I greeted him, with more reticence than I might have were Mycroft our only witness to affection. He nodded at me and returned his attention to the fourth person in the room.

Apart from his lack of sunburn, the newcomer looked even more worn than Holmes. The small man's now-damp linen suit was as wrinkled as a centenarian's face, and bore signs of any number of meals and at least one close acquaintance with oily machinery. He had not only slept in his clothing, he had lived in them for days, and for many, many miles.

The arrival from Shanghai was not a document.

“You have been in Shanghai, I perceive,” I blurted idiotically.

The three men stared at me as if I had pronounced on the state of cheese in the moon, so I smiled weakly and stepped forward, my hand out. The small man started to rise.

“Don't stand,” I ordered. “Mary Russell.”

He subsided obediently, clutching his plate with one hand; the other one took mine with a dapper formality that sat oddly with his state of disrepair.

“This is Mr Nicholas Lofte,” Mycroft said. “Recently, as you say, of Shanghai.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said smoothly, with an accent as much American as his native Swiss.

One whiff of the air in his vicinity explained why Mycroft had left a space between himself and Lofte; it also meant that I retreated to Holmes' side rather than take the chair between them.

Mycroft circled the table with a bottle, playing host to the wine in the glasses as he told me, “From time to time, Mr Lofte takes commissions for me in the Eastern countries. He happened to be on hand in Shanghai, so my request for information was passed to him.”

Which did not explain why Mr Lofte himself occupied a chair in Mycroft's sitting room: Was the information he had compiled too inflammatory to be committed to print? As if I had voiced the speculation aloud, Mycroft said, “His dossier of information was rather lengthy for telegrams, and writing it up and presenting it to the Royal Mail would have delayed its arrival until the middle of the week.”

“As I had my passport in my pocket, I merely presented myself at the air field instead and, as it were, affixed the stamp to my own forehead,” the man said. “Sat among the mail sacks across Asia and Europe, which doesn't leave one fresh as a daisy, if you'll forgive me, ma'am.”

My distaste had not passed him by, but he seemed more amused than offended by it, his eyes betraying a thread of humour that, in a man less stretched by exhaustion, might have been a twinkle.

“No need for apology, Mr Lofte, I have been in similar circumstances myself.”

“So I understand,” he said, which rather surprised me. Before I could ask him how he knew, he had turned back to Mycroft. “It cost me a few hours to get free of my prior commitments after I'd got your orders, but Shanghai's a small town for its size, if you get my meaning. It didn't take me long to find your man.”

He paused to add in the direction of Holmes and me, “My brief was to find what I could about an Englishman named Damian Adler, and about his wife Yolanda, previous name unknown. Adler's name came with a physical description and a date and place of birth, his mother's name, and the fact that he might be a painter. And that was all.

“I got lucky early, because he'd been in and out of the British Embassy a number of times last year, first to replace his lost passport, then to add his wife and young daughter to it. You hadn't said anything about a daughter, but I figured it had to be he, so I started from there.

“Before I go any further, do you want this in the order of how I came upon the information, or re-arranged chronologically? They're more or less reversed.”

Mycroft answered before Holmes could. “You've had time to consider your findings; feel free to tell it as you wish.”

Holmes shot him a glance, having no doubt been on the edge of demanding the bare facts as Lofte dug them out, and leaving the synthesis to his audience. But Mycroft knew his man, and the Swiss mind was more comfortable with an ordered sequence of events. Lofte picked up another sandwich, downed another swallow of wine, and began.

“Very well. My sources were the Embassy, several police departments, and the Adlers' circle of friends and business acquaintances. I wanted to speak with Mrs Adler's family, but their home was a day's travel away, and I judged that time was of greater import than complete thoroughness.

“The earliest sign of Damian Adler in Shanghai was June 1920. One man I spoke with thought Adler had been there for several weeks before that, but June was the time he took up rooms in a bro-er,” he said, shooting me a glance, “in a pleasure house. The owner of the house had got in the habit of having one or two large and relatively sober young men living on the premises, at a low rent, to help keep the guests in line. I asked him if this wasn't like putting a fat boy in charge of a chocolate shop, and he told me that yes, there was a certain tendency to, er, indulge in the goods at first, but he had found that having one or two dependable neighbours gave the girls a sense of family, and someone to go to if a client became rowdy.”

I did not look at Holmes to see how this version of Damian's tale was hitting him, but I had felt him wince at the phrase, “indulge in the goods.” His only overt reaction was to take a rather deeper swallow from his glass.

“Yolanda Chin-the future Mrs Adler-was not a resident of the house at the time Mr Adler moved in, although it would appear that she had been some years before. According to the madam, the girl came in 1905 or 1906, when she was thirteen or fourteen years of age. As, I fear, a prostitute,” he told us, just to be clear. He glanced at our stony faces, and took a prim sip of wine as he arranged his thoughts.

“When she married in late 1912-”

“What?” Holmes exclaimed, an instant before Mycroft or I could.

Lofte looked at him in surprise. “But yes.”

“You are certain?”

In answer, he reached down for a valise I had not noticed and withdrew a manila envelope. Unlooping its tie, he thumbed inside until he came up with the paper he sought. “This gives her age as sixteen, although her birth registration makes her three years older.” He slid the page down the table to Holmes; I looked past Holmes' shoulder.

A marriage certificate, dated 21 November 1912, between Yolanda Chin, sixteen, and Reverend James Harmony Hayden, age thirty, a British subject.

This time, the exclamation was mine.

“Born in 1882-do you know what Hayden looks like?”

Lofte went back to his envelope and took out a square of newsprint, commemorating some kind of donation or prize-giving: The quality was as poor as might be expected, but it showed two men shaking hands and facing the camera, the man on the left clothed in formal black and silk hat, the grinning man on the right in light suit, soft hat, and clerical collar.

“The one on the right is Reverend Hayden. The occasion is the opening of a school for poor children for which his church helped raise funds.”

Apart from the grinning teeth, all one could tell about James Hayden was that he was Caucasian, and that his eyes were dark. A shadow next to the left eye might have been wear in the page or a flaw in the printing, but I was pretty sure it was not.

“He has a scar next to his eye,” I said.

“That's what it says in his description,” Lofte agreed. “I haven't seen him, but I understand that he was in an accident in late 1905, a building collapse with live electrical wires. He was badly hurt. It was the following year that he set up shop as a reverend.”

“He's not ordained?” Holmes asked.

“He may be. There are many religions in Shanghai.”

“It's him,” I said ungrammatically, my eyes fixed on the clipping. I had not seen his face, could not testify to the colour of his eyes or the shape of his hair-line, but I had no doubt.