Seduced by Murder (12 page)

“I just had to see you! I heard about your eye,” she said in a concerned voice.

Her expression was serious, but her eyes were laughing, daring me to resist her.

I grinned. “A good thing you came too. That’s a sight for a sore eye.”

I knew she must have planned her entry. She lifted my sunglasses and observed my eye. I felt her breath on my face. She was as tall as I was, five nine, making her tall for a woman.
She was lithe, slender, and it made her look even taller. I was broad, by virtue of years of hitting the gym, and it made me look shorter.

“That must hurt, baby,” she said removing my sunglasses, and gently blowing cool air at my eye, almost challenging me with her pink, shapely lips. Her face was devoid of any make-up, and her natural beauty bewitched me. It was happening again.

She was twirling my sunglasses in her hand, fully aware of her control over me. I caught hold of her petite hand and held it still. Then I wiped the sunglasses against the fabric of the robe, between her breasts. I made sure my fingers lingered on her nipples for a few seconds. They were hard.

“Oh … Vishal!”

I waited until her lips had almost touched mine.

“Sunil!” I exclaimed.

She jerked back violently and turned around. There was no one there. She looked back at me with a petrified expression. I grinned.

“You shouldn’t play with fire, baby, unless you want to get burnt.”

She looked at me angrily and marched away. I knew she was hurt. I also knew she was vindictive. With her, a misdeed never went unpunished.

Her breath lingered over me, and my headache increased. I wanted a drink. Many drinks. I walked into the kitchen. There was a young woman cooking something. The aroma teased my hunger. I realised I hadn’t eaten anything since morning. Ram was nowhere around, so I requested her to guide me to Shalini’s room. We passed through the kitchen,
down several corridors, and up some flights of stairs, before arriving at a room with the door ajar.

She pointed to the door and hurried back to the kitchen. I entered the room. The lights were switched off, and the blinds were drawn. The room had been plunged into melancholic darkness. Shalini was sitting at the corner of a bed, staring at a laptop. She was oblivious to my presence. I noticed two single beds separated by a dressing table, the size of a tank. I felt sorry for her as I remembered Paras’s words that her marriage had never been consummated.

I coughed softly. Shalini’s head jerked, and she stood up, almost dropping the laptop. She looked terrified, and transfixed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a speeding vehicle. Her eyes were hollow – eyes that had been open for too long and needed rest.

“I am sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Don’t you have the basic courtesy to knock?” Her recovery was fast, too fast for my comfort. She had been expecting me.

“Sorry,” I went outside and knocked at the door. There was no reply. “Ready or not, here I come.”

She had walked to the other corner of the room, and was sitting on a sofa. I was rewarded with an intensely hostile stare. I saw faint traces of fear beneath her hostility. Her shoulders were arched with tension. I sat down opposite her. She was playing with her fingers. She avoided eye contact now, preferring to stare at a distant wall. The white sari she was wearing contrasted against her complexion. Her hair flowed in waves down her shoulders. I realised that Shalini was an attractive woman, the kind of woman a man would like to comfort and take care of.

Her eyes interested me. They darted everywhere, unable to focus at a single place. I stood up and walked till I was right behind her. She immediately stiffened and turned around, watching each step, paranoid. I walked to the closet and opened it. It contained a woman’s clothing and cosmetics. I opened the adjoining closet. This one contained a man’s clothes. I opened the drawer and saw a few watches, a mobile phone, some credit cards, and a gold wristband. I turned towards her.

“You heard about Leo?”

She lowered her gaze. “Yes.”

“It seems Anil carried the locket home. Probably kept it in the drawer in this closet.”

She was still staring at the floor, and made no attempt to indulge me. I said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Shalini, Mr Kapoor has given me a carte blanche to question all the family members. Is there a problem with that?”

She locked her fingers, and then flexed them again. “No, no problem.”

“Good. I know this must be an unpleasant time for you, but I need to ask some questions. I will make it quick. May I?”

She remained quiet, and hunched her shoulders in a defeatist gesture. I thought about her sharing this depressing room with a man who despised her. I imagined her watching her father fall into a life of oblivion. It must have been a lonely existence.

“The police have established that Leo had returned the locket to Anil. The locket could have reached the farmhouse in two ways. Either Anil carried it there with him, or the murderer took it from this closet. I would be worried if it was the latter case.”

She looked at me with cautious interest as I continued, “If the murderer carried the locket to the farmhouse, then we are dealing with an extremely perceptive person, who was smart enough to pre-empt the need for framing Leo, in case his or her plan of incriminating a villager failed. What I am sure of, however, is that the person who put the locket outside the gate is the murderer. Do you agree?”

Always ask the suspect questions that have to be answered in the affirmative. His evaluation of the import of his answer will either slow down the answers or make him nervous. She answered quickly, almost as if she had prepared the answer. “I know nothing of the locket. I knew it existed only because Sunil created a ruckus when it was delivered.”

“Ruckus? What kind of ruckus?”

“The bill was charged to the company’s account. It was an expensive ornament. Each diamond in that thing must be worth lakhs. When Sunil discovered that Anil had gifted it to Leo, there was a big fight between those two.”

“Diamonds?”

“Yes.”

“The ones on the letter
L
?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know they were that expensive. You reckon they were worth lakhs?”

“Yes. There were at least ten of them on the pendant,” Shalini replied.

“I thought you hadn’t seen the diamond pendant in your life. You only knew it existed because of the ruckus that night?”

Her face turned white, and her eyes widened. She said in a barely audible voice, “I haven’t seen it.”

“Then how did you know that the chain had the letter
L
engraved on it, studded with diamonds?”

“I … I heard about it.”

“From whom?”

“From Sunil.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. He described the locket to me.” She was perspiring in the air-conditioned room, and I noticed her hands trembling.

“What time did Sunil speak to you?”

“After dinner, I think.”

“So after dinner he discussed the pendant in intricate detail with you?”

She whispered something inaudible. I could see she was on the verge of tears.

I said loudly, “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

She said in a quivering voice, “Yes. I think so.”

“Okay. I think I will speak to Sunil, just to be sure. You have a tendency to forget important details. You also forgot to mention that you heard metallic sounds at the back gate that led us to the locket.”

“Frankly, I don’t remember who it was,” she said defiantly. “It could have been Vimal who told me about the locket this morning, or I might have heard the servants talking.”

She was not going to be cornered so easily.

“Okay. Were you aware of Leo’s … eh … involvement in Anil’s life?”

“Yes,” she said, visibly relieved that I had stopped asking her about the locket.

She was still not looking me in the eye. There were a million questions looming in my mind, like meteors attacking, and I picked the least incriminating among them.

“Did you love your husband, Shalini?”

She looked up guardedly, surprised at the question.

“What kind of question is that?”

“An insignificant one. You don’t have to answer that.”

I had succeeded in making her look directly at me, so I asked her a significant one. “Inspector Babu told me that you heard distinct sounds, metal against metal, just before Anil was murdered.”

“Yes. It was a faint sound, and I gave it no thought.”

“Funny. I remember where your room is at the farmhouse. If I remember correctly, your bedroom is the last one along the passage. And yet you heard noises that no one else heard – not even your father, whose room is closest to the window overlooking the back gate. Of course, one can always argue that you and your father were the only sober people that night. So, if you were able to hear noises, maybe your father heard some too.”

I could see the panic in her eyes. She replied slowly. “My father has a weak heart, and suffers from high blood pressure. That is why I don’t allow him to drink. He takes sleep-inducing tablets.”

“I didn’t know that BP tablets were sleep-inducing. I will take the prescription from him and check … just to be sure.”

“Check? What do you mean?” she was alarmed.

“Well, considering that the murderer was cutting the lock on the gate barely half an hour after all of you retired for bed, and your father’s room was closest to the gate, I am surprised he could not hear the noise.”

“I am telling you he was asleep.”

“I know. But just to make sure, I have sanctioned a lie-detector test for him tomorrow,” I lied without batting an eyelid.

Tears ran down her cheeks. She said amidst sobs, “Don’t harass him. He’s been through a lot already.”

The sensitivity of the female tear gland always confounds me. I stared at her with cold detachment. I looked around the room, attempting to ignore her sobs, and was elated to discover a small liquor cabinet housing all sorts of colourful elixirs. I had half a mind to go to the bar and take a drink. I diverted my eyes to the wall above it to curb the temptation. There was a family portrait on the wall that caught my attention. I walked towards it, my eyes fixed on one face in the multitude of faces.

Anil and Shalini were seated on the divan, while the rest of the family stood surrounding the bride and the groom. Aditi stood next to Sunil, looking radiant in a traditional red lehenga choli that parted slightly at her midriff. I realised I had stopped breathing. Suddenly, all my senses were active and conscious of Aditi’s presence in the wretched house. There was an immense emptiness I felt in the house. I had to get out fast.

I tore my eyes off the portrait and walked towards Shalini, who was still sobbing. I placed my hands on her shoulder and said softly, “Shalini, there was no sound. There was no outsider. It was only after it was proved that the murderer was an insider that you panicked and conjured up the story about hearing a sound. Then, to throw the cops off the track, you placed the locket outside the gate. We can do a fingerprint analysis to see if you touched the locket. There are not many options now except for telling the truth.”

The fingerprint stuff was pure bullshit. It had fallen into so many hands, that an exact analysis was not possible.

I had shot an arrow in the dark. The cold accusation hung in the air. My heart beat like a tom-tom. All she had to do
was throw hysteria at me, feign a nervous breakdown, excite sympathy, and I would have to back off.

She had her head bent over a table. Her body shook with tearful convulsions. She stopped crying after a minute, wiped her face, and asked me with a look that Eve would have given Adam before he relented and tasted the forbidden fruit.

“Why are you intent upon proving that the murderer is someone from the family?” Her eyes were pleading with me.

“Why are you so intent upon proving that the murderer is
not
an insider?”

“You don’t understand. There was no other option.”

My heart started pounding at her last statement. Was this a precursor to her confession? The recorder was inside my shirt. I had switched it on the moment I had entered her room. I knew my moment of triumph was a few cajoling statements away.

I spoke very softly. “Shalini, the murderer is an insider. The lock was broken from outside. The steps on the beach…”

She interrupted me with a renewed light in her eyes, speaking with the excitement of a person who, after being sentenced to death, is given a chance at pardon.

“Maybe the murderer didn’t get on the beach, and threw the knife from a distance. That would explain the missing footprints on the sand.”

I panicked slightly at this new turn of events, and tried to make her relinquish control.

“Shalini, it was pitch dark! The lights were off. Anil was lying on his stomach. You mean to say that the murderer aimed for Anil’s heart from that distance, in that position?”

“Yes. And I can prove it!”

“How?” I asked, stupefied.

She ran to the laptop. That made it clear that she had been preparing for our little interview.

She spoke energetically. “I have been doing some research on village gypsies. They are expert knife throwers, and can aim from as far away as thirty feet. Have a look.”

There was a buoyant spring in her step, propelled by a desperate need to convince me. She kept the laptop on my lap, and stood behind me. She maximized a web page that showed pictures of silly people dressed in sillier clothes.

“Look at the pictures of this gypsy tribe. They are renowned for their knife-throwing accuracy. Read this text.”

She placed the cursor at a certain portion and read aloud. “… successfully aiming at targets as small as an apple placed on a person’s head, while blindfolded, from a distance of thirty feet or more.”

She opened another webpage and said excitedly, “Read this. These ones are so skilled that some mafia groups employ them as professional assassins.”

In her eagerness to prove her point, and harpoon my theory, she had leaned close … too close. Her soft breasts were pushing hard against me, and exuding warmth that left me cold. It was a deliberate move. I wondered whether, in her naiveté, she actually thought she was distracting me.