THE CASE OF THE CHELMFORM CHEMIST By Brian Small Copyright 2004 The year 1899 was a busy one for my friend, Sherlock Holmes. His fame as a detective had made him wealthy and his services were much in demand by prominent figures throughout England and Europe. It is safe to say there was scarcely a person who did not know his name. Many of his most memorable cases had been laid before the public by the press, and I had published accounts of several in my capacity as Holmes' unofficial chronicler. None of his cases, however, was as strange and interesting as the disappearance of the Chelmford chemist. Unfortunately, Holmes had insisted upon withholding the details because of his reticence to accept accolades for what he felt was a trifling matter. I had asked my friend's permission on several occasions to change his mind, but Holmes steadfastly refused. We were sitting in the cluttered but comfortable living area of our Baker Street quarters, with the windows open wide to admit the cool, fresh fall air, one day in late September, 1901, when the matter came up again, and surprisingly it was not raised by me. For some reason, as I snapped shut a dense medical volume, that case came to mind, and I sat remembering the affair. Holmes was absorbed in cataloguing and cross-referencing his impossibly large collection of coastal soil samples. He turned to me and said: "Well, Watson, perhaps it IS time to make Mr. Waverly Hanson the subject of one of your outrageously overblown accounts. Possibly I have been unfair in not allowing you to do so." I looked at Holmes, thunderstruck. "Good Lord, man. How could you possibly have known I was thinking of that very case?" Holmes smiled, and sat down at the table. "It was really quite simple," he said. "Once I outline for you the chain of events which led me to conclude that you were thinking about the poor chemist, you will see that, if you apply yourself, even you could have reached the same conclusion." "Really, Holmes," I retorted. "At times you can be quite insufferable." Holmes pretended he did not hear the anger in my voice, or perhaps, believing he had gone too far, looked away, and began to worry the dottle in his unlit pipe with a small penknife. "Once you put aside your book, I noted you began daydreaming," said Holmes, "so it became an exercise to see if I could determine what was occupying your thoughts. I had no success at first, because you were content to stare at the fireplace, and occasionally rub your ear. Within a few minutes, however, your attention shifted to the box containing your unpublished notes." He had loosened the charred tobacco in his pipe sufficiently to light it. "You stared at the box for some time, evidently recalling the cases we shared, but which you had not sent to print. One immediately came to mind--the missing Chelmford chemist--because you had on several occasions suggested it as a case for the public. My guess, for that is all it was at that point, was confirmed, however, when you then looked at the scar on the back of your left hand. I recalled you had badly torn the skin on your hand when you fell down the embankment at the edge of the quarry, and slid into the rusted metal tools at the bottom, as we searched for a path in the dark. "So far so good. But you clinched it when you glanced at the bookshelf by the door, and your eyes sought out the volume on chemistry. It is the only book on that side of the shelf, the rest of the space being taken up by my tobacco ash vials. So I was confident I could then astound you with my reasoning." I had to smile at the simplicity of it all, but a few minutes ago, could not possibly have pieced it together for myself. My flash of anger now forgotten, I chuckled and complimented Holmes upon arriving at the correct solution. He waved his hand impatiently. "It was nothing, my dear fellow. But I have to admit a certain pleasure at still being able to make you smile after all these years by my trifling observations." "Well, with your thankfully received permission, I will dig out my notes, and begin work on the manuscript," I said cheerfully. Holmes merely nodded, and arose to resume his work. As a medical man with a large practice, proper record-keeping is vital, and in fact, in some circumstances can represent the difference between life and death. So I had no difficulty in quickly finding the notes, bound together with brown ribbon, and filed in an envelope, which I had carefully archived. The facts in the case were simple enough. Mr. Waverly Hanson had been a chemist on Chelmford Mews, near Oxbow Street, for several years and his business had prospered. He was a man known in his neighborhood for his ethical business practices, quick wit, and well stocked shelves. He had married late in life, and his wife Mary, the daughter of the local Magistrate, became a fixture in his shop. She saw to it that the floors and shelves were kept spotless, for it was her view that the public's perception would be favorably impressed by cleanliness. She also went out every day at precisely 12:45 p.m. and walked the half-block to their residence, to prepare and bring back lunch. It was after one such sortie that she returned to the shop to discover her husband had disappeared. She was immediately suspicious, and very worried, for she knew he would never leave the premises with the door unlocked, even for a moment. After he did not return within 20 minutes, she locked the front door and hurried to find a constable. The case first came to our attention when the story was laid out in detail in the public press. There were endless speculations as to Hanson's whereabouts, but none could even begin to suggest how a man of his inflexible schedule and habits could disappear without a trace. In the days following, the case gradually faded from public interest, and the police, who were just as baffled by the mystery, went on about their business. It was two years ago, almost to the day, when events were to draw Holmes into the vortex of one of the most intriguing cases of his career. We had just finished a late lunch when Mrs. Hudson's distinctive tread could be heard on the stair. She approached Holmes, who was hunched over the flame from a small, noxious substance, wrinkled her nose in evident distaste, and announced she had just received a card at the front door. "It was delivered by Kerry, the coachman," she said. She quickly withdrew, the faster to escape the thickening fumes from Holmes' experiment. "Ah, our old friend Lestrade must have something on his mind," said Holmes. "He wants to stop by for a chat. And unless I miss my guess, it will in all probability have to do with the missing chemist." He spoke no more about the matter, and it was not until the appointed time, when Lestrade of Scotland Yard presented himself at the top of the staircase, that his supposition was proved correct. "As you know, Holmes," said Lestrade, after greetings were exchanged all round, "the affair of the chemist has given us some grief. We're at a loss to explain it. Even veterans have no idea how a man of Mr. Hanson's presence could just vanish without a trace." "Yes," said Holmes. "Judging from what I read in the papers, there have been no recent developments. But I have an idea you have one or two pieces of the puzzle which you want to present to me for my opinion." Lestrade shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and frowned. "Well, I do have something which I found most unusual, and thought it might have a bearing on the case, but I'm not even able to say why I think that. Perhaps it is that this envelope," he said, reaching for his lettercase, "is so strange in itself, that it seemed somehow linked to the disappearance of the chemist. But I must say, this may be a complete waste of time." Holmes smiled. "Time spent in your company is never time wasted, my good Lestrade," he said. Lestrade allowed himself an embarassed smile, then handed what looked like an envelope to Holmes. Seated next to Holmes, I was able to see immediately it was a rough, obviously hand-made envelope, which had what appeared to be dried tree leaves attached to the outside. Holmes examined the rough package closely, then jumped to his feet with a start and using his strong glass, scanned the envelope front and back. "I must say, Lestrade, if it were not for the message spelled out by the leaves, I would say this is some kind of prank." "That was my thought too," said Lestrade. "What do you make of it?" "I make nothing of it, except that someone made this package using a square of old wallpaper, and sealed the edges with some unknown substance, probably porridge; the package was made no more than four days ago, as evidenced by the hardness of the porridge; the person who made the package is being held captive; his prison is most certainly a stone cottage, likely abandoned; and the message spelled out by these 'leaves' on the surface of the envelope, which I'm certain you have noted, Lestrade, instructs the finder to 'GeT HeLP'. "And, other than the fact that these leaves actually grow in the shape of the letters they form, which of course is an impossibility, I can deduce nothing more," said Holmes. "But Holmes," blustered Lestrade, "surely someone has taken the trouble to cut the letters out of leaves?" "My dear friend, even a cursory examination with a magnifying glass will enable you to see the leaves are in pristine condition. No, the letters have not been cut out. They actually grow that way. And I am at a loss to explain how that is possible." He nodded toward the cluttered bookcase. "You may have read the monograph I wrote for the Royal Botanical Society in which I described in detail, with sketches, the leaves of all the trees in the British Isles. None grow in the shape of letters." He returned his attention to the envelope. "It occurs to me that the leaves were fresh when picked, since they are not quite dry. There are still hints of green in the areas around the veins, so that would suggest they were dark green in color, much like a summer maple leaf. How did you come by this singular letter, Lestrade?" "A young delivery boy who cycles round his route brought it in to the Yard yesterday. He said that upon his return to the shop the previous evening, he found the letter tucked into the leather carry-all bag which rides on the frame over the rear wheel of his bicycle. And he was honest enough to say the letter contained a sovereign, which he took to mean the bearer was to keep for delivering the letter to police. We were delighted to let him keep it." "Extraordinary," said Holmes. "And he has no idea how it came to be in his bag?" "No," said Lestrade, "And he was not at all helpful in remembering his stops. He had a great number, in many areas of the East End, but was able to provide us with a partial list. However with the shortage of staff at the Yard, no one has been assigned to follow up. And since there is no evidence of a crime, no one is likely to be assigned in any case." Holmes prised open the envelope with his thumb and peered inside. "More leaves. As I expected." He dumped them onto the table and spread them out with great care. I noted a jumble of clearly defined letters, many capital letters and many letter combinations, evidently of what Holmes felt were tree leaves. I was still not convinced, but kept my own counsel. He went to the oak cabinet, took out a roll of paper, tore off a section, cleared a place on the table to receive it, and began laying out the leaves. "Well, I see no great mystery here," he said to Lestrade. "It will now be just a matter of trying all the permutations and combinations until I can reproduce the intended message. But you can be sure a crime has been committed, and I shall be glad to outline for you the message, and details of the crime, it you would be so good as to stop by again this evening. About 7 p.m.?" Lestrade nodded, and stood up. "Do you think it is related to the missing chemist?" he asked Holmes. "I do not have all the facts, so it is premature to say. But what I have learned certainly points in that direction. Until tonight, then," he said as he ushered Lestrade to the stairs. "Well, well, this case is certainly unique," said Holmes. "I can't recall another which presented so many points of interest. But as I told Lestrade, there is still work to be done." "Then you will have no objection to me taking my leave, and stopping to visit Bartels while he is spending time with his daughter, while you do your investigations?" I asked. "Not at all," replied Holmes. "I should be obliged if you would hand me my Practical Chemistry guide on your way out." Ahh, I thought, he will be trying to discover if indeed there exists a tree of which he is unaware. I took down the book, handed it to him, and left him thumbing through the volume. Four hours had passed, and it was dusk when I returned to Baker Street. Holmes, sitting in the chair by the window, was hidden behind a huge blue cloud of smoke from his pipe. "Ah, Watson. Did you find Bartels in good spirits?" "Yes indeed. A little overweight, perhaps, but in very good spirits. And what of you, Holmes? Have you solved the mystery?" He emerged from the smoke, grinning broadly, and walked toward the table. "Yes," he said with a chuckle. "It was actually quite simple. There remain several features still to be sorted out, but with your help, I think we can deliver Hanson to safety this very evening, if you fancy a trip across town to the dockyards area." Holmes pointed to the leaves he had arranged on the paper. "It was a message from Hanson, somehow slipped into the delivery boy's saddlebag, and it was only the work of a few minutes to arrange the leaves into the proper sequence to arrive at this message." I glanced down, and was able to read the following: HANSON OK LiON SWAN GaTe PATh "Remarkable, Holmes. Well, the first part of the message is clear enough, although I am at a loss to explain what the rest of it means." At that moment Mrs. Hudson appeared on the stair with Lestrade close behind. "Well, Mr. Holmes, it's delightful to be out on a pleasant night. It will be even more so if you can shed some light on that affair with the leaves." "Indeed I can, Lestrade," said Holmes, motioning the detective over to the table. He waved his hand over the display on the table, and began to explain what the message meant. "Of course, the good news is that Hanson is alive and well, or at least was when this singular method of communication was conceived. As I sorted through the leaves, I quickly found the letters for Hanson's name, because I had expected to find them. "It then became a matter of educated trial and error to rearrange the remainder of the leaves to establish what the writer intended us to read. I thought it suggestive that while most of the letters are capitals, there are some leaves which form a capital letter and a small letter. Look...here is Li, and here is Ga. Here is Te. Now examine the leaves on the envelope-- 'GeT HeLP'. Upon close inspection, it turns out that the words are formed by leaves, some of which are actually folded and then glued with the foreign substance, which by the way proved to be porridge, as I suggested. "I carefully unfolded the leaves on the envelope, and the letters now read: GeTh HFeLiP "It immediately became evident that the writer of this note not only had no access to a writing implement, otherwise why would he use this method of communicating in the first place? but he also did not have access to an entire leaf alphabet of capital letters. Therefore, to write the message on the front, he had to use some leaves with one intended letter and one unintended. For example, to write GeT, the last letter, originally Te, was folded so that only the T was visible. "By some coincidence, I had recently finished reading Lord Rayleigh's latest revision of the brilliant Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev's first Periodic Table, and so the capital letter-small letter combinations was suggestive. Li then stood for Lithium, discovered by Arfvedson in 1817. Ga was of course for Gallium, discovered by de Boisbaudrain in 1875. Te stood for Tellurium, discovered by von Reichenstein more than a century ago. "And it was fortunate that the author of this ingenuous note used Rayleigh's Periodic Table, for he and his colleagues Ramsay and Travers were able to place Neon in the updated table, and as you note, the letter N is used no less than three times in this message." "Well, Holmes, you have convinced me," boomed Lestrade. "Had I spent some time studying the contents of this envelope, I know I would have eventually sorted it out myself, but with the number of cases I'm working on at the moment, I felt you would have more time to look into this little problem." "Indeed, Lestrade," said Holmes. "I'm surprised you didn't decipher the note while on your way over here in your police wagon yesterday. But I think it's time to act if we are to rescue the unfortunate chemist from his imprisonment before midnight." "...er, where will we be going?" Lestrade asked meekly, glancing again at the note. "Why, my friend, to the Lion and Swan, a most dreary watering hole for the scum who inhabit the dockyards. As the writer of this note suggests, we might follow the path that leads through the gate." Within minutes, we three were enjoying a wild ride across London in Lestrade's police wagon. The driver was cracking his whip over the horses, and needed no further encouragement to make haste, as Lestrade had ordered. An hour passed, and we began to encounter signs that we were nearing the waterfront. It was not long before we slowed, then stopped, so we could approach the tavern on foot. We soon came upon a dark, dirty building, from which loud shouts and wafts of foul smoke emenated. Most of the paint had flaked off the oval sign hanging over the door which identified the tavern as the Lion and Swan. A preliminary walk-around convinced us we would not be able to find the gate or the path from the front. Further exploration revealed a narrow opening through a tangled mass of trees and bushes which seemed to head in the right direction, and in the dim light of a half-moon we set out to find the prison where Holmes believed Hanson was being kept. It was a few minutes later that I came suddenly upon the old quarry, and slipped down the very edge, cutting my hand in the process. I tied my handkerchief around the wound, and gritting my teeth against the pain, continued on. We soon came upon a moldering limestone shed, and Holmes signalled us to halt. He carefully examined the building and discovered the lone window at the back was heavily barred. We crept through the trees, which completely concealed the shed from the tavern 70 yards away, to find the heavy door was secured with two bars and padlocks. "Wait here," Holmes whispered to us. "I shall try to contact Hanson." He returned to the window, but we could hear nothing. A moment later, Holmes' gaunt form loomed out of the darkness. "Well, the missing chemist is indeed locked in that building," Holmes whispered. "He is gagged and shackled, but I have no doubt a stout iron bar will make short of those locks, and also his shackles." Such proved to be the case, and within minutes the pale and shivering prisoner stepped into the moonlight a free man again. We led him through the woods, and in no time were speeding toward Scotland Yard, where in due course we learned Hanson's story. His wife had no sooner left the shop when two men entered, and forced Hanson to open the safe. The intruders evidently expected something else, for after shuffling through the papers that were inside, slammed the door and demanded cash. Hanson said he had no idea what they were talking about, and despite being threatened, stuck to his story. The two men then decided to kidnap him to see if they could make him talk. After a few days, the criminals realized Hanson had no cash on site, as an ex-employee of Hanson's shop had loudly proclaimed over many ales at the pub owned by the intruders. Hanson offered to lead them to a bank, where he would withdraw a large amount of money to buy his freedom. But it now dawned on the pair that they had set a trap for themselves...Hanson knew where he was, and he would be able to offer police a full discription of the duo. So they kept him locked up until they could come up with a plan. "I discovered quite by accident that a tree growing right outside the window contained leaves shaped like letters, so by using a hook I crafted from the materials I found in the old shed, was able to pull branches down to my cell window to gather the letters I needed. "You correctly deduced I used a section of old wallpaper to create the envelope, and that horrid porridge that was served twice a day to paste everything together. My hope was that someone would discover the note, read it, and accept the sovereign as compensation for taking my note to police. However, the remoteness of the shed made that an impossibility. "By good fortune, one day later I heard someone outside, and spotted a bicycle leaning against the wall, right below the window. The rider was nowhere in sight, so using the hooked stick I was able to manoeuver my note into his bag and pull the top closed. At that very moment, I heard someone unlocking the padlocks, and only had time to hide the hook before one of my captors barged in. He had seen the cyclist, whom it appears was just taking a break from his rounds, and thought I might have been in contact with him. He and his partner then chained me to the wall, secured my feet, and gagged me, just as you found me. "And from the hints they dropped, I knew they had something unpleasant planned for me. "So I had resigned myself to my fate. And then I heard Mr. Holmes at the window, whispering to me to tell him the chemical symbol for Lithium. Even with a gag on, I blurted out a muffled answer. And I was fortunate that you were able to find a bar nearby strong enough to break the locks and set me free. I am deeply indebted to you all," he nodded in our direction. "We have four officers on their way to the tavern at this moment," said Lestrade, taking charge of the situation. "I should be surprised if we don't have the kidnappers in custody within the hour. And your wife is on her way compliments of my own hansom, so you can expect to be reunited very shortly." He turned to us. "Mr. Holmes, your help in this case is appreciated. Once again you have been able to sort out some of the details for us. And now I must say goodbye, as the paperwork for me is only just beginning." We shook hands, and Holmes and I took our leave. "Harrumph," I grumbled. "Lestrade is most often a pompous ass, and never more so than in this case. He thanks you for your HELP? Good Lord, man, you SOLVED the case." "Don't worry, Watson," said Holmes. "I'll get my reward later this week, when I can convene a meeting of the Royal Botanical Society under the tree beside Mr. Hanson's prison. For unless I am mistaken, that tree represents an entirely new genus, never before identified." And that's exactly what happened. Although it was late in the season for deciduous trees to be in leaf, there were enough letter-leaves still on the branches for the astounded botanists to see them in situ. Society President Wesley Hobbs, a long-time friend of Holmes, patted the detective on the shoulder, and announced to the scientists in his meeting-hall voice: "My friend Holmes will become more famous than ever after this wonderful discovery. Imagine, a tree whose leaves form the symbols of all known chemical elements." There was a loud burst of applause. I joined in the accolades. "Well Holmes," I said, " I should imagine as discoverer of this tree you'll be entitled to name it. Have you given any thought to what you intend to call it?" He smiled deeply, and put his lanky arm around my shoulder. "Yes. It will be called elementum arborus," he said. " Element Tree, my Dear Watson." Brian Small labatt50