Death Comes to Cambers (26 page)

There are, of course, those at the Foreign Office to whom the darkest, most involved cipher is clear as sunlight at noon, but the hour was late, the Foreign Office would be seeking repose after its customary heavy labours of the day, and Bobby had a fancy, too, to try his own luck.

First of all he turned his attention to the combination of numbers, each set of which would probably represent either a letter or a word. 

Carefully, intently, Bobby studied the thing.

It looked discouraging, but Bobby knew enough of ciphers to be aware that they are seldom so formidable as they appear at first sight.

To begin with, he counted that there were about eighty-five of the separate combinations. If each stood for a word, then that would make a somewhat lengthy message, and cipher messages in agony-columns are generally brief. Moreover, if a numerical combination representing words is used, it probably means that the system of reference to a previously chosen book by number of page and of word thereon has been adopted. Now some of these combinations of figures were in the thousands, and one or two began with a nought. But there are few books with over six thousand pages and none where the numbering starts with a nought.

Bobby made up his mind, therefore, to begin on the assumption that each set of figures stood for one letter.

Again he set himself to a careful examination of the cipher, so that a grieved waiter had to ask him if the soup was not to his taste since he was letting it go cold.

‘Oh, no, very nice, very nice indeed,' answered Bobby, pushing it away untasted, for he had noticed suddenly that every now and then there occurred single sets of doubled figures that were always above five – though once the doubled nought appeared – that they occurred in regular progression from 66 to 99, and that such doubled figures seemed to occur nowhere else. It struck him that perhaps this doubling was for some special purpose, as perhaps to mark the division between words. He noticed, too, that towards the end of the cipher some of the sets of numbers were in four and even five figures, though at its start none exceeded three.

What reason, he asked himself, could there be in the nature of any scientifically constructed cipher for this sudden increase in the number of figures in each combination?

It seemed to him unlikely there could be any such necessary cause for so abrupt an increase. But if not, if there were no such reason, then this increase in the number of digits used must be arbitrary, impelled perhaps by an uneasy desire for finding greater security in greater variety. And if the number of the figures used had been increased arbitrarily, then it followed that some of them must be meaningless – merely inserted to confuse.

‘Mirabeau's cipher,' he said to himself excitedly. ‘I'll bet anything that's it.'

The waiter brought him his fish. He disposed of it in about two mouthfuls, so great a hurry was he in to pursue his idea.

The distinguishing feature of the familiar cipher known as Mirabeau's, from the legend that it was invented by that statesman, is precisely the abundance it provides of ‘non values', as they are called – of signs, that is, that can be inserted merely to confuse, being instantly so recognizable by the recipient of the message. As in this system each letter is represented by two figures, neither of which is ever above five, the higher figures – six, seven, eight, nine – as well as the nought, are available for this purpose, to be used merely to baffle those not in the secret.

The idea of the Mirabeau cipher is the simple one of breaking up the alphabet into five groups of five letters each, the selection of letters for each group, and their order in it, being entirely arbitrary. To each letter is then assigned, first the number of the group, from one to five, in which it occurs, and then the number of the order in which it occurs in that group. If, for example, ‘e' is the fourth letter in the third group as arranged, then it will appear in the cipher as ‘34', and this can be varied by adding any of the ‘non-values' as fancy dictates, since the recipient of the message will know that only the figures 3 and 4 possess any significance.

Calmer now that he felt himself on the trail, Bobby devoted almost equal attention to the chicken that had followed the fish and to writing out and musing on the cipher with every figure above five and every nought eliminated, and on the supposition that every doubled figure meant the ending of a word.

He knew that much the commonest letters in the English language are ‘e' and ‘t'; ‘a' ‘o' ‘n' ‘i' following as bad seconds. Now the ‘non-values' had been removed, a glance told him 34 was the most frequent combination, occurring about thirteen or fourteen times. At once he wrote down 34 as ‘e'. The next most frequent combination seemed to be 25, so he put that down as ‘t'. Then he noticed that each of the first two words ended in ‘e-t', and, since ‘est' is a common termination, and agony-columns tend to superlatives, he wrote down the 33 sign as meaning ‘s'. So now the first two words stood ‘-ee-est, t-est', and it was little trouble to guess they were ‘deepest, truest', thus giving the signs for four more letters. But what in agony-columns is likely to be truest and deepest but love? – especially as the last sign in the next word was again that convenient 34. The following word was in three letters beginning with a ‘t'. ‘The' suggested itself, but there was no 34, and the second and third letters were the same. ‘Too' was Bobby's guess, and so was ‘o' added to the growing alphabet.

Working on these lines, Bobby soon had the key to the cipher jotted down, thus:

I
m a x o k
1 2 3 4 5
II
r i n v t
1 2 3 4 5
III
h b s e q
1 2 3 4 5
IV
g f c z u
1 2 3 4 5
V
p l y d w
1 2 3 4 5

Thus ‘m', for example, in this arrangement would always be represented by 11, as the first letter of the first group, ‘e' by 34, as the fourth letter of the third group, and so on, the message now standing revealed as:

Bobby stared at it thoughtfully and disgustedly, and indeed with a certain heat.

‘Well, of all the beastly waste of time and trouble,' he said to himself ruefully, ‘to think of all the time and trouble and energy I've given to making out some ne'er-do-well's attempt to borrow a fiver from the fool of a woman he's got in tow.'

Bobby felt almost too sad and dispirited to tackle the other cipher – if, that is, the meaningless jumble of words he had copied out was in fact one. And if it were, and if it turned out to be the same sort of thing as that he had just read, he felt as though it would be unbearable.

However, he supposed stern duty compelled him to the attempt. He read it over again:

Bobby had arrived at the coffee and cigarette stage now, and, after he had read this twice over, he felt that a liqueur was indicated as well, so he ordered one. Then he read the paragraph over again, and decided it might have been better to stick to soda-water. Could even the F.O., to whom ciphers are as the sun at noon, make head or tail of this gibberish? ‘Suspects gloves' and ‘Sunday helmet', for instance. ‘Carved rhododendrons' too! What a phrase! Who wanted to carve rhododendrons, anyway? Yet if it had not been for that word ‘rhododendrons' he would have been inclined to give the thing up as wasting time. But it was a rhododendron-clump in which some unknown person had certainly been concealed that tragic Sunday night, and was it only coincidence that a reference to rhododendrons appeared in this mad medley of meaningless words about which there seemed to Bobby to hang in some vague way a kind of literary flavour, somehow reminiscent of something he had once seen or heard or read? An idea struck him. At Oxford he had been friendly with a man who now held a position on the staff of that well-known weekly,
The New Prophet
, and had the job of explaining week by week how poor, how thin, how dull, was the literature of the day. He had, indeed, a widespread reputation through parts of Chelsea, and even into the outlying districts of Bloomsbury, for the way in which he could express that bored disdain wherewith the mere sight of a new novel afflicted him. Bobby found him on the point of setting out to join a midnight literary party, where reputations would be made and marred – chiefly the latter – and showed him the cutting from the
Announcer
. He read it with interest.

‘A very fine bit of prose,' he declared. ‘Gertrude Stein, I should think. I can't place it exactly, but it has the touch that only she can give. Notice the rhythm; notice with what care each word has been chosen to make its own effect. Oh, very fine indeed. Observe how splendidly, with what cunning art, that many-syllabled word "rhododendrons” comes rolling in at the end.'

‘Yes,' agreed Bobby, with a mingling of doubt and respect in his voice, ‘yes – that word is what specially interested me.'

‘Good,' said his friend heartily. ‘Style always tells – wonderful how surely the most subtle effects appeal to the most primitive mind. Great Scott, there's my bus. Glad to have been a help,' he said as he fled.

‘Great Scott!' repeated Bobby dazedly. ‘Why, of course, why on earth didn't I think of that before? Makes it plain at once,' he said, with a grateful glance after the bus that was bearing his friend away.

Full of his discovery of the meaning of that odd jumble of words printed in the
Announcer
agony-column, convinced that it was the origin of the quarrel between Amy Emmers and her mistress, positive that it was proof of secret communication between Amy and Tim Sterling, but by no means sure what its exact bearing was upon the murder, Bobby hurried back to headquarters to report. There he was kept till late, writing out his report and submitting it, explaining how he had discovered the meaning hidden in those jumbled words, communicating by phone this new information to Colonel Lawson, who so far qualified his habitual disapproval of anything his subordinates might do as to agree to Bobby staying in London to pursue other inquiries, and in especial to try to trace the missing Jones.

‘Not,' pronounced the chief constable, ‘that he's likely to be able to tell us anything useful. Probably he is what he said – a retired business man on the look-out for a country home, and when he heard about the murder he thought that didn't seem much like a peaceful rural retreat so he took himself off back to Town.'

‘Yes, sir. Very likely indeed, sir,' agreed Bobby dutifully. ‘But I always feel a little worried about that fountain-pen. If Dene's story is true, it seems possible the thing was last in Jones's possession.'

‘Oh, for that,' answered the chief constable, and Bobby could almost see the gesture with which at the other end of the line Eddy Dene's fountain-pen was relegated to the realm of the unimportant, ‘there may be fifty explanations.'

Again Bobby dutifully agreed, though reflecting to himself that it was certain only one of the fifty explanations could be the right one, and possibly it might have its significance. However, by now Colonel Lawson had rung off, so Bobby finished what he had to do, and then retired to seek his rooms and his bed.

In the morning he was up early, and went first to headquarters to see if any fresh instructions were awaiting him. None were. But reports had now been received from all the private detective-agencies known, and none of them admitted to any knowledge of anyone answering to the name or description of the elusive Mr. Jones.

So it seemed the hint, intended or not intended, Bobby had derived from Eddy Dene's remark that Jones asked as many questions as a detective, was proved valueless; and that the idea that he was a private detective employed to watch Lady Cambers had to be given up.

‘Of course,' the official Bobby was talking to remarked presently, ‘there are plenty of bright lads who mix a dash of private detection with a spot of blackmail, and who take care we never hear of them if they can help it, but this letter you got hold of from Miss Bowman's charwoman does not seem to tune in very well. If you're employing a private detective to watch your wife in the hope of getting a divorce because she's carrying on with someone – Eddy Dene, probably, in this case – you would hardly switch on to murder while your private detective was still on the spot, would you?'

‘It seems a weak point in the case,' Bobby agreed. ‘I suppose the prosecution would argue impatience and disappointment at lack of results leading to other methods – the method someone did adopt with Lady Cambers. It might be the private detective developed into the accomplice. There's always that fountain-pen to account for. I suppose it's been examined here?'

‘Goes back with full report to Colonel Lawson to-day, I believe,' the other answered. ‘Nothing significant discovered, though. What do you propose now?'

‘To get hold of Jones.'

‘How?'

‘There's the match-stalk from the Hotel Henry VIII. I thought of trying there first.'

‘Rather an off chance,' observed the other. ‘If you draw blank there...?'