Holmes looked at the collection of unlikely shapes and colours. “What is that?”

“By the feel of it, mostly honey.”

He peeled one from my palm and popped it in his mouth, pausing briefly to consider it. “Sage flower,” my beekeeper husband pronounced. “And something else. Rather piquant.”

“Holmes, we haven’t time to hunt down the source of the pollen in those ladies’ honey,” I said firmly.

He pulled out his watch, nodded in agreement, and turned for the rickety stairs. “You’re quite right, the ship’s siren went a few minutes ago. We risk missing the launch if we delay too long.”

I hadn’t heard the siren. “Can’t we send someone to have the ship held for us?”

“I shouldn’t like to chance it. The P. & O. lines pride themselves on keeping to the rules. Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

But fifteen minutes proved too little time to find the owner of the empty apartment across the street. There was indeed a bash in the wall, and the boards that had created it—a balcony railing and four or five carved supports—were lying by themselves at the very base of that wall, across the alley from the bulk of the débris. There was no convenient length of rope or chain attached to the middle of the railing, and the marks were too myriad to be certain, but it did look as if something had torn a fresh groove into the wood in the centre of the fallen railing. It was the sort of mark that might result if a person standing at a window were to toss a hooked line at an already unsteady structure across a gap of some fifteen feet, then give it a mighty pull. On the other hand, it was also the sort of mark that might come from hanging almost anything from that same railing, and the gouge in the wall could be days old. Without a look at the room to see if the window-frame bore the marks of a rope or if the opposite wall showed where a pulley had been mounted to make one man’s strength sufficient, without even a ladder to examine the wall more closely, there could be no certainty.

In any case, the ship’s siren sounded again, impatiently, declaring its intention to leave without us. We grabbed up our few purchases, which had been preserved and guarded by the carpet-seller (grandfather to the half-naked child), accepted a small rolled carpet thrust into Holmes’ hands as a token of gratitude, and trotted away.