We took the tube to Epping the next day and reached Warrendel School at half past three in the afternoon. The main building was behind a huge sports ground. It was probably two hundred years old. Feluda wanted to find out if Ranjan Majumdar had really been a student there and whether there had been a Peter Dexter in his class. A hall porter met us at the front door. ‘I would like some information about one of your ex-students. He studied here many years ago, in the late forties,’ Feluda told him. The porter took us to what looked like a library. ‘Mr Manning here may be able to help you,’ he said. Mr Manning was seated behind a desk, writing busily in a notebook. Feluda cleared his throat softly. He looked up. ‘Yes?’ Feluda explained what he wanted. ‘Right. Which year did you say?’ ‘1948.’ Mr Manning rose and fetched a fat ledger from a shelf. Then he put it on his desk and sat down again. ‘What name did you say?’ he asked, quickly leafing through the pages. ‘I didn’t. The name’s Majumdar. Ranjan Majumdar.’ ‘I see. Majumdar . . . Majumdar . . .’ he began running his finger through a list and stopped abruptly. ‘Yes, here it is. R. Majumdar.’ ‘Thank you. Could you check another name for us, please? Dexter. Peter Dexter. Was he in the same batch?’ ‘Dexter . . . no, I see no Dexter here.’ ‘Oh. Would you be so kind as to look up the 1949 list as well? Maybe Dexter came a year later?’ Mr Manning was most obliging. Sadly, though, there was no mention of Peter Dexter in the 1949 list, either. There was no point in wasting more time. ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ Feluda said to Mr Manning. ‘You have been most helpful.’ On our way back to Piccadilly, Feluda said, ‘If we went to Cambridge and made enquiries, I am pretty sure we could learn something about Dexter. Still, I think it might not be a bad idea to put a small notice in the personal column of the Times.’ ‘What will you say in your notice?’ ‘If anyone knows anything about a Peter Dexter of Norfolk, he should contact me at my hotel.’ ‘What do you think you are going to achieve by this?’

‘I don’t know. Look, if we simply went to Cambridge, we might find his name in an old list of students. But that wouldn’t tell us anything about the man, would it? An ad in a paper might bring better results, who knows?’ ‘But that will take three or four days, surely?’ Lalmohan Babu asked. ‘No, the ad should come out in two days. If we get a free day, we’ll explore London. There’s so much to see. Have you heard of Madame Tussaud’s?’ ‘Where there are the waxworks of famous people?’ ‘Yes, then there are the art galleries, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, St Paul’s Cathedral . . . you might get blisters on your feet walking, but you couldn’t finish seeing everything in a day.’ ‘When will you go to the office of the Times?’ ‘Today. Hopefully, the notice will come out the day after tomorrow.’ ‘OK then, we can spend all day tomorrow just sightseeing, can’t we?’ ‘Certainly.’ Madam Tussaud’s was a remarkable place. Even the porters who stood in front of certain rooms were made of wax and amazingly lifelike. The chamber of horrors gave me the creeps. When we came out of Madam Tussaud’s, Feluda began walking without telling us where we were going. Puzzled, Lalmohan Babu and I followed him silently. Suddenly, my eyes fell on a sign fixed high up on the wall of a building, that told me which street we were in. ‘Baker Street’, it said. Sherlock Holmes used to live in 221-B Baker Street. Now I knew what Feluda was looking for. As it turned out, there was no house with that number, but we found number 220. That was good enough. Feluda stood before that building and murmured softly, ‘Guru, you showed us the way. If I am an investigator today, it is only because of you. Now I can say coming to London was truly worthwhile.’ I knew how deeply Feluda admired Holmes and his methods. He had told me how the creator of Holmes, Conan Doyle, had once killed the famous detective. But his readers had made such an enormous fuss that he was obliged to bring him back. I realized that seeing the sights of London would have remained incomplete if we hadn’t seen Baker Street.