"Yes," Nair said. "The woman you found in your bedroom. The woman we've been calling Rohini Sharma — the actual victim — was Layla Menon." She set the forensic report on the table. "Based on this, and the notebook documentation of ongoing harassment, and the phone evidence — this changes the investigation significantly."
"I killed her," she said. It came out flat — not a confession, not a performance. Just the logical conclusion of the chain of facts, stated because stating it was the only honest thing available.
"We don't know that yet," Nair said. "We know she was in your apartment and she died in your apartment. The post-mortem report says the cause of death was head trauma consistent with impact on the nightstand corner. That impact could have been the result of a fall. It could have been the result of a struggle. It could have been deliberate." She paused. "What we know about the relationship, and what the notebooks document about the pattern of behaviour — any of those scenarios exist within a context that is materially different from the context we were working in yesterday."
She looked at Nair. "You're telling me this carefully," she said. "You're giving me the facts without a conclusion."
"I'm telling you what we know," Nair said. "Which is: a woman who had been harassing you for over a year was in your apartment at midnight. That woman is now dead. You survived. You have no memory of what happened." She paused. "The investigation is now one of a different kind. Not who killed Rohini Sharma. But what happened between Rohini Sharma and Layla Menon in this apartment at some time between midnight and three AM."
She looked at the red notebook on the table — the one she had been reading since yesterday, the record of three years and everything it had contained. "The notebooks," she said. "Everything in them — it's documented. It's contemporary documentation, dated entries, specific incidents. The harassment. The pattern." She paused. "I wrote them in case I needed to prove something. In case no one would believe me."
"In case she had succeeded in making people think you were unstable," Nair said. "The destabilisation campaign she was running."
"Yes." She looked at the apartment — her apartment, the palace she had built, every object a memory in its place, the system she had constructed to protect her own mind from someone who had been trying to dissolve it. "Inspector. I need to remember what happened. And I think the apartment is how I get there."
"You've already remembered two things," Nair said. "The door and the morning with hills."
