CHAPTER SIX-The Team
By the second morning the Special Investigation Team had a proper name, a proper room, and a whiteboard too small for what was already being asked of it. SN kept the core deliberately compact — Meena, sharp and unimpressed by rank; Pillai, whose railway expertise would prove, in the end, to be exactly as useful and exactly as misleading as it first appeared; a forensic officer named Dinesh who spoke almost entirely in probabilities and refused, on principle, to speculate past what a lab result could support; and a young constable, barely into his twenties, named Arul, who had grown up two streets from where Aranya’s family lived and who SN kept close less for his rank than for the way he asked questions no one senior enough to know better would think to ask.
“Why her,” Arul said, on the second morning, apropos of nothing anyone else in the room had been discussing. “If this is really a pattern going back four years — why did whoever’s behind it pick a girl whose boyfriend already has a police file? That’s the one thing that makes him easy to find.”
The room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet around a question nobody has an answer for and everybody wishes they’d asked first.
“Maybe he’s not as smart as we’re assuming,” Pillai offered.
“Or maybe,” SN said slowly, “being easy to find was the point. Maybe somebody wanted us looking exactly where we’re already looking.”
Nobody in the room, that morning, followed the thought further than that. It would take another five weeks, and a great deal of wasted railway surveillance, before anyone did.
Dinesh, for his part, said almost nothing in that first team meeting beyond a single request — that no theory, however elegant, be allowed to outrun what the lab could actually confirm — and SN would think back on that request more than once in the weeks ahead, usually at the exact moments he least wanted to be reminded of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN-The Noticeboard
It was Arul, again, who put the photograph in front of SN — a printed missing-person flyer, curling at the corners, pinned to the noticeboard outside a women’s hostel two streets from Aranya’s college, a case from eleven years earlier that had never officially closed. A different girl. A different name. The same particular blankness in the eyes of a photograph taken for a college ID and repurposed, against its will, into something a family had to look at every day.
SN stood in front of it longer than the moment strictly required, and Arul, sensing something he didn’t have a name for yet, said nothing and let him.
It was the noticeboard, more than the photograph, that did it — the specific texture of a corkboard gone soft with monsoon damp, the drawing-pins rusted at their heads, a hostel warden’s handwritten notice about water-supply timings pinned two inches from a girl’s face who had never come home. SN had seen a board exactly like it before, in Kotagiri, twenty years earlier, when he was nine years old and Varsitha had been moved to a hostel school after the trouble at their old one, and he had stood in a corridor much like this one, waiting for a warden to let him see her, not yet understanding that some absences arrive with an ordinary, almost bureaucratic quietness that makes them harder to grieve, not easier.
He had not thought about that corridor in years. It came back to him now whole — the smell of boiled rice and disinfectant, his mother’s hand tight on his shoulder, Varsitha’s voice, thinner than he remembered it, coming from behind a door that would not open for another forty minutes.
“Sir?” Arul said, finally, when the silence had gone on long enough to worry him.
“It’s nothing,” SN said, which was, as it so often was with him, not quite a lie and not quite the truth. “Log the old case number. I want to know if anyone ever looked at it alongside the others.”
Nobody had. It went onto the board with the rest — the thirteenth name, in a list that would, before the investigation ended, grow to include far more than thirteen.
He found Arul waiting by the car afterward, not asking questions, simply present in the particular way SN had come to recognise as the younger man’s version of respect — and for a moment, standing on that damp street with a twenty-year-old ache reopened in his chest, SN understood something about why he had kept Arul close from the very first morning, even before either of them had a name for it.
CHAPTER EIGHT-The Board Fills Up
By the end of the first week, the whiteboard that had begun as a search grid for one missing girl had become something closer to a map of grief — four states, twelve confirmed names, one unresolved flyer from Kotagiri that may or may not belong on it, and, in the top right corner, in Pillai’s neat block capitals, the four numbers that had, for six days, refused to mean anything at all.
“Sir,” Pillai said, on the morning of the seventh day, with the particular energy of a man who believes he is about to hand someone good news. “Come look at this.”
He laid the timetable beside the case map, route lines drawn in red marker connecting each of the four numbers to a state where a name on the board had vanished. It was, SN had to admit, a genuinely elegant piece of work — clean, internally consistent, and built entirely out of real, verifiable railway data. Andhra. Telangana. Kerala. Odisha. Four numbers, four routes, four states with unresolved names on the board.
For the length of one long breath, standing in front of that board, SN let himself feel something close to relief — the specific, treacherous relief of a case finally agreeing to make sense.
“We put surveillance on all four routes starting tonight,” he said. “Station by station, TTE manifests cross-checked against every name we have. If this is a network moving on rails, we will see it move.”
The room, for the first time in a week, sounded almost like a room that believed it was close to finishing something.
It was not close. It was, in fact, further from the truth than it had been on the very first night, when the numbers were still only numbers, and nobody in the room had yet decided what they had to mean.
Meena stayed behind after the others had gone, studying the red lines a while longer in the emptied room. “Sir,” she said finally, to no one in particular, in the tone of someone rehearsing an objection she wasn’t yet ready to raise out loud. “A network smart enough to run for four years without getting caught, leaving its own map lying around in a schoolgirl’s book. I keep trying to make that fit and it keeps not fitting.” Nobody answered her. The room, still glowing with the relief of a theory that finally made sense, was not, that night, in the mood to be argued with.
...........THE END OF PART ONE............
DEAR READERS,
And just like that… PART ONE has come to an end. ❤️
If you’ve travelled this far with the story, thank you—not just for reading the words, but for giving them a place in your imagination.
For now, the case file closes… but the story certainly doesn’t.
During this little pause before PART TWO, I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you felt, what surprised you, which chapter stayed with you, or even which clue made you suspicious. Your words, thoughts, and encouragement mean more to me than you might realise. They give me the courage to keep turning the next page and writing the next chapter.
If you would like to share your thoughts, theories, reviews, or ideas, you can reach me on Instagram @sn1425 or email me at authorpoetsn@gmail.com.
When you message me, please mention the book title and chapter number so I can follow your journey along with you.
And now…
PART TWO — THE WRONG TRACK
The journey is about to take another turn.
More questions.
More clues.
More twists.
And perhaps… a few hints hiding where you least expect them.
So keep your eyes open and your instincts ready.
Travel with the case file. Follow every clue. Question every turn.
Because sometimes, the wrong track is exactly where the truth begins.
Until we meet again in PART TWO…
Got to gooo…!!
Keep reading. Keep guessing. And most importantly—keep feeling the story.
With love,
~SN ❤️
