Different Senses Read online

  She’d chosen a pretty place to die. Sturdy trees—the kind that could resist yearly inundations—stood amidst lush grass and lanky plants with empty seed heads. Six weeks ago, they’d probably have been flowering. This would have been an oasis of beauty among the dull fields and stolid farms. One of the trees had fallen in the past, and while the branches were probably taken away for use on the farms, part of the trunk remained, forming a convenient seat. The ground near it was trampled, the grass shorter than elsewhere, as if others had thought the same. I sat and wondered if Sapna came here often. Maybe to be alone, to think? Just because she loved her husband and her family, didn’t mean she was happy, even before the baby died.

  I looked up. Bedraggled ribbons adorning the branches of a nearby tree, and tied around its girth. White ribbons, for mourning. This was where she’d hanged herself.

  I didn’t believe someone had murdered this girl. Killing someone by forcing them to kill themselves was a crime so rare it bordered on the mythical, and why would a murderer choose a place with so much special meaning for the victim? Sure, I could be wrong. Maybe a psychopath lived with these people, and in a few months, another woman would die, but I doubted it. Not in a community where everyone knew everyone else, and a stranger caused every head to turn. Nikhil Kamlesh hadn’t done it, and he was the only likely suspect.

  I stood and dusted my hands. The sun was low in the sky, and I was hungry. Time to tell Sapna’s parents there was no conspiracy, no crime. Just the sad loss of two young lives. An ordinary tragedy they’d have to deal with, somehow.

  The two sons had gone who knew where, but otherwise the little sitting room was just as crowded and sombre as when I’d left it. Shrimati Kartik offered me chai, but unfortunately, no food. My stomach rumbled and I hoped supper wouldn’t be long in coming.

  Jyoti sat near me, apparently calm, but inwardly anxious. “What did you learn, Javen?”

  “Have you explained to your aunt and uncle that I’m matos?”

  She nodded. “Yes. To them, this is a good thing.”

  “Right. Well, I spoke to the constable and the doctor who did the autopsy, and I also spoke to Sapna’s husband. I went over everything carefully, and I talked to him for some time. He didn’t kill your cousin. He is grieving and angry, not guilty. He’s hiding nothing. Tell them that.”

  She did so, and provoked an angry reaction from the aunt, and growled words from the father. “They say you’re mistaken. Or that someone else killed her.”

  “No, I’m not mistaken, not about him. And no one else killed her. Doctor Nihar showed me his reports, and I looked at the autopsy images. There’s not a shred of evidence she was killed by anything but her own hand.”

  “Could someone have forced her to kill herself?”

  “In theory, yes. But they could have forced her to write a note too, which would have left no doubt. I don’t believe she was forced to kill herself. I’m sorry this isn’t what they want to hear, but I can’t lie to them.”

  She gave me a wry look, and passed on what I’d said. The parents stood and shouted at me, and the father lifted a fist. No need for translation as to what that meant. The man was stooped and frail and no threat to anyone but himself, but I still beat a retreat, Jyoti behind me, still talking to her angry relatives as I fled down the stairs.

  I waited for her at the auto. “Guess they don’t want me on the case any more.”

  “No, nor to stay with them. I’m truly sorry, Javen. I believe you’ve been thorough. Except you said you would speak to her co-workers?”

  “Yeah, I would have done, tomorrow. The note’s still a puzzler, but it won’t change the facts. It’s too late to drive back to Hegal now. Any hotels around the place?”

  “Back on the main road. We passed it, remember? About an hour from here.”

  “Fine. I’ll stay there tonight, come by and pick you and your mother up tomorrow.”

  “But...you haven’t completed your investigations.”

  “They fired me.”

  “But you work for me,” she said with a frown.

  “Well, technically, but you’re not paying me, are you?”

  She drew herself up to her full height, bringing her eye to eye with me. “Are your ethics so determined by money? You offered me a favour, Javen. You haven’t completed it.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “To what point? Your cousin killed herself. I’m sorry but that just makes her one of hundreds of people who do that every year in Medele. You know why too. It’s no mystery. All your family are doing are torturing themselves and, by the way, really hurting her damn husband. You should be helping each other, not accusing him of murder. The poor bastard’s half out of his mind with sorrow.”

  She bowed her head. “I’ve always felt they were unfair to him. Javen, if you could solve the mystery of the note...if they had that much. One more day, is it so much to ask?”

  I blew out my cheeks in frustration. “Okay. One more day. One. But there’s no damn note. Maybe she was just too upset to write it, or got confused and thought she had. Maybe she mailed it to her parents and it got lost. I don’t know. But nearly two months on? No way is it going to turn up now.”

  “You’re probably right. But one day? And we’ll return the day after? It will give my mother and me the chance to talk to them, perhaps persuade them you are correct.”

  I sighed, bowing to the inevitable. “If you insist. Damn it, I’m starving. Don’t suppose there was a restaurant near that hotel?”

  “I didn’t notice. You could ask when you get there.”

  Clearly no use hoping for her sympathy. I grudgingly said good night and headed off down crappy roads back the way I’d come. If I’d been a nastier person, I’d have kept on driving, but my word was my word. The coming day would be a complete waste of time and energy but cursed irrationality, I wasn’t doing anything else right now.

  It took a few minutes for anyone to answer my pressing the reception bell, and the woman who shuffled over to let me in looked barely awake, even though it wasn’t that late in the evening. She had a room free, but when I asked about somewhere to eat, she said everything would be closed by now. “But I could fix you up something, if you like. Got food in the freezer. Won’t take me long to heat it up.”

  I’d probably end up with food poisoning, but I was so hungry I didn’t care. “That’d be great, thanks.”

  “I’ll bring it over to your room, sir, with some chai.”

  I was the only guest, or at least the only one with an auto. I wondered who stayed here normally, and why the owners had chosen such an unlikely place for their business. I was beginning to regret rashly promising to pay my debt to Jyoti. There would be no happy resolution on this case, no matter what I did.

  The room was sparsely furnished, but clean and neat. The bed was hard, but bearable, and the network access free. I also had a good phone signal, so I called Yashi and told I wouldn’t be back for another two days. “Everything okay, Javen?”

  “Yeah. My first case, if you can believe it. Not a paying customer though.”

  “Oh. Well, see it as practice. Where are you?”

  I told him and a little about the case, without giving specifics or names. “What do you think?”

  “I think you were right but they’ll never accept it. That poor guy.”

  “The husband? He’s a wreck. Probably never get over it, not completely.”

  “No. Remind me to hug you when you get home, brother. And I think I might go and hug my family too.”

  “Give them extra ones from me. Love you all.”

  I closed the call, thinking I could be so much worse off than I was. Nikhil Kamlesh needed help he would never get in that close, close-minded community.

  With no other way to pass the time, I opened up the files Doc Nihar had sent me. I was deep into the history of the original colonisation of Uterden when a knock at the door announced my supper. The woman had made quite an effort for the small amount I’d paid for the meal, s
etting it out carefully on a pretty painted tray, on what were probably her good dishes. I regretted all the unkind thoughts I’d had about how lousy it was likely to be. I thanked her profusely and made her blush. Wasn’t likely she got many compliments on her cooking or anything else, I thought. She told me to leave the tray outside and left me to it.

  The food was delicious and satisfying, though I was so hungry I’d have eaten just about anything. With my stomach filled, my mood lifted, and I relaxed over the strange story of how a pacifist and philosopher, a man called Manendra from Niken had deliberately crafted a race and a culture to colonise Uterden, hoping to create a rural paradise, devoid of religious and racial wars. He gave his udawathei, as he called them, red hair, green or blue eyes and a distinctive facial bone structure to show they were chosen for this purpose, to build his brave new world, and he seeded the genes of his new people with the empathy he possessed, because he thought that would lead to greater communal harmony. A group of one thousand modified humans settled on Garle, a large fertile continent on their new planet, and began to build their paradise.

  But despite his care his udawathei still split into sects, arguing about the meanings of texts and where their ‘Seeker of the Spirit’ had or hadn’t reincarnated, and eventually breakaway groups went exploring, looking for virgin territory to re-establish the perfect communities they still believed were possible. Seven hundred years ago, one such group had settled this land of Medele, a continent to the south of Garle, and spread along its east coast, farming and setting up communities, living according to their interpretation of Manendra the Seeker’s ideals. Then three hundred years later the Kelons arrived, and everything changed for the udawathei on Medele.

  As colonisation stories went, it was one of the more unusual and less violent, and explained a few things I’d never really understood about the banis around Hegal, like the fact they hung onto their old town there despite their dislike for Kelons because they believed the Seeker had lived and died there in one of his incarnations. I wasn’t one for history, but the text wasn’t hard to read, and didn’t get too bogged down in the religious side of it all, which bored me to tears.

  Thinking about religion, though, sent my thoughts off on the case again, and a marriage between two young people, where one was apparently devout, the other not. Could have caused tensions, I thought. Strains between them, like the way I found it hard to talk to Jyoti and her mother. Maybe Sapna had felt there were things she couldn’t talk to Nikhil about.

  I looked at the paper copies Constable Girilal had given me, and the records Doctor Nihar had sent to my account. Sapna’s phone logs were among them. On the day she’d died she’d made some calls. Girilal hadn’t seen any significance in them, but I wondered why. Had he talked to the people she called? She already knew she would kill herself. If she spoke to anyone, surely they were people of significance to her. One of the very last calls was to a Lakshya Daya Yuyutsu’s account. Now where had I seen that name before?

  Yeah, there it was. He was the farmer who’d found Sapna after she’d given birth—the one who’d taken her and her dead child to Doc Nihar’s clinic in Sapna’s vehicle. A customer of Sapna’s employer, Girilal had noted next to his name. A friend, or at least an acquaintance, for sure. Everyone knew everyone else here. So why had she called him? Was Lakshya the last connection with her dead baby? What had they talked about?

  But I checked the time again, and realised the connection had been too short for a conversation. She’d left a message for him, content unnoted in the files, and then she’d gone off, slung a rope over a branch, and ended her life. I needed to talk to this Lakshya Yuyutsu.

  I showered in the communal bathroom, and settled down for an early night. I fell asleep quickly, worn out by a long day’s driving, my dreams filled with a disjointed narrative of a weeping woman begging me to save her child, and a wise, kind man offering to help by taking her away to safety in a gleaming, fantastical spaceship.

  ~~~~~~~~

  I didn’t have to trouble my hostess for my breakfast, because a small diner catering to passing traffic was already open when I left the hotel not long after dawn. I dawdled over idlis and chai, the object of not entirely friendly curiosity from the diner staff and the customers, before driving back to the Flats to begin a pointless second day of investigations.

  First stop was Sapna’s place of work, the farm store. It was in a small group of businesses up on a mounded site, and trade was brisk—at least, by the standards of the Flats. But just as everywhere else I’d been, I was picked out immediately as a stranger, and viewed warily, though the women behind the counter smiled politely enough. “Can we help you, sir?”

  “My name’s Javen Ythen. I’m an investigator from Hegal, working for Sapna Janak’s parents.”

  One of the women stood up and came over. “I’m Varuni. Sapna was my best friend. What are you trying to find out?”

  “You know her parents still have suspicions about her death?”

  The other woman frowned. “You better take this outside, Varuni. I’ll let the boss know.”

  “Is this inconvenient?”

  “No, but it’s not appropriate for here,” Varuni said. “Come out back with me.”

  On the edge of the mound, someone had built a little wooden bench, more out of hope than the reality of a scenic view, though the river in the distance wasn’t my idea of a pretty vista. But it gave us some privacy. Varuni sighed as she sat. “Six weeks, and I still expect her to walk in some mornings. Miss her so much.”

  “No one suspected she was suicidal?”

  “She never mentioned it to me. I knew she was depressed. Who wouldn’t be? She cried on my shoulder a few times, but I thought she was getting over it, as much as anyone can, I mean.”

  “Sushri Varuni, this is a difficult thing to ask...but did Sapna have marital problems?”

  “Not that I know of. Sometimes she’d complain about Nikhil doing this or that, but in the way you do when you live with someone. Not the way you do when you want to leave them.”

  “Right. And she wasn’t...seeing someone?”

  “An affair? Sapna? Never. I’d know,” she said firmly.

  “I have to ask. Sorry to upset you.”

  “It’s okay. I wish I could help her parents accept what happened.”

  “So do I. If I could find the suicide note...you don’t have any idea about that?”

  She shook her head. “No, but it wasn’t like her. The only thing I could think of was that she wrote it and it blew away, or maybe a bird pecked it off. She would have left a note.”

  That was the impression I’d got. Didn’t help find the answer. “The last person she called was the man who found her with the baby—Lakshya Yuyutsu. Do you know him?”

  “Of course. He’s one of our customers. A friend too, and to most folks around here. Nice man. One of the people Sapna did special deliveries to.”

  “More than usual?”

  “No. He raises tus. He’s the only farmer in the area who does, so we don’t keep a lot of the supplies he uses. It’s easier for us to order drugs and feed in as he needs it, and since Sapna had a regular delivery run, she’d drop them off. There are a few customers like that.”

  “Right. Do you know why she’d call him before she killed herself?”

  The bluntness upset her and she stood to get away from me. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s fine. I just hate thinking about...what she did. Why didn’t she tell me? Talk to me? We’d have helped her. Everyone would. We tried.”

  “I know. It’s not your fault. People who kill themselves aren’t in their right mind.”

  “But she was at work with us and we didn’t know...we should have known.” She turned and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know why she called Lakshya. You should ask him. I don’t think I can help you with anything else. I don’t know anything else.”

  “Thank you for your time anyway. If it helps, I don’t think anyone could have stopped what
happened. Unless she’d been in hospital and receiving medical treatment, you wouldn’t have known. She didn’t want you to know.”

  She gave me a sad smile. “Thanks. Maybe one day I’ll believe you.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  Had Sapna known how much pain she’d cause by killing herself? Maybe she’d guessed but couldn’t see past her own to understand the devastation her action would bring. I didn’t exactly enjoy the idea of speaking to another one of her friends, feeling their grief. I had a thumping headache already, and it wasn’t even nine.

  I smelled the tus before I saw the huge birds in a pen, milling around as a banis man threw feed out of a bucket at them. The smell was worse than a two-week-old dead body, and the noise of their weird calls like a fire in a bullet factory. I eyed the huge yellow crests and the savage teeth and decided I was really glad to be on the other side of a heavy wooden fence.

  The farmer didn’t notice me until he finished feeding the animals and came to the pen gate. “Oh, hello. Didn’t see you waiting for me. What can I do for you, sir?”

  He had the classic Nihani features except for his brown eyes. A handsome man, in a rustic kind of way. “Javen Ythen. I’m working for Sapna Janak’s parents. Asking a few questions about her death.” I had to shout over the rattle of the birds.

  His guilt and grief hit me like a club to the head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He unlocked the gate and strode quickly to the barn.

  I gave chase. “Sri Yuyutsu, why did Sapna call you before she killed herself? What was your relationship with her? Were you having an affair?”

  No answer. I kept shouting my questions until he emerged out of the barn carrying a pitchfork. “Get off my land. I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I surreptitiously put my hand on my gun under my coat. “Why? Got something to hide? Like the fact you murdered her?”

  Roaring with anger, he charged, but I was ready for him, dodging him easily and sending him flying with a carefully placed foot. Then I sat on him and waited for the stream of insults and yelling and sobs to stop, while I rubbed my temples and wished the people in this community weren’t so bloody loud about their feelings.