“You are kind. However, when you turned to face me, it appeared as if you were assuming a position of the martial arts.”

“Yes, I have some training.”

“Interesting. And you, sir?”

“A discipline called baritsu. It's Japanese, a style of—”

“I am familiar with it, although I would have thought that few Westerners were. Thank you, it was merely a point of curiosity.”

“Sir,” Holmes said, with an air of drawing the meeting to order. “You have no doubt spent considerable time on the question of your foster parents' murder.”

“Oh yes, I have. And cast out a hundred lines of enquiry, with no result.”

“Yet you have never formulated a theory as to their deaths?” Holmes put it more as an accusation than a statement, and eyed him over the top of his glass.

The bookseller smiled. “I did not say that.”

“Aha!”

“Yes. However, until this good lady appeared in my store this afternoon, there seemed little I could do about it.”

“Wait, are you saying that I know anything about their deaths?” God, not another gap in my mind! Or was he saying—no, surely he couldn't think that I, a fifteen-year-old girl, would have come to Chinatown with a gun to do away with the family servants. To say nothing of the fact that in February of 1915, I'd been in England, on the verge of meeting Sherlock Holmes.

“No, of course not. But I have come to wonder if the actions of your parents might not have, unwittingly and posthumously, contributed to the deaths of my own.”

Before I could summon speech from my dropped jaw, a rap at the door indicated the arrival of our meal. The distribution of linen and plates suspended conversation for a time, and the momentum of the actions and the odours from beneath the silver lids took us halfway through the meal. But eventually, I laid down my fork and said to the little man opposite me, “I think you need to explain how the Russell family brought killers to your door.”

“It is a complex puzzle,” he began, “and I do not have all of its parts. But I will fasten together the pieces that I have, and you can tell me what design you see.

“The earthquake was the centre, April the eighteenth, 1906. But the story of our two families had its beginnings a number of years before that. And, I believe, its endings.”

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven