The case had started slowly, but was now progressing somewhat, despite the distances it involved in both time and place. While Russell had been immersed with her solicitor and business affairs, he had been occupied with things far more demanding than Paganini sheet music.

Tuesday morning, their first in San Francisco, he had used the time while she was busy with Henry Norbert to get the lay of the land, assembling maps and creating the initial contacts among the local vendors of newspapers and flowers, the shoe-shine boys, the local policemen, and the all-important street-sweepers: his eyes on the world.

He had also succumbed to a growing urge and laid out the beginnings for a line of enquiry into some unfinished business. This had begun with a trip to the P. & O. Line's offices. With considerable difficulty, he had finally determined that the ship on which he and Russell had sailed to Bombay in January, the Marguerite, was currently on its way back across the Mediterranean and due to dock in Marseilles late on Saturday. Immediately he left the steamship offices, he had sent a telegram home to Sussex, asking Mrs Hudson to find the whereabouts of his old comrade-in-arms, Dr Watson. After a bit of thought, he had also sent one to his brother, Mycroft, requesting that he find out if anyone had been enquiring in early January about the absence, and whereabouts, of one Sherlock Holmes.

That damnable incident in Aden bothered him mightily. He wanted to be quite certain that the falling balcony was just an accident.

He still was not sure what had driven him to appeal to those two for assistance—an ill Mycroft and an arthritic Watson. No doubt it was at least in part due to the unexpected and highly disconcerting absence of his partner-wife's usual competence; in her mental absence, he had turned to her predecessor.

In any case, turned to Watson and Mycroft he had; there was little point in agonising over the why of it.

With past events cared for as best he could, he turned to present concerns, and cast out for information regarding Russell's city, family, and history. With a visit to the offices of the Chronicle, he'd come up with an obituary for the Russell family—Charles (age 46, born in Boston), wife Judith (age 39, from London), son Levi (age 9), survived by daughter Mary (age 14)—and the article about the crash, from which he gleaned a description of the actual location.