UNPUBLISHED TRAIL

Pune — 8:02 a.m.

The building was colorless, a pale skeleton tucked between a crumbling temple and a banyan tree whose roots had broken through cement like truths rising from silence. The women’s shelter in Kothrud looked like it had tried, once, to be invisible.

Inside, the air smelled of antiseptic and prayer. Voices were hushed — fragments of trauma and hope colliding quietly behind doors too fragile to knock on.

Detective Arjun Roy stood in the hallway, jacket damp from travel, exhaustion lined into his jaw. Beside him, Inspector Mukesh Kulkarni adjusted his collar, already scanning the layout like a crime scene.

A nun in her fifties approached. Her habit was pressed, her face lined with grace and fatigue.

“We’re looking for someone,” Arjun said, flashing his badge. “Name’s Natasha D’Mello. We believe she came here.”

The nun hesitated, then nodded gently, as though recalling a ghost.

“She was here. But only briefly. Two nights ago, she left. Said she was heading further south. She didn’t say where. Only that… someone might come looking. She asked me to give you this, if anyone did.”

From the pocket of her habit, she produced a torn page — yellowed, folded precisely. Arjun unfolded it.

The handwriting struck him like a familiar voice in a dream. It was Anna’s.

He reads every word I write.
If I speak, I die.
But I must write.

Mukesh peered over his shoulder, frowning. “She’s not running,” he murmured. “She’s protecting something.”

“Or someone,” Arjun said quietly.

He slipped the page into his coat and turned back toward the car. “We follow the names. The rivalries. The one incident Anna never talked about.”

3:40 p.m. — Café Citrus, Versova

The café was sun-drenched and discreet, tucked between boutiques and yoga studios. Inside, Renuka Deshmukh sat like a storm waiting to gather, her back straight, her cheekbones knife-sharp, a teacup held with deliberate elegance.

She didn’t rise when Arjun and Mukesh approached. She simply looked at them, her expression unreadable.

“I heard about Anna,” she said, her voice cool, almost clinical. “You think I had something to do with it?”

Arjun pulled out the chair across from her. “We think you have something to say.”

She studied him, then took another sip of tea, her gaze distant.

“Five years ago,” she began, “Anna accused someone of plagiarism. Not just of copying a line or borrowing a metaphor. She said he had taken entire stanzas. Poems she’d shared in workshops. Work that had never been published.”

“Who was it?” Arjun asked.

“She never went public. But privately — she told me it was Christopher Lobo.”

Arjun didn’t move. But the air around him seemed to tighten.

Mukesh looked up. “The politician?”

Renuka’s smile was dry. “Before he was a politician, he was a columnist. Before that, a poet. Before that? A parasite.”

“She was going to expose him?”

Renuka nodded slowly. “But then she vanished from the circuit. No interviews. No readings. Just… gone.”

“Why?” Arjun leaned forward.

“Because Lobo wasn’t just another plagiarist. He had friends. Power. And shadows to move through. Maybe she thought exposing him would be like dropping ink into the ocean. Or maybe,” she said, stirring her cup, “he threatened her.”

Arjun watched her carefully. “You used the word ‘predator.’ What did you mean?”

Her voice dropped. “The Orphic Society protects its own. And some of them… they don’t just steal words.”

“You knew about the Orphic Society?”

Renuka nodded, her lips pursed.

“She told me once. In whispers. Invitations she turned down. Things she buried in verse instead of evidence.”

6:13 p.m. — Crime Branch HQ, Mumbai

The diary was fragile, parts of it burned or torn out. But what remained was enough to make Arjun’s chest tighten.

He turned the pages slowly, Mukesh leaning over beside him.

The Orphic man watches through blinds and smiles in metaphors.
They reward him with columns, awards, and applause.
I reward him with silence. But not for long.

They said I was mad. Said I was obsessed.
But when the last line comes, they’ll know the madwoman wrote the truth.

Arjun placed the entries beside the anonymous threat poems. His eyes scanned the rhythm, the punctuation, the spaces between thoughts.

“The killer isn’t just quoting her,” he murmured. “He’s responding.”

Mukesh straightened. “A conversation in poetry. One-sided. And the other side keeps dying.”

9:02 p.m. — Carter Road, Bandra

The call came just as the night was beginning to settle.

Lena Mascarenhas. Twenty-nine. A rising star in the poetry circuit. Found dead in her Carter Road flat. No signs of forced entry. No visible wounds.

A Remington typewriter waited on her desk. Fresh page loaded.

She rhymed too loud, she lit the dark,
But dared to sing where silence marked.
Now ink is paid to keep her still,
Another poet, another kill.

By the time Arjun arrived, the scene felt eerily familiar. Too familiar.

“Same setup,” the forensics officer confirmed. “Locked from the inside. Typewriter. Poem. No fingerprints. Nothing but hers.”

Arjun stared at the poem. The words felt hot, as if the killer had just left.

“He’s escalating,” he muttered. “But not out of panic. He wants us to chase him. But only on his terms.”

He scanned Lena’s desk. Books, clippings, journals. And then — a notebook. Half-buried beneath a pile of edits.

One name underlined in pencil: Father Peter Almeida.

11:11 p.m. — Almeida Book Haven

The bell over the door didn’t jingle this time. It groaned.

Peter looked up from a half-written sermon. The pain was already on his face before Arjun said a word.

“Lena…” he whispered. “She was just here last week. Full of fire. She said she’d found something. In an anthology. A line that didn’t belong.”

“What line?”

Peter handed over the volume. Dust in Verse. A slim collection, yellowed with age. One stanza had been circled in red ink.

He carves the future with plagiarized prose,
And wears another’s rhythm like his clothes.

“She believed someone had inserted it,” Peter said. “A signature, hidden in plain sight. She was going to confront the Society.”

“And she paid the price.”

Peter looked at the floor. “Like Anna.”

1:34 a.m. — Arjun’s Apartment

The wall was now alive. Names. Strings. Faces. Poems.

Anna. Natasha. Lena.

Each one a verse in someone else’s poem. Each one punished for knowing the rhythm too well.

Mukesh entered quietly, a flash drive in hand.

“Rohan Thakkar. Freelance journalist. Was digging into Anna’s disappearance. His apartment was ransacked. He’s missing.”

He inserted the drive into Arjun’s laptop.

“One article draft survived.”

On-screen, a headline blinked into view:

The Poet’s Hidden Enemy: A Culture of Theft and Silence

Rohan’s words unfolded like a confession.

He wrote of the Orphic Society. A secretive network of critics, publishers, and power players — men who blurred lines, stole verses, and erased voices.

And one paragraph stood out in bold:

‘M.W.F.’ appears repeatedly in Anna’s encrypted writings. Multiple sources suggest it refers to a manuscript called The Man Without a Face — an exposé Anna was compiling about a powerful literary-political figure.

Arjun stared at the screen, the silence between them heavier than the air.

“If that manuscript exists,” he said slowly, “it’s the key.”

Mukesh nodded. “And if Natasha has it…”

Arjun didn’t need to finish the thought.

They both knew what came next.

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