Nair was quiet. Then: "Tomorrow. The scene will be cleared by tomorrow morning. I'll take you back myself."
She accepted this and did not point out that she had nowhere to spend the night, because Nair had already thought of this — the inspector had the quality of someone who had thought of things before they were mentioned — and five minutes later someone arrived with a bed in a liaison accommodation room, and a phone with a single number programmed into it, and a fresh cup of coffee.
She lay on the liaison accommodation bed and read the notebook until the light outside changed and then she read by the room's single lamp until her eyes could no longer make sense of the handwriting and she set it down and looked at the ceiling and thought about memory palaces. About the technique of them — you built a space in your mind and you walked through it and every object you had placed was a memory and you could retrieve the memories by encountering the objects. The system worked because the mind was better at spatial memory than it was at abstract memory. The space made it retrievable.
She thought about the apartment. She thought about the kitchen and the sofa and the bookshelves and the herbs on the window ledge. She thought about where things were and what the arrangement felt like from the inside — not as a viewer, but as someone who knew it. Someone who had navigated it, who knew which drawer in the kitchen held the good knife and which held the things that had no home. She had been reaching for the right drawer the whole time she was there. She had reached for it before she had consciously thought to reach.
She lay on the bed and she thought: I know this apartment the way I know my own hands.
Then she thought: that means something. That means something specific. And the something it meant was forming at the edge of her mind, just past the reach of what she could currently access, like a word on the tip of a tongue, the name of something you had known and had briefly forgotten, the specific quality of imminent retrieval that was almost but not yet the thing itself.
She did not sleep for a very long time. When she did, she dreamed: a room with many shelves, each shelf holding a specific object, each object connected to a feeling she could not name. She walked through it and she understood that this was the palace, and somewhere in the palace was the name she needed, and she only had to find the right shelf.
