The stained document before me seemed to be a soldier’s clearance certificate, and although the name, along with most of the words, was almost completely obscured by time and salt, it looked to belong to a K-something O’Meara, or O’Mara. The date was unreadable, and could as easily have been the 1700s as the past century—assuming they issued clearance certificates in the 1700s. I turned without much hope to the second document. This was on parchment, and although it appeared even older than the first and had been refolded no less than four times into different shapes, it had been in the center position inside the leather pouch, and was not as badly stained. It concerned the same soldier, whose last name now appeared to be O’Hara, and represented his original enlistment. I could feel Mycroft’s eyes on me, but I was no more enlightened than I had been by the certificate representing this unknown Irishman’s departure from Her Majesty’s service.

Holmes had the third document unfolded, using the care he might have given a first-century papyrus. He made no attempt to weigh down the edges of this one, merely let the soft, crude paper rest where it would lest it dissolve into a heap of jigsaw squares along the scored folds. I craned my head to see the words; Holmes, however, just glanced at the pages, seeming to lose interest as soon as he had freed them. He sat aside and let me look to my heart’s content.

This was a birth certificate, for a child born in some place called Ferozepore in the year 1875. His father’s name clarified the difficulties of the K-something from the other forms: Kimball.

I looked up, hoping for an explanation, only to find both sets of grey Holmes eyes locked expectantly onto me. How long, I wondered, before I stopped feeling like some slow student facing her disappointed headmistress? “I’m sorry,” I began, and then I paused, my mind catching at last on a faint sense of familiarity: Kimball. And O’Hara. Add to that a town that could only be in India. . . . No; oh, no—the book was just a children’s adventure tale. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, only where before it had connoted apology, this time it was tinged with outrage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?”

“You’ve read it?” Mycroft asked.

“Of course I’ve read it.”

“Good, that saves some explaining. I believe this to be his amulet case.”

“He’s real, then? Kipling’s boy?”

“As real as I am,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And yes, this is his amulet. I recognise it.”

“You know him?” I don’t know why this revelation startled me as if he’d claimed to have met a hippogryph; heavens, half the world considered Holmes fictional. But startle me it did.