Wimsey sighed, and rose.
‘I’m going home to bed,’ he declared. ‘We must wait till we get the photographs of the paper. Life is dust and ashes. I can’t prove my theories and Bunter has deserted me again. He disappeared from Wilvercombe on the same day as William Bright, leaving me a message to say that one of my favourite socks had been lost in the wash and that he had lodged a complaint with the management. Miss Vane, Harriet, if I may call you so, will you marry me and look after my socks, and, incidentally be the only woman-novelist who ever accepted a proposal of marriage in the presence of a superintendent and inspector of Police?’
‘Not even for the sake of the headlines.’
‘I thought not. Even publicity isn’t what it was. See here, Superintendent, will you take a bet that Alexis didn’t commit suicide and that he wasn’t murdered by Bolsheviks?’
The Superintendent replied cautiously that he wasn’t a sporting man.
‘Crushed again!’ moaned his lordship. ‘All the same,’ he added, with a flash of his old spirit, ‘I’ll break that alibi if I die for it.’
XXVI
THE EVIDENCE OF THE BAY MARE
‘Hail, shrine of blood!’
The Bride’s Tragedy
Wednesday, 1 July
The photographs of the paper found on the corpse duly arrived next morning, together with the original; and Wimsey, comparing them together in the presence of Glaisher and Umpelty, had to confess that the experts had made a good job of it. Even the original paper was far more legible than it had been before. The chemicals that remove bloodstains and the stains of dyed leather, and the chemicals that restore the lost colour to washed-out ink had done their work well, and the colour-screens that so ingeniously aid the lens to record one colour and cut out the next had produced from the original, thus modified, a result in which only a few letters here and there were irretrievably lost. But to read is one thing; to decipher, another. They gazed sadly at the inextricable jumble of letters.
XNATNX
RBEXMG
PRBFX ALI MKMG BFFY, MGTSQ JMRRY. ZBZE FLOX P.M. MSIU FKX FLDYPG FKAP RPD KL DONA FMKPC FM NOR ANXP.
SOLFA TGMZ DXL LKKZM VXI BWHNZ MBFFY MG, TSQ A NVPD NMM VFYQ. CJU ROGA K.C. RAC RRMTN S.B. IF H.P. HNZ ME? SSPXLZ DFAX LRAEL TLMK XATL RPX BM AEBF HS MPIKATL TO HOKCCI HNRY. TYM VDSM SUSSX GAMKR, BG AIL AXH NZMLF HVUL KNN RAGY QWMCK, MNQS TOIL AXFA AN IHMZS RPT HO KFLTIM. IF MTGNLU H.M. CLM KLZM AHPE ALF AKMSM, ZULPR FHQ – CMZT SXS RSMKRS GNKS FVMP RACY OSS QESBH NAE UZCK CON MGBNRY RMAL RSH NZM, BKTQAP MSH NZM TO ILG MELMS NAGMJU KC KC.
TQKFX BQZ NMEZLI BM ZLFA AYZ MARS UP QOS KMXBJ SUE UMIL PRKBG MSK QD.
NAP DZMTB N.B. OBE XMG SREFZ DBS AM IMHY GAKY R. MULBY M.S. SZLKO GKG LKL GAW XNTED BHMB XZD NRKZH PSMSKMN A.M. MHIZP DK MIM, XNKSAK C KOK MNRL CFL INXF HDA GAIQ.
GATLM Z DLFA A QPHND MV AK MV MAG C.P.R. XNATNX PD GUN MBKL I OLKA GLDAGA KQB FTQO SKMX GPDH NW LX SULMY ILLE MKH BEALF MRSK UFHA AKTS.
At the end of a strenous hour or two, the following facts were established:
1. The letter was written on a thin but tough paper which bore no resemblance to any paper found among the effects of Paul Alexis. The probability was thus increased that it was a letter received, and not written by him.
2. It was written by hand in a purplish ink, which, again, was not like that used by Alexis. The additional inference was drawn that the writer either possessed no typewriter or was afraid that his typewriter might be traced.
3. It was not written in wheel-cipher, or in any cipher which involved the regular substitution of one letter of the alphabet for another.
‘At any rate,’ said Wimsey, cheerfully, ‘we have plenty of material to work on. This isn’t one of those brief, snappy “Put goods on sundial” messages which leave you wondering whether E really is or is not the most frequently-recurring letter in the English language. If you ask me, it’s either one of those devilish codes founded on a book – in which case it must be one of the books in the dead man’s possession, and we only have to go through them – or it’s a different kind of code altogether – the kind I was thinking about last night, when we saw those marked words in the dictionary.’
‘What kind’s that, my lord?’
‘It’s good code,’ said Wimsey, ‘and pretty baffling if you don’t know the key-word. It was used during the War. I used it myself, as a matter of fact, during a brief interval of detecting under a German alias. But it isn’t the exclusive property of the War Office. In fact, I met it not so long ago in a detective story. It’s just –’
He paused, and the policemen waited expectantly.
‘I was going to say, it’s just the thing an amateur English plotter might readily get hold of and cotton on to. It’s not obvious, but it’s accessible and very simple to work. It’s the kind of thing that young Alexis could easily learn to encode and decode; it doesn’t want a lot of bulky apparatus; and it uses practically the same number of letters as the original message, so that it’s highly suitable for long epistles of this kind.’
‘How’s it worked?’ asked Glaisher.
‘Very prettily. You choose a key-word of six letters or more, none of which recurs. Such as, for example, SQUANDER, which was on Alexis’ list. Then you make a diagram of five squares each way and write the key-word in the squares like this:
‘Then you fill up the remaining spaces with the rest of the alphabet in order, leaving out the ones you’ve already got.’
‘You can’t put twenty-six letters into twenty-five spaces,’ objected Glaisher.
‘No; so you pretend you’re an ancient Roman or a medieval monk and treat I and J as one letter. So you get this.’
‘Now, let’s take a message – What shall me say? “All is known, fly at once” – that classic hardy perennial. We write it down all of a piece and break it into groups of two letters, reading from left to right. It won’t do to have two of the same letters coming together, so where that happens we shove in Q or Z or something which won’t confuse the reader. So now our message runs AL QL IS KN OW NF LY AT ON CE.’
‘Suppose there was an odd letter at the end?’
‘Well, then we’d add on another Q or Z or something to square it up. Now, we take our first group, AL. We see that they come at the corners of a rectangle in which the other corners are SP. So we put down SP for the first two letters of the coded message. In the same way QL becomes SM and IS becomes FA.’
‘Ah!’ cried Glaisher, ‘but here’s KN. They both come on the same vertical line. What happens then?’
‘You take the letter next below each – TC. Next comes OW, which you can do for yourself by taking the corners of the square.’
‘MX?’
‘MX it is. Go on.’
‘SK,’ said Glaisher, happily taking diagonals from corner to corner, ‘PV, NP, UT –’
‘No, TU. If your first diagonal went from bottom to top, you must take it the same way again. ON = TU, NO would be UT.’
‘Of course, of course. TU. Hullo!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘CE come on the same horizontal line.’
‘In that case you take the next letter to the right of each.’
‘But there isn’t a letter to the right of C.’
‘Then start again at the begininning of the line.’
This confused the Superintendent for a moment, but he finally produced DR.
‘That’s right. So your coded message stands now: SP SM FA TC MX SK PV NP TU DR. To make it look prettier and not give the method away, you can break it up into any lengths you like. For instance. SPSM FAT CMXS KPV NPTUDR. Or you can embellish it with punctuation at hapazard. S.P. SMFA. TCMXS, KPVN, PT! UDR. It doesn’t matter. The man who gets it will ignore all that. He will simply break it up into pairs of letters again and read it with the help of the code diagram. Taking the diagonals as before, and the next letter above, where they come on the same vertical line, and the next to the left where they come on the same horizontal.’
The two policemen
pored over the diagram. Then Umpelty said:
‘I see, my lord. It’s very ingenious. You can’t guess it by way of the most frequent letter, because you get a different letter for it each time, according as it’s grouped to the next letter. And you can’t guess individual words, because you don’t know where the words begin and end. Is it at all possible to decode it without the key-word?’
‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Wimsey. ‘Any code ever coded can be decoded with pains and patience – except possibly some of the book codes. I know a man who spent years doing nothing else. The code diagram got so bitten into him that when he caught measles he came out in checks instead of spots.’
‘Then he could decode this,’ said Glaisher, eagerly.
‘On his head. We’ll send him a copy if you like. I don’t know where he is, but I know those that do. Shall I bung it off? It would save us a lot of time.’
‘I wish you would, my lord.’
Wimsey took a copy of the letter, pushed it into an envelope and enclosed a brief note.
‘Dear Clumps, – Here’s a cipher message. Probably Playfair, but old Bungo will know. Can you push it off to him and say I’d be grateful for a construe? Said to hail from Central Europe, but ten to one it’s in English. How goes?
‘Yours,
‘Wimbles.’
‘Seen anything of Trotters lately?’
He addressed the envelope to an official at the Foreign Office, and picked up another copy of the cipher.
‘I’ll take this if I may. We’ll try it out with some of Alexis’ selected words. It’ll be a nice job for Miss Vane, and a healthy change from crosswords. Now, what’s the next item?’
‘Nothing very much yet, my lord. We haven’t found anybody who saw Perkins pass through Darley at any time, but we’ve found the chemist who served him in Wilvercombe. He says Perkins was there at eleven o’clock, which gives him ample time to be at Darley by 1.15. And Perkins has had a bad relapse and can’t be interrogated. And we’ve seen Newcombe, the farmer, who corroborates finding the mare wandering on the shore on Friday morning. He says, too, that she was in the field O.K. when his man was down there on the Wednesday, and that he is quite sure she couldn’t have got through the gap in the hedge by herself. But then, naturally, nobody ever believes his own neglect is to blame for anything.’
‘Naturally not. I think I’ll run over and see Farmer Newcombe. In the meantime, Miss Vane is going to do her damnedest with the cipher – trying out all the marked words on it. Aren’t you?’
‘If you like.’
‘Noble woman! It would be fun if we got ahead of the official interpreter. I suppose the Weldons show no signs of moving.’
‘Not the slightest. But I haven’t seen much of them since the funeral. Henry seems a bit stand-offish – can’t get over the snake episode, I suppose. And his mother –’
‘Well?’
‘Oh, nothing. But she seems to be trying to get fresh information out of Antoine.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes. Antoine is being very sympathetic.’
‘Good luck to him. Well, cheerio!’
Wimsey drove over to Darley, interviewed the farmer and asked for the loan of the bay mare and a bridle. Mr Newcombe not only granted the loan most cordially, but expressed his intention of accompanying Wimsey to watch the experiment. Wimsey was at first not best pleased; it is perhaps easier to wallop another man’s horse over a four-mile course if the owner is not looking on. On reflection, however, he thought he saw a use to which he could put Mr Newcombe. He asked that gentleman to be good enough to precede him to the Flat Iron, and make a note of the exact moment at which he himself should come into view, and thence time his progress. The farmer, surmising with a wink that the loosing of the mare and the tragedy at the Flat-Iron had some connection with one another, readily agreed, and, himself mounting a sturdy white nag, took his departure along the shore, while Wimsey, glancing at his watch, set out in pursuit of the bay mare.
She came up to be caught with remarkable readiness, no doubt connecting Wimsey in her simple equine mind with oats. The gap in the hedge had been opened again, by permission, and Wimsey, having bridled her, rode her through it and stirred her up to a canter.
The mare, though willing enough, had, as he expected, no exceptional turn of speed, and since their progress had to be made actually through the water, it was a trifle impeded and remarkably noisy. As he rode, Wimsey kept his eye on the cliffs above. Nobody and nothing was in sight, with the exception of a few grazing animals. The road was hidden. He made good time to the cottages, and then began to look about for Ormond’s break in the cliff. He recognised it when he came to it by the fallen rocks and the fragments of broken fence above, and looked at his watch. He was a little ahead of time. Glancing along the shore, he saw the Flat-Iron well in view, with Farmer Newcombe seated upon it, a little dark lump at a mile’s distance. He left the break in the cliff to be explored on the return journey, and urged the mare to her best pace. She responded vigorously, and they made the final mile in fine style, the water spraying about them. Wimsey could see the farmer clearly now; he had the white horse tethered to the famous ring-bolt and was standing on the rock, watch conscientiously in hand, to time them.
It was not till they were within a few score paces of the rock that the bay mare seemed to realise what was happening. Then she started as if she had been shot, flung up her head and slewed round so violently that Wimsey, jerked nearly on to her neck by the plunge, was within an ace of being spun off altogether. He dug his knees into her bare sides and hauled hard upon the bridle, but, like many farm nags, she had a mouth of iron, and the snaffle made little impression upon her. She was off, tearing back in her tracks as if the devil was after her. Wimsey, cynically telling himself that he had under-estimated her power of speed, clung grimly to her withers and concentrated on shortening his left-hand rein so as to wrench her head round to the sea. Presently, finding it hard to go forward against this determined drag, she slacked pace, skirmishing sideways.
‘Bless and save you, my girl,’ said Wimsey, mildly, ‘what’s the matter with you?’
The mare panted and shuddered.
‘But this’ll never do,’ said Wimsey. He stroked her sweaty shoulder reassuringly. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you, you know.’
She stood quietly enough, but shook as she stood.
‘There, there,’ said Wimsey.
He turned her head once more in the direction of the Flat-Iron, and was aware of the hurried approach of Mr Newcombe on the white horse.
‘Lord a’mighty,’ exclaimed Mr Newcombe, ‘what’s come to the mare? I thought she’d have you off surely. Done a bit of riding, ain’t you?’
‘Something must have frightened her,’ said Wimsey. ‘Has she ever been there before?’
‘Not as I know on,’ said the farmer.
‘You weren’t waving your arms or anything, were you?’
‘Not I. I was looking at my watch – and there! Dang me if I haven’t clean forgot what time I made it. I was fair mazed with her taking fright so all of a sudden.’
‘Is she given to shying?’
‘Never known her take and do such a thing before.’
‘Queer,’ said Wimsey. ‘I’ll try her again. Keep behind us, and we’ll know it wasn’t you that startled her.’
He urged the mare back towards the rock at a gentle trot. She moved forward uneasily, chucking her head about. Then, as before, she stopped dead and stood trembling.
They tried her half-a-dozen times, cajoling and encouraging her, but to no purpose. She would not go near the Flat-Iron – not even when Wimsey dismounted and led her step by step. She flatly refused to budge, standing with her shaking legs rooted to the sand, and rolling white and terrified eyes. Out of sheer mercy for her they had to give up the attempt.
‘I’ll be damned,’ said Mr Newcombe.
‘And so will I,’ said Wimsey.
‘What can have come over her –’ said Mr Newcombe.
‘I know what’s come over her all right,’ said Wimsey, ‘but – Well, never mind, we’d better go back.’
They rode slowly homeward. Wimsey did not stay to examine the break in the cliff. He did not need to. He knew now exactly what had happened between Darley and the Flat-Iron Rock. As he went, he put the whole elaborate structure of his theories together, line by line, and like Euclid, wrote at the bottom of it:
WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE
In the meantime, Constable Ormond was also feeling a little blue. He had suddenly bethought him of the one person in Darley who was likely to have kept tabs on Mr Perkins. This was old Gaffer Gander who, every day, rain or shine, sat on the seat of the little shelter built about the village oak in the centre of the green. He had unaccountably overlooked Gaffer Gander the previous day, owing to the fact that – by a most unusual accident – the Gaffer had not been in his accustomed seat when Ormond was making his inquiries. It turned out that Mr Gander had actually been in Wilvercombe, celebrating his youngest grandson’s wedding to a young woman of that town, but now he was back again and ready to be interviewed. The old gentleman was in high spirits. He was eighty-five come Martinmas, hale and hearty, and boasted that, though he might perhaps be a trifle hard of hearing, his eyes, thank God, were as good as ever they were.
Why, yes, he remembered Thursday, 18th. Day as the poor young man was found dead at the Flat-Iron. A beautiful day, surely, only a bit blowy towards evening. He always notices any strangers that came through. He remembered seeing a big open car come past at ten o’clock. A red one it was, and he even knew the number of it, because his great-grandson, little Johnnie – ah! and a bright lad he was – had noticed what a funny number it was. OI 0101 – just like you might be saying Oy, oy, oy. Mr Gander could call to mind the day when there wasn’t none o’ them things about, and folks was none the worse for it, so far as he could see. Not that Mr Gander was agin’ progress. He’d always voted Radical in his young days, but these here Socialists was going too far, he reckoned. Too free with other folks’ money, that’s what they were. It was Mr Lloyd George as give him the Old Age Pension, which was only right, seeing he had worked hard all his life, but he didn’t hold with no dole for boys of eighteen. When Mr Gander was eighteen, he was up at four o’clock every morning and on the land till sunset and after for five shillings a week and it hadn’t done him no harm as he could see. Married at nineteen he was, and ten children, seven of them still alive and hearty. Why, yes, the car had come back at one o’clock. Mr Gander had just come out from the Feathers after having a pint to his dinner, and he see the car stop and the gentleman as was camping in the lane get out of it. There was a lady in the car, very finely rigged out, but mutton dressed as lamb in Gaffer’s opinion. In his day, women weren’t ashamed of their age. Not that he minded a female making the best of herself, he was all for progress, but he thought they were going a bit too far nowadays. Mr Martin, that was the gentleman’s name, had said good morning to him and gone into the Feathers, and the car had taken the Heathbury road. Why, yes, he’d seen Mr Martin leave. Half-past one it were by the church clock. A good clock, that was. Vicar, he’d had it put in order at his own expense two years ago and when they turned the wireless on, you might hear Big Ben and the church clock striking together quite beautiful. There hadn’t been no wireless in Mr Gander’s day, but he thought it was a great thing and a fine bit of progress. His grandson Willy, the one that was married on a woman over to Taunton, had give him a beautiful set. It was that loud, he could hear it beautiful, even though his hearing was getting a little hard. He’d heard tell as they were going to show you pictures by wireless soon, and he hoped the Lord might spare him long enough to see it. He hadn’t nothing against wireless, though some people thought it was going a bit far to have the Sunday services laid on like gas, as you might say. Not but what it might be a good thing for them as was ailing, but he thought it made the young folks lazy and disrespectful-like. He himself hadn’t missed going to Sunday church for twenty year, not since he broke his leg falling off the hayrick, and while he had his strength, please God, he would sit under vicar. Why, yes, he did remember a strange young man coming through the village that afternoon. Of course he could describe him; there wasn’t nothing wrong with his eyes, nor his memory neither, praise be! It was only his hearing as wasn’t so good but, as Mr Ormond might have noticed, you had only to speak up clear and not mumble as these young people did nowadays and Mr Gander could hear you well enough. One of these rickety-looking town-bred fellows it was, in big glasses, with a little bag strapped to his back and a long stick to walk with, same as they all had. Hikers, they called them. They all had long sticks, like these here Boy Scouts, though, as anybody with experience could have told them, there was nothing like a good crutch-handled ash-plant to give you a help along when you were walking. Because, it stood to reason, you got a better holt on it than on one of they long sticks. But young folks never listened to reason, especially the females, and he thought they was going a bit far, too, with their bare legs and short pants like football players. Though Mr Gander wasn’t so old neither that he didn’t like to look at a good pair of female legs. In his days females didn’t show their legs, but he’d known men as would go a mile to look at a pretty ankle.
Have His Carcase Page 33
