Dead Water by Simon Ings

she wanders back into the living room and up to the window. She watches as Yash Yadav lets himself out through the security gate, crosses the road, and points his key at his car, unlocking it: a new Opel Corsa. She leans against the glass. She wants Yash to pause. She wants him to turn. She wants him to see her there, against the glass, naked under his robe. She watches him drive away. He is everything she thought he’d be. More. Big and dangerous. Magnificent.
    They dine in restaurants in Agra, far from Firozabad’s rumour mill. They drink in Mughal Bar and Downtown Club, Le Bar and Downing Street. He meets her in a side street behind the town hall. He pays for them. He chooses their food. He orders their drinks. At the end of the evening he pays her cab fare home. He buys her gifts: jewellery and shoes and scarves. She hides them from her husband. She keeps them in her locker at work. She takes them out only for him. She dresses only for him. She scents and shaves herself only for him. She dreams of him.
    She remembers the flak she took, leaving Bombay. The cheap humour flying around as she packed up her desk at the ACB: beanpole-slim Roopa following wobble-hipped Yash Yadav into the outback. Even her superintendent, even Kala Subadrah, could not resist a gag as she returned Roopa’s salute: ‘I hope he’s worth it.’
    Yash has not slimmed down. He’s hardened up: an engine, big and square, trembling with controlled violence. She fucks him and fucks him. She is sore from him. It is what her hard, athlete’s body was built for, has longed for, screamed out for.
    He’s serious, direct, utterly two-dimensional: a blank on to which she might project any desire. A hero of sorts; impervious, at any rate, to the ironies and doubts that hedge round ordinary men. He is a motive force and as earnest as a child. He lifts himself out of her and kneels over her and fills her mouth. He buries his tongue inside her. He slaps her, and she bends for him. He squeezes her breasts as though there were milk there. He’d eat her if he could. The bite marks show sometimes, but Hardik does not notice. Hardik never gets close enough to see – and if he could bring himself to do so, and he saw, would he even care?
    This cannot last. This heat. This turbulence. But then, it does not have to. Roopa’s not forgotten why she’s here.
    She’s drunk on Yash, yes, but it’s her betrayal of him that drives her to heat, quite as much as his passion. Bedding Yash Yadav, she finds quite easily the things she needs to incriminate him and smoothe her path in glory back to Kala and the ACB. ‘Raise your voice and it shall be heard!’ She’ll raise her voice, all right. She’ll make front page, if this goes well.
    Yash rolls off to the bathroom; she reads the messages stored in his phone. She writes down his recently dialled numbers. Sometimes Yash leaves her in his flat when he goes out to work: the region’s anti-terror tsar. In a bedroom lined with movie posters – curry westerns, war films, historical epics – she reads his diaries. She trawls the trash under his desk. She undeletes the files binned on his laptop. She tabulates, crossreferences. She’d eat him if she could. Instead she’ll tear him down.
    There’s a solicitor, Mohinder Gidh, works for Yash Yadav. He spends his nights in a room lit entirely from lights whirling underneath a raised plastic dance floor, throwing single, low-denomination notes on to the floor, more or less at random, as he tries to decide which heavily made-up girl to fall in love with tonight. Later he will hurl money by the handful at his chosen muse. Whole weeks’ wages. He is lucky that the club, a recent and controversial import from Mumbai, is a Yadav enterprise.
    By day, Gidh sails close to the wind, orchestrating a land-grab backed by some possibly forged paperwork. A car-repair business has been acquired by the Yadav family on terms so unfavourable intimidation must have been a factor in the