Author's Note: My apologies for the long wait between parts 28 and 29 and the rather brief nature of part 29; I have been rather unwell recently, plagued with constant migraines which are currently under investigation; I am hopeful that the MRI I will be undergoing next week will give us some idea what's going on and lead to some form of effective treatment. In the meantime, I shall endeavour to post up chapters as and when I can, and thank my readers for their forbearance and patience.

Irene stared down at the river, the gaslights from the bridge reflecting like miniature moons upon the black, oily waters. She stared at her hands as they rested on the stone balustrade; she thought she could still see traces of blood if she stared hard enough at the chipped, broken nails. She pulled her gaze unwillingly from her hands and returned to staring at the water.

He had been gone when she returned to the wharf; she didn't know why she had seemed to expect otherwise, really. She hadn't been exactly thinking straight at the time. She'd sat beside the broken stones for some time, staring at the dried blood; long enough that a bargeman had called up to her from his boat to ask if she was all right, stirring her from her reverie. She'd stood then, and for the first time noticed the new marks – the paw prints of a dog, bloodied mud betraying the splayed paws of a small hound beside those of a man with a walking cane.

No – two sets of prints; two men with canes, two dogs. One man's prints were familiar to her – the good doctor's; she wondered where he'd come by the dog, as the paw prints were not those of Gladstone, she was certain. The other set belonged to an older, heavier man; the imprint of the cane was deeper, the stride shorter. The doctor had come back later and found Holmes gone, and followed with his dog. Dusting off her skirts, she followed the marks as far as the road, where they became obliterated by the traffic.

She'd wandered aimlessly after that, allowing the buffeting crowd that jostled her along the streets guide her footsteps until finally she found herself alone, cast out from press of humanity that thronged the street to catch her breath awhile against the cold stone and steel of Westminster Bridge in the shadow of St Stephen's Tower. She folded her arms upon the stone and rested her head upon them, head canted a little to one side as she continued to stare down into the cold forbidding waters, watching the boats that yet still plied the river even at this time of the evening. London never truly slept; its wakefulness was different to that of New York, she mused. New York's energy was brash and young, the feel of youth and hope. London was an older, more insidious wakefulness; the energy of an older time, one that had no need of sleep any more. It was the wakefulness of a brooding behemoth, its arterial roads and backstreet veins teeming with dark life and swift death, the shadowed gazes of low women, the quick keenness of a stiletto blade before blood hides its betraying silver from the gaze of the moon. Money and lives trading hands and places away from the bright sunlight of respectable society. If New York was where one went to make one's fortune, then London was the place one came to lose it, or be lost one's self. It cared not one whit for a lonely woman who leaned upon one of the many bridges spanning the heart of the Thames and mused upon things lost, amongst them herself and all she held dear.

Her eyes tracked without really seeing the boats below; without fully realising it she followed the movement of a small steamer as it hugged the wall below the silent Houses of Parliament. Something about the boat seemed to ring an alarm bell in her mind, and she straightened up, eyes narrowing as she focussed more fully upon its motion. There were no lights upon the boat – a strange thing at this time of the evening. It was chugging quietly along, a bare span of perhaps feet away from the stone wall as it approached the bridge. She started to walk slowly along the bridge back towards the north bank, never taking her eyes off the boat as she went.

One of the crew on board the boat opened the firebox door to shovel in more coal, and in that brief flare of orange light she could see others on board the boat – a man in a top hat, pointing up ahead with a cane, and two other men holding a third between them. As she watched, the third man's head rolled back, and her eyes widened in recognition. Her breath caught in her throat as the orange light was extinguished; clutching her skirts, she darted between the traffic upon the bridge and thrust her way past the throng upon the other side, fighting her way to the stone balustrade and leaning over in time to see the boat re-emerge from beneath the bridge. In the faint light from the street lights lining the bridge, she could see a little more clearly into the back of the boat as it pulled over closer to a sewer outlet that breached the wall near the waterline. She recognised that grille all too well; had she not climbed inside in the company of that man who sagged between his captors, head lolling back in unconsciousness, the moonlight playing over those pale features, that wild tousled black hair she knew so well?

The boat halted beside the sewer grate, and a shadowy figure stepped across to open the small sallie-gate. As Irene made her way back up to the north bank and along the embankment, she could see the top-hatted figure step across and through the open gate, followed by the two men carrying the unconscious Sherlock Holmes.