He heard the sound and half-saw the motion of the fabric, and leapt across the room to rip away the curtains and thrust his head and shoulders out of the window, gun aimed at the ground below.

I was already in motion, knife in one hand, snatching up Damian's cravat with the other. He heard me coming and nearly managed to extricate himself from the window before I slammed into him, knocking him half out of the room, then jerking the upper window down hard across his spine. He bellowed and shoved back hard. Glass and wood crackled, then went abruptly silent as he became aware of the tip of my knife, pressing into an exquisitely sensitive, and currently exquisitely vulnerable, part of his anatomy.

“Drop the gun,” I said loudly. When he failed to respond, I twitched the knife, and his squeak was followed by a thud from the flower bed below. “Now show me your right hand.”

His body tensed to brace himself against falling, and his right hand waved briefly on the other side of the cracked pane. Good enough. I wound the cravat around his ankles and snugged it into a messy but effective one-handed knot.

It took some doing to get the weight of him out from the window without permitting him freedom of motion, and he nearly had me twice, but finally, with his belt, three neck-ties, and the rope-tie from a dressing gown, I had him trussed. Bleeding, enraged, and trussed.

I walked on uncertain feet over to the light-switch, and managed to unscrew the face-plate and prise out the sliver of lead. I could hear him all the while, struggling against the various bonds.

By the time I got the lights on, the worst of my reaction had sub sided, and I was faced with a conundrum-not, What to do with him? because I knew what I was going to do with him, but-How do I get him to talk?

I'd seen enough of this type of man to know that he would absorb a lot of damage before opening his mouth. If I were Holmes, or Lestrade, this man would spit on my questions. I could threaten him further with the knife, but it would take a lot to convince him that a mere girl would carry out the threats.

He'd be right, too: I might be willing to damage a thug to save Holmes, but for Damian and his daughter?

The man on the floor lay still now; I could feel his eyes on my back. I circled the room slowly, letting him think about his situation. That he was neither cursing nor demanding to know who I was told me that he had more brains than his overdeveloped muscles suggested.

I looked down at the trestle table and its litter of paint and drawings, and became aware that I was looking at myself.

Not myself, as in a mirror, but a simple, flowing continuous line of ink on paper, elegant as a Japanese master. It was not a sketch, it was a finished piece, done on a sheet of dense and expensive paper. At the lower left was its title: My Father's Wife. It was signed Adler.

I deliberately pushed it out of my mind, and reached for one of the tubes of paint, juggling with it for a moment before laying it back on the table. I put the knife down beside it, and returned to my captive. His eyes held mixed fury and contempt, which was fine. What I needed to see there was fear.

I grabbed the lapels of his coat. He smirked, expecting me to tug and struggle against his weight, but the secretions of the adrenal gland can be turned to strength as well as fear, and I hauled him in two great backwards strides to the corner of the worn carpet, and let his head thump down against the bare boards.

“Hey! What the hell is going on here, sister?”

I went around the room, methodically piling up the furniture until the carpet was free of encumbrance.

Then I rolled him up in it.

He was cursing now, an astonishingly vicious torrent, ever more breathless. Still silent, I walked back to the table for the knife, then knelt on the floorboards beside his head. I held up the stained blade for him to study. He looked at it-he couldn't stop himself, a thin, shiny blade edged with scarlet-but he did not believe I would use it.

I didn't. Instead, my eyes watching his face, I put it to my mouth, and slowly, appreciatively, licked it clean.

It was not blood, of course, it was bright red paint from one of Damian's tubes, but it was far more effective than mere blood. I took out a handkerchief and patted my lips delicately, then slid the blade away into its scabbard.

The unexpected can be frightening. His eyes no longer held contempt.

“You shouldn't have cursed,” I told him.

I could see him wrestling with the unlikeliness of that opening statement. “What?”

“If you'd held a deep breath instead, you'd have more room now. As it is, your lungs are constricted. You'll probably pass out after a while.”

“Lady, you're in deep trouble.”

“When is he coming back for you?”

“Any minute.” I had been watching his face, and saw the lie.

“I don't think so.”

“He's coming up the drive now.”

“I don't think he's coming at all. Certainly not in time to save you.”

“You're not going to use that knife on me.”

“Of course not. I don't have to. Tell me, how's your breathing? Getting any easier? You think you'll manage until your boss comes back for you?”

The first shadow of uneasiness passed through his eyes, telling me what I needed to know.

“I don't think he's coming. And next Wednesday, when those nice people come for their meeting. Do you think they'll persist until they get into the house, or will they just knock politely and, when no-one answers, go away?”

His breathing quickly grew more laboured.

“You see? I don't need a knife. I don't need to do anything, just walk away and lock the front door behind me.”

“What do you want?” He said it with more obscenity, but I overlooked the words and spoke to the question.

“Where can I find the man who just drove off and left you here?”

He told me what I could do with my question.

I sighed, and stood up. At the motion, the uneasiness returned.

“Oy,” he said. “Honest, I don't know. I know what he says his name is and I know generally where he lives, but he never told me what he was doing, and he never had me go to his house.”

“You've worked for him since last autumn.”

“Yeah, but it's just that, working for him. I drive him around, I do things for him. He never asks me what I think or tells me anything more than what I need to know.”

I moved away, and he cried out, “Wait, don't”-I was only fetching a cushion from the chair. He eyed it warily, and looked relieved when I dropped it on the boards and settled onto it.

“Tell me what you do know about him.”

“And if I do?”

“I'll see to it that you don't die here. If you don't talk, I'll go away and you can take your chances that someone will hear you shouting. Oh, and I'll strap a belt around your legs first. You won't be able to roll out of the carpet.”

He didn't believe that I would use the knife, but he did believe this. He talked.

His name was indeed Marcus Gunderson, and he called his boss The Reverend, a name that was half disdain and half deference. The Reverend had called himself Thomas Brothers, and all the people at his church knew him by that name, but Gunderson had helped him set up that identity back in November.

“What's his real name?”

“Dunno. Honest, I don't know.”

“How did he find you?” I asked.

“There's a group run by some of the churches, helps men when they come out of nick. Find jobs and that, you know?”

“And you were freshly out of prison?”

“Four years in The Scrubs.”

Wormwood Scrubs prison was aptly named for the bitterness of one's experience there. “So this Brothers presented himself as a fellow churchman willing to give a convict a second chance.”

“'S right.”

“Instead of which, he gave you a second career. Did you drive a young woman down to Sussex last Friday?”