Scott Mariani - Valley of Death

One thing he was getting used to, and fast, was Brooke’s company. The tension between them had melted away and being with her felt more natural and comfortable with every passing minute they spent together. He had to keep reminding himself not to touch her as they walked.

On the second floor a placard outside the offices read proudly, The Prateek Prajapati Detective Agency specialises in cases relating to anonymous letters and suspicious telephone calls, pre-matrimonial investigations, divorce and adultery, kidnapping and missing persons, extortion, financial crimes and cheatings. Fully licensed and qualified.

‘A man of many and varied talents,’ Ben commented. Brooke knocked, walked in, and he followed her through the door. The small reception area was full of artificial plants, with a desk in one corner behind which sat a small, middle-aged Indian woman in a bright blue sari. Opposite the desk was a cramped waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs. A pair of internal doors led off from the reception area, one marked BATHROOM and the other plain. The receptionist frowned at them over the top of a Dell monitor as they approached the desk. The plastic monster plant next to her needed dusting. If there was any air conditioning in the building it didn’t seem to be working.

Brooke rested her hands on the desk and gave the woman a polite smile. ‘Brooke Ray, to see Mr Prajapati? It’s concerning the case of my husband, Amal.’

The receptionist checked her screen, spent a moment tapping and scrolling, frowned a bit more and said, ‘You do not appear to have an appointment. Mr Prajapati is very busy. If you do not have an appointment he cannot see you right now.’

Ben said, ‘Oh, I think he’ll see us.’ Before the woman could react or hit the intercom button on the phone in front of her, he stepped towards the unmarked door and pushed straight through without knocking.

Delhi’s top private detective was lounging on a sofa with his feet up and a sports magazine in his hands. He was a large, jowly man in his late fifties, with jet-black thinning hair and a bushy moustache that were obviously dyed. Dark rings around his eyes gave him a panda-like appearance and his mound of a belly strained at his shirt buttons. At Ben’s sudden entrance he launched the magazine up into the air and almost fell off the sofa in alarm.

Brooke stepped into the office behind Ben and stood with her hands on her hips. ‘It’s good to see you so hard at work finding my husband, Mr Prajapati.’

Jumping to his feet, Prajapati straightened his rumpled shirt and crooked tie and smoothed his hair and began to bluster indignantly about the need to make an appointment, and how he was just taking a short break in a hectic day. Ben eyed the remains of a large takeout lunch on the desk. Pretty obvious how the busy super-sleuth had spent the last hour or so.

Brooke said, ‘I’ve been hoping you might call to keep me updated on how your enquiries are progressing. Perhaps you lost my number? Anyhow, I just happened to be in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d stop by.’

Prajapati shot a deeply suspicious glare at Ben, pointed a thick finger his way and said, ‘Who is this person?’

‘I’m your new assistant,’ Ben said. ‘Come to work with you on the Ray kidnap case. It’s a real honour for me.’

‘I have no need for an assistant.’

‘Then I’ll just have to manage on my own,’ Ben said. ‘Shame.’

Brooke said, ‘This is Mr Hope. He’s travelled to India to assist me, doing what it seems nobody else here is willing or able to do. That is, to find my husband and bring him home safely.’

More collected now, Prajapati walked over to the desk and perched on its corner with one leg dangling, like a link of sausage. He laced his fingers together over his belly and looked at Ben with flat cop eyes. ‘You are wasting your time, my friend.’ To Brooke he said, ‘Mrs Ray, please let me remind you that locating your husband is, under the circumstances, a very difficult business.’

‘I’m aware of that. That’s why I hired you, on the understanding that you were the best person for the job. Are you saying you’ve made no progress at all? And have you heard anything from the police inspector in charge of the investigation? Because I haven’t. All this waiting for the phone to ring starts giving you the strangest idea that nothing’s actually happening.’

‘In fact I was intending to call you today,’ Prajapati replied gravely. ‘Mrs Ray, you need to prepare yourself for bad news. Please, take a seat.’ He motioned at the pair of fabric director’s chairs the other side of the desk.

Brooke didn’t sit down. Her face turned pale and her jaw tightened. ‘You’ve heard something. You’re going to tell me that Amal’s been found dead. Is that what you’re going to tell me?’

Prajapati shook his head, and his jowls wobbled. ‘No, Mrs Ray. It isn’t. Your husband has not been found. But in such a case as this, where no ransom demand has been made and the motivation for the crime is obviously something other than financial, a revenge attack perhaps, the chances of a happy outcome are very slight. Very slight indeed. That is why I say you should prepare yourself. The call I had been intending to give you, which now you are here in person is no longer necessary, was to inform you that after much consideration I am resigning from this case. Because in my professional opinion it is almost one hundred per cent certain that your husband is no longer alive, and at this stage we are looking for a corpse.’

But Prajapati was wrong. Because Amal Ray was still very much alive. For the moment, at any rate – though for how much longer, he was too petrified to contemplate.

Amal could still see the last look on Brooke’s face as they ripped him away from her. Could still hear the echo of his own voice yelling, Run, Brooke, run! Then the van door slamming shut, and the start of the nightmare journey into the unknown. He remembered the van stopping. Sounds, footsteps, voices. Then a sudden flood of harsh light making him blink as the back door was wrenched open. A glimpse of brickwork in the background: had he been taken to a garage or a warehouse of some kind? Then the terrifying sight of one of his kidnappers, the one in charge, his face masked like a terrorist’s, coming up to him with a hypodermic needle in one gloved hand and an evil glint lighting up his eyes.

After that, there was a gaping hole in Amal’s memory. Whatever sedative they’d pumped into him could have rendered him unconscious for minutes, hours, he had no idea. The next thing he’d known was awakening in this place, head aching, feeling nauseous and utterly afraid.

And he’d been here ever since. Long enough to have examined every square inch of his strange new environment a hundred times over.

His prison was thirty feet square, a figure he’d paced out accurately over and over, back and forth and round and round like a zoo animal in a caged enclosure. It was lit by a single naked bulb in the middle of the ceiling that burned around the clock, so that it was impossible to tell night from daytime hours and hard to keep track of the days passing. His captors had taken away his watch, along with his wallet and shoes. Why the shoes, he’d wondered at first. Maybe to make it harder for him to run away, in the unlikely event that he managed to escape this place. Or maybe to prevent him from hanging himself with his laces.