Kaveri noted all of this without expression. The woman looked at her with the specific directness of someone who was frightened but was not going to pretend to be less frightened than they were, and was also not going to perform anything beyond what was actually happening. This was either the most convincing performance of genuine amnesia that Kaveri had encountered, or it was genuine amnesia. Both required the same initial approach: careful, specific, draw no conclusions.
"Can you stand up?" Kaveri said.
The woman stood up. She was medium height, stable on her feet — not someone who had been hit or drugged recently enough to affect her physical function.
"I'm Inspector Kaveri Nair, CCB Bengaluru," Kaveri said. "I need to ask you some questions. I also need to document your presence at this scene. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"Yes," the woman said. "I'm a suspect."
"You're a person present at a death scene," Kaveri said carefully. "That's what you are right now."
The woman looked at her. Something in her face that was almost — almost — a kind of relief, the very small relief of someone who has been given a precise category to occupy rather than left floating. "Okay," she said. "What do you need to know?"
Kaveri asked her the standard questions and the woman answered them in the standard pattern of someone who genuinely did not have the answers rather than someone who was choosing not to answer: no name, no memory of arrival, no memory of the woman in the bedroom or the events of the previous night, woke up on the floor at approximately seven AM, had not left the flat since waking. No phone, no identification, no bag. When asked if she knew the deceased, she had looked at the bedroom door for a long moment and said: "I don't know her. But the apartment — it doesn't feel unfamiliar."
"What does that mean?" Kaveri said.
"It means I know where things are," she said. "I knew the cup was Coorg ceramic. I knew where the kettle was. I knew — it feels like a place I know, but I don't know her." She paused. "That's the thing I can't make sense of. The apartment and the person don't match. I know this space. I don't know her."
Kaveri wrote this in her notebook. She wrote: Unknown woman, amnesia claimed. Says apartment is familiar, deceased is not. Note: this distinction — space known, person unknown — requires follow-up. She underlined the last sentence twice.
