Different Senses (12 page)

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, setting 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.”