A MURDER AND A MYSTERY

Chapter 1: Sebastian finds a corpse

In the wee hours of the morning one day, Sebastian discovered a body in his apartment. The stench had been building up for some days now, but Sebastian had put it away to a dead rat. He had been trying his best to locate the source of the odour without success. This was always so with dead rats; they could die anywhere, in some dark recess of the house. You may try everything at your disposal to trace the dead rat, but it would take days before you could pull out the carcass. The stink would continue for days after you have cleansed the house, leading you to believe there may be other dead rats somewhere around.

But this was not a dead rat; it was the body of a young woman. Sebastian did not know the woman; or how she happened to be in his apartment.

Sebastian is a forty-year-old widower. His wife died in the second year of their marriage without bearing him a child. In fact, he had discovered soon after his marriage that his wife was quite ill. A fact which her family cleverly hid from him and his parents. Within days of his marriage, the truth tumbled out, with his wife requiring to be taken to the hospital for urgent attention. It was then that he discovered that she suffered from terminal cancer.

After her death, Sebastian vowed never to get married again. His parents had suggested that he could divorce his wife and sue her parents for conspiracy. They had after all hidden vital information about their daughter, and the marriage was thus a fraud. Sebastian was the only son to his parents and the parents felt guilty that they were a party to his disastrous marriage. Had they not been enamored with the wealth that the girl's parents were prepared to give in marriage, they could have saved their son's life. The deal should have aroused suspicion in them, and they should have investigated into the background before committing to the marriage.

Sebastian had thought agonizingly on the various options. His wife was dying and the girl had been forced to marry; she was under a strong oath not to reveal or rebel. The guilt of lying increased her pain and she suffered without demur. She was ready to accept any punishment Sebastian would mete out to her. Her parents, however, showed no remorse and told Sebastian quite plainly that he had been paid well for the alliance. There was no question of taking their daughter back under any circumstances. Sebastian finally decided that he would not abandon his wife and would take care of her.

When his wife died, his parents took ill and soon departed one after the other. They left him with a three-bedroom apartment and all the wealth they had received from the girl's parents. There was also the motor workshop which his father had run for years along with his brother. There was thus no pressure on Sebastian to work for survival as the wealth would last long after his death.

But living itself was a pressure under which Sebastian labored day and night. He had lost his wife, his parents and there was nothing to look forward to in life for him. He started to live within an absurdness which haunted him day and night. He would wake up and go to sleep at any time of the day. He would eat or not eat as he wished. Time had no relevance for he was shut out from life and living.

Sebastian did not seek any pleasure from life. He was content in his dark world, where even thinking was not necessary. He had no servants, and he had no qualms of living in a large and shabby house. Initially, his friends and relatives bothered him with their well-meaning enquiries. He hated their intrusion in his privacy and was sick of all the good things they told him. Soon his well-wishers tired, and left him alone. There were, of course, a few close relatives who kept hovering around him once a while; maybe waiting for him to turn insane or die of loneliness; like vultures circling above their imminent prey. His uncle had already taken over the workshop as Sebastian showed no interest in running it.

Sebastian stumbled upon the body of the young woman by sheer chance. That it happened in the wee hours of the morning was of no relevance, for he did not differentiate between day and night in his life. As was normal with him, he was in a stupor which passed off as sleep. He then had a dream. His dead wife appeared before him in the dream and said that she was unhappy even after her death. The reason for her unhappiness, she told him, was because she had made his life miserable. She told him that unless he was able to come out of his miserable life and make himself happy, there would be no salvation for her.