Club You to Death Anuja Chauhan (best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT) 📖

evidence against these others, bring it to me. If you can’t, let’s just reel Mehra in. With this tambola-rigging evidence in place it should be a piece of cake.’

Flights over the low-pressure area of the Bay of Bengal are notoriously turbulent and Bhavani’s is no exception. The aircraft bucks like a bronco bull with hiccups, and he has to grip the arms of his seat to keep himself from being flung about towards either the matronly lady on his left or the skinny teenager on his right, while deeply regretting the mayonnaise-laden sandwich now sitting uneasily in his stomach.

And of course, there’s all the turmoil inside his head. When he closes his eyes he can see a tiny Aryaman Aggarwal flashing his privates at Cookie Katoch, the pink flashing gums of Ajay Kumar on his wedding day, Ganga Kumar’s blue plate full of jasmine flowers spinning below the statue of Saraswati, a young Urvashi Khurana in the throes of labour, Behra Mehra at the frontline, the Poddars and the Todis taking a boat ride on the Banaras ghats at dawn …

The feeling that he has articulated to his chief several times comes back to him even more strongly. Somebody is leading the investigation up the garden path – very elegantly, very smartly. This somebody, who thought to obscure the gym camera with a bunch of gas balloons, and to bury an inconvenient body in an already dug up compost pit – is the real killer. Not Behra Mehra who is essentially a blunt instrument, but somebody else – with a sharper, subtler mind and, perhaps, some animosity towards the general.

Judging from the scene at the Daily Needs this morning, Mehra isn’t too popular anyway …

It has to be one of the hotties on the horticulture sub-committee, Bhavani thinks, shifting about in his seat and earning dirty looks from the matronly lady on his left.

Love ... and dosti – and equal-equal trust.

Roshni Aggarwal seems a likely candidate, but she is too cold to be friends with old Guppie Ram. No, he is clearly describing a friendlier person, a warmer person, a person who inspires loyalty!

Urvashi Khurana fits the profile of the killer, but she seems to have no motive. No matter how hard Bhavani and Padam dig, they can find no deep dark secret in either her life or her husband’s. None of Leo’s many camera recordings feature her doing anything that crosses the line. The Khuranas – father, mother and the two daughters (whom Roshni Aggarwal had described rather uncharitably as buffaloes swathed in Chantilly lace) – seem to have led an entirely blameless life.

The plane hits another air pocket and everybody gasps as weightlessness sucks at their belly. Bhavani’s chunky body rises a few inches into the air inside its belted seat, then lands back with jarring thud, and just like that several pieces fall into place inside his head with the dramatic ka-ching! of a slot machine hitting jackpot.

He sits riveted in his seat, a little thrill running right through his square, stolid frame.

Of course! There it is. Right before his nose. The only possible explanation.

He has finally divined Urvashi Khurana’s ‘secret’.

15

Killer on a Hat-Trick

‘What d’you mean I’ve been writing them to myself? Are you fricking insane?’ Bambi Todi demands of ACP Bhavani Singh at her residence on Aurangzeb Road the next day.

He sighs.

‘Bambi ji … please, we are very close to cracking the case. In fact, we will go so far as to declare it already cracked. All we need to do now is tie up some loose ends. Pardon us for saying this, but you have actually been wasting taxpayers’ money and our time with all this childish letter-writing. Do you know we had to travel to Kolkata to talk to Shri Poddar?’

She looks at him in complete horror. ‘What d’you mean you’ve cracked it? How could you have cracked it without finding out if these letters are from Anshul or not?’

Bhavani sighs again. ‘We have spoken personally to Shri Poddar. Face to face. We have collected handwriting samples of Shri Anshul from the house in Alipore, and had them analysed by handwriting experts. The writing is nat at all similar to the letters you have shared.’

She stares at him like she’s talking to a moron. ‘But the injuries could have altered his handwriting! Maybe he writes with his left hand now!’

Bhavani regards her with a mixture of exasperation and pity. ‘Anshul Poddar is dead and cremated, Bambi ji. Please make your peace with that.’

‘But I’m being stalked!’ she says as tears fill her eyes and stream unchecked down her face. ‘I’m being followed! I can feel it!’

But Bhavani just shakes his head.

Then, as she continues to stare at him in angry disbelief, he slides a pen and pad towards her. ‘Write down something here, for the handwriting experts. Ideally the text of one of the letters you received. We are sure you know them by heart.’

Bambi dashes the tears from her face, gives him an angry, fulminating look, then gets to her feet and flounces out of the room.

‘It’s weak, Bhavani.’

‘What are you saying, sir? We are nat saying it is the perfect solution, but it is worth investigating!’

The chief shakes his head gravely. ‘No, no, no. All these … theories of yours … are too airy-fairy, and not grounded in any kind of solid evidence! Here we have solid evidence! There is a revolver found buried with the victim. A revolver with one bullet missing. Mehra’s revolver. Ajay Kumar’s body. And from Srivastava’s phone recording, we know Mehra was trying to incriminate Khurana! It is an open and shut case!’

Bhavani, mindful of the first of his four tenets – that violence is futile – nods calmly and attempts a reasoned reply.

‘But sir, we do nat even have confirmation that the body in the beetroot patch is Ajay Kumar. It is all conjecture!’

‘Rubbish! We have Cookie Katoch’s video of the Aggarwal boy