He was 28 Years of Age, highly esteemed

by his fellow workmen

for his many amiable qualities, and his

Death will be long lamented

by all those who had the pleasure of his acquaintance.

…

THIS STONE WAS ERECTED AT THE JOINT EXPENCE OF HIS FELLOW WORKMEN 1842

The stone was black and white and chipped and scraped in places, and Warren noticed how it must have been repainted and restored several times down the years. He was moved by the tale it told, the desire to keep alive a friend’s name, and impressed that the workmen had paid out of their meagre wages, over a period of two years, to do so.

He stood before the grave for some time, his trilby lowered, before he left the yard.

✲

The images on Warren’s screen didn’t seem to be the wisest use of a detective’s attention. Colleagues had already looked at this residential camera footage: dingy white cement render with a small green metal gate to the right. Hours of nothing to meet the eye but this side of a house and its green gate. But Warren, rewinding, had an idea that there might be something more to see. You just had to go back far enough. He rewound the hours until, at last, he stumbled on the minute when a bow windowpane came into view. Unpeeled eyes could easily have missed that pane, as it was near the periphery of the image.

The house had moved several inches. The observant camera must have swivelled. But no gust of wind could have done that – only a human hand. Warren timed the change in angle to the start of the evening of 27 November – six or so hours before Jasbir’s death.

He continued to rewind and pause and play the tape. More side wall and gate, but now with the bow windowpane on the far right side of the picture. Once in a while a neighbour’s car could be seen passing the wall, in either direction, to park behind the house or to drive away. Warren was more interested in the pane. Because just beyond the pane, and the rest of the bow window, there would be the front door. So that anyone entering or leaving flashed in the corner of the camera’s eye. A marginal shadow, a fraction of a second, but the movement was recorded. Unless and until, that is, someone thought to avert the camera’s gaze.

The house was on Salisbury Road. Warren had rounded that same side wall and gate to inspect the Mercedes van. He returned now with a search warrant. He’d realised at long last what it was a penniless man could leave to his killer.

His name.

There was a life insurance policy found stashed away in Jagdev Rai’s affairs; Warren knew that there would be. Rai had secretly taken out the policy in 2008 using Jasbir’s full name and birth date. Jasbir was living in Canada at the time. Rai had only to pretend to be a man two years his junior, thirty-seven, whose thoughts, entering midlife, were turning to mortality, to providing for a loved one in the unlikely event something happened to him, since, despite excellent health and high spirits, you never knew, right?

The moment he’d come off the phone he became Jagdev Rai again. ‘The beneficiary’ Jagdev Rai.

Ever since, he’d been paying a £20 monthly premium for a policy presently valued at £318,913. Add to that the mortgage on a small house in Wednesbury he’d also taken out in the name of Jasbir Singh Bains. The accompanying life insurance was valued at a further £56,703.

In all, Jasbir’s name, on Rai’s papers, was worth over £375,000. Rai had been biding his time until the investigation blew over and he could put in his claim.

He was arrested in early April 2013 for the murder of Jasbir Singh Bains.

Warren and his team had learned that Jasbir had borrowed thousands of pounds from Rai, not long before flying to Canada. The flight had infuriated Rai; he’d made it known around town that he was more than unhappy about the debt. Now the police discovered that in June of the same year – 2006 – he’d used a deed poll to create a parallel identity for himself in the name of his future victim.

The accused refused to cooperate with the police. There’d been no hard feelings between him and the victim, he claimed. He would not say what he had done with the blade brought to the park that night, or with the dead man’s phone he’d carried away. He would not say with which fateful words he’d texted Jasbir an invite to the park – perhaps something like, ‘Meet u at the lake Jas, for old time’s sake. Got some cans from the outdoor.’

Police used mobile network records to link Rai’s text to around the time of the killing. Their search of his house uncovered the phone packaging and SIM card holder of the device used to send the invite.

In January 2014 Rai’s trial came to court and Warren was called to give evidence. The accused’s continued denials did not surprise the detective. He’d seen and heard it all before. The lengths to which they would go to lie. Even when caught red-handed, even when in court, up before the judge in a borrowed suit and tie, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they would lie. Stupid lies. Transparent, contradictory lies.

From the BBC News website, 21 February 2014:

A man has been jailed for life for slitting his friend’s throat and dumping his body in a lake.

Jagdev Singh Rai, 44, of West Bromwich, was convicted of murdering Jasbir Singh Bains, 41, at Wolverhampton Crown Court.

Mr Bains was found floating in a lake in Dartmouth Park, West Bromwich, in November 2012.

Mr Rai, also known as Jamie, was sentenced to a minimum term of 27 years. He had denied the murder but was convicted on Thursday.

✲

Warren retired from the West Midlands detective team in 2019. He wasn’t getting any younger or fitter. Of the ninety-two murders he’d investigated over seven years, all but one ended in the killer’s conviction. These days he works mostly from home, assessing officers for promotion. He passes on his experience to junior colleagues, future detective inspectors some of them, so that his knowledge will survive him. So that, in his own modest way, he’ll leave a name that’s worth remembering.

Naoise

Once I write this sentence I hardly know where it will take me, she thought as she sat at the crowded desk by the window and lifted her pen optimistically. All night she had slept on the sentence, which, she could see now in the frank light of day, was a definite improvement on its predecessor. And so she crossed out words long worked over and beneath them jotted down their betters, killing her darlings without qualms or regrets, for after all, as she often told herself, perhaps a little too often, they were only words. Head bent, busy pen in hand, she hoped to sit like this throughout the remainder of her time alone. But after an hour or so she felt her mind begin to wander. A daydream came between her and the pages, the last draft of her first novel, Edith and Julian, to which she was applying the final touches.

She was on the guest list of some swanky literature festival, perhaps up for a prize – this was a daydream, wasn’t it? There she went, picture it, swanning her way to the entrance, dressed for the occasion (less so for the Tube rides) and already tasting the bubbly when she bumps smack-bang into the doorman. A smile. That is, a doorman’s smile, the least smiley-looking smile around. ‘Name, please.’ That’s what doormen say. Not hello or good evening. Name, please. A glance down at his list. ‘Nee-sha Dolan,’ she’d say, to which she’d get a perplexed, ‘How do you spell that?’ That’s when she’d know she was well and truly out of Terenure. ‘N-a-o-i-s-e.’

She shook her head then and found herself once more in the flat she shared with an asset manager who doubled as her best friend. They’d met at a university debating contest and got on so well that they had known straightaway they’d be in each other’s life forever. Both now entering their late twenties, they had in common a certain estrangement, a sense of not quite belonging or fitting in. Both were new to London: his family were British Indian; hers, Irish. He fell in love with men; she, with women. Neither had what you might call a typical mind. ‘Off in her own world,’ people had always said of her, although her mother preferred to say ‘imaginative’. She’d hid from schoolmates her swotty summers at the camps organised by the Dublin Centre for Talented Youth. It’d been a relief not having to hide any of this from her flatmate-slash-best friend – he’d earned eighteen A-stars at GCSE. A precocious history buff at thirteen, he’d volunteered to spend three weeks living in 1941 for a British TV documentary series. Smothering blankets. Tripe for supper, and stodgy apple pie. No computers or mobile phones. No communication with the outside world. It had been his idea of fun. Naoise, when told the story, thought it sounded like way too much trouble. She had also lived immersed in the forties, incommunicado for weeks – it was called reading a Jane Bowles novel.

Oh, but, this was no way to be working. Daydreams and distractions. Allowing her cloud-like thoughts to drift. She retrieved her pen and again faced the typescript pages and the emendations in her neat cursive. She felt she knew all these pages by heart. She knew where the words were long and made the reader pause, where laughs were caused by this scene or that pun. She knew the polished parts that had taken ages and ages to get just right. The wry observations on money, sex and class. The exchanges where she showed how her generation formed relationships, how they text-messaged, how they spoke. She saw the gap here on this page that no one else would know to see, the edited-out sentence (another darling gone) that had once filled it:

‘He’d had a habit of cutting short whatever you were saying to go, Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he wanted to be agreeable but wished you could be slightly more economical with his time.’

Economical. It was her style as well.

She read over the pages, but she had not written in pages. She’d written paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word. Each one a swaying bridge to the next. All through the writing she’d avoided ideas of plot or character, but simply cultivated both as they’d grown out of the words that she selected – they were what happened when the words acted on one another, influenced one another, made sense together. Not once had she imagined a scene in order to write it, the shape of a table or the dimensions of a room or even colours – she didn’t see red when she wrote ‘red’, rather she saw what writing ‘red’ would do to a sentence, and what the sentence would do to a scene, and what the scene would do to the story. In this associative, cumulative, almost magical way she had composed and now revised this debut novel of hers. It was how she knew to write.

To which genre, she wondered with some dry amusement, would critics assign Edith and Julian: Literary fiction? Young adult romcom? Highbrow chick lit? Chic lit? Aut lit? (Recently she’d had it confirmed from doctors that she was autistic.) She could be as ferocious with herself as with her words.

Dark humour – that ability to make light of yourself, of circumstances beyond your control – it had helped to save her more than once, growing up. Came with the family back in Ireland. Speaking of whom, what would they make of these pages once they were published next year? The book, they would call it. Never the novel. Your book. Her book. She could imagine her mother’s friends sighting it in Eason’s, saying to her mother afterwards, ‘Hasn’t your one done well for herself.’

Had she, though? She could not be so certain. She had the very bad habit of being hard on herself and here she went again. Two hundred or so pages. A slim novel. Versions of which, at least the earliest scenes, dated back four years. Four years, and this was all the writing she had to show for them. But this was unfair. It was her nature, and her wisdom, not to rush. And she was forgetting her piece of travel writing which had appeared in the Irish press. Not to mention her poem, ‘Seasonal Fling’, all seventeen lines of it, published by a culture website in her last year at uni. She had several short stories ready to go. Essays, too. And literary criticism.

Publishers were interested, that was the main thing. Seven of them in Britain had just bid for the rights to her novel.

The alarm on her phone alerted her to a coffee break. Gladly she took leave of the desk and made for the kitchen, suddenly recalling her legs. Bloody pins and needles. She hobbled over to the kettle, thinking it was a good thing the jar of instant hadn’t moved. Where would she be without it? Not at this cupboard, that was for sure. From a low shelf, she fetched down her usual mug.

She was a creature of routine. A stickler for it, she might say. Every day began with her toothbrush, and afterwards there would be coffee but neither too soon – for then her enamel might stain – nor too late, lest she should grow too tired and headachy to do anything with her morning, including going out for coffee. That was why she always allowed thirty minutes – not twenty, or forty – between her tooth-brushing and her coffee drinking. Time enough to dress for the café and to rehearse ordering her customary soy flat white to go, and the trip to said café which would get her walking and the walking get her dopamine flowing through her brain. A long sip back at her desk, or two, or three, and she’d feel ‘on’, open her email briefly, then spread out her pages like a general with a map.

Quite often, though, the coffee wouldn’t behave. It wouldn’t want to stay put in the cup; it would dribble down the sides, spatter her skirt and leave moist brown rings on her manuscript.

Some days the novel had needed six cups or eight, other days, ten. All in all, gallons had gone into the book, she could have bathed in the stuff, like Cleopatra and her donkey milk – with the difference that coffee, at least, really was rejuvenating.

No coffee, no novel. It was as simple as that. Also: no reading, no novel – for reading had always seemed to her as vital as eating, and, as it happened, she trusted her own good taste in literary influences. Jane Bowles. She’d read, and reread, Two Serious Ladies during the months that she wrote an early draft, and taken from it various lessons in dialogue. And she’d paid just as great attention to her dog-eared Oscar Wilde, because could that Irishman write! Those plays, the evergreen wonder she’d found in them as a teen, the wonder of being initiated into other people’s thoughts. She loved how Wilde’s prose bared a character’s innermost urges, condensing them into pithy phrases, excelling in telling without a story’s saids and dids.

Nabokov. Another treasured model. The émigré’s sharp eye and sure feel for language. Whenever she’d become despondent, mid-second or third or fourth draft or later, wondering if there was any point to what she was doing, or trying to do, with a sentence structure, or some allusion, she’d had only to revisit his Lectures on Literature to quell her unease.