“The rest of the day I spent with the cops. They've got nothing at all on your Chinese friend. You knew his parents were found murdered at that same address you gave me? It's still on the books, more or less—not exactly near the top of the pile. They did question him, but he said he was at school—training as a doctor, back in Chicago—and as soon as they got confirmation of that, he was cleared. The only funny thing in the file was, someone wondered how two Chinese servants could afford to buy a three-storey building in Chinatown. There wasn't a follow-up to that, probably decided the old folks ran an opium den on the side or something. Might be something to look into.”

“There's nothing there,” Holmes reassured him. “What about the others?”

Hammett's fork and knife paused while he studied the older man, then he shrugged. “If you say so. Auberon's name is Howard, he's got one charge of running a card game back when he was a teenager, but nothing since then.”

“Wait a minute, he must be in his late forties now. I thought all the records burnt in 1906?”

“Police records were saved, though they're in a hell of a mess. It was the City Hall stuff that went—births, property rights, you name it. If you own a house, you might have God's own time proving it, but an ancient arrest for drunkenness will follow along like a stink on your shoe. Anyway, talk is that your boy on the desk doesn't run anything too organised, but like any desk man, he can get you anything from a bottle to a companion, for the right bill.”

Auberon, then, was about as clean as could be expected.

“And as for your wife's old man, he was a positive paragon of virtue. He came from money, but then you'd know that. Picked up once when some of the boys he was with had a little too much to drink, broke some windows, that kind of thing. He spent the night in the jug, paid for the repairs, stayed clean after, at least in San Francisco.”

“When would this have been?”

“Oh, let's see. Yeah, here it is, 1891.”

Charles Russell would have been twenty-three years old, and fresh out of university; four years later he'd gone to Europe, there to meet and marry Judith Klein. “Did you get the names of his companions in drunkenness?”

By way of answer, Hammett reached for his note-book, tore out a page, and slid it across to Holmes:

Thomas Octavio Hodges (San Francisco)
Martin Sullivan (San Francisco)
Robert Greenfield (New York)
Laurence Goldberg (New York)
Calvin Francis O'Malley (San Francisco)

Holmes studied the names: The only one he might identify was that of Robert Greenfield, who could be the father of Russell's childhood friend Flo. “You know any of these men?”