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'I'd just popped in for a drink when a cigar-chomping moron tried to feel me up. I politely told him to go away, but he persisted. So I told him not so politely. I think he's out of the hospital now.'

The ship's horn suddenly blasted out a sound like a drashig's mating call.

The Doctor winced.

'I did tell you-that women are decorative, rather than productive, in this society,' he said, scrunching his hat up in his hands. 'They do not drink alone in bars, and they most emphatically do not get involved in unseemly brawls.'

'They don't do anything! I checked out of the hotel that night, and checked into another one the next day dressed like this.'

'Where did you get the clothes?'

'From my erstwhile admirer's room. I figured he wouldn't be needing them for a while, not with his ribs in that state. So I liberated them.'

The Doctor grinned slightly, and so did I. His eyes twinkled. I couldn't match that, so I waggled my ears instead. And that's how Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson found us, grinning like loons and performing tricks with bits of our anatomy.

I knew there was something familiar about them when they approached, gazing around at the spectacle that was Bombay, sweat glossing their faces and a bevy of Indian porters hauling their trunks after them. Watson could have been anyone - he was handsome, in a reserved sort of way, but he wouldn't stand out in a crowd - but Holmes's aquiline profile and incisive, penetrating gaze hit some deep vein of memory in me.

They were both wearing lightweight tropical suits and those topees that make people look like mushrooms. The Doctor (who once took me to a planet where mushrooms look like people, but that's another story) was dressed in his usual linen suit and white hat, and somehow looked less out of place here than usual. I could tell from the way that Holmes and Watson were standing that they were wearing those bizarre spinal pads that were supposed to protect your spine from the sun and facilitate the circulation of air, but ended up making you feel even more uncomfortable and just as hot.

'Professor Bernice Summerfield, Mr Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson,' the Doctor announced.

Holmes nodded coolly at me. Watson was flustered. I wondered why for a second, then remembered that I was dressed as a man. He didn't know whether to shake my hand or kiss it.

'Professor Summerfield,' he said finally, clasping his hands behind his back. 'I'm enchanted.'

By his expression he had me figured for a lesbian. Normally it wouldn't bother me - bisexuality is the norm in my era - but I knew from my researches that the eighteen eighties weren't quite as enlightened. Ask Oscar Wilde.

'I'm working undercover,' I confided, 'and call me Bennie.' He smiled, relieved.

'Where do we go from here?' he asked.

'I've booked rooms for you in my hotel,' I replied. 'I suggest that you wash and brush up, then we'll meet for dinner.'

He nodded.

'I've been looking forward to tasting Indian food again for the entire voyage,'

he confided as I gestured to the nearest group of tikka-gharis - four wheeled horse-drawn carriages similar to hansom cabs. After a brief argument, one of them headed towards us. Watson made to take my arm, but caught himself just in time.

'You've been here before?' I asked.

'Indeed. I passed through here on my way to Afghanistan. I fought in the Second Afghan Campaign, you know?'

'How brave.' I was being mildly sarcastic, but he didn't seem to notice.

'I was wounded in the shoulder with a jezail bullet. Still gives me gyp. Nasty things.'

'Jezail?'

'It's a sort of long-barrelled musket, fired from a rest.'

The carriage pulled up beside us and the driver busied himself fighting with Holmes and Watson's bearers for possession of the bags. Like all lower-caste Indians, they wore turbans and dhotis - long lengths of cloth wound around their midriffs - and little else. It had taken me a month to stop regarding them as unfortunate accident victims. Still it could be worse. The