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Out of all of the cases of Sherlock Holmes that I have had the fortune to be apart of, this is likely one of the most peculiar ones that I can recall. It started one dreary evening in our little flat in London. Holmes was perched in his chair with his feet crossed in the seat. In one hand was a notebook of his, and in the other was a pipe. I was in my own seat, reading a book on a new medical study that a famous doctor had recently published. Although Holmes was focused almost entirely on his own work, he would occasionally look up at me, nod, and, with what I believed to be a small smile, would turn back to his work, puffing out smoke from his pipe all the while.
At around seven in the evening, I rang for supper. Mrs. Hudson came with a plate of potatoes and a roast, and, to my surprise, I was able to convince Holmes to come over and eat as well. It often took all of my energy to convince Holmes to actually take care of his health, though he had stopped his use of the drug after our three years apart, but I digress.
“My dear Holmes,” I started, putting food upon his plate, for I knew he would not be persuaded to eat otherwise, taking great care in making sure none of the foods from different food groups were touching, as I also knew he would be appalled at the sight and would curl in on himself in disgust if his potatoes touched his vegetables. “It has been quite a while since our last case, two weeks, I believe. May I inquire as to how you are doing?”
“My darling boy,” Holmes replied, a soft smile on his sharp face. “I am feeling the same as ever. However, I would not be against a case at the moment, as you well know.”
Our conversation was about the same, until about halfway through our supper, the doorbell rang, and Mrs. Hudson came upstairs with a peculiar looking young woman. She was dressed in an outfit so extravagant that she had to have been from money, almost an outfit fit for a princess. She was clutching her pearls, though there were no pearls around her neck, and seemed quite frightened.
“My dear, what’s wrong?” I asked, concerned for the poor girl. Holmes watched the woman with that look on his face that, even after all our time together, I could not be exactly sure what it meant.
“My name is Opal Chantebel,” The girl told us. “Years ago, my mother gave me a diamond tiara, which had been handed down to her from her mother, and her mother before that. It is one of the last items I have to remember her by, and is greatly important to me. This morning, I woke up and it was gone, but nothing had been messed with in my room! Please help me, Mr. Holmes!”
I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the poor girl; I owned my dear pocket watch, gifted to me by my father before joining the war, so I understood how she might have been feeling. I guided her to sit on the settee, “Would you like a cup of tea, my dear girl?”
Miss Chantebel nodded, grateful. Meanwhile, Holmes introduced the two of us properly, “Miss Chantebel, it seems you already know who I am, but allow me to introduce my dear friend, Dr. Watson, to you.” Holmes gestured to me.
“It’s wonderful to meet you, Miss Chantebel,” I shook her hand gently, then handed her a cup of tea.
Miss Opal Chantebel explained the situation in more detail to Holmes and I over tea, and we planned to come and look at her estate and her room the next morning. We had left that night, as Miss Chantebel lived in the French countryside. Holmes had tried to spend the train ride thinking about the case, despite my stating that he needed his rest, as I knew he had spent the night before researching something I knew not about for a reason beyond my comprehension.
I woke up the next morning next to a wide-awake Holmes, ate a quick breakfast, and left the train with Holmes to go to the Chantebel estate.
It was a beautiful building, akin to a castle, with gorgeous sprawling grounds. How I wished to walk along it and discover it all, but Holmes and I had work to do. Upon entering the estate, we were escorted to Miss Opal Chantebel’s room by said woman and her handmaiden, Mary-Anne Laurent, and Holmes immediately took to inspecting the room. There was a large, four-poster bed in the middle, pressed against one of the walls, with curtains hanging from the posts. Next to the bed was a bedside table with a small jewelry box, though nothing was missing from it, and a French copy of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
“This is where I kept my tiara,” Miss Chantebel guided Holmes and I’s attention to a vanity in one corner of the room, where a pillow sat, empty, with an indent where a tiara would usually be.
“When was the last time you saw your tiara, Miss Chantebel?” Holmes asked, picking up the pillow to inspect it and the vanity around it, which had some makeup, a hairbrush, hair pins, and other pieces of jewelry. According to Miss Chantebel, the tiara was the only thing of value missing from her room. Upon hearing this information, Holmes hummed, “Interesting.”
“But why would a thief only want the tiara?” I asked Holmes.
“Elementary, my dear Watson!” He replied, but he was not putting me down. It was clear he enjoyed explaining things to me, and felt proud when I understood things before he explained it. “The tiara must have some value to the thief over all the other items. They must have some sort of attachment to it. To a common thief, they would break in and take all the items they could, but our thief was smarter than that.”
“Perhaps they wanted to melt it?” I asked.
Holmes responded with, “I understand with the silver surrounding the diamonds, but diamonds are only made of the element Carbon, and Carbon is found in other, cheaper items, like graphite. There would be no point in melting it.”
Before I could ask Holmes how he possibly knew that, he became preoccupied with the room again. It occurred to me that this must have been what he was researching the other night.
We interrogated some of the staff and family living in the estate, before Holmes announced that we would find lodgings for the night. On the way to our lodgings, Holmes said, “It’s clear you are curious about why we left so quickly, my dear Watson. Well, the research I was doing the other night was over the element Carbon. Did you know that not only is carbon what diamonds and graphite in pencils are made of, as well as some coals, it also has a form called amorphous carbon, which is used to make paints, inks, and rubber?”
A soft smile graced my lips; I quite enjoyed listening to Holmes talk about anything and everything that caught his attention. “That’s quite interesting, my dear Holmes. So carbon is often black or a clear crystal. Is it typically a solid?”
“Indeed, my darling Watson! That’s exactly true! It also takes quite a bit of heat to melt carbon, 4098 Kelvin, or 3825 degrees celsius, to be exact!” Holmes happily explained. “Carbon doesn’t have any common ions, as far as my research has been able tell me, but it’s common oxidation states are +4, +2, and -4. When it’s a powder, it’s very flammable, though the flammability changes depending on what form it is in. I found that out the hard way.”
“So that was what that crash last night was!” I exclaimed. “It woke me up, but I assumed it was part of my dream.”
“Apologies, my dear fellow,” Holmes replied. We chatted for quite a bit of the evening, before retiring to bed.
The next morning, we investigated the Chantebel estate once more. While we were walking through the grounds, we spotted the gardener. He was a young fellow named Mr. Carbie who had just joined the staff of the estate, and was working under the main groundskeeper. He seemed quite skittish when we talked to him, but was a polite young man. Our interaction was as follows:
“Good morning!” I called out, waving to the man in question, he startled, seemingly pulled out of his thoughts, and turned from where he had been staring down at a flowerbed to look at Holmes and I.
“Oh, hello. You must be Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson!” Carbie greeted, “I’m James Carbie. It’s a pleasure to meet you both, though I do wish it were on prettier terms. That poor Miss Chantebel.”
Holmes took in the boy, nodding, “Yes. Well, would you mind telling me what you remember from the other day, when Miss Chantebel first noticed that her tiara was missing?”
Carbie smiled, but his voice wavered as he spoke, “Well, sir, the night before Miss Chantebel’s tiara went missing, I worked, then went to the servants’ quarters, where I ate my supper and then got ready for bed. I read a book, then went to sleep. That’s all that happened.”
I didn’t fully trust the boy, but Holmes made no indication of his suspecting anything. He just nodded and shook Carbie’s hand, “Thank you for your help. We’ll be sure to call on you again if we have any other questions.”
However, when we went back inside Miss Chantebel’s room to look around again, Holmes frowned, “That boy, Carbie, he had a hand in the robbery.”
“How can you be so sure, Holmes?” I asked, though I never doubted his brain or his methods.
“The way his voice wavered when I asked about his whereabouts,” Holmes told me. “Not only that, but when we walked up to him, it was clear that he seemed quite confused on what he was supposed to be doing with those clippers, like he had a very small knowledge on gardening, despite supposedly being a gardener. And look!” He pointed to a spot on the floor, by the vanity. “See that mud? It came from these grounds.”
“But that boy was so timid! He can’t have been the mastermind behind this theft!” I exclaimed.
Holmes nodded, “No, I doubt that he was. There was someone smarter behind this. A father, perhaps?”
With that, we left the Chantebel estate to go into a nearby village. In our questioning of the townspeople, Holmes and I discovered that James Carbie, the garden boy, was the son of a once very rich man named Richard Carbie, who was rivals with Miss Chantebel’s father, Sir Chantebel. It was then at once that Holmes and I knew who had taken the diamond tiara, and who had planned it all.
We followed directions given to where Carbie Sr had currently taken up residence, an old, abandoned churchhouse.
“My dear Watson,” Holmes whispered to me, “You have your gun loaded and ready, yes?”
“I always do,” I replied, placing my hand in my pocket where my revolver lay.
We entered the church and found Carbie Sr, just as Holmes had thought. He looked insane, almost maniacal, sitting with the diamond tiara in his hands, holding it as if it were the most precious item in the world to him. He snapped his head to us, “Ah, Sherlock Holmes and his little sidekick. Come to take the beauty that rightfully belongs to me, huh? Well you cannot have it!”
He threw something at us, but Holmes just side-stepped it and laughed. Very quickly, Holmes and I had caught Carbie Sr and were taking him back to town with us, diamond tiara and all. According to Holmes, Carbie Sr was insane, and, after going bankrupt, had formed a peculiar love for the element carbon, which was why he targeted his old rival’s daughter and her diamond tiara.
When we got back to 221b Baker Street later that evening, I asked Holmes to tell me more about his research on Carbon, and quite enjoyed listening to what he had to say. Here is what I can remember from his lecture:
Carbon’s thermal conductivity is 140 watts per meters Kelvin, its electrical conductivity (in graphite) is 100,000 siemens per meter, and it has 4 valence electrons with an electronegativity of 2.55 on the Pauling scale. It also has a density of 2.26 grams per cubic centimeter. It doesn’t react much with water, and only reacts to very strong acids.
While this case was short and easy, I’ll never forget how much I learned (nor will I forget how peculiar that Richard Carbie was).
Works Cited
“Carbon | c (Element) - PubChem.” Pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/6.
Carbon, East. “18 Main Chemical Properties of Carbon You Should Know - East Carbon.” East Carbon, 22 Oct. 2024, www.eastcarb.com/chemical-properties-of-carbon/.
“ICSC 0702 - CARBON.” Ilo.org, 2017, chemicalsafety.ilo.org/dyn/icsc/showcard.display?p_lang=en&p_version=2&p_card_id=0702.
Royal Society of Chemistry. “Carbon - Element Information, Properties and Uses | Periodic Table.” Rsc.org, 2017, periodic-table.rsc.org/element/6/carbon.
“Technical Data for the Element Carbon in the Periodic Table.” Periodictable.com, periodictable.com/Elements/006/data.html.