She turned left, using the opportunity to control a sudden heartache. “Maya misses her father, of course. It’s difficult for us to come to terms with his death. I don’t suppose we ever will.”
Santosh nodded.
There was a pause.
“Tell me it gets easier, Santosh. Reassure me of that at least.”
“It does. It really does. When you learn to leave behind all the guilt and regrets, the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. It gets easier. It’s just that getting rid of those things is the hard part. Choosing how to do it is the trick.” He gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I can certainly help you when it comes to choosing the wrong methods.”
Nisha remembered her boss stinking of whisky first thing in the mornings. Yes, Santosh knew all about self-medication. “I have Maya,” she said. “She’s what keeps me going. Her and work, of course.”
“As long as the balance is right,” said Santosh, and Nisha felt a little stab of guilt in return. They both knew full well that the balance was rarely right.
By now they had arrived at Greater Kailash. The house was just as Nisha remembered it, except of course the police were no longer there, just plastic incident tape that fluttered across the front door and bordered a hole in the front garden.
“Here’s where I spoke to the neighbor,” said Nisha when they had pulled to the curb and stepped out, and were standing on the sidewalk.
“Strange comings and goings,” mused Santosh, looking up and down what was a thoroughly unremarkable street. “A black van registered to Dr. Arora. The coincidences are piling up. And yet they refuse to form a cohesive, logical conclusion. Come on.”
He led the way to the house, where they made their way through the front gate and into the garden.
“I didn’t get this far before,” Nisha said with a trace of apology.
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” insisted Santosh with a raised finger. “Our remit was different then. Besides—” But then he stopped. “Oh, that’s interesting.”
He was heading off the path that led to the front door and onto the grass. Then stopped and knelt down.
Once again, Nisha was half surprised, half amused at how sprightly Santosh was, despite the cane he always carried.
“Look,” he said. And Nisha found her attention directed to a bald patch in the grass.
“Yes?”
“Something’s been taken from here.”
Santosh stood. His head twitched this way and that as though he was looking for something in the overgrown garden, and then he was setting off with great strides toward the far corner. There they found another bald patch, similar to the first.
“Something has been taken from here,” he repeated. He pointed with the cane from one empty patch to another. “My hunch is we’ll find two, maybe more of these, and that they are—or were—some kind of surveillance, security device.”
“A laser mesh trap.”
“Possibly.”
“But one that’s been removed.”
“Exactly.” Santosh’s eyes sparkled. “And do you know what? I’d bet my life that it was disguised to look like something different, a sprinkler or something. That girl the neighbor saw running away, who fell through the subsidence and into the cellar below—she and her boyfriend presumably triggered the warning system. Some kind of cleanup team came and removed the equipment.”
“Why not remove the bodies?”
“No time. The neighbor had already called the police—the regular police.”
Then Nisha said, “Something’s occurred to me.”
Santosh looked at her. “Let’s hear it.”
It was her turn to lead him across the grass to where the incident tape marked out the courting couple’s unfortunate entrance into the basement. They peered into the basement below but there was nothing to see. Forensics had taken everything; crime-scene cleanup teams had done the rest. Not a single shred of evidence would be left.
But then, that wasn’t where Nisha and Santosh’s interest lay.