tested. I am worried that they the English here will find me out to be a fake – I am not particularly brave or experienced, I am not upper class, I am not really upper middle class but an interloper, a tourist in the class system. I could get away with this in Clapham but here in India where all the English are kings, because theirs is always a dog worse off than they are.

The file cum dossier sits on my desk.

The noises of Calcutta beat around it.

It doesn’t provide me with a huge amount of information, and I see I am going to have to tread through a lot of this stuff, trying to read between the lines. I’ve written a long note, the first people I need to seek out and interview: plantation workers, colleagues of Bit, colleagues of Dutch, members of the army (and the church), friends of Agatha, psychologists, monks - and a Maharaja. I’m not going to bore you with the details of all the interviews because some were rotten and I did them as perfunctorily as I could get away with. Much of life is boring, that’s half the problem I have with life. That’s why at work I have a reputation – swiftly, tidily, with my reputation in tact – much of my work simply doesn’t move me. I can get away with this because I am detached and many regard me as a plain

man. I’m not a plain man. I have an effect of being able to seep into the furniture – the observer, not the observed. And yet if I like you, I will respond. And I can’t help feeling that there is something round the corner here going to happen. I’m not sure what it is, but I feel it here in Calcutta.

Of course I am full of theories.

It’s a love triangle, a ménage, a conspiracy, a right bloody mess. Forgive my language. It’s all political, it involves spying, it had to do with the war breaking out – after all, it’s been said before that people will do funny things in a war - a drama bigger than their own, and which, perhaps, they tried to make their own, like actors on a stage. Extend this theory a little further, and this drama, unfolding in India, could not have taken place anywhere else in the world?

My favourite theory, at this point.

Another theory: that perhaps, simply, it was the heat. People do strange things in the heat, do they not?

For example, I am writing this now in my digs in Calcutta. I have a fan and a manservant and a cook and