A FIVE-PIPE PROBLEM

Copyright © Richard Sabey 2003

One morning - it was the fifth Tuesday in February, as I recall - I had come down to breakfast to find Holmes seated on the floor next to his old tin box, surrounded by a multitude of sheets of paper. From time to time, he puffed away at his before-breakfast pipe, whose contents I did not enquire into.

"Another of your old cases, Holmes?"

"Five cases, Watson. In each one, a woman had come to me, as a valuable item had been stolen from her. The cases had, as too often happens, foxed the police, but in the end I managed to identify the thieves and restore the stolen valuables to their rightful owners."

"And these are your notes on these cases? But you surely didn't consign these cases to this shower of confetti?"

"That is not so far from the truth! My notes on these cases were on loose sheets of paper, which are now all jumbled up. I have been trying to piece them all together. It is quite a five pipe problem!"

The idea of a healthy stroll in the park beckoned. I settled down to breakfast, and tucked into my scrambled eggs to the accompaniment of Holmes's scrambled accounts of these five cases.

"One of these clients was Louisa Forrester from Camberwell.
Another was Emma Farintosh, whose opal tiara had been stolen.
Another was an old Russian woman. Someone had stolen an item from her safe, and I tracked the crime to Vanderbilt and his yeggman.
Some jewels had been stolen from Bishopgate.
I found that the Sydenham burglary was done by the Randalls.
John Horner didn't steal the Countess of Morcar's blue carbuncle, but in one of these cases, he had stolen a Ming vase, and you know all about Ming, don't you!"

Holmes went on "In another of these cases, an incunabulum was stolen. My client claimed that hers was a sixteenth-century example; if she was right, it must indeed be valuable, as no others from that period are known. Then there was Vittoria, the circus belle..."

"It's beyond me, Holmes. It's all a tangled skein of unrelated threads."

"All is not lost, Watson. With each of these cases, I recorded a tremendously important statistic: the number of pipes I needed to smoke before I solved the case. These five cases show a delightful variety from easy to hard.
The Holborn case was the easiest: a mere one-pipe problem.
The case that Hannah Turner presented to me turned out to be a two-pipe problem.
The case of the stolen painting was a three-pipe problem."
One of these cases was fiendishly difficult to solve. It took me four pipes before I realised that the culprit was Professor Moriarty..."

"The famous scientific criminal, as - "

"As we well know... " Holmes interrupted. "The remaining one of these five cases, though, was one of the most amazingly complex ones I have ever had to solve. A five-pipe problem, Watson!"

"Who was the criminal in that case?" Could there be a criminal mastermind even greater than Professor Moriarty?

It was obvious that I was never going to know, as Holmes started puffing away at his pipe and went back to his sheets of paper. "I'm sure that the case where I fingered John Clay needed more pipes than the Notting Hill case. That one, by comparison, was elementary..."

Can you help Holmes and Watson? Who stole what from whom and where, and how many pipes did Holmes need to solve the case?

Instructions for the applet

The idea is to fill the grid (the green area) with all the items.

To place an item in a row, first choose the item by clicking its button,
then click on the row.

To move an item from one row to another, you can choose it either by
clicking on it in the grid, or by clicking its button.

The Reset button clears the grid.

The Check button checks your progress so far. You don't have to
complete the grid in order to check. Check will tell you which clues
you have broken (if any).