‘And when did he return?’
‘I don’t know the exact time…’
‘You don’t know?’ Dora repeated. ‘You were at the gate, weren’t you?’ She grinned conspiratorially. ‘Or did you fall asleep?’
‘No, madam. I didn’t sleep. But he didn’t return through the gate.’
‘Is there another way? I thought the compound was fenced.’
‘There is a small gate there.’ The guard pointed vaguely towards the left. ‘It is kept latched from the inside, but if you know how to do it, you can unlatch it from the outside too.’
‘How do you know somebody opened it from the outside? You said you couldn’t see five paces in the fog.’
‘But sounds carry well in the mist, madam. I heard the gate open. I went quietly, and saw a man enter. When he reached the lights of the main building, I saw that it was Murthy Sir.’
‘What time was it?’
‘Somewhere between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., I think. I can’t be sure. I didn’t look at the clock until later.’
‘Can you show us the gate?’
‘Of course.’
Two minutes later, they were at a small wooden gate built into the resort’s fence between two wooden pillars. It was hinged to one of the pillars and latched to the other. The guard unfastened the latch and opened it.
‘See?’ he said as the latch made a flat noise and the hinges creaked. ‘You can hear it from the main gate.’
He repeated his action a couple of times, demonstrating that the gate was always noisy. Athreya asked the guard to step back. He held the top bar of the gate with one hand and lifted it an inch or two. Having done that, he slowly opened the latch without letting it fall. When he had fully unlatched the gate, he gently let the latch down, a millimetre at a time. Still exerting an upward force on the top bar, he slowly pushed the gate open, moving it an inch at a time. When it was half open, he let the gate down gently. The gate had made no noise at all.
‘Sir is very smart!’ The guard grinned.
On returning to the main gate, Dora thanked the guard and turned to Athreya, her face tight and pale. She hadn’t missed the significance of Michelle’s husband having been out of the resort the night of the murder.
‘You go inside and speak to the staff about the other guest,’ Athreya said. He didn’t want Dora with him for the next activity he had in mind. ‘I’ll have a look around and come back here in fifteen minutes.’
Athreya mounted the cycle and pedalled towards the two identical cottages across the mud road from the resort gate. The name boards at the gate of the cottages showed the one to the right to be Phillip’s and the other one as Ganesh’s. He locked the cycle and entered Phillip’s cottage through the right-side gate.
The front of the building comprised a covered veranda that was about three yards wide. Bisecting the veranda into two was the front door. It was bolted from the outside, and a midsize padlock hung from it. The four windows that pierced the front wall of the cottage were closed and curtained from the inside.
After studying it for a moment, Athreya went around the cottage. All the windows were shut and curtained. The back door was also shut, and seemed to have been locked from the inside. Once he had completed a full round, he mounted the steps of the veranda and approached the front door.
From his jacket, he pulled out a flat leather pouch and opened it. In it were a set of twenty-four pieces of metal with flat handles and thin, elongated protrusions with differently shaped and sized tips. Along with it were several L-shaped pieces of different sizes.
Lock picks.
Athreya selected a lock pick and an L-shaped piece of metal and got to work on the padlock. Less than a minute later, the door opened. Athreya pocketed his tools and entered the cottage, quietly closing the door behind him. From another pocket, he pulled out a small torch that cast a highly focused beam.
No sooner had he closed the door than he noticed a wet smear on the floor, a few feet from the front door. He lowered himself on to his haunches and studied it. He could make out a part of a footprint. He touched it with his finger. It was still wet. Someone had been here no more than six hours ago. With a small camera, he photographed it. A couple of feet further into the cottage was another wet smear, which he also photographed.
He stood up and looked around the sparsely furnished hall, which clearly belonged to a bachelor. Books, papers and painting supplies lay untidily about. In one corner were a number of cardboard tubes with metal caps. In another corner was a small music system. At the far end of the hall was a small dining table with two chairs.
Three doors led from the hall, one to the kitchen and two to bedrooms. He made a quick survey of the other rooms, but found nothing noteworthy. One bedroom was used as Phillip’s work room, where he did his painting. The rug on the floor carried countless paint blotches and drops of different hues. The other bedroom had a double bed and a couple of cupboards with clothes in it. A small locked steel almirah stood in one corner, which Athreya didn’t attempt to open. That was best left to the police.
A minute later, he was back in the veranda, and the padlock was back in its place. Just as he approached the gate, he saw Dora returning from the resort’s main building to its gate. He hurried to her on his cycle.
All she had learned was that Murthy was still fast asleep, and the other guest—a young man, as the security guard had said—was sleeping it off after being stoned for much of the previous day and all of the night. He
