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'What are you doing in this cab?'

The cab swerved slightly as a growler overtook us at some speed. Our cabbie cursed the driver in earnest and graphic terms.

'I'm following someone. Or perhaps I should say something.'

'Pray explain yourself, Doctor.'

'Oh, I'm not sure I could do that.'

He smiled.

'However, perhaps Doctor Watson here has told you that he has been followed ever since we left Mrs Prendersly's house.'

Holmes shot a disappointed look at me.

'I have not been followed!' I protested. 'Holmes, you have taught me enough about detective work that I would be able to tell if any man were dogging my footsteps.'

Holmes smiled slightly.

'I myself have followed you during a number of our cases,' he said, 'in situations where I have anticipated some attack being made upon your person.'

'But I have seen nothing,' I exclaimed.

'That is what you may expect to see when I am following you,' he replied smugly.

'What makes you think that it is a man?' the Doctor interrupted.

'Because should any lady within a three mile radius show the slightest interest in Watson,' Holmes said, smirking, 'then he would know about it.'

The Doctor drew back the curtain of the trotting cab and indicated an alleyway ahead with his umbrella.

'Do you see?'

I peered towards the alley. It was mostly in shadow. I could make out no human form within it, just a pile of sticks set to form a rough stand, reminiscent in form of the iron 'cat' set in front of the fire at Baker Street upon which Holmes and I were wont to toast muffins on winter evenings. I had seen its like elsewhere, recently, but where?'

It vanished.

'Great Scott!' I exclaimed.

The Doctor pointed ahead to where a tree stood by a corner. A bundle of twigs was leaning up against it.

'A fast mover,' the Doctor said. 'Faster than the human eye can follow, at any rate. That probably indicates a race who are preyed upon by hunters of some sort.'

I tried to focus upon the . . . the animal, if the Doctor was to be believed . . .

but it moved again.

'I've seen similar behaviour in Raston Robots,' the Doctor murmured, 'but never before in a living creature. The energy it requires is phenomenal.'

He leaned out of the window.

'Around the corner!' he yelled.

'Right, guv,' came the resigned voice of the cabbie.

The growler veered sharply to the left, and Holmes peered out of the window.

'I see nothing,' he said.

The Doctor pointed to a pile of refuse, beside which I again saw the twigs.

'But what is it?' I cried.

'I don't know. I pursued it here from the Diogenes Club. I think it had followed you there, and lost you.'

'You cannot possibly be serious.'

He gazed at me with eyes that seemed to contain the weight of the world within them.

'Can't I?'

I leaned back in my seat and tried to make sense of what I was being told.

Try as I might, I could not fit this particular piece into the rational world-view which I held. It came from a different puzzle entirely.

The cab trotted on whilst I wrestled with my thoughts. The Doctor kept on yelling instructions out of the window, and Holmes tried and failed to see what we were following. Eventually we began to slow down, and I roused myself from my thoughts.

'Where are we?' I asked.

'Holborn,' Holmes and the Doctor said as one. I joined in as the growler halted: 'And the Library of St John the Beheaded.'

Of course. Where else?

Holmes stepped out into the street. I joined him. We were in more or less the same location in which Holmes and I had been dropped the day before.

I took the Doctor's umbrella as he scrambled out of the carriage and, on a whim, examined it closely for signs of oil or a channel through which oil might emerge. The entire ferrule had been cast as a solid lump of brass: despite Holmes's claims, whatever the Doctor had used to calm the waters of the Serpentine, it was not this. I handed it back, and he smiled.

The Doctor paid the cabbie, who snorted, flicked his whip at his horses and drove off with some speed.