Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel - Page 33/83

When Radha was all set to press for divorce regardless, tragedy struck her that fateful day; as he tried to force her to have a drink with him and his mistress, as she refused to oblige, he necked her out of the house in a fit of rage, forcing her to turn to a friend for a shelter as her parents were dead and gone by then. When a neighbor called her the next day to tell her that Madhu and Mala died of poisoning and the police were on the lookout for her, she rushed to the police station to clear her name, but to be locked-up as the main suspect. How Shakeel the inspector on duty had abused her, she only knew, oh, what a diabolical character he was!

Though Shakeel failed to book the real culprit to date, she always had a hunch that Pravar, the awara brother of Mala, would have been the killer, and so with a little detective work, she gathered that he became an object of ridicule because of his sibling’s conduct and all taunted him on that score. While that could be a motive for him to murder the illicit couple, he had a criminal background to boot, though not on the scale that Shakeel tried to picture on the TV screens. Well, it smelled something fishy really; whatever, she knew that the poisoned drink the couple drank to their death was a present from Pravar for their cherished occasion, and as she was going through an old issue of Eenaduthat she missed earlier, coming across Dhruva’s ad, she turned hopeful.

Finishing her tale of woes and looking into his eyes directly, she said enticingly that she hoped that at last, her hope won’t turn out to be a dupe after all, and that he would set things right for her while she herself assisted him in his endeavors.

As her version matched Pravar’s account, Dhruva felt it was indeed a poetic justice that Pravar, who tried to implicate her in a murder she didn’t commit, found himself in the dock for a crime that he had nothing to do with. Besides, he felt that her account of her lover illustrated that love and lust alike are manifestations of sexuality in that while love begets affection through sexual union, lust might remain barren in spite of sexual fulfillment.

While she looked at him in hope, he asked her what she thought could have been behind her lover’s refusal to part with a penny being in a position to do so; she said that in hindsight it was clear to her that besides being a mean-being, he was money-minded as well. Whatever, the way he used and reused a trusting woman, wouldn’t that make him a regular bastard after all?