Chapter 7: A Letter Postmarked Geneva

The letter arrived on a Thursday, which Watson would later note was the only ordinary thing about it.

He found it on the floor beneath the mail slot when he came in at half past eight, still wearing his coat and carrying the particular exhaustion of a man who had slept badly and woken early and spent the intervening hours convincing himself he had not. The office smelled of cold ash from the previous night's fire and the faint chemical residue of the lamp oil he had let burn too low. He had been working late, which he did most evenings now, not because the work required it but because Montague Street at midnight was easier than Montague Street at nine with nothing to occupy his hands.

The other letters were routine. A printer's invoice. A circular from the British Medical Association that had followed him from his former practice address through two redirections and would, he suspected, continue to find him until one of them ceased to exist. A brief note from Lestrade, which he set aside to read properly over what he still, from habit, thought of as breakfast and which was increasingly just coffee and whatever bread had not yet gone stiff.