He was wearing the same clothes he had been the other night, and they were none too fine. Not ragged, not yet, but probably also not clean. Certainly not what one wore to a dinner at the home of one’s former employer’s daughter.

Margot pressed her lips together. He was about the same size as Lukas. Half an inch shorter, perhaps, but his shoulders looked to be the same breadth. And her brother had plenty of clothes. He could lend him a suit of them, and Willa’s sister Rosemary could do any alterations needed. Rosie was brilliant with a needle. They’d be happy to help. They always were.

“Of course you’ll come.” Margot nodded, as if that settled it. It wouldn’t have done so for her, if she were the one resisting. But perhaps Holmes just needed someone to do for him what Maman had always done for her—insist and leave no room for argument. She’d find a way to inform him later of how to go about avoiding embarrassment. For now, she turned a bit toward the park. From this distance, she could just make out a figure sitting at the wrought-iron table. “Did you have any luck playing detective, Mr. Holmes?”

He chuckled and turned as well. “Well, I’m no Sherlock, I daresay. But I did, at that.” He shuffled a step closer to her and pitched his voice to a lower volume. “It was two days before the bloke showed up, and when he did, he wouldn’t talk to me—as you said was likely to happen. But I followed him to his flat that night and got his name from his box. John Williams.”

“Well, that’s easy to remember.” Dot slid to the other side of Margot, smiling in an easy way that proved she had no stakes in this game.

Margot wasn’t quite sure why she did, but the thought of John Williams playing Go in her park just wouldn’t leave her alone. “Thank you, Holmes. I appreciate your finding that for me.”

“Oh, I found more than that.” When he grinned, he didn’t look like a footless soldier who had to beg a few shillings from her. He looked like a friend of Dot’s who knew his way around the city. “Did a bit of asking about. Seems that until the war began, Mr. Williams had been in Japan, part of a diplomatic envoy. Spent a decade there. When hostilities broke out in ’14, he decided to come home and enlist. He was an officer on a minesweeper, the Ariel, that was sunk by a U-boat in August. One of the few survivors. According to my sources”—here he leaned closer, speaking more quietly still—“he hasn’t been right since. In the head, I mean.”

Dot pressed a hand to her chest. “How very sad!”