It seemed she had a grievance against her employer. She hinted darkly that Miss Bowman was not all she seemed, not the ‘class’ that she, the ‘charlady’, was accustomed to. There was a gentleman, she said, and left the rest to be understood. Also, there had apparently been trouble about a bottle of whisky, of which the contents tended mysteriously to diminish, though no lady as was a lady would ever have thought so low as to use her tape-measure, and the ‘charlady’ herself a teetotaller from her earliest days, and ready to take her dying oath she never tasted anything except a glass of port at the King’s Arms, and very cheap, too, with just a drop of gin, perhaps, at times, to give it a flavour.
Bobby hinted gently that all this was very interesting, but hardly any business of his, and the woman looked at him sideways, and said: ‘You’re police?’
‘I expect you saw my card when I gave it you for Miss Bowman,’ Bobby reminded her.
‘There’s a Lady Cambers been murdered,’ she said. ‘It’s on all the placards.’
‘Yes,’ said Bobby. ‘Well?’
‘Sir Albert Cambers what’s her husband – isn’t he? – visits – her,’ the woman went on.
‘You mean Miss Bowman? Yes. I know.’
‘Stays all hours he does, as the porter will tell you if you ask, and me always most particular them I obliges is respectable same as me.’
Bobby made no comment, but waited for what he felt was coming.
‘There, you read that,’ she said, and thrust a letter into his hand.
‘Where did you get it?’ he asked.
‘Found it,’ she answered; and, when Bobby still looked at her, she added: ‘In her desk. Why not? She hadn’t locked it.’
Bobby looked at the letter. It was addressed to Miss Bowman, signed by Sir Albert. It was long. It was couched in affectionate, if hardly passionate, terms. Certainly it testified to a considerable degree of intimacy. There were references to marriage and a future to be spent together. One passage ran, and Bobby read it twice: ‘I won’t go into details. It would be more prudent for you not to know them. But I have made up my mind things can’t go on like this, unbearable for both you and me. I shall go through with it, no matter at what risk or cost. My dearest, I give you my solemn word. By Monday morning next, the obstacle that keeps us apart will no longer exist.’
Once again Bobby read this passage that seemed as though it stood out in blood-red letters, and the thick voice of the charwoman said, by his side: ‘We’ve all got our duty to do, and now I’ve done mine.’
CHAPTER 24
‘GREAT SCOTT!’
From the local police-station, whither Bobby had conducted the charwoman, there to deposit her letter and to repeat her statement before the C.I.D. officer for the district, Bobby took another bus to Fleet Street, to the office of the Daily Announcer, his next destination.
That incriminating letter was almost enough in itself, he thought, to bind the rope about Sir Albert Cambers’s throat. An ugly meaning it had seemed to bear, and one only too easy for a jury to understand, and yet how completely this new re-marriage motive, as it might be called, seemed to clash with the rabbit-trap theory they had previously been working on, and how entirely left to one side were such odd incidents as Amy Emmers’s prompt washing-up of the plate and glass found in Lady Cambers’s den, or the discovery of Eddy Dene’s pen on the scene of the murder.
To Bobby, as he sat and brooded, the general pattern of the case seemed more puzzling and confused than ever till there broke upon his troubled thoughts the voice of the conductor.
‘Penny more if you’re going on,’ said the conductor, and Bobby apologized and hurriedly scrambled down as the bus began to climb the slope towards St. Paul’s.
He had a few yards to walk back to where a gilded figure with a brazen trumpet presided over the magnificent portal of the imposing building whence the editor of the Announcer directed the world each day on the course the proprietor of the Announcer wished it to take – not that the world took any overwhelming notice.
A file was available, and once more Bobby studied intently the issue for that day on which there had occurred the quarrel between Amy Emmers and Lady Cambers that had so startled the rest of the household staff, had seemed to have no visible result, and had been so simply explained by the Emmers girl as due to neglected darning.
The tearing of the morning’s newspaper Farman had mentioned might of course have been the merest incident, with no real connection either with the actual quarrel or its underlying cause. A newspaper is easily torn when tempers rise. Once again Bobby scanned it with care, noting every paragraph, examining even the advertisements. It was a long and tedious task, and in the end he was left with nothing but the two advertisements he had already noticed in the agony-column, the one a figure cipher, the other apparently a mere meaningless jumble of words.
He inquired what was known of the circumstances of their insertion, but they had attracted no special attention at the time, and such routine information as had been supplied was soon found to be false. So that line of inquiry was blocked, as Bobby had fully expected it to be; and with the two agony-column advertisements in his pocket he adjourned to a small restaurant near-by, where he ordered dinner, for it was now late in the day. While he was waiting for his meal and eating it, he would have, he thought, good opportunity to see what he could make of the two ciphers.
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.
‘AAA. 504 : 634 : 346 : 51 : 394 : 303 : 25 : 66 : 259 : 21 : 465 : 734 : 33 : 925 : 77 : 652 : 14 : 284 : 34 : 88 : 285 : 148 : 146 : 99 : 381 : 12 : 291 : 5 4 : 645 : 51 : 66 : 259 : 194 : 66 : 493 : 14181 : 34 : 77 : 23 : 394 : 13 : 2°5 : 88 : 365 : 34 : 394 : 13 : 99 : 23 : 934 : 834 : 54 : 66 : 42 : 292 : 24 : 304 : 21 : 66 : 12 : 205 : 77 : 32 : 3049 : 12 : 3930 : 23 : 88 : 34 : 34 : 0012 : 236 371 : 562 : 304 : 363 : 6363 : 99 : 6364 : 03047 24 : 914 : 923 : 22 : 914 : 6623 : 77 : 5555 : 14 : 59910 : 33 : 50306.’
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 scientificall
y 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:
‘Deepest, truest love. Too hard up to come next week. Need fiver at least. Deathless devotion. Wopsy.’
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:
‘MMMM: They don’t carved at the worry if aunt meal with suspects gloves must of fix steel and things once they drank for all the red wine expect me through late the Sunday helmet evening barred shall wait they carved rhododendrons till at the coast meal clear. MIT.’
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.
CHAPTER 25
CHASE THROUGH LONDON
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.
Death Comes to Cambers Page 20
