Free The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken by Tarquin Hall

terrain the grey of nuclear ash.
    The English word for the place was 'landfill' but this was a misnomer, Tubelight reflected as he turned off the highway on to a rough track. An open 'drain', or sewer, with garbage-strewn banks led to a tangle of tumbledown shacks blackened by dirt and pollution. He stopped to ask a kabari wallah if a rag picker with a dead dog had passed that way. By a miracle the man knew his name: Raju. Finding this Raju, however, didn't prove easy. The area's geography was defined, indeed as most of Delhi is by the majority of its inhabitants, by landmarks and narratives.
    'Turn down the lane where the old blind man sits,' Tubelight was told.
    When he came across the blind man (who, fortunately, was where he was supposed to be), a woman hanging wet clothes on a barbed-wire fence pointed in the direction of a communications tower jutting up above the tin roofs. 'Beneath that you will see the place where the men have been digging these past days and where another died when he fell off his ladder.'
    Eventually, he found the rag picker's shack, built against the exterior wall of a crematorium. Tubelight saw him crouched amidst a pile of gutted computers. His wife sat nearby, baby cradled in one arm, stirring a big metal basin sloshing with a soup of nitric acid and circuit boards. A teenage son panned for bits of copper, gold and lead.
    'I sold it,' said Raju when asked about the dog.
    For a small fee, he agreed to take Tubelight to the buyer and led the way deeper into the jugghi. They passed more rag pickers bundling and weighing recyclable refuse - cardboard, newspapers, tin cans, bags of plastic bottle caps - until they reached a compound surrounded by a brick wall. The smell was different here: the stench of death hung in the air, and for the first time, Puri's operative felt the urge to retch.
    Stepping into the compound he spotted a couple of men lowering a bloated dog carcass into an oil drum of boiling liquid. Another dog lay nearby, equally bloated. Raju the rag picker recognised it as the one he'd brought from Rabies Control.
    Fifty rupees, a little more than the price the animal's bones would fetch from the agro fertiliser industry, gave Tubelight possession of the dog, and ten more went to procure a large piece of dirty plastic sheeting to wrap it in.
    Once the stinking carcass had been loaded into the back of the auto, Tubelight handed Raju thirty rupees. He took the payment without a word and set off back through the slum.
    Not once had the rag picker queried why someone would want the animal. Everything had a value in Delhi. Even a dead dog.

    SIX
    WHILE TUBELIGHT WAS ingratiating himself with the dhaba wallah and the coolies outside Kotla Stadium, Puri returned to the Delhi Durbar Hotel. He found the banquet hall cordoned off and three jawans guarding the main doors. That is to say they were sitting around, drinking tea and talking idly amongst themselves - three vocations at which jawans the length and breadth of India could justifiably claim to excel.
    Through the banquet hall's open doors, the detective could see two forensics officers in white jumpsuits examining the round dining table where Faheem Khan had met his fate. He dearly wanted to slip inside and find out if they had come across a delivery device for the poison. Getting past the jawans would not present too much difficulty. But doing so would risk his involvement in the case becoming known.
    Besides, the detective had other means. Half an hour ago, he'd spoken to his friend and occasional collaborator Inspector Jagat Prakash Singh, who'd agreed to meet him in the evening and let him know what the official investigation had discovered. Assuming, of course, that the Chief had discovered anything aside from his own shadow.
    For now, Puri would settle for a copy of last night's dinner seating plan and went in search of the resourceful young waiter who'd sprung him from the Mattu table last night. Gunny was his name, and the detective