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Her face crumpled and she reached out to me, but I pushed her hands aside.
“I’m not so narcissistic that I get off on knowing the extent of Vishal’s obsession with me. But I’m hoping that since I was the object of his obsession, maybe there is something in that room that might give me a clue about what he was thinking. Something that Samar’s team and the police might not even recognise because it means nothing to them. Also, all of you seem to have missed an important point. For all we know, I was not the first girl that he was obsessed with. Maybe there were other girls. Maybe there are medical files that show his mental history. Anything that can prove that there was more to his suicide than just fear of getting on the wrong side of rich royals. Because that doesn’t even make any sense. What was the worst that we’d do to him even if we caught him? This is Goa, not the hinterlands where our men would spray him with bullets for looking at their women.”
“I get what you’re saying, Tasha. But that’s a job for the police now. We can’t even enter the flat without being seen,” she protested.
“How about this? We can drive around to his house, and if we see any reporters or cops, we hightail it out of there. Bombil can get us back to the commune safely. But if there’s no one about, we can have a shot at peeking around.”
She agreed reluctantly, and I tapped Bombil on the shoulder.
“Take us to this address,” I ordered, showing him the location on my phone.
He didn’t look too convinced, either, but he didn’t argue with me. I tried not to think of what DV would do to me if he found out where we were headed. Instead, I tried to think of how relieved he’d be after we put all this behind us. He would be furious with me, for sure. But the relief would set in at some point. It had to, right?
We were in luck. There was only one police vehicle parked outside Vishal’s building and no sign of the paparazzi.
“Bombil, park as close to the gate as possible, and block the entrance so that the cops don’t see us getting out of the van,” I instructed.
We need not have worried. Two sleepy-looking constables gave Bombil’s van a passing glance and went back to staring at their phones. Sona and I snuck out of the van and looked around warily for security guards, but Vishal’s apartment was in a run-down building with no security whatsoever.
Our luck held and we ran up the rickety stairs to the fourth floor unnoticed. His flat was the last one on the floor. There was no one around, but when we got to his door, we saw a huge padlock with an official-looking seal on it.
We hadn’t bargained for that.
“Huh. Who would have thought the police would have locked the place up?” I mused.
Sona shot me a disbelieving look.
“Really? Did you expect them to lay out the welcome mat?”
“Pfft. Do you have a hairpin?”
“No! And we’re not going to break into that apartment, Tasha. That seal means something,” she declared.
“What?”
“I don’t know what, but I don’t even want to find out. If Samar hears about what we’ve been up to, he will… well, I don’t know what he will do to me, but I don’t think I want to find that out either,” she said, with a shudder.
“Oh, please! You love whatever he does to you,” I said with a smirk.
But Sona shook a finger in my face.
“Don’t. Even. Try.”
I blew out a weary breath. It was so unfair that we came all the way for nothing. Though, I didn’t think I had the balls to break open that big police padlock, either. Because whatever Samar would do to Sona, DV would do thrice as worse to me. He might even get me locked up in a mental health facility, as he had once threatened when I had tried to sneak into Rajabai Tower in the middle of the night on a dare.
The place was rumoured to be haunted, and I was very young and very stupid. Well, when you’re expecting to see ghosts, it’s a bit of a let-down to see your angry fiancé glaring down at you, instead. I was so cowed by his furious lecture that I didn’t even ask him how he knew I was going to be there that night. Now that I thought about it, he must have hacked into my phone! Hmph!
I turned the padlock around, hoping they had forgotten to lock it, but our luck had run out. I was about to turn away from the door when I felt the nape of my neck tingling. Someone was watching me. I turned my head quickly and caught a mop of dark curls disappearing on the staircase above us.
I tiptoed up to the staircase and peeked over the bannister.
“Gotcha!” I whispered.
A little girl giggled up at me. She must have been around seven years old.
“Are you spying on us?” I asked with a fake frown that didn’t fool her one bit.
She nodded firmly, giggling even louder.
