the MG, the passing traffic barely denting her quieted mind as she prepared for an audience with the man her beloved Maurice had turned to in times of doubt. Soon she took a deep breath and left the motor car. She unlatched the heavy iron gate and made her way across the courtyard to the front door. It opened at the very second she raised her hand to grasp the bellpull.
“Miss Dobbs. Welcome.” A young man dressed in a long white tunic and white linen trousers bowed before her, his hands together as if in prayer. “Khan sent me. He said you would be here soon.”
Maisie put her hands together and gave a short bow in return. “Thank you. Would he be able to see me now, or shall I wait?”
“Oh no, no waiting. He wishes to see you at once.”
She slipped off her shoes, leaving them on a bench at the side of the door, and followed the young man across the hexagonal entrance hall and into Khan’s inner sanctum.
Khan sat by the open window, as was his habit. The fine white curtains flicked back and forth, twitched by the breeze, which in turn seemed to move the heavy scent of incense around the room so that it never seemed cloying, but was carried gently on the air.
The young man plumped several cushions on the floor for Maisie to sit as Khan turned to face her, his hands outstretched.
Maisie took his hands in her own. “Khan, you knew I would come.”
“Of course. You have questions for me, and rightly so, for I have sent you a problem, a maze to be negotiated, I am afraid.”
She drew breath to respond, but he held up his right hand. “No, let us speak of you first. Do you still grieve?”
“Of course, Khan. I miss Maurice very much, though the pain is not so sharp—instead it catches me when I least expect it. When I see his handwriting on a card, or when I want to hear his voice directing me.”
Khan nodded, and as he moved his head, a long white strand of hair fell forward. He did not reach to touch the hair, but ignored it, as if the distraction had not happened.
“Those are reminders, my child. Each time you see his penmanship or hear his voice in your head, it is as if he is here with you, and in your soul you will know his advice for you.”
“I wish I could be as confident. Sometimes I feel that, with passing time, I am losing him, losing all that he taught me.”
Khan laughed. Maisie thought it sounded like a chuckle, a sound that might come from an amused child, yet this man was of a great age. His mind, though, was as sharp as a freshly honed knife.
“You will never lose him, Maisie Dobbs, for he is as much part of your mind, of your work, as your skin is part of your body.”
Maisie drew breath to speak again, but Khan posed a question.
“Now, what of you? Where are you on life’s road?”
“That’s a very good question.” She paused. Khan made no movement to hurry her. “I want to go overseas, Khan. And I think I want to travel to India. And the strange thing is that it isn’t inspired by this case—your referral of Mr. Pramal to me. I had decided long before he first came to me that I wanted to travel. You see . . .” She faltered, searching for words. “You see, that’s the missing link. I have followed Maurice into this work, and I have been so very fortunate to be the recipient of his wisdom, of his deep knowledge. Yet he learned so much through a breadth of experience, not least in much time spent abroad, often living in simple circumstances. I have read his diaries and I have, in a way, seen those places in my mind’s eye. But it does not replace the desire to see, to feel, to smell another country.” She rubbed the place at the nape of her neck where she’d been wounded by shelling when she was still no more than a girl—she had lied about her age to work as a nurse close to the front lines of battle during the war. “And now this . . . this case. The Indian woman whose life was taken so violently, to be followed by the death of her friend, Maya Patel, in exactly the same manner.”