“I no longer know whom I can trust. Even Hari, who has been with me for twelve years, even him . . .” Nesbit broke off, to dig a silver case from a pocket and light a cigarette, pinching the match between his fingers and tucking it back into the case. “I begin to understand how the officers must have felt during the Mutiny. Their own men, men they’d fought beside, marched with, trusted with their lives—with the lives of their wives and children, for God’s sake—turning on them, slaughtering them. And five years ago, I saw Jallianwala Bagh, the morning after. I saw the results of Dyer’s order to fire on the demonstrators. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds and nearly every one of them hit civilian flesh—men, women, and little children heaped against the walls where they’d tried to get away from the machine-gun fire. I’ll never outlive the nightmares, never. Hundreds dead, thousands bleeding, and every white man in India wondering when the country would rise up and kill us in our beds, rid themselves of us once and for all.

“And who could blame them? We collect their taxes and we give them nothing but the bottom of our boot. You heard of Dyer’s ‘crawling order’? Where he set guards to make certain no native could walk past the spot where an Englishwoman had been attacked, but had to crawl—even the natives who’d rescued her? God help us, with such officers. There are days when, if I heard that someone in a position to undermine the Survey from within had chosen to do so, I couldn’t altogether bring myself to condemn him.”

“Yet you don’t believe O’Hara capable?”

“No. Not him.”

“Even though since he was a child his white blood has warred against his love and loyalty to the country that nurtured him?”

“Even so. He would not deceive his friends in that way.”

“O’Hara is quite capable of practising deceit, when it comes to playing The Game.”

“No.”

Holmes looked at the younger man and gave a small shake of his head, but said merely, “I’ll need all the details on the three men found dead, and on those missing.”

“I’ve included a précis in the O’Hara file I have for you. I prepared it myself; no one has seen it.”

“That’s as well.”

Nesbit crushed his cigarette out under his heel, then said abruptly, “I am having doubts as to the wisdom of this venture.”

“That is understandable, but we shall take the file nonetheless.”

“I should not have allowed you to come here, openly to my home. What if you were seen, and followed?”

“Who knows we are here?” Holmes asked.

“You and Miss Russell? By name? No more than four men within the Survey, all of them high ranks. But still . . .”