out full, and the shoulder providing ample power and thrust to it. The smile broadened on the Butcher’s face.

  It was in that fraction of a second that Hawa Singh saw the glint at the tip of the steel blade. Hawa Singh dodged aside, but the knife cut his chest open. It was Hawa Singh’s turn to make a telling move. He grabbed at the hand that held the knife and directed a sturdy kick towards the knees of the owner. There was a cracking sound, and the knife clattered away on the ground.

  Ruby was calling out for help, as she dialled the SSP’s number from her cell phone.

  Hawa Singh advanced to grab the attacker. The Butcher, fumbling for a new weapon, found a wooden plank and hit him on the head with it. Everything went black. Intense pain overwhelmed him. And then, his legs buckled under him. But he clung to his Colt, knowing it wouldn’t betray him.

  He was on his knees, pointing the Colt aimlessly. At a distance, the Butcher pulled himself upright. He had to get out now. The fog had swallowed his Russian friend.

  There will be another time, another place, he vowed to himself. He was, afte
r all, the Butcher. Indistinctly, he saw the nose of the Colt, searching for him. He hated guns.

  Guns were responsible for more deaths than any other weapon. They killed, and there was nothing artistic or clever about them. It takes far, far more courage to wield a knife.

  He could see Ruby frantically making calls, and Hawa Singh fighting to stay up on his knees. He knew all about him—he had made a study of his exploits. Not for nothing did they call him the Ghost.

  It would take more than a Russian knife to get to him. But then, the Butcher promised himself, he would not disappoint. A crooked smile formed on the Butcher’s face.

  He dissolved into the fog.

  CHAPTER 15

  There was a combined sickening smell of spirit and vomit in the room. The white walls were stained, and cracks had formed, showing years of neglect. Electrical wires were crisscrossed by lizards chasing insects. Cobwebs awaited the survivors. The bins in the room overflowed with plastic, needles, left-over food and cotton swabs soaked in blood. It was cold and damp. A dreadful white glare from tubelights illuminated the room. It was not a place anyone would want to be in.

  Hawa Singh was lying on a bed in the government hospital. He had had to have five stitches on his arm and another twelve on his chest. The Russian knife had found its way.

  He opened his eyes, to see the SSP, Ruby and some others of his investigating team standing over his bed. ‘Who was it? Do you think it was the killer? Did you see him?’ A relentless barrage of questions came at him, fired by the SSP.

  In here, there were no doctors or nurses to restrict the SSP. ‘Please don’t disturb the patient. He needs to rest,’ they would have said. But there were hardly a handful of doctors for thousands of patients. Moreover, no one here would have dared to interrupt the SSP.

  ‘Where’s the knife?’ Hawa Singh asked Ruby, fighting against his weakness from loss of blood.

  ‘I have it.’

  ‘Sir,’ he turned to the SSP, ‘send the knife to check for fingerprints. I couldn’t see the attacker in the fog but I’m sure he was not wearing gloves.’

  When the Butcher disappeared, Hawa Singh had managed to salvage the knife in the fog. Never one to carry a handkerchief—too girlish, he always thought—he had asked Ruby for hers. People around him had forever thought him to be shabby, rustic, and even uncouth. He had never bothered himself with their opinions. It was the Ghost that went into the darkness, into the fog, to fight, to spill his blood for them. To make them feel secure, and be free to mouth such comments about him. The darkness called to him again, and again, he had to be ready to obey its summons. Be ready to die. He always was.

  Ruby gently touched the bandages on his arm. ‘You think he was the killer?’ she asked.

  Hawa Singh struggled to a sitting position on the bed, resting against the meagre hospital pillows. ‘Till now,’ he managed, panting a little, ‘the killer has been very secretive. He hasn’t left any prints or clues. I don’t understand why he would personally come out like this in the open, trying to kill me. Perhaps it was a hired hand.’

  Ruby showed the knife to Hawa Singh. He studied it and said, ‘This is no ordinary knife. It looks expensive and exclusive. There are very few people who could possess a weapon of this kind. It has the Cross embossed on its handle.’

  ‘It looks Russian to me,’ observed Ruby.

  Hawa Singh turned his gaze to the SSP. ‘More important than this, is the message that the killer left for us.’

  Then he told them everything about the horoscope on the corpse of the dead man, and the hidden message that the next target would be killed on the coming 30 January.

  Then SSP sat himself down on the wheeled steel stool beside Hawa Singh’s bed. He was quiet, almost in a helpless manner. ‘In less than two weeks, there have been three murders in Benares. Even if I don’t count the murder of that Aghori, we still have two murders—of foreigners—on our hands. And now, this threat,’ said the exhausted police chief.

  ‘Don’t look on it as a threat,’ interpolated Hawa Singh. ‘It’s a clear message to us: “Stop me, if you can. But you cannot.” He has already selected his next victim. He has planned it carefully, done research on the victim to the extent that he knows his/her birth date, birthplace and the time of birth, so that he can accurately make out the horoscope’.

  ‘So what do we do?’ asked the SSP in desperation.

  ‘We need the entire police force on high alert. There should be policemen in mufti on the lookout. We have to prevent yet another killing,’ said Ruby.

  ‘She’s right. One thing we’ve got to keep in mind is that both the last two victims were found at pilgrim sites. There is the probability he’ll use another such site. What we don’t know is whether he kills the victim at that spot, or after killing him or her, places the body there.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how many such pilgrim sites there are in Benares?’ asked the SSP exasperatedly, lighting a forbidden cigarette in the hospital room. ‘The entire place is a centre of pilgrimage. How many places can we watch all that closely?’ Everyone understood the extent of the pressure imposed on the SSP by politicians, various embassies and senior police brass, asking for immediate results to the investigations. But no one realized that results were a product of hard labour, toiling for days and queries into nothingness. How many of them had ever dealt with such a psychopath?

  The SSP looked at Ruby. ‘What does the FBI say, so far into this case?’

  ‘We have to catch the killer before he strikes again, is what we feel,’ she replied coolly. ‘His message is that he has gained increasing confidence, to the point that he feels free to take on the entire police force. He has given us a clear date. But who the target will be, whether it will be male or female, is not clear. Also, there is nothing to go by to ascertain that it will be a white foreigner or someone else.’

  Hawa Singh, trying to straighten up in bed, felt a painful tug at his stitches. Hearing his subdued cry, Ruby hurried to help him sit up straight. They looked at each other, then looked away. ‘Okay, let’s look at what we have in hand right now,’ he said, breaking the air, heavy with tension.

  ‘Yes,’ the SSP said hurriedly, ‘we got the autopsy report on the second victim found inside the Kashi Vishwanath temple. I almost forgot to mention it. It disclosed a similar modus operandi. The heart was removed and a Cross was placed in its stead. The ash smeared on the victim’s body was found to be from the cremation grounds. It contained particles of bone ash and burnt human tissue.’

  ‘The cremation grounds are the place where the Aghoris live,’ put in Ruby.

  Hawa Singh slowly nodded, lost in thought. His cerebral calculator was arriving at its own computations.

  The human brain, as scientifically recorded, is the fattest organ in the body and consists of at least 60 per cent fat. And while one is awake, the brain generates between 10 and 23 watts of power—or enough energy to light up a bulb.

  Hawa Singh was trying to energize the coils inside his brain and light up his thought bulb. ‘Why would any Aghori target a foreigner?’ he asked, finally.

  ‘Who the hell knows why? These Aghoris do indulge in human sacrifices, and that is well known. Maybe they are targeting white foreigners for some special kind of ritual. We need to get cracking on them,’ exploded the angry SSP.

  Gaya Prasad Sharma, sub-inspector, who had been standing quietly near the door, said, ‘Sir, I tried to talk to the Aghoris, to get the fingerprints of Neelambar Nath, to check against those found on the axe handle. They threw me out, and warned me that they would chop me into pieces if I ever dared to enter their grounds again.’

  ‘I don’t want you to waste your energy on the murder of that bloody Aghori,’ riposted the increasingly heated SSP. ‘Did you find anything about the second victim? Do we still have no idea who he was? Which country did he come from?’

  ‘We are working on it, but now, with the murder being reported widely by the media, no one wants to come forward with information,’ sa
id Gaya Prasad.

  A nurse came in to inject Hawa Singh with a painkiller. A drop of blood erupted where the needle went in, and she wiped it away with a cotton swab which she threw into an overflowing bin.

  ‘When can I leave the hospital, nurse?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  ‘You’d better rest here for another week, or these wounds will not heal,’ said the nurse tersely. She looked at the SSP, lowered her gaze and darted out of the room.

  ‘So, now, we are one soldier down,’ said the SSP.

  ‘I’m not dead,’ said Hawa Singh. ‘These nurses don’t know anything. I’ll be out of here by morning tomorrow.’

  The SSP nodded. He wanted him now, more than anyone else. Only a Ghost could track the Butcher.

  ‘Gaya,’ Hawa Singh now said to the younger policeman, ‘we can’t leave out anything. Go back to the Aghoris and tell them, if they don’t help us, I’m going to go there and drag them to the police station. Also, take the prints of Baba Ramtirath and keep a close watch on the Naga sadhus.’

  The SSP tried to protest. Then, he shrugged. ‘Get it done, Sharma.’

  Ruby re-entered the conversation. ‘We need to have a foolproof plan for the 30th,’ she said to Hawa Singh. ‘Maybe we need to keep in mind that in the last two cases, the killer struck at night, or, to be precise, right before dawn.’

  ‘Did forensics find anything inside the tunnel?’ asked Hawa Singh.

  The SSP sighed. ‘Water had seeped in by then, and the entire tunnel was filled waist-up. No prints of any kind. They found other passages connecting the same tunnel to other places.’

  ‘We need to keep an eye on that tunnel, said Hawa Singh. ‘It’s close to the ghats and the killer might be using it to escape.’ He scratched his head, looked down at himself, and realized, with a jolt, that he couldn’t find his Colt. He straightened up further and checked his back more thoroughly. It was not there.

  ‘We have your horse,’ said the SSP. ‘Sharma, get it.’