I picked at my meal, making no more response to the conversations around me than would a stone statue. Afterwards we listened to the ship's string quartet render a competent selection of Beethoven, and took a turn around the decks, Holmes chatting, me unresponsive. Eventually we took ourselves to bed, for another night's broken sleep.

The next morning the mirror showed a woman with stains beneath her eyes. Holmes had already risen, and I dressed slowly, drank several cups of strong coffee, and took a book up onto the sun-drenched deck. The pages, however, made no more sense than the conversations of the night before, and eventually I merely sat, staring at the almost imperceptible horizon of sky and sea.

After some time I became aware that Holmes had settled into the adjoining chair. My gaze came reluctantly back from the distance and settled onto the bit of brightness he held in his hand. It was, I decided, the silken scarf he had purchased in a bazaar on the first leg of our voyage out from England, a garish item perhaps useful for one of his gipsy disguises. He held it in his hands as if its bright dye bore a hidden message; it was his focussed concentration that finally caught my attention.

“What is that, Holmes?”

“The length of silk we bought in Aden. I thought to use it as an aide-mémoire, to bring back the details of that curious afternoon. The whole affair puzzles me still.”

Recalling the events of Aden was something of a wrench, since so much had taken place in the intervening months—weeks in India tracking down a missing spy and jousting with a mad maharaja, followed by the better part of a month in Japan with all the complexity of events there, interspersed by the dream-plagued weeks at sea. Granted, we had nearly been killed in the Aden bazaar by a balcony falling on our heads, but near-death experiences were no rarity in my life with Holmes. I had in the end dismissed it as a curious series of events that might have had tragic consequences, and fortunately had not. Clearly, Holmes was not of the same mind.

“It had to have been an accident, Holmes,” I objected. “The balcony fell because the bolts were old, not because someone tried to pull it down on our heads.”

“So I tell myself.”

“But yourself will not listen.”

“A lifetime's habit of self-preservation leaves one disinclined to accept the idea of coincidence.”

“Holmes, one event does not a coincidence make.”

“But two oddities catch at the mind.”

“Two?”

“The fallen balcony, and the ship's passenger who enquired about us, then disembarked. In Aden.” He raised an eyebrow at me to underscore the importance of that last.