Thursday, Morning
Aditya was a chatterbox. He could easily get people to talk to him. So, while Kabir and Akriti waited, Aditya chatted up another waiter in an attempt to find out what time Bilal’s shift ended.
Smugly, he walked back to their table. ‘Bilal’s shift gets over in another half hour. Let’s go and wait outside for him. Since he is staff, he will leave using the service exit at the back gate.’
As they walked out of the hotel, the doorman smiled pleasantly at them. ‘Have a great day, kids!’
‘Thank you!’ Akriti said with a huge smile on her face.
Kabir shook hands with him. ‘Nice watch,’ he complimented. The doorman seemed pleased and his chest swelled a few inches.
Aditya didn’t care. He was too busy keeping an eye out for Bilal – he did not want to miss him.
The three unlocked their bicycles and wheeled them to the ancient oak tree by the road outside the back gate. They waited hidden behind the massive trunk so that Bilal would not be able to see them. It had been over thirty minutes and Bilal had still not surfaced. Though patience was not the children’s strong suit, they bid their time stoically. For the first few minutes, they discussed the case and Bilal. Who would want to steal Pingu? The person has to be in the hotel and in dire need of money. Someone who lives beyond his means. Bilal seemed perfectly suited. Middle class. Always on the lookout to make a quick buck. And the injury on the hand. All this made him a key suspect.
Kabir then called his father, Chief Walia, to check if he had received the CCTV footage. Their hopes were dashed when Chief Walia said they hadn’t yet received the footage from the hotel. Since no one at the hotel had been told about Pingu’s kidnapping, sending the CCTV footage to the police wasn’t on the hotel’s priority list. After fifteen minutes of waiting, they had grown silent, lost in their own thoughts. ‘Look! There he comes!’ Aditya suddenly exclaimed, as Bilal came out of the hotel service entrance on his flaming red cycle.
Signalling to the other two to hurry, he jumped onto his bicycle and started pedalling behind Bilal. Akriti was about to follow when she realized Kabir was still lost in thought and probably hadn’t heard Aditya. Shaking him out of his stupor, she angrily whispered, ‘Come on!’
The three detectives rode behind Bilal, all the while keeping a safe distance so that he wouldn’t see them – and at the same time never letting him out of sight. Bilal rode on for ten minutes or so before making a stop at the grocery store in the market. Walking over to the pharmacy next door, he placed an order and went to sit on the bench outside the tea-stall.
The kids parked their bicycles by the shrubs and hid behind a parked car. They could see Bilal through the glass but unless he turned to look in their direction, he was not likely to spot them.
This seemed like Bilal’s regular routine. The shopkeepers and the tea-stall owner greeted him as if they knew him well.
‘If he visits them regularly, it must mean that he lives in this area,’ Akriti said.
‘Once he goes home and we find Pingu, we can come back to this stall and have a steaming hot cup of tea!’ Kabir said, as always, thinking about his tummy. It had taken years for Aditya and Akriti to understand how to deal with Kabir’s food cravings. And now that they knew, they did just that – ignore him.
After he finished his tea, Bilal picked up a bag full of medicines from the pharmacy and began walking in the opposite direction. The kids looked at each other. They knew there were no houses in the lane where Bilal was headed.
‘Where the hell is he going?’ Kabir wondered aloud, only to be cut off by Aditya.
‘If we don’t move, we won’t know,’ he said hastily, as the three detectives ran as fast as their legs could carry them. They were just in time to see Bilal enter a two-storied building at the far end of an isolated compound.
‘Wait, isn’t that the –’ Kabir said hesitantly.
‘What?’ Aditya and Akriti asked him exasperatedly.
‘I think that is Solan Hospital’s wing for mentally challenged patients,’ Kabir replied.
His father had once been to the asylum on police business and told him about it. ‘But what is Bilal doing there?’
The Mental hospital stood isolated in the compound and no one could be seen around it. The three of them were baffled. What was Bilal doing there?
With their hearts literally in their mouths, they walked towards the building cautiously.
Minutes later, they saw Bilal hand over the bag of medicines to a nurse who had brought out a teenage boy. One look at him made it evident that the boy was a child with special needs. The three stood there, frozen into inaction as the scene unfolded before them.
Bilal was trying to make the boy sit next to him. But the boy angrily pushed him away, trying to get away from Bilal. He flailed his hands, groaned, yelled, pushed, scratched and bit Bilal. But nothing the boy did deterred him. Bilal kept trying to pacify the boy. Eventually, the boy got tired and sat on the bench.
Feeling almost ashamed of themselves for having presumed Bilal’s guilt the three returned to their bicycles. They had learnt a valuable lesson that appearances could be deceptive.
‘This was why his hand was injured, and we thought he had stolen the cat!’ Aditya lamented.
‘But the marks did look like serious scratch marks. It’s not my fault,’ Akriti said defensively.
‘No. It’s not your fault. As detectives we are always supposed to look at what can be, rather than what is,’ Kabir said. Then quite pleased with his cleverness, he added, ‘Hey, that’s a nice line.’
‘We’re back to square one,’ Akriti wailed. ‘We’ve wasted the entire morning and we are neither closer to finding Pingu, nor do we have any other suspects.’
‘True,’ Aditya solemnly agreed. Hoping to get some new leads, he said to Kabir, ‘Can you check with your Dad again if he’s got the CCTV footage?’
Scared that his father might get irritated by his repeated calls, Kabir said, ‘Dad seemed annoyed by my earlier call. I’ll just drop him a text this time.’
‘Okay,’ Aditya said. Looking from Kabir to Akriti and back, he asked, ‘So what next? What time is it anyway? We have to call Mom. She must be wondering where we are.’
Kabir looked at his wristwatch but instead of telling them the time, he clenched his fist and pumped the air with it. ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed.