box containing her pawnshop purchase across the table to Billy—a Number Two C Autographic Camera, manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company. “Study the instructions for a few minutes. I think it will help us to have some photographs of the area.”
Billy nodded. “Right you are, Miss. We should use this a lot more, I can see it being handy for our cases.”
“Keep it in your desk drawer—I can always grab it if I need it. Anyway, back to Usha Pramal: though we’ll have names later, Billy, root out what you can about the boys who found the body—they were messing around along the canal path, probably getting up to harmless mischief. Now they’ll probably have nightmares for years, poor little mites. Anyway, Billy, you’re a father of boys, so you will know how to deal with them.”
“It’s our girl who’s going to need dealing with, I can see it coming already. Nearly a year old and breaking hearts already.”
“They always say that about the girls, but it’s the boys who break the hearts,” said Sandra.
“Not if I’ve got anything to do with it—no one will break my little girl’s heart.”
“I’m sure they won’t, Billy,” said Maisie, turning to her secretary. “Sandra, you said you thought you might have seen Miss Pramal before—have you had any recollection?”
Sandra shook her head. “I wish I had, Miss. At first I thought I might have seen her—and I’m sorry I nearly said it in front of her brother, but they all sort of look the same, when they’re from somewhere else like that. You know, your Chinese, your Indians. I’m sure you can see the differences if you live there and you’re used to the faces, but when you only see them now and again, you can’t always tell. That sounds really terrible, but, well, I think a lot of people get confused like that.”
Maisie sat back in her chair, tapping the crayon on paper, creating a series of dots. “You know, that might be something for us to bear in mind—what if Usha was not the intended victim? What if someone just got it wrong, and thought she was another person?” She looked up at Sandra. “It’s a sad reflection upon us, if we’re that insular. After all, we’ve all nations under Britain’s roof and it’s not as if we’re short of people from other continents, here in London.” She leaned forward and wrote “mistaken identity?” on the wallpaper, circled the words and then linked them with a line to Usha’s name.
Sandra spoke again. “It’s not that I go to many places in a day—I go from here to Mr. Partridge’s office, or the house, or I go to classes at Morley College, or to Birkbeck—and I go back to my flat. I think I’ve only ever been to Camberwell once or twice, even though one of my friends I share the flat with goes to the art college there.” She frowned, then looked at Maisie, her eyes wide. “Hold on a minute—I think I know where I saw her. Well, it might not have been her, as I said, but . . . about four months ago, must have been in May or thereabouts, my friend asked me to go with her to one of the lectures; open to the public, it was. The talk was all about colors and how things feel—textures, and that sort of thing. The lecturer had people helping him—it was all very interesting, I must say—and he was showing pictures these different artists had painted, and their sculptures, and what have you, and then he talked about color and places, so she—if it was her—came onto the podium with this pile of saris, all these lengths of silk in different colors, and she opened one up after another, and draped them over her arms. I remember her standing there, like a goddess, she was, clothed in all these colors. Your eyes could hardly stand it.”
“And you think this assistant was Usha Pramal?” Maisie picked up the photograph, now some years old and torn at the edges. She handed it to Sandra.
The young woman frowned, and began to nibble the nail on the middle finger of her left hand. “Oh, dear—I can only say it looks like her, because I remember the woman smiling, really smiling, as if she’d turned into a butterfly. My friend was thinking the same thing, because she whispered in my ear, ‘She’s a Camberwell Beauty, if ever I saw one.’ You know, the