Nobody’s Murder
The neighborhood was not the same anymore. All the houses assumed an air of forced silence. The children were no longer allowed to play outside after school. The women stopped coming out of their houses even for the regular evening banter. Young girls were never allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied. Yes, the neighborhood had undergone a change that I can only hope is temporary. For this is not the place I grew up in. It was all because of the murderer on the loose. Yes, a murderer.
No one can remember how it had all started or can even begin to comprehend why it had. It started as one freak incident in a part of the city that was farther away from us. No one cared much about it and it didn’t warrant more than a few moments of discussion on the erosion of law and order and personal morals. It had been just another headline. That was until the scary stories chose our area as their home ground. It started out in the nearby localities and by the end of the month had made its way to our own colony.
The police seemed to be out of any real leads. I knew a little more than the rest because my father himself was an employee of the Police department. He was not a police inspector or anything of the sort. He worked in the fraud investigation unit, which dealt more with corrupt business practices than with murders and the like. In other words, his was the less interesting of police jobs. However this is fun for me because of the folks that I get to interact with. Many of Dad’s good friends were real police officers. You know the ones that can actually kick rears.
Needless to say, all these disturbing events meant regular visits by the police officials to the colony. What made this case very weird and difficult were the inconsistent nature of the victims and the lack of any real motive. It almost seemed like the murdered just felt like killing someone and so he did. The first victim had been a young beautiful thing in her twenties. Her purse had remained intact and she had not been meddled with either. The next one had been an elderly man, and his wallet was untouched too. Then the blows had come closer to home. It was Sarita, the local washerwoman, who collected all our dirty clothes, washed, pressed and delivered them to us. It came as a rude shock to see Sarita one day and not the next day. Worse was realizing that we would never see her again. The only thing that came close to physical evidence were some cigarette butts. Nothing more. It was hard to identify a smoker who had a propensity to kill among 4 million people in the city. Everyone had been hit by some kind of a sharp object from the back. Forensics said there was a good possibility that the victims did not even see this coming and probably did not even look at the killer.
None of this added up to a suspect.
“This man has to be a genius,” said Ramesh uncle, one of the constables on the case.
“Or he is going through an unbelievable patch of great luck,” said Inspector Raju, when they stopped over at my house for a cup of tea.
“Is there really no evidence at all, Uncle?” I asked. Ever since these incidents happened, not only was I upset, I was curious as well. This had tickled my mind in such a way that I was now obsessing over the case. I had read all possible information I could about the cases. My Dad also helped me by getting me access to whatever information he could and was allowed to. My mom did not like the business at all. All very dark and not suitable for a young boy, she would keep saying.
“Oh it is just an interest. It won’t do any harm,” my Dad would come to my rescue.
“Besides Mom, I want to work for the crime branch one day,” I said, which only irked her more, as she had already made me an couple of different engineers in her mind.
“Whatever, I don’t like any of this business,” she said and walked off.
The police were right in being befuddled. There really was not much one could get in terms of physical evidence. As I was going through a bunch of crime scene investigation reports, my eyes caught another report. It seemed to have been put in this bundle by mistake. I say this because there had only been 3 of these murders. Where did this one come from?
I soon found out that this was a homeless woman who had been found dead near the platform she had called home. The photos showed a small tent formed out of torn sarees and shawls that she had probably gathered from trash. There was even a small Pooja area that she had created from the cardboard boxes people so carelessly tossed off. The report just called it some freak accident and closed the case without any further investigation. Even forensic reports were incomplete. There were some blood samples and hair available on the crime scene. But it had never proceeded anywhere.
As I lay in bed that night, the vulgarity of the whole incident affected me in a way that I could not understand. All lives are not created equal much as we yearn to believe that. The homeless elderly woman’s life was clearly not nearly as important as the elderly man or the pretty young woman who was from a well-off family. Why, even Sarita was taken more seriously. The homeless person probably had no one to bother the officials about her. Her life had been a dispensable one. Some officers probably told themselves “Who cares?” and tossed the file over. The distressing thing is no one probably would care.
Sleep simply refused to greet me; I got out of my bed and went back to the photos to see if I could find something that I had missed previously. My eyes went to the old woman’s crime scene instinctively. I wanted to say sorry; I don’t know why or on whose behalf, maybe for mankind in general.
And then I saw it. At first my eyes just glanced over it, almost missing it. And then something pulled me back to it and this time it was clear. I could not believe my eyes and more so, I could not believe how I had missed it before. I had seen these pictures so many times that every minute detail in them was etched in my mind. I could immediately relate it to the other pictures.
I immediately went to my parent’s room and woke my dad up and told him what I had found. He was in a state of shock both because of being woken up from sleep and because he seemed to believe that there was something of merit that I had stumbled upon. A flurry of phone calls followed. It was followed by a bunch of plain clothes policemen entering and leaving our place. I was showing my new find to Inspector Raju and some crime scene folks who had also turned up.
After a few minutes of intense activity and arguments, calm fell upon our house again. I was too tired to do anything. I just went to my room crashed in to my bed. I woke up the next morning to a lot of noise outside. I had really gotten used to the neighborhood quiet that the noise, though not very loud, disturbed me from my sleep. I got up and went straight to the newspaper. I saw the headlines in the city section about how the murders that had taunted the neighborhood had finally been solved. I was surprised that an arrest had been made so fast. I moved my eyes down to the part where they had explained how the murders had been solved.
“It was an incredible piece of evidence that had gotten buried in another murder case. A portion of a cigarette case along with some butts had been found near the murder victim. It is already known that cigarette butts had been found near the previous murder victims as well. What proved to be path breaking was the cigarette case with a metallic encasing and initials printed on them. The police were immediately able to contact the manufacturer and then track the trail leading to the owner of the case.”
There were even a couple of lines mentioning my name and how I had helped in the investigation. My father was smug with pride and patted me on the back a couple of times, telling everyone who would lend an ear, what an amazing detective I would turn to be. My mom even managed a smile.
The last few lines of the article caught my attention:
“The government congratulated the police department for ardently pursuing the murderer and upholding democracy where no two citizens are different.”
I thought of the old homeless lady whose case file had read “Case closed” and had lack of investigation written all over it. My mom interjected my thought with a question
“Who was that old lady?”
“Some platform dweller. A nobody. That is why it was over looked,” said the neighbor who was more relaxed now that the threat to the colony was diffused.
Her tone almost suggested that she believed there was nothing wrong in overlooking that case. She was after all a platform dweller.
She was not a nobody, I thought to myself. She had saved a couple more lives by dying. That was no nobody.
–Nivethitha Kumar
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