SS- Sepulchre by the sea - Chapter 4, Pg 5, 20 Oct - Page 3

Originally posted by: Escapist

What's with you and gory murder thrillers ??

Loving how the story is shaping up...can't lay a finger on a single thing and say this person is a culprit...

Nice part :)

Cheers,

F

Come on...this isn't gory. Its a simple who-done-it case without any complex psychological profiling involved. It's a short series so wont delve into theorizing and lot of discussion :-)

loved it again!!
and riya's confidence was awesom😊
update soon..!!

Chapter 3:

"Roopa filed for divorce after twenty months of marriage. Piyush didn't contest it and they were divorced three months after the filing." Shree said checking his notes. "Here is the marriage certificate," Shree said handing Rathore a sheet of paper. "Manu and Payal signed as witnesses. Manu, Payal and Piyush were classmates and close friends during college. The association continued as Manu and Piyush started their investment business. Manu and Payal married few months after Piyush did."

"Did you contact Roopa?" Rathore asked.

"She will be back in town tonight and she is ready to meet us tomorrow morning. She hasn't been in town for the past two days and is cutting her trip after she heard the news." Shree replied.

"That eliminates her," Arjun said. He paused looking at the marriage certificate and an old memory flashed in his mind. His silence didn't go unobserved but the rest of the team allowed him to mull.

"Did you find any other women associated with Piyush?" Rathore asked Chotu.

"I checked at apartment complex and with help of Shree, I went to social establishments where Piyush liked to socialize. He was well liked and was mostly alone. He was sometimes accompanied by Manu and Payal or even just Payal." Chotu explained.

"It's no secret that Payal and Piyush were close and even Manu enforced the fact." Arjun dismissed.

"What about the gifts Piyush received regularly? Where are we on that?" He asked turning to Shree.

"This is where things get a little weird. The office building keeps a log of people who enter their premises and their archive goes back to five years. The security of apartment complex where Piyush lived maintains a log of delivery personnel. I checked the copy of log and it goes back as far as seven years." Shree said bringing up a spreadsheet on projector. "I wish everyone kept records this way; makes our lives less complicated," Shree murmured under his breath. Arjun and Rathore exchanged amused looks.

"What are we looking at?" Riya asked looking at the spreadsheet.

"I took guest logs from office and filtered out deliveries made to Piyush. I did the same for the logs from apartment complex too. The result was a master set of all the deliveries made to Piyush year on year basis. I believe there would be some missing but I guess I have a fix for that too - but that will have to wait." Shree rambled on. He shook his head and cleared his throat when he realized that he digressed from the point he was trying to make. "What you are looking now is the days the gifts were delivered to Piyush."

"Is there anyway knowing what these gifts are and who they are from?" Chotu asked.

"There is and for knowing that we need to acquire warrant which we will get by noon tomorrow." Shree replied.

"By looking at the dates, it seems like there are only specific set of dates where he received deliveries," Rathore noted.

"Yes sir. Few dates are obvious - his birthday and couple of festivals which I could map to for that year. There are about three other dates which I don't know what they signify as they repeat every year however some are unique."

"The dates are significant for the murderer and Piyush may or may not know about it." Arjun replied. "Someone has been stalking Piyush for a long time now." He added.

"Isn't five years a long time?" Riya asked.

"We have records for five years with us Riya so there is a probability that it dates back much further. We have to talk to Manu and his wife about this." Arjun replied.

"Good work Shree," Rathore said and started to walk away, the rest following his suit.

"Sir..." Shree said. "I am yet to come to the weird part." He said. Everyone stopped and turned around.

"There is a pattern I found in few of the dates," Shree said and took a sip of coffee he had in front of him. The team waited. He cleared his throat and continued. "As you can see I have also shown the day of the week when the gift arrived. The delivery to residence was during holidays or on a Sunday - the days he would be definitely at home. But the other dates which I couldn't map to a festival bugged me. So I requested Ketan to give me Piyush's access logs for their office. Their office has a swipe in system to enter office and is used as a proxy way of maintaining attendance of employees. What I found out was that for some of the days he didn't go to office due to poor health, he received flowers at home." Shree said and highlighted the days on the spreadsheet.

Surprise was evident on everyone's face.

"This narrows down the suspect pool to an extent," Rathore frowned.

"Something is off," Riya frowned. The rest of the team looked at her. "Stalkers don't just give gifts and be quiet about it. For this kind of involvement, five years is a very long time. There should have been escalation in case of emotional involvement." She said.

"Are talking about the inevitable contact that a stalker makes with his victim?" Arjun asked.

"That's right. We have to find out what gifts did he receive which will give us an idea how much the stalker knows about Piyush. It could be someone from his past and maybe he didn't want to talk about it." Riya said. "Or the escalation was in progress for several months and they finally met face to face yesterday which led to the stalker killing Piyush." She added. No one spoke for several moments.

"When the stalker feels that they are being betrayed by their targets, they will confront them which never end well for either of them. The stalker will kill their target if they don't comply with the fantasy that's playing in their mind. And if reaching their target becomes impossible, they chances of killing themselves are very high. Living without obsessing over their targets isn't an option for them - especially in cases like these where the stalking is evident for more than half a decade." Riya explained.

"Shree, send out a wire to every police station in the city to check if they have any FIR filed by Piyush in last ten years regarding this and also ask them to check for complaints filed by him in past two years. Police might have refused to file FIR without concrete case. If a stalker did kill Piyush after losing handle on reality, then it would be evident in his or her behavior for past few months. It would reflect in gifts or nasty phone calls or even emails." Arjun said.

"I am posting a warrant for accessing his official emails sir. However accessing his private emails would need some workaround," Shree replied.

"If there is something from the stalker, then it would be in his official email," Chotu said. "Piyush carried a Blackberry which synchronized his work emails. He had access to work email all the time. With the kind of smart phones in market, even private emails are easily accessible but the Piyush didn't carry any other device. Sure, he has a laptop and the probability exists but..." He trailed.

"It's a possibility," Shree nodded.

"We will meet in the morning. Get some rest," Rathore said looking past Shree's shoulder and looking at the time.

My dear Sookie,

First of all, my apologies for being so late with my comments. It was not because I was lazy; I wanted to read the 4^th part (Chapter 3) before writing this, and somehow I could not locate it in the forum, on the 20^th and then I got sidetracked with the Navaratri festivities. I have found it just now, 3 days late, using the link I had for the thread. The first few pages in the forum fill up so fast, it is tough to dig anything specific out of the plethora of threads!

First and most important, a BIG thank you for the rare treat of reading a genuine, true blue, unalloyed crime story. Your FF is so focussed and single minded in tracing this main track that it is a delight to read.

No, I did not think it was too gory; the violence is obviously as much a part of the motive and the compulsions driving the killer as in, say, Peter O'Toole's Night of the Generals. And then, I and your other readers are in the happy position of not having to view the body, and so we can safely read the story even after a full meal!

This said, the asides between Shree and Riya about not having anything to throw up rang true. Also, the phlegmatic detachment with which Riya inspects the corpse up close, and even counts the stab wounds, is not just proof of her courage in dealing with the realities of a nasty murder, but also perhaps hints at her determination to prove to Arjun what she asserts to the psychiatrist, that she is NOT a coward.

The names of the scents mentioned clearly hint at a man, which is in any case more likely. One can, at a pinch, have a woman wielding that cricket bat, but it is tough to imagine a woman inflicting 36 stab wounds on the body ( I do not say 'corpse', as it is not yet clear whether the stab wounds were post or ante-mortem). It is curious that Arjun uses the word 'perfume' . which is usually used for feminine scents.

I was also pleased with the clues scattered about the premises and the narrative : the absence of any bloodied clothes, the fact that the killer had not brought any weapons with him/her (I will keep both windows open for now) but seemed to know that they would be available on the spot, the overdose of a masculine scent. It made me feel comfortably at home, as if I was at the beginning of a rather uncharacteristically violent Christie, or perhaps a PD James thriller. The 'blunt force trauma' sounds so professional!

You also have a pronounced flair for the gently comic: the scene between Riya and the shopkeeper, with an exasperated Arjun listening in (and, I am sure, hoping that she would fall flat on her face) is absolutely sure-footed and just right. It reminded me of the time in Case No.3, when she winkles the list of Dr. Jatin's patients out of the reception clerk, who had earlier roundly snubbed Arjun, put off by his peremptory demands.

The rest of that scene is very natural and believable. It must have been such a relief, and a catharsis, for the poor boy to talk about the man he had looked up to so much and whose death must have been a very great shock for him, and a source of genuine grief. The extent, and vital importance, of what Riya is able to extract from him, purely thru the empathy and the reassuring attitude she displays, only goes to show that a essential talent for a good detective is the ability to put the most unlikely interlocutors at ease and get them to unburden themselves to him/her. I felt like cheering her with an Atta girl, Riya!, and I was pleased that even Arjun was fair enough to applaud her for it. Perhaps this is the dawn of a relationship of respect and mutual understanding between them – from his side, for all this already exists on hers.

The latest chapter shows how the art of detection relies almost equally on the painstaking gathering of proven facts, and then on the ability to interpret them properly, without trying to fit them into a pre-conceived theory.

I loved the little aside by Shree about meticulous records making his life easier; it reminded me of his complaining bitterly about the absence of CCTV cameras in the boarding school episode, where they were investigating the disappearance of a student. I am strongly tempted to plonk him down with Sherlock Holmes in late 19^th century London, and see how he would cope! Come to think of it, I think he would cope quite well in term of the physical clues; it is in their interpretation that he slips up from time to time, as in the case of the window being broken (from inside), in the exchange murders case (a take off on Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train) to simulate an entry by a thief. This time, however, he is spot on in deducing from the gift delivery details that the sender is someone in a position to know when Piyush is absent from the office for the day.

While on this point, I have a question for you. When Chotu asks whether there is any way of knowing what these gifts are and whom they are from, Shree answers that there is, but it will need a warrant. How can a warrant, presumably for searching Piyush's mail (for they already have the run of his apartment) assuredly reveal what the gifts were? Or who sent them, for that matter? They might do so, if Piyush had been on e-mail with the sender (even if the messages had been erased, Shree would be able to retrieve them), but that is hardly a given. How then is Shree so categoric about this?

Lastly, while I agree with your comments about stalkers, and I found Riya's little dissertation on the common traits of stalkers interesting and impressive, I am not sure the sender of these flowers and gifts need necessarily be labelled as a stalker. It might very well be someone from Piyush's past who is not willing to be consigned to that past, but wants to make sure he/she is not forgotten. Moreover, there is no evidence as of now, going by what Sunil tells Riya, that receiving these gifts/flowers upset Piyush in any way, or alarmed him. His change of mood is linked to the visit by his ex-wife Roopa, not to the gifts. If the sender had been a standard issue stalker, surely Piyush would have displayed some reaction of worry or alarm that would have been evident to those in his office, especially to Sunil, who is obviously cared a lot for him. We will have to wait for the result of the enquiries about whether Piyush field any police complaints about the mysterious sender, but a priori, it does not seem that he was worried about them.

Good Lord, my comments are as long as one of your chapters: I only hope I have not bored you to death.! Congratulations on your tantalizingly named story, which I like a lot. It has had a very good beginning, and I am sure it will only get better as you move ahead with your narrative.

Finally, I would like to wish you, and the rest of your family, a wonderful Vijayadashami today. May the year be good for all of you in every way.

Shyamala B.Cowsik

Originally posted by: -Sookie-

Chapter 3:

the time.

another exciting update..
the mystery persists...
now a stalker in the murder case...
liking it..
do update soon..

Ah, so here's another of this genre from Sookie,
Now, are we to start looking for Annabel Lee?

PS: I am still mired in the quicksand that is work. But, I fortunately managed to catch the start. It promises a good story. I hope to catch up with you by the time you have penned down a few more chapters:-)