“Unless the clothing was intended to deflect suspicion, as well as raise a challenge to his father's intellect.”

There was no arguing with that.

He added, “There is also the possibility that Damian's involvement is secondary. That he plays a peripheral rôle in… whatever this is we are looking at.”

Nor with that.

“The author of that book,” I answered at last, “whoever he might be, is either a dangerous charlatan, or an even more dangerous psychopath.”

Mycroft said nothing: He was going to make me speak my thoughts to the end.

I went on. “In either case, he would strike one as both plausible and engaging.”

No response, which was the same as agreement. I took a deep breath.

“The question is, could Holmes be duped by such a person?”

“Any man may be duped, if he wishes to believe.”

This time, even a stranger would have heard the pain in his voice. I shook my head, more in denial than in disagreement.

“Yes,” he insisted. “Even my brother. The key to deceit is to find the weak point in one's target.”

“I've only spent a couple of hours in Damian's company, but I have to say, if he is the author of that book, I should look to madness, not duplicity. However-” I had to clear my throat before I could give voice to the end point of this line of thought. “The author of that book is almost certainly responsible for…”

“Where is the child Estelle?” Mycroft said, his voice soft.

Again, I shook my head; this time the gesture was one of despair.

Mycroft drifted to a halt, leaning on his stick to stare unseeing at Kensington Palace. “The one faint ray of light in all this is that, assuming it is tied to the influence of the full moon, we have twenty-three days until the next one. Surely we can lay hands on the young man, given three weeks.”

He is Holmes' son, I thought but did not say aloud. I did not need to, not to Holmes' brother.

Holmes' brother was now, I noticed, staring at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Have you eaten today?”

“Yes. I think so. I don't remember.”

“I thought not. You have that stretched look I have seen you wear, when you have not eaten. Surely we can remedy that, at the least.”

And so saying he raised a hand and conjured a taxi.

The brothers Holmes have an irritating habit of being right, and so it proved now with Mycroft and food. Not that a meal rendered the world rosy, but an unstarved brain permitted my near-panic to take a small step away, that I might assemble my thoughts and come up with a plan.

Perhaps my attachment to Holmes made me too ready to condemn the son he had so eagerly clasped to his breast. My suspicions of Damian, though justified, were compounded by my burden of emotions, namely the residual resentments that I had lived with since the 1919 revelation that Holmes had a life from which I was precluded. It was unlikely that I should have a child: That Holmes had one already opened a separation between us.

But it was not merely the bitter edge of envy that set me in opposition to Damian Adler. Holmes had adopted Damian's cause with a wholesale enthusiasm I would not have expected. Under less dire circumstances, I might almost be entertained by the chance to prove Holmes fallible; on the other hand, both experience and loyalty demanded that I throw myself over to Holmes' stance and labour to prove his son's innocence. But Damian's fate rendered the first option repugnant, and Yolanda's death made the second impossible: Were I to join in declaring Damian's innocence, the dead would have no voice.

Scotland Yard, it appeared, were positioned on one side; Holmes and Damian occupied the other: The equation needed a balancing point, a mind committed to cold facts, a heart given only to impartiality.

It was left to me to pursue the middle course of truth: me, and Mycroft.

Holmes had always freely bowed to his brother's superiority when it came to pure observational ability, declaring that his brother's ability to store and retrieve facts was matched by no living man. Mycroft had never come near to Holmes as an investigator, being severely limited by his disinclination to stir beyond his small circuit of rooms, club, and office. However, what I needed now was not an investigator, but a pure retrieval mechanism. It could save me days of tedium amongst the back-issues.

If the moon was at all significant, its meaning might have begun to manifest before the Cerne Abbas possible-suicide in June. When Mycroft was seated in his chair again, glass to hand and fragrant cigar in its ash-tray, I asked him.

“What,” he said, “other murders around the time of full moons? There were none-none worthy of note.”

“Not necessarily murders, but events. For example, Holmes mentioned a dead ram in Cumbria, although it was only another letter by an outraged gentleman-farmer to The Times.”

His light grey eyes fixed on me, slowly losing their habitual vagueness. After a minute, he sat back, laced his fingers across his waistcoat, and let his eyelids drift half closed. I picked up my pen and the block of paper.

“March the twenty-first,” he began, “was a Friday. London saw a death on the Thursday night, a sixty-nine-year-old woman in Stepney run down by a lorry. The lorry driver stopped and was detained, then released because the woman was nearly blind and deaf. On the following day, a man was found dead in an alley off the Old Bethnal Green Road, no signs of foul play, being drunk and it being a wet night. No bodies on the Saturday, although a house in Finsbury that was used as an informal Hindu temple had a rude word scratched on its door.”

He paused, reaching for the next pigeon-hole of his orderly brain, then resumed. “In Manchester during those three days, there were no deaths, no crimes of a religious nature, but several arrests were made following a talk at a vegetarian restaurant concerning Madame Blavatsky. In York…”

This was going to be a long night.

28

WEDNESDAY MORNING, MYCROFT SEEMED NONE the worse for wear from his prodigious feat of memory of the night before, but I was still fatigued as I read through my ever more incoherent notes. There seemed a stupendous number of crimes on my pages, and I wondered how the figures a week on either side of the full-moon dates would compare-then winced at the thought of having to go through that experience a second time.

In March, a man named Danielson had been knifed in a fishing village in Cornwall, his body found the morning after the full moon, his assailant not identified. In April, a shepherd's death was probably exposure, but then on 18 May there was an interesting item: Blood was seen near the entrance of a large chambered tomb in the Orkney Islands. When the farmer went to see, he found a sheep dead inside the chamber, its throat savaged by a dog.

Right, I thought, I can just see asking Lestrade to look into that. That reminded me: “What about Holmes' dead ram? It's not on this list.”

Mycroft blinked. “Might he have been making a jest with Lestrade?”

“It didn't sound like it.”

Mycroft's gaze focused on the coffee pot in the centre of the table, as he slipped effortlessly back into the retrieval state. Twenty minutes later, as I was myself eyeing the pot and wondering if it would shatter his concentration were I to pour myself another cup, he stirred and picked up his cold cup.

“The only dead sheep that received mention in the news or in my dispatches was the one in Cumbria, although it happened the first week of May, not during the full moon. I shall make enquiries with my colleagues in Agriculture.” He sounded mildly embarrassed, as if admitting to failure, and I hastened to re-assure him.