“Thank you for coming. I see Hari has brought you tea. Did he give you the Indian or the China?”

“The Indian,” Holmes answered, “and very nice indeed.”

“Good. With Hari, one can never be sure. I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Holmes. We did, in fact, encounter each other long ago, when you visited my father’s camp in Himachel Pradesh, but you won’t have remembered. I was seven; my last tour with him before I went home to school.”

Holmes held the man’s hand for a moment as he studied the man’s features, and then his mouth twitched in a brief smile. “He was a district officer and you were in short trousers. A boy with a thousand questions about . . . turquoise and rubies, wasn’t it?”

Our host’s face opened in a grin. “I should have known you would forget nothing. And you must be . . . Miss Russell, I’m told you prefer? I’m Geoffrey Nesbit.”

His hand was cool and strong, and I thought, as he turned to face me fully, that Holmes’ act of memory was less impressive than inevitable: Even as a child, this would have been a difficult person to forget.

Nesbit was one of the most beautiful men I have ever laid eyes on, the thin scar running down his jaw line merely serving to emphasise his looks. Neat, blond, and sun-burnt, he was not the kind who usually stirs me to admiration, but his green eyes shone with intelligence and humour, and he watched with the quiet attentiveness of a cat, missing nothing. Like a cat, too, he appeared ageless, although the skin beside his eyes and down his throat testified to an age near forty. He reminded me eerily of T. E. Lawrence, another small, tow-headed, and youthful man who looked at the world out of the corners of his eyes, as if in constant dialogue with an amusing inner voice.

Nesbit was dressed in an odd combination of garments, jodhpur trousers beneath a long muslin kameez, and if the aura of horse he carried with him explained the trousers, he had certainly changed his footwear upon returning from his morning gallop. Unless he was in the habit of riding in soft leather slippers, in the style of an American Indian. Certainly in the photographs the man wore ordinary riding boots.

He poured himself a cup of tea, taking it black with sugar, and urged us back into our chairs, sitting down on the other side of the low, intricately carved table. He settled into a third, legs stretched out, ankles crossed.

“How is your brother?” he asked Holmes.

“Improving. I had a telegram yesterday night, he sounded himself.”

“I am glad. The world would be a lesser place without Mycroft Holmes. And a great deal less secure.”