Deadly incidents- 7

Read part 6 - here
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It was only the second time Pavil had met Anik, but he could have sworn he’d known this man for a while. The only anomaly dulling his otherwise clear aspect was his painfully grieving eyes that seemed to swell from a night of hurt, other than that he looked like a crisp clean schoolboy who'd never known to suffer a single boorish moment; so definitely couth and hygienic did this man look. 

Pavil couldn’t see it but he knew the aggressive analysis the young man was going through while he heard and smelled the soft trickle and spicy aroma of Khar’s signature tea. 

Within moments a hand had silently darted from nowhere and offered him a police station standard styrofoam cup and he delighted in seeing Anik’s sudden surprise at realizing there was another man present in the room.

Khar had a way of being covert and making someone uneasy, the way he’d stealthily creep upon someone’s senses and this is exactly what he seemed to be doing to the lamenting husband. 

His pale bereaved face seemed flushed and worried, though this worry wasn’t only on account of Khar’s deceptive presence but because of his possession of his dead wife’s phone, which he quietly slid towards a much annoyed Pavil.

‘Why was this with you?’ Pavil asked testily.

Anik quietly stared at the table in front with blank eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it would be a problem. It was..I just picked it off the table. It is my wife’s phone. I don’t need to explain this.’

‘yes, you do. You can’t just pick anything; especially her phone from the scene of ..uh..that incident. This can make matters complicated for you.’ 

‘How?’ Anik’s voice gained heat. ‘I didn’t pick it from anywhere, not like it was fallen someplace. It was on the table where I sat when you came in. I didn’t even think much of it. It's just, it’s hers you know.’ and he sat back quietly, looking readily in compliance to whatever punishment Pavil would decree. 

‘You have to understand Anik,’ Pavil began with benevolence in his voice and checked it to that of indifference when he saw Khar rolling his eyes ‘that we are yet to conclude matters and decide this to be an accident, but until that happens you are a person of interest.’

Pavil expected gasps and eyes raised in horror but Anik was a discerning man as Pavil had already decided and he nodded in understanding. 

‘Yes, I know’ he spoke with some sadness in his voice. 

‘What are we going to do, Khar?’ Pavil asked the lumbering man who stood to inspect the photographs, immersing himself in each frame. 

‘I don’t know about me.’ he said at length, ‘but you are going to wait for the autopsy results and go through that phone and give it up to the technical department to check for any deleted data or phone calls. They might have to collect all the data from the mainframe but that won’t be difficult. Have you spoken to people from her work? friends, enemies?’

‘Reyan has gone to visit the studio she was currently working at.’ Pavil exhaled. ‘I’m still trying to figure out the mysterious man Mr Gor spoke about. The questionable Hercules.’

‘Hmm’

‘What?’

‘Just that, you’d probably find someone of that description in the gym, perhaps.’ Khar said blankly.

‘As always you are right.’ Pavil smiled and switched on the phone. 

‘Lot of work-related e-mails.’ he scrolled through the long list. ‘She was much in demand. ‘and there are some unchecked ones too, hmm. But they’re all work’ he muttered as he rifled through the thread of conversations. 

‘Ah what’s this.’ he slowly exclaimed. 

Sure enough, there were several threads of e-mails in conversation with a hunk180 at gravity dot com.

Pavil raised his eyebrows and hoped Khar was doing the same as they both devoured the entire list of conversations between Avi and the possible Hercules.

Some conversations dated as far back a few months while the latest one was on the night before her death, wherein she’d asked the man to come to her house the next day in her absence in the morning and collect his remaining few “things” before her husband arrived home. The day she met with an accident in her bathroom.  

What Khar did notice was how none of the conversations was addressed to a particular moniker, instead of starting with a salutation and invitation by Avi to visit her house, suggestive of nothing and mostly ending with a much formal “regards” or sometimes “Love”. 

The emails directed to Avi by the mysterious man did, however, address her by her name and always seemed to flow with requests, gratitude and praises but anything suggestive of a covert liaison was somehow amiss or at least appeared so to Khar.

 Each conversation was short, limited only to a few lines, some even a few words usually only dealt with questions like ‘when should I come’ by hunk180 and a response following that by Avi specifying date and time and always with some instructions regarding where and how he could keep his “things” in her house.

Pavil was furiously noting down the specified dates in his notebook and there was a sort of weariness in his bearings. 

‘This does not look good Khar.’ He frowned on hearing no response from the aloof man. 

‘Seems like there could be a motive for the husband to kill his adulterous wife.’ Pavil didn’t like the sound of that, remembering the photographs he’d seen in that apartment of a couple that looked in perfect harmony. 

‘That, or you have another person of interest.’

‘If someone did visit that house in the morning, and it wouldn’t do much if this hunk180 did so in her absence because then there’d have been no one to kill. She was seen alive coming back from the gym, Khar.’

‘Yes, and what about after that? There is a separate fire exit stairway from the back. Couldn’t anyone have sneaked in from there? or maybe someone was already waiting for her.’ He pointed at a conversation where Avi had asked the mystery man to pick up spare keys to her house from under the mat to let himself in, during her absence.

This was meant to be an unfortunate bathroom accident. 

‘You know what this means, Khar? That bothersome old man was right.’ A very dejected Pavil shook his head with exasperation. ‘Hercules’ he muttered.

‘Maybe. We will see.’ Khar spoke consolingly, almost cheering up his brooding friend.