by Guy Roberts
The Termite smiled wordlessly and sat back in his chair. Vano’s bravado had not removed his disquiet. If their source in London was out of the loop then other measures would have to be employed.
2100 16 June 2015, The Shard, London.
GR 510504491, -0.086312
Jack stretched his aching back and rubbed his neck muscles in frustration. The summer sun was squatting on the horizon, flooding the apartment with the last rays of the afternoon sun. David’s poem lay on the table before the three of them. Jack felt cramped and stifled. Tensions were rising as the final stanza of the poem mocked all attempts to decipher its meaning. Even the computer in the library had failed, the search engines of the internet were all equally stymied by David’s comments. The poem lay on the tabletop surrounded by scribbled comments, a roadmap of the city, a dictionary and a copy of ‘Great Treasures of Britain’ pilfered from the library. The last fifteen minutes had been spent in frustrated silence, the three of them collapsed into the spacious armchairs. Jack was fuming at their lack of progress.
‘Ok,’ Andrew’s voice grated on Jack’s nerves. ‘Let’s start again.’ The methodical calmness of the IT expert was far removed from Jack’s exasperation. Andrew picked up the page of poetry and cleared his throat gently.
‘You creeping man and weakest link,
half man half beast all out of sync.
After year each time place in order true,
Then fourth and ninth and fifth take you
By titled end is letter deign
And poem’s end is searchers gain
Andrew took a big sigh before he continued. ‘So it looks to me like the first two lines are about the location of the clue, while the rest of it is instructions on how it can be deciphered.’
‘We figured that bit out at seven o’clock.’ Jack glared at the IT staffer.
‘But still,’ Andrew was unperturbed, ‘it’s the key. When we have that, the rest will fall into place.’
He suddenly leaned forward with excitement. ‘In fact… Creeping man and weakest link… It reminds me of that picture of the evolution of man – a series of pictures going from a chimp to a Neanderthal to a man carrying a spear. And weakest link could be the ‘missing link’.’ Andrew looked at them excitedly. ‘In that case... Missing link and creeping men means Evolution, which means we’re talking about a statue of Charles Darwin!’ He looked at them expectantly, eyebrows raised.
Jack thought carefully. ‘I don’t think so.’ He shook his head. ‘The other things we looked at all had some link to David and I – places we visited, or things he told me about… I can’t remember us crawling over a statue of Charles Darwin or anything like that.’
Andrew’s excitement deflated.
‘Hang on,’ Cleo suddenly exclaimed. ‘Half man, half beast. Every other part of the poem has had a monster in it – ogre, satyr, cyclops, sphinx. So that’s got to be the next clue – something half human, half animal… like a,’ she paused, racking her brain, ‘like a centaur, or a harpy, or a…’
‘Or a mermaid,’ Andrew declared, clicking his fingers in agreement.
‘Or a minotaur,’ Cleo continued.
‘Or a vampire, or an orc, or a bloody undead Nazi!’ Jack’s temper suddenly flared as he snapped at the pair in frustration. ‘Listen, we’ve spent two hours trying to figure this shit out and we’re still clutching at straws.’ He balled his hands in rage. ‘If David wanted us to find the damn clue then why did he hide it in such stupid bloody poetry? Why didn’t he just tell us?’
‘Come on, Jack,’ Cleo leaned forward, pushing herself into his frustration. ‘David didn’t want the clues falling into the wrong hands. We can do this. We just need to think carefully. Think like David did. Eliminate every impossibility and what’s left will be the truth.’
‘That’s right,’ Andrew nodded encouragingly. ‘David wrote this stuff with you in mind. Remember how we first met, just next to 221b Baker Street. Cleo’s right – we just need to think like Sherlock Holmes.’
‘Think like Sherlock bloody Holmes?’ Jack muttered resentfully. ‘You can both Sherlock Holmes my arse.’ Cleo gave him a look of deep irritation. Realising he had overstepped the line Jack leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath, counting to ten in an effort to eliminate his frustration.
‘I’m sorry, guys,’ he apologised after a few seconds. ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes and neither was my broth…’
Jack stopped speaking mid-word and his face went still. Frustration and apology were both forgotten as his thoughts raced forward. It’s true, Jack realised, I’m not Sherlock Homes and neither was David… but David loved the stories like nothing else. As a boy David had hero-worshiped the imaginary detective, Jack remembered, while he, the ever-faithful younger brother, had lapped up David’s opinions on everything about their shared literary hero. What David had liked, Jack had loved, what David had scorned, Jack had loathed and of every Sherlock Holmes story written by Arthur Conan Doyle, there was only one which David had always criticised as far-fetched and disappointing.
‘What is it Jack?’ Cleo asked, looking at him with rising hope.
‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes.’ Jack grinned. ‘But if anyone can find an answer to a case, it’s him.’ He could feel a certainty growing in his breast. ‘Quick, I need a copy of the Sherlock Holmes books.’
‘What?’ Andrew was incredulous. ‘I know we joked about it, but…’
‘No questions,’ Jack was focused. ‘The clue in the poem – it’s not a statue, it’s a story. One of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, I’m sure of it, I’m bloody sure of it. I just need a copy of the books.’
‘Can you two stop arguing and get in here,’ Cleo called out from the library. Jack and Andrew followed her quickly and looked around the chamber in dismay. Thousands of books crammed the shelves. ‘Oh crap,’ Andrew breathed. ‘This is going to take forever.’
‘Well, perhaps.’ Cleo was leaning against the wall on the far side of the room with a strange smile playing across her face. ‘Or perhaps not.’ She shifted to one side, revealing a silhouette of the famous detective drawn across the spines of three fat books.
‘I saw it the moment I walked in,’ she explained.
‘Cleo, I could kiss you.’ Jack smiled, pulling the three books from their shelves and moving quickly back to the table.
‘The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes,’ Jack read as he opened the first of the volumes carefully. He flicked through some of the pages and raised his eyebrows in impressed surprise. Each page of the story was dotted with voluminous and exhaustive side notes. David would have loved this, he thought.
‘But what are we looking for?’ Andrew interrupted his reverie. ‘A half man, half beast? I thought Sherlock Holmes was about fighting crime, not monsters.’
‘He was,’ Jack murmured, his eyes scanning the tables of contents rapidly. ‘But the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, had a deep interest in the occult – he even got taken in by the Cottingley Fairies hoax in the 1920s. But what we’re looking for is a little less obscure. In fact, it should be….there.’
Cleo looked over his shoulder at where his finger was pointing at the table of contents. ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man,’ she read. ‘Well, that’s in the first line of the poem, at least.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Andrew looked doubtful. ‘This is so precise, how could anyone honestly know this is what David meant?’
‘I could.’ Jack spoke firmly. ‘David knew where the clues were, and he wrote that poem to lead me there. Other people might have figured it out in time, but he gave me every advantage that he could along the way… I should have remembered how much he didn’t like this story, it’s just that I was expecting another statue, not a book.’
‘Isn’t that the same for all the clues he gave us?’ Cleo shrugged. ‘At least this time David put the title right there.’
‘Well…’ Andrew subsided.
‘Cleo’s right,’ Jack agreed. ‘David loved Sherlock Holmes and so did I. This cl
ue was staring me right in the face, I just had to connect the dots.’
‘What’s the story about?’ Cleo asked.
Jack smiled. ‘Oh… a professor starts acting like a monkey and is nearly killed by his dog.’
Andrew and Cleo raised their eyebrows in surprise.
‘It’s about as bad as it sounds.’ Jack shrugged. ‘Not one of Conan Doyle’s better stories.’
‘Well, what about the next part of the clue?’ Cleo asked after a few seconds. ‘What does the rest of the poem say?’
Jack read from David’s poem once again. ‘After year each time place in order true, Then fourth and ninth and fifth take you.’
‘Each time?’ Cleo looked at him expectantly. ‘What does that mean? The position of words? The date it was written?’
Jack shook his head, thinking carefully.
‘Page numbers? Number of words on a page?’ Andrew chipped in.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Jack mused thoughtfully. ‘Page numbers and words would depend on different editions. I don’t think the date of publication would help either. It has to be a clue in the text itself.’
‘After year each time place in order true.’ Cleo frowned. ‘Maybe there’s dates in the text?’
Her finger darted to the bottom of the first page. There, ‘September 1903. Write that down.’
Jack scribbled a note next to the poem and looked back to the text. They stood still, a trio of figures staring down at the pages of text like a painting from the Middle Ages. The last rays of the setting sun played across their features unnoticed.
‘July 2nd, Andrew commented. ‘and more dates here…’
‘July 2nd again, July 11th, July 20th… September 4th… September 5th… August 26th… July 2nd a third time… September 3rd, August 26th.’ The dates were read out one by one as they were encountered.
There was a few minutes silence as they read to the end of the story.
‘Ok,’ Jack grinned. ‘Bad story, good clues. If this isn’t something, then I don’t know what is.’ He looked down at the column of numbers they had extracted from the text.
9-1903
2-7
2-7
11-7
20-7
4-9
5-9
26-8
2-7
3-9
26-8.
‘Ok,’ Andrew spoke thoughtfully. ‘The instructions are ‘After year each time place in order true. Only one of the dates involve an actual year – the first one. After that, it’s all over the place.’
‘So,’ let me guess,
That list has the dates all over the place. The dates should run according to the order of the months - July, August and September. Jack nodded, then wrote out a new column.
9-1903
2-7
2-7
2-7
11-7
20-7
26-8
26-8
3-9
4-9
5-9.
‘Ok,’ Jack looked to Andrew for advice. ‘We’ve done that, what’s next?’
‘Then fourth and ninth and fifth take you…’ Andrew looked across the numbers. ‘So we take the fourth, ninth and fifth sets of numbers… that’s… 2-7, 3-9 and 11-7… so…2-7-3-9-1-1-7.’
He glanced up at Jack. ‘Does that sound right?’
Jack took a deep breath. Does that sound right? Who knows… but what other choice do we have? ‘Well,’ he shrugged, ‘it’s seven letters… just like the rest of them, at least.’
‘But how could David know?’ Andrew frowned, scratching his head perplexedly. ‘How could the dates from the story match what we’re looking for?’
Jack shook his head, stumped. He had been wondering the same thing – how had David managed to build the clue into a Sherlock Holmes story? Was it there already, or did he hide it there himself?
Cleo leaned forward. ‘David told me previously that one clue was on the Wellington Statue, another was somewhere in Apsley House – that’s why I went to the cocktail party.’ Cleo frowned, deep in thought. ‘We found the other clues at Nelson’s Column and Cleopatra’s Needle. All four clues were on monuments or buildings constructed after the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps the fifth clue was hidden in the same way… on a building or monument which was built after the Battle of Waterloo, but which was destroyed or demolished when Conan Doyle was writing Sherlock Holmes?’
‘In which case the keepers of the secret had the clever idea of hiding it in a written story, rather than an actual building.’ Jack nodded, ‘that was clever. And somehow David found that clue along with the rest of them.’ He shook his head in admiration at his fallen brother. I guess I’ll never know how he tracked all those clues in the first place… it must have been some challenge. He pulled his thoughts away from the past and focused on Andrew and Cleo.
Andrew was nodding in understanding. ‘So that’s how David knew the code was hidden in the story… which means that now we only have the last two lines left to figure out… By titled end is letter deign, and poem’s end is searchers gain.’
‘We’re getting there.’ Jack smiled at Andrew for a moment, then turned to Cleo with a solemn face. ‘But before we go any further… there’s something Cleo needs to share.’
2115 hrs 16 June 2015, Spring Gardens, London.
GR 51.506601, -0.128130
The distant sound of late night traffic washed up from cars passing through Admiralty Arch. Only the highest government officials knew of Sir Johnathon’s discreet city apartment in Spring Gardens, a tiny street tucked behind the Arch and close to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. The civil servant was sitting back in a leather arm chair, reviewing every moment of the last few days. Sir Johnathon carried himself with elegant dignity, even in disgrace. A glass of Macallan whisky sat by his hand and a Wagner overture came gently from a CD player in the background. A nineteen-year-old corporal of the Grenadier Guards sat opposite Sir Johnathon, the young man awkward and uncomfortable with guarding the legendary Obi Wan Kenobi. The Chairman of COBRA was a Whitehall legend, and the young soldier was feeling more unsettled by the moment. He had been instructed to keep the old man under house arrest, but the unblinking countenance of his prisoner was driving his nerves to a fever pitch.
Sir Johnathon did not notice how his stillness was affecting the younger man. Every element of his being was focused on the issue of Jack Starling. Problems and theories spun through his mind like great pieces of machinery, names and faces dashing forward and dancing backward as other issues were considered, each element touching and interconnecting in an ever closer dance. The faster his thoughts moved, the stiller he became. The strains of Wagner’s Rienzi pulsed gently through the room, lifting Sir Johnathon’s mind upward as his thoughts swirled across the cities and histories of the world. Two pieces of ice tinkled together as they settled in the whisky glass.
Sir Johnathon’s eyes contracted to pin points at the sudden noise. His face an impenetrable mask, the civil servant smiled at the guard sitting before him.
‘What’s your name, young man?’ He spoke softly, a fatherly smile on his face.
‘Me, sir?’ The guard was confused.
‘Indeed,’ Sir Johnathon looked at him with genial interest.
‘Um, Corporal Timothy Paige, sir.’
Sir Johnathon nodded, one hand fiddling at his wrist watch for a moment before he turned gestured toward the sideboard where the bottle of Macallan whisky stood next to an unused tumbler.
‘Corporal Paige, would you join me for a drink?’
The soldier nodded thankfully, eager for a way to settle his nerves. The overture swelled toward a triumphant conclusion as Sir Johnathon passed a glass of the single malt toward the thirsty young soldier.
‘Cheers.’ Paige murmured.
A smile touched Sir Johnathon’s lips but did nothing to soften his cold blue eyes. As the Russians say, he thought, watching the soldier drink, ‘Na zdorove.’
2130 hrs 16 June 2015, The Shard, L
ondon.
GR 51.0504491, -0.086312
‘Well.’ Jack kept his eyes trained on Cleo. ‘We’ve nearly solved the final clue. It’s time for you to tell us what they mean.’
Andrew looked between the two of them in confusion. ‘What they mean?’
‘Exactly,’ Jack nodded. ‘Wellington’s officers hid the clues around London, but we need something else to make sense of them. Something which Cleo has been keeping secret up till now.’
Cleo looked at them both and nodded carefully.
‘All right,’ she admitted after a moment, ‘fair’s fair.’ She swallowed nervously, then threw another quick glance at Jack. He was disconcerted to realise it was tinged with pity and concern.
She pulled a folded piece of paper from a pocket and passed it over to him. ‘David left this for me in the British Library,’ she explained. ‘Apparently it explains where we need to go to understand the clues.’
Jack took the piece of paper cautiously, then cleared his throat and began to read.
‘If every hidden truth you hold,
Then seek with humble step the hidden gold.
Bronze and brick and written letters shown.
That highest temple and its eastward throne.
When found, I hope your quest of pain will cease.
And brother, mine, I hope that we find peace.’
Jack suddenly realised his throat was choked up. David had reached out from death and tried to ask forgiveness. He gave a long sigh. They were elegant words, but they came too late. David was dead. Jack looked up to see Andrew looking at him with confusion. Cleo had her arms crossed and was looking at the floor.
‘Right,’ he declared, pushing the emotion away. ‘Bronze and brick and written letters show…. Anyone?’
Cleo and Andrew remained silent.
‘Come on,’ Jack cleared his throat and spoke softly, pushing away the emotion he felt brimming at the thought of his brother. ‘The letters. Let’s sort that out first. Some of the clues we found started with letters. The Statue of Wellington had the letter A, the paper from the Napoleon Statue had an M on it and the one from Cleopatra’s Needle had an O. But that’s only three letters, for five clues. Two of the clues still don’t have a letter – Nelson’s Column and this Sherlock Holmes story. So let’s find these letters first and go from there.’
