Mira D’Silva
Episode 1 – The Hidden Canvas
Ananya Mehta had never entered Professor Hall’s office without permission before. The narrow corridor outside the Fine Arts Department was deserted that evening, the winter light drained from the sky, and the flickering tube light above made the varnished wooden door glow in a tired, sickly sheen. She stood with her hand on the brass knob, half-deciding whether to turn away, but curiosity had its own pull. Hall had sent her a hurried message to retrieve a folder from his desk, nothing more. He had sounded distracted, impatient even, as though every second wasted might cost him something.
Inside, the office smelled faintly of turpentine and stale tobacco. Piles of books sagged against one another, heavy with dust. The curtains were drawn, allowing only a weak yellow lamp to scatter light across the room. She noticed the folder he had mentioned sitting on the desk, its edges protruding, but her eyes were drawn elsewhere—towards the far wall where a large canvas leaned, half-covered by a tarpaulin cloth. It did not belong to the neat order of the department’s collection. Something about the way it had been hidden, pushed to the corner, made her step closer.
She pulled back the cloth just enough. The painting revealed itself like a secret whispered in haste: muted ochres and deep, storm-laden blues depicting a riverbank beneath a swollen sky. The brushstrokes had a strange urgency, almost violent, as though the artist had fought with the canvas rather than painted it. At the bottom corner, the signature was absent. Instead, there was a mark—an angular spiral etched in faint crimson that looked less like a flourish of art and more like a coded symbol.
Ananya’s breath quickened. She had seen a reproduction of this work once in a rare catalogue of “missing colonial artifacts,” a book she had pored over in the British Library. The entry had claimed the original was lost in Bengal in the late nineteenth century, looted during the violent dispersal of a riverside temple community. Historians had dismissed its existence as myth. Yet here it stood, dusty but intact, in her professor’s office.
She nearly dropped the cloth when she heard footsteps. The door creaked, and Professor Hall entered, his heavy coat still damp from the drizzle outside. His face, usually calm with scholarly detachment, froze when he saw her standing by the canvas. His eyes, pale blue and bloodshot at the edges, sharpened like glass cutting through fog.
“What are you doing?” His voice was quiet but carried the kind of restraint that hides fury.
Ananya stammered. “Sir, I—I was only looking. I thought—”
“You thought wrong,” he snapped, striding forward. With sudden violence he yanked the cloth back over the painting and turned it to face the wall. “You will forget what you saw.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. The silence in the room thickened. Hall’s hand trembled slightly as he lit a cigarette, drawing a long breath as though it might steady him. He exhaled smoke towards the ceiling and added, softer now, “There are things, Miss Mehta, best left in darkness. Trust me on that.”
She picked up the folder quickly and left, her heart still racing. Yet the image of the painting refused to leave her mind. That spiral in the corner seemed to burn against her eyelids every time she blinked.
Two nights later, the entire campus was awake with sirens.
Ananya had been in her hostel room, drafting an essay, when the commotion began. Students spilled into the courtyard, whispering wild guesses. A security guard ran past shouting something about the gallery. She followed, her throat dry with a foreboding she couldn’t explain.
The university’s gallery stood on the far side of the quad, its tall glass windows throwing back the glare of emergency lights. Police vans were parked at odd angles, and officers hurried in and out with clipped urgency. She pushed through the gathering crowd until she saw them wheeling out a stretcher. The white sheet covering the body slipped for a moment in the wind, revealing a glimpse of pale, lifeless skin and familiar features.
Professor Hall.
The whisper spread through the students like a ripple: murdered.
Inside, the gallery was chaos. Glass lay scattered across the marble floor where a case had been smashed. Detectives paced with notebooks, taking hurried statements. And on the main wall, where the centerpiece of Hall’s private exhibition had hung, there was only a rectangular shadow of dust. The painting—the one she had seen—was gone.
Detective James Carter stood at the center, tall and broad, his coat collar up against the rain. His expression was one of irritation at being pulled from his evening, but his eyes were sharp, assessing. He bent to inspect the broken case, then glanced at the lifeless form being carried away. “Robbery gone wrong,” she heard him mutter. “Simple enough.”
But to Ananya, it was anything but simple. She could feel it in her bones—the missing canvas was at the heart of the killing. She stepped closer to catch another glimpse of the wall where it had hung. The shadows of dust seemed almost to mock her, as if the painting had never existed at all.
In that moment, standing among the murmurs of police and students, she felt the first stirrings of a dread she could not yet name. A professor silenced, a painting vanished, a spiral that haunted her vision. She realized with a chill that forgetting what she had seen was no longer an option.
Episode 2 – A Crime in Oils
By morning the gallery had been pared down to clean lines and cordoned tape. The flood of blue lights was gone; the echo remained. Ananya arrived in a damp coat and the stale taste of sleeplessness in her mouth, her student ID clenched between frozen fingers. She had told herself she was only here to deliver a brief statement, to say what she’d seen, and then to recede back into the easy safety of classes and deadlines. But once you’ve watched a body go by under a sheet, ordinary days unspool like thread with no needle to hold them.
Detective James Carter stood beneath the empty rectangle where the painting had hung. Up close he looked less like a policeman and more like someone who had learned to wear skepticism as a winter layer—practical, weatherproof, not to be removed. A notebook balanced in his palm; his handwriting marched in tidy lines.
“You’re Miss… Mehta?” he said without looking up.
“Yes,” she said. “Ananya.”
He nodded at a uniformed officer who peeled back a section of tape to let her through. The marble smelled faintly of detergent and something else—linseed oil, she realized, the sticky sweetness that clings to brushes and skin. Carter followed her gaze.
“Every surface has been wiped,” he said. “Your professor kept things fastidious. That makes our work easier.”
“It smells like fresh varnish,” she murmured. “Why would anyone varnish a gallery floor?”
“We haven’t varnished anything.” He turned a page. “Start at the beginning.”
She told him about the message, the folder, Hall’s office, the canvas hidden against the wall, the tarpaulin, the crimson spiral where a signature should have been. Carter’s face didn’t change, but his pencil paused.
“You’re certain about this symbol?”
“I’m an art student,” she said, then flushed at how it sounded. “I mean—I’m trained to see what people overlook. It was there.”
“Something like a spiral could be a restorer’s mark, a colour test—”
“No.” The word arrived too fast. She steadied herself. “It was deliberate. It was… a code.”
Carter’s mouth tightened, not unkindly. “Let’s not get romantic about the evidence. We’re looking at a break-in, a smashed case, an expensive painting gone. A robbery that turned violent.” He gestured to the cracked glass in a bin, the empty brackets on the wall. “Simple story.”
She forced herself to look at the wall and not the recollection of the body. The dust shadow where the canvas had hung wasn’t rectangular after all, she noticed. Its edges were uneven, smudged, as if someone had tried to rub out fingerprints with too much zeal. In the upper corner, a finger had cut a crescent through the dust, and beside it, barely there, a faint trailing curve. It might have been nothing. It might have been a spiral not completed.
“Who else knew about the painting?” Ananya asked.
Carter read from his notes. “Two gallery technicians. A student assistant, Maximilian Rhodes. The manager, Ms. Saira Khan. Dr. Hall had a small exhibition planned—private view for donors next month. That didn’t please everyone.”
“Not please?”
“Not all colleagues love a man who seeks daylight.” He snapped the notebook shut. “Tell me about your relationship with Dr. Hall.”
“I’m his advisee. Was,” she corrected. “He—he pushed us hard. He knew how to argue with a canvas.”
“Any disputes? He owe money? Lover’s quarrels? Anything that drops this neatly into the human category instead of the mystical one?”
She thought of his hand shaking as he lit a cigarette two days ago, the way he’d said darkness like a place one might move into. “He seemed… afraid. Not of money or people. Of the painting. As if it would talk.”
Carter watched her a moment more than necessary. “We’ll need a formal statement. You’ll avoid the press, Miss Mehta. And you’ll let us do our work.”
He moved on to a pair of technicians, leaving her in the corridor where posters advertised talks on provenance and postcolonial aesthetics. She pressed her palm to the cool glass of a display case and found herself inside a memory: Hall’s office, the hidden canvas, the storm-bellied sky and the riverbank swaggering under it. She closed her eyes and saw again the crimson spiral like a pin driven into a map.
Maps.
She swung her gaze to the catalogue stand by the lobby. A stack of slim booklets bearing the exhibition title—Currents & Crossings: Water in South Asian Art. She took one, flipping fast. Hall’s curatorial text spoke of rivers as memory, water as archive. The plates were decent reproductions, annotated by tiny numbers. It was in the margins she found the thing that made her scalp prickle: tiny dot-and-dash notations beside certain works, not just dates or inventory numbers but sequences that looked like nothing she’d learned to catalog. In the plate of a nineteenth-century river painting, the corner carried a symbol shaped like a hook, then a faint curve, then another—no, not merely a flourish. A motif. The same family of marks. Spirals and hooks, coils and waves.
She photographed the pages on her phone, guilty as if committing a small theft of her own. Saira, the gallery manager, appeared as if summoned by the thought of wrongdoing. Her lipstick was the exact red of freshly cut silk, her eyes too tired to hide anything.
“You’re one of Hall’s?” Saira said. “I’m very sorry. He was difficult in the precise way that made him valuable.”
“You hung the missing painting?” Ananya asked.
Saira shook her head. “It wasn’t on the manifest for this show. But he kept insisting it had to be seen, properly, with everything else. He was obsessed with juxtapositions. I told him to clear it with legal.”
“So it hung here without paperwork?”
“Briefly,” Saira said, and her voice dropped. “Look—the CCTV. It’s a mess. Whoever did this knew the timing of our patrols and the—” She stopped herself, tugging her blazer straight. “You’ve spoken to the detective, I assume.”
“May I see Hall’s office?” Ananya said before she could decide it was a bad idea.
Saira hesitated, then gave the smallest nod, as though some private loyalty had tilted the scales. “Five minutes. If anyone asks, you’re collecting his personal items.”
The office felt colder now. The tarpaulin still leaned against the wall, but behind it there was only drywall—no painting. The desk bore a new orderliness that read as an apology for chaos. Ananya hovered a moment, then drew open a drawer. Notebooks, invoices, a lacquer box of charcoal sticks. Beneath them, a single folded page, its crease shiny where it had been opened and smoothed too many times. She laid it flat.
It was a hand-traced grid of a river delta, its channels and branches spidered into the paper, each fork labeled in Hall’s cramped script. At four points the script broke into symbols—spiral, hook, wave, a trisected wheel. She swallowed. Those same marks sat like accents in the catalogue plates. And at the bottom of the page, barely legible, a note: If you know how to look, the painting is a confession.
Her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number: Stop. The screen lit her face. She raised her head too fast and smacked the open drawer. Pain shot up her knuckles. In the corridor outside, someone’s footsteps slowed, then resumed.
“Time,” Saira said in the doorway, voice too carefully neutral to be anything but warning. “Detective Carter will want to know what you’re doing.”
Ananya slipped the traced delta back where she’d found it, but not before running her finger over the spiral—an old habit with fresh consequences. “Do you know Max Rhodes?” she asked.
“The assistant? He’s vanished since last night.” Saira’s mouth thinned. “I called, no answer. If he’s hiding, he’s either scared or guilty.”
“Or both,” Ananya said.
They returned to the gallery where Carter was pinning the day to a board—times, names, a neat absence where motive should live. He saw the catalogue in Ananya’s hand and arched an eyebrow.
“You planning to solve this by reading?” he asked.
“By seeing,” she said. “You’ve been looking for a thief. You may need to look for a reader.”
“Reader of what?”
“Brushstrokes.” She opened the catalogue to a page where an old river painting had been reproduced. “Look at the corner. The varnish is uneven. Beneath it, you can make out a faint—here.” She drew a circle with her fingertip. Carter leaned closer despite himself. The motif was so slight it might have been a printing error, a ghost under the ink. But once seen, it would not be unseen.
“That mark,” he said, “could be… anything.”
“It repeats.” She flipped to two more plates. There again, near the lower right margin. And again, hidden in the shadow of a boatman’s oar. “Hall didn’t only collect. He annotated. The way smugglers sometimes notch crates. The way priests hide prayers under paint.”
Carter straightened, shutting the space between them with a breath. “I’ll have our analysts look. Meanwhile, a man is dead. A painting is missing. Both have a market price.”
Ananya folded the catalogue closed like a lid. “And both have a history.”
He didn’t disagree. He only gestured toward the empty wall, that halo of dust where colour had been. “You’re convinced that thing killed him.”
“I’m convinced someone killed him for that thing,” she said. “And that the marks tell us who.”
He glanced at the faint scuff she’d noticed earlier—the curve in the dust where a finger had hesitated, then stopped. He reached and brushed it with the back of his knuckle, a gesture as quick and private as a superstition.
“Miss Mehta,” he said at last, “do me the courtesy of staying alive while you look.”
She nodded because it was simpler than saying the fear was already here, pooling at her feet with the smell of oil and rain. When she stepped outside, the sky hung low over the university like the weighted lid of a chest. On the stone steps she stopped, opened the catalogue again, and ran her eyes over the plates until the symbols refused to be mere decoration.
If you know how to look, the painting is a confession.
She turned the page and saw the river again—the swollen sky, the banks dissolving to silt. The spiral at the corner seemed suddenly less like a signature than a direction. Left bank. Right bank. A coil tightening.
Behind her, the gallery door clicked shut. Somewhere in the city, hands wrapped a canvas around a wooden stretcher, drew twine to cinch it tight. Somewhere a phone lit a bare room with the word Stop glowing white as a blade. Ananya tucked the catalogue under her arm and walked, as if the simple act of moving forward might turn dread into proof.
Episode 3 – The Gallery’s Secret
The next morning, London looked scrubbed clean by a night of rain, but Ananya felt none of that crisp renewal. She walked past the gates of the university, coffee cooling in her grip, heart still tangled in the images of the previous night. Professor Hall’s office—emptied. The spiral marks—persistent. The missing painting—haunting. Her inbox glowed with faculty emails mourning his “untimely passing,” stripped of all suspicion, and she knew then that grief in institutions always wore a powdered mask.
The gallery remained sealed under police tape, but the archives—those shadowy rooms where the past slumbered—were not. She signed in with her student badge, forcing her hands to stay calm, and slipped between rows of sliding shelves. Dust bloomed with every tug. This was where Hall had spent hours, scrawling notes that bled into margins, tracing colonial routes through the language of art. If answers existed, they’d be in these brittle pages.
The first register she opened dated back to 1871. Its parchment pages mapped the flow of artworks shipped from Bengal to Calcutta, then to London. Silk-wrapped idols, temple carvings, paintings unnamed except for cryptic descriptions. One entry made her breath catch: “River Deity, pigment on canvas. Acquired from Ganga temple dispersal.” The location matched Hall’s traced delta. Scribbled beside it, in an archivist’s different hand, was a warning: provenance disputed.
Her phone camera clicked, capturing the evidence. She opened another box—Hall’s personal file requests. Slips of paper bore his neat handwriting, item numbers cross-referenced with colonial shipping logs. Again and again, the same series of works surfaced: river paintings, late 19th century. Each one carried the faint annotation of missing provenance. Each, potentially stolen.
A shiver passed through her. Hall hadn’t been collecting out of greed—he had been trying to assemble proof. Proof that entire collections in Britain had been built on theft. If revealed, such evidence could devastate reputations, collapse careers, and strip galleries bare. And someone had killed him before he could speak.
“Miss Mehta.”
The voice fractured the air. She spun. Detective Carter stood in the aisle, his coat damp with rain, eyes narrow. “You have a habit of putting yourself where you shouldn’t.”
She swallowed. “I’m researching.”
“You’re tampering.” He stepped closer, scanning the open register. “You think because you see a word in ink, you’ve solved the case. Do you know how many paintings have provenance disputes? Half the empire’s loot. It doesn’t mean your professor was killed by history.”
She pushed the page toward him. “But this painting matches what I saw in his office. And look—symbols in the margins. The same hand that marked the catalogue.”
Carter studied the page longer than he intended. His jaw tightened. “You’re walking on dangerous ground. If you’re right, this isn’t just about a stolen painting. It’s about a crime three centuries deep. People who profit from that don’t forgive.”
The lights overhead buzzed and flickered. For a moment, the two of them stood surrounded by stacks of restless paper, the air thick with unspoken truths. Then Carter closed the register firmly, the sound sharp.
“You’ll hand me every photograph you just took,” he said.
She hesitated, then slid her phone into her pocket. “And if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll find yourself cited for obstruction, and your career will end before it begins.” His words were blunt, but his eyes were conflicted. “Don’t mistake my warning for indifference. I want the truth. But I also want you alive.”
He turned to leave, his coat brushing the shelves. Ananya let out a breath only when his footsteps faded. She pressed her back to the wood, pulse racing. He was right—this was more than theft. This was blood layered across generations.
On the way out, she noticed a narrow drawer left slightly open, marked Miscellaneous Sketches. Inside lay scraps of paper—rushed drawings, incomplete studies. Among them, a half-finished sketch of the missing painting: the riverbank beneath a storm sky. In the lower corner, Hall had drawn the spiral again, darker, like he was trying to etch it into permanence. Beneath, in hurried pencil, a line of words: “It begins where the water bends.”
She copied it down, her hand shaking.
Outside, the rain had returned, a thin drizzle veiling the university’s brick facades. Students hurried past with umbrellas tilted like shields. Ananya stood still, the sketch heavy in her bag. If Hall had been mapping a truth hidden inside brushstrokes, then the murder wasn’t random. It was a silencing.
As she crossed the street, her phone buzzed. The same unknown number lit the screen. This time, the message read: You’re following the wrong river.
Her heart dropped. The crowd around her blurred. Someone out there knew every step she was taking—and wanted her lost in the current.
Episode 4 – The Collector’s Trail
The text—You’re following the wrong river—sat on Ananya’s screen like a hand pressed over her mouth. She read it again on the Tube, the carriage lurching through tunnels where advertisements rippled by like schools of bright fish. Wrong river. Hall’s note had said, It begins where the water bends. She had assumed Bengal, the delta he’d traced with symbols that looked like prayers. But London was a river city too, its own memory written in water: Docklands, Rotherhithe, the old wharves where ships had once disgorged cargo and ghosts in equal measure. Perhaps the map she needed first was under her feet.
She got off at Canary Wharf and walked where the glass gave way to brick. The Thames had the colour of melted tin, the air carrying a metal chill. At Limehouse Basin the towpaths narrowed between moored boats, and warehouse doors wore new names—lofts, studios, units—that disguised old functions. She found the address Saira had murmured yesterday with a guilty glance: Venn & Morrow—Conservation and Valuation. The plaque was brass, discrete. The buzzer yielded to a voice like smoke.
Inside, the studio smelled of glue and old varnish. Canvases lay flat under lamps, faces turned to the ceiling. A man appeared wiping his hands—mid-fifties, dry and neat, the sort of man whose shirt collars avoided the world. “You must be the student,” he said, as if students always arrived on days when inconvenient things had happened. “Alistair Venn.”
“Ananya Mehta.” She kept her tone level. “I’m looking for information about a nineteenth-century river painting that passed briefly through our university gallery.”
“Passed through,” he echoed. “Such pastoral phrasing. And what makes you think it passed by me?”
“Because your invoices live in our archive,” she said. The bluff startled even her. “Conservation work on related pieces. River scenes. Bengal.”
He didn’t blink. “And you have the gallery’s authorization to inquire?”
“Do you have the painting?” she asked, because sometimes audacity forced a truer answer than courtesy.
Venn’s smile was tidy as the rest of him. “Students these days treat provenance like a moral puzzle they can solve between lectures. Do you know what provenance really is? Memory with receipts.” He turned a lamp to show a cracked seascape. “Paintings travel. They’re repaired, reframed, re-signed, re-storied. The canvas you’re looking for—if it ever existed—will be exactly what the current owner needs it to be.”
She recognised the conversation’s dance: refuse the premise, shift to abstraction, file the guest out. She changed step. “I’m not asking about ownership,” she said, “I’m asking about marks.” She took the catalogue from her bag, opened to the plate, tapped the faint motif near the corner. “This symbol appears across a set of works. It matches a note in Dr. Hall’s hand. Spiral. Hook. Wave. You annotate, Mr. Venn. Restorers leave fingerprints of a kind. You would have noticed.”
At the name, something minute changed in him. He replaced the lamp with careful fingers as if putting light back into its place. “Hall was a man who tugged at threads,” he said. “Threads are load-bearing.”
“And when you tugged, what came down?”
A long second. Then Venn crossed to a drawer and took out a transparent sleeve. Inside, a sliver of canvas no larger than a fingernail lay like a dried petal. “I found this under a stretcher bar last year,” he said. “Came from a river scene with a suspiciously clean provenance. New keys, new stretcher, old paint. A restretch will hide edges. But edges talk.” He held the sleeve to the light. Along one side, where the weave ended, a smear of pigment curved. Not brushstroke. Incised. A spiral, clumsy and sure. “Whoever owned it before wanted to erase the edge.”
“Where is that painting now?”
“In a place that keeps its receipts better than your archive,” Venn said dryly. “And before you ask, no, I will not say. My job is to conserve, not to confess.”
“Hall was killed,” she said. “The painting stolen from our wall.”
“And you think confession prevents murder?” He slid the sleeve back into the drawer with a soft plastic sigh. “Sometimes confession supplies motive.” He looked at her for the first time without the small pleasure of superiority. “Go home, Miss Mehta. Some paintings aren’t meant to be found.”
“Because they’re cursed?”
“Because they rearrange the rooms they enter,” he said.
When she stepped back into the grey light, the basin had the quiet of a held breath. She took the long route along Narrow Street, river on her left; cranes and luxury balconies; remnants of rope and rust. Wrong river, the text had said. Or perhaps: wrong reach. The Thames bent and bent again, a muscle flexing. She traced its curve on her phone’s map and dropped pins at the old docks—Wapping, Rotherhithe, Deptford—places where goods disappeared into private inventories.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown again: Stop looking where the city looks back.
She typed, hand shaking only after she sent it: Who are you?
The reply came with an image: a photograph shot through glass. Her own reflection in the gallery’s lobby the previous day, catalogue in hand. Her stomach went cold as wet ash. Someone had stood there, separated by a pane and a moment, and seen her as a problem.
She turned the phone face down and kept walking because stopping felt like acquiescence. The wind rose; gulls described white commas against the iron sky. She thought of Hall’s traced delta, of London’s river, of rivers elsewhere doing the same unspectacular work: carting silt and stories, undoing and remaking banks. It begins where the water bends. Venn’s sliver of canvas had confirmed the mark existed at the edge—the place you hide when you restretch a life.
By evening, she had names. She sat at a corner table in a cafe that had once been a chandler’s and wrote them in small script on a napkin: Owen Blythe, who ran private viewings in a Clerkenwell warehouse where insurance men pretended not to be; Mina Talwar, a restorer whose skill at “stabilizing” included stabilizing angry clients; Rhodes, Max Rhodes, the assistant who had not answered calls since the night of the murder. The napkin looked theatrical, like a prop in a detective’s pocket. She slid it into her notebook anyway.
Her flat felt wrong the moment the door closed. The air had that disturbed stillness, the way a pond holds ripples long after a stone sinks. She set her keys down without the satisfying ceramic clink because the bowl lay on its side. A thin scrape scored the paint near the latch.
She moved through rooms with the careful stupidity of someone who half-believes the act of seeing changes what is seen. On her desk, the catalogue lay open to a torn page—no, not torn, lifted; the plate she’d circled gone cleanly like a missing tooth. Her sketchpad—the one she’d filled with copied spirals and hooks—lay in ribboned strips. The low drawer where she kept her passport sat three fingers open.
Her heartbeat thudded in her throat. She moved to the kitchen, where the light fell flat across the counter. The knife block had a knife missing. She stared until she remembered she’d left it in the sink that morning, handle up like a flag. The dish drainer held its shape. She laughed and it sounded like dry paper.
The unknown number again. Last warning.
“What do you want?” she whispered before she could stop herself, which was ridiculous because her voice travelled nowhere across the text. The reply came without the cushion of seconds: To keep the river quiet.
She sat down hard on the floor because the chair felt like furniture for someone else’s life. Keep the river quiet. Which one? The bend in London where warehouses had been laundered into apartments? The fork in Bengal where the temple had been stripped? Rivers were never quiet; they only pretended for cities.
A knock. She froze. It came again, two degrees louder. She stood, wiped her palms on her jeans, and peered through the fisheye lens. Detective Carter’s coat shouldered the frame, rain grading from his collar in patient lines.
She opened the chain reluctantly. He took in the desk, the fine snow of paper, the careful mess that had been made of her careful life. For a moment the skepticism fell off his face like a shawl dropped because the room was too hot.
“Your door wasn’t forced,” he said, and the fact sounded obscene.
“They had a key,” she said.
“Or a hand on the inside.” He stepped around the strips of sketch, knelt to lift one, frowned at the repetition of spirals. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because every call is a choice about who hears it,” she said, and heard the tremor.
He rose, glanced at the drawer. “Passport?”
“Still there.”
“They weren’t here for your identity,” Carter said. “They were here to tell you you don’t have one. Off the case. Off the river.” He moved to the window, looked out at the brick backs of neighbouring buildings. “I had a note on my desk this afternoon. No handwriting. A printout in a cheap font. Close the file or we’ll close it for you. They’re old-fashioned, our friends, even in their menace.”
“Then we’re right,” she said. Saying we felt reckless and necessary.
He turned, that winter layer of skepticism buckling at one buckle. “You went to Venn.”
She didn’t ask how he knew. “He showed me a sliver of canvas. The spiral was on the edge, under the stretcher.”
Carter’s jaw went still, like a muscle deciding between clench and release. “Edges evade catalogues. A neat place to hide a message. If Hall knew that, he was cataloguing more than art.”
“Confessions,” she said. “He wrote that. If you know how to look, the painting is a confession.”
“And confessions,” Carter said quietly, “make enemies.”
A silence sat down in the room with them. Outside, someone argued on a balcony about whether the bin men had come. Life continued its small civil wars. Inside, the shredded sketches held their shapes like the remnants of an insect’s metamorphosis—the casing after the leaving.
“We can put you in temporary accommodation,” Carter said. “Different locks. Different hallways. It buys a night.”
“No,” she said, and surprised herself by the certainty. “I have lectures tomorrow. I’ll be in rooms with people. That’s safer than rooms without them. And I have somewhere to be now.”
“Where,” he said, not as an order.
“Clerkenwell. A warehouse where men who sell insurance pretend they don’t.”
He stared, then exhaled a rueful breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “If you are bait—as of tonight—you’re going on the hook with me attached.”
“What about the note?”
“What about it,” he said. “They have printers. We have shoes.”
He gave her ten minutes to put her life back into a bag. She did not touch the torn sketches. Some ruins were evidence; some were altars; she hadn’t yet decided which these would be. As she closed the door behind them, she slid the chain across. It felt theatrical, but then so did everything once the last ordinary day ended.
On the street, the rain had settled into that English compromise between falling and hovering. The city smelled of wet concrete and whatever private catastrophes the weather carried. Carter hailed a cab with a whistle that cut the damp. As the car pulled away, Ananya looked back at her window. Her own reflection watched her from the dark like a witness who might one day be called.
She took out the napkin with the names and underlined Owen Blythe. The cab turned toward the river, then away again, as if reminded of something it did not wish to pass. London bent and unbent itself. Somewhere along a different bend, a canvas slid deeper into shadow. And in the narrow space between, where edges hid their marks, the trail began to feel less like a path and more like a confession that had chosen its listeners.
Episode 5 – The Detective’s Doubt
Clerkenwell at night had the texture of secrets. Warehouses converted into lofts leaned against pubs with names older than empires; alleys curled like veins that had carried centuries of trade. The cab stopped before a plain brick façade whose only sign was a brass number plate—no company, no plaque. The windows glowed faint amber. Carter paid and gave the driver a look that meant: forget what you saw.
“Blythe keeps things subtle,” Carter said. “No menus, no ads. If you’re here, you’re meant to be here.”
Ananya tugged her coat tighter. “And if I’m not meant to be here?”
“Then you’ll know when the door doesn’t open.” He pressed the buzzer. A camera lens winked from above, humming like a throat clearing. The lock clicked.
Inside, the warehouse was warm, humid with too many bodies in too little space. The air smelled of polish and money, the faint perfume of old wood mingling with champagne. Canvases lined the walls, discreetly lit—landscapes, portraits, abstracts. None bore labels. The buyers knew, or pretended to know. Men in suits, women in silk, the occasional young dealer hovering like a jackal waiting for scraps. In the corner, a string quartet played something stately enough to soothe consciences.
Owen Blythe himself was a presence before he was a man—tall, silver-haired, his suit the colour of ash, his voice as smooth as the champagne he poured. He greeted Carter with the indifference owed to lawmen whose warrants never reached this address. “Detective,” he said. “And you’ve brought a student. How democratic.”
“Mr. Blythe,” Carter said evenly. “We’re looking into the murder of Dr. Richard Hall. A painting has gone missing.”
Blythe tilted his glass. “Paintings are always missing. That’s why they’re interesting.” His gaze slid to Ananya. “What river did you swim from, Miss…?”
“Mehta,” she said, steadier than she felt. “South London, not the Ganges. But I’ve seen the painting you’re hiding.”
His laughter was a polite cough. “Ah, the arrogance of youth. To assume that because you saw a shadow, you know the body.” He waved at the walls. “Look around. Which one would you say I stole?”
The canvases were carefully chosen: harmless landscapes, mild still lifes. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw it. A small river study in the far corner, the paint cracked like sunbaked clay. In the lower margin, barely visible under varnish, was the faint echo of a spiral. Her pulse hammered. She opened her mouth to point—then Carter’s hand pressed lightly against her arm.
“Not here,” he murmured. His face betrayed nothing, but his grip was steel.
Blythe’s eyes twinkled as if he’d noticed. “The professor was a man who confused heritage with ownership,” he said. “He thought paintings should return where they began. But objects are like people—they migrate, they adapt. Do you insist on living only where your ancestors farmed, Miss Mehta? No. You cross oceans. Why deny a canvas the same liberty?”
“That canvas was stolen,” she said. “From a temple. From prayers.”
Blythe’s smile thinned. “Prayers fade. Paint endures. That’s why men kill for one and not the other.”
Carter stepped in then, his voice dry. “And do they kill in your name, Blythe?”
The collector’s eyes glittered. “Detective, the only names here are cheques.” He tipped his glass and moved away, already absorbed by another cluster of buyers.
Ananya exhaled. Her throat burned with words she hadn’t spoken. “You saw it,” she whispered. “The spiral.”
“I saw something,” Carter said. He led her to a quiet corner where a waiter refilled glasses without listening. “But pointing at it in a room like this is like pointing at blood in a slaughterhouse. Everyone sees it. No one calls it murder.”
“You believe me now,” she said.
He studied her, the skepticism that had been his armour shifting like a plate knocked loose. “I believe,” he said slowly, “that you’re seeing patterns. And that those patterns make sense. But believing in patterns isn’t proof. Proof is what goes to court, what holds when men like Blythe laugh.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Hall believed, too. And look what happened to him.”
“You think I’ll end like him.”
“I think,” Carter said, voice low, “that you’ve already stepped past the line where your safety matters to them. You’re in it now, whether or not you choose to be.”
The quartet shifted to a minor key, the music suddenly sharp, like knives. In the corner, the river painting glowed faintly, a storm waiting behind varnish. Ananya felt its pull—the way water draws the eye even in the driest desert. And for the first time, she saw a flicker in Carter’s face: not dismissal, but doubt. Doubt about his own neat theory of robbery-gone-wrong. Doubt that could turn into belief, if she could survive long enough to show him.
They left the warehouse close to midnight. Rain slicked the cobbles, turning streetlights into streaks. As the door shut behind them, Carter muttered, “If Blythe has it, we’ll never prove it by walking through the front.” He glanced at her, rain running from his lashes. “But there are other doors.”
“And you’re willing to open them?”
His silence lasted half a street. Then he said, almost to himself, “I didn’t sign up for art history. But murder’s murder.”
For the first time, she thought she saw it: not just a detective tolerating her obsession, but a man beginning to share it.
Episode 6 – Bloodlines of Betrayal
The flight to Kolkata was restless. Ananya spent the hours turning the napkin list into a map, sketching spirals in the margins of her immigration form until the ink bled through. Carter, two seats away, dozed with his chin on his chest, his coat rumpled like a man unaccustomed to sleep in transit. When they landed, the air hit them like a wet blanket—dense, salted with sweat and smoke, heavy with voices. London’s damp restraint seemed a pale rehearsal for Kolkata’s orchestra of noise.
Carter muttered, “City’s awake even when it’s asleep.”
“It doesn’t sleep,” Ananya said. “It waits.”
They drove past trams clanging through traffic, past peeling colonial facades and neon billboards. The Hooghly River shimmered under bridges like an uncoiled snake. Hall’s traced delta had led them here. His notes—smeared margins, spirals—pointed not only to paintings but to a history anchored in this soil.
Their contact was an archivist at the Asiatic Society, a lean man with spectacles forever slipping down his nose. He led them into a room lined with teak, where the fans churned air heavy with mildew and old ink. He placed a register before them—records from 1890.
Carter flipped pages, his skepticism tugged thin by the evidence. Lists of artifacts, “acquired” under duress. Paintings, statues, temple bells. Margins annotated in two hands: one official, another furtive, with the same symbols Hall had traced.
The archivist lowered his voice. “Your professor came here last year. He believed the marks were not mere scribbles but a code. A way to trace which works were removed from Bengal illegally. He said it was a confession written by those complicit. Even his own ancestor.”
Ananya looked up sharply. “Ancestor?”
The man nodded. “Richard Hall’s great-grandfather was a civil officer here in the 1890s. His name is on these lists. Some of these objects left Bengal on his watch.”
The page trembled under her hand. Hall hadn’t been chasing an abstract mystery—he had been following bloodlines, his own. His murder was not only about colonial plunder. It was about betrayal that ran through his family like a vein.
Carter exhaled slowly. “So he digs too deep into his own past, threatens to expose it, and someone decides he doesn’t live to publish.”
The archivist shut the register firmly. “There are names in those margins still powerful today. Descendants in politics, business. They inherit more than wealth—they inherit silence.”
As they stepped back into the humid street, a procession clattered by—drums, cymbals, voices chanting around a painted idol. The colours blurred against dusk. Ananya felt dizzy with the overlap: art as worship, worship as memory, memory as crime.
“Hall wasn’t just exposing theft,” she whispered. “He was exposing his own family’s guilt. That’s why he looked afraid.”
Carter’s jaw worked. “Which means if we keep pulling, we’re not just chasing paintings. We’re dragging whole families into the river.”
They spent the evening tracing addresses Hall had scribbled beside spirals. One led them to a crumbling mansion in North Kolkata, its verandah sagging, paint peeling like scabs. An old caretaker let them in reluctantly, muttering about sahibs and curses. Inside, dust lay thick on portraits—stern men in colonial uniforms, wives in lace and pearls. Hall’s great-grandfather stared from the frame, his eyes painted with the arrogance of a man certain history was his to command.
In a back room, they found crates stamped with faded shipping numbers. Inside were fragments—broken frames, scraps of canvas, idols chipped and abandoned. Ananya lifted a fragment of river painting, the pigment cracked. In the corner, unmistakable, the spiral.
The caretaker shook his head. “Every sahib who touched those paintings died bad deaths. Fever, drowning, bullets. They say the river takes back what belongs to it.”
Carter crouched, studying the fragment. “Curse or not, someone today is still cashing in on what these men took.” He looked up at Ananya. “Blythe doesn’t buy at random. Someone fed him these.”
They stepped out into night. The air buzzed with mosquitoes, incense, and traffic. Ananya held the fragment wrapped in cloth, feeling its weight shift in her hand. It was more than pigment. It was testimony.
Her phone buzzed. Another message from the unknown number: Some inherit guilt. Some inherit knives.
Her chest tightened. She looked at Carter. “They know we’re here.”
He scanned the dark street, hand brushing the weight at his side. “Then we move faster. Before the knives arrive.”
Behind them, the river glistened, swollen and black. The city’s lights danced on its surface like false stars. Ananya thought of Hall tracing spirals in the margins, chasing ghosts through archives, and realized with a shiver that they were walking the same path, step for step, toward a betrayal that had been waiting more than a century.
Episode 7 – The Venetian Auction
The Palazzo Contarini stood on the Grand Canal like a jewel that had survived too many thieves. Its windows glowed in the Venetian night, lanterns spilling fractured gold across the water. Gondolas ferried guests in evening wear, their laughter bright, rehearsed. Inside, an auction was about to begin—private, unlisted, the kind of gathering where paintings whispered their provenance only to those who paid enough to listen.
Ananya adjusted the mask on her face. It was Carnival season; anonymity was currency. The gilt edges itched, the ribbon tight against her temple. Carter, beside her, wore black half-mask and blacker expression. He looked like a man dragged unwillingly into theatre but too stubborn to walk offstage.
They had learned of the auction from a leak in Kolkata—one of Hall’s coded notes cross-referenced with a shipping manifest. “The river bends twice,” he had written, “and its reflection ends in Venice.” Blythe’s name was on the guest list. So was Mina Talwar’s, the restorer who could make stolen art wear new skin. If the missing painting was to surface anywhere, it would be here.
The ballroom was a kaleidoscope of velvet and murmurs. Canvases stood veiled in shadow until the auctioneer, a man with a silver gavel and a voice like oiled wood, unveiled them one by one. A Botticelli sketch. A Mughal miniature. A Coptic icon. Prices climbed in whispers, nods, the flick of fingers holding wine.
And then: the river painting.
The cloth fell back and there it was—larger than Ananya remembered, its storm sky almost alive, brushstrokes vibrating under the chandeliers. The spiral sat at the corner, faint under a sheen of fresh varnish, but present. Her breath caught, pulse rising like the river itself.
Carter’s hand brushed hers lightly, grounding her. “Steady,” he murmured through his mask.
The bidding began at half a million euros. Numbers jumped like sparks. Blythe lifted a finger without effort, as though stretching after dinner. Across the room, a man in a crimson mask countered. Mina Talwar spoke quietly to another buyer, her eyes flicking toward Ananya just once, recognition sparking.
The price surged past a million. The crimson mask bidder grew agitated, voice rising. Blythe remained calm, glass in hand. Then someone fired a shot.
Chaos burst. Guests screamed, dove under tables, masks skewed. The painting wobbled on its easel as guards rushed in. Carter shoved Ananya down behind a marble balustrade. Another shot cracked, splintering plaster. The crimson-mask man collapsed, blood soaking his white cuff.
“Stay down!” Carter hissed, drawing his gun.
Through the storm of noise, Ananya’s eyes fixed on the canvas. Two men in black lifted it from the easel with terrifying precision. They moved toward a side door while everyone else fled toward the main hall.
“No,” she whispered. “They’re taking it.”
Before Carter could stop her, she bolted. Adrenaline drowned hesitation. She wove between overturned chairs, seized the edge of the curtain, and caught one thief’s arm. The painting lurched sideways, nearly tearing from its stretcher. Up close, she saw it again—the spiral, dark as dried blood under varnish.
The thief snarled in Italian, shoving her hard. She hit the floor, air leaving her lungs. Carter was there a second later, firing a warning shot that froze the room. One thief dropped the canvas and ran. The other dragged it through the side door, disappearing into shadow.
Ananya struggled up, clutching her ribs. “They’ve taken it—”
Carter pulled her toward the exit, jaw tight. “And we’ll live long enough to follow. Move.”
Outside, the Grand Canal churned with confusion—boats ramming, voices shouting in a dozen languages. The stolen painting vanished into the night, swallowed by water and darkness.
They escaped through a narrow calle, the echo of gunshots still in their ears. Carter leaned against a wall, chest heaving. “This isn’t an auction anymore,” he said. “It’s a battlefield.”
Ananya pressed her hand to her side where the fall had bruised her. “We were so close. I touched it.”
“And it almost killed you.”
She met his eyes through the half-mask. “That painting isn’t just paint. It’s speaking. And if it keeps vanishing, more people will die trying to silence it.”
He said nothing, but she saw it in his expression: the doubt that had lingered since London was gone. Now he believed.
From the canal, faint and mocking, a gondolier’s song floated under the moonlight, as if the city were laughing at their chase.
Episode 8 – The Curse of the Brushstrokes
The Palazzo’s chaos still echoed in Ananya’s bones as dawn filtered through Venetian fog. She and Carter holed up in a pensione off Cannaregio, its walls thin enough that every boat’s horn seemed to rattle the plaster. Neither had slept. Carter cleaned the bruise along her ribs with quiet precision, the silence broken only by her hiss of pain and his muttered, “You’re lucky he shoved, not stabbed.”
But Ananya’s mind wasn’t on her injury. It was on the few seconds she had touched the painting. The spiral at the corner had been darker up close, almost layered—as if painted, then repainted. Not ornament. Instruction.
She spread sketches across the rickety table—copies of spirals from Hall’s notes, the fragment in Kolkata, the catalogue. “Look,” she whispered, pencil racing. “It isn’t random. Each spiral sits at a bend. A curl. Always at the corner of water.” She circled them. “Together, they’re not symbols. They’re coordinates.”
Carter leaned over, skeptical but unwilling to interrupt.
She connected the marks. The curves formed not abstract shapes but the outline of a delta. The Ganga’s mouth, splayed like fingers. “Hall wasn’t just tracing theft,” she said. “He was tracing a map hidden inside the brushstrokes.”
“Hidden by who?” Carter asked.
“Maybe the artist himself. Maybe a priest who knew it was stolen. Maybe even Hall’s ancestor, leaving guilt disguised as geometry.” Her hands shook with the enormity of it. “But it means the painting isn’t just evidence—it’s a guide. To where the rest of the stolen artifacts were buried.”
He sat back, exhaling. “You realise what you’re saying? That canvas is a treasure map in oils. No wonder people are dying for it.”
A knock rattled the door. Both froze. Carter’s hand went to his gun. He opened it a fraction—only to find Mina Talwar standing there, drenched from the fog, her dark eyes sharp.
“You’re fools,” she said, slipping inside. “Do you know what you’ve started?”
Ananya bristled. “You were at the auction. You helped them varnish it, hide the spiral.”
Mina’s mouth curved. “I tried to protect it. Do you think men like Blythe understand? They want only price, not meaning. That painting has been speaking for a hundred years and no one listens. Except your professor. And look at him now.”
She dropped a folded photograph on the table. Grainy, black-and-white—men in colonial uniforms carrying crates onto a steamer. In the corner, the river painting leaned against a box. The spiral was clear, even then. “Hall found this in archives I once guarded. He told me it meant the painting was cursed. That everyone who tried to silence it ended in blood.”
Ananya touched the photograph, cold against her fingers. “Curse or not, it’s pointing somewhere. If we can follow—”
Mina cut her off. “Follow it, and you’ll join the bodies. You think you deciphered something new? Hall thought so too. So did three others before him. Each ended dead, drowned or shot. The brushstrokes aren’t guiding you—they’re marking graves.”
Carter’s jaw tightened. “Then why bring this to us?”
“Because the men who stole it last night are not collectors,” Mina said. “They’re hunters. If they find where it leads, they’ll strip the riverbed clean. You can’t stop them with your notebooks and police reports. You’d have to burn it, erase it forever.”
Ananya’s throat constricted. “But then the truth—”
“—is gone with the fire,” Mina finished. “Yes. And maybe that is mercy.”
She left as swiftly as she’d entered, her footsteps fading into fog.
Carter locked the door, muttering, “Mercy’s a word thieves use when they want to keep their cut.”
But Ananya could not stop staring at the sketch-map. The spirals no longer looked like symbols of direction—they looked like whirlpools, pulling her deeper. Each mark was not just a coordinate but a warning. Every person who had traced the lines had been swallowed.
Her phone buzzed again. The unknown number: You’ve seen the curse now. Step away before it chooses you.
She dropped the phone on the table, heart pounding. For the first time, she wondered if the brushstrokes weren’t just memory but intent. A curse written in pigment, tightening with every new reader.
Carter touched her shoulder. “Ananya. Look at me.” His voice was steadier than she’d ever heard it. “Curse or no curse, this isn’t finished. If that painting maps a burial ground, we can’t leave it to men like Blythe. We see it through.”
She met his eyes. The doubt that had once defined him was gone. But in its place was something more dangerous—conviction.
Outside, Venice’s bells tolled noon. The fog parted briefly, revealing the wide bend of the canal. Water curving, spiraling, like paint laid centuries ago. Ananya shivered. The curse wasn’t waiting. It had already begun.
Episode 9 – Return to the River
The Hooghly stretched before them like a sheet of tarnished bronze, wide and patient beneath the humid Bengal sky. Ferries roared across its surface, bells clanging, while smaller boats drifted like stubborn punctuation marks in a text too long. The river smelled of silt, incense, and something older—like history refusing to die.
Ananya stood at the bank near Chandernagore, sketch-map in hand, Carter beside her. The spirals they’d traced across Hall’s notes and the painting’s brushstrokes converged here. It begins where the water bends. The river curved in a wide crescent, trees leaning toward the current as though in conspiracy.
“This is it,” she murmured. “The coordinates match. The temple that was looted stood near this bend.”
Carter squinted at the crumbling structure ahead—stone columns strangled by roots, steps sinking into waterlogged mud. “Looks more like a ruin than a revelation.”
But when they walked closer, the ruin breathed. Carvings of deities, worn but defiant, stared from moss-coated walls. The sanctum was empty, stripped bare long ago. Yet faint pigment clung to the stone—blues and reds echoing the painting’s storm sky.
Ananya touched the wall, feeling the chill seep into her fingers. “This is where it was taken. Hall’s ancestor stood here. Maybe even ordered it.”
They explored the interior, torches throwing trembling shadows. In the collapsed hall they found fragments: shards of idols, splinters of frames. Ananya lifted one—river reeds sketched in oil, edges burned. At the corner, half a spiral survived.
“Everywhere the same mark,” Carter muttered. “It’s like a man signing his crime over and over.”
“Or a man confessing,” she countered.
A rustle broke the silence. Both spun, Carter’s hand on his gun. A figure stepped into the torchlight—frail, wiry, wrapped in a white dhoti. His eyes, clouded but alert, studied them.
“You are not the first to come,” he said in Bengali. Ananya translated quickly. “Others came with machines, with shovels. They searched the riverbank. Some never returned.”
The old man led them outside to a half-buried stone slab near the bend. He tapped it with his stick. “Here is where the priests hid what they could before the soldiers came. They believed the river would guard it. But the sahib took the painting. He marked it so it would call the guilty back.”
Ananya’s skin prickled. “Marked it with spirals.”
The man nodded. “Each who carried it met the river again. Fever, drowning, blade. The river waits. Always.”
Carter shifted uneasily. “You’re saying it’s cursed.”
The man’s gaze lingered on him, unreadable. “Call it curse. Call it justice. The river does not care for names.” He turned and disappeared into the trees as suddenly as he had come.
They stood in silence. The air was heavy, cicadas buzzing like a thousand clocks.
Ananya crouched by the slab, brushing away dirt. Symbols were carved into the stone—spirals, hooks, waves—the same code hidden in the painting. She traced them with her finger, breath shallow. It wasn’t only art. It was a ledger. Each symbol pointed to a cache of stolen artifacts buried along the river.
Carter knelt beside her. “If we uncover this, it’s dynamite. It won’t just topple collectors. It’ll drag families, governments, whole institutions into the water.”
“That’s why Hall died,” she whispered. “He wanted to bring it out. And someone silenced him.”
Thunder rolled across the sky, sudden and deep. The river darkened, wind lifting its surface into small, violent peaks. Carter touched her arm. “Storm’s coming. We can’t stay.”
They hurried back toward the village, the first drops pelting hard as stones. Behind them, lightning flashed across the bend, illuminating the slab, the temple, the river rising.
Ananya looked back once, rain stinging her eyes. She thought of Hall, of Mina’s warning, of Blythe’s smile. The painting wasn’t just a map. It was a curse written in colour, dragging everyone back to this river bend—one by one—until the ledger was complete.
Her phone buzzed in her soaked pocket. The unknown number again: The river doesn’t forgive. Neither will we.
Carter read the message over her shoulder. His jaw tightened. “They know we’re here. We’ve run out of time.”
The storm broke in earnest, drowning their words. The river roared, as though eager to claim the next names on its list.
Episode 10 – The Final Stroke
The storm cracked open the night. Rain hammered the Hooghly as if the sky itself wanted to erase the ledger carved into the riverbank. Ananya and Carter took shelter beneath the skeletal roof of the ruined temple, water dripping through fractures in the stone. Their phones buzzed with no signal; their breaths came loud in the storm’s chorus. Somewhere in the darkness, they could hear the churn of a motorboat against the current.
“They’re coming,” Carter said grimly, checking his weapon. “Not Blythe’s kind of party guests. Hired men.”
Ananya’s heart pounded, but her eyes kept returning to the slab half-buried outside, the spirals gleaming with rain. The marks seemed alive, coiling and uncoiling in the torchlight. The map wasn’t meant for preservation—it was bait, drawing greed back to the river again and again.
The first figures emerged from the downpour: silhouettes with flashlights slicing the rain. At their center walked a man in a black coat, hood pushed back, face unmistakable even in the stormlight. Max Rhodes.
Ananya’s throat tightened. Hall’s assistant. The missing student. The boy with access to storerooms and catalogues.
“You,” she breathed.
Rhodes smiled, rain glistening on his skin. “You should have stayed in London, Ananya. You and your detective here. Hall was brilliant, but he was also weak. He thought exposing his family’s sins would redeem him. I gave him a chance to share in something greater. He refused. So now he’s part of the river’s ledger.”
“You killed him,” Carter said, gun steady.
Rhodes shrugged. “I silenced him. For history’s sake. The painting belongs not in dusty museums but in the hands of those who understand its value. Do you think I care about curses? Every curse is just a story told by the robbed to shame the thief.”
Ananya stepped forward, the rain plastering her hair to her face. “No. Every spiral was a confession. You’ve turned it into profit.”
Rhodes’s smile thinned. “Confession, profit—same river, different bend.” He signaled his men. Two advanced with rifles.
Carter fired first. Thunder swallowed the shot. One man dropped. The others fanned out, gunfire stitching the temple walls. Ananya ducked behind the slab, shards of stone flying. She pressed her palm against the spirals, whispering to herself, It begins where the water bends.
A crack split the air—not thunder, but the boat’s engine revving. Two more men dragged a tarpaulin from the deck. Beneath it, shielded by plastic, was the painting. The river scene glowed even in the storm, its storm sky mirroring the one above them.
Ananya’s breath hitched. The spiral at its corner shimmered in rain and torchlight, as though pulsing. She realized then: it wasn’t just coordinates. It was a warning etched forever. A curse painted into pigment so that anyone who stole it would carry the river with them until it claimed them.
“Ananya!” Carter shouted. He was pinned behind a fallen column, bullets ricocheting.
She crawled through mud, heart hammering. Rhodes bent over the canvas, shielding it. “With this,” he shouted above the storm, “I’ll rewrite ownership! Do you know what men will pay to control history?”
She seized a broken idol from the ground, its stone face eroded but weight still deadly. With all her strength, she hurled it. The idol struck the easel. The painting toppled forward, sliding across the wet earth toward the river.
“No!” Rhodes lunged, hands clutching the canvas as the current seized it.
Ananya scrambled to the edge. She saw his face illuminated by lightning—desperate, furious—as the water surged higher. The painting twisted in his grip, spirals dark against the storm. Then the river yanked, pulling both canvas and man into its black flood. His scream cut short.
The current swallowed them. The spiral vanished beneath waves.
Silence fell, broken only by the storm’s ragged breath. The remaining men scattered into the dark, their courage gone with their leader.
Carter staggered to her side, drenched and panting. “You just—” He stared at the water. “You let it take him.”
She was shaking. “No. The painting chose. The river took what was already written.”
They stood there until dawn crept grey across the sky. The river had calmed, deceptively innocent, as if nothing had happened. No painting. No Rhodes. Only the slab and its spirals, still waiting.
Carter broke the silence. “You realise we’ll have no proof. No canvas to hold up in court. Just fragments, rumours.”
Ananya nodded slowly. “Maybe that’s the point. Some truths aren’t meant for courts. They belong to the river.”
He looked at her, the lines of his face softened by exhaustion. “And you? You’re still alive. That counts for something.”
She glanced once more at the slab, the spirals glistening faintly. The river had written its final stroke. Hall’s death, the thefts, the greed—it had all circled back here. She felt both emptied and bound, as though the curse had brushed her but spared her, for now.
As they walked away from the ruins, the river whispered against the banks. A sound like brushes against canvas, like history painting itself again.
End
