“Not a thing. Looks like she's cutting her losses and I'll end up nailing the envelope onto the front of the building like I told her. But like I said, my wife's taken the kid off to Santa Cruz for a couple of days with friends. I'm at your service.”

“What did your police detective have to say about the Ginzberg death?”

“A fat lot of nothing. Not even any prints on the statue that bashed her. Some kind of bird carving it was, an owl maybe, from Rhodes or Crete or something in the Mediterranean. Seems she collected bird sculptures from all over.”

“If you haven't exhausted your friends' patience there, how would you feel about having the police lab look at a set of prints?”

“From where?”

“I found them on an otherwise pristine toilet-pull in the house. They appear to belong to a woman—ours probably has no record, but just in case.”

“Okay.”

“Then later, why don't you come by the house? I've arranged something that might interest you.”

“Yeah? What's that?” Hammett's plate arrived and he picked up his utensils.

“Oh, I suppose you might call him a Chinese fortune-teller.” Hammett shot him a dubious glance before bending to his food. “There's also this,” Holmes added, and slid Mycroft's telegram across the table.

The thin man read it carefully, then asked, “What are these two stones he's lost?”

“Stones? Ah, that's a British weight measurement; fourteen pounds is a stone. My brother's doctors have him on a slimming diet.”

“Got you. You think that's your gal he's found, that she's followed you all the way here?”

“It would fit. She lives in Paris, sees mention of my name in the Saturday Times, scrambles desperately for a means of getting to Egypt ahead of our boat—the weather was vile, which added to her difficulties. She finds one on Monday for a considerable price and boards the ship in Port Said. While we're sailing down the Suez Canal and Dead Sea, she keeps mostly to her cabin while finding as much about us as she can. Then we get to Aden, when she gets off—possibly having arranged with an associate to meet her there and set up a booby-trap. The bazaar isn't that large, so that if we were going to disembark for the afternoon, there was a good chance we'd walk past her trap eventually. I have a friend there I can ask to find out, for a fee.”

“But she missed.”

“If it was an attempt in the first place, and not just a shaky balcony,” Holmes added, to be fair.

“As you say,” Hammett noted. “But by that time, she knew you were headed to San Francisco. So while you and your wife were in India, she came on here.”

“Where she broke into the house, found some papers and burnt them, and lay in wait for our arrival. Which, again, seems to have made it into the papers.”