“Holmes had an advantage,” said Harold.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“He lived in Victorian England. He came from a society so class-stratified that you could tell where people grew up within a few miles by their accent. The word ‘Cockney’ originally meant someone who lived within hearing distance of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow. Your shirt cuffs were your destiny. Holmes was able to tell so much about a man’s walking stick-in, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles-because gentlemen carried walking sticks. There are no more rules nowadays. You have a million options of clothing and style to choose from. If your clothes look expensive, they could still be from a secondhand store. I live in L.A., where the basic code seems to be the more casual you look, the more money you have. We’re both Americans, so outside of a few very specific regions, accents tend to move around. Especially among people who actually do move around. You’re a reporter-how many different cities have you lived in? Four? Six? You could have been born in any one of them.”

“Excuses, excuses,” said Sarah. “You’re not the only Sherlockian who’s off chasing Cale’s killer right now. But you’re the one I bet on. You don’t want me to think I’ve put my money on the wrong horse, do you?”

“You haven’t.”

“Good. So, have I been to London before or not?”

Harold paused. A flight attendant deposited plastic champagne flutes on each of their tray tables.

Harold believed in Sherlock Holmes. He knew the stories weren’t “real,” of course-he didn’t believe in Holmes like that. But he believed in what the stories represented. He believed in rationality, in the precise science of deduction. Sherlock Holmes could do this. And so could Harold.

He examined her. Bright blue eyes. Thin nose. Two hoop earrings hanging from her earlobes. Curly brown hair held up in a ponytail, a few loose strands dangling down. Something behind her ear. He leaned in closer, over the gap between the first-class seats. There was a small tattoo behind her left earlobe.

“Yes,” said Harold. “You’ve been to London before.”

Sarah smiled. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t know. But it was a reasonable guess. You have a small mark on your nose, where a piercing used to be. And there’s a tiny tattoo of a musical note behind your left ear. Who gets musical-note tattoos? Musicians, obviously. So you were a musician at one point. I’m going with rock band, because you don’t take care of your fingers like a classical musician would, and you used to have a stud in your nose. Bass player? You were dedicated, or else you wouldn’t have gotten the tattoo. But then you quit and became a reporter. You’re freelance, which means that either you’re semifamous or you don’t make that much money. I don’t think you’re famous, or I would have heard of you. So you didn’t quit music because you needed the money, and you didn’t become a reporter for that reason either. So I don’t think you’ve ever been strapped for cash. You were a rich kid, or at least a relatively welloff one, pursuing a crazy dream to piss off your parents. Between your childhood, with parents who could have taken you on European vacations if they wanted to, and your time in your band, which must have toured if you were that committed, it stands to reason that you would have been through London at one point or another.”

Sarah beamed at him, and then pressed her hands together in a playful golf clap.

“Accordion,” she said. “Not bass. I played accordion in a punk band.”

“Your punk band had an accordion player?”

“It was pretty cool. But we never made it out of the East Coast. I grew up near Berkeley, and my parents were ‘comfortable,’ as they’d put it. They took me to Europe three times when I was a kid. Paris, Madrid, and a week in Italy, traveling from Rome to Cinque Terre by way of Florence. But we never went to London.”

“But you said you’d been,” said Harold.

“Yes,” said Sarah. “I have an ex who’s British. Born in London. We met in New York, but we went back to visit his family a few times.”

She raised her champagne flute and clinked it against Harold’s.

“Cheers,” she said before taking a long gulp. “I think you did great for your first time.”

Alex Cale’s sister was crying when they arrived. And judging from the pork-pink bags around her eyes, it looked as though she had been for some time.

Though a few years younger than her brother, Jennifer Peters looked much older when she answered the door to her spacious flat in London Fields, on the third ring, and allowed Harold and Sarah inside. Her short hair looked both shiny and frayed, and as they talked, she kept brushing the ends of her severe bob behind her ears. She wore jeans, a low-necked sweater, and thick red socks-no shoes. She would have appeared Sunday-morning comfortable had she not been so clearly miserable.

Her husband was not in the flat with her, and Harold didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. The couple had no children and spent much of the year abroad. She had arrived in London only the day before, to attend to the disposal of Alex’s possessions, to recover his body, and see it interred at Highgate Cemetery, where some generations of their family had been laid to rest. Jennifer was her brother’s sole next of kin.

When the three of them sat down, Harold and Sarah on the hard couch and Jennifer on a wide, white plush chair, Harold felt grief lying sickly in the room like mildew. The couch felt sticky and wet.

And Harold felt like a tremendous ass. At least he’d had the good sense to leave the deerstalker cap at the hotel, with all of his bags. (Actually, he did so less because of his good sense and more because of Sarah’s gentle urging, but still, he thought he deserved credit for the decision.) He couldn’t help feeling like a grave robber as he forced Alex’s sister to talk about her dead brother, just when she had to deal head-on with the sensation that she had so very little family left.

“When was the last time you spoke to your brother, before his death?” Harold asked.

“I’m sorry, why are you here, again?” Jennifer responded plaintively.

“He was a good friend.” Harold swallowed, embarrassed at the exaggeration. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to him.”

Jennifer turned to Sarah, then away from them both. She looked puzzled, not at the complexity of the problem but at its simplicity. Her brother had died. That was “what happened to him.”

“Harold traveled in the same circles as your brother,” said Sarah. “We think he might have some insight into who did this that’s not available to the police.”

“You’re a detective?” asked Jennifer of Harold.

“No. Not exactly.”

“What do you do, then, exactly?”

“I’m a reader.”

“What does that mean?”

“I read books… well, I’ve read a lot of books, past tense, I suppose that’s more accurate. See, I’m freelance, I work for the legal departments of most of the major studios, and when someone sues one of them for copyright infringement, I help prepare the defense on the grounds-”

“You’re one of Alex’s Sherlockian friends?”

“Yes.”

She faced Sarah. “And you’re a reporter?”

“Yes.”

Jennifer sighed and crossed her legs, picking lint specks from her red socks. “I hadn’t spoken to my brother for a month or so. We weren’t… Well, that’s not true. We were close in our own way.”

“What did you talk about? Did anything seem out of the ordinary?” said Harold.

“Something was always out of the ordinary with Alex. The Great Game was always on, he was always after some relic or precious document or what-have-you. He was always this close, ever the last few inches, from finishing his biography. On that day, if I remember, he said that he had been followed ever since he’d found the diary. I thought he was being characteristically overdramatic.”