A smart criminal who fools the whole shebang is an invention of the movies. There is no such thing as a perfect murder. There is planning and communication, surveillance cameras and unexpected witnesses. There is physical struggle and trace evidence. There is science and technology. There is family and friends and colleagues and foes and sexual partners and secret emotions. There is motive. Even in a case of corpus delicti there is an invisible history to it, a coherent road to reconstruct until the coherence is broken, a ghost to point your finger at. They always leave things behind.
It is said that every crime awaits its investigator, every cold case its reinvestigation. You can never know whether the case is yours, of course, but before nodding yes to your superior, you’d do well to pause and appreciate the previous investigation because in the reopening of a cold case nothing is more central than a robust understanding of the previous investigation. In other words, it is important to investigate the investigation.
Vijay Menon – inspector general, Crime Branch, North Zone, Kerala Police – sighed deeply and paused his thoughts and sipped his taro bubble tea. He had some of the files from the case in question on the reading board, the history of lack of evidence, the history of no culprits. He had never drunk this taro bubble tea before in his life and he was liking it, the milk and the taro and the swirl of the tapioca pearls. Padmini was listening to some TEDx talk by some pickpocket genius named Omanakkuttan on YouTube, AirPods in her ears. She wore a teal-green nightie and lay leaning on her elbow on a long short-legged divan bed, her long straight hair on the frayed old sarouk rug on the marble floor, beside it a couple of treble clef-shaped barrettes that had undone her hair in a salt-and-pepper avalanche exactly fourteen minutes ago, her posture since then stark and disturbingly still against the Wedgwood blue of the wall. If he were to go over she would have made space for him on the divan and they would have made love in their fiftyish ways because she was waiting for him. But he couldn’t have because he had taken his pill only fifteen minutes ago. He drank his bubble tea and licked the fringes of his dense moustache clean and picked up his Pentel pen and returned to his thoughts, decided to turn the thoughts into a silent lecture to his wife of twenty-four years.
“A special team was formed, headed by IG Jose Mathew, and they begin their investigation by examining hundreds of CCTV footage in Kozhikode town and its suburbs, with a special focus on the arteries that connected them to Kamburam Beach, where the murder took place. One hundred and twenty-nine hours of footage recorded between 3 and 6 am were meticulously studied, zooming and slow-motioning, pausing and replaying, hunting for suspects and even for possible witnesses. They mark off more than two dozen vehicles, issue summons to the owners and quiz them until they knew it was time to let them go. Then they isolate a black Mahindra Commander from footage captured outside the gate of a businessman’s mansion just across the church cemetery at West Hill. The same camera captures the same Commander some thirty minutes later as it slows down and almost stops right in front of the gate to allow a Mercedes car to pass, its curtains now drawn in the pouring rain. The registration number on its new shiny plate turns out to be false and they extend the search, they collect the surveillance footage from the nearby towns. They try to trace it further north to Koyilandy town, where there were at least two CCTV cameras overlooking the highway, but they fail. They surmise that the murderers were in that jeep, that they killed Kannan between 4.30 and 4.45 am, that they came from and returned north, somewhere south of Koyilandy. They were right. And they would have their confirmation three weeks later, a month into the murder.”
He did not expect her to ask him what he was thinking about, but he would have answered her anyway if she had, he wouldn’t have hesitated and told her that he was thinking about a murder that had taken place on a beach north of Kozhikode eight years ago, in the early hours of 30 November 2009. That would have sat her up and she would have asked questions, she would have demanded the photographs of the crime scene and the autopsy report and he would have provided them because she was a forensic surgeon by profession, a famous one at that. Her eyes would have seized on one fancy detail in the report called VBE. In the pleasant professional shock she would have probably mapped the trajectory of the bullet describing how it had bored the scapular area and undergone a busy intravascular migration before slaloming down into the right hepatic vein. A .38 S&W Special. She would have tried to reason out how and why it had happened, using words only a colleague would understand. She would have explained how rare the incidence of bullet embolism in general and venous bullet embolism in particular was and her mood would have transmogrified. She would have closed the MacBook and removed the AirPods and said, Listen, fixing her hair with the musical barrettes in a double bun, a style she called Harappan. Then she would have subjected him to a seminar with examples from the journals and the books she had read in excited erudition and you would have doubted it if she were to confess to you that she had not encountered a single actual case of either arterial or venous bullet embolism in her own long and illustrious career but she would be telling the truth because in the state of Kerala a gun is not the weapon of choice for committing murders as it is in the northern counterparts. In the state of Kerala, they hack and chop and dismember, with knives as long as the sleeves they hide them under.
Groucho Marx once said that he had known Doris Day even before she had become a virgin. Something like that with the Menons. So much so that both they and their parents had felt something incestuous about it when they first broached the topic of their marriage in 1993. They cannot recall a time when they were strangers. Their mothers were close friends who had studied together at Government Victoria College, Palakkad – two Brahmin cousins who were excommunicated for marrying two Menons from Ottappalam, who taught them physics and chemistry. They called their husbands Physics Menon and Chemistry Menon, and Physics Menon fathered Padmini and Chemistry Menon fathered Vijay, five days apart from each other, on 5th and 10th, respectively, August 1965, both escaping the nuclear dates by a day. You could say they were one family trying to be two houses or one house trying to be two families and you would be wrong in neither. Vijay and Padmini were the children of cousins and best friends and neighbours and they ate touch-me-not flowers together and flipped their eyelids together and went to school together and waited for the Sky Lab together and shared the same bench and desk in college until their professional aspirations parted them in 1985, one on her road to become a forensic surgeon and the other an IPS officer, batch of 1993.
They named their first daughter Kalyani after Padmini’s maternal grandmother and they named their second daughter Roxanne after the Bactrian wife of Alexander the Great. Roxanne, unlike her mother or sister or her Bactrian namesake, was dark-skinned, like her father.
This is what he did two times a week: He swallowed his sildenafil citrate and sat down and waited for a twang from the deep.
She lay still as a sculpture, bored or absorbed, he couldn’t tell, a short bespectacled woman with thin threaded brows and thick lashes and black eyes, slightly double-chinned. Dr Padmini Menon. He tried to imagine her in a bright pink floral kimono with a classical wide collar and fine silk texture and found it remotely arousing.
He called this his incubation hour. This was their ritual since they were in their late forties. Either his hormones were depleting or the blood flow towards the genital was slowing down, he couldn’t be sure, his Google search had hit stuff like penile Doppler ultrasound scan and nocturnal penile tumescence test and he couldn’t bring himself to consult a doctor and she didn’t insist. But, she said, he needed to boost himself with pills to salvage the marriage and he agreed. This was their Memorandum of Understanding, the therapeutic tranquilliser to the late trials and tribulations of their long and tedious monogamy.
Excerpted with permission from The Menon Investigation, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, Penguin India.
