Elementary

by william Todd

  “Quite right,” Holmes replied. “Still…”

  “Do you wish to talk to the widow or see the crime scene first?” the inspector asked as we made the landing.

  “The crime scene, of course,” said Holmes.

  “Just to get your bearings,” Lestrade then said pointing around them, “that room under the stairs to the loft is the Austins’ bedroom. That is where Mrs. Austin was when she heard the shot. The kitchen is through there with the dining room beyond in a large alcove that opens onto back stairs. The parlor is through that door. There is a second sitting room through that archway. That is where the widow is currently at rest with Parker, there, at the entrance to attend to whatever she may need while we investigate.”

  Holmes and I both gave the young constable a once-over. He had removed his waterproof, which lay in a pile on the floor next to him. His thick, brown hair clung to his forehead as it dried out from the inclement weather, and his uniform, though mostly dry, was discoloured from wetness about his collar, cuffs, and pantlegs. He was a vigorous looking man with a chiseled, clean-shaven jaw that bulged a bit on one side, thin lips, and intense blue eyes. His musculature filled out his uniform impressively, and I could see why Lestrade would think it would take some feat to outrun someone with such an athletic build. Yet a head start and weather that would obscure anything over a half-block away surely tipped the balance in favor of the blackguard in his escape. His demeanor, as he silently looked upon us as we walked by, was one of disappointment. He no doubt also felt as though the murderer should not have escaped his clutches.

  The stairway to the loft was open with a sturdy banister on one side and a high wall to accommodate the ample ceiling height on the other. At the top of the steps was an open door, and here Lestrade held out his hand and bid us enter the room.

  The area before us was a spectacular display of test tubes, Bunsen burners, placards of the periodic table of elements, glass and rubber tubing and receptacles of all shapes and sizes, all lit by electric light. The whole place had a haphazard, wild look about it—a jungle of laboratory paraphernalia. Along the wall to the left was a bookshelf filled with works from Watt, Faraday, Newton, Frankland, and Strindberg (who I knew not as a scientist but as a playwright and novelist), as well as some names that were unfamiliar to me. Next to it was a glass cabinet filled with numerous chemicals. I am sure that if Holmes had devoted his life to chemistry instead of the art of detecting, this would have been a good start to his laboratory.

  Our murdered alchemist, Mr. Austin, lay slumped over the desk to our right. There was a small, blood-soaked hole in his white shirt in the area just below his right shoulder blade. The coppery scent of blood was faint yet discernable. In warmer weather, certainly up in a loft, it would be overpowering by now, but the cold climate had kept the odour at bay. The desk itself was centered at the only window in the loft.

  Holmes glanced at the floor then took in the state of the room before us before we gathered around the dead man and his desk. He then briefly peered out the window past our reflections at a dark, washed-out courtyard centered amongst the buildings. “No one would have been able to see anything from this height and at such a distance between habitations, especially in this weather, which blurs everything.” Holmes then asked as brought his critical eye closer to home, “What do you make of the wound, Watson?”

  As I examined the body, I couldn’t help but notice that the professor was young and comely, with dark hair and square, set features, not the rounded, balding and bespectacled type usually given over to academia, which Victor Montrose fit perfectly. A cup of cold tea was set before him, and he was still grasping his pencil when the fatal shot found its mark. I set about to examine the entrance wound a few inches below his right shoulder blade. I then pulled the body up from the desk to examine the larger exit wound slightly lower in the front. “It almost certainly went through his liver. This was not a survivable wound. It looks like the bullet is lodged in the front drawer of his desk.”

  “Yes, we’ll be retrieving that shortly,” remarked Lestrade. “Do you think death was instantaneous.”

  “No,” I replied. “I see no evidence of spurting, so I do not think the hepatic artery was hit. The exit wound is of sufficient size that if the artery was indeed hit the blood would have spurted out with every heartbeat. Nothing I see suggests that. On the contrary, the blood seems to have pooled in his lap. That would tell me that he more than likely exsanguinated—bled to death. It would have been a few minutes at most before he succumbed to his wound, but he would have been rendered unconscious from blood loss sometime before that.”

  “And these are the papers on which the professor was working when he was murdered?” Holmes asked, referring to a stack of about a dozen papers in front of the dead professor on the desk.

  “Yes, that’s right,” replied Lestrade stifling a cough and wiping his nose. “I looked them over myself. They are chemical equations of one sort or another. Between these and the paper the murderer ran off with, that is why I decided on asking for your assistance.”

  Holmes picked up the papers from the desk and looked over the first few pages. After about the fourth page he folded them up but kept them. He hmphed. “Mostly synthesis reactions and double displacement reactions. Common chemistry. Nothing of the speculative chemistry Montrose spoke of.”

  Lestrade knitted his brow. “Speculative chemistry? Where did you hear that from? Who is Montrose?”

  “The neighbor across the street, Mr. Montrose.”

  “Ah, the smoker.”

  “Did you know the smoker was a professor at the same

  university as Austin, albeit in a more junior capacity?”

  “I did not,” replied Lestrade.

  “Did you not think to ask during your normal line of questioning?”

  “I can see no relevance in a neighbor’s situation when asking if he had seen the perpetrator of murder running from a murder scene,” he said with a bit of annoyance.

  “Honestly, Lestrade, your lack of imagination in methods of inquiry are uninspiring.”

  The inspector pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his now ruddy nose. “Have I learned nothing from you Holmes, after all these years? I at least had the sense to know when I was out of my element to bring in someone with more expertise.” He then gave Holmes a wry smile. “Anyway, you only found that out because I asked you here. You could just as easily be back at Baker Street playing that whining violin of yours and missing out on all this.”

  Holmes began looking more closely at the desk. “Touché, Lestrade, how prescient of you.” He opened the top drawer. I saw nothing in it. However, I could tell by the look on Holmes’s face that its emptiness spoke volumes to him. Yet he said nothing, closed the drawer, turned, and began looking over the laboratory equipment.

  Lestrade’s eyes then became wide with excitement. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. You might find this interesting. Maybe more interesting than the dead professor.” He motioned for Holmes to follow him down to the end of a long counter at the opposite end of the room as the body. It seemed that all the vine-like coils and tubing seemed to be meandering their way to this particular area. It was here that we could see the fruits of Professor Austin’s labour. One long stretch of copper tubing ended at the opening of a small, glass flask. Dripping from the mouth of this small copper tube was a golden liquid which, it seemed to me, congealed or coalesced into a small, irregularly shaped fragment at the bottom of the flask as it rested in tiny amount of clear, yellowish liquid.

  As Holmes inspected the detritus in the flagon, I ran my eyes along the tubing, following it back to its origination at the opposite end hidden amongst piles of books and large flasks and graduated cylinders in need of washing. Here, sitting on a mesh-metal screen was a small, book-sized block of what to my eyes looked like lead. Another bluish liquid was awash and bubbling over the metal like an acid and was being collected through the mesh into a funnel. From there, the journey wound its way through sev
eral boiling liquids and condensers, which made its way back down the counter to where Holmes and Lestrade were standing.

  “Holmes, there is what looks to be a small block of lead at this end being dissolved by some unknown substance, possibly an acid of some sort,” said I.

  Holmes ran down to where I now stood, inspected the block, then followed the setup with his trained eye from one end, through all its twists and turns and tubes, all the way back to the small piece of gold material in the flask at the end.

  As Holmes inspected all this, Lestrade said, “Now, to my untrained eye it looks as though Professor Austin just might have solved the mystery of turning lead into gold.”

  “Or that is what he wanted everyone to believe,” replied my friend.

  “Looks like gold to me.”

  “It could be pyrite, ‘fool’s gold’,” said Holmes. He examined it further. “However, pyrite has a more cuboidal appearance to it. This might actually be gold.”

  “Could it be that he really discovered the ultimate secret of alchemy?” I asked. “The ramifications of this discovery have worldwide significance. A country would pay a king’s ransom to know this secret.”

  “Indeed,” remarked Lestrade. “Murder would be a small price to pay for such a discovery.”

  “It is an impossibility,” retorted Holmes steadfastly. “You were not an hour ago lamenting on that very remark.”

  “Yet, how do you explain this?” asked Lestrade.

  “Ah, if only answers came just when you summon them. If that were the case, I could have saved myself a fight to the death at Reichenbach and three years of my life, not to mention countless other inconveniences throughout my career. My methods do not work that way, you know that, Lestrade. Rest assured; the answers will come. They always do.”

  Holmes then decided to inspect the bookshelf and rummaged through the titles. He, at last, came upon a small volume bound in cracked leather, written in French. Holmes read the title out loud, “Wonders of the Alchemy of Compte De Saint Germain.”

  “Who the devil is he?” asked Lestrade.

  “He was one of the most enigmatic figures in history,” said Holmes. “No one knows with certainty who he was or from where he came, but he was a most intimate friend to many of the royalty of Europe a century and a half ago. He was believed by some to be five-hundred years old. It is because of this that he is also well-renowned as one of the most powerful alchemists who ever lived.”

  “Is it then possible that this volume is where Austin found the solution to alchemy?” I asked.

  Holmes waved the statement off. “I have read it myself, Watson. A dry, fantastical piece of fiction that would no doubt elicit full assault of conscience from our friend across the street. No, if the elixir of life and other nonsense were indeed written between the pages of this tome, someone long before our dead professor would have stumbled upon it.”

  “Well, he stumbled upon something,” said I. “Maybe the more relevant work is on the paper that was stolen.”

  Lestrade asked, “So, having now seen all this, what do you make of it all, so far?”

  “It poses several interesting theories, none of which I am as yet ready to propound. There are still missing threads that I need to knit together this little mystery. I believe I need to now speak with the widow.”

  It was then that Jefferies, Lestrade’s right-hand man, popped his gigantic head in the doorway and said, “We were able to find a few of Austin’s students at a pub, King George’s Seat, just down from the university.”

  “And?” Lestrade asked impatiently.

  “And none are suspects. The publican insists they were all there since at least eight, an hour before the murder.”

  “Do any have an idea who our mysterious intruder could have been?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Bloody hell!” Lestrade exclaimed. “I was sure with one of those students we’d have our man.”

  “One bloke I spoke to, a—” here he consulted his note pad “—Geoffrey Carmichael did say, however, that only a handful of students were permitted into the laboratory at his flat—those who were helping him with these experiments. And of those students, there was one who was not present at the pub: Archibald Merriweather. But none pegged him as the type who would shoot a man in cold blood. Very bookish and a bit of a dandy. Probably never held a pistol in his life—their words, not mine.”

  “Well, perceptions can be wrong, Jefferies. I think we have our number one suspect.”

  “You have a suspect, not necessarily the suspect,” reminded Holmes. “You cast your net and pull out a fish, and there you have your Moby Dick, not even considering whether your catch is a white whale or a run-of-the-mill herring. You need to cast a wider net.”

  “Do you not at least think it odd that one other person with access to the laboratory was not with his fellow students, while an unknown person murders the professor and slinks off into the night with what might be a formula that will change the world?”

  “You deal with conjecture, Lestrade. You seem comfortable there. I shall hang my hat on fact.”

  Then, it seemed, Holmes began to lose interest quickly in this back and forth and began to look over the professor’s papers, once again until we could excuse ourselves to talk to the widow.

  I, on the other hand, offered a question of my own to Jefferies. “Did they mention if they were close to any breakthroughs?”

  “It seems the professor was very secretive about his formulas. They knew certain ingredients but had no idea of what quantities and in what order. They were only there to, and I quote, ‘Fetch me this, get me that, turn that on, turn this off when I say.’ That sort of thing.”

  I then asked, “In our conversation with the gentleman across the street, he mentioned that he was asked but could not produce answers to some elaborate equations posed to him by Mr. Austin. When he could not furnish the desired result, Austin said he would press upon greater minds to come up with the answer.”

  Jefferies was giving me a telling nod as I spoke and offered, “I didn’t know about that, doctor, but I did ask if they knew of anyone outside the circle of students who might have known about what Austin was doing or who might have been assisting in his work. They said the entire university knew of it thanks to a bit of gossip, but as far as they knew no one outside of them helped in the experiments.”

  “That increases our circle of inquiry considerably,” Lestrade lamented. “It may be that our golden thread lies with that greater mind that Montrose was alluding to, but now our suspect pool has grown to the size of an entire university. How’s that for casting a wider net, Holmes?” With that, he pulled out his handkerchief, sneezed, and blew his nose, once again.

  It was here that we were all startled by a burst of laughter from Sherlock Holmes.

  “And what do you find so funny, Holmes?” asked the inspector. “Is it my blasted cold or the prospect of having to interrogate an entire academic institution?”

  “Neither,” remarked Holmes. “I must apologize to you, Lestrade; and Watson, I believe we will have to make a similar act of contrition to our newest acquaintance, Mr. Montrose. We have indeed wasted everyone’s time in this matter.”

  “What on earth are you talking about, Holmes?”

  “First, I must lay at least some blame with you, Lestrade.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  Holding up the papers in which he’d been holding and now obviously scrutinizing with a more studious eye, he said, “Did you not tell me that you looked over these papers yourself?”

  “You know I did. It was because of those papers that I sought your assistance.”

  “And they were in the exact order in which you found them?”

  “They were.”

  Holmes gave Lestrade a critical stare, at which Lestrade gave a face as one who was going over in his head the steps he had taken earlier. Then, his face fell. “You are quite right, Holmes. When I was looking over the papers, I believe I laid them to
the side face-up as I went from paper to paper instead of face-down.”

  “Exactly,” replied Holmes. “So, the first paper becomes the last and the last first.”

  “Why would it matter? You said yourself that there was nothing of import on them.”

  “I had only looked through the first few pages. While you felt the need to increase your work by pining over the possible list of suspects from an entire university, I lessened it to but one by reading the rest of these papers. But if the papers were in the correct order, I could have deduced this earlier.”

  Lestrade’s face began to turn the same colour as his nose. “I read over those papers, and I saw nothing that would be of any help in catching a murderer.”

  Holmes smiled. “You did one thing right, inspector—you called upon me.”

  At this, he produced a sheet of paper from the ones in his hand and gave it to Lestrade, who gave it a cursory glance and said, “So what is so special about this paper? I see no help in our investigation anywhere on here.”

  Holmes replied, “It looks like a list of elements, yes?”

  Lestrade handed me the paper. On it were listed some random elements. After I glanced at it, I also remarked, “I have to agree with Lestrade. Unless you enlighten us, I see nothing of import here. It is just a random list of elements.” Then something struck me, and I asked, “Do you suppose this might be the list of ingredients needed to turn lead into gold? Is it possible our murderer already knew the what of the experiment so did not need to abscond with this list and only needed to make off with the how that was written on that paper?”

  I could tell by his demeanor that Holmes was disappointed with our inability to recognize what he could so clearly see. Yet, more often than not, this was the usual state of affairs. “Your theory is flawed, Watson, as we shall see momentarily. I shall first want to draw your attention on how I recognized the who. First, notice how the last n in Nitrogen trails off. That was the last word he wrote before he died. That is how I knew this was the top sheet of paper.”

  “That could be anything,” Lestrade argued half-heartedly. “Being interrupted or startled while writing that list could have caused the same mark.” He knew Holmes was correct disproportionately more than he was wrong, yet Lestrade, even after all these years, would not let go of a missed clue on his behalf. It always amused me, but the inspector’s pigheadedness, often a detriment in cases such as this, was also the reason why Holmes always called upon him in times of trouble.