Episode 3 – Lamarck’s Inheritance

Every officer available had been given the same description. Dark jacket, gloves, face covered, last seen entering the east stairwell of Velmoor General at 10:48 PM.

Joy had pulled the CCTV himself at midnight, forwarded every frame to the technical unit, and put three officers on foot across the surrounding streets before he went home. He had not slept. By 6 AM he was back at his desk. By 7 AM the search had the quiet determined energy of something that everyone involved privately suspected was going nowhere.

Officer Shinde provided his account with the practiced remorse of a man who had rehearsed it several times before delivery.

“We were only gone four minutes, sir. Maybe five. Six at the most.”

“For tea,” Joy said.

“The machine on this floor was broken, sir. We had to go to the second floor.”

“Both of you.”

A pause. “We didn’t want to leave each other alone, sir.”

Johns, standing slightly behind Joy, pressed his lips together very carefully, holding in his laughter.

Joy looked at Shinde for a long moment. “You left a woman who had survived an attempted murder alone in a hospital room so that neither of you would have to wait for a cup of tea by yourself.”

Shinde had the grace to look at the floor.

Joy turned and walked away before he said something that would require paperwork.

“To be fair,” Johns said, falling into step beside him, “the tea on the second floor is significantly better.”

“Johns.”

“I’m just saying I understand the logic.”

“Do not understand the logic.”exclaimed Joy

By mid morning it was clear the masked man trail had run out completely.

John’s said, “Whoever it was had known the hospital’s blind spots with a familiarity that suggested either advance preparation or very good luck. It can be a staff of the hospital, a person who has known the hospital for long time, Nurse? Doctor? Wait! Who owns the hospital??”

Joy filed it without closing it….

There was a ring to find.

Suddenly, Joy gets a phone call, an unknown number. He answers it anyway…..

It was the the doctor from the gala, which Joy had not expected…

The Doctor said that he had been following the news coverage and wanted it on record that his initial assessment at the scene had been made under difficult conditions and that he had always maintained something seemed unusual about the situation.

Joy muttered a dry “thanks,” ended the call, and stared at the phone for a moment, as if it had personally disappointed him.

A man who had confidently announced heart attack within thirty seconds of seeing a body was now very interested in being remembered as someone who had found the situation unusual.

Joy noted it. Said nothing to Johns about it.

He thought “People who changed their stories when the wind changed were worth watching. Not always guilty of anything, except wanting to be on the right side of history. But worth watching…”

The breakthrough on the ring came from a source nobody expected.

Johns had been calling historians, genealogists and retired professors since early morning with the systematic energy of a man who had decided that somewhere in Velmoor there existed a person who knew every family seal in the city and was simply waiting to be asked.

He was right.

Professor Saldanha picked up on the first ring, which suggested either extraordinary availability or extraordinary loneliness, and identified the crest in under forty seconds.

“Mirchandani,” he said, with the quiet satisfaction of a man deploying thirty years of niche expertise. “Lion with one paw raised, sword behind, initials at the base. That is the Mirchandani family seal. Been around since this city was a third of its current size.”

He paused meaningfully. “Old money. Very old. The kind that doesn’t need to introduce itself because every room it enters already knows its name.”

Johns thanked him and hung up.

He walked over to Joy’s desk.

“Mirchandani,” he said.

Something moved behind Joy’s eyes. Quick and private.

“I know that name,” Joy said quietly.

“Everyone knows that name.” said John

“I know it from somewhere else.” He didn’t say where.

Johns waited.

Joy didn’t continue.

Johns had learned by now not to push. Joy was like a safe that opened on its own schedule. Pushing only broke the mechanism.

Joy spent twenty minutes going back through the guest list before they left.

He had gone through it four times already. This time he read it differently, not looking for who was there but thinking about who had been invited. Who had a standing invitation. Who belonged in that room so naturally that nobody would look twice.

He stopped on one name near the bottom of the third page.

Sunaina Rao.

Retired judge. Listed as a patron of the Ferreira Foundation.

He had seen the name before somewhere. Not in connection with the case. In a different context, a long time ago, in the particular way that names of important people accumulate in a city like Velmoor and sit in the back of your memory without attaching to anything specific.

He moved on.

There was a house to visit.

The Mirchandani property sat behind iron gates on the elevated west side of Velmoor, where the roads were wider and the trees were older than most of the buildings. The place was called Arjun Nivas. Three generations of the same family in the same house, which in a city that tore itself down and rebuilt every decade was either admirable or suspicious depending on how you looked at it.

Joy and Johns drove up at ten in the morning.

The security guard examined their IDs with the slow deliberate thoroughness of a man who had been hired specifically to make other people feel the weight of the inconvenience of existing near this gate.

“He’s doing that on purpose,” Johns said quietly.

“Yes.”

“Should we say something?”

“He’s doing his job. Poorly, but his job.”

The guard handed back their IDs without making eye contact and pressed the gate button with the energy of someone making a very small concession to a very large inevitability.

The gate opened.

They were halfway up the path when the front door opened.

A man stood in the frame. Tall, silver haired, dressed in a simple white kurta that had the particular quality of expensive things that don’t announce themselves. He looked at Joy and Johns with the pleasant unhurried expression of someone who had never once in his life been genuinely surprised.

He was smiling.

Joy stopped walking.

He stood on the path and looked at the man for just a moment longer than politeness required. Long enough to make a point.

“Mr. Mirchandani,” Joy said. 

“Oh please, call me Vikram”, said Mr. Mirchandani

“You were expecting us?” Asked a puzzled Johns

“Word travels in this city.” The smile held without effort. “Please come in. It’s hot and you both look like you haven’t slept.”

Johns glanced at Joy.

Joy looked at the smile.

Some smiles, he thought, were expressions, others are instruments. The trick was knowing which one you were looking at.

He walked inside.

The sitting room was large enough to be slightly absurd. Tea appeared within two minutes of them sitting down, which meant someone had been watching from the moment they drove through the gate.

Vikram Mirchandani settled into his chair with the ease of a man completely at home in his own gravity.

“Terrible thing about Nadia,” he said. “I knew her father for years. Known the whole family.”

“Were you close to Nadia personally?” Joy asked.

“Not particularly. These circles produce a certain kind of relationship. You attend each other’s events. You smile at each other across rooms.” A brief pause. “You never really know each other.”

Joy noted the phrasing. Filed it.

“Were you at the gala Friday night?”

“Of course. We were among the primary donors.” Said without pride, the way you state something that simply exists.

“We’re looking for a piece of jewellery,” Joy said. “A gold ring. Family crest. Lion, one paw raised, sword behind, initials at the base.”

Vikram looked at both his hands. Slowly. Deliberately.

Then he looked up.

“I’ve had a ring matching that description for thirty years,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find it since Saturday morning.”

Silence.

“It’s missing,” Joy said.

“I assumed I’d misplaced it at the gala. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

A small, measured pause. “Is it relevant?”

“We believe it may have been at a crime scene,” Joy said.

Something moved in Vikram’s face. There and gone, the way lightning appears before you’re sure you saw it.

Walking back to the car Johns spoke first.

“He knew we were coming.”

“Yes.”

“His ring disappears the same weekend as the murder.”

“Yes.”

“Either he did it and he’s extraordinarily calm about it, or someone took the ring specifically to point us here.”

Joy stopped at the car and turned to look back at the house. A curtain shifted at one of the upper windows. Someone stepping back from the glass, not wanting to be seen but not willing to stop watching.

“There’s a third option,” Joy said.

Johns waited.

“Both,” Joy said.

“How can both be true simultaneously?”

“That,” Joy said, opening the car door, “is what we need to understand.”

Johns got in and flipped through his notebook. Then stopped on one page.

“Joy,” he said slowly.

“What.”

“The guest list. I went through it again last night.” He looked up. “Vikram is on it obviously. But there’s another Mirchandani.”

Joy looked at him.

“His son. Rohan. Twenty-eight.” Johns paused. “Also at the gala.”

Joy said nothing. He started the engine and pulled away. In the rearview mirror Arjun Nivas sat still and enormous behind its iron gates.

Old houses, he thought, were like old money. They never told you anything directly. They simply waited, patient and permanent, for you to run out of questions.

He had not run out of questions.

He had barely started.

They were ten minutes from the office when Joy’s phone rang.

Unknown number. He put it on speaker.

A voice. Low, deliberate, clearly disguised.

“Stop looking at the Mirchandanis.”

Joy said nothing. Let it continue.

“You’re looking in the right place for the wrong reasons. Keep going the way you’re going and Rhea Sodhi won’t be the only one in a hospital bed.”

The line went dead.

Johns stared at the phone.

“Threat or warning?” he said quietly.

“Both,” Joy said. “But notice what they gave us without meaning to.”

Johns waited.

“They said right place, wrong reasons,” Joy said. “Not wrong place. Which means the Mirchandanis are connected to this. Just not the way we think.”

Johns looked out of the window.

“So what are the wrong reasons,” he said.

Joy didn’t answer.

He was thinking about the sitting room at Arjun Nivas. The tea that appeared without being ordered. The smile that never moved. The curtain at the upstairs window.

And the thing Vikram had said, almost in passing, about Nadia Ferreira.

“You never really know each other.”

The careful, considered words of a man who had thought about exactly what to say before they arrived.

About a young woman he had supposedly barely known.

So why, Joy thought, did it feel like he was lying?

And if he was lying about that, what else in that sitting room wasn’t true?

Joy picked up his laptop and pulled up the guest list one more time.

He scrolled to the name he had paused on that morning before they left.

Sunaina Rao. The name rang a bell….Retired judge. Foundation patron. A name that sat in the back of his memory without attaching to anything specific.

Joy was about to shut his laptop when something in the foundation documents caught his eye.

A board amendment. Filed quietly eight months ago. One member removed from the founding board.

He clicked it open.

The removal paperwork had been filed by Nadia Ferreira herself.

The member she had removed was Sunaina Rao.

Joy sat back slowly.

Nadia had found something in those accounts eight months ago. Something significant enough to make her remove a retired judge from her family’s foundation without telling anyone. Without explanation. Without any public record of why.

And yet there she was. At the gala. In the same building. On the same night.

Not as a board member anymore.

But there. He brought in Nadia’s call records, and searched for any communication between her and Sunaina after the removal.

Nothing.

Then he searched for communication before it.

Twelve unanswered calls. Nadia’s number to Sunaina’s office. Over three weeks. All unreturned.

Nadia had been trying to reach Sunaina before she removed her. Had been trying to talk to her. Warn her. Ask her something.

Sunaina had not picked up once.

Joy dug deeper,

He searched Sunaina’s name alongside Vikram Mirchandani’s.

The results were not nothing.

Three years ago a public dispute over a land acquisition case, Sunaina had ruled against a development project that Vikram had significant financial interest in. Vikram had made his displeasure known through the kind of channels that powerful men use when they want to be heard without being quoted. 

Sunaina had responded with the particular silence of someone who didn’t need to respond at all. Vikram proceeded with the developmental project in the land without proper documentation, he built a hospital there.

Velmoor General, the one Rhea was currently lying in a bed on the third floor…

The feud had never escalated into anything documentable. But in Velmoor’s social circles, where everything was connected to everything else through money or history or both, their shared membership on the Ferreira Foundation board had always been considered quietly unusual.

Two people who publicly disliked each other, bound together by one charitable organisation…

And then he thought about something that hadn’t bothered him until right now….

Nadia had removed Sunaina from the board.

But nobody had removed Sunaina from the guest list….

Someone had still wanted her in that room on that night.

The question was whether that someone was Nadia.

Or the person who had already decided what was going to happen to Nadia….

Someone had still wanted her in that room on that night.

The question was whether that someone was Nadia.

Or the person who had already decided what was going to happen to her.

Joy sat back and looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

Three days into this case and every answer was quietly producing two more questions. Every thread he pulled tightened something else. He had investigated corruption before, betrayal before, premeditated violence before.

But this was different.

This had the particular texture of something that had been constructed over a very long time by someone who understood exactly how investigations worked and had built their exits accordingly.

He thought about Nadia Ferreira going through those accounts. Finding something. Trying twelve times to reach a retired judge who wouldn’t pick up. Removing her from the board quietly, alone, without telling anyone.

Doing everything right.

And still ending up in that corridor.

Joy closed the laptop.

Some puzzles, he thought, weren’t waiting to be solved.

They were waiting to see if you were good enough.

He intended to find out.

There was something big coming…..

It was 7:43 am and Joy’s phone rings, he answers it, the person on the other side said,

“We got it……”

(Confusion wasn’t the obstacle… it was the inheritance. Like Lamarck’s Inheritance, every lie had adapted, carried forward, evolving into something harder to recognize, and far more dangerous to understand.)

Next episode releasing Sunday, 7 PM… yes, faster this time.

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