Silent Fires by Poojitha G Prasad

Author:Poojitha G Prasad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: 2021-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Matthew D’Souza

Because Ashish was used to surprises by way of his work, he wasn’t as shocked as Manav was. Things clicked easily into place in his head. “We now know whom the second body belongs to,” said Ashish.

Manav’s round eyes turned to him. “This guy?”

Ashish muttered. “Finally, we have a clear-cut motive. Arun is the only one with a clear motive, isn’t he? I mean, look at these pictures. He saw them and went crazy.”

“He… just… doesn’t seem like the sort of person…” Manav’s voice trailed off.

Ashish kept his gaze on Manav for a while, wondering why his little brother couldn’t see the obvious. Then, he narrowed his eyes and spoke quietly, “Do you remember Ajja’s house? When the silver idol was stolen? Everyone blamed the cook. Only I knew it was Santhosh when no one would have suspected our own cousin. I just knew.”

Although Manav gave him a look as if to say that he knew these things by-heart, Ashish went on anyway.

“And about Roshni Aunty. No one believed me when I kept saying she was going to kill herself. I just knew. And they found her dead in her apartment with wine glasses and empty pill wrappers. I was just ten, and I knew.”

“You knew,” repeated Manav, patronizing him.

“Yes,” said Ashish. “And… I knew… something wasn’t right about Meenakshi’s husband…” his throat seized up.

Ashish just couldn’t bring himself to speak about his low-life ex-brother-in-law. Every inch of his being rapidly turned to fire when he thought of how he should have acted on his instincts and kicked his brother-in-law out of their life in the very beginning, before their sister could fall in love with him, before she would threaten to kill herself if they separated them… if he’d only acted.

“I will never ignore my gut again. Ever!” said Ashish, his breath turning harsh. “I am right about Arun.”

“So we’ve heard,” said Manav with a smile. “And now, we finally have some proof.”

With whatever they had found, it was easy to put together information on the mystery-man. They took the car number from the photo of the romancing pair leaving in their car and put it into the police database.

Matthew D’Souza was a local musician who freelanced as a karaoke host at pubs.

“Hails from Cochin, Kerala,” muttered Bharath. “Sir, we have to send a team there. Find out more. We need more on his whereabouts.”

The three of them sat holed up in Ashish’s office, poring through social media accounts and the police database. The officers from the morning-shift were slowly arriving at the station, so they wanted to finish this before raising any suspicion.

“We don’t have resources right now. We’re not officially supposed to be doing this,” Ashish reminded him grimly. “We have to find another way.”

“We could tell Sunder’s team, sir,” said Bharath. “But they’ll take too long. They’re very slow.”

Ashish agreed at once. The logical step was handing over this information to the team in-charge but Ashish just couldn’t bear to put this information into Sunder’s incompetent hands–the man would just bungle it up.

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