NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 3 The Case of the Fifth Word — Let us think and reflect

The text puts the trap in the form of a question the reader cannot answer either: “Who would believe that the best detective alive was an eighth grader?”

C. He desires to blend with the other boys to prevent seeming different.

The extract states the motive almost word for word: “He didn't want to seem different from other boys.”

The false reason is C. They want him to be remembered as different from the others around.

It contradicts the whole passage. The family's effort runs in the opposite direction — the boy “didn't want to seem different from other boys”, and the parents support that by using Leroy, the name that makes him one boy among many.

‘Stuck with' means he was saddled with the name and could not get rid of it, however much he disliked it — it had been fixed on him by other people and was completely out of his control.

The writer chooses the phrase deliberately. Compare three ways of saying it:

B. He is confused, unable to make sense of the words.

He does not dismiss the note — he studies it, then shakes his head and hands it on with a question: “Can you figure it out?” A man who thought the words were meaningless would not pass them round the table.

Option A is wrong because he is not confident of anything; C and D are wrong because he has already treated the sheet as evidence — it was clipped to the will and he copied it into his notebook.

True.

She takes each word separately and gives its dictionary meaning: Nom = a shortening of nominative, a grammatical term; Utes = an American Indian tribe; Sweden = a country in northern Europe; Hurts = hurts. She never asks what the four together might be doing on a calendar sheet — and so she reaches the honest end: “I can't figure it out.”

It shows that the message is a private code, not ordinary English — its meaning does not lie in the words at all, so no amount of vocabulary will unlock it.

Two things follow from her failure:

• It was designed for one reader. Encyclopedia says so himself: “it wouldn't make much sense to someone who isn't looking for a hiding place.” Only Davenport, who knew jewellery had been hidden and then moved, would look at the sheet and ask the right question.
• The key is outside the words. The clue is the paper — “especially as it's written on a sheet from a calendar”. A calendar tells you the category: days of the week. Nolan then removed the letters d-a-y from each day and jumbled what was left.

His mother had drifted into grammar and geography. By saying “Davenport disappeared right after the hold-up,” he pulls everyone back to the one fact that gives the note a purpose: there is a missing partner and missing jewellery.

Five pieces of evidence, in the order the story gives them, build the case for a close partnership:

1. They became friends in prison. “Nolan and Davenport had met… while both were in prison in South Carolina. They became friendly because of shared interests.”
2. Davenport moved into Nolan's house. “Davenport came to live with Nolan a week before the jewellery store hold-up” — you offer your house only to someone you trust.
3. They committed the crime together and hid the loot together. Chief Brown's belief is that “Nolan and a friend, a man named Daniel Davenport, pulled the hold-ups”, and his hunch is that “he and Nolan decided to hide the loot until things cooled down.” Neither man moved the jewellery for five years, which means each trusted the other not to take it.
4. Nolan left him everything. The will “leaves everything he owns, including his palm-tree nursery, to Davenport.”
5. His dying act was a message to Davenport. With his last strength he clipped a coded calendar sheet to the will so that his partner — and nobody else — would learn the new hiding place.

Why he disappeared: he was the loose end. During the hold-up “one gunman's mask slipped” and a clerk “thought she recognised Nolan” — so Nolan was already half-identified. Nolan, however, had a settled cover in Idaville: a house and a palm-tree nursery. Davenport had none. He was a recent ex-convict from the same prison who had moved in exactly one week before the robbery; if the police found him, the link between the two men would be obvious and both would be finished. By vanishing he made sure he could never be questioned, never be picked out in an identification, and never be connected to Nolan.

His likely plan if Nolan had lived:

• Stay out of sight until, in Chief Brown's words, “things cooled down” — that is, until the police stopped watching, witnesses forgot, and the newspapers moved on.
• Let Nolan guard the jewellery in the meantime under the cover of a struggling, harmless nursery that “barely yielded him a living” — the poorer he looked, the less anyone suspected him.
• Return quietly after some years, collect his share, and sell the jewellery piece by piece in another place, where a million dollars' worth of stones would not be recognised.

It shows her to be alert, well-informed and an active partner in her husband's work — not a listener at the table but one of its investigators.

• She has a long memory. A name mentioned once makes her sit up: “That name is familiar… Wasn't he mixed up in a jewellery robbery a few years ago?” — a robbery from five years earlier.
• She asks the practical questions. “I thought Tim Nolan was arrested”, “Didn't you search Nolan's house, dear?”, “Is there some mystery about Nolan's death yesterday?” Each question pulls out another fact — which is, of course, exactly what the two parents are quietly doing for Leroy.
• She brings her own knowledge. As a former high-school teacher of English “and other subjects”, she is the one who can say what nominative, Utes and Sweden mean.
• She is honest about her limits. “‘I can't figure it out,' she confessed.” She does not pretend, and she does not resent being outdone by her son — she looks at him “hopefully”.

Chief Brown was proud of Leroy for two quite different reasons — his ability and his discretion.

His ability. Leroy solves what a trained police force cannot. Officers Lewis and Maloney, working with a court order, “just about took Nolan's house apart” and found nothing; the Chief himself studied the four words and could make nothing of them. Leroy needed “only one question to solve a case before dessert” — and his one question, about a fir tree in a palm-tree nursery, was so exact that his father asked in astonishment, “How did you know?”

His discretion. The boy takes no credit at all: “Encyclopedia never spoke of the help he gave his father.” A gift that size in a child could easily have become showing off; instead it stays inside the family.

Because the facts he had, taken singly, proved nothing — but taken together they pointed only one way. This is circumstantial evidence, and a good police officer is right to be guided by it even when a court cannot act on it.

The four words — Nom Utes Sweden Hurts — are the centre on which everything in the story turns. Their role is at least fourfold.

1. They create the mystery. Until the calendar sheet appears there is only a cold case. The moment Chief Brown reads out four words that mean nothing, the story has a question, and the title (‘The Case of the Fifth Word') has already promised that the answer is something not written down.
2. They are the plot's delivery system. Nolan had changed the hiding place and could not reach his partner by telephone. Clipped to a will that a lawyer must carry to Davenport, the code is the only message a dying man can still send.
3. They sort the characters. Mrs. Brown gives each word its dictionary meaning and fails. Chief Brown cannot even do that and passes the paper on. Encyclopedia ignores the meanings entirely, notices the paper the words are written on, and reads the pattern. The same clue measures three minds.
4. They are the misdirection. The words are chosen to look like a scholar's puzzle — a grammatical term, a tribe, a country, a verb. Every reader, like Mrs. Brown, starts hunting for a connection between the meanings. There is none. The connection is in the letters, and the key is the calendar sheet itself.

Plan first. Use the four traits from the table as your four paragraphs — knowledgeable, humble, keen listener, clever — and give each one a line from the story as proof. End with what the traits add up to.