Dorothy L. Sayers - [Lord Peter Wimsey ]

by Nine Tailors

  He was still puzzled about the finding of the cryptogram. The keys jingled together in his hand—the two great keys of the West and South doors, all by themselves on a steel chain, and then, in a bunch on a ring together, the keys of the crypt and vestry, the key of the belfry, the key of the ringing-chamber and the key that unlocked the counter-poise of the belfry. How had Cranton known where to find them? He could, of course, have taken them from the sexton’s house—if he had known already. But if “Stephen Driver” had been asking questions about the church keys, somebody would have taken notice of it. The sexton had the key of the West door and of the crypt. Had he the other keys as well? Wimsey suddenly turned back and shot the question through the study window at the Rector, who was struggling with the finances of the Parish Magazine.

  Mr. Venables rubbed his forehead.

  “No,” he said at last. “Gotobed has the West-door key and the key of the crypt, as you say, and he also has the key of the belfry stair and of the ringing-chamber, because he rings the single bell for Early Service and sometimes deputizes for Hezekiah when he’s ill. And Hezekiah has the keys of the South porch and the belfry stair and the ringing-chamber, too. You see, Hezekiah was sexton before Gotobed, and he likes to keep his privilege of ringing the passing-bell, though he’s too old for the other work, and he has the necessary keys. But neither of them has the key to the counterpoise. They don’t need it. The only people who have that are Jack Godfrey and myself. I have a complete set of everything, of course, so that if one of the others is lost or mislaid, I can supply it.”

  “Jack Godfrey—has he the key of the crypt as well?”

  “Oh, no—he doesn’t need that.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, thought Wimsey. If the man who left the paper in the bell-chamber was the same man who buried the body, then either he took all the Rector’s keys, or he had access to two sets, and those two sets had to be Jack Godfrey’s (for the key of the counterpoise) and Gotobed’s (for the key of the crypt). And if the man had been Cranton, then how did he know? Of course, the criminal might have brought his own spade (though that added to the complication). If so, he must have had either the Rector’s keys or Jack Godfrey’s. Wimsey went round to the back and got hold of Emily and Hinkins. They were both quite sure that they had never seen the man who called himself Stephen Driver inside the Rectory gates, much less inside the Rector’s study, which was the proper place for the keys when they were in their proper place.

  “But they weren’t there at all, my lord,” said Emily, “because, if you remember, they keys was missing on New Year’s night, and it wasn’t till near a week after we found them in the vestry—bar the key of the church porch and that was in the lock where Rector left it after choir-practice.”

  “After choir-practice? On the Saturday?”

  “That’s right,” said Hinkins. “Only, don’t you remember, Emily, Rector said it couldn’t have been him as left it, because it was gone a-missing, and he didn’t have it on Saturday and had to wait for Harry Gotobed?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Emily, “but that’s where it was. Harry Gotobed said he found it there when he went to ring for Early Service.”

  More confused than ever, Wimsey trotted back to the study window. Mr. Venables, arrested with a carrying-figure at the tip of his pen, was at first not very clear in his recollection, but said presently that he believed Emily was right.

  “I must have left the keys in the vestry the week before,” he suggested, “and whoever left the church last after choir-practice must have found the church key and used it—but who that would be, I don’t know, unless it was Gotobed. Yes, it would be Gotobed, because he would wait behind to make up the stoves. But it was funny that he should leave the key in the lock. Dear me! You don’t think it could have been the murderer, do you?”

  “I do, indeed,” said Wimsey.

  “There now!” exclaimed the Rector. “But if I left the keys in the vestry, how did he get in to find them? He couldn’t get in without the church key. Unless he came to choir-practice. Surely, nobody belonging to the choir——”

  The Rector looked horribly distressed. Wimsey hastened to comfort him.

  “The door would be unlocked during choir-practice. He might have slipped in then.”

  “Oh, yes—of course! How stupid I am! No doubt that is what occurred. You have relieved my mind very much.”

  Wimsey had not, however, relieved his own mind. As he resumed his way to the church, he turned the matter over. If the keys had been taken on New Year’s Eve, then Cranton had not taken them. Cranton had not arrived till New Year’s Day. Will Thoday had come, unnecessarily, to the Rectory on December 30th, and might have taken the keys then, but he had certainly not been in the church on the night of January 4th to restore them. It remained possible that Will Thoday had taken the keys and the mysterious James Thoday had returned them—but in that case, what was Cranton doing in the business? And Wimsey felt sure that Cranton knew something about the paper found in the bell-chamber.

  Meditating thus, Wimsey let himself into the church, and, unlocking the door in the tower, made his way up the spiral stair. As he passed through the ringing-chamber, he noticed with a smile that a new board had made its appearance on the wall, announcing that: “On New Year’s morning, 19—, a Peal of 15,840 Kent Treble Bob Major was Rung in 9 hours and 15 Minutes, the Ringers being: Treble, Ezra Wilderspin; 2, Peter D. B. Wimsey; 3, Walter Pratt; 4, Henry Gotobed; j, Joseph Hinkins; 6, Alfred Donnington; 7, John P. Godfrey; Tenor, Hezekiah Lavender; Theodore Venables, Rector, assisting. Our Mouths shall shew forth Thy Praise.” He passed up through the great, bare clock-chamber, released the counter-poise and climbed again till he came out beneath the bells. There he stood for a moment, gazing up into their black mouths while his eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness. Presently their hooded silence oppressed him. A vague vertigo seized him. He felt as though they were slowly collapsing together and coming down upon him. Spell-bound, he spoke their names: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul. A soft and whispering echo seemed to start from the walls and die stealthily among the beams. Suddenly he shouted in a great voice: “Tailor Paul!” and he must somehow have hit upon a harmonic of the scale, for a faint brazen note answered him, remote and menacing, from overhead.

  “Come!” said Wimsey, pulling himself together, “this won’t do. I’m getting as bad as Potty Peake, coming here and talking to the bells. Let’s find the ladder and get to work.”

  He switched on his torch and turned it on the dim corners of the belfry. It showed him the ladder, and it showed him something else also. In the gloomiest and dustiest corner of the floor, there was a patch that was not so dusty. He stepped eagerly forward, the menace of the bells forgotten. Yes, there was no mistake. A portion of the floor had at some fairly recent time been scrubbed, for the dust which in other places lay centuries thick was here only a thin film.

  He knelt to examine it, and new thoughts went swooping and turning through his brain like bats. Why should anybody trouble to swab the floor of a belfry, unless to remove some very sinister stain? He saw Cranton and Legros climbing to the belfry, with the cipher in their hands for guidance. He saw the green glint of the jewels, dragged from their old hiding-place in the light of the lantern. He saw the sudden leap, the brutal blow, and the blood gushing to the floor, the cipher fluttering, unheeded, into a corner. And then the murderer, trembling and glancing over his shoulder, as he snatched the emeralds from dead fingers, took up the body and stumbled panting down the creaking ladders. The sexton’s spade from the crypt, the bucket and scrubbing-brush from the vestry, or wherever they were kept, the water from the well——

  There he stopped. The well? The well meant the rope, and what had the rope to do with this? Had it been used merely as a convenient means to carry the corpse? But the experts had been so sure that the victim had been bound before he was dead. And besides, there were the blow and the blood. It was all very well maki
ng horrible pictures for one’s self, but there had been no blow till the man had been dead too long to leave any pool of blood. And if there was no blood, why scrub the floor?

  He sat back on his heels and looked up again to the bells. If their tongues could speak, they could tell him what they had seen, but they had neither speech nor language. Disappointed, he again took up the torch and searched further. Then he broke out into harsh and disgusted laughter. The whole cause of the mystery revealed itself absurdly. An empty quart beer-bottle lay there, rolled into an obscure place behind a quantity of worm-eaten beams that were stacked against the wall. Here was a pretty ending to his dreams! Some unlicensed trespasser on consecrated ground—or possibly some workman legitimately engaged in repairs to the bell-cage—had spilt his beer and had tidily removed the stains, while the bottle, rolling out of sight, had been forgotten. No doubt that was all. Yet a lingering suspicion caused Wimsey to take up the bottle very carefully, by means of a finger inserted into the neck. It was not very dusty. It could not, he thought, have lain there long. It would bear somebody’s finger-prints—perhaps.

  He examined the rest of the floor very carefully, but could find only a few jumbled footprints in the dust—large, male prints, he thought. They might be Jack Godfrey’s or Hezekiah Lavender’s, or anybody’s. Then he took the ladder and made an exhaustive search of the bells and timbers. He found nothing. No secret mark. No hiding-place for treasure. And nothing whatever suggestive of fairies or elephants, enchanters or Erebus. After several dirty and fatiguing hours, he descended again, carrying the bottle as his sole reward.

  Curiously enough, it was the Rector who solved the cipher. He came into the schoolroom that night as the hall-clock struck eleven, thoughtfully bearing a glass of hot toddy in one hand and an old-fashioned foot-muff in the other.

  “I do hope you are not working yourself to death,” he said, apologetically. “I have ventured to bring a little comfort for the inner man. These nights of early summer are so chilly. And my wife thinks you might like to put your feet in this. There is always a draught under that door. Allow me—it is slightly moth-eaten, I fear, but still affords protection. Now, you must not let me disturb you. Dear me! What is that? Are you pricking out a peal? Oh, no—I see they are letters, not figures. My eyesight is not as good as it was. But I am rudely prying into your affairs.”

  “Not a bit, padre. It does look rather like a peal. It’s still this wretched cipher. Finding that the number of letters formed a multiple of eight, I had written it out in eight columns, hoping forlornly that something might come of it. Now you mention it, I suppose one might make a simple sort of cipher out of a set of changes.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “Well, by taking the movements of one bell and writing the letters of your message in the appropriate places and then filling up the places of the other bells with arbitraries. For instance. Take a Plain Course of Grand-sire Doubles,1 and suppose you want to convey the simple and pious message ‘Come and worship.’ You would select one bell to carry the significants—let us say, No. 5. Then you would write out the beginning of your plain course, and wherever No. 5 came you would put in one letter of your message. Look.” He rapidly scribbled down the two columns:

  1 2 3 4 5 6

  213546 . . .C . .

  231456 . . . . O .

  324156 . . . . M .

  342516 . . . E . .

  435216 . . A . . .

  453126 . N. . . .

  541326 D . . . . .

  514236 W. . . . .

  152436 . O . . . .

  125346 . . R . . .

  215436 . . S . . .

  251346 . H . . . .

  523146 I . . . . .

  532416 P . . . . .

  etc.

  “Then you could fill up the other places with any sort of nonsense letters—say X L O C M P, J Q I W O N, N A E M M B, T S H E Z P, and so on. Then you would write the whole thing out in one paragraph, dividing it so as to look like words.”

  “Why?” inquired the Rector.

  “Oh, just to make it more difficult. You could write, for example, ‘XLOC MPJQI. WON NAE M MBTS! HEZP?’ and so on to the end. It wouldn’t matter what you did. The man who received the message and had the key would simply divide the letters into six columns again, ran his pencil along the course of No. 5, and read the message.”

  “Dear me!” said Mr. Venables, “so he would! How very ingenious. And I suppose that with a little further ingenuity, the cipher might be made to convey some superficial and misleading information. I see, for instance, that you already have the word WON and the Scotch expression NAE. Could not the idea be extended further, so that the entire passage might appear completely innocuous?”

  “Of course it could. It might look like this.” Wimsey flicked Jean Legros’ communication with his finger.

  “Have you——? But pardon me. I am unwarrantably interfering. Still—have you tried this method on the cryptogram?”

  “Well, I haven’t,” admitted Wimsey. “I’ve only just thought of it. Besides, what would be the good of sending a message like that to Cranton, who probably knows nothing about bell-ringing? And it would take a bell-ringer to write it, and we have no reason to suppose that Jean Legros was a ringer. It is true,” he added thoughtfully, “that we have no reason to suppose he was not.”

  “Well, then,” said the Rector. “Why not try? You told me, I think, that this paper was picked up in the belfry. Might not the person to whom it was sent, though not himself a ringer and not knowing how to interpret it, have connected it in his mind with the bells and supposed that the key was to be found in the belfry? No doubt I am very foolish, but it appears to me to be possible.”

  Wimsey struck his hand on the table.

  “Padre, that’s an idea! When Cranton came to Fenchurch St. Paul, he asked for Paul Taylor, because Deacon had told him that Tailor Paul or Batty Thomas knew where the emeralds were. Come on! Have at it. We’ll ask Tailor Paul ourselves.”

  He picked up the paper on which he had already written the cryptogram in eight columns.

  “We don’t know what method the fellow used, or which bell to follow. But we’ll take it that the bell is either Batty Thomas or Tailor Paul. If the method is Grandsire Triples, it can’t be Tailor Paul, for the Tenor would be rung behind the whole way and we should find the message running down the last column. And it’s not like to be Grandsire Major, because you never ring that method here. Let us try Batty Thomas. What does the 7th bell give us? GHILSTETHCWA. That’s not very encouraging. For form’s sake we’ll try the other bells. No. No. No. Could the man possibly have started off with a bob or single?”

  “Surely not.”

  “Well, you never know. He’s not pricking a peal, he’s only making a cipher and he might do something unusual on purpose.”

  His pencil traced the letters again.

  “No. I can’t make anything of it. Wash out Grandsires. And I think we can probably wash out Stedman’s, too—that would keep the significants too close together. Try Kent Treble Bob, and we’ll take Tailor Paul first, since the Tenor is the usual observation bell for that method. She starts in the 7th place, H. Then 8th place, E. Back to 7th, S; to 6ths, I; to 4ths, T. ‘HESIT.’ Well, it’s pronounceable, at any rate. Dodge up into 6ths place, T again. Down to 5ths, E; to 4ths, T; to 3rds, H. ‘HESITTETH.’ Hullo, Padre! we’ve got two words, anyhow. ‘He sitteth.’ Perhaps ‘He’ is the necklace. We’ll carry on with this.”

  The Rector, his glasses sliding down his long nose with excitement, pored over the paper as the pencil made its rapid way down the letters.

  “‘He sitteth between’—it’s part of a verse from Psalm xcix—there, what did I tell you? ‘He sitteth between the Cherubims.’ Now, what can that mean? Oh, dear! there is some mistake—the next letter should be a B—‘be the earth never so unquiet.’”

  “Well, it isn’t a B; it’s another T. There isn’t a B anywhere. Wait a moment. THE is coming—no, THEI—no, as you we
re. It’s THE ISLES. I can’t help it, Padre. It couldn’t come like that by accident. Just a second, and we’ll have it all sorted out and then you can say what you like. … Oy! what’s happened here at the end? Oh, dash it! I was forgetting. This must be the end of the lead. Yes”—he calculated rapidly—“it is, and we’ve got to make the 3rds and 4ths. There you are. Message complete; and what it means is more than I can tell you.”

  The Rector polished his glasses and stared.

  “It’s verses from three psalms,” he said. “Most singular. ‘He sitteth between the cherubims’; that’s Ps. XCIX. 1. Then ‘The isles may be glad thereof; that’s Ps. XCVII. 1. Both those psalms begin alike: ‘Dominus regnavit,’ ‘The Lord is King.’ And then we get, ‘as the rivers in the south.’ That’s Ps. cxxvi. 5, ‘In convertendo,’ ‘When the Lord turned the captivity of Sion.’ This is a case of obscurum per obscuriora—the interpretation is even more perplexing than the cipher.”

  “Yes,” said Wimsey. “Perhaps the figures have something to do with it.

  We have 99 1 97 1 126 5. Are they to be taken as one figure 9919711265? or to be left as they are? or re-divided? The permutations are almost endless. Or perhaps they ought to be added. Or converted into letters on some system we haven’t discovered yet. It can’t be a simple a = 1 substitution. I refuse to believe in a message that runs I I A I G I A B F E. I shall have to wrestle with this quite a lot more. But you have been simply marvellous, Padre. You ought to take to deciphering codes as a profession.”

  “It was pure accident,” said Mr. Venables, simply, “and due entirely to my failing vision. That is a curious thing. It has given me the idea for a sermon about evil being over-ruled for good. But I should never have thought of the possibility that one might make a cipher out of change-ringing. Most ingenious.”