Nesbit grunted unhappily. “You came to this country to look for Kimball O’Hara,” he said, then stopped again to reach for the brandy decanter and pour himself a couple of undiluted inches. I was starting to feel positively apprehensive about this. Whatever his point was, he clearly did not expect us to like it much. “On the voyage out, this other matter came to your attention, and you brought it to me.”

Holmes had had enough. “Come, man, get it off your chest. Are you saying you wish us to go to Khanpur for you?”

“Yes,” Nesbit said, sounding relieved. “But it’s not just—here, let me show you what I’m getting at.” He abandoned his drink and went to a low, deep cabinet on the wall, opening one of its shallow drawers and pulling out two maps. He cleared the glasses from the table and smoothed the first page out before us, a map of all India, its long triangle heavily marked with irregular blue shapes that covered nearly all of the north and a great deal of the centre: the princely states.

I blinked in surprise. “I hadn’t quite realised how much of the country is in private hands.”

“A third of the land, a quarter of the people. Native states hold some of the richest agricultural land, diamond mines, key passes into Afghanistan and Tibet.” His finger tapped a place heavily marked by topographical lines, orientating us to the whole. “Here’s Simla. There’s Delhi,” he added, touching his finger to the city three inches south, then dragging it up in the opposite direction. “The Afghan border here; Tibet; Kashmir up here, and just below it, looking deceptively small and out-of-the-way, lies Khanpur.” When we had absorbed its setting, he plucked the other map from the floor and allowed it to settle over the first.

Where the first map had been a product of some government printing agency, a cooperative effort with more detail than personality, this page was a work of art, a depiction of the northernmost knob of the Indian nation, lettered by a hand both neat and familiar. I bent over it to be sure.