Holmes walked for a while, staring sightless at the bright wagon, deep in thought. I was braced for his disapproval, that I had not told him this part of it earlier, when I first saw him in Khanpur city. I had my refutations all in a line: that simply failing to reappear in The Forts would have stirred up all kinds of uproar, that not being a small furry animal nor a servant, I was hardly in any danger, and so on. But he just kept walking, and eventually sighed to himself, as if he’d gone through all my arguments in his head and had to admit my position. Sometimes, the speed of Holmes’ wit could be disconcerting.

“An unbalanced man” was, in the end, all he said.

“But you, Holmes, you’ve been in Khanpur nearly as long as I have. What impression of the prince have you got from his subjects?”

“The people are extremely wary of their ruler. They acknowledge that he has improved their lot in any number of ways, appreciate that their sons are learning to read and that their villages have clean water, but they accept these things with the caution that an experienced fox will use in retrieving bait from a trap. And twice I have heard rumours of men vanished into the night.”

“Men, not women?”

“Strong, middle-aged men.”

“Not the sort of target one would expect for perversions.”

“No. And as evidence, it would be dismissed by the most forgiving of judges. Men disappear for any number of reasons, in Khanpur as in London.

“So tell me, Russell, having spent five days in his company: If the maharaja of Khanpur did lay hands on Kimball O’Hara three years ago, would he have killed him or kept him?”

“Kept him,” I answered instantly, then thought about it. “Assuming he knew who the man was. And unless O’Hara drove him to murder.”

“For what purpose?”

What Holmes was asking me to do might to the uninitiated sound like guesswork, but was in fact a form of reasoning that extended the path of known data into the regions of the unknown. Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning worked best with the motivations and goals of career criminals and other simple people; the maharaja of Khanpur was not a simple man.

“I can envision two reasons, although they would not be exclusive. One is, for lack of a better term, political: The maharaja knows O’Hara is in fact a spy, and he wishes to extract from him all possible information about the workings of the British Intelligence system. Although after three years, I can’t imagine there would be much he had not got out of the man.”

“You see political power as the maharaja’s goal?”

I found myself fiddling with the silver-and-enamel charm around my neck. “Nesbit indicated something of the sort, that a native prince might be a compromise between the Congress Party and the Moslem League.”