He led the doctor down an alleyway, around the back of a herring shed, and through mountains of precisely stacked whisky barrels, which was hardly a direct route but he’d spotted the PC down the lane, and didn’t want to risk a second encounter. By the time they hit the small beach, the doctor was scurrying to keep up, and Holmes had become aware of a helmeted presence behind them.

He strode ahead of the diminutive doctor and had the boat untied and floating free before she caught him up. “Are we-” she started to say, but he seized her shoulders to lift her bodily in over the last bit of mucky sand, letting go before she was fully balanced. She plopped onto the seat with a squeak of protest; he stepped one foot inside and shoved off with the other, nearly toppling her backwards as the small craft shot away from the land and rotated 160 degrees. Two quick pulls of the oars completed the turn-about, and they were soon beyond shouting distance, leaving a puzzled PC on the shore, scratching the head beneath his helmet.

The doctor, with her back to the town, noticed nothing apart from her escort’s haste. She straightened her hat, tucked her black bag underneath the seat, and scowled at the man working the oars. “As I was about to ask, are we in a hurry?”

“Tide’s about to turn. I didn’t want to risk losing the dinghy, but we’re all right now. I hope you’ll be having a scalpel in that bag of yours?”

“Of course. But why should I require a scalpel to stitch a cut?”

“Ah, about that. There is a hole in the lad’s epidermis, all right. Unfortunately, there’s a small lump of lead as well.”

“A lump of-do you mean a bullet?”

“That’s right.”

“What have you dragged me into?” At last, she sounded uneasy. High time, thought Holmes sourly, and allowed the Scots to leave his diction.

“In fact, you’re walking on the side of the angels, although I’d recommend in the future that a person who barely clears five feet might do well to ask a few more questions before she goes off with a strange man. Our situation here is… complicated, but all I need is for you to cut out the bullet and patch up the entrance hole, and we’ll set you back safe and sound on firm land.” Although I fear, he added to himself, some distance from where you began.

She gaped at him, then turned about as if to see how far she might have to swim to reach safety. The constable was still visible, but his back was turned, and she’d have needed a megaphone against the sharp breeze. When she faced Holmes again, she was angry beyond measure, and the flush in her fair skin made her eyes blaze blue.

“I don’t know what you’re about, but kidnapping is a felony.”

“You’re merely making a house call. Or, boat call,” he amended. “I intend to pay you, generously. I swear to you, neither I nor the wounded man have done anything remotely illegal.” Yet.

She studied his face, and the anger in her own subsided with her fear. “If you’ve done nothing illegal and yet he’s been shot, why not go to the police?”

“As I said, the situation is delicate at present. A misunderstanding. And being far from home, difficult to clear up.”

“Where is home?”

“ Manchester,” he said promptly, and then they were at the boat, and Gordon was reaching down to help the doctor aboard.

“Captain,” Holmes said before the fisherman could speak, “this is Doctor Henning. However, I think it may be best for everyone if we leave our names out of this. If she does not know our names, she need not worry about the consequences of speaking freely.”

Gordon stared at the petite figure at the other end of his arm. “This is a doctor?”

The Reverend Thomas Brothers, seated before the peat fire in the Orkney cottage, smiled freely at the wording of the telegram MacAuliffe had brought him:

IF HEALTH PERMITS MEET ME TUESDAY ST ALBANS GUNDERSON HAS DETAILS.

Health did not permit, not really. But with Gunderson at his side, he might be able to make it-and the chance to actually meet The Friend after all this time made it worth the effort. Besides which, as any leader knew, it was never a good idea to reveal weakness to one’s lessers, not if one might need them for whatever the future held.

Three days, to make his way down the length of the country; three days to reconsider what failure meant.

If failure it was. One thing Brothers knew was that the Fates took a mysterious hand in all human acts. If his long and laboriously constructed Great Work had fallen apart, if the blood on the Stenness altar stone had failed to unite with the timing of the solar eclipse, if an accumulation of blood and Energies had spilt out for naught, then either the Fates were cruel, or he had not understood the demands of the Work.

He wished he had someone to talk this over with. MacAuliffe had as much sense as one of the sheep bleating outside the door, and Gunderson was little more than a useful tool. Yolanda would be the ideal ear, willing, if uncomprehending, but his one-time wife was dead now, in what he had thought would be a key element of his Work.

Which brought him in a circle again: What had happened?

Brothers shifted in the chair in front of the smoke-blackened stones, wincing as the sharp pain grabbed at his breast. The powerful homebrew in the glass helped take the edge off it, but the prospect of travel was not a happy one.

Gunderson would help. With all kinds of problems.

The clever young man stood at the wide window with a glass in his hand, looking through his reflection at midnight London. Standing as he was, his head’s shadow engulfed most of the houses of Parliament, the white streak over his temple overlaid the face of its famous clock, his chest engulfed Westminster Bridge and the hungry, flat, greasy River Thames, while his raised right elbow rested on the palace of the archbishop.

God of all he surveyed.

His presence in this place was a quirk, an anomaly that would have surprised all who knew him, were they ever to be invited here. Grey and invisible minions of government did not live among the warehouses of London ’s South Bank, no more than did men whose ambitions encompassed government as his reflection encompassed Whitehall. Not that any of his colleagues knew of his ambitions, any more than they knew of his home.

The building had belonged to his grandfather, who had lost it-or, from whom it had been stolen-along with the rest of the family inheritance. The grandson was on medical leave in 1917, following the bullet that left him with a streak of white in his hair, when his restless wanderings brought him here, to an empty and derelict warehouse, part of its roof taken off by a zeppelin attack. He had made a surreptitious and scandalously low offer for it-a steal, one might say-and in his first deliberate act of self-concealment, become its owner. After the Paris talks he had returned to London and a new position, and now he stood at the big north-facing window in the modern flat raised up from the top floor, his outline a frame over the powers of the empire.

So appropriate, that dim outline. Nothing overt, no splashes of the politician’s mark or estate magnate’s hammer. Merely a shadow, colouring all it overlay.

He’d found it every bit as easy to construct a hidden life as it was to construct a charismatic façade or the reputation for front-line fortitude. Men liked him, women, too, and beguiled by the wit and easy charm, none of them noticed that they knew nothing about the man underneath.

Even Whitehall scarcely knew he was here. Few so much as suspected a presence among the anonymous halls.

Mycroft Holmes was one. He thought that, in recent months, Holmes had caught a faint trace of someone at his heels: Why slim down and take up with a lady, unless in a pointless drive to reclaim youth? However, he’d been looking over Holmes’ shoulder since 1921 without giving himself away-how else would he have known about the letter from Shanghai?