Friday morning had been spent digging through mountains of old newspapers, at the Chronicle building, City Hall, and the public library. Now in his possession were Photostat copies of the pages that had been burnt in the morning room fireplace: The bold, heavily leaded “URNS!!” had indeed been a headline about the city burning, from a newspaper outside the area of damage whose presses were still functioning. Nothing in it seemed to explain its presence among the papers burnt, other than its possible value as a souvenir, for the page was primarily concerned with names of the missing, availability of shelter, news about looting, and the expected recovery of the fire chief (who, Holmes had later read, in the end died of injuries caused by his house falling in on him). The other piece of burnt newsprint, smaller than the first to begin with, was from the following Monday, long enough after the original disaster and the cessation of the fire that urgent news was being supplemented by human-interest stories. Prominent among those was the tale of a newlywed couple who had been separated in the hours after the quake and driven apart further by the track of the fire. Each had spent days convinced that the other was dead, until a chance encounter with a mutual friend had led the husband to his wife. On the obverse were several small articles no more than a paragraph or two long: the theft of a number of Army tents from Golden Gate Park; an infant rescued from wreckage; a dog gone mad with grief; the burnt body of a policeman amid the charred ruin of a house; and the departure from San Francisco of the great tenor Caruso. Holmes set aside the Photostats, for further consideration.

Later in the day he'd tracked down that other source of inside knowledge into a neighbourhood, the Pacific Heights milkman of 1912. He'd been forced to hare across town twice in the process, wasting huge blocks of time, and all for nothing. The man might as well have been deaf and blind for all he knew about the Russells, or anyone else for that matter. Now, if Holmes could tell him of any unusual standing orders the family habitually placed, he might remember. . . .

It happened in every investigation, hours wasted. Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite tediousness, he reminded himself, and scraped out his cold pipe into the motor's ash-tray, filling the bowl anew.

Friday had also seen the utter collapse of Russell, knocked flat by the news of Dr Ginzberg's death. All in all, not a good day, Friday.

But not without its bright points. Mrs Hudson's answer, typically long-winded, had finally come into his hands during one of his cross-town trips on Friday: