Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 47

7 years ago

Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 47

“What!” Daniel exploded, only after the lady had departed. “Don’t tell me Mrs. Malik was referring to the same notorious Cain Martins of whom you and I were familiar.” His insides screamed No! in a hundred different languages.
“I’m afraid it’s the same Cain.” Lot replied solemnly, thinking deeply.
“How is that possible?” demanded Daniel rhetorically, “I can’t believe we’re investigating a murder case involving the man who nearly killed—”
“Please stop, Famous,” Lot cut him off, “Let’s concentrate on the case.”
“This is utterly unbelievable, detective. It’s unbelievable!”
“Nothing is ever as it seems, Famous. I learnt that the hard way a long time ago.” He shifted in his seat. “What do you think about the woman’s explanation?”
“You can see the tears on my face. Her story is so pathetic. I wonder how you always remain dry-eyed after hearing stories of this nature. Don’t you feel any emotion?”
Lot ignored his question and asked, “Aren’t you seeing something worse in her narratives?”

Daniel frowned, “Something worse? What are you talking about?”
Lot said, “How old is Remi?”
“She shouldn’t e more than—” Daniel stopped himself abruptly here, his eyelids were stretched and his mouth was agape with an astonished O. the significance of the detective’s question now registered in his mind, “You mean—you mean—Remi could be—” he could not complete the statement.
Lot completed it for him, “Yes, Remi might be Abel’s daughter. Look at it this way; what if Abel wasn’t sent off only because he slept with his older sister? What if he was sent off because his sister became pregnant for him?”
Daniel suddenly stood up and backed away from the table, as if the furniture had suddenly turned into a serpent. ‘No—no! It can’t be! It mustn’t be!”
“If Remi is twenty years old, it could be.” Lot said.
“I’m in love with her!” Daniel screamed out. “Please, it mustn’t be—Remi mustn’t suffer such a cruel fate! She’s too innocent for this.”
“Is she really innocent?” Lot asked sharply, “No one is innocent until the criminal has been caught. Come back to your seat, Famous, there is no cause for alarm yet. We still need to ascertain if the corpse we found is really Abel Malik.”
“Mrs. Malik said Abel was having a scar on is left thigh. Shouldn’t you call the morgue to confirm?”
“I wanted to go to the morgue and confirm with my eyes, but I can just call the doctor there to check the corpse.” Lot took his phone and dialed Doctor Bantu’s number, “Hello—doctor? Yes, it’s the detective. Okay, thanks for the compliment. Before I sign your autograph, I want to confirm if you know the phone number of any of the doctors presiding over the morgue where we deposited that second body. Yes, okay. Please call one of them and ask him to check the corpse for any visible scar on the left thigh. Okay, thanks. Please call me back as soon as you get the facts. Thanks, doctor.” He ended the call.

“What did he say?”
‘He’ll call me back. There is another angle we need to check concerning that corpse. You remember what happened before I sent you forth to Sawmill Lane?”
“Nothing happened. Except that we managed to decipher the content of the note, but we were too late still. If we had broken the numbers sooner, that man might probably still e breathing now.”
“Look here,” bellowed lot. He struck the top of the table with such a sharp blow with his fists that the sheets of paper fluttered off. “Believe anything, but never believe that the man died because we didn’t decipher the note on time—the man was long dead before you arrived at the scene.”
Daniel looked at Lot askance, “When you said ‘long dead’, what time exactly did you mean?”
“He was dead about two or three hours before you arrived there. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Have you forgotten that you spoke with him on phone? That was less than an hour before I reached Sawmill Lane.”
“The only explanation to that is that the deceased wasn’t the man I spoke with on the phone.”
“I don’t want to believe that is likely.”
“Speaking with someone on the phone is, in a certain sense, and aside from the mechanical interventions, somewhat like speaking to a person in the dark. You hear the voice alone.

There is no personality or physical appearance to distract you from your impression of the voice itself. If you heard a voice on the phone, without having seen the speaker, and later you met the speaker in real life, you might not recognize him, because his appearance or his personality might destroy the impression of the voice.”
“What you’re telling me now may jeopardize this investigation. What if the doctor was wrong? What if you actually spoke with him and someone murdered him before I got there? I always disregard medical evidence about the time of death, which is bound to be faulty in short-time diagnoses.”
“The doctor is not wrong, I had another doctor examine the corpse. The man was long dead before you got there. And the voice of the man I spoke with on the phone wasn’t the voice of the murdered man.”
“You can’t be sure about that. Remember, voices on phones can easily be manipulated. You admitted it yourself, sir.”
“Not everyone can easily manipulate their voices like Helen Paul, but I’m not much concerned about the voice but of what the man who picked the phone said.”
“What did he say? You didn’t tell me.”
“The first thing the man who spoke with me on phone said was that it was nice hearing my voice again. He said those words as though he knew me.”
“Of course, the deceased might know you.

Quite a popular detective you are. In fact, we have no other detective in this country who can match you in wits.”
Lot’s reaction to the compliment was nil. He said, “That statement the man made was contrary to line 16 of the note.”
Daniel picked up the copied text of the note, counted sixteen lines, read the words thereon and sighed, “I’m not following your train of thought, sir.”
“ ‘I shall be waiting to cite the quote’,” Lot quoted, “That was what the writer of the note wrote. But he didn’t cite any quote.”
Daniel frowned, wondering whether he was supposed to know what his superior was talking about, “Are we still talking about the second corpse? Or are we trying to compose a new stanza for Hare Krishna?”
“Bare your mind, Famous, and you’ll see the flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. What did God give you for a brain—a mixture of pap and garri?”
“God is in the best position to answer that question.”
“Famous last words,” commented Lot and continued, “From that line 16, anybody—except you—could see that the writer of the note was going to tell his recipient—if indeed the reader was able to find the out the phone number—just for his caller to be certain that he was the one, he’d quote out the quote which, according to you, was extracted from Shakespeare.”
Daniel continued staring at Lot incomprehensibly; the detective noticed this and shook his head in pity before continuing.
“Therefore, the first words I said when I spoke with the supposed scribbler of the note was the first line of the quote, expecting him to quote the rest of the lines. But, alas, he didn’t understand why I said those words—he only told me how good it was to finally speak with me.” He looked at Daniel seriously and said, not without slight rudeness, “You now understand what I’ve been trying to tell you, don’t you?”
Daniel still did not get the full significance of the detective’s narration, but he nodded—any otherwise protest, he knew, might invoke the investigator’s ire. He said, “Do you realize what you’re saying though? Not to mince understandings, I think you’re trying to tell me that the man we found there in Sawmill Lane was murdered by the same person who killed Mr. Malik.”

“Yes,” agreed Lot, “That’s the only logical explanation for now.”
“Then who do you think was the person who spoke with you on phone?”
“It could be the murderer. Remember that the deceased already confessed in the note that he was afraid that his life was being threatened. I’m sure you’ve not forgotten about V. The letter may not be of much importance because the murderer might have given his victim any bogus name he could think of., but still, we shouldn’t disregard it.”
“A bogus name which even Mr. Malik might happen to have known? Come one, detective Lot!”
“At least, unlike you, I am using my brain. These crimes weren’t the ones committed at the spur of the moment. They’re well-planned, and the mystery is not expected to be unraveled. But when it comes to crime, no matter how tightly-knitted it is, there always remain one or two loopholes. And I suspect that the party who is committing these crimes is very much experienced. So, coming back to my explanations, the murderer eventually found out about the plan—whatever the plan was—and took the necessary step he could take to prevent the plan from being carried out. And I’ll bet my day’s meals that the preservation of his identity was one of the reasons he killed them.”

“If you so much believe that the person who committed the crime in Sawmill Lane was one of our suspects here then you should give a good explanation of how that could be humanly possible. If you are accusing a man in London of killing a man in New York by shooting an arrow across the Atlantic Ocean, you must produce a plausible explanation of how he was able to do it.”
“The corpse was reported dead before we were able to completely crack the note. There was more than enough chance for the murderer to slip out and commit the deed. The two police officers who should have watched over the household members weren’t around at the time—they were escorting the landlord’s body to the morgue.”
“There’s something very important we seem to be leaving out, what about the playing cards found by the corpse? Do they not mean anything?”
Lot smiled, “I admit, the criminal is quite a clever one—he reminds me of Richard.”
“Richard is not a criminal.” Daniel scowled.
“How many times am I going to tell you that everyone is a criminal? All I’m saying is that this criminal we’re trying to hunt down is almost as clever as Richard Kish. The criminal is committing the crimes and intentionally leaving clues behind.”
“Which criminal would be daft enough to try such?”
“This one believes so much in his own ingenuity; he was leaving clues behind but was very certain that he would never be caught. These clues, however, may lead us in wrong directions, thereby leaving him free and wide. We must be very careful.”
“Are you saying we shouldn’t find out why those cards were left there?”
“You can’t expect me to easily pull a rabbit out of a hat at will, but take your mind back to the night of the first murder. When you checked the corpse the first time there was nothing on him, but when I arrived I found about it a half-burnt note. That note was not burnt accidentally, it was carefully burnt in half. No accidental burn would result in such near-perfect dissection. The criminal wanted us to concentrate our attention on unravelling the content of the note while he tidied up his crime.

Now we have another distraction on our hands—the cards.”
‘At least, let’s find out what message lies in this too.”
It was at this time the detective’s phone rang. He picked up the call, listened for a few seconds and thanked the caller before hanging up.
“That was from the morgue,” he told Daniel, “The corpse is having a scar behind his left thigh. It appears to be the scar of a slash, but it has healed smoothly.”
“Then the corpse we found is truly Abel Malik—Ruth’s brother. Mrs. Hannah Malik wasn’t lying after all. This saddens my heart, detective.”