"We're still working on identification," the inspector said. She set a photograph on the table — not the original, a printed copy. "This is Rohini Sharma. The woman whose apartment you were found in. I want you to look at it carefully and tell me if anything comes back."
She looked at the photograph. It was the same face she had seen in the bedroom photographs — the wide smile, the dark hair, the quality of easy laughter and serious thought. She looked at it and she felt nothing that could be called recognition. No name. No memory of a conversation or a meeting or any of the things that a person felt when they looked at a face they knew.
"Nothing," she said. "I'm sorry. She's — the face is kind. I don't have anything to put with it."
"Okay," Nair said. She looked at the notebook. "What's in there?"
"She wrote about her apartment," she said carefully. "She called it a memory palace. She was using it as a — a system for organising her memories. Each part of the apartment corresponds to something." She paused. "She wrote about someone called L. Not full name, just L."
Nair's expression did not change but her pen did — she made a note. "Did she say anything about L that might identify the person?"
"Not in what I've read so far. I've only read about sixty pages." She looked at the notebook. "Inspector. There's a line in the back — the last entry. It says: If you are reading this and you do not know who you are — start at the beginning. The apartment will tell you. It was built for exactly this." She looked up at the inspector. "She wrote that for someone who would wake up not knowing who they were. She anticipated this. She—" She stopped. She felt the specific cold she had been feeling since the bedroom doorway, but different now — not the cold of discovery, the cold of a shape forming in the dark.
"Read me the line again," Nair said.
She read it.
Nair was quiet for a moment. "She wrote that for someone specific," she said. "Or she wrote it for herself. In case she—" She stopped herself. "Keep reading," she said. "Tell me anything that names L or describes the relationship."
