White Rage by Campbell Armstrong Page B

life?’
    â€˜She didn’t have one. She lived for that school. Bloody awful place. Nobody in the family wanted her to work there.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜She spurned the chance of a good marriage because she wanted a career. Great career, eh? Look how it ends.’
    â€˜Who did she turn down?’ Perlman asked.
    â€˜The man she rejected lives in Calcutta. The marriage was one my father had arranged.’
    The arranged marriage. The amalgamation of families and business interests, Perlman thought. ‘So she went to work, came home, never went out? How did she fill her spare time?’
    â€˜She read. Watched a little TV. Mostly documentaries. She was into ecological issues. Most nights she planned her classes. She was conscientious, despite the fact she earned a pittance at that Sunshine school or whatever it’s called. And now she’s dead.’
    â€˜And we have to find her killer,’ Scullion said quietly.
    Perlman noticed a bowl of fruit. He realized he was hungry. With a younger man’s sense of acute anticipation, he’d been looking forward to afternoon tea with Miriam, but that prospect had been set aside for another time. Now he longed to reach for a pear, an apple; his belly had begun to grumble quietly.
    He gazed at Dev Gupta, who gave more an impression of anger than grief. He thought of the arranged marriage Indra had refused and imagined the arguments that must have rolled around this house. The daughter defies the father’s will. The daughter remains firm. The brother sides with whom? Father? Sister? They all fall out. The atmosphere is tense, one of uneasy truces shattered by outbursts of belligerent reproach.
    Gupta said, ‘She once thought somebody was following her.’
    â€˜Did she know who?’ Scullion asked.
    â€˜Just some man. She didn’t know him, and she wasn’t absolutely sure he was a genuine stalker anyway. Then she stopped mentioning him, and we assumed he wasn’t hanging around any more. My sister, you have to understand, hated making a fuss. All she wanted was to contribute – her word, not mine – to the lives of the kids in her school. That was her choice. She could’ve chosen a different path, and she’d still be alive.’
    â€˜And married,’ Perlman said. A stalker who might not have been, he thought. A young woman who didn’t want to make a fuss. He glanced at Scullion. Over the years they’d developed a kind of silent communication; Perlman’s present expression, and the accompanying tiny shrug of the shoulder, was a way of saying that there had to be more than this to Indra Gupta’s life. Otherwise, why was she killed? Did somebody just drift in off the street and shoot her randomly?
    Scullion paced the room as if measuring it for a new carpet. ‘She didn’t have a boyfriend?’
    â€˜Right,’ Gupta said.
    â€˜You’re absolutely sure?’
    â€˜I knew my sister, Inspector.’
    Perlman eyeballed the fruit longingly, and imagined the flesh of a pear dissolving in his mouth. ‘So she never kept any secrets from you?’
    â€˜She wasn’t the furtive type.’
    â€˜With all due respect,’ Scullion said, ‘sometimes we think we know people better than we really do. Sometimes they surprise us.’
    â€˜Not my sister.’
    Perlman picked up an apple. He remembered how WPC Meg Gayle had suggested that the killer might have known Indra’s name. Might have. A child’s impression. ‘Did she ever say anything specific about this possible stalker? A description? What he wore?’
    Gupta shrugged. ‘Nothing I remember. She’d seen a man a couple of times at the end of the street when she walked to the bus stop in the morning. She also thought she saw the same man in the vicinity of the kindergarten once or twice.’
    â€˜She never talked to this guy?’
    â€˜I seriously doubt it.’
    A tall