The answers Pritam gave seemed so fishy to the people firing the questions that Vishal and Raghavan broke into helpless snorts. They both stepped out of the interrogation room, frustrated, with Raghavan instructing his subordinates to investigate and dig out the entire information on Pritam's store, the actual store owner, Pritam's family, the people regularly visiting the café, anyone the neighbouring stores' people highlighted as potential suspects.
Any lead possible.
The SIT people and the constables working on the case spent the day moving in and out of the police station, gathering data and evidence. By nightfall, they gathered that Pritam's statements were true.
He did have a family consisting of a physically weak mother and a younger sister who finished high school and worked as a maid in a few neighbouring houses. The people who had visited his Internet Café were traced and they were either school going teenagers or adults with proper background and work; none of them had any link to Mitra or even the remotest possibility of being a serial killer of women.
The only lead that they found useful was that of the actual shop owner. The name on the registration papers of the store was Manoj Bhal while the owner Pritam claimed to have been hired by was Nitish Naik.
The team was aware of the prevalence of corruption, proxy owners, businesses run for illegal transactions and other such practices in real estate and small businesses. Raghavan gave ample instructions to his colleagues to find out the people behind the store and the hidden purposes of running it in such a desolate corner of the locality it was in.
Vishal was overlooking one of the constables while they went through the personal profile of Manoj Bhal when the Cyber team called them up to let them know that videos were indeed uploaded from the café. They had enough evidence.
Vishal mused to himself about the uncovered details, wondering how soon they would be able to find the real murderer.
###
Mitra had been sitting idly without much activity. By this point, she had exhausted her thoughts also. The extent of her anxiety and overthinking gave her a splitting headache and she realized she needed to properly relax and calm down her agitated mind in order to think straight.
She ticked off the facts of her situation in her head.
She was a dead woman in the eyes of the public, chained and locked up in reality. She had been under the impression that she could scare Sashi into releasing her. Or even attack and injure him enough to force him into submission.
It dawned on her finally that she was not going to have any escape.
As she stared blankly ahead of her at the wall, her gaze focused on the glass window. She had always wondered what lay beyond the room, and no matter how much she tried, she hadn't been able to see anything past the glass. It must have been opaque.
Maybe not. Why should she care?
And then something clicked into place. Why hadn't she thought of it till now?
Cursing herself under her breath, she got up, her movements the fastest they had been since the time she had attacked Sashi the night he kidnapped her, and grabbed the wooden chair next to her. It was heavy, but she couldn't be bothered by it.
She dragged the chair to the wall mustering all her strength and will power, raised it and smashed it against the glass window with a loud battle cry.
The crash resounded in the room and throughout the corridor outside, the echoes of it failing to scare the agitated Mitra. The window had splattered its glass shards on both sides of the wall while one corner of the window had a big, dangerously sharp pointed piece of glass still sticking to its frame.
She put the chair down amidst the broken shards that had fallen to the ground, stepped up on the chair and grabbing the pointed glass shard from the window frame, pulled it out with all her strength.
The blunt edges of the glass fitted in her hand nicely. The triangular shaped piece could be used as a knife very well.
She grabbed the shard with enough pressure in her hand as she peered out of the now open window. It seemed like a really dark corridor. The light emanating from her room wasn't enough to illuminate the whole corridor, but it was enough to notice that the place was really old outside too.
Mitra had expected to see Sashi come tearing through the room upon hearing the crash.
Oddly, there was no sound heard in the building. Mitra wondered if it was an abandoned building that was being used solely for her confinement.
She tugged at the chains binding her to the opposite wall. They didn't budge. Mitra had spent a better part of her lone confinement time trying to pry open the chains and even knock out the hinges that held the chains to the wall, but they had been too strong for her efforts.
She wished fervently for them to crack open as she pulled at them again with all her might. Neither did the hinges come off, nor did the chains crack anywhere.
Just once. I just need to free myself from these. Then I can escape through the window. If there's no one in the building right now, all I need to do is jump out of the window. I can then make an escape from this building.
Mitra's thoughts shifted their focus towards breaking herself free, the glass shard she had fancied as a weapon now lying on the bed. She picked up other smaller pieces of glass and tried scrapping the wall around the hinges of the chains. She wanted to scrape it all off till the chains came off the wall.
No one was in the building. If only she could hasten the process, she might succeed in freeing herself before Sashi busted her.