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“We met briefly in the summer of 1919. After that, he went to Shanghai. I lost sight of him until he appeared on my terrace in Sussex, nineteen days ago.”

“And in that time his wife died at the hands of a crackpot, and you solved the case, then uncovered several other deaths, and eventually tracked the murderer to far distant Orkney, where Mr Adler was wounded. And this mad religious leader was killed.”

“An adequate précis, yes.”

“You killed the man?”

“A gun went off; he died.”

“And yet you say that you have committed no crime.”

“Homicide in defence of self or family is not a crime. My son saved my life.”

She blinked, not having expected that her patient was the man with the gun. After a minute, she asked, “The man was about to kill you?”

“Damian was his intended sacrifice, to coincide with yesterday’s solar eclipse over the sixty-fifth latitude. I intervened; there was a struggle.”

“Well,” she said. “You’ve certainly had a busy three weeks.”

“My wife did much of the work.”

“Your wife.” The flat syllables indicated that Damian had neglected this part of the tale.

“She read theology at Oxford.”

“Of course she did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. How do you intend to get the police to listen to you? Or will Mr Adler be forever in hiding?”

“That would not do at all. I have resources, and they will listen. However, I need to reach them first, without attracting police attention.”

“Hmm. And may I ask, where is Mr Adler’s daughter? He’d got as far as the confrontation on Friday night before exhaustion took him.”

“The child is with my wife.”

“Where?”

“Orkney, when last I saw them.”

“Mrs Holmes was on Orkney as well?”

“She goes by the name Russell, but yes, she was there. Damian’s memories of the incident at the Stones may be uncertain, but she and I were both present. However, with Damian injured, we could not risk having the child to slow us down. So we split up, and Russell and Estelle remained behind.”

“You left your wife and a child to explain to the police about a dead madman?”

“I should be astonished if Russell was still there when the police arrived.”

“She, too, is evading the police?”

“Dr Henning, you heard me say that all three of us have warrants out for our arrest, from before this. And all three of those warrants are unjustified. I say again, you will come to no harm, apart from the inconvenience of this voyage. For which I sincerely apologise.”

He met her gaze then, grey eyes locking on green, and in a moment, she surprised him. Her eyes began to dance, and her mouth twitched, and then she was laughing, with full acceptance and good humour and not a trace of the hysteria one might expect of a woman in her situation. She laughed so hard, the basket jumped out from underneath her and left the doctor sitting on the grubby deck.

“Oh, my,” she said, fishing out a handkerchief. “My, my, my. And to think that mere minutes before you arrived in my surgery, I was making an inventory of supplies that I’d counted ten times already and wondering if it was too late to take a position of public-school nurse that I’d been offered in Edinburgh.”

“Yes, well,” Holmes said, “my wife does not tend to complain of boredom.”

“I can see that.” She stretched her legs out straight and clasped her hands on her skirts, a gesture of decision. “Very well. I should tell you that I happen to have a relative on the Dutch coast. Would you consider that ‘safe haven’ for your son?”

Chapter 16

I coasted through the darkness on silent wings for a time, and then snapped back into a confusion of pain and terror and the stench of petrol. Some furious creature was struggling against me, a knife was buried into my kidneys, and my head felt like a football: kicked about and swollen with air.

Directed less by thought than by animal instinct aimed at making the noise and pain go away, I patted at the furious struggling creature. After a while its noises and struggles diminished somewhat. Nothing I could do about the vacant pounding inside