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Chapter Eight
The Weaver House
3:15 PM
There is a secret to detection, and it’s a very simple one. Trevor had taught Davy the
basic concept the previous November, when he had first taken the young bobby under his mentorship.
But in the nine subsequent months, Davy liked to think he had improved upon and refined Trevor’s
method.
He kept this belief to himself, of course.
All you must do is get to know the focus of your investigation – be they the victim or the
suspect – well enough to understand how they spent their days. The time they customarily rose from
their beds, what they ate for breakfast, the route they took to work. For we humans are ritualized
creatures. We tend to live in certain ways, day after day and year after year, and once a detective
begins to understand each individual’s chosen modes of behavior, he can also see where the pattern
deviated. Why did the suspect awaken at six and not at seven? Skip his breakfast tea or forget his
morning paper? What made the carriage turn toward the hills and not the harbor? Why was the
locked door suddenly open or the barking dog silent?
For it is in the deviation of the pattern that the answer always lies. Trevor had decreed
one question to be at the heart of all good police work: What made this one particular day different
from all the others?
And thus Davy Mabrey arrived at the Weaver home with a determination to better
understand a typical morning in the household. He would need to collect fingerprints, true, but they
would most certainly be the fingerprints of the Weavers and their small staff and thus of little help. Of
little help, that was, unless he could discern the underlying pattern of the household and thus the
variation. Of little help, that was, unless he could find the one hand which touched something that it
should not have touched.
Seal had described the home as “secured” by which he evidently meant that the front
door was closed, but not locked, and that a sign had been posted warning the public away. Davy
doubted such signs were any more effective in Bombay than they were in London – likely less so,
since the wording was in English, a language the vast majority of the populace could not read. He
walked up the steps, through the door and down the large central hall, noting that the interior of the
house was more impressive than the exterior. The construction of homes in the tropics, he was
beginning to see, had more to do with counteracting the heat than with following any principles of
architecture. The outside of the Weaver house was composed of mortar block, a bit squat and
certainly unimposing. But inside the rooms continued to open into more rooms - at times even full
sections, as if the house was unfolding around him the longer he walked.
At least at first glance, nothing seemed amiss. Davy did a quick walk through to get the
lay of the land, as Trevor always called it, and then decided to start with Rose Weaver’s room.
It did not take much effort to ascertain which was hers. The majority of the bedrooms
had a neat but dispirited air, with the ornamentation generic and no details to reveal the personality of
the occupants. Evidently the Weavers were well prepared for guests who rarely came. The chambers
in the back, down a hall behind the kitchens, were smaller and evidently designated for the household
staff. Only three bedrooms distinguished themselves, and only one furthermore clearly belonged to a