Adventures of Martin Hewitt (18 page)

We went to the window, and there saw in Hewitt’s hand a piece of written
musical notation, thus:—

Hewitt pulled out from his pocket a few pieces of paper. “Here is a copy I
made this morning of the Flitterbat Lancers, and a note or two of my own as
well,” he said. He took a pencil, and, constantly referring to his own
papers, marked a letter under each note on the last-found slip of music. When
he had done this, the letters read:

You are a clever cove whoever you are but there was a
cleverer says Jim Snape the horney’s mate.

“You see.” Hewitt said handing the inspector the paper. “Snape, the
unconsidered messenger, finding Legg in prison, set to work and got the
jewels for himself. The thing was a cryptogram, of course, of a very simple
sort, though uncommon in design. Snape was a humorous soul, too, to leave
this message here in the same cipher, on the chance of somebody else reading
the Flitterbat Lancers.”

“But,” I asked, “why did he give that slip of music to Laker’s
father?”

“Well, he owed him money, and got out or it that way. Also, he avoided the
appearance of ‘flushness’ that paying the debt might have given him, and got
quietly out of the country with his spoils.”

The shrieks upstairs had grown hoarser, but the broom continued
vigorously. “Let that woman out,” said the inspector, “and we’ll go and
report. Not much good looking for Snape now, I fancy. But there’s some
satisfaction in clearing up that old quarter-century mystery.”

We left the place pursued by the execrations of the broom wielder, who
bolted the door behind us, and from the window defied us to come back, and
vowed she would have us all searched before a magistrate for what we had
probably stolen. In the very next street we hove in sight of Reuben B. Hoker
in the company of two swell-mob-looking fellows, who sheered off down a side
turning in sight of our group. Hoker, too, looked rather shy at the sight of
the inspector.

“The meaning of the thing was so very plain,” Hewitt said to me
afterwards, “that the duffers who had the Flitterbat Lancers in hand for so
long never saw it at all. If Shiels had made an ordinary clumsy cryptogram,
all letters and figures, they would have seen what it was at once, and at
least would have tried to read it; but because it was put in the form of
music, they tried everything else but the right way. It was a clever dodge of
Shiels’s, without a doubt. Very few people, police officers or not, turning
over a heap of old music, would notice or feel suspicious of that little slip
among the rest. But once one sees it is a cryptogram (and the absence of bar
lines and of notes beyond the stave would suggest that) the reading is as
easy as possible. For my part I tried it as a cryptogram at once. You know
the plan—it has been described a hundred times. See here—look at
this copy of the Flitterbat Lancers. Its only difficulty—and that is a
small one—is that the words are not divided. Since there are positions
for less than a dozen notes on the stave, and there are twenty-six letters to
be indicated, it follows that crotchets, quavers, and semiquavers on the same
line or space must mean different letters. The first step is obvious. We
count the notes to ascertain which sign occurs most frequently, and we find
that the crotchet in the top space is the sign required—it occurs no
less than eleven times. Now the letter most frequently occurring in an
ordinary sentence of English is e. Let us then suppose that this represents
e. At once a coincidence strikes us. In ordinary musical notation in the
treble clef the note occupying the top space would be E. Let us remember that
presently.

“Now the most common word in the English language is ‘
the
.’ We know
the sign for
e
, the last letter of this word, so let us see if in more
than one place that sign is preceded by two others identical in each case. If
so, the probability is that the other two signs will represent
t
and
h
, and the whole word will be ‘
the
.’ Now it happens in no less
than four places the sign e is preceded by the same two other
signs—once in the first line, twice in the second, and once in the
fourth. No word of three letters ending in e would be in the least likely to
occur four times in a short sentence except ‘
the
.’ Then we will call
it ‘
the
‘, and note the signs preceding the
e
. They are a quaver
under the bottom line for the
t
, and a crotchet on the first space for
the
h
. We travel along the stave, and wherever these signs occur we
mark them with
t
or
h
, as the case may be.

“But now we remember that
e
, the crotchet in the top space, is in
its right place as a musical note, while the crotchet in the bottom space
means
h
, which is no musical note at all. Considering this for a
minute, we remember that among the notes which are expressed in ordinary
music on the treble stave, without the use of ledger lines,
d
,
e
and
f
are repeated at the lower and at the upper part of the
stave. Therefore, anybody making a cryptogram of musical notes would probably
use one set of these duplicate positions to indicate other letters, and as
a
is in the lower part of the stave, that is where the variation comes
in. Let us experiment by assuming that all the crotchets above
f
in
ordinary musical notation have their usual values, and let us set the letters
over their respective notes. Now things begin to shape. Look toward the end
of the second line: there is the word
the
and the letters
f f t
h
, with another note between the two
f
‘s. Now that word can only
possibly be
fifth
, so that now we have the sign for
i
. It is
the crotchet on the bottom line. Let us go through and mark the
i
‘s.

“And now observe. The first sign of the lot is
i
, and there is one
other sign before the word ‘
the
.’ The only words possible here
beginning with
i
, and of two letters, are
it
,
if
,
is
and
in
. Now we have the signs for
t
and
f
, so
we know that it isn’t
it
or
if
. Is would be unlikely here,
because there is a tendency, as you see, to regularity in these signs, and
t
, the next letter alphabetically to
s
, is at the bottom of the
stave. Let us try
n
. At once we get the word
dance
at the
beginning of line three. And now we have got enough to see the system of the
thing. Make a stave and put
G A B C
and the higher
D E F
in
their proper musical places. Then fill in the blank places with the next
letters of the alphabet downward,
h i j
, and we find that
h
and
i
fall in the places we have already discovered for them as crotchets.
Now take quavers, and go on with
k l m n o
, and so on as before,
beginning on the A space. When you have filled the quavers, do the same with
semiquavers—there are only six alphabetical letters left for
this—
u v w x y z
. Now you will find that this exactly agrees
with all we have ascertained already, and if you will use the other letters
to fill up over the signs still unmarked you will get the whole message:

“In the Colt Row ken over the coals the fifth dancer slides
says Jerry Shiels the horney.

“‘Dancer,’ as perhaps you didn’t know, is thieves’ slang for a stair, and
‘horney’ is the strolling musician’s name for cornet player. Of course the
thing took a little time to work out, chiefly because the sentence was short,
and gave one few opportunities. But anybody with the key, using the cipher as
a means of communication, would read it easily.

“As soon as I had read it, of course I guessed the purport of the
Flitterbat Lancers. Jerry Shiels’s name is well-known to anybody with half my
knowledge of the criminal records of the century, and his connection with the
missing Wedlake jewels, and his death in prison, came to my mind at once.
Certainly here was something hidden, and as the Wedlake jewels seemed most
likely, I made the shot in talking to Hoker.”

“But you terribly astonished him by telling him his name and address. How
was that?” I asked curiously.

Hewitt laughed aloud. “That,” he said; “why, that was the thinnest trick
of all. Why, the man had it engraved on the silver band of his umbrella
handle. When he left his umbrella outside, Kerrett (I had indicated the
umbrella to him by a sign) just copied the lettering on one of the ordinary
visitors’ forms, and brought it in. You will remember I treated it as an
ordinary visitor’s announcement.” And Hewitt laughed again.

On the afternoon of the next day Reuben B. Hoker called on Hewitt and had
half-an-hour’s talk with him in his private room. After that he came up to me
with half-a-crown in his hand. “Sir,” he said, “everything has turned out a
durned sell. I don’t want to talk about it any more. I’m goin’ out of this
durn country. Night before last I broke your winder. You put the damage at
half-a-crown. Here is the money. Good-day to you, sir.”

And Reuben B. Hoker went out into the tumultuous world.

Of this case I personally saw nothing beyond the first advent in Hewitt’s
office of Mr. Horace Bowyer, who put the case in his hands, and then I merely
saw Mr. Bowyer’s back as I passed down stairs from my rooms. But I noted the
case in full detail after Hewitt’s return from Ireland, as it seemed to me
one not entirely without interest, if only as an exemplar of the fatal ease
with which a man may unwittingly dig a pit for his own feet—a pit from
which there is no climbing out.

A few moments after I had seen the stranger disappear into Hewitt’s
office, Kerrett brought to Hewitt in his inner room a visitor’s slip
announcing the arrival on argent business of Mr. Horace Bowyer. That the
visitor was in a hurry was plain from a hasty rattling of the closed wicket
in the outer room where Mr. Bowyer was evidently making impatient attempts to
follow his announcement in person. Hewitt showed himself at the door and
invited Mr. Bowyer to as soon as Kerrett had with much impetuosity florid
gentleman with a loud voice and a large stare.

“Mr. Hewitt,” he said, “I must claim your immediate attention to a
business of the utmost gravity. Will you please consider yourself
commissioned, wholly regardless of expense, to set aside whatever you may
have in hand and devote yourself to the case I shall put in your hands?”

“Certainly not,” Hewitt replied with a slight smile. “What I have in hand
are matters which I have engaged to attend to, and no mere compensation for
loss of fees could persuade me to leave my clients in the lurch, else what
would prevent some other gentleman coming here to-morrow with a bigger fee
than yours and bribing me away from you?”

“But this—this is a most serious thing, Mr. Hewitt. A matter of life
or death—it is indeed!”

“Quite so,” Hewitt replied; “but there are a thousand such matters at this
moment pending of which you and I know nothing, and there are also two or
three more of which you know nothing but on which I am at work. So that it
becomes a question of practicability. If you will tell me your business I can
judge whether or not I may be able to accept your commission concurrently
with those I have in hand. Some operations take months of constant attention;
some can be conducted intermittently; others still are a mere matter of a few
days many of hours simply.”

“I will tell you then,” Mr. Bowyer replied. “In the first place, will you
have the kindness to read that? It is a cutting from the
Standard’s
column of news from the provinces of two days ago.”