Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel - Page 78/83

When he noticed that the 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, for as corpses they could not have let him or her 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 that the house key that Kavya brought with her to Castle Hills showed traces of wax on it, it was clear that someone got the duplicate keys made out of it – one to enable the duo to enter into Spandanand another for her own entry into it to retrieve the one she gave them. Who could have done that? Not the Rajus for sure.

Who would have wanted to eliminate Pravar as it was evident that Natya was a collateral damage to implicate Kavya? Why not Radha? Besides, as she had reason to see the end of Shakeel, if not in Ranjit’s, he set out to her Red Hills house for hard clues and found those keys and the potion. 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 9, Castle Hills, while he, fearing that a peeved Radha could poison Kavya, had substituted it with a harmless solution (he could feel Kavya’s caress on 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 Spandan; Dhruva said that, in that case, instead of Radha, she herself would have been in the dock fending to avoid the noose. As Kavya felt that it was ironical that such a thin thread should have separated truth and falsehood; he averred that it was in the character of crime to uphold justice by overawing the criminal to leave a way for it to cry foul. While Kavya heaved a sigh of relief, he added that given that Radha had planned and executed the murders as she did, it was a remarkable, if diabolical, job and if it were only to be Ranjit’s or Shakeel’s murder, who knew, she would have had the last laugh. Recalling Dicey’s death, he said that as Radha didn’t leave the pet for a moment till it died, he thought then that how she cared for it, but as he could see in the hindsight, she was only monitoring how the poison worked on it; the thought of it makes him feel bitter about her but then like her killer, the pet too was a victim of victim-hood.