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Holmes crossed to the window.

'We may be able to tell something by the way he . . . ah! Yes, there he is now, climbing into a hansom.'

Holmes suddenly leaned forward, like a pointer dog on the trail of a stag.

'Hello, what's this!'

Mycroft and I moved to join Holmes. Mycroft, being nearer, got to his brother's side first, effectively blocking my view.

'Most instructive,' Mycroft murmured.

'You noticed?' Holmes. said.

'Of course.'

'What's happening?' I bleated.

Mycroft moved aside and I squeezed past him to gaze along Pall Mall at a swaying two-wheeler with a baronial crest upon its side.

'I see nothing,' I said.

'You see nothing now,' Holmes corrected. 'The hansom was listing sideways before Maupertuis entered. His weight evened the suspension out.'

'I don't . . . Ah! I see! You suspect that the hansom was already occupied?'

'I suspect nothing,' Holmes replied. 'I know. The science of deduction allows no room for suspicions. A fact is either true or it is not true. Did you not notice how Maupertuis was in a hurry to leave us for another engagement? I would suggest to you that he was due for an assignation with another person. The coach is obviously his, judging by the crest, and contains the person with whom he is meeting.'

It would be instructive to know the identity of the other man,' Mycroft said ruminantly. 'Save that he is elderly and does not often visit London, I can tell nothing about him.'

'He is of above average height,' Holmes added.

'Or thinner than the norm,' Mycroft riposted. Both brothers smiled. I was at a loss. I wanted to ask them how they could tell all this from the tilt of a hansom cab, but the answer would only make me feel a fool for not being able to tell myself.

Just then the hansom described a wide half-circle and began to trot towards the Diogenes again. As it passed, I craned my neck in an attempt to see its occupants. Holmes and his brother had moved back into the room, and so I was the only one to see the silhouette of a hooded and robed figure sitting next to the Baron - the same figure that I had seen in the Library of St John the Beheaded.

Chapter 6

In which Holmes and Watson make a subterranean voyage and a footman is fired.

'I need to see that man,' Holmes snapped after I had imparted the news to him. 'It may be that there is nothing suspicious in this meeting - after all, we already know that the Baron is a member of the Library. Never the less, a hooded man is a suspicious figure of almost gothic proportions. Where will Maupertuis be heading now?'

'Sherlock, I'm not even my brother's keeper, let alone that of a foreign nobleman. Come, we will ask the doorman.'

Moving quickly for a man of his build, Mycroft led the way out of the Visitor's Room, along hushed corridors and down the wide marble staircase to the foyer of the Diogenes Club. Whilst we waited by the main desk, he beckoned the doorman to the steps just outside the door and flung questions at him. As he gestured to us to join him outside the club doors, I saw him slip the man a shilling.

'Jessup here says that the passenger was in shadow, but he heard the Baron tell the driver to head for an address in Euston.'

'Then we must get there before him.' Holmes looked around for a cab, but there were none to be seen.

'He has a good few minutes start,' Mycroft said. 'By the time you get there, they will have entered the house, and you may never see the other passenger. Unless...'

'Unless what?'

Instead of answering, Mycroft led us both back inside the confines of the Diogenes and through the reading room - a large, oak-lined study in whose deep leather armchairs sat a cross-section of the most important, the most unconventional and the most unpleasant men in the Empire. Skirting around the back of an armchair, I found myself looking at a familiar face.

The Doctor.

He was standing in front of the armchair. Its occupant was reading a copy of the Times. From my position behind him I could see that he was