A Hundred Thousand Dragons

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘So what, Jack?’ asked Rackham after a pause.

  Jack stood up. ‘I was wondering why the drawing was so razor sharp. After all, these are watercolours. You’d expect fades and washes. It’s part of the technique of watercolour painting.’ He leaned forward and tapped the book. ‘The painting I saw in Vaughan’s study, the one supposed to be painted by Simes, was an ordinary watercolour. These are more like coloured drawings. The objects in the pictures are startlingly vivid. Unnaturally so, I’d say.’ He pulled at his earlobe thoughtfully. ‘What if it’s not the number of pictures on each page but the number of objects in each picture?’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Rackham. Lady Rivers obligingly turned the book round for him. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said after a little while. ‘They’re coloured drawings, aren’t they? Let’s give your idea a go, Jack. The number of objects in each picture?’ He shrugged. ‘At the very least, it’s something we’ve not tried before.’ He went back to the table, and pulling the notepad towards him, picked up the pencil. ‘How many objects are in the first picture?’

  ‘One. An Arab.’

  ‘So if this an alphabet substitution code, that gives us the letter A.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t forget I and J count as the same letter. We want twenty-five letters, not twenty-six in this alphabet.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Rackham. ‘What’s the second picture?’

  ‘That’s four palm trees and the third picture is of . . . crikey, hang on, there’s lots of rocks. There are twenty-four in all.’

  ‘What about the second page?’

  ‘That’s three pictures again, and the first picture is of about a million birds. How many would you say there are, Aunt Alice?’

  They counted up the birds quickly. ‘Twenty-five, Bill.’

  ‘Which gives us Z.’

  ‘The next picture has four camels.’

  ‘Which gives us D.’

  ‘And the next picture is of . . . fourteen Turkish soldiers.’

  ‘Giving us O.’

  ‘The next page has eleven pictures and the first one has . . . Wait a moment . . . eighteen oil drums in it.’

  ‘Which is S.’

  ‘The second has eight tents.’

  ‘Which is H.’

  ‘And the third is another big one. Twenty-three field guns.’

  ‘Which is X.’

  Lady Rivers looked at what Bill Rackham had written. ‘A, D, Y, Z, D, O, S, H, X. It doesn’t make any sense, Jack.’

  ‘Give the boy a chance,’ he pleaded. ‘At least we’ve got some letters. I’ve got a feeling in my bones about this. And don’t you think the pictures on each page correspond to the length of each word? I bet they do. So that’s two three letter words and the beginnings of this eleven-letter monstrosity.’

  By the time they had got to page six, Rackham had written out a string of letters that Lady Rivers looked at in frank perplexity. ‘It might make sense to you two,’ she said, ‘but I can’t make head or tail of it.’

  ‘Again, wait,’ said Jack. ‘Or perpend, if you’d rather. I think it’s time we got our code square going, don’t you, Bill? That’ll tell us if we’re on the right lines.’

  ‘The keyword’s Ozymandias?’ asked Rackham.

  ‘Ker-rect. Drop the second A.’

  Rackham, watched by the fascinated Lady Rivers, drew out the squares for the code.

  ‘What do we do now, Jack?’ she asked.

  ‘Now, I hope, everything starts to fall into place,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Bill, the first letter we’ve got to read is A. That’s at the top right-hand corner of the square, so it transposes with the letter at the bottom of the column.’

  ‘Which is X.’

  Jack’s face fell. ‘Is it? That’s not very promising. The next letter is D. That gets replaced by the letter to the immediate left.’

  ‘And that gives us N.’

  ‘XN? Strewth, I hope this picks up soon. Next is Y which gives us . . .’

  ‘Z.’

  ‘God in heaven, does it? XNZ? What’s the beggar playing at?’

  Frowning, Rackham carried on for a while. ‘This is no good, Jack,’ he said eventually, putting down the pencil with a sharp click. ‘I’ve got X, N, Z, U, N, T, I or J, C and T. It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Jack regretfully, looking at the paper. ‘And yet I was sure we were on to something, you know. Damn!’

  ‘Let’s have another sherry,’ Lady Rivers suggested. ‘Maybe something will occur to you.’ She looked at the code and sighed. ‘I feel it should mean something.’

  ‘I wish I knew what,’ said Jack. He refilled their glasses and flung himself into an armchair. With his hands behind his head, he stared at the ceiling. ‘Objects,’ he muttered. ‘Objects in the pictures. It all seemed to be falling into place. I was sure that’s what it was.’

  Lady Rivers sipped her sherry. ‘Maybe it is. Jack, I know you know about codes . . .’

  ‘I know a bit,’ Jack put in. ‘Anyone who worked with signals had to.’

  ‘I’m sure they did. But although Von Erlangen was a German officer, you don’t know he’s got any knowledge of codes, do you?’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ agreed Rackham. ‘After all, I was in the Cheshires and I haven’t got a clue about codes or ciphers. I left that to the experts.’

  Lady Rivers nodded. ‘Of course you did, but you had got experts to turn to. Von Erlangen would have to rely on what he knew. I was thinking about the Sherlock Holmes story, The Dancing Men. I don’t know anything about codes either, but I understood the story. How did Holmes crack the code?’

  Jack got up, and walking to the bookcase once more, crouched down and pulled out a couple of books. ‘Here we are,’ he announced after a brief search. ‘Dancing men . . . No dancing ladies. It sounds like a bit of a grim night out, doesn’t it? The Ritz would have to shut down if a lot of blokes turned up without girls.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Rackham with a laugh. ‘How does the Great Detective crack the code?’

  ‘I imagine, knowing Holmes, he smokes like a chimney,’ said Jack, flicking through the pages. ‘D’you know, it’s remarkable that although he never does any exercise, doses himself with cocaine and smokes tobacco that smells like old socks, he’s always fighting fit? I don’t know how he does it. Hello, here we are. He whistles and sings according to this – I’d whistle if I thought it’d do us any good – and he sits with furrowed brow and vacant eye. He says he’s familiar with all forms of secret writing, which is a dickens of a claim, and the author of a trifling monograph – I love how he never writes a serious monograph but only trifling ones – in which he analyses a hundred and sixty separate ciphers. Wow. Now that’s what I call an expert. It’s a straightforward alphabet substitution code, as a matter of fact. He sees which one of the little dancing men appears most often, assumes that’s the letter E, and, with a nod to the fact that it’s not all plain sailing after that, assigns other letters to various figures. T, A and O are the next most common letters – he goes through the alphabet – and says that to analyse the code he needed a fair old bit of material to work with.’

  ‘Can’t we do that?’ asked Lady Rivers. ‘After all, if we had the whole message to work with, we might be able to see which letter occurred most often.’

  ‘We could,’ said Jack, putting the book back. ‘We might as well get all the letters we can. You’re quite right, Aunt Alice, it’s not a bad idea. We might be lucky.’

  After about a quarter of an hour’s work, Rackham looked at the collection of letters they had culled. ‘I’d say D occurs most often, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Which means that D equals E, or it should do,’ said Jack. ‘After that . . . Well, there’s not a lot in it.’ He glanced across the table to where their coded square lay discarded and sighed. ‘I was sure the word Ozymandias had something to do with it. It seemed to fit so perfectly.’

  ‘It does!’ said Lady Rivers excit
edly, stabbing her finger at the paper. ‘It does fit! Not the way you read the letters at first, but see. In the squares you’ve written Ozymandis without the extra A and the rest of the alphabet and see – the D comes above the E.’

  Jack and Rackham looked to where she was pointing. ‘By jingo, so it does,’ said Rackham slowly.

  ‘I wonder if that’s it,’ breathed Jack. ‘Perhaps we’ve all been right, so to speak. Von Erlangen wasn’t an expert in codes but knew enough to compose a square and a keyword. What he didn’t know or couldn’t remember was how to read off the letters.’

  ‘So he made up his own method,’ said Lady Rivers. She picked up the pencil again. ‘Let’s try it. We’re reading the letter above the coded letter, yes? So the first letter is A which gives us . . . I’ve run out of letters. It’s off the square.’

  ‘Try the letter below it, Aunt Alice,’ suggested Jack. ‘That gives us B.’

  ‘All right. And the next is D which gives us E.’

  ‘And Y which gives us I or J.’

  ‘B, E, J?’ said Rackham. ‘Or I. That’s not a word.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s carry on, though.’

  Rackham looked at him sharply. He could hear the excitement in his friend’s voice but couldn’t see any reason to justify it. ‘All right. The next letter is Z.’

  ‘Which gives us D.’

  ‘And D.’

  ‘Which gives us E again.’

  ‘O’

  ‘Oh for the wings of a dove . . . Which is N.’

  ‘And now we’re on to the next page. The first letter is S.’

  ‘Which is G.’

  ‘H.’

  ‘Turns into R.’

  ‘X.’

  ‘Which is off the square so I’ll try A.’

  ‘Then A.’

  ‘Which is B,’ said Jack, again with that odd note of suppressed excitement. ‘To be or not to be . . . Sorry Bill.’

  Rackham looked at him critically. ‘I don’t know what’s eating you, because so far we’ve got bej or bei den grab which doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I think,’ said Haldean, his eyes dancing with black fire, ‘it would make a great deal more sense if we spelt grab with a capital letter. All nouns in German start with a capital.’

  ‘What!’ Rackham stared at the paper. ‘You mean it’s German? But damn it, none of the rest of it’s German. Why’s he suddenly changed language?’

  ‘We worked out he painted the book for Freya,’ said Jack, hesitating slightly over the name. ‘The top part, the public part of the book, is in English. It’s as if he’s inviting anyone to look at it. But the secret part, the part underneath, is in German. I can’t imagine he talked to Freya in English.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ agreed Rackham. ‘So what does it mean?’

  Jack leaned back, lit a cigarette and grinned. ‘I’m willing to bet that this word of eleven letters is Grabstätten or tombs. Bei den Grabstätten. By the tombs . . . Dear God, it works,’ he added in a different voice. ‘It really does work.’

  Rackham shook Jack’s hand vigorously. ‘Congratulations, old man. I’d virtually given up on it but you’ve done it. By jingo, even the expert, Professor Bruce, couldn’t read it but you’ve done it.’

  ‘Your Professor Bruce didn’t have my advantages. I knew the significance of the name Ozymandias and he didn’t have Aunt Alice to point out that although it might be set out as a Playfair code it wasn’t written by Playfair’s rules. Well spotted, Aunt Alice.’

  ‘I just happened to see it,’ she said, blushing, ‘as we were thinking about Sherlock Holmes and the letter E. I do like Sherlock Holmes,’ she added. ‘Even if he is rather crushing to poor Dr Watson. I suppose, if this was written with Freya Von Erlangen in mind, they must have used this code before. Perhaps not with pictures, which seems very complicated, but just with ordinary words. He’d have to know she could read it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Jack dubiously. ‘As I say, he’s a secretive blighter.’

  ‘There’s something else I thought, too,’ said Lady Rivers. The two men looked up sharply. ‘It’s the paintings themselves. They’re silent, aren’t they? I wonder if that ties in with the poem.’

  Jack snapped his fingers. ‘The Silent Ones! The Silent Ones, when asked, will measure, the hidden way to dragons’ treasure. I wonder if that’s it?’

  ‘You see, these pictures have shown us the way, haven’t they?

  ‘Let’s get the rest of the code worked out,’ suggested Rackham. ‘Then we can see what these Silent Ones really are telling us.’

  With the help of Cassell’s German Dictionary they threw themselves into the work and within half an hour Von Erlangen’s renderings of scenes as various as Turkish carpets, lizards, oil drums and the pyramids by moonlight (amongst others) had turned into German prose. Bei den Grabstätten die wispernden Toten stehen Sie vor Petra. Treten Sie in den Löwen hinein. Kämpfen Sie mit den Skorpion. Drüden Sie den Adler. Suchen Sie die Jungfrau. 33 (this had been a picture of thirty-three birds in flight and had caused them some hesitation) KM SSO Q’asr Dh’an. 48 (these had been squares on a mosaic floor) KMS Petra. Pferdkopfstein.

  ‘And now let’s get it into English,’ said Jack. ‘Heave the dictionary over. My German’s a bit rusty. Here goes. By or at the tombs of the whispering dead . . . Crikey. It sounds a cheerful sort of place. Stand you in front of Petra. I suppose that means face towards Petra. Step or go you in the lion inside. Go into the lion we’d say, I imagine. Fight you with the scorpion. Crush or squeeze or vex you the eagle. Would it do to simply irritate it, I wonder? Search you or look for the virgin or maiden. 33 kilometres SSE (ost is the German for east) Q’asr Dh’an. 48 kilometres S. Petra. Horsehead rock.’

  ‘And what,’ said Rackham with great feeling, ‘does all that rigmarole mean? The directions are clear enough, but what’s all this about vexing eagles, fighting scorpions and looking for maidens?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Jack. ‘It sounds as if he’s going to start a barney in a zoo. And who’s the maiden, I wonder?’

  ‘It all sounds perfectly thrilling,’ said Lady Rivers, her eyes alight. ‘What are you going to do now, Jack?’

  Jack looked at Rackham. ‘It’s really up to you, Bill. If we’re right – and I bet we are – there’s rather more than a king’s ransom waiting to be picked up, to say nothing of our pal, Von Erlangen.’

  ‘I’m going to see the Assistant Commissioner,’ said Rackham. ‘He’ll know what to do.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘He might be at the Yard. If not, I’m going to his house. This is important enough to warrant it.’ He picked up the decoded message. ‘Can I take this?’

  ‘Half a mo. Let me copy it out first,’ said Jack. ‘I want to keep it amongst my souvenirs. Aunt Alice and I are going out for dinner, Bill. Do you want to join us?’

  ‘I’d rather get on to the Chief,’ said Rackham. ‘Thanks, though.’

  They parted at the door, Rackham to Scotland Yard and Jack and Lady Rivers to dine on the balcony at Romano’s on the Strand. After dinner, he escorted her to Waterloo Station and saw her on to the train home.

  As her train pulled out of the station, his good mood evaporated. He’d known how fragile it had been. Nothing, he thought, as he let himself back into his rooms, seemed to add up to anything very much. Yes, they knew how Vaughan had done it. Yes, they’d cracked Von Erlangen’s code.

  So now what? he asked himself as he mixed a whisky and soda. Perhaps the Assistant Commissioner would be able to pull the right strings. Maybe Von Erlangen would be arrested. It was far more likely, thought Jack bleakly as he lit a cigarette, that Von Erlangen would escape. And Freya? His stomach twisted at the thought.

  He put down his glass as he heard footsteps on the stairs and stood up to answer the caller’s knock. He wasn’t expecting anyone.

  Bill Rackham came into the room. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ he said, taking off his hat and cutting Jack’s greeting short. ‘A cable’s arrived
at the Yard. I’m sorry, Jack. Freya Von Erlangen is dead.’

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Dead?’ Jack echoed the word blankly.

  Rackham nodded. ‘She was found in a trunk in Aden. There was another body, too, the body of a man. At a guess, he’s Gilbert Faraday, the missing driver we’ve been looking for. I’ll swear the manager at the Balmoral knew something was wrong, even if he didn’t know it was murder. I’m looking forward to asking him a few questions.’ As succinctly as he could, Rackham related Cynthia Coire’s gruesome discovery. ‘What I think happened is that Von Erlangen killed her, put her in his trunk and, once he was on board ship, got down into the hold and swapped the labels on his trunk with the labels on Mrs Coire’s. It was a new trunk and she didn’t notice anything wrong until it was unpacked.’

  Jack sat down slowly, numbed by the sick taste of grief. ‘She was killed because of me,’ he said, more to himself than Bill. ‘That night he attacked me, Freya saved me from being knifed. He’d never forgive her for that.’ Sudden anger flared. ‘If only I’d worked out the truth sooner! I talked about Craig, for God’s sake! If I’d had the truth, the real truth, if I’d had the sense to realize Von Erlangen was alive, she’d have trusted me. I told her I could help and yet, with every word I said, it was obvious I couldn’t.’

  ‘Easy does it, Jack,’ said Rackham uncomfortably. ‘If she had told you the truth, you would have helped her.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Jack’s voice was savage. ‘I talked about her being an accessory to murder. It’s not reassuring, is it? She didn’t even know her precious husband murdered the American guard. That’s the bitter irony of it.’

  ‘She must have known Craig had been murdered though.’ Rackham’s voice was measured. ‘And there’s this poor young devil, Gilbert Faraday. She must have known about him. And if she’d told us, we could have stopped Von Erlangen there and then.’

  Jack started to speak, then stopped, covering his hand with his mouth. ‘You’re right, damn it,’ he said dully. ‘Of course you are. Yes, she could have turned to us. To me. I wish she had, but she wasn’t a free agent. Can you imagine her state of mind? She must have felt like a rabbit trapped by a stoat.’