Murders to Mislead

That day, Detective Dhruva asked Kavya, whom he rescued from her kidnappers, if she could recall the serial killings of some middle-aged women in the Langar Hauz area that shook the Hyderabadis five years back. Nodding her head in the right direction, she said that she was aware of the intriguing murders but there was no news about it later.

Then he revealed that in his earlier avatar as a cop he happened to probe the matter, but when he reached the dead end, his late wife Mithya, viewed those mysterious murders from the kaleidoscope of liaisons. So as to try to crack the case, she rented a portion in the Langar Hauz as an estranged wife and gathered the details of the cheating husbands and wives through the grapevine. But as he was disinclined to pursue that investigative course for the list didn’t carry the nerves of a killer, shifting her gossiping gear to reach the abused women, she came to know about the peculiar relationship between Ramya a young woman and Haritha, her middle-aged step-mother that is owing to the unusual will and testament that bound them.

Shortly before his death that was twenty years back, Ramya’s father bequeathed his entire property to her, five-years then, and made Haritha, his childless second wife, her guardian. Besides adding insult to his wife’s injury, he stated in his will that if his widowed was to wed again, she would cease to be his daughter’s guardian, and all that goes with it. Further venting his apathy towards his young wife, he willed that as and when his daughter becomes a mother, his widow would be only entitled to a meagre pension, and should his daughter die barren, then the orphanage he named gets it all. Finally, as if to protect his progeny from his wife’s presumed ill-will, he willed that if his daughter and her heirs were to die before his wife’s death, for whatever reason, all his assets would then go the said orphanage. Well, as that Will underscored mistrust and spelled malice, Mithya cultivated the young Ramya, who in a moment of weakness made her privy to the untenable arrangement her father’s will ushered in her life.

Widowed, at barely thirty and seeing the death-knell of a will, Haritha was seethed with a hapless rage, but in time, applying her mind to browbeat the imposition, she thought of an ingenious solution to bypass its nefarious proposition. Accordingly, she convinced Ramya, six then, about the need of a male in the house for their protection, and got her married to the sixteen-year-old Rahul, however, with an eye on him. However, having come of age, when Ramya, realized that her man was her stepmother’s lover, Haritha sought to palliate her by letting Rahul consummate their marriage. But soon, turning eager to have her husband all for herself, Ramya tried to wean him away from her stepmother’s grip, though unsuccessfully, but once her youth blossomed into womanhood that coincided with the oldie’s weaning charms, Rahul started leaning towards his wife. At that, a peeved Haritha began throwing tantrums at them to rob their newfound marital bliss, which drove Rahul into his wife’s exclusive fold. Thus, thrown out of the unethical love triangle that left in the lurch, the embittered woman turned even more cynical and began to menace the young couple at every turn.

So Mithya thought that the random killings in the neighborhood could have been their prelude to target their nemesis under their shadow, and to get to the bottom of it, as she worked on Ramya’s presumed guilt. So, at length, Ramya confided in her that Rahul had reckoned that if they randomly kill a couple or more of the middle-aged women to start with, unless caught in the act, for the lack of any motive, none would ever suspect their involvement in those murders, and in time, if they hit their real target, under the smokescreen of those murders, the police would treat that as yet another of the same serial. Thus, having laid the path for Haritha’s last journey, when they were all set to strike at her, she was struck with the terminal cancer, thereby rendering the youngsters remorseful of killing those innocents, so, in a way, even after her cancerous death, Haritha continued to torment them.

Saying in conclusion that as Mithya felt that the couple, having been the victims of subterfuge, deserved a fresh lease of life, he had agreed to put a lid on the case that his department anyway closed as unsolved, and when he wanted to know how she felt about it all, she said that she was at a loss to form an opinion. But as he averred that the discretion to arraign an errant or not, lent charm of being a private detective, she told him that she hoped that he would not abuse his prerogative in the case on hand.

Excerpted from the eponymous chapter in the author’s ‘Prey on the Prowl- A Crime Novel’ a free ebook in the public domain.