'It wasn't quite as bad as that, sir. We were in our boat by half past four, lying concealed under the cliffs to the north of the bay with our night glasses out, all ready for the performance. Then their boat came down the channel and they chucked you overboard. We could have reached you within two minutes but we wanted to wait, if it were possible, until they'd gone back up the creek and couldn't spot us and guess we were on to their little game. Our scheme went like clockwork. They think you're dead and that they're safe as houses; so no alarm will have been given. You're out of it and we'll be able to pull them in just when we wish.'
Gregory nodded. 'Good staff work, I suppose, but devilish hard on the nerves, and you've made a pretty fine mess of my poor old carcase.'
'Maybe, but did you get anything? That's what I had to wake you up to know.'
'I did,' said Wells with new enthusiasm. 'I managed to spot the address on that case before they grabbed me. Mitbloom &Allison, 43, Barter Street, E. 1.'
'Good boy,' the Superintendent chuckled into his double chin. 'I'm leaving for London now and we'll take a look over the place tonight. The doctor tells me there's no damage done to either of you; although you'll be a bit sore in the ribs for the next few days. You'd both better take it easy, I'm thinking, while I get on with the job.'
Gerry Wells sat up, suppressed a groan, and said: 'Half a minute, sir. This is my pigeon. Surely you're not going to do me out of it; just because I took a chance on getting caught last night.'
'I don't want to do you out of anything if you're fit to carry on, but the doctors seem to think you ought to rest up for a day or two, at least.'
'I'll be all right, sir. I've no bones broken. It's only a bit painful where the ropes cut into the skin on my chest and back when you pulled me out. What time d'you mean to raid Mitbloom & Allison?'
'I shan't raid it. That would give the game away. I shall have a search warrant made out, and pray to God I won't be called on to show it, then pay the place an unofficial visit sometime in the early hours tomorrow morning. I'll find out in the meantime if they keep a night watchman. If they do I'll think up some scheme to get him out of the way for a bit. Then we can go in and have a snoop round without anyone being any the wiser.'
'If I caught the last train up then I could be in on it couldn't I, sir?' Gerry Wells pleaded.
The Superintendent nodded. 'Certainly if you're fit. Best stay here for a bit though and see how you feel this evening.'
Gregory eased himself over on to his tummy. 'We'll be with you. Old soldiers never die. Just order some dinner for us and a car to take us to the station; both items on Sir Pellinore's account. He owes us that for his day at the seaside.'
The doctor, who had been warned to attend again when the patients were woken, was summoned. He said that there was no danger in their getting up and only advised against it owing to the pain which must result from their bruised muscles. Where the ropes had cut into them he dressed the broken skin with soothing ointment and fresh bandages. When he had finished Superintendent Marrowfat and Sir Pellinore left them, to return to London, while the two patients turned over to doze and rest.
At eight o'clock the manager of the hotel called them in person, inquired most kindly after their health, and superintended the preparations for an excellent meal ordered by Sir Pellinore, to be served in their room.
They both felt terribly stiff, but apart from that, and the soreness under their arms, perfectly fit and well again after their thirteen hours in bed. Dressing proved a painful operation, but once it was accomplished and they had been heartened by a good dinner, washed down with a fine bottle of Burgundy, they felt as keen as ever. A car was waiting for them when they came downstairs and they caught the 9.8 to London; arriving at Charing Cross two minutes before midnight.
At the Yard all preparations for the secret raid had been completed. Mitbloom & Allison proved to be a firm of wholesale tobacco merchants. Their warehouse, so the Superintendent had ascertained, was fitted with electric burglar alarms but they did not employ a night watchman. Arrangements had been made for the electric current to be cut off at the main between the hours of one and three so that the police would be able to make an entry without the alarm going off and, unless they were very unfortunate, no one would suspect on the following day that the place had been searched in the early hours of the morning.
The Superintendent, Gregory, Gerry Wells, a lock expert from the special department, and another detective, squeezed themselves in one of the bigger Flying Squad cars at a quarter to one, and the driver turned its nose eastward.
They ran down the Strand which was still fairly busy with traffic passing to and from the great restaurants; Fleet Street, now given over to swift moving newspaper vans lining up to collect and distribute the early copies of the great national dailies; then up Ludgate Hill and through Queen Victoria Street, strangely silent and deserted compared with the swarming thousands who throng those great business areas in the day time. Passing the Bank of England, they sped on to Liverpool Street, then turned right, into that maze of thoroughfares into which the wealthier population of London and the suburbs so rarely penetrate.
Barter Street proved to be a dark canyon between high brick buildings. It contained no residential houses and was given over entirely to tall warehouses; some of which had dusty looking old-fashioned offices on the ground floor. Dustbins lined the pavements; a solitary cat minced its way forward in leisurely manner across the street upon its nightly prowl.
They parked the car at the end of the street leaving the driver with it. A city policeman touched his helmet to the Superintendent, having been warned of their visit, and remained on the corner to keep watch while the others made their way along the narrow pavement to number forty-three.
Grimy window panes stared at them blankly from the street level; above, the big hook and ball of a crane for hauling merchandise to the upper floors dangled over their heads. The Superintendent looked at his watch.
'Five past one. Go ahead, Jim,' he said.
The lock expert produced a bag of tools and, selecting one, started work on the door. 'Lock's easy enough,' he murmured. 'Old-fashioned piece.' With a twist of his wrist it clicked back into its socket.
Pushing the door open the five men entered the building. The Superintendent switched on his torch. It showed a dusty hallway with a flight of stone steps leading to the upper floors and, on their left, two glass panelled swing doors giving on to the offices. Thrusting them wide the fat Superintendent led the way in.
The beam of his torch, as he flashed it round, showed shelves with rows of faded letter files upon them; an old-fashioned clerk's desk, with high stools in front of it, and a rusty brass rail which carried a number of leather-bound ledgers. The place had the odour of dreary old-fashioned commercialism where men toiled half their lives in a perpetual twilight for a pittance. Another door with a frosted glass panel, upon which was painted 'Private' in black letters, showed to the right. The Superintendent walked over and tried its handle. The lock expert set to work again and soon had it open.
The inner office was little better than the one they had just glanced over. It gave on to a deep well, and was lit in the day time only by glass reflectors swung on chains at an angle to the windows. A few faded photographs of elderly side whiskered gentlemen, probably long dead directors of the firm, were hung upon the whitewashed walls above a skirting of pitch pine. A roll top desk occupied a corner near the window; a meagre square of turkey carpet failed to conceal all but a small portion of the worn oilcloth with which the floor was covered. An open bookcase contained piles of old trade journals, samples, and miscellaneous paraphernalia.
'We'll come back here later,' said the Superintendent. 'First I want to see the contents of the warehouse.'
They trooped out behind him and up the stone stairs to the first floor. It was an empty barn like room; containing only several stacks of cases. The Superintendent pointed: Wells and the extra detective pulled one out from the middle of a
stack, and, by means of a jemmy which the lock man produced from his bag of tools, opened it up. It was a longish coffin shaped case and contained tins of leaf tobacco.
They hammered back the nails carefully, so that it should not appear to have been opened, and replaced it in the centre of the stack.
The contents of four other cases were investigated from different portions of the room and the Superintendent noted down particulars of the goods they contained in his pocket book. Then they visited the upper floor and the same process was gone through with other consignments of merchandise which they found there. The top floor and the one below it were empty.
'We'll get down to the offices now,' the Superintendent said and, with an elephantine tread, led the way downstairs again.
They all had torches and began a rapid search through the clerks' desks and papers. It was impossible to examine them all in so short a time but the police officers made various notes of invoices, addresses, and dates of correspondence, without coming across a single item which tied up the place with its illegal source of supply.
Gregory wandered into the inner room. If there were any, it was there, he felt certain, that important papers would be kept.
The lock expert had already opened the roll top desk and the Superintendent had gone carefully through it without finding any papers other than those connected with apparently legitimate business. Gregory stared round the place, scrutinising the photographs upon the grey white walls and the miscellaneous collection of samples and trade papers, hoping for inspiration. Then his eye fell upon the lower shelf of the bookcase.
Half buried under stacks of dusty documents there were a long row of books. He bent down and flashed his torch on them. It was a set of Shakespeare's works in forty volumes. As a book collector himself he knew it well. It had been published by an American company, just after the war, and remained at an exceptionally low price. The volumes were bound in grey boards with a strip of blue cloth down their spines on which were paper labels. Each contained one of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, except the last three, which were devoted to the sonnets and poems.
He stared at them for a moment; thinking how queer it was that the owner of this grim business office should be sufficiently interested in Shakespeare to keep a set in his depressing work room. Then he noticed that whereas the tops of thirty-nine volumes were grey with dust, the fortieth, number sixteen in the set, was comparatively clean and stood out a little from the others as though it had been recently used and hastily put back.
'When you are ready,' he said to the Superintendent who was standing in the doorway, 'we'll quit. I don't think you'll find much here but, if you'll provide me with a copy of The Tempest, when we get back to the Yard, I think I'll be able to decode that famous telegram for you.'
18
The Deciphering of the Code
At Scotland Yard Gregory settled down in the Superintendent's room with a thin paper edition of Shakespeare's plays, a pencil, and some blank sheets of foolscap. He knew that any ordinary combination of figures could have been deciphered by the decoding department at the Admiralty, to which Sir Pellinore had first sent the Corot telegram. The fact of its having defeated the experts showed quite clearly that the numerals referred to the lines of a certain book known only to the sender and recipient or their associates. His discovery of The Tempest as the only book in the set of Shakespeare, reposing so incongruously in the dusty warehouse of Mitbloom & Allison, which had recently been used, made him feel certain it held the key to the cipher.
He spread out the telegram before him and reread it:
COROT CAFE DE LA CLOCHE CALAIS SIXTH 41 44 II 15 THENCE 46 SEVENTH 43 47 EIGHTH AGAIN 47.
Turning to the play he looked up line 41, which read:
'… drown? Have you a mind to sink?'
Then line 44: 'Work you then.1
Next, line 11; which only had the single word: 'Enough!'
Line 15 was, 'Where is the master, boatswain?'
And line 46: '… noisemaker. We are less afraid to be drowned than…'
It simply did not make sense so he tried another method.
Treating the first numeral in each pair as indicating an act of the play, and the second numeral the line, which gave him:
41 'If I have to'
44 'Amends; for F
11 'Here, master: what'
15 'Ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.'
This did not seem to make sense either so, for a quarter of an hour, he worked on all sorts of other possibilities; trying out the numbers against full speeches or as lines in various acts and scenes, but none of them gave any results until it occurred to him to try the songs of the Fairy Ariel.
There were four songs in the play and he wrote them down.
I. Act I. Scene II.
1. Come unto these yellow sands,
2. And then take hands:
3. Curtsied when you have and kiss'd
4. The wild waves whist:
5. Foot it featly here and there;
6. 'And, sweet sprites, the burthern bear.
7. Hark, hark!
8. Bow wow.
9. The watchdogs bark:
10. Bow wow.
11. Hark, hark! I hear
12. The strain of strutting chanticleer:
13. Cry, cockadiddle dow.
2. Act I. Scene II.
1. Full fathom five thy father lies;
2. Of his bones are coral made;
3. Those are pearls that were his eyes;
4. Nothing of him that doth fade,
5. But doth suffer a seachange
6. Into something rich and strange
7. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
8. Ding dong.
9. Hark! now I hear them Dingdong, bell.
3. Act II. Scene I.
1. While you here do snoring lie,
2. Open eyed conspiracy
3. His time doth take.
4. // of life you keep a care,
5. Shake off slumber, and beware:
6. Awake, awake!
4. ActV. Scene I.
1. Where the bee sucks there suck I:
2. In a cowslip's bell I lie;
3. There do couch when owls do cry.
4. On a bat's back I do fly
5, After summer, merrily.
6. Merrily, merrily shall I live now
7. Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
On taking out the lines, in accordance with the numbers in the telegram, he arrived at the following:
(Song 4, line 1). 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I.' (Song 4, line 4). 'On the bat's wing I do fly.' (Song 1, line 1). 'Come unto these yellow sands' (Song 1, line 5). 'Foot it featly here and there.' (Song 4, line 6). 'Merrily, merrily shall I live now.' (Song 4, line 3). 'There do couch where owls do cry.' (Song 4, line 7). 'Under the blossom that hangs on the
bough.'
(Song 4, line 3). 'There do couch where owls do cry.' (Song 4, line 7). 'Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.'
This little collection seemed by far the most hopeful he had achieved yet. There was a reference to 'yellow sands' and another to 'owls', which suggested the Brown Owl Inn. The words 'foot it featly', too, immediately conjured up in his mind a vision of long dancing limbs clad in silk stockings.
Bearing in mind that the first four lines referred to the sixth of August, when he had witnessed the smugglers' operations at Calais, he went over them again. 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I', seemed to suggest the depot at Calais, from which the smugglers drew their supplies. He did not know where they had landed on that occasion but, now that he was acutely conscious of the vast stretch of yellow sands at Pegwell Bay and their base a little way inland from it at Ash Level, it looked as though that was the spot where the smugglers had dropped their cargo on the night of the SIXTH.
Going on to the seventh, the Brown Owl Inn on Romney Marshes was plainly indicated, as he knew that they had landed there that night, and the repetition of it for the
eighth, when they had landed there again, confirmed his guess.
He was puzzled for a moment about the line 'Under the blossom that hangs on the bough', but, in view of the fact that they had discovered tobacco in Mitbloom and Allison's warehouse, he soon decided that the inference must be to leaves, and that both the cargoes he had seen landed at Romney on the two previous nights were shipments of tobacco. When he had finally redrafted the telegram on these assumptions, it read:
COROT, CAFE DE LA CLOCHE, CALAIS. SIXTH. / AM COLLECTING SUPPLIES FROM OUR BASE AT CALAIS. THEY WILL BE DESPATCHED BY PLANE TO PEGWELL BAY AND THE FREIGHT ON THIS OCCASION WILL BE A CONSIGNMENT OF SILKS. THENCE I SHALL PROCEED TO THE CARLTON AND ON THE SEVENTH A FURTHER CONSIGNMENT WILL BE LANDED AT THE BROWN OWL INN ON ROMNEY MARSHES CON SISTING OF TOBACCO. ON THE EIGHTH THE LAST OPERATION WILL BE REPEATED AND WE SHALL LAND AT THE BROWN OWL INN AGAIN WITH A FURTHER CARGO OF TOBACCO.
'There you are he pushed it over to Wells and the Superintendent, 'that all fits in doesn't it?'
The Superintendent nodded. 'Good work, sir. If you're ever out of a job I think we could find you a billet. Unfortunately, though, this telegram only carries us up to the night of the eighth and it's already the ninth, or rather the morning of the tenth I should say now, so we are stuck again. Otherwise, if I could only catch them red-handed landing a cargo, I'd bring them in now we've got on to Quex Park, Ash Level, Romney Marshes, Calais and at least one of their London depots.'
'Yes, we're at a bit of a dead end now,' Gregory confessed and the new moon's due in two days' time. They'll stop operations then until the dark period in September unless I'm much mistaken, I've a hunch, though, they'll put another lot of stuff over tonight and on the eleventh so if you get your people to cover their three known landing grounds you ought to be able to catch them at it and capture their fleet tonight or tomorrow night.'
'Well, I'm for bed,' said the Superintendent. 'I was up all night last night chasing down into Kent, after Sir Pellinore got on to me to pull the two of you out of the mess you'd landed yourselves in, and you've, both had a pretty sticky time, too. I think we'd best meet again here and talk things over later in the morning. How will eleven o'clock suit you?'
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