me? When did they start committing adultery?” Judas queried dryly.
“It must have been a couple of years before you started lecturing us—in Hertford, that is, barely a year before Clara was pregnant with Kane. What I found out revealed that she loved the Larry guy as much as she loved you.”
“So a trusted jewel like my immortal Clara could be so wonky to smudge me by getting mucilaged to this kind of wormwood.” He drew a stool to himself, draped both soft white arms on it, and continued more dryly: “So all along, I was standing comfortably on a three-legged vanity. Someone was inserting his third leg inside my cherished canoe. Clara, shame on you.”
“My Dean, I will suggest you don’t interrupt me because I may forget some important discoveries.”
If Judas was thinking rightly, without this bad news in his head, he would have reminded Kelvin that he always told them as students to make use of jotters all the time.
After a short disturbing silence that kept the Dean waiting, Kelvin started tapping his head rapidly with a finger, staring blindly at the carpet, in an attempt to recall what he said last.
He finally went on. “Your late wife wanted the relationship to continue secretly as it had been, but never consented to the idea of divorcing you. So the Larry guy reasoned that you were the only obstacle to his dream wife. Through one terrible Othollo from MOPOL, he organized to get rid of you for some time. The guy who gave the false confession that nailed you was a real armed robber, an Othollo man. Immediately he wrote that confessional statement against you, Othollo presented him with a poisoned meat pie and some money. Then he died.”
Superintendent Kelvin paused for breath and wiped his forehead. “It wasn’t long before the Larry guy was down with a complicated disease or something. On his sick bed, surrounded by family members, he never stopped muttering the two words—Clara Duncan—until he died. His father, Dave Harrison, himself a gangster in his early years, wouldn’t give another meaning to the names, Clara Duncan, other than a murderer. He wouldn’t accept that his now-deceased son was calling the only name he loved. The Dave guy employed the services of his friend, the same Othollo, to find whoever bore that name. It took some years before she was found and killed in that club.”
“I am stained, nauseated. I feel like I have been injected with homicidal intention. It will surely give vent to my display of fangs. How can we get this Dave?” Judas asked pointedly. “Is he still alive?”
Kelvin removed a sheet of paper from the book, the last days of Hitler. “That contains everything necessary for you to know about Dave Harrison.”
Judas collected it with a shaking and sweat-soaked hand. He soon decomposed it. “I am grateful to you, my dear Kelvin.”
“My Dean, I did not investigate this case for the fun of it.”
“Undeniably so.” He was absent-minded. What clouded his disturbed mind was Clara’s unfaithfulness.
“Dave Harrison must face justice, my Dean.”
“Definitely, he must.”
“If he faces the State’s justice, by and by he will free himself.”
“Surely, he will.”
Kelvin frowned. “If he frees himself with money, we would be unhappy and we’ll be interested in killing him.”
“Essentially, we would.”
“And if we do, we’ll be prime suspects because we’ve just had a case against him.” Kelvin said enthusiastically. “So we must drop all evidence that can nail him and go ahead with a well co-coordinated jungle justice.”
Judas folded the sheet of paper, hid it in the cushion he sat on, and made Kelvin know how careful they must be if they had to kill a man like Dave. “Investigation will boil at 1,000 degrees centigrade. To execute the plot is not in the least difficult as planning the plot. We must not bare our furious faces in the murder. I can’t afford to do another eighteen years.”
“Don’t worry about that—I shall come up with a plan.” He adjusted his shirt. “I should be going now.” He dipped a hand into his back pocket and brought out some money. “This is twenty thousand. I need some version.”
Judas collected the original money and as he headed to his laboratory he mumbled an appreciative sentence. He crawled in and presently returned with fifty thousand. Kelvin and BM Kazeem were the only partners who received fifty thousand fake at the presentation of twenty thousand original. Others received that amount for twenty-five thousand original. Judas said he appreciated his patronage, and watched him divide the money into all the pockets in his narrow gray trousers.
Mixing wine in his bar after he had bolted the door against his visitor, Judas was startled by the sudden slam of the bathroom door. “That was scary.” He turned to Kane.
“So you befriend cops, eh?” Kane asked lightly but with pretended annoyance. He’d heard their discussion and knew that Kelvin was not a threat to his safety. “That fellow is a cop, eh?”
“Oh, relax.” Judas shrugged it off. “You care for an ounce of whiskey on the rocks?”
“Whiskey on the mountain, my ass! You pal with the police and told me to feel at home.”
Judas patted him on the neck. “Sit down, my boy—don’t get fearfully aroused.” He drained his glass and told his son how important Kelvin Lucas was in his life.
***
Kelvin returned to Judas’s house when his memory had clicked to one of those discoveries he’d forgotten to reveal, but by then some days had passed. He was about to sit down when Judas emerged from his bar with two glasses of wine and offered him one.
“I have helped you make that. It will reduce your amnesia.”
Kelvin, perceiving a foul smell coming from the glass, had a quick look at it and saw leaves and seeds floating. “Thanks.” He downed it and frowned. “Very bitter.” He rejected the offer of another glass.
“How are your wives and the kids?”
“All are well.” The look on his face didn’t suggest so.
“I know that the sketching of a master plan wouldn’t take you an eon. Let me hear your theory before I say bravo and then redesign it,” Judas said roughly, with a wrapped weed hanging on a corner of his mouth.
“I haven’t come up with a plan yet. I’m still going to get one crucial report about Dave Harrison before anything constructive.”
“You are not alone.” He’d been fumbling with the lighter to get the weed on fire. He finally lit it and winked from the effect of the smoke. “I was going to tell you about my noble intention of adding some five or six neophytes to our circulatory chain stores.”
“My dear Dean, we will talk about all that later.” Kelvin narrated what happened in his station few days back, how an officer arrested Kane’s best friend, the interrogation
