on his own to prove his worth? She imagined his hair longer now, and if he was living rough—and she strongly suspected that Martin Robertson was indeed Robert Martin—he would be ill-kempt and tired. He might even be afraid. For his part, Jesmond Martin had wanted to find his son and paid good money to see him brought home. Yet he appeared to be a man adrift from any emotion—had his love for a wife who was sick taken a toll on his relationship with his son? Had they argued about the boy’s mother—perhaps when Usha Pramal had helped the woman and was thrown from the house for her trouble? Was Jesmond Martin so prejudiced that he could not accept Usha’s healing ministrations, when the nurse herself said that Mrs. Martin was feeling so much better? She wondered if Mrs. Martin’s crippling headaches and the necessity of being confined to her room had, for some reason, brought a measure of peace to the household? In which case, perhaps Usha Pramal had stumbled upon evidence that Mrs. Martin’s headaches were caused deliberately—which might in turn have placed her at risk.
Now Maisie tried to clear her mind of the thoughts that began to cascade before her—random connections, more questions about Maya Patel, about Pramal, the loving brother, at home in India when his sister was murdered. She considered the Singhs—an unusual couple, yet so ordinary in their everyday life. They could have been the proprietors of any corner shop across Britain, but instead of weighing biscuits or sweets, flour or currants, Mrs. Singh was spooning turmeric and cardamom into small indigo paper bags for women who wore silks and who knew how to heal with spices and herbs blended by stone pressed to stone.
But her thoughts always came back to Usha Pramal, and the fact that, to a person, she had been described as unusual in some way, whether by her own or those outside her culture. And she had been loved, that much was clear. With this consideration, Maisie leaned her head on her knees. Would it be a leap to believe that Usha Pramal was killed by someone who loved her too much? And who would want to kill an extraordinary person who touched the lives of others with such gentleness? Who would find such beauty of spirit a threat—and take the life of a daughter of heaven?
Maisie remained in the shade offered by the branches for a while longer. She meditated for some minutes, becoming more aware of the residue of emotion left by whoever had chosen this place for refuge—for it felt like a refuge. And wasn’t a place of refuge usually sought by someone who had lost something of value—perhaps a way of life, a house, a home, a lover, or simply part of themselves? Refuge. The word spun webs in her mind. She knew she would come back to that sense of a safe place in which to curl and, perhaps, escape from the world. There was sadness here, too. A suggestion of pain that went beyond the body into the heart and soul of a person, and again she pressed her hand to her chest, lest the lingering despair impress itself into her being. It was time to leave. Time to go across the common and back to the street. It was time to see the Reverend Griffith.
As she looked back at the trees, the breeze seemed to catch upon itself and the air became sharper and quicker and blew across the hay-like grass, shimmering gold in the afternoon light. She thought that, in time, those trees would become a place where children would fear to tread, that in their youthful imaginings, it would be the forbidden center of the common. Didn’t children always sense evil before their elders? How many pulled back while a mother or father said, “Don’t be frightened, there’s nothing to scare you here.” Perhaps Usha Pramal held a fear of the canal, but she pressed on anyway. And had she felt as Maisie felt in that moment, when she stepped out from under the trees and began her walk towards the gate and the road? It was the overwhelming sense that she was not alone and was being watched.
Chapter Eighteen
There was no answer to her knock when Maisie called at the home of the Reverend Griffith. She waited on the doorstep, knocked again, and listened. No sound issued from the house, though she remembered that the main rooms in Griffith’s