Chapter 14: Meghna / Talashi (The Search)

# Chapter 14: Meghna / Talashi (The Search)

A room searches began at three PM.

Hemant had secured verbal permission from the SP. A phone call, brief, the SP's voice carrying the gravelled authority of a man who had been interrupted during his Sunday afternoon and was authorizing the search with the understanding that Hemant would produce results or produce a resignation, whichever came first. His jaw clenched hard enough to send an ache through his temples.

"Every room occupied by the wedding party," Hemant instructed the constables — four of them now, augmented by two more who had arrived from the Sadar station in a Bolero that parked in the courtyard beside the dismantled mandap. "Bags, luggage, wardrobes, bathroom cabinets. We're looking for a blade, twelve to fifteen centimetres, sharp edge. We're also looking for clothing with blood stains, and anything that connects to room fourteen — the storage room, fibres from the linens, dust from the floor." The wooden frame of the door was smooth and worn under her fingertips.

Meghna watched from the first-floor landing as the constables moved through the building. The wedding party had been told — Hemant's voice, level, in the bar, that their rooms would be searched and that they could be present during the search if they wished. Most wished. Latika stood in the doorway of room eleven with her arms crossed and her sunglasses on and an expression that communicated, through the barrier of tinted glass, the specific displeasure of a woman whose privacy was being invaded while she had a migraine. Poornima observed the search of her room with the clinical detachment of a dentist watching a procedure performed by a colleague. Jhanvi cried, quietly, in the corridor — not because she was guilty but because she was twenty-six and had never been involved in a police investigation and the sight of a constable going through her suitcase was, for a young woman from a middle-class Udaipur family, a form of violation that no amount of legal authority could make feel normal. Goosebumps rose along her forearms.

A third floor was the focus.

Room fifteen — Shekhar's room. The constable found: a blue Nehru jacket (as Shekhar had claimed), two kurtas (one cream, one maroon, not dark, as the CCTV figure had worn), a phone charger plugged into the wall (consistent with Shekhar's claim of a dead battery), toiletries, and a small bottle of whiskey — Rajputana single malt, half-empty, the same brand served at the bar. His shoulder blades pressed into the wall behind him.

"The whiskey," Hemant noted. "Did you take this from the bar?"

"I bought it from Devkishan. For the room. After the reception." Shekhar's leg was bouncing. "That's not a crime."

"It's not." Hemant moved on.

Room sixteen, Farhan's room. The constable found: military-neat packing, clothes folded with the precision of a man trained in barracks discipline, a Quran in a leather cover, a small Bluetooth speaker, and a laptop, a Dell, locked, the screen dark. The sting of salt air nipped at her cheeks.

"The laptop. Password?"

"I'd prefer not to share that without a warrant."

"I can get a warrant. It'll take three hours. During which your laptop remains in my custody."

Farhan looked at Hemant. The communications officer and the inspector, measuring each other. Two men trained by the state, one to protect the seas, the other to protect the streets, now on opposite sides of a desk, negotiating the boundary between cooperation and compulsion. She rubbed the ache from her left palm.

"Five-seven-two-eight-three-one," Farhan said. "My service number. You'll find work emails, technical manuals, and three episodes of a Turkish television show I was watching on the train. Nothing relevant to this investigation." The weight of the silence pressed against her chest like a physical thing.

"I'll verify that."

Room seventeen — Girish's room. The constable found: a dark kurta.

The room went still. Not the room, the corridor. Constable held up the kurta, black cotton, V-neck, the kind of kurta sold in every Fabindia and Westside in the country, unremarkable in itself, but remarkable in context, because the CCTV had shown a figure in a dark kurta ascending the stairs at 12:47 AM. His fingers found the rough edge of the envelope.

"That's mine," Girish said. From the doorway. Arms still crossed. Calm still intact. "I wore it to the reception. Under my bandhgala. When I went to bed, I took off the bandhgala and kept the kurta on. That's what I slept in."

"You told me you went to bed at twelve forty-five. The camera shows someone in a dark kurta ascending the stairs at twelve forty-seven."

"I went to bed at approximately twelve forty-five. I wasn't watching a clock. If I went up at twelve forty-seven, then I went up at twelve forty-seven. The two-minute difference doesn't change my account."

Hemant took the kurta. Held it up. Examined it in the light from the jharokha window.

"There's nothing on it," Girish said. "No blood. No stains. I wore it to bed and I wore it this morning. It's been on my body or on the chair since last night."

"Forensics will confirm."

"Forensics will confirm what I'm telling you. Because it's the truth."

Hemant bagged the kurta. Tagged it. Handed it to the constable. His face revealed nothing — the inspector face, the face that had been trained to process information without telegraphing conclusions, the face that held everything in a separate compartment until the compartments could be opened and the contents sorted.

---

Room twelve. Kundan's room. The room he'd checked out of at seven AM.

It had been cleaned. The housekeeping staff — operating on the automatic schedule that hotels ran on, the schedule that knew nothing of murders or investigations or the fact that the room they were cleaning had been occupied by a potential suspect — had stripped the bed, emptied the bin, scrubbed the bathroom, and vacuumed the stone floor with the industrial efficiency of people who cleaned seventeen rooms every day and did not distinguish between the rooms of murderers and the rooms of honeymooners.

"The room was cleaned before we could secure it," Hemant said to Meghna. They stood in the doorway. A room was empty, clean sheets, clean towels, the brass lota polished, the bed made with the tight corners that hotel housekeeping applied with military precision. The room smelled of phenyl and lemon, the cleaning chemicals, the chemical signature of a space that had been scrubbed of its occupant and made ready for the next one.

"Anything recovered from the cleaning?"

Hemant had already asked. The housekeeping supervisor, a woman named Kamla, fifties, with the sturdy competence of a person who had been cleaning rooms since before the building was a hotel, had reported: nothing unusual. No stains. No items left behind. No smell other than the standard post-checkout smell of used soap and stale air.

"He was thorough," Hemant said. "Checked out at seven. Paid cash. Left nothing behind. This room was cleaned within the hour."

"What about the register? His signature?"

"I have it. Devkishan preserved the register page. The signature matches the Aadhaar photocopy — Kundan Singh Shekhawat. Jaipur address."

"And the Jaipur police?"

"I've contacted them. They're sending someone to the Bani Park house. But Kundan — if he knows we're looking, he's had ten hours. He could be anywhere. Jaipur, Delhi, Bengaluru. If he has money — and he does, if Manoj's account is correct, he has options."

Meghna looked at the clean room. The white sheets. The empty surfaces. The room that had held a man who had come to a wedding with a purpose and left before the purpose was discovered.

"Hemant."

"Yes."

"The 12:47 figure. The dark kurta. That's Girish. He went up to his room. He went up at 12:47, not 12:45 as he said. A two-minute discrepancy. That's nothing."

"It's something. But it's not enough."

"The 1:23 figure. Someone coming down. Same dark kurta. If Girish went up at 12:47 and someone came down at 1:23. That's thirty-six minutes. Why would Girish go down again after going to his room?"

"Maybe he forgot something. Maybe he went to the bar for a last drink. Maybe he went to smoke in the courtyard."

"Or maybe the 1:23 figure isn't Girish. Maybe it's someone else in a dark kurta."

"Kundan?"

"Kundan was in the building. Room twelve, second floor. If he went up to the third floor at some point, via the main staircase, and came back down at 1:23, "

"He'd appear on camera going up and coming down. But we only have one 'up' trip in a dark kurta, 12:47. If the 12:47 figure is Girish, then Kundan went up a different way."

"The service staircase."

"The service staircase has no camera. Kundan could have gone from the second floor to the third floor via the service staircase at any time. And come back down the same way. Never appearing on camera."

"Then who came down the main staircase at 1:23?"

Question hung in the air of the clean room. The empty room. The room that had been occupied by a man named Kundan who had signed his real name on a register and his fake name on a checkout slip and had driven away at seven AM in a car that was now somewhere on the NH48 between Udaipur and Jaipur or somewhere else entirely, because a man with ₹5-8 crore of disputed assets and a dead cousin behind him would not be driving to the family home in Bani Park. A man like that would be driving away from everything.

"I need to find Kundan," Hemant said. "But I also need to understand the timeline. The 12:47 and 1:23 trips, who went up and who came down. The 2:08 trip, who went up and didn't come down via the main staircase. These are two or possibly three different people, and at least one of them was in Bhoomi's room when she died."

"What if, " Meghna started, then stopped.

"What?"

"What if the 12:47 person was Bhoomi herself? Going up to her own room. She was at the bar until late. If she went up to her room at 12:47, she'd appear on camera. Dark clothing. She was wearing the blue lehenga, which in black-and-white CCTV with poor resolution could look dark."

"The figure was described as male build."

"In a dark kurta. From behind. In grainy footage. resolution is terrible, Devkishan's security system hasn't been updated since 2009. A woman in a heavy lehenga with a dupatta, the silhouette could be misread."

Hemant pulled out his phone. Scrolled to the CCTV screenshots. The 12:47 figure: back of head, right shoulder, ascending the staircase. Grainy. Black-and-white. figure was dark-clothed, medium build, the outline blurred by the poor resolution and the motion blur of the camera's low frame rate.

"It could be a woman," he admitted. "The build — in a heavy garment — it's ambiguous."

"If the 12:47 figure is Bhoomi, then she went to her room at 12:47. And the 1:23 figure coming down is someone else. Someone who was already on the third floor, or who went up via the service staircase, visited Bhoomi's room, and came back down via the main staircase."

"And the 2:08 figure is a second visitor. Going up. Not coming back down."

"Two visitors. One at 12:47-1:23 time window. One at 2:08. The first came down the main staircase. Second used the service staircase."

"Or didn't leave at all."

"The rooms were searched. Everyone on the third floor is accounted for."

"Not Kundan's room. Kundan's room was on the second floor. And it's been cleaned."

That puzzle was rearranging itself. The pieces that Meghna had placed, the floor plan, the relationship map, the timeline, were shifting, reforming, the picture changing with each new piece of information the way a rangoli changed with each new colour, the pattern emerging not from the individual dots but from the spaces between them.

"I need Kundan," Hemant said. "Everything else is theory until I have Kundan in a room answering questions."

"And if you can't find him?"

"Then I build the case with what I have. The note. The financial motive. The room registration. The timeline. The DNA under Bhoomi's nails, if it matches Kundan, that's, that's everything." The heat from the stove radiated against her shins.

"The DNA results. Forty-eight hours."

"Forty-eight hours." He looked at his watch. "It's three-thirty. The earliest we'll have results is Tuesday morning."

"What do we do until then?"

"We keep looking. The weapon hasn't been found. The CCTV footage needs frame-by-frame analysis; I'm sending it to the district lab. And the wedding party stays in the hotel."

"They won't be happy."

"They don't need to be happy. They need to be here."

Hemant left the room. Meghna stayed. She looked at the clean bed. The white sheets. The empty space where Kundan had slept and schemed and packed his bag and walked out of the building forty-five minutes before the woman he'd killed, possibly killed, she corrected herself, the librarian's instinct for precision overriding even the momentum of the narrative, was discovered.

Room told her nothing. Clean rooms never did. But the building, the haveli, the three-hundred-year-old structure with its seventeen rooms and its two staircases and its mirrors and its stones, the building had more to say. She was sure of it. building had seen everything, and buildings, unlike people, did not lie.

She just had to learn how to read it.