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So brazen.
“And who might you be?” asked Sona, crouching next to me until her head was at the same level.
“Sia,” lisped the little girl.
“Do you live on this floor, Sia?” I asked.
She nodded once.
“Where’s your mother?” asked Sona.
“At work,” she replied.
“And your Dad?”
“Sleeping. He drinks at night and sleeps all day,” said Sia sadly.
It was a common-enough story, where the wife worked to provide a living for her children, and the father drank all her money away.
Sona pulled out her wallet and took out some money.
“If I give you some money, do you know of a place where you can hide it until your mother comes home? Don’t give it to anyone but her. Tell her to use it for your school fees, okay?”
The girl nodded happily and took the money Sona gave her.
“Where will you hide it?” I asked curiously.
In reply, she pulled off her doll’s head and stuffed the money in her neck before screwing the head back on with a grin.
“Let’s go,” said Sona, patting Sia’s cheek.
I gave the child a high-five and we started down the stairs.
She peeked over the bannister at us.
“If you give me more money, I’ll tell you a secret,” she called.
We laughed and I pulled out a five hundred from my wallet.
“You can have it for free,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me your secret.”
“That’s okay. It’s not really a secret,” she said, stowing the note away safely inside her doll. “I told my Mama, and she said I must have been dreaming.”
“Hope it wasn’t anything scary,” I said, making a face.
She giggled again.
“No. It was about that weird man,” she said and pointed to the flat next to Vishal’s.
Sona and I froze as we stared at her little finger. Our eyes met and Sona shook her head.
I ignored that and turned to Sia. This was our only chance to find out something - anything - about Vishal Agarwal that maybe the police didn’t know.
“Did all the noisy people disturb you when they opened that door?”
She nodded again.
“They broke it open,” she said sombrely. “It was scary.”
