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'But surely you believe us?' I asked him. Mac sighed and reached for his pint of mild and bitter.

'You have to understand my position, Doctor Watson, Doctor . . .'

He looked questioningly at the Doctor, who stared back with basilisk-like impassivity.

'Er . . . yes, Doctor,' he continued. 'You're technically under arrest, both of you. By rights I should have you locked up.'

'But . . .?' the Doctor said unblinkingly.

'But Sherlock Holmes has pulled my fat out of the fire too many times for me to throw his friends in choky. Whatever happened to that woman wasn't your fault. I know that.' He gazed unhappily into his drink. 'Persuading Bradstreet might tax my skills, though. He's of the old school, like Lestrade over there: if you can't find the right man, lock the wrong one up. Keeps the arrest figures looking good.' He grimaced. 'You know what Bradstreet said to me once? "There's two types of people in the world, son: those who have been arrested and those who haven't been found out yet". That man's more of a danger to the Yard than anything anarchists or the Irish might do.

If I could only think of another explanation for Mrs Prendersly's death, I might be able to convince Bradstreet of your innocence.'

'Have you ever read Dickens?' the Doctor queried.

'Dickens?' Mac was puzzled. 'Well, I picked up a couple of bound sets of the weeklies in one of the second-hand shops along the Strand for the wife.'

'Then you may have come across his novel Bleak House.'

Mac's face proclaimed that he had not, but I realized what the Doctor was getting at.

'Of course!' I exclaimed, 'the death of Krook!'

The Doctor beamed at me, as if I was a backward child who had suddenly managed to grasp a complicated mathematical theorem. Mac just scratched his head.

'During the course of the novel,' I amplified for his benefit, 'the aptly named Krook is found burned to death in his room, supposedly as a celestial judgement on his sins.'

'I can't use a work of sensational fiction as evidence,' MacDonald protested.

'Mr Dickens was merely reporting a well know phenomenon,' the Doctor said calmly. 'Known generally, I believe, as spontaneous human combustion.'

'Nonsense!' My cry turned several heads around the room. After the hush was filled again by the babble of a myriad conversations, I continued.

'Spontaneous human combustion is a fallacy, an old wives' tale dusted off to explain any unusual death involving fire. It has no rational explanation, and therefore it does not exist.'

I sat back in my seat, thinking how proud Holmes would have been of me.

'I presume that you have read Carpenter's Principles of General and Comparative Physiology?' the Doctor asked with a slight smile.

'Yes,' I mumbled. 'Forty years old, but still a very useful book.'

'And one which admits to the existence of cases where men and women have burst into flame for no obvious reason. No doubt you have also had reason to consult Beck and Beck's Elements of Medical Jurisprudence in the course of your adventures with Mr Holmes?'

'Well . . . yes.'

The Doctor's voice was gentle, but remorseless. I could not help but contrast his style of debate with that of Holmes, whose superior attitude and scathing criticisms frequently cowed me into submission. Mac watched our verbal duel, entranced.

'Those eminent gentlemen also believed in spontaneous human combustion. You may even have read an article on the subject in the Bulletin de la Societe Medico-Legal de France last year.'

'I do know that Casper's Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine well and truly trounced the idea.'

'Did it?' The Doctor took a sip of his sarsaparilla. 'And how did Casper explain the bizarre fate of Nicole Millet, a landlord's wife whose charred body was found on Whit Monday in 1725 in Rheims in an armchair that did not have a single burn upon it? Or that of Grace Pett, a fisherman's wife who burned to a cinder on the ninth of April 1744 in Ipswich, near a paper