‘Twelve o’clock?’
‘Thereabout, sir. It come back to her all of a sudden, when we was talkin’ over what that young Ormond wur askin’ about.’
Wimsey left the cottage with his ideas all in disorder. If someone had been riding on the shore at twelve o’clock it accounted for the horseshoe, but it did not account for the murder. Had he, after all, been quite wrong in attaching so much importance to the horseshoe? Might not some mischievous lad, finding the bay mare at large, have ridden her along the beach for a lark? Might she not even have strayed away on her own account?
But that brought him back to her strange behaviour of that afternoon, and to the problem of the ring-bolt. Had the ring-bolt been used for some other purpose? Or suppose the murderer had come to the rock on horseback at twelve o’clock and remained talking there with Alexis till two o’clock? But Jem said that there had been only the one figure on the Flat-Iron. Had the murderer lurked hidden in the rocky cleft till the time came to strike the blow? But why? Surely the sole reason for riding thither could only have been the establishment of an alibi, and an alibi is thrown away if one lingers for two hours before taking advantage of it. And how had the mare got home? She was not on the shore between one o’clock and two o’clock if – again – Jem was to be trusted. Wimsey played for a few moments with the idea of two men riding on one horse – one to do the murder and one to take the animal back, but the thing seemed far-fetched and absurd.
Then an entirely new thought struck him. In all the discussions about the crime, it had been taken for granted that Alexis had walked along the coast-road to the Flat-Iron; but had this been proved? He had never thought to ask. Why might not Alexis have been the rider?
In that case, the time of the mare’s passing might be explained, but other problems bristled up thick as thorns in a rose-garden. At what point had he taken horse? He had been seen to leave Darley Halt by road in the direction of Lesston Hoe. Had he subsequently returned and fetched the mare from the field, and so ridden? If not, who had brought her and to what rendezvous? And again, how had she returned?
He determined to hunt out Inspector Umpelty and face him with these problems.
The Inspector was just going to bed, and his welcome was not a hearty one, but he showed signs of animation on hearing Wimsey’s fresh information.
‘Them Pollocks and Moggeridges are the biggest liars in creation,’ he observed, ‘and if there’s been murder done, it’s good proof that they’re all concerned in it,’ said he. ‘But as to how Alexis got there, you can set your mind at rest. We’ve found six witnesses who saw him at various points along the road between 10.15 and 11.45, and unless there’s some other fellow been going about in a black beard, you can take it as proved that he went by the coast-road and no other way.’
‘Did none of the witnesses know him personally?’
‘Well, no,’ the Inspector admitted, ‘but it isn’t likely there’d be more than one young fellow in a blue suit and a beard going about at that time, unless somebody was deliberately disguised as him, and where’d be the point of that? I mean to say, the only reasons for anybody impersonating him would be to make out either that he was in that neighbourhood at that particular time when he was really elsewhere, or that he was really alive some time after he was supposed to be killed. Now, we know that he was in that neighbourhood all right, so that disposes of number one; and we know that he really was killed at two o’clock and not earlier, and that disposes of number two. Unless, of course,’ said the Inspector, slowly, ‘the real Alexis was up to some funny business between 10.15 and two o’clock, and this other fellow was making an alibi for him. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘I suppose,’ said Wimsey, ‘that it really was Alexis who was killed. His face was gone, you know, and we’ve only the clothes and a photograph to go upon.’
‘Well, it was somebody else with a real beard, anyhow,’ said the Inspector. ‘And who would Alexis be wanting to kill, do you suppose?’
‘Bolsheviks,’ suggested Wimsey, lightly. ‘He might make an appointment with a Bolshevik who meant to murder him, then murder the Bolshevik.’
‘So he might – but that doesn’t make things any easier. Whoever it was did the murder, he had to get away from the Flat-Iron. And how could he have managed to change clothes with the victim? There wasn’t time.’
‘Not after the murder, certainly.’
‘Then where are you? It’s only making things more complicated. If you ask me, I think your notion of the mare having been ridden down there at some other time by some mischievous young fellow is a good one. There’s nothing against it except that ring-bolt, and that might quite well have been put there for a quite different purpose. That washes the mare out of the thing altogether and makes it all a lot easier. Then we can say that either Alexis did away with himself or else he was murdered by some person we don’t know of yet, who just walked along the coast on his two feet. It doesn’t matter that those Pollocks didn’t see him. He could have been hiding under the rock, like you said. The only trouble is, who was he? It wasn’t Weldon, it wasn’t Bright, and it wasn’t Perkins. But they’re not the only people in the world.’
Wimsey nodded.
‘I’m feeling a bit depressed,’ he said. ‘I seem to have fallen down a bit over this case.’
‘It’s a nuisance,’ said Umpelty, ‘but there! We’ve only been at it a fortnight, and what’s fortnight? We’ll have to be patient, my lord, and wait for the translation of that letter to come through. The explanation may be all in that.’
XXVIII
THE EVIDENCE OF THE CIPHER
‘I know not whether
I see your meaning: if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice,
Dim as an evening shadow in a brook.’
Fragment
Friday, 3 July
The letter from ‘Clumps’ at the Foreign Office did not arrive till the Friday, and then was a disappointment. It ran:
‘Dear Wimbles,
‘Got your screed. Old Bungo is in China, dealing with the mess-up there, so have posted enclosure off to him as per instructions. He may be up-country, but he’ll probably get it in a few weeks. How’s things? Saw Trotters last week at the Carlton. He has got himself into a bit of a mess with his old man, but seems to bear up. You remember the Newton-Carberry business? Well, it’s settled, and Flops has departed for the Continent. What-ho!
‘Yours ever,
‘Clumps.’
‘Young idiot!’ said Wimsey, wrathfully. He threw the letter into the waste-paper basket, put on his hat and went round to Mrs Lefranc’s. Here he found Harriet industriously at work upon the cipher. She reported, however, total failure.
‘I don’t think it’s a scrap of good going on with these marked words,’ said Wimsey. ‘And Bungo has failed us. Let’s put our great brains to the business. Now, look here. Here is a problem to start with. What is in this letter, and why wasn’t it burnt with the rest?’
‘Now you mention it, that is rather odd.’
‘Very. This letter came on the Tuesday morning. On the Wednesday, bills were settled up, and on the Wednesday night, papers were burned. On Thursday morning, Alexis set out to catch his train. Is it too much to suppose that the instructions to do all this were in the letter?’
‘It looks likely.’
‘It does. That means that this letter probably made the appointment for the meeting at the Flat-Iron. Now why wasn’t this letter burnt with the rest?’
Harriet let her mind range over the field of detective fiction, with which she was moderately well acquainted.
‘In my own books,’ she remarked, ‘I usually make the villain end up by saying “Bring this letter with you.” The idea is, from the villain’s point of view, that he can then make certain that the paper is destroyed. From my point of view, of course, I put it in so that the villain can leave a fragment of paper clutched in the victim’s stiffened hand to assist Robert Templeton.’
‘He’d have to be rather an amateur villain.’
‘Why shouldn’t he be? Unless this is really the work of a trained Bolshevik agent, he probably is. I suggest that somewhere in this letter, perhaps at the end, we shall find the words “Bring this letter with you” – and that will account for its presence.’
‘I see. Then why do we find it tucked away in an inner pocket and not in the victim’s hand as per schedule?’
‘Perhaps the victim didn’t play up?’
‘Then the murderer ought to have searched him and found the paper.’
‘He must have forgotten.’
‘How inefficient!’
‘I can’t help that. Here is the paper. And no doubt it’s full of dangerous and important information. If it made an appointment, it must be because it would then almost amount to a proof that Alexis didn’t commit suicide but was murdered.’
‘Look here, though! Suppose the letter was brought simply because it contained instructions for reaching the Flat-Iron and so on, which Alexis didn’t want to forget.’
‘Can’t be that. For one thing, he’d have had it handy, in an outer pocket – not tucked away in a case. And besides—’
‘Not necessarily. He’d keep it handy till he got to the place and then he’d tuck it away safely. After all, he sat at the Flat-Iron alone for an hour or so, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, but I was going to say something else. If he wanted to keep on referring to the letter, he’d take – not the cipher, which would be troublesome to read, but the de-coded copy.’
‘Of course – but – don’t you see, that solves the whole thing! He did take the copy, and the villain said: “Have you brought the letter?” And Alexis, without thinking, handed him the copy, and the villain took that and destroyed that, forgetting that the original might be on the body too.’
‘You’re right,’ said Wimsey, ‘you’re dead right. That’s exactly what must have happened. Well, that’s that, but it doesn’t get us very much farther. Still, we’ve got some idea of what must have been in the letter, and that will be a great help with the de-coding. We’ve also got the idea that the villain may have been a bit of an amateur, and that is borne out by the letter itself.’
‘How?’
‘Well, there are two lines here at the top, of six letters apiece. Nobody but an amateur would present us with six isolated letters, let alone two sets of six. He’d run the whole show together. There are just about two things these words might be. One: they might be a key to the cipher – a letter-substitution key, but they’re not, because I’ve tried them, and anyway, nobody would be quite fool enough to send keyword and cipher together on the same sheet of paper. They might, of course, be a key-word or words for the next letter, but I don’t think so. Six letters is very short for the type of code I have in mind, and words of twelve letters with no repeating letter are very rare in any language.’
‘Wouldn’t any word do, if you left out the repeated letters?’
‘It would; but judging by Alexis’ careful marking of his dictionary, that simple fact does not seem to have occurred to these amateurs. Well, then, if these words are not keys to a cipher, I suggest that they represent an address, or, more probably, an address and date. They’re in the right place for it. I don’t mean a whole address, of course – just the name of a town – say Berlin or London – and the date below it.’
‘That’s possible.’
‘We can but try. Now we don’t know much about the town, except that the letters are said to have come from Czechoslovakia. But we might get the date.’
‘How would that be written?’
‘Let’s see. The letters may just represent the figures of the day, month and year. That means that one of them is an arbitrary fill-up letter, because you can’t have an odd number of letters, and a double figure for the number of the months is quite impossible, since the letter arrived here on June 17th. I don’t quite know how long the post takes from places in Central Europe, but surely not more than three or four days at the very outside. That means it must have been posted after the 10th of June. If the letters do not stand for numbers, then I suggest that RBEXMG stands either for somethingteen June or June somethingteen. Now, to represent figures our code-merchant may have taken 1 = A, 2 = B, 3 = C, and so on, or he may have taken 1 as the first letter of the code-word and so on. The first would be more sensible, because it wouldn’t give the code away.* So we’ll suppose that 1 = A, so that he originally wrote A? JUNE or JUNE A? and then coded the letters in the ordinary way, the ? standing for the unknown figure, which must be less than 5. Very good. Now, is he more likely to have written June somethingteen or somethingteen June?’
* The hypothesis that RBEXMG represented a date written entirely in numerals proved to be untenable, and for bravity’s sake, the calculations relating to this supposition are omitted.
If you’re coding the pair of letters DE, then, by taking the letters to the right of them (by the horizontal rule) you get DE = ER; the letter E appears both in code and clear. And the same for letters that immediately follow one another in a vertical line. Now, in our first pair EX = JU, this doesn’t happen, so we may provisionally write them down in diagonal form
‘Most English people write the day first and the month second. Business people at any rate, though old-fashioned ladies still stick to putting the month first.’
‘All right. We’ll try somethingteen June first and say that RBEXMG stands for A? June. Very good. Now we’ll see what we can make of that. Let’s write it out in pairs. We’ll leave out RB for the moment and start with EX. Now EX = JU. Now there’s one point about this code that is rather helpful in decoding. Supposing two letters come next door to one another in the code-diagram, either horizontally or vertically, you’ll find that the code pair and the clear pair have a letter in common. You don’t get that? Well, look! Take our old key-word SQUANDER, written in the diagram like this:
Taking these letters as forming the corners of a parallelogram, we can tell ourselves that JX must come on the same line in the diagram either vertically or horizontally; the same with JE, the same with EU, and the same with UX.’
‘But suppose JN follows the horizontal rule or the vertical rule without the two letters actually coming together?’
‘It doesn’t matter; it would only mean then that all four of them come on the same line, like this: ? J E U X, or X U E? J or some arrangement of that kind, So, taking all the letters we have got and writing them in diagonals we get this:
Unfortunately there are no side-by-side letters at all. It would be very helpful if there were, but we can’t have everything.
‘Now the first striking thing is this: that U and X have to come on the same line. That very strongly suggests that they both come in the bottom line. There are five letters that follow U in the alphabet, and only four spaces in which to put them. One of them, therefore, must be in the key-word. We’ll take a risk with it and assume that it isn’t Z. If it is, we’ll have to start all over again, but one must make a start somewhere. We’ll risk Z. That gives us three possibilities for our last line: UVXYZ with W in the key-word, or UWXYZ with V in the key-word, or UVWXZ with Y in the key-word. But in any case, U must be in the bottom left-hand corner. Now, looking again at our diagonals, we find that E and U must come in the same line. We can’t suppose that E comes immediately above U, because it would be a frightful great key-word that only left us with four spaces between E and U, so we must put E in one of the top three spaces of the left-hand column, like this:
‘That’s not much, but it’s a beginning. Now let’s tackle X. There’s one square in which we know it can’t be. It can’t come nex
t to U, or there would be two spaces between X and Z with only one letter to fill them; so X must come in either the third or the fourth square of the bottom line. So now we have two possible diagrams.
‘Looking at our diagonal pairs again, we find that J and X come in the same line and so do J and E. That means that J can’t come immediately above X, so we will again enter it on both our diagrams in the top three squares in the X line. Now we come to an interesting point. M and N have got to come in the same line. In Diagram 1 it looks fearfully tempting to put them into the two empty spaces on the right of J, leaving K and L for the key-word; but you can’t do that in Diagram 2, because there’s not room in the line. If Diagram 1 is the right one, then M or N or both of them must come in the key-word. M and E come in the same line, but N can’t come next-door to E. That warns us against a few arrangements, but still leaves a devil of a lot of scope. Our key-word can’t begin with EN, that’s a certainty. But now, wait! If E is rightly placed in the third square down, then N can’t come at the right-hand extremity of the same line, for that would bring it next to E by the horizontal rule; so in Diagram 1 that washes out the possibility of JMN or JLN for that line. It would give us JLM, which is impossible unless N is in the key-word, because N can’t come next to E and yet must be in the same line with it and also with M.’
Wimsey clawed a little at his hair and sat muttering.
‘It looks as though we’d sucked our five letter rather dry,’ said Harriet. ‘How about trying the rest of the message? I’ve got it all ready sorted out into pairs. Hullo! Here’s our old friend EXMG appearing again in the body of it.’
‘Is there?’ Wimsey sat up. ‘Then, if we’re right, that will be another date in June. I can’t believe it’s part of two words, one of which ends in J, or I, or JU or IU or IUN or JUN. If the letter was making an appointment for June 18th, why shouldn’t the two letters before it be the letters for 18, that is AH? We’ll try it, anyway; what are they?’
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