The body was found at 6:47 AM on a Sunday in November, when the Arabian Sea was the colour of bruised steel and the fishing boats of Anjuna were returning with their morning catch and the beach dogs were conducting their daily territorial negotiations in the sand.
She was lying at the base of the cliff — the red laterite cliff that separates the beach from the plateau where the old Portuguese villas sit like faded queens on a crumbling balcony. She was wearing a white cotton dress, no shoes, and her dark hair was spread around her head in a pattern that the first officer on the scene would later describe, with the particular poetry of a Goan cop who'd read too much crime fiction, as "a halo made of ink."
Her name was Meera Kaul. Thirty-four years old. Former journalist, currently between careers. Wife of Rohit Kaul, forty-one, tech entrepreneur. Resident of Villa Saudade, the Portuguese colonial house on the cliff edge that had been converted into a private residence by her husband two years ago, when they'd moved from Mumbai to Goa for reasons that everyone assumed were romantic and would later turn out to be something else entirely.
Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the posterior skull, consistent with a fall from the cliff. Height of fall: approximately twenty-two metres. Time of death: between midnight and 3 AM, according to the preliminary examination by Dr. Fernandes, the district medical officer, who'd been pulled from his Sunday morning mass and was not pleased about it.
The fall could have been accidental. Goa's cliffs have killed tourists before — drunk, careless, unfamiliar with the edges that crumble without warning. The laterite is ancient and unreliable. It breaks.
But three things prevented the Anjuna police from filing this as an accident.
First: the bruising on Meera's wrists. Bilateral, symmetrical, consistent with someone gripping her forearms with significant force in the hours before death. Someone had held her. Hard.
Second: the phone. Meera's phone was found twenty metres from the body, screen shattered but data recoverable. The last call, at 11:43 PM, was to a number registered to one Kabir Menon, thirty-six, freelance photographer, resident of a rented cottage in Vagator, and — as the village's gossip network confirmed within hours — Meera Kaul's lover.
Third: the confession. Or rather, the confessions. Plural.
Within twelve hours of the body's discovery, three people walked into the Anjuna police station. Separately. Without coordination. Each one sat across from Sub-Inspector Priya D'Souza — thirty-two, Goa Police, sharp as a fish hook and twice as persistent — and each one said the same four words:
"I killed Meera Kaul."
The husband. The lover. And the best friend.
Three confessions. Three versions of the same night. Three stories that overlapped in places and contradicted in others, like three transparencies laid on top of each other, each one showing a different image through the same frame.
Only one could be true. Or none. Or — and this was the possibility that kept Sub-Inspector D'Souza awake for the next two weeks — all three.
This is the story of those three versions. This is the story of a woman who died on a cliff in Goa, and the three people who loved her, and the three truths they told about the night she fell.
One of them is lying.
The question is which one.
The worse question is why the other two are telling the truth.
