‘May I close the door?’ asked Helmut as we walked into our room. Then he shut the door without waiting for an answer. I looked at him and began to feel vaguely uneasy. He was tall and strong, taller than Feluda by at least an inch. What did he want to do that required such secrecy? I had heard that some hippies took drugs. Was Helmut one of them? Would he—? By this time, Helmut had placed his camera on my bed, and was opening a large red envelope with Agfa written on it. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Feluda offered. ‘No, thanks. I came here only to show you these photos. I couldn’t get them printed here. So I had sent them to Darjeeling. I got the enlargements only this morning.’ Helmut took out the first photograph. ‘This was taken from the North Sikkim Highway. The road where the accident took place goes right across to the opposite hill. You can get a wonderful view of Gangtok from there. That is where I was that morning, taking photos of this view. Mr Shelvankar had offered to pick me up on his way. But his jeep never got to the spot where I was standing. I heard a noise as I was clicking, which made me turn around. What I saw from where I was standing has been captured in these photos that I took with my telephoto lens.’ It was a strange photo. Most of the details were clear, although it had been taken from a distance. A jeep was sliding down a hill. A few feet above it, a man was standing on the road, looking at the falling jeep. This was probably the driver. He was wearing a blue jacket. His face couldn’t be seen Helmut took out the second photo. This was even stranger. Taken a few seconds after the first one, it showed the jeep lying wrecked by the side of the hill. Next to it, behind a bush, there was a partially hidden figure of a man in a dark suit, lying on the ground. The driver was still standing on the road, this time with his back to the camera, looking up at the hill. Right on top of the hill was another man, bending over a rock. His face was just as unclear, but he was wearing red clothes. In the third photograph, this man in red could not be seen at all. The driver was running—in fact, he had nearly shot out of the frame. The jeep and the man in the dark suit were still lying on the ground. And the rock that was on top of the hill was now lying on the road, broken to pieces. ‘Remarkable!’ Feluda exclaimed. ‘I have never seen photographs like these!’ ‘Well, it isn’t often that one gets such an opportunity,’ Helmut replied dryly. ‘What did you do after taking these pictures?’ ‘I returned to Gangtok on foot. By the time I could walk across to the spot where the jeep had fallen, Mr Shelvankar had been taken away. All I could see was the broken jeep and the shattered rock. I heard about the accident the minute I reached Gangtok. I then went straight to the hospital where Mr Shelvankar had been taken. He remained alive for a couple of hours after I got there.’ ‘Didn’t you tell anyone, about the photographs?’

‘No. There was no point, at least not until I could have the film developed, and use it as evidence. Yet, I knew it was not an accident, but murder. Had I been a little closer, the face of the murderer might have been clearer in the picture.’ Feluda took out a magnifying glass and began examining the large prints again. ‘I wonder if that man in red is Virendra?’ he said. ‘That’s impossible!’ Helmut declared. There was something in his voice that made us both look at him in surprise. ‘Why? How can you be so sure?’ ‘Because I am Virendra Shelvankar.’ ‘What!’ For the first time, I saw Feluda go round-eyed. ‘What do you mean? How can you be Virendra? You are white, you have blue eyes, you speak English with a German accent, your name . . .’ ‘Please let me explain. You see, my father married twice. My mother was his first wife. She was a German. She met my father in Heidelburg when he was a student. That was where they got married. Her maiden name was Ungar. When I left India and settled in Germany, I started using this name, and changed my first name from Virendra to Helmut.’ My head started reeling. Helmut was Shelvankar’s son? Of course, if he had a German mother, that would explain his looks. ‘Why did you leave home?’ Feluda asked after a brief pause. ‘Five years after my mother died, my father married again. I couldn’t bring myself to accept this. I loved my mother very much. It’s not that I did not care for my father, but somehow when he remarried, I began to hate him. In the end, I thought leaving home was the only thing I could do to solve my problems. It wasn’t easy to travel to Europe on my own, and make a new beginning. For about eight years, I moved from place to place, and job to job. Then I studied photography, and finally started to make money. A few years ago, I happened to be in Florence working on an assignment. A friend of my father’s saw me there and recognized me. He came back and told my father about it, after which he approached a detective agency to track me down. When I came to know about this, I grew a beard and changed the colour of my eyes.’ ‘Contact lenses?’ Helmut smiled and took the lenses out of his eyes. His real eyes were brown, just like my own. He then put the lenses back and