names crossed out inside the flap.
“Commissioner cut your stationery allowance?” asked Maisie.
Caldwell sighed. “I shouldn’t be mentioning it to you, but it’s the bean counters, coming round and checking how we’re using everything from a pencil to a pin.” He nodded towards the notes in Maisie’s hands. “To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for the woman. Even the examiner said she was a beauty. Taller than some of them. Bob Carter was in India, with the army, and he said she would have been of a higher caste, or with a bit of Anglo in her, he thought. But there again, she was living in that home for servants.”
“It might have been the only place for her to go—she had been taken on as a governess. How long had she been dead when she was discovered?”
“About twenty-four hours, according to the postmortem report.”
“Had her body been brought to the canal? Were there any signs of her death along the canal path? The summer’s been dry for the most part, so there would have been blood on the ground if she’d been shot nearby.”
Caldwell shook his head. “I had men walking up and down that path looking at the dirt and gravel until they couldn’t move their necks for a week. Nothing.”
“So, she was carried there?”
He nodded. “I would have thought so.”
“Not easy to lift, a dead weight,” said Maisie.
“Unless there were two doing the carrying.”
“Were there distinct footprints?”
Again, Caldwell shook his head. “Someone was very careful, I reckon. Could have shot her next to the canal, so she just fell in when the bullet hit her.”
Maisie sat back and regarded the inspector, the way he fiddled with a piece of paper on his desk and avoided meeting her eyes. He feels guilty, she thought. He didn’t do the job as well as he could have, and he knows it.
“What else did you discover? And I know I could read all this, but what might you have found out about Usha Pramal that you were keeping from her brother?”
Caldwell sighed. He looked up at Maisie, then came to his feet to stand alongside the small soot-stained window through which sun would never shine into his office.
“We have evidence to suggest she was a prostitute.”
Maisie frowned. “Are you sure?”
“We talked to people in the area, and from all accounts she was seen with men.”
“I’m seen with men, Inspector, but I hope no one thinks ill of me.”
“But not her sort. It’s not on for them, is it? Seen going into houses to see men.”
“Are you sure? Was she seen going into a house to see one man, but five people saw it? Or was she really seen going into different houses?”
The detective sat down again. “I admit, a bit of doubt crept in. She was never seen out at night—we talked to the warden at the ayah’s hostel, and she said Miss Pramal was always in of a night. Rules, you see. But she was out during the day. According to the warden, she always had some money—not lots, mind, but she had some sort of work outside what was organized for her. Most of them work as cleaners, anything they can get.” He paused. “And there’s no two ways about it, a lot of these women who were given their marching orders by the people who brought them over here have ended up on the streets, especially down by the docks. They find their own kind there, see. Lascars—Indian sailors.”
Maisie chewed the inside of her lip. “Poor souls probably didn’t have much choice. What kind of people would bring a young woman from her home—so different from this country—then cast her out when they no longer had need of her services?”
“They didn’t all do that. When I spoke to the warden, Mrs. Paige, she said a fair number had their passage paid to go back home. And there’s cases of these ayahs’ getting a new job straightaway and coming right back again with another family.”
“Then why is there an ayah’s hostel?”
“Well, you’ve got a point there, Miss Dobbs. Mrs. Paige and her husband—churchgoers, they are, very religious—said they felt they had to help these women. Started when Mrs. Paige came across an Indian woman begging on a street corner, so she got talking to her and realized what had happened—lost her job, and had nowhere to go. She brought her home, gave her room and board in return for work, and she discovered that there were more who needed