The bookshelf produced this feeling in four specific places. A small ceramic figure on the dining table — a dancing Ganesha, the paint slightly worn on the right foot from being touched — produced it strongly. A scarf on the hook by the door — red, silk, the colour of something specific — produced it so strongly that she had to set it down. She set it down and she stepped back and she stood very still and she breathed and the edge of the thing approached and receded and she could not get it.
"Tell me about the scarf," Nair said. She had been watching the whole time.
"It's mine," she said, before she had decided to say it. "I know that. I don't know how I know, but that scarf—" She looked at it on the hook. Red silk, an embroidered border, slightly folded from being on the hook. "That's mine. Not hers." She looked at Nair. "Why is it on her hook?"
"When did you decide it was yours?" Nair said.
"When I picked it up," she said. "The weight of it. The—" She stopped. She knew what the word was for the thing she meant and the word was not a word she should know, it was a word that meant something specific and the meaning was beginning to tell her something. "The familiar weight of a thing you have put on and taken off many times," she said. "I know the weight of this scarf the way I know the weight of my own arm."
Nair wrote something. She put down her pen and she looked at the woman in front of her with the expression of a person who has formed a hypothesis and is deciding whether to share it. "I have to tell you something," Nair said. "We ran the fingerprint results this morning. The apartment has two consistent fingerprint sets — one is confirmed as Rohini Sharma's. The other is on all the same surfaces: the coffee maker, the kitchen counter, the bookshelf, the coffee table. On everything that gets touched regularly." She paused. "We don't have a match in our database for the second set. But we also took your prints yesterday, at the station." Another pause. "Your prints match the second set in the apartment."
She looked at Nair. The inspector's face told her what the statement meant before she had fully processed it herself.
"I have been in this apartment regularly," she said. "Many times. Over a long period."
