I wanted to talk to her, wanted in fact to grab her hard and demand what had set her on our heels so resolutely, but then I saw her glance at him, and in that one glance, it all became clear.

Even after all these years, and despite the self-control that was keeping her spine straight and her face untroubled, her weakness was the man beside her. For a brief instant, she looked afraid—not for herself, but for him.

She was not his sister. She might have been his willing slave.

My eyes went to him, as if mere appearance could explain such a lifetime of devotion: Robert Greenfield, my father's comrade-in-youth, who had inspired mistrust in my mother and open animosity in his ex-wife. An ordinary enough figure, other than the scarring on his face, and even that was hardly fearsome.

Standing at the front of the motor, Greenfield's curses only increased in volume, until one of the men nearby drew a length of filthy rag from about his person and held it up enquiringly in front of Dr Ming. Dr Ming deferred to Holmes, who turned to look at me, asking with his eyebrows if I cared to speak with the man before the police arrived.

Greenfield followed the sequence of glances until it ended up with me, at which point his curses strangled in his throat. “Jesus—Charlie?” he choked out, then looked at me more comprehensively. If anything, his face went whiter, and the internal murmur of something, there was something behind the—grew loud and louder in my ears.

“You . . . You must be the daughter. Mary. Christ, that hair, those glasses . . . I thought—” He caught himself up short, and tried hard to summon a crooked grin. “Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like your old man?”

“Before you killed him, you mean?”

The grin slipped for an instant before he retrieved it to buoy his protests, but I was not listening to his words. Instead, I was taken up with his face and the voice itself.

The burn that affected about half his facial skin had erased one eyebrow and part of the other, but had not gone deep enough to reach the muscles and tendons. Below the shiny scar tissue the movement was normal enough, albeit somewhat stiff on the left side.

And the voice—I knew that voice, slightly hoarse and with the flat Boston accent that my father had possessed in a much softer degree. The voice reached in and pulled out the hidden something, the room in my memory house that I had known was there, the key I had obediently set aside so thoroughly that I did not even see it.

“You said, ‘Don't be afraid, little girl,'” I told him. I had not meant to speak aloud, but the man blinked, so clearly I had.

“What?” he said.