I felt Holmes' sharp gaze on me, but I did not look at him. He caught up his own hat and stick to accompany our guest out, so I was not surprised when he did not return for the better part of an hour, approximately the time it would take to make a slow and thoughtful foot trip back from Chinatown.

When he came in, he found me where he had left me, curled on the sofa with the mezuzah in my hand. When he had shed his outer garments at the door, he came and sat down beside me, taking my hand—not, as I thought at first, in a gesture of affection, but in order to prise my fingers away from the object. The palm of my hand was dented red with the shape of it, my fingers stiff. He examined it curiously before laying it on the low table before the sofa, then reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief.

I blew my nose noisily and drew an uneven breath. “I never had a chance to say good-bye to them. Not before they died, not even at their funerals, since they had to be buried before I got out of hospital. Dr Ginzberg took me to their grave site, but I was so full of drugs at the time, it made no impression on me.

“It's the . . . unfinished quality of their deaths that is hard to set aside.”

“Yes.” There was an odd intonation to the monosyllable, almost as if he had asked a question: Yes, and . . . ?

“What do you mean, ‘yes'?”

His grey eyes, inches away, drilled into mine, his expression—his entire body—radiating an intensity I could not understand. He did not answer, just waited.

I shook my head wearily. “Holmes, you apparently believe you see something I am missing entirely. If you want me to react to it, you're just going to have to tell me.”

“Your parents died in October 1914.”

“And my brother, yes.”

“And you were either in hospital or under your doctor's supervision until you came to England in the early weeks of 1915.”

“Yes.”

“Your parents' cook and gardener—ex-gardener—were murdered in February 1915.”

“According to Mr Long.”

“Your house sits vacant for ten years, then is broken into in late March, approximately the time you would have been here had we not stopped in Japan. And within forty-eight hours of your return to San Francisco, someone is shooting at you.”

“Or at Mr Long. Or simply at a Chinese man who dared to venture from his assigned territory.”

I might not have been speaking, for all the impression my voice made on his inexorable push towards his ultimate point. “And during the earthquake and fire of 1906, some experience troubled a brave and loyal servant into a change of heart towards his employer.”

“Holmes, please, I really am too tired for this.”