Sex and Crime stories

Ella always plunged into things, heart and soul, and that was one of the reasons I loved her so much. Each new adventure would be met with shining eyes, parted lips, flushed cheeks, and her full, enthusiastic attention.

When Ella had turned those hazel eyes on me, I couldn't believe my luck. There was no slow burn with her: within six months we were engaged, and within a year we were married, renting in one of Adelaide's solidly middle-class suburbs, saving for a house deposit. I suddenly had a beautiful, loving wife, enthusiastically rebooting her own career in HR, making friends in the neighbourhood, and generally making me the happiest guy that I knew.

And trying for kids, of course: Ella wasn't the type to wait until she was 39. "I want at least three by the time I'm thirty," she'd said, and I was a willing accomplice. We literally wrecked our first bed with our lovemaking: two of the legs broke off when we unintentionally set up some harmonic vibrations with our vigorous, rhythmic humping. It collapsed beneath us with Ella shrieking and giggling as I kept thrusting into her amongst the wreckage.

Our next bed was stronger, but the kids didn't come. We couldn't work out why and neither could the medical professionals, but Ella was undeterred.

"We can put aside some money for IVF," she said. "Or we can always adopt. We'll make it work, don't worry. I still love you, Graham."

She got bored of HR, and decided to try her hand as a Real Estate Agent, inspired by the woman who had sold the house to us.

"I love the people contact," she said excitedly after her first week. "I can be good at this."

And shewasgood at it, and was bringing in some good money to help pay the bills, but after a few more years, she was bored again.

"It's not that I hate it, but it does feel a bit false and transactional," she said. "I want to do something that connects more deeply with people."

Two weeks later, she was starting a new job as a funeral director. I was unsure, but when she arrived home at the end of her first day, the first thing she did was to strip her knickers off from under her black business skirt and jump onto my lap in the home office.

"Death turn you on?" I teased her, as she bounced up and down on me, legs either side of my office chair, auburn hair swinging around.

"You bet!" she panted. "Or, not so much death, but being able to help people. I heard such amazing stories today about beautiful people. It's good to give them a good ending. And it makes me realize that life is not to be wasted."

We locked lips and she threw her arms around me as I stood up and carried her to bed.

"Tie me?" she asked, and I roped her wrists together and tied her to the bedframe, putting her on her back, before bending down to give her a loving, extended eating-out while she moaned and giggled. After she came I untied her and put her on all fours, entering her from behind with a single thrust and falling quickly into a rhythm that would give us a shot at a simultaneous climax, my right hand busy on her clit until she cried out again and I emptied myself into her. We might not have been great at conceiving, but the sex was fantastic.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Our thirtieth birthdays came and went. Still no children, and we started to get serious about planning for IVF treatment. It was expensive though, and we agreed that we'd wait a couple more years so that we could buy a house first. Ella was still loving her job, and had risen from a junior assistant to a proper funeral director, taking the lead with clients and managing funerals. I was busy myself at work and pulling a decent salary, but it was always Ella who had the interesting stories to tell at the end of the day.

"I met such a beautiful guy today, but his story is heartbreaking," she said one night during dinner. "He's a wonderful doctor, but he couldn't save his young wife from drowning when she had a seizure on holidays. I felt so sad for him."

"Why him in particular?" I asked. "I don't mean to sound uncaring, but you've had lots of tragic cases."

She looked thoughtful. "I don't know. Maybe because his eyes are so luminous, so expressive. Maybe because he's just good at connecting with people. Most of the people I work with are grieving, of course, but it was like he was letting me see his real, raw self. He really let me inside. I can't really explain it."

"So it's not that he is really attractive?" I teased.

She kicked me under the table. "Well, heisattractive. He's Indian: from Hyderabad. He looks like a Bollywood star. His wife was a blonde Aussie though: they met here. Her funeral is next week."

She ate in silence for a bit, perhaps trying to think of a better answer to my question, but after a while she changed the subject.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I'd forgotten about the conversation, but the following Wednesday she came home teary-eyed.

"Tamas' wife's funeral," she answered to my quizzical look.

"Tamas?"

"The Indian doctor. The funeral was very emotional, even though there was almost nobody there: just some friends. I felt so sad for him, alone in Australia now."

"Oh." I was trying to be sympathetic, but I still couldn't work out why she was so affected when she dealt with grieving relatives every day.

That night, when we were making love, she was looking distracted.

"Hello? Earth to Ella? Come in, please?"

"Sorry, Graham," she said, embarrassed back to the present. "I was just thinking about people who die young. Maybe we ought to hurry things up a bit more."

Then she started bouncing up and down more enthusiastically, and said no more about Tamas.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

From around that point there was a change. She still talked about her job, but for the first time I had the impression that she was selecting, editing extracts from her day instead of her usual unfiltered download. It felt odd, somehow cold, and I realised how much I'd been lazily relying on her to keep the conversation going. I started putting in more effort myself, but I had less to interest her with: agile project meetings could hardly compete with Daily Tales of Death.

She was feeling more absent during sex, too, as though she knew that we had to keep doing it, but her mind was checking out.

"Is there somebody else?" I finally asked, exasperated one night after a particularly uninspiring coupling.

"No!" she said, looking hurt, but her eyes wouldn't meet mine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We kept trying to conceive, but as the months went by, the disconnection seemed to be getting worse.

"We're putting too much pressure on ourselves," I said. "Nobody's making us have babies. You're not even on speaking terms with your mother, and my family don't care. And it's not your fault either. It might be my issue."

"You don't get it," she said. "It's always the woman's fault, even if it's not physically our fault."

"Huh?"

"You'll never understand. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," she said, cryptically.

"That's a quote. Where is it from?" I asked, puzzled.

"Shakespeare," I think, she said, absently, and changed the subject.

It was Shakespeare indeed, but I'd heard it somewhere else. I made a mental note to look it up, but forgot about it later.

Ireallyshould have looked it up.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was only a week after that that I came home to find most of her things gone and a letter waiting for me on the table. In it, she apologised profusely but said that it was time to make a new beginning. She assured me that I would soon get over her and find somebody better. She said that she would be in touch sometime to get the rest of her things: we were renting and had little in the way of joint assets other than the shared account for the house deposit. She had already moved her half to another account.

I was flabbergasted. She might not have been intending to hurt me, but it felt like a massive gut punch. I slumped over at the dining room table, letter clutched in my hand, before trying to call her: the service had been disconnected.

I called her workplace and spoke to her puzzled boss: Ella had given notice the previous month: had I not known? He'd written her a great reference, but other than that she hadn't left any forwarding details, and in the circumstances, he wouldn't be at liberty to tell me anything anyway. He spoke cautiously, carefully, and I wondered if he was evaluating me as a potentially stalkerish ex-husband. It hurt, but I managed to keep my cool.

Desperate, I contacted her mother: they hadn't spoken in ten years, so there was little hope there. And Ella had no close female friends, and no social media presence. In this age of connectivity, she had somehow managed to vanish.

After some thought, I went to the police, taking the letter with me. I was careful and considered in what I said, emphasizing that I just wanted to know that Ella was okay.

The desk sergeant just shook her head at me. "No offence, mate, but I've heard it a thousand times, and nine hundred of those have turned out to be wife-abusers. Unless you can convince us that she's in danger from somebody else, we won't look into it. My advice is to let her go, if you're one of the 10% of good guys. And if you're one of the 90%, you can fuck off right out of hereandalso let her go."

I wanted to lash out back at her, but I took a deep breath and smiled. "If that's your version of 'no offence', I wouldn't be working here for quids. I hope your day improves."

Inside, I was quickly dying.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next few months were hell. I'd always thought of myself as mild-mannered, reasonable, and a good listener, but I soon realized that that was because I'd never been tested. I was angry and depressed: I hadn't understood how much the love and support of a beautiful partner was buoying me until it was suddenly withdrawn. I tried to not think about her with Tamas, but jealous rage wasn't far away. In my more rational moments, I also struggled to make any sense of what happened. Apart from Ella's ticking biological clock and her admitted tendency to be attracted by shiny new things, I'd thought we were okay. More fool me.

My few mates were no use. Some were sympathetic but couldn't suggest anything beyond murmuring platitudes about new beginnings. Others tried to inspire me with revenge fantasies that rewrote Ella as an evil bitch who was never good enough for me. They were out of order: I knew the truth was more complicated, plus I still loved her, or at least I thought so.

I took a week off work and went to visit my folks. They were semi-retired, living in the country on the Murray River as it meandered its way to the sea. The so-called mighty Murray didn't have enough water in it and was choking in carp, but Dad took me fishing anyway and we sat there for hours, catching inedible fish.

"I can't beat the police advice, honestly," he said. "She's made her decision and you're probably better off just living with it. 'If you love somebody, set them free', as the multi-millionaire rock star with toxic bandmate relationships said."

"The one that also wrote that famous stalker song that gets played at weddings?"

"That one, yes." He reeled in another carp, and threw it back in the river. "If youdon'tlove something, set that free as well," he said. "Either way, let it go. That's fromFrozen, apparently, but if you start singing Disney to me, you're disinherited."

Mum was marginally more helpful. She read Ella's letter several times, carefully, and then asked me more about our attempts to conceive and what Ella had said about it.

"It's not your fault, Graham dear," she said, "but it's almost impossible to explain to a man the pressure that be on women to fulfill their biological destiny and prove their worth as a human, even if it's unintentional. It seems like Ella has more angst there than she was willing to tell you."

Dad interjected. "That's it? She gets a free pass because she has trouble conceiving?"

"You've just proven my point," she snapped back at him. "No, of course she doesn't get out of her obligations. But itissomething, and it's probably made her more vulnerable to whatever else was going on."

She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. "This 'Tamas' guy that she met. Something seems off. I can't tell you why. Maybe you should look into that."

"Aren'tIbecoming the stalker then though?" I asked. "I want to kill him, after all. If I go after him, it can't end well."

"Don't kill him, but if I'd left your father in those circumstances, I'd expect him to make reasonable attempts to win me back."

"So I have to let her go but also win her back?" I was incredulous, angry. I'd been keeping my cool long enough, apparently.

She leant over the table to kiss my cheek. "I didn't say it was easy, dear. But I know you have brains, from me if not from your father. Use them, and stop balling your fists like that. You'll get arthritis."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I took Mum's advice, and looked up Tamas. He was indeed a doctor. He was listed as working at a local hospital, but when I contacted them, they said that he had left several weeks previously, once again with no forwarding address. And again, he didn't seem to be on social media. The fact that he had left his job just before Ella seemed significant: it seemed reasonable to assume that they were together, which, as my Mum had guessed, was definitely 'off' given that he was recently widowed.

I found a story about the drowning, which included a photo of him and his deceased wife (a pretty blonde), but there the trail ran cold. Try as I might, I could find no trace of him or Ella. For a while after I went back to work, I would go to some of her favourite places at night and on weekends, but there was no sign of her. I walked alone at nights through the streets of Adelaide, cold, sometimes wet, lost in my thoughts, but never getting anywhere useful.

After a while, I decided to take my Dad's advice. I let it go. I moved into a smaller apartment, with no room for lust, love or children. That was all packed away with Ella's remaining things: she never came back for them. I went to work, came home, played video games, and went to bed alone, staring into space until I was able to sleep, packed into my own cardboard box of a sort.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Two years went by, and I started dating again. My first few attempts were disasters. I was nervous, tentative, grasping, and my dates were puzzled and scornful. But my fourth date, Maria, was nice. She was a friend of a workmate of mine, and knew my situation. She was an attractive brunette, mature, confident, and good with people: she worked as a nurse in a local hospital. We got along well, and when I dropped her home I got invited in for coffee. But then she let me down lightly.

"Graham, this is not going to work right now. It might one day, and that's why I invited you in. But you've got unresolved business. Tell me more about this ex-wife of yours."

I made a face. "A lawyer sent through the divorce papers, and that's all final. We're out of touch. There are no allegations against me, no alimony, and we had no real joint assets, so it was relatively easy apart from the emotional pain."

"Which is pretty significant. You don't even understand why she left you, do you? And you've been putting this off for how long?"

"Over two years," I admitted. "Although I have tried. Just not recently."

She made me tell the story from start to finish and then she was silent, thinking.

"I knew Tamas," Maria said eventually. "He did lose his wife in tragic circumstances: I can't remember the details. And then after a while he left the hospital. But he was a bit of a prick, really. Charming to patients and to hospital management, but an arsehole to work for. You don't know somebody until you've seen whether they punch down or not. I don't know your ex, but I wouldn't wish him on anybody, to be honest."

"It's like they've both dropped off the face of the planet," I said, ruefully.

"I thought you were an IT Professional? All knowing, all seeing?"

"Garbage, in, garbage out," I said. "If there's no input data, the answers are rubbish."

She gave me a hard stare. "You're a nice guy, but try harder before you talk to me again," she said, and then she showed me out.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After I got home from the date with Maria, I had an idea, and logged onto my work environment. I'd been working on a new project, using AI in a language-translation mode to ferret out news articles from archives around the world. Tamas had been Indian, right? From Hyderabad? I needed to look at him more deeply.

Within 30 minutes, I was staring at the screen, swearing. There was a blurry photo of somebody who might be him, in a Hindi news article. Six years previously, he'd lost his young wife in tragic circumstances. Drowning, just as Ella had said. But the timing didn't match, and in the picture his wife was a beautiful Indian woman, not an Aussie blonde.

I went back to Australian media, and I found the other picture: Tamas under a slightly different name, but it really seemed like the same person, pictured with his smiling blonde bride, who had drowned just as Ella had said.

Two wives, two countries, two drownings. Same Tamas? Different wives?

I couldn't be sure, but if I was right, my wife was with him, and had been for two years while I'd been wallowing in self-pity. And she was in danger.

Fuck.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next day, I was back at the police station. The same sergeant was there. She didn't remember me, but when I explained and showed her the articles, she looked dubious.

"It seems a bit vague," she said. "Different name, different wife, and it might or not be the same person. And you don't even know if she ran off with him or not. We can look at it I suppose, but we've got a lot on at the moment. I'll dig out the file on the drowning here, but I'm not giving you the details of the next of kin. Privacy reasons."

At least she hadn't sworn at me, but I went home again frustrated and edgy. The police clearly weren't going to do anything, and I still had no leads here that I could follow.

Well, there was one clear lead, even if would take some work to follow. I called my boss and begged some personal leave, and then I booked a plane ticket.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Two days later I was in Hyderabad, following directions to an address in a middle-class suburb. I had managed to track down the family of the woman in the newspaper article surprisingly easily, and they had agreed to meet me, although I hadn't explained why over the phone. Their deceased daughter's name was Kashvi.

"It means 'shining'", said her mother tearfully, as she poured me some Masala chai. It had a divine aroma to it: far richer than any chai I'd tasted in Adelaide. That wasn't so surprising, since most people in Adelaide thought that saying 'Chai Tea' made them sound sophisticated when they were really just saying 'tea tea'. She made a bit of a fuss around me, offering some fruit and nut snacks. She had introduced herself as 'Saritha'.

She was thin for a middle-aged woman, looking like an older version of her daughter. She wearing a pale blue sari, which was beautifully made with delicate flower-like motifs woven into the borders. She saw me looking at it and smiled. "This was Kashvi's. She liked blue: it indicates wisdom and serenity. I wore white in mourning for a year, and now I mostly wear her saris. It keeps her close to me."

Her husband, Mandeep, was also dressed traditionally, in what he explained was a kurta, which was like a long, stitched shirt, with pyjama style pants underneath. It was in a blue that matched his wife. Mandeep had a smart moustache (as did I), was a little plump, and had a receding hairline: in short, a classic middle-aged Indian man. He spoke English with an Indian accent, of course, but it was faint and his vocabulary was more sophisticated than mine: I suspected that he had studied at a prestigious university.