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“Chloroform!” announced John, arriving downstairs in his dressing gown and slippers to find Sherlock on the couch, apparently unmoved from where he’d retreated in the depths of boredom the previous night.
“Mmm?” asked Sherlock, half-heartedly.
“Chloroform,” repeated John. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
Sherlock sat up and frowned at him. “Why should it?”
“No idea,” sighed John, disappointed. “I was hoping you might know. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I’d solved the case. Remember the man from yesterday?”
“Of course I remember,” said Sherlock, looking insulted at the memory of the agitated toffee-accented man who’d come to visit them, seated himself primly in the client’s chair and told them his story.
Grant Munro and his beloved wife Ophelia had been a perfect couple, by his report. In her younger days she’d fallen in with the wrong crowd, been a consummate party girl—John had struggled not to raise his eyebrows when he recognised her name as the subject of a leaked sex tape, and not a very good one at that—but that had apparently all been well before she’d met Grant. She’d turned her life around, been clean and sober for a year before they’d met and fallen instantly and deeply in love. Their marriage had been the talk of the society pages some three years ago, and apart from her reluctance to visit her parents, all had been sunshine and roses until recently.
And then, a few months ago, large sums of money had begun to go missing from their joint accounts, money Ophelia admitted to withdrawing, but wouldn't explain what for. She was making secretive phone calls. The passcodes they’d once freely shared with one another had suddenly changed and were kept private. Their internet history was regularly cleared, and there’d been emails deleted.
Sherlock had barely tolerated sitting through to the end of the story before telling the man that his wife was clearly having an affair with her drug dealer ex-boyfriend, whom her parents had pressured her away from to push her into a marriage with someone more suitable.
And then John had needed to forcibly eject the man from the flat. He’d refused to believe Sherlock’s allegation and started yelling abuse at him and threats against the defamation of his wife’s good character.
“Well,” said John smugly, the next morning, still high with the truth of the dream-revelation. “You were wrong. And I wrote the answer down in my notebook, to make sure I didn’t forget it.”
“Alongside all your trite ideas for headline puns, which we’d all rather you did forget,” sneered Sherlock.
“Then I went back to sleep,” John pressed on, ignoring that. “And that’s what the note says. ‘Chloroform’! It’s the answer, and a new mystery, all in one! Isn’t it worth chasing up?”
“Right,” said Sherlock. “I think it would be best, John, if you stuck to blogging. This is a simple domestic matter: the woman took his money and is consorting with her previous boyfriend, giving him money in exchange for drugs. Her parents may have forced her to clean up under their roof, and convinced her to marry a man within their own circle, but we are no longer living in the nineteenth century; no one could pressure her to stay, not even with the aid of your mythical chloroform. Our would-be client may have been convinced she loved him, but on all the available evidence she was clearly having an affair. Case, such as it was, closed.”
Then he curled himself back into the couch, and refused to respond to John for the rest of the day.
The idea festered in John's mind and he spent the rest of the day turning it over, before he eventually gave up on it.
A few weeks later, he'd almost forgotten it when there was another knock on the door at Baker Street and Grant Munro returned, shamefaced. He apologised for his behaviour on his previous visit, promised there would be no repeat, but claimed he was at his wits end.
His wife had left for a weekend—pleaded with him not to ask her where she was going, but begged him to believe that she still loved him more than life itself—and he’d found a receipt for a hotel in Norbury in the kitchen bin. A suite. He had to have the answer about his wife’s activities, and he was ready to listen to whatever Sherlock Holmes could tell him.
John took him upstairs, pulled out his notebook as the man spluttered through his effusive apologies again to Sherlock, and bent to pretend to jot something down, just to get away from the pleasantries for a moment, and saw…
“Chloroform!” he blurted out, and then studiously pretended not to notice Sherlock’s glare. “Chloroform, Mr Munro, does it mean anything to you?”
The man looked at him, perplexed. “No?” he said. “Should it?”
John threw his notebook down on the table. What, exactly, had he wanted with chloroform at 2am anyway?
“I’ll make tea,” he snapped, and stomped off towards the kitchen, listening with only half an ear to the conversation in the other room: Sherlock explaining the meaning of the man’s wife’s behaviour with his usual lack of tact, Munro’s objections getting fainter and fainter as the conversation went on.
“John,” called Sherlock, and John made it back into the room with the tea tray to find the detective stopped stock still halfway through a pacing step, looking down at John’s notebook where it lay on the coffee table. Sherlock picked it up, frowning at it, and tracing one of the words therein with a long forefinger. “I knew doctors’ handwriting was bad, but I’d always assumed that you could actually read it yourself.”
“It was dark!” protested John. “I was writing by feel. And I was half asleep! It’s not how I usually write!”
“That’s not the way you’ve ever shaped your ‘r’,” Sherlock said, shaking his head. “It’s far too tall, and far too close to the previous letter. Let alone that you’ve apparently switched to upper case for the last three letters. And just because the ‘i’ has merged on top of the ‘l’ doesn’t make the double-stroke where you formed it any less obvious. It doesn’t say ‘chloroform’; it says ‘child of ORM.’ ORM—Ophelia Rebecca Munro, in the context of our case. But why… oh. Oh! John, you are brilliant!”
“What?” demanded John, as Sherlock sat down in his chair again, looking up at John with the same kind of stunned surprise that might be appropriate to seeing a dog abruptly walk on its hind legs and doff its hat. “What does it mean, Sherlock?”
“Although obviously still an idiot, at a conscious level,” Sherlock shook his head.
“Obviously,” said John, rolling his eyes as he put down the tray and began to pour.
“Mr Munro,” said Sherlock. “Your wife turned her life around a year before she met you, you told us that—but you never told us why.”
“Well,” interjected Grant, a little flummoxed. “I don’t really know. Her parents got her into rehab, apparently. She doesn’t talk about that time much. Doesn't talk to her parents at all, if she can help it.”
“She’s not having an affair, and she’s not hiding her contact with the old boyfriend,” said Sherlock. “She got pregnant."
“Yes!" cried John. “I remember now, that's what I thought! That’s why she got off the drugs.”
"And why she stayed off," agreed Sherlock. "She spent nine months clean and after that it stuck. And she had the baby, but her parents convinced her to give it up for adoption, thus the estrangement. Now, she’s been trying to find it again. She’s worried about how you’ll react—whether it will be the same way they reacted—but she can’t help herself. That’s where she’s gone this weekend. She’s found it. Her child. She's arranged to meet it.”
“Oh,” said Grant Munro quietly. “Oh.”
He thought for a few moments, and then….
“Excuse me, Mr Holmes, Dr Watson,” he said, fending off the proffered cup of tea in John’s hand and standing up. “Thank you ever so much for your time, but right now I need to call my car and get to Norbury right away. I think I need to make some things clear to my wife."
He paused in the doorway and smiled at them thinly, the despairing slump gone from his posture and a light back in his eyes. "Perhaps I'll even be in time to join her in meeting my step-son or daughter.”