When you move into a new place, don’t you always wonder who lived there before you? Often, it can be difficult to figure out, if the place were carefully cleared out and cleaned up, maybe repainted, washed, even new carpet. (Though nobody carpets their houses here; not the nailed down kind of carpet, anyway.)

We moved into the bigger apartment a month ago, and the signs we saw of the previous occupants were limited. Some curtains. A few shelves. A “First 1” flat-screen TV, a brand I’ve never heard of. A few stickers on the refrigerator. One for getting KFC home-delivered — KFC is very big here. Another was the phone numbers for a local minimart which apparently will deliver water bottles. And the third was an “I (heart) Abu Dhabi” sticker.

Not much to go on.

Then, about the second day in, after moving the bed away from a position against the wall, I opened one of the drawers built into the bed frame … the drawer on the side of the bed that had been flush against the wall.

And I found some quite telling evidence of a previous occupant. Though whether this was the previous person or someone else …

It was one of those double-take moments. “I don’t remember sticking any shoes in that drawer. And, hey, those aren’t shoes either of us own. What the …”

Three pairs of women’s shoes (as seen above) in the drawer. As well as one baby booty.

I don’t know much about women’s shoes except that women usually are quite particular about them. And once Leah got a look at the three pairs, she was convinced someone left them behind by accident/oversight.

What struck me first was how tiny they are. Compare the shoes to the booty. Maybe twice as big? That’s not a big foot. Though Leah says they are just small, not tiny, as I insist. “Boots tend to look like a size smaller than they are,” which doesn’t sound right to me, but what the heck.

What do they tell us? The shoes were Size 37 European.

OK, here is Inspector Leah at work.

“That’s about Size 6 American, but it doesn’t mean the woman was from the continent. She could have been British and she bought the shoes here. The shoes here are European sizes, not British or American. But I doubt she was American because Americans don’t wear shoes like that. She wasn’t Indian or an Arab; they wouldn’t wear those, either.

“I believe they are a woman’s shoes, not a girl’s, because of the baby booty. This place isn’t big enough for a woman, a child and a baby. So those shoes must be the woman’s.

“The pair on the left are slip-on sandals for everyday use. Not dressy but not run-down. The boots in the middle are Caterpillar brand; like the company that makes tractors. Caterpillar and Marlboro brand shoes and apparel over here; it’s weird. Maybe the woman went hiking from time to time, though they’re not particularly sturdy. My guess is she wore them whenever she went back to where she lived.

“The pair on the right are Adidas sneakers. You run in them. Athletic shoes.

“You could survive here with just those three pairs of shoes. Unless she went to really fancy restaurants, the sandals are perfectly acceptable with dresses or pants. You can wear the boots with jeans, and the sneakers for exercise.

“They are not inexpensive. Mid-range. But leaving them behind had to be an accident, a pure accident. It was like a hotel, when you think you’ve checked everywhere and you haven’t. So she got to wherever she was going and said, ‘Damn, where are my shoes?’ Those are hard to replace, three pairs like that; broken in and comfortable.

“Because of the baby sock, it probably was a woman in her 20s or 30s, maybe here with a husband, and if I was going to guess, I bet she moved out to get a bigger place because rents have been coming down.”

Anyway, though, we never saw any Western babies during our year living just around the corner … and I wonder if the shoes might have been left by the person-before-last. She left them in the drawer, and maybe the next tenant pushed the bed against the wall, first thing, and never even looked in that drawer because it was inaccessible.

Another bit of evidence here is not as personal but perhaps telling — three bits of curtains, all cut very badly. As if someone laid them on the floor and cut them by hand without any markings. Because the bottoms of the three curtains are uneven — in the bedroom, the kitchen, the living room. “That’s something a guy in a hurry would do,” Leah said. “A woman might have cut them that badly, but she would have fixed them once she got them up and saw how bad they look.”

And she also sees a guy’s handiwork in the four shelves bolted into the wall, two by the flat-screen TV (also left by a predecessor) and over by the entry way.

Anyway, Leah dropped the shoes off at St. Andrew’s church, which has a thrift store, on Christmas Eve. Presumably, somebody is wearing those handy little shoes, and paid far less than did the original owner, who sat in this same room with her little child maybe two months ago. Or maybe two years ago, before the guy moved in and made a hash of the curtains and ordered KFC to be home-delivered all the time.

It’s fun to try to figure it out. I suppose we could ask Mr. Mohammed, the caretaker. But that wouldn’t be as fun. Plus, his English is really shaky, and our Urdu is worse.