Holmes looked at me, unable to suppress a smile. ‘I hold there is more to this present case than we can possibly know, Watson. The second note. Doesn’t it indicate a very pretty little mystery?’
‘Titel?’ I queried.
‘Cast your mind back, Watson, to the time the Prince Regnant of Bulgaria asked us to change to second class carriages at Marchegg. Did you fail to note the instruction on one of the destination boards, ‘For Titel take the service to Novi-Sad/Újvidék’?’
‘Holmes!’ I exploded. ‘I’d have thought our time in Bulgaria was enough experience of the Balkans for any one life-time - once again we shall be in shot-and-powder country. If we suspect a jilted woman, why not Swabia or Zurich where Einstein spent so much time? By summer the whole of Serbia will be a boiling cauldron of disease. I invite you to take your pick of which pestilence you’d most like to send us to a premature grave. If malaria fails to harm us, there’s always typhus, cholera, measles and chicken-pox just over the horizon. Balkan rat fleas still carry the Yersinia pestis bacterium which causes the Black Death. By comparison the ravages of diphtheria in Birmingham in the 1870s will be as nothing.’
Holmes’s mouth twitched in a slight smile. ‘My dear Watson, whoever wrote those notes to Professor Sobel has decided we would be wasting our time anywhere but Serbia. At the very least Titel will take us far from Colonel Moran and his men. For a while longer you must suppress your desire for the amiable Mrs. Hudson’s green peas each evening at 7.30 sharp.’
He went on, ‘Did you notice the type of paper the notes were written on?’
‘Not especially. Only that it wasn’t Bohemian paper. As I recall, it was unbleached and similar to hard antique paper.’
‘Good, Watson. The paper is much too sturdy for normal correspondence. Given your time in Afghanistan with the Berkshires I’m surprised you failed to make more of it. I shall forgive you because such paper is no longer used by the major Powers for the tube section of shot-shells but such paper still continues to be used for encasing ammunition in the Balkans.’
‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘Cartridge paper!’
‘As to the cover role we should adopt,’ Holmes continued, ‘now you are without a camera, the same attire will do perfectly well for a fisher. I shall ask Mycroft to go to Hardy’s and arrange for a pair of ferruled fly rods to be delivered to us under assumed names, one for salmon, the other a single-handed for trout. I shall also request a collection of James Gregory lures - and some flies. How about Mr. W. Senior’s Red Spinners on a Snecky Limerick grilse hook? For cloudy days this fly should, I think, be dressed with a dark shade of tinsel and the coch-y-bondu hackle. What d’you say?’
My jaw dropped. Where had Homes picked up so much angling knowledge? Not once had I seen him on a river-bank, rod to hand.
That night I lay in bed retracing my steps during long-gone days and nights. The Alps triggered memories of the mountain ranges of Afghanistan in 1880 on the eve of the Battle of Maiwand. I recalled in vivid detail my first night sleeping under the stars. The rustle of trees. The hump-backed moon. The alarms and excursions, rumour and counter-rumour. Heliographs flashing in the rising sun. The crackle of Martini rifles.
I relived our punitive expedition’s early morning marches across rickety bridges over mountain streams to reach the Pass and confront Ayub Khan before he could lead his men a final fifty miles south-east to Candahar. Rumour circulated that St. Petersburg had supplied Ayub Khan with three thousand Turcoman cavalry. The rattle of our Gardner guns echoing Ayub’s superior Nordenfelts. Attack and counter-attack, cold then hot. The slaughter. The terrible heat. Suddenly, astonishingly, the galloper clattering up with the shout, ‘Sauve qui peut.’
The rout was over. We had lost what we had expected to be one of the lesser hill wars. Out of the Brigade’s two-and-a-half thousand brave soldiers almost a thousand lay dead. The wounded endured the nightmare journey to a line of hospitals in Peshawar and Rawal Pindi, Deolali and Nowshera, where cholera awaited them. Young Rudyard Kipling later wrote of the battle:
There was thirty dead an’ wounded on the ground we wouldn’t keep -
No, there wasn’t more than twenty when the front began to go -
But, Christ! along the line o’ flight they cut us up like sheep,
An’ that was all we gained by doing so.
I thought of the rotting, uncoffined bodies of the dead in the mortuary-tents. I thought more cheerfully of Bobbie, the regimental mascot, wounded like me at Maiwand but able to make his way back unaided to his kennel at the fort, to die many happy years later, safe in England’s bosom. The campaign had brought promotion and honours to many, but for my Army career it had nothing but misfortune. With the shoulder wound, my time in the East had come to its end.
In the morning a dog-cart bearing the insignia of the Swiss mails clattered up to the Hotel Pension Stechtelberg. It brought the fishing equipment sent by the assiduous Mycroft. He had included a brand-new copy of Philip Geen’s What I Have Seen While Fishing and How I Have Caught My Fish. The Angling guide was accompanied by a slip with the author’s scribbled words: ‘Dr. Watson. From the President of the London Anglers. See you at Euston Jan. 14. Bring Lob worms. Long live shoals of 3lb roach’.
I had met the grand old salmon-fisher some years before when I set out to entice Holmes to follow in Boswell’s and Dr. Johnson’s footsteps through the Highlands and Western Isles. Instead, Holmes had turned the proposed fishing trip to Scotland into an opportunity to rid himself of my company for a while. I found myself companionless in the smoking saloon of a sleeping-car surrounded by a merry and boisterous crew of gentlemen, fishermen all. They suffered from the insidious malady my medical skills could never remedy, spring salmon fever.
Chapter VI
We Meet Mileva
Our bicycles took us through Berne’s narrow streets, past sandstone facades, fountains and historic towers to the Café Bollwerk. A waiter led us to a vacant table at the café’s outermost circle. We sat among solid burghers of Mitteleuropa in linen suits and Leghorn straw hats. The air was rank with the highly scented tobacco smoked incessantly by gaggles of talkative students. We had been there ten minutes when a young man of open countenance came towards us and greeted us.
‘I’m Michele Besso. I heard from Professor Sobel you would be here. He mentioned you are very kindly donating your beautiful bicycles to the Olympia academicians.’
He continued, ‘Would it be all right if I sit with you for a while? I so wanted to meet you, Mr. Holmes.’
We called a waiter and ordered coffee. Holmes said, ‘I observe from your forefinger that you make your own cigarettes. Have no hesitation in lighting one,’ at which our young visitor drew out paper and tobacco and twirled the one up in the other with great dexterity.
‘I hear you’re a close colleague of Einstein?’ I put encouragingly.
‘At the Patents’ Office they call us the Eagle and the Sparrow,’ he agreed, adding with a rueful laugh, ‘I hardly need to tell you which of us is the sparrow.’
He lit the cigarette and continued, ‘Mr. Holmes, I have heard you are something of an expert on the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic. Perhaps you can give us some advice. Albert and I are trying to solve a problem that’s been discussed for more than fifty years, the anomalous advance of Mercury’s perihelion. We have checked whether other theories - Henri Poincaré’s especially, or those of Minkowski, Abraham or Nordström - can account for the Mercury anomaly. None of them can.’ He added, ‘Had you not disposed of Professor Moriarty, Albert and I may well have consulted him on the matter.’