Theirs was a symbiotic relationship of two species, different yet alike, that might well have lingered into old age, but for a car going off a cliff, some miles south of San Francisco.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Holmes reached out to refill Mr Long's glass. The story had taken nearly an hour in the telling, and now our guest sat forward with his drink clasped in his hands.

“That much I know, for a certainty. And it was necessary to tell you in detail so that you might understand the links between our families. It began with the rescue of a woman, but it was not simply a matter of rewarding a service.”

“I do see that,” I told him.

“And as you were young when you knew my parents, I did not think that you would have understood the ways in which they were something other than mere servants. I think your mother would not have spent hours discussing Chinese philosophy with her gardener, were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And your father would not have felt so free to lend him books, and later talk about them, were the things between them not more solid than a job and a payment.”

“I am grateful to you. I . . . I don't remember a lot about my parents.”

“That would be true of any child who is not given the opportunity to know his or her parents as an adult.” The way he said this reminded me that he, too, had lost his mother and father—twice over, in fact.

“As I said,” he continued, “it is necessary to perceive the strength of the links between them in order to make sense of what happened in 1906. Although that, I fear, is precisely where my tale falls into thin ground.

“You may have been too young to remember, but the catastrophe of those first days after the earthquake was unimaginable. Block after block of buildings collapsed, often on top of those trying to rescue their belongings. Men and women wandered the streets, driven mad by shock or simply with no place to go, no possessions to guard. People would be trapped under rubble, and the fire would reach them before the rescuers could—more than one was shot, through mercy, to save them from burning alive. The police feared riot and disorder so much, it was ordered that any person caught looting would be shot on sight—with no suggestion as to how the soldier or policeman might tell if the person in his sights was a looter or a rightful home-owner. It was an absolute hell of irrational behaviour against a back-drop of flames and shattered brickwork.