Thursday, Evening
The three detectives re-entered the café. Their table, however, was occupied. All three were already feeling low at having no leads with Bilal as well as the doorman alibiing out in the past one hour. And now finding their table occupied made them feel very annoyed. They had reached an impasse and it was frustrating. They knew they had to keep going but they had zero leads to follow – no more suspects and no new information. All three were thoroughly disappointed and discouraged.
‘Let’s find a quiet place and start from the beginning. Let’s go over everything that we know,’ Akriti suggested.
‘What for?’ Aditya snapped. ‘We need new information.’
‘And maybe we missed something, and it might jump out,’ Akriti said.
With a scowl, Aditya reluctantly agreed to his sister’s suggestion. They walked over to the swimming pool and sat at a table by the pool. Huddling together, they discussed every detail they had about the case so far. Half an hour later the three accepted defeat.
Going over what they knew wasn’t going to get them any new insights. They needed new leads. And then just at that moment, Kabir’s phone beeped.
‘It’s Dad,’ he said, as he hurriedly unlocked his phone and looked at the message. The moment he read it his face fell. Looking up, he saw two pairs of anxious eyes staring at him. He shook his head and said, ‘There is no CCTV folks. The hotel’s CCTV has not been functioning for over six months. Apparently, they felt that Solan was so safe that they never felt the need to get it repaired when it stopped working.’
‘Damn!’ Aditya exclaimed. Their last hope had vanished into thin air. They had reached a dead end. The match was the next day and here they were staring into the vast expanse of the hotel’s garden with nothing to work on. No lead. No clue. No nothing. A frustrated Aditya stomped out into the gardens that led to the swimming pool. Kabir and Akriti followed a few steps behind.
‘No new information is going to come walking to us here, by the pool, where there is nobody but us,’ Kabir said. He was hungry and wanted to go back to the airconditioned café and have something to eat.
The gardens and the poolside were empty, with most of the hotel residents resting for an exciting tomorrow.
As Aditya paced back from the other end of the pool towards their table, he saw Punit Singh, his favourite cricketer in the balcony of a pool-facing room on the first floor. Punit was talking on his mobile and hadn’t noticed Aditya below. Aditya rushed to a spot beneath Punit’s window. ‘As soon as he’s finished his call, I’ll ask him if I can take a picture with him,’ Aditya said to himself happily as he thought of how jealous his classmates would be. For an instant, he forgot about the missing cat and was only concerned about a selfie with Punit in the background.
Then just he was taking out his phone, he froze. Punit was speaking to someone in a low voice. The silence in the hotel backyard amplified his voice and Aditya could hear him clearly. ‘If Rahul and Rhea find out that it was me last night, I will be dead. I have never seen her as angry as she was last night. So please! Please promise me that you will never tell anyone what we did yesterday.’
The moment Aditya heard these words, he crouched below, hiding himself so that Punit wouldn’t know that someone was listening to him. ‘Why do you want to meet and discuss this?’ Punit said after a few seconds.
Aditya crossed his fingers and prayed that the person at the other end would request a meeting somewhere other than the inside of a room; somewhere the SMS gang could reach.
‘Fine. Let’s meet tomorrow before heading out to the stadium. At noon in the café. By then, the breakfast crowd will have thinned out and it will be quite empty,’ Punit said before hanging up.
Unable to contain himself, a devastated Aditya sprinted to their table. Devastated because Punit was his favourite player of all time. ‘You will not believe what I just overheard!’ he said to his friends.