For many years Holmes had resisted any return to the Reichenbach Falls. When I mooted the idea some five years earlier Holmes responded tersely, ‘You must drop it, Watson; you really must, you know’. On another occasion Madame Tussaud’s offered Holmes a substantial sum to advise on Moriarty’s wax portrait. It would portray the look of horror on the arch-criminal’s face as he slipped over the cliff edge to his doom, one hand reaching up like a vulture clawing at the sky. The commission was rejected out of hand.
I was at a loss for a ruse to lure Holmes back to the Falls. The matter was complicated by a not-especially attractive attribute Holmes shared with the Ottoman Turk. From the moment his ears picked up the word ‘no’ falling from his own lips it seemed nothing in the world would oblige him to retract it. Like the chameleon fixating its prey, I stared at him as he stooped over his latest chemical experiment. He stood sideways to me, attired in his mouse-coloured dressing-gown. Sherlock Holmes’s physiognomy at rest has been compared to the famed Red Indian chief Sitting Bull. My recent visit to the Bristol City Museum’s Assyrian and Egyptian mummy gallery showed how remarkably similar he was in profile to Horemkenesi, the Egyptian 11th Century B.C. priest and official.
My gaze switched to the cold roast of beef on our sideboard left by our kindly landlady to ensure Holmes did not go hungry through an arduous chemical night. Letters which he at some point planned to answer were pinned down on the mantel-shelf by a jack-knife. One letter was from a Miss Julia Freeman, captain of the Glynde Butterflies Stoolball team. Would Holmes come to Lewes to umpire the final match of the season against the formidable Chailey Grasshoppers? The Great Western Railway begged permission to name their newest locomotive after Holmes. Another invited him to address the Three Hours for Lunch Club, the event in question set for some weeks past. A sudden emission of a vile gas from an over-heated boiling tube sent my companion gasping backwards. A flying hand knocked the microscope to the floor. Still choking, Holmes retreated from the chemical corner towards the half-open window. He flung it wide to encourage an exchange of our gas-laden air with the fetid air of Baker Street.
If Holmes could be persuaded to return to the Falls, photographic equipment would pose no problem. Readers of The Case Of The Bulgarian Codex will recall how the Prince Regnant of Bulgaria presented me with a mahogany Sanderson Bellows camera in Sofia in 1900. I had left it behind in our Baker Street lodgings in the move to my new practice in West Kensington. The magnificent creation still stood in prime place in a corner of our sitting-room. Professional photographers were turning to smaller cameras, especially roll-film models. I intended to stay with my older, trusted, wooden Sanderson though I had been tempted by the sight of a brass-bound Meagher among the pages of advertisements in the Strand for Rowlands’ Kalydor (‘Cools and refreshes the face and arms of Ladies, and all exposed to the Hot Sun and Dust’), and tins of Abdulla’s Egyptian Tobacco Mix.
I stared affectionately at the Sanderson. It almost vibrated in anticipation of a visit to the Alps. All it needed was a trip to the photographic specialists to replace the focusing screen and check the bellows. Throw in a box of unexposed Paget plates and the commission was tantalisingly within my grasp yet - unless I could come up with some inducement to persuade Holmes - desperately distant.
For a good while I sat by a fire still a-glow from the previous night, the tiny flames flickering across the sea-coals. My comrade abandoned work with test-tubes and resorts and leant at the open window. He held the lace curtain aside, looking languidly down at the street. I reached across to the day’s first edition of The Times. The inside pages briefly reported a terrible shoe factory disaster in Massachusetts. An exploding boiler caused the four-story wooden building to collapse. I turned the page. Elsewhere plans were afoot to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. J.M.W. Turner’s fine painting of the 98-gun ship ‘Temeraire’ would take centre stage at the National Gallery.
A headline caught my eye: ‘DISCOVERER OF THEFIRST PYGMY HIPPOPOTAMI KNOWN TO SCIENCE VISITS THE REGENT’S PARK HEADQUARTERS OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON’. The article continued:
This afternoon at 3 o’clock Dr. Johann Büttikofer, Director of the Zoological Garden at Rotterdam, will present a public lecture on discoveries made during his explorations of the Liberia interior in 1879-1882 and 1886-1887. Dr. Büttikofer collected the first complete specimens known to science of the pygmy hippopotamus, now at the Natural History Museum of Leiden. In recognition of this signal achievement, Switzerland’s largest university, the University of Berne, awarded Dr. Büttikofer a dr. h.c. in Natural Sciences.
‘An Honorary Doctorate!’ I exclaimed under my breath. ‘Of course! That might do it!’With as casual an air as I could muster I said, ‘I feel in need of fresh air. I’ll take a short walk in the Regent’s Park.’
‘Will you indeed?’ came the response. ‘I had no idea you were interested in the pygmy hippopotamus.’
‘Why, how on - ?’
Holmes spluttered with laughter, pleased at my astonishment. ‘You confess yourself utterly taken aback, Watson?’
‘I do,’ I admitted.
‘My reasoning was simple enough. You are not interested in the Shipping News. You turn to the inside pages. You skim over the foiled attempt to steal the original manuscript of Dickens’s Great Expectations. You alight on a small piece on wife-beating and move on to a report about the murder of two shopkeepers in south London, solved by the use of fingerprinting technique - I have long said that fingerprinting is almost as good as footprints-finally you fixate on the fifth column of the page, towards the bottom. Now you yank your venerable hunter from the left pocket of your waistcoat pocket but you distrust the time it offers. You raise your head and stare hard at our grandfather clock. With surprising agility for a man of your age and condition you leap to your feet.’
Holmes pointed at the newspaper in my hand. ‘Only one article inside today’s Times referred to an event taking place at a specific hour this afternoon, namely a lecture at the Regent’s Park Zoo at 3 o’ clock. Indeed you must hurry, Watson. It’s already a quarter past two.’
‘My dear Holmes,’ I protested, ‘it’s hardly a surprise that a lecture on exotic creatures attracts my interest. During my time in Gilgit-Baltistan I was considered an expert on the species of wild goat known as the markhor.’
On this immodest note I took my hat and made a hurried exit. Within minutes I was in the Regent’s Park en route to the Zoo. I crossed Clarence Bridge, passing lines of governesses seated in the shade of vast old horse-chestnuts while their charges played around them. The sun’s light filtered down on the pages through the striking white upright inflorescences typical of the species. It was impossible to enter the Park on a fresh spring morning not to have a song in your heart.
It was my fervent hope that an offer of an Honorary Doctorate from a Swiss university would tickle my comrade’s fancy - and so draw us back to the Bernese Oberland, the site of the Reichenbach Falls. At the end of the lecture I approached our speaker, Dr. Büttikofer. An admirer of Sherlock Holmes’s work, he readily agreed to contact the Rector at Berne University.
Chapter III
Holmes Receives the Offer of a Doctorate
I saw little of Holmes over the next few days. He was out when the post brought a large envelope stamped Universitas Bernensis. I eased the flap open. Dr. Büttikofer had done his job well. It contained the offer of an Honorary Doctorate contingent on Holmes’s acceptance. I resealed the envelope and quit my breakfast before the marmalade stage.