Arraigned in Remand
That evening, closeting with a nonplussed Kavya, when Dhruva asked her about her house keys, telling him that after her husband’s death, she got the old Godrej lock replaced with a new one, she pulled out one from her purse, and informed him that she kept the other two with a bunch of cupboard keys in her bank locker along with her jewelry. Then when he asked her what for she got the main door bolt removed while replacing the door lock, apparently surprised, she said that it was very much intact even as he led her out of her house to bring her into his that day. Finally, he asked her what made her to leave her burkas on the clothes-line in the master bathroom, she swore that she never wore a burka all her life, and wondered what it was all about. At that, holding her in his reassuring arms, he detailed his findings at Spandan that pointed towards a conspiracy against her, and said that still there was no need for her to lose sleep about that. However, at length, taking hold of that Godrej key for his safekeeping, he bade Kavya good night with sweet dreams.
The next morning, as she volunteered to show him the other keys, as Dhruva drove her to the Andhra Bank in the Jubilee Hills, greeting her warmly; the manger wondered why she became so scarce of late. When she told him the purpose of her visit, he helped her complete the formalities, and after that, she led Dhruva to her locker, from which she retrieved two Godrej keys with a bunch of other keys that she entrusted to him,
Thus having left the bank, as they got into the car, though she looked at him in hope, he said that if the post-mortem report were to come up with some foul play, she can count on Simon to arrest her and press for her custodial interrogation. When she lamented how her past came to haunt her, folding her in his arms, as if in protection, he said that she better obtained an anticipatory bail, before he could bail her out of her predicament. However, she said that she better subjected herself to the due process of law to come clean for she was confident of defending herself in the court. Then, in all admiration, pressing her more closely to him, he assured her that he would get to the bottom of the crime for truth to prevail. However, updating all the murders so to help her fashion her arguments to avoid remand, he dropped her at their place, and headed to the forensic laboratory with those keys.
However, even before an eager Radha could have a word with Kavya; armed with an arrest warrant and accompanied by a woman constable, Simon had descended upon
9, Castle Hills, and led away Kavya to the Jubilee Hills Police Station for questioning for the post-mortem had revealed that the couple had died of poisoning.
The next day, Dhruva and Radha reached that Nampally Sessions Court well before Simon had produced Kavya before Purushottam Rao, the magistrate, upon which her searching look met Dhruva’s reassuring stare. Then, Jeevan Reddy, the Public Prosecutor, recapped her life from the time of her self-confessed association with the errant couple till their death in Spandan. While Kavya heard him impassively, turning eloquent, he stated that she could have murdered her man at the behest of her lover, who would have brooked no rival to him in her bed, and, later tired of the ruffian; she murdered him in cold blood, so as to get out of the rut she willy-nilly got into. Hence, it was immaterial whether she had a motive or not to murder Natya, as, if left alive, she would have exposed the accused to get the noose. So, as it a case of her neck or Natya’s, her choice should be clear as sky, even to a novice of a defense lawyer.
What can be more incriminating against the accused, Reddy exhorted, than the very fact that she has had an intimate relationship with all those who died after consuming some slow-acting poison in her house? Besides, there was an eyewitness to testify that a burka-clad woman had entered the house the day the young couple could have been poisoned, who else it could but the accused. The prosecutor further asserted that as the circumstantial evidence pointed towards the involvement of the accused in the murder of not only Pravar and Natya but also Ranjit, her husband, her custodial interrogation was imperative in cracking both the cases. Thereby averring that if let loose, she would be able to tamper with whatever little evidence that could have been left to implicate her, and by way of the final nail on her bail coffin, he had insinuated that she had misused the anticipatory bail granted to her in her husband’s murder case by killing her paramour and his companion; so he sought police custody of her for a fortnight at the least.
Permitted by the court to argue her own case, Kavya owned up the facts of her life as brought out by the prosecution, but pointed out that the Public Prosecutor seemingly suffers from a selective amnesia as he had conveniently forgotten that the self-same poison also killed Inspector Shakeel, and that he too was last seen with a burka-clad woman. Why not the woman, who poisoned Shakeel, was the one who had committed the crimes in Spandan, in her proven absence from it? Since she had no acquaintance, much less a motive to kill the cop, the police should have looked elsewhere for the killer of what appeared to be interconnected crimes. When she reminded the court that logic was a double-edged sword that cuts both ways, Reddy said peevishly that she would have killed Shakeel too to advance such an argument; but the magistrate, by no means amused with that wondered why the police failed to pursue that line of investigation since the identity of the burka-clad woman, last seen with the cop, was relevant to the investigation of the other two cases.
As a tamed Reddy said that he had no more to add, the magistrate opined that while the accused at large might hamper the investigation, it was not a fair proposition either to interrogate her without any compelling reason, but at the same time as he has to take the public interest also into account, he ruled that Kavya might remain in the judicial custody for four weeks, before which the police should produce prima-facie evidence, if any, against her, failing which she would be entitled to seek a regular bail thereafter.
Thanking the magistrate for his fair order, when Kavya submitted that any police presence in her precincts was inimical to her public image, Simon volunteered to withdraw the guard forthwith.