by Emily Organ
“No, I didn’t think that. I suspected she would bring about a breach of promise action, but I didn’t think it would be as awful as this. And now James is angry with me because I didn’t listen to him!”
“You never listen to anybody, Penelope.”
“That isn’t helpful, Ellie!” Hot tears began to prick my eyes. “What if he is never able to forgive me?”
“Now, now,” said my sister, walking over and sitting beside me on the bed. “Of course he will. James loves you because of all your insubordinate habits, such as not listening to people and doing whatever you please, not in spite of them. There are plenty of ladies who would listen intently to him and obey his every word, but I’m sure he would find them extremely dull. He’ll forgive you quickly; if he hasn’t already, that is.”
She gave me her handkerchief and I wiped my eyes with it.
“Thank you, Ellie. Let’s change the subject. How are you finding your work with Miss Barrington?”
“I’m enjoying every minute of it. I’ve been collecting the rent from the tenants and ensuring that repairs to the housing have been carried out. I have to check that the tenants are keeping their living spaces clean and tidy, and that everything is in order. I have also been assisting them in various ways. Some of them are unable to read or write, so I have been reading their letters aloud. I also helped a lady write a letter and played with her young son while she carried out some chores. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to get anything done with young children running around!”
“But you have a nursemaid.”
“Indeed, and it can still be difficult, even with a nursemaid! I don’t know how these poor women get by. This particular lady takes on sewing work in order to pay her rent. She is almost continually sewing something and is just about able to watch over her children as she does so. It’s far preferable to working in a factory, I suppose. This new work of mine has made me realise just how little other people have. Some of the tenants own nothing more than the clothes they are wearing, and they must toil all the time, every single day of their lives. Even when they have worked hard all week they will only have earned just about enough to cover their rent and food.
“Anyway, I console myself with the fact that Miss Barrington’s housing project provides these people with homes, and that people like myself do whatever we can to assist them. It’s not about offering charity, because otherwise they will never learn to look after themselves. Instead, people like me can help them care for themselves. I am enjoying the feeling that I can be of some use.”
“It has given you a measure of independence, Ellie.”
“It has indeed. And it has encouraged me to proceed with the divorce. I have instructed a law firm to assist me.”
“That’s extremely brave of you. Congratulations!”
“I can’t say that I feel happy about it. In fact, it’s all rather sad, but the matter must be resolved. I have already received a number of disapproving comments from the housekeeper.”
“It’s likely that many people will disapprove, Ellie, and there is nothing much you can do about that. But there are reasons why you have chosen to take this course of action, and very good ones, too. Many people will be unable to understand them, and I cannot see that there would be a lot of use in explaining it all. I think you are displaying a great deal of bravery in this matter, but then I always knew you were a brave person from the way you go careering around London on your bicycle.”
“Thank you, Penelope. Now, shall we burn this Holborn Gazette in the fire?”
I finally received some good news later that day. A letter had been received at the Morning Express offices from a lady called Miss Margaret Davies. She had seen the appeal for information about Miss Hamilton and her letter said that she might be able to help. She had offered to call in at the Morning Express offices on Monday the twenty-fourth of November at four o’clock.
Chapter 33
“Your bruise is looking a little better,” I said to James as we met in a rainy Westminster the following Monday morning.
“It feels a little better,” he replied, holding out his umbrella so I could join him beneath it.
“Are you still angry with me?” I asked.
He sighed. “No, not with you, Penny. I’m just angry about the whole silly court case in general. I don’t know where I am expected to find six hundred pounds. Anyway, that’s by the by. The good news is that Mr Jenkins has been charged with causing an affray.”
“Good!”
“You could have agreed to have Charlotte charged as well.”
“I didn’t see the need. I effectively stole her husband, so perhaps the score is settled now.”
James shook his head. “You’re too forgiving, Penny. Her behaviour was despicable.”
“Let’s hope that we will neither hear nor see anything more from the Jenkins family from now on.”
“I hope not. I’m also hoping that Mr Hobhouse has managed to decypher the message we gave him. Shall we go and find out?”
We walked down Whitehall, avoiding the puddles as best we could.
“The lady we spoke to at the house on Old Cavendish Street, Miss Kay, left a message for me at the Yard,” continued James. “Apparently, she or one of her friends encountered Miss Hamilton a few times at various restaurants. Her name was Clara Hamilton and she was usually in the company of some gentleman or other.”
“Was that all she said?”
“Apparently so. At least we know Miss Hamilton’s first name now.”
“Did Miss Kay know where Clara lived?”
“She didn’t say. We’ll have to continue with our enquiries.”
“Young Blakely! I presume you’re here to find out whether I’ve had any success with your cypher.”
“That’s right, Mr Hobhouse.”
“What have you done to your face?”
“Just a minor altercation.”
The old man tutted, swapped his spectacles around and handed James the piece of paper that had been found in Miss Hamilton’s bag.
“What you’re holding there, Blakely, is an example of the Vigenère cypher.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Blaise de Vigenère was a Frenchman who came up with a clever method of encryption during the sixteenth century. Actually, there was an Italian chap who proposed it before him, but Vigenère always gets the credit. Here’s his table.”
Mr Hobhouse handed James a piece of paper with the alphabet written on it in multiple rows.
“What’s this?”
“A to Z written out twenty-six times. You will see that each row is shifted along by one letter. So on the second row, Z is below A and A is below B. On the third row Z is below B and A is below C and so on. There is a shift of one each time.”
“I see that.”
“You’ve probably come across the Caesar cypher before, Blakely.”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“You will have done, though perhaps without realising it. It’s the simple substitution of one letter for another. So for example if you wanted to send the delightful Miss Green a message in Caesar cypher you could substitute ‘B’ for ‘A’ and ‘C’ for ‘B’ and so on. The system is named after Julius Caesar, who apparently used a shift of three letters. So he substituted ‘D’ for ‘A’ and ‘E’ for ‘B’, and the rest followed in the same sequence thereafter. Its weakness is that it is rather easy to decypher because some letters are used far from frequently than others. For example, ‘E’ is used a great deal, but ‘Z’ is not. So identifying the frequency of the substituted letters means you can eventually decypher it. You look for patterns as well. Not many letters appear side by side as a general rule, but ‘O’ does in words such as ‘book’ and ‘look’. The Caesar cypher is quite simple to work out in a short space of time; usually a matter of hours.”
“I’m sure it would take me longer than that,” said James.
“What Vigenère did was invent a cypher in which each
letter had twenty-six possible substitutions. That’s what you see written in the grid I have just given you. You can see there that ‘A’ can be represented by any of the twenty-six letters beneath it.”
“I do see that,” said James. “But how on earth do you use it?”
“That’s where the keyword comes in. The writer of the message comes up with a keyword, which is applied to the first column of the table.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said James.
I couldn’t help smiling at the intense concentration on his face.
“Let’s say you come up with the keyword ‘sun’, and you want your message to the charming Miss Green to say ‘Good morning’. First of all, you let Miss Green know that you will be using the keyword ‘sun’. That’s something that must be agreed between you. Then when you send the message you spell out the keyword in the first column here. So you find the alphabet line that begins with ‘S’ and read along it until you find ‘G’ which is the first letter of ‘Good morning’. Then you go to the line at the top and that will be the letter you substitute it for. Then you find ‘U’ and correspond it with ‘O’ to find the letter substitute. The keyword has fewer letters than the message, so you simply repeat the keyword until you reach the end of the message. Good morning would read ‘yibv gbjhvfa’ in this case.”
“I think I understand it now,” said James.
“I don’t think I do,” I said. “How do you know that Miss Hamilton’s message was written in the Vigenère cypher, Mr Hobhouse?”
“I didn’t immediately. I tried a few different approaches before I realised it was likely to be Vigenère.”
“Have you managed to decypher it?” I asked.
“I believe so, yes.”
“But you didn’t have the keyword.”
“No, but with careful analysis there are ways and means of working it out. I think the keyword used to code this message is ‘nemesis’.”
“How on earth did you work that out?” asked James.
“Well, for three hundred years no one could solve the Vigenère cypher. It was so difficult, in fact, that the French named it le chiffre indéchiffrable. That was until twenty years ago, when a Prussian officer published a decyphering method.”
“But how did you do it?” asked James.
“I have probably bored you enough for one day, young Blakely, but in summary I firstly looked for sequences of letters that appeared more than once. I looked at the spacing between those sequences and that information helped me narrow down the length of the keyword. I then proceeded to use this assumption of keyword length to analyse the frequency of letters that corresponded with the first letter of the keyword, the second letter and so on. From this analysis I began to come up with some ideas of what the keyword might be. It took a few attempts, but I decided that the keyword had to be ‘nemesis’. And when I decyphered the message using that keyword, this is what I found.”
He gave James a piece of paper with the following message written on it:
Sunset at Arromanches, The Bountiful Harvest, Shepherdess at Thirlmere, Rural Scene North of Trieste, Summer Scene at St Moritz.
“Quite poetic,” I commented.
“Perhaps they’re the names of poems,” suggested Mr Hobhouse.
“They could be,” said James. “Or songs.”
“I can imagine a song about a bountiful harvest,” said Mr Hobhouse, “but it’s not a song I’m familiar with. I’m quite sure there’s one about a shepherdess, though.”
“Thirlmere,” said James. “Where’s that?”
“The Lake District,” replied Mr Hobhouse. “Wordsworth liked it up there, so perhaps these are poems after all.”
“A shepherdess,” I said as an image came to mind. “Wasn’t there a painting of a shepherdess in Mr Gallo’s rooms?”
“Yes!” said James. “And there was a sunset, too. Perhaps that was at Arromanches? And another of the paintings had mountains in it, so perhaps that was St Moritz. There were some farmworkers in fields… Could that be the bountiful harvest?” He grinned. “It’s beginning to make sense!”
“Well, I’m relieved that it makes sense to you because it was completely meaningless to me,” said Mr Hobhouse, swapping his spectacles over again.
“But why were the names of these paintings written down using a cypher?” pondered James. “And was the message sent to Miss Hamilton or did she write it herself?”
“Perhaps Mr Gallo wrote it,” I suggested.
“Either way, it seems the lady was engaged in a kind of secret communication with someone,” said Mr Hobhouse. “It’s all very intriguing indeed.”
“Might the keyword give us some sort of clue?” asked James, carefully folding and placing the message in his notebook. “Nemesis sounds rather threatening.”
“She is the Greek goddess of retribution,” replied Mr Hobhouse. “I don’t know anything about art, but I know my goddesses.”
“Nemesis was a goddess?” I said. “I didn’t realise that. In fact, I had never given any thought to where the word might have come from.”
“Interesting indeed,” said James. “Miss Clara Hamilton seems to have been rather more mysterious than we first imagined.”
Chapter 34
“These are the names of the paintings discovered in Mr Gallo’s room all right,” said Mr Russell, examining the decyphered code in James’ office at Scotland Yard.
“Are you absolutely certain of that?” James asked.
“Absolutely sure. We visited the Hotel Tempesta last week and took a good look at them. Inspector Raynes and I managed to identify them all, didn’t we, Raynes?”
“Our work was made slightly easier by the fact that all the paintings had already been listed as stolen,” said Inspector Raynes. “I’ll go and fetch the ledger to show you.”
“The names of the paintings were written in code, you say?” Mr Russell asked James.
“Yes, using the Vigenère cypher.”
“Intriguing.”
“Is that one of the cyphers Jack Shelby uses?”
“He prefers the Playfair cypher, which would be quite complicated to decypher if he didn’t use the same keyword each time.”
“The keyword isn’t ‘nemesis’, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Have you encountered the word nemesis anywhere else during your investigation?”
“Nowhere, I’m afraid.”
James sighed. “I feel there must be a connection between Shelby and Gallo, but it’s proving rather difficult to establish one.”
“It is extremely difficult,” replied Mr Russell. “That’s why I was at the dinner in the first place pretending to be Mr Hardy from The Hotelier. All we have to go on is a sighting of Shelby at Gallo’s hotel a few weeks ago.”
Inspector Raynes returned with a heavy, leather-bound volume, which he placed on his desk. “We’ve found the paintings listed in here; all of them stolen within the past twelve months.” He opened the ledger and proceeded to show us the relevant entries.
“But it says here that The Shepherdess at Thirlmere has been recovered,” said James. “Does that mean it was stolen, recovered and then sold on to Mr Gallo?”
“No. It means that Mr Gallo was in possession of a clever forgery,” said Mr Russell. “Two of the other paintings have also been recovered. I think Mr Gallo was in possession of five forgeries in total.”
“Did he know that they were forgeries?” asked James.
“I should think it unlikely. He probably thought he was buying stolen paintings, which isn’t a particularly admirable undertaking. But he did love his art, and it seems he was willing to take a few risks in the way he acquired it. As I explained to you when we met last, the paintings are stolen and then forgeries are made. The forgeries are sold to people who think they are getting their hands on the real thing, and then the genuine painting is sold back to the owner. Inspector Raynes and I have visited the owners of all three recovered paintings, but they remained tigh
t-lipped about those they had done a deal with to recover their artworks. They’re worried about possible recriminations if they talk.”
“All they really care about is getting their paintings back,” added Inspector Raynes.
“Two of the owners haven’t had their paintings returned,” said James. “Are you encouraging them to negotiate with the criminals in a bid to find out their identities?”
“We’re doing exactly that, Inspector,” replied Mr Russell. “Hopefully we’ll soon discover that Shelby is behind all this.”
“But what about Miss Hamilton?” I asked. “The coded message found in her bag suggests that she also had a vested interest in these paintings. Where does she fit in with all this?”
“I haven’t come across any connection between Shelby and a Miss Hamilton as yet,” replied Mr Russell. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, though.”
“She was up to something,” I said. “She was more than a paid companion, I believe. Her supposed profession was just a cover, but for what? Why was she so interested in those paintings?”
My question was met with blank expressions all round.
“Clara Hamilton was a spy,” said James as we left Scotland Yard and made our way toward Bow Street. “That explains why no one has reported her missing, and why barely anyone seems to know her. I’m assuming that Clara Hamilton is a false name because she was working undercover for someone, that would also explain why we can find no official record of her. Let’s hope Miss Davies will be able to tell us more about her when she visits you this afternoon.”
“It also provides a possible motive,” I said. “Someone may have realised she was spying on Mr Gallo and wanted her to stop.”
“But why would he have been murdered as well?”
“Because he was a witness to her murder, perhaps.”
“Possibly. But this Shelby chap might have wanted him dead as well, mightn’t he? Perhaps he sold the forged paintings to Mr Gallo, who told Miss Hamilton whom he had purchased them from.”