I am trying to like Agatha - actually I am trying to love her because that would have made my job so much easier, so much more sympathetic. But she is the type of woman whom I am not confident with. When I was in my early twenties, I had a mild obsession with a woman which made me unhappy and a friend gave me advice which I’ve not forgotten: Careful, you won’t be able to handle her. I was young, I had no idea that women, like mad men and horses, cannot be handled. This phrase - can’t, won’t handle her… has stuck with me and I have navigated my way with women since always with it in mind. I have used it successfully for years and I feel I can safely apply it to Agatha.

Up until this week I had left almost all-social anxiety behind, until now arriving in India to be with the English at their worst – and my defences are up again. In spite of all that I am a moral man. If it can be ascertained how they died, if they were murdered or if it was an accident etc. – then the inheritance will be affected. But I am not a detective. My habit of living in detachment has already been sorely pushed. I suppose there are worse ways than sitting out the war. As a fireman I see cruel sights but it is not action, it is not violence. It’s not strategy or politics or hate. In India the war doesn’t exist in its European form, it is not even

like a stage play written by the same author – the two worlds of war are quite different. I have arrived here by a hopping aircraft through Suez having never been further than France and Italy in my youth. Though organised as my trip is – we have liaised with local consul and police in Bengal throughout - I feel immediately that there is something that is being been kept back. The Indians are warm, formal, the Brits cold and formal, full of warnings about the Indians. Fresh to Calcutta – how ironic that sounds, as if anything could be fresh in this country for long – I had asked in advance if the local authorities here could help with accommodation etc., and so they have put me in police quarters in Calcutta, Dickensian, larger than life.

As your narrator and new friend I should say a quick word generally on Calcutta – I like it. In fact, I am surprised just how much I like it. It is a dark city but not malevolent, full of warm human mess – dark colour if you like, the dark side of the rainbow – but a place to trust, strangely. I merge here very well. I have arrived with all my social anxieties revived. I thought I had dealt with them all, thought the shadows of my mother had gone. That’s the problem with having found such a comfortable part of England to lodge in. You can come out, come out into a different landscape and be sorely