The two men slipped into the toy room beside me, and I pushed the door shut, more or less. As I turned into the room, two hands came to rest on my shoulders, Holmes’ familiar long fingers gripping my left, O’Hara’s on my right. Now was the time to make good on my foolish assertion to Kimball O’Hara that I could find my way through a black room I had visited only once.

I bent my head and allowed my mind’s eye to summon a view of the room as it had been. The door; the high shelves of mechanical dolls and animals to its left; the scattered arrangement of glass-enclosed mechanisms across the floor—not in a haphazard pattern, not once one knew that there was a doorway hidden behind them. The Englishman-eating tiger was over there, the erotic toys back there. Which meant that we need only circle the piggies’ tea party and dodge the pair of fortune-telling gipsies, and we would be at the room’s entrance.

I led the way forward—slowly and with my hands stretched out to be sure, since I was not all that supremely confident. But we reached the door without noise or mishap, and I felt a surge of pride as I laid my hand upon the doorknob.

The corridor stretched out in both directions, lit by oil lamps every thirty feet or so. The nearest one was smoking and guttering, a black stain on the ceiling showing that it had not been properly trimmed. We closed the door quietly and turned south, away from the durbar hall and the billiards room, where late guests and their attendant servants might still be up.

The southernmost quarter of the New Fort, hidden from view behind a thick stand of timber bamboo, had not yet known the hand of the maharaja’s renovators. Behind the greenery, the plaster was chipped, the paint long peeled away, the stone floor of the arcade worn and gritty underfoot. But not uninhabited—these were the servants’ quarters, with faint cooking odours wafting in from the open corridors. We slipped from one darkness to the next, freezing into imitations of the stone pillars around us when two tired-looking chuprassis scurried from the Fort’s central courtyard and slipped between two columns into the south wing.

I stood pressed up against the greasy stones and looked through the bamboo at the guest centre above the durbar hall and dining rooms. It had to be nearly one o’clock, but all the lights were still burning, the band played, the sounds of merriment spilled over the lotus pond and trimmed bushes. I thought the merriment sounded more than a little forced, but perhaps that was imagination. Certainly the sound was drunken. What state could the maharaja be in? Thwarted at every turn, his captives escaped, first Mary and then Martin tweaking their Russellian noses at his compulsory hospitality. No wonder the servants looked edgy.