Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel, BS Murthy [best contemporary novels .txt] 📗

But at Dhruva’s behest, as Shakeel began probing Ranjit’s past, I saw the need to catch him before he caught me, if only not to lose my love and he too fell into my trap when I invited him to share some clues to tie Kavya’s hands with Ranjit’s murder. So when we met in my Red Hills house, I induced him to have some drinks with me, and he readily agreed, maybe hoping that the rendezvous could end up in my bed, only to be dead in his own bed. What with my old wounds thus opened up, I wanted to plant my kiss of death on the ‘malicious magistrate’ too, but to my peculiar disappointment, I came to know that by then the blackguard was dead and gone.

While Ranjit’s death removed the bitterness of my past, Shakeel’s end threatened my future for Dhruva started believing in Kavya’s innocence and began leaning towards her. Beset by jealousy, as I was bugged to keep her away from him, it occurred to me that if Pravar were to be poisoned in her house, it would be hard for him not to suspect her hand in it. So, having accessed her door key from her handbag to make the duplicates, I raked my brains for a plan that would have spared Natya and yet snared Pravar into the Spandan. How badly I wanted to tend her as my daughter being Dhruva’s woman, but failing to conceive any escape route to her, sadly I had to sacrifice her as I did Dicey before.

So, when Kavya left for Guntur to probe into Ranjit’s past, I made Natya believe that while she herself was away for an alibi, Kavya had arranged a supari for them. Then, I convinced her that the safest place for them to hide was the Spandan, and, so, she led Pravar, and sadly, herself as well, to their poisonous end. So, when Natya came to collect the key to their deathtrap, I made her wear a burka and gave her the poisoned food for dinner, promising to fetch them breakfast the next morning. 

But in spite everything, as Dhruva put his stakes on Kavya, I was torn between my old sexual jealousy and my new lesbian libido. However, when it became clear that it was a question of her neck or my neck, I sought to implicate her with the ‘poison bottle’, and to my dismay, he saved the day for her by replacing it with some impotent potion. Maybe, what really spoiled the show for me was Ranjit’s old photograph with me, and it’s as though he had avenged himself for his death at my hands, never mind, while alive, he murdered me emotionally. Was it a poetic justice in a prosaic way, I would never know!     

So finished Radha in tears as those present could barely hold theirs, and as she signed her confessional statement, the magistrate ordered her judicial custody, and Kavya’s unconditional release.   

Chapter 26

Decoding the Crime          

When Simon led Kavya back to 9, Castle Hills, finding Dhruva in the portico, she rushed to him as though to dispel his pensiveness, and the cop, handing him a copy of Radha’s confessional statement, went into the anteroom to allow them a free reign on their emotions. 

Discerning myriad emotions in his demeanor as he read it, as if to share his feelings, Kavya nestled her head on his shoulder, but as he had finished with it, seeing him overwhelmed with grief, she exhorted him to be strong, so that he could be of strength to the hapless woman. Thanking her for reminding him of his duty, he wanted her to read it herself, and in turn, having finished it in tears; she sank into his chest only to wet his shirt, even as he wetted her head. Holding each other thus, for log, they cried for the woman, whose fate hanged in the criminal balance.

However, in time, when he wished that she pleaded Radha’s case in the court as well, she said that though she would have loved to do that, yet she felt that besides making herself tense for it involved her rival’s life and death, it could cause unease in the arraigned for the same reason. Patting her in apparent appreciation, he rang up Prativadi, the feted defense lawyer, after which he fetched Simon to join them.

When the cop wanted to know how and when the detective came to suspect the culprit, Kavya said that the recap might as well help him unwind himself but as Dhruva felt that his narrative might embarrass her as well, she assured him, notwithstanding Simon’s presence, there was no way she would be sore on that score as she came to treat her past as a bad dream.

Dhruva began the recap by saying that he felt guilty when he heard that Kavya developed a soft spot for Pravar, believing that Ranjit was hand in glove with Shakeel in foisting the fake-notes case on him. But when Ranjit said that he suspected she became close to the criminal, he realized that she was a victim of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ induced psyche, and he suffered from remorse, as the misfired idea was his.

Pausing to have a look at her, and seeing her surprised look, his demeanor became dull, but as she laid her hand on him with love-filled eyes, holding her hand, he resumed the recap.

His focus had always been to wean Kavya away from Pravar before his inimical influence proved to be her undoing, but what made it worse for him was he had no way to prevent her anticipated fall in that brat’s company, and the murder of her husband, in which, possibly she might have had a hand, only added to his misery.  

However, when she came to seek his help to nab her husband’s killer, he was not sure whether she came with a red herring or not, but when he saw her sense of purpose, he was inclined to believe her, (he looked at Kavya as she fondly caressed his hand) in spite of Radha’s averments about her likely guilt. While Kavya’s remorseful confession, in the wake of Shakeel’s death, reinforced his belief in her innocence, Radha’s pointers to Kavya’s guilt tended to dent her credibility though he was unable to see how Shakeel could have eaten from either Natya’s or Kavya’s hand, not to speak Pravar’s. Why, it would have been far more easy for Pravar to bring in his, or Rajan’s, revolver into play, and that seemingly ruled out his involvement in Shakeel’s murder and Kavya’s too by extension.

Radha’s innuendoes that he could have been blinded by Kavya’s allure didn’t help either and being pulled apart emotionally by two superb women he came to admire; it was as if he was truly sundered on the investigative ground. But it was the murder of Pravar and Natya in the Spandan that reinvigorated his investigative mind; why, in every way, it was an extraordinary murder, though Radha tended to picture it as a cut and dry case of Kavya’s culpability; there was no denying that Kavya had the motive as well as the means to commit the crime, never mind her alibi, as Guntur was but a six-hour drive from there.  

When Simon told him that the deceased ate packed food, the plot only got thickened, though it wouldn’t have been hard for Kavya to lure the duo into her house, but would it have been easy for her to make them eat the poisoned stuff without herself sharing it with them? Was Kavya as naive as not to know that lying in her house, the duo’s dead bodies would surely point their fingers at her role in their death? Why shouldn’t she have poisoned them in their own den even if she wanted to murder them out of foolhardy? Whatever such a course was far easier for her, right, but what if Pravar, spurned by her, developed a suicidal urge to hurt her? True, one’s psychic impulse for suicide stems from the obsessive desire to inflict emotional injury upon the one, who was the cause of one’s hurt, but how he got the door key. What if Kavya in their bonhomie give him one of the keys, but then, why none was found in the Spandan after their death. With the lock being unhampered, it was evident that the ill-fated couple was snared into the dwelling, but why would Kavya have them there to implicate herself? When he realized that Kavya had only one door key with her, and the other two were in the bank locker, which she did not access ever since she came to stay with him, it was apparent that her hands were clean.

What about the burka-clad woman, a common factor in all the murders? He was certain that it was a woman and not a man in the burka; didn’t Godse give up the idea of donning a burka to assassinate Gandhi realizing that man can’t hide his gait behind it? Why burkas in the Spandan were lying in the wrong place, normally Natya could have hung hers on the clothes-line of the guest room’s bathroom and not in that of the master bedroom’s toilet? Given that the talk about some burka-clad woman behind the poison murders was thick in the air, it made no sense for Kavya, if she were behind it all, not to get rid of them; so they were clearly planted to derail the investigation, what’s more, it confirmed that the intruders had access only to the main door key and not that of the cupboards, the right place for their stacking.

When he noticed that the main door bolt was missing, it was apparent that it was removed beforehand by the culprit to ensure that the duo don’t get bolted inside, intentionally or otherwise, for as corpses they could not have helped the culprit to get in to retrieve the key, before the neighbors smelt foul. So, the ‘entry key’ to the murders was not the ‘genuine one’, literally as well as figuratively, and as the house key that Kavya brought with her to his place showed traces of wax on it, it was clear that culprit got the duplicate keys made out of it – one to enable the duo to enter into the Spandan and another for her subsequent entry into it to retrieve the one she gave them. Who could have done that? Not the Rajus for sure.

As it was evident that Natya could have been a collateral damage, who would have wanted to eliminate Pravar to implicate Kavya? Why not Radha? After all, she had every reason to see the end of Shakeel, if not in Ranjit, so he set out to her Red Hills house for hard clues, and found those keys and the poison. Since he chose to play his cards close to his chest, failing to read his hand, Radha believed that it was only a case of burglary in her house, and didn’t lose much sleep over the missing keys. But as expected by him, afraid of a repeat, she smuggled the poison into his house, while he, fearing that a peeved Radha could poison Kavya too, had substituted it with a harmless potion (he felt Kavya’s caress at his back). When Rani, her ‘half-namesake’ and  ‘full-soul mate’ as Radha put it, who too happened to come into his life, sent that incriminating photograph and as the forensic reports too nailed her to the core, he had alerted Simon about it

When Kavya wondered what would have been the case if, instead of the indicative burkas, Radha had indeed planted the implicating poison in the Spandan; Dhruva said that, in that case, instead of Radha, she would have been hard-pressed fending to avoid the noose. As Kavya felt that it was ironical that such a thin thread should have separated justice and injustice; he averred