"She was anticipating herself," Nair said quietly. "She was documenting a threat. She expected something to happen. She expected that something happening might cause memory loss. She wrote instructions for herself in case she survived whatever she was afraid of and couldn't remember it."

The apartment was quiet. Outside, HSR Layout in the late afternoon — traffic, someone's music, the city going about its business. Inside the apartment: the blue sofa and the bookshelves and the herbs on the kitchen ledge and the map on the wall with the small coloured dots and the eight notebooks and the question that was now fully formed and sitting between them.

"Where is Layla Menon?" she said.

"We don't know," Nair said.

"And Rohini Sharma is in your morgue," she said.

"Yes," Nair said.

She looked at the photograph on the mantelpiece — Rohini Sharma at the hillside, hand extended toward the person taking the photograph. She thought about her own fingerprints on every surface of the apartment. She thought about the scarf on the hook. She thought about the certainty with which she knew the weight of the Coorg ceramic cup.

"I need you to get Rohini Sharma's dental records," she said. "And compare them to the woman in your morgue."

Nair was very still.

"I need you to confirm," she said, "that the woman you have in your morgue is actually Rohini Sharma."

The silence between them was the specific silence of two people who have arrived at the same place simultaneously and are looking at it.

"That would mean—" Nair started.

"Yes," she said. "It would."