The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part IV

by David Marcum

  The housemaids of Mrs. Hudson’s establishment may well have counted themselves fortunate. Our room required little in the way of dusting, due to Holmes’s habit of covering every horizontal surface with papers. That is not to say the papers fell arbitrarily; indeed, he had little difficulty in placing his hands on any desired document the moment he wished to retrieve it. But although my own tidiness in regards to housekeeping was less conscientious than one would expect from a medical man with a military past, I still could not but wish him to commit his possessions to a superior filing system.

  Such were my thoughts one evening, as I sat in my arm chair reading of the War in Burmah in the newspaper. Holmes worked industriously amidst a pile of papers at his desk, and had little attention to spare for my remarks about the Viceroy’s telegrams regarding the status of Minhla and Singboungwe. After a few failed attempts to engage him in conversation, we lapsed into companionable silence for a while, before I set my newspaper aside and moved to retrieve a sheet of paper which had drifted, unheeded, from his workspace to the floor.

  Before I returned it to him, I took the opportunity of taking a brief glance to see what project so absorbed my friend’s attention. But I could make no sense of it. At first glance, I thought I had recovered a page from a letter, but upon closer inspection, found that the words were, in reality, a jumble of letters conveying no discernable meaning.

  RIMGZ KIO

  ZQSFT ADSRW CSCS

  EFBWY ESR

  CYSDI HMLUK GONZI GBCCY OF QSKY

  NERR QOGYY LEUBHH YIQLV FEMRP

  QVF BHV LGELST YYPLGS BVF SRS

  DOCLYCR MGVIS DZLM VESSQ EUBH

  OCUILY BMEY GZTIKVNS QOGYYL

  GMLDK W PQDSB WRSN BHFIG BCV

  XUI QNQN BGSU YLUE CDGL VKFTTI

  DVPUK VFTAM RIQ VPQKU HYCR

  YHRCX EMLIG BCS MQS OQ LVCRCDD

  IHYCD VOG MXT QN CDDLL IV PBKEY

  FPKEHY

  IGGCFE

  “If I am going to pry into your affairs,” I told him, handing over the document, “I would appreciate it if your messages were in the Queen’s English. It would be far more enlightening.”

  Holmes set down his pen and turned to face me. “That? Ah, it’s a mere aide-mémoire from a trifling affair back in my student days. Hardly worth remembering, except for the appearance of an interesting cipher to which I thought I might like to refer in the future. As it is, I’m in the process of composing a monograph on the subject. It’s a project with which I’ve been dabbling for years. My original intentions were to discourse upon an assortment of fifty different ciphers, but as the work has progressed, that number has ballooned to nearly treble. I suspect it will continue to grow before all is said and done. However, my publishers are rather stingy, and are annoyed at the lavishness of my page-count as it currently stands. It’s becoming rather a more expensive volume than they believe there is a market for. This monograph, when completed, will be the greatest work on cryptanalysis since Kasiski’s Die Geheimschriften Und Dechiffirkunst, but for now, the Philistines care only about the pagination and deadlines. On both points, they are quite upset with me, and I, on my part, am considering alternate channels.”

  As tempting as it was to encourage the conversation along such paths as the shortsightedness of the industry, I instead elected to ask, “So, you were able to make sense of this gibberish? How long did it take you to discover its secrets?”

  “My dear Watson, I cracked the cipher as easily as one might crack an egg,” said Holmes. “The encipherer might have thrown up a few extra obstacles that would have made things a trifle less obvious, but in the end, it would have surrendered its secrets easily enough. The thing about ciphers, you see, is that not a lot has changed since the days when Cardinal Wolsey was ambassador to the Viennese court. And even in his day, not a lot had changed since Caesar conquered Gaul, or Polybius shot flares from his ships. The weakness of a cipher is that it’s based on a language, and a language operates under very strict rules and patterns. One may play with the language, but the rules and patterns still exist for those who have the patience to extricate them from whatever knots they have been snarled.”

  “I insist you tell me the story from the beginning,” I said, and he was amenable enough to humor my request.

  “I was an undergraduate at the time, and developing a reputation for rendering assistance in odd problems here and there,” he began. “Campus gossip being the way that it is, news of my successes spread rapidly, even regarding the most delicate of matters, the net result being that a number of individuals, both faculty and of the student body, called my attention to a pretty assortment of difficulties over the course of those two years. Success bred success, and complete strangers were knocking at my door, anxious to lay bare their souls and reveal their innermost secrets in exchange for any light I might shed. Things have not changed much in the intervening years, although I must say the business is only slightly more profitable these days than it was then.” He gave a dry chuckle; obviously the remuneration he received for his efforts still had room for improvement.

  “One of those individuals was a student by name of Woodford, of a family of mercantile gentlemen. Their trade was in the importation of dried fruits from Turkey. He wasn’t a particularly popular fellow, although his society might have been more appreciated if he didn’t have the deplorable habit of considering the other students’ private stores of libation his own. Whether grape or grain, he considered it a fair trade for the honor of his company, and rarely troubled himself with asking a by-your-leave from its rightful owner.”

  “What a shocking impertinence,” I murmured.

  “Indeed. I’m sure my rooms were a disappointment to him when he came to visit me, as he seemed perturbed and in need of refreshment during his discourse. He kept looking around in a distracted manner, as though expecting me to proffer such hospitality, but gained momentum soon enough despite the absence of such stimulants, and settled in to his story.

  “It had to do with his family trade. The shipping firm had been created by his grandfather, who had passed away ten years previously. His father and uncle were equal partners. Uncle Charles lived in Stamboul for a good thirty years of his life, tending to the business on the Bosphorous side of things; his father managed the Liverpool office. Uncle Charles remained a bachelor throughout his time in that distant country, and had returned to England perhaps a year or two previous to the time of our conversation. In that time, he had met and married an English girl who was even younger than our young Woodford, and lived in apartments over the shipping offices. Perhaps owing to his thirty years’ independence, or the isolation of his years abroad, or perhaps natural temperament, Uncle Charles had a tendency to keep to himself. Although he was most scrupulous in matters of business, he was stand-offish and private regarding personal matters, even towards his own brother.

  “Young Woodford claimed to not be particularly annoyed by his Uncle’s dabbling in matrimony so late in life. As the only child of his generation, he had little doubt that his Uncle Charles would die without issue, and was confident that, given the passage of time, the shipping firm would descend to him through his father.

  “However, since he lived upon the premises, it was soon remarked upon that Uncle Charles was in the habit of receiving private parcels from Turkey several times a year. The contents of these parcels were never disclosed, although they were the subject of more than one conversation. Rather than giving an innocent explanation and allowing the subject to drop, Uncle Charles grew red and wrathful at having his privacy so grossly violated and accused them all of being insufferable nosy-parkers. And that, of course, only inflamed curiosity all the more. No one took the steps of actually tampering with the post, but there were concerns that perhaps he had developed some shifty side business during his time on the Golden Horn, and was now running it from afar. Young Woodford and his father ent
ertained the unfounded speculation that he was importing opium, perhaps, in the shadow of their respectable fruit business.

  “The father had made no progress with his brother through the ordinary channels. When another foreign package arrived in due course, he called upon the natural recklessness of the son to see what he could make of the mystery. It was late in Winter Recess, so young Woodford was working at the shipping offices and had opportunity enough to play the spy. Not satisfied with dogging his uncle’s steps around the office, he went so far as to intrude upon his Uncle Charles’ private apartments, inviting himself to dinner on the pretext of getting to know his Uncle’s new bride all the better. For the record, I believe dinner involved a celery soup, stewed cardoons, larded oysters, and a jam pudding. Woodford was most disparaging about the menu. Business was far too profitable for his uncle to dine his guests upon such humble fare. I refrained from pointing out he was fortunate that the evening’s menu was as accommodating as it was; chops for two could hardly be stretched for three so neatly at a moment’s notice.

  “After dinner, he joined Uncle Charles in his study to discuss the intricacies of the Stamboul side of the business. Uncle Charles had a cigar, but pointedly neglected to offer one to young Woodford. Young Woodford, with his characteristic aplomb, helped himself anyways. Uncle Charles concocted a hot toddy for himself, since it was a wet, dreary winter that season. He did not offer any refreshment to his nephew. Uncle Charles was unexpectedly called away to tend to some matter or another elsewhere on the premises; young Woodford took the opportunity to concoct a hot toddy of his own, and then, as his uncle continued to be delayed, another. During the time he was waiting for the water to boil over the spirit lamp, he amused himself by going through some papers on his uncle’s desk and in the waste paper basket at its side. One of the papers he found was the one you see before you; he placed it in his inner pocket.

  “Uncle Charles was apoplectic with rage when he came back and discovered that young Woodford had helped himself to his brandy. It was hardly surprising that a relation of his would have expected him to act with any greater degree of restraint when left unattended, but so it was. Pale and trembling, he directed a barrage of verbal abuse, at quite the loud volume, at his nephew, who took it as his cue to depart. Thus it was that he bore away this enciphered letter. Not long after making his way to his own lodgings, he began to feel quite poorly, and, in fact, was absolutely prostrate, complete with nausea, vomiting, dizziness, double vision, and a severe case of the scours. It passed as suddenly as it came in about twenty-four hours, but what a twenty-four hours it was in the interim! He claimed he would never forget the sheer misery and agony of those long, dragging hours, and it was actually two or three days before he was wholly himself again, but more than once, before then, he was wholly convinced he stood at death’s door.

  “Now, in addition to suspecting his uncle of being a smuggler of opium, he couldn’t help but wonder if his uncle was a poisoner on top of it all. He was quite suspicious of those oysters, having read a few cheap novels where poisoned oysters played a crucial role in the plot. Young Woodford spent the remainder of the Winter Recess avoiding his uncle as much as was possible in such close quarters, and as soon as Lent Term resumed, lost no time in consulting me regarding his concerns and suspicions. And how he covered that territory with relish! It was with difficulty that I wrested him from that line of thought, and directed him to tell me more about whether it was usual or regular for them to use ciphered messages during the course of ordinary business.

  “‘We use a cipher at the office for our business correspondence, to protect our post from prying eyes,’ young Woodford told me, without the least trace of irony. ‘I believe he has used our cipher for his own ends. I found this amidst the remnants of parcel wrappings with a Turkish postmark in his waste basket. But without the keyword, it’s impossible to decipher.’

  “‘What one man may write, another may read,’ I told him. ‘Pray describe your method.’

  “‘For example, if the keyword is “apricots”, one writes down A-P-R-I-C-O-T-S in the first squares at the top, wrapping around to the next line as necessary, and then proceeds to fill in the remainder of the alphabet afterwards, in a five-by-five grid, consecutively, skipping over the letters which already are present in the keyword. So since the “a” and “c” already exist in “apricots”, the next letters to come after are “b”, “d”, “e”, “f”, and so on. There being twenty-six letters and only twenty-five spaces to fit them within, “i” and “j” are deemed the same letter. Such is our grid.

  A P R I C

  O T S B D

  E F G H K

  L M N Q U

  V W X Y Z

  “Messages are enciphered by taking pairs of letters and forming rectangles, rows, or columns. So, you see, if we wish to encipher the word “fruit”, you look for the rectangle formed by the “F” and the “R”. The other two corners are formed by the “G” and the “P”. The enciphered letter is kept within the same row as the plaintext letter, but is moved over accordingly within the confines of this invisible rectangle. With “U” and “I”, you have “Q” and “C”. And “T” remains by itself, so the null of X is placed after it to form a couplet, and “S W” is the result. So “FRUIT” becomes “GPQCSW”. You can see how the cipher changes with the keyword - if it were “PRUNES” or “EDINBURGH”, the encipherment would look quite different.’

  “‘And suppose,’ I said, ‘that the word to be enciphered was “BIRD”? How would that play out?’

  “‘With a vertical column, such as with “BI”, one uses the letter immediately beneath - “HB”. With a horizontal box, one would use the opposite corners, keeping within rows, so that “RD” becomes “CS”. And “BIRD” is now “HBCS.”’

  “You can imagine, friend Watson, that I found this enciphering system rather intriguing. The problem, you see, with an ordinary substitution cipher is that it will readily yield its secrets due to the frequency of some letters in the alphabet, such as the ‘e’, and the impossibility of disguising the shapes of certain words, once you have determined one or two of its component letters. But within this digraphic substitution system, ‘BIRD’ may well be ‘HBCS’, but ‘MILD’ may well be ‘QPUO’, so one is unable to say that an ‘I’ is always this, and to always read that in place of a ‘D’.”

  “What a headache, Holmes,” I said. “Even knowing the keyword, it seems easy to make mistakes.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first, Watson,” said Holmes kindly. “When I was researching for my monograph, I had an excellent time with some American ciphers of the last century based on variations of the Trithemius-Vignère type of cipher. John Adams and James Madison were particularly wretched at it. But I digress.”

  “So, you had the advantage of knowing the most likely system, but how did you go about piercing the cipher itself?” I asked.

  “Look at the document, Watson. It’s obviously a letter. What goes at the upper right-hand corner of letters such as these?”

  “The location and date, perhaps?” I hazarded.

  “Excellent. Now, consider. The package was posted from Turkey. It takes more than two, perhaps as many as three or four weeks for the steamer to travel from Stamboul to Liverpool. The package arrived during the Winter Recess, in December. Presume that it was posted in November. Is it possible to obtain ‘November’ from ‘ZQSFT ADSRW CSCS’?”

  “I wouldn’t begin to know, Holmes,” I said. “The spacing, for one, seems not to fit.”

  “Disregard the spacing. Remember what I said about the patterns of language. It’s a frequent tactic to disguise the natural word-breaks by putting enciphered text into arbitrary groups, but word spacing itself is an artificial construct. If a message were to be composed in scripta continua, one would still be able to comprehend the author’s intentions. In this particular case, it is the pairs of letters that hold the
key, so let us address ourselves to the task.

  “There are two ways of structuring the date: ‘the third of November’ or ‘November third’, for example. ‘CS CS’ is obviously a repeated series of letters. The word ‘November’ has no repeated series of letters, so let us presume as our first working hypothesis that the date is expressed with the month first, followed by the day. If that is so, we also presume that ‘ZQ’ equals ‘NO’, ‘SF’ equals ‘VE’, ‘TA’ equals ‘MB’, and ‘DS’ equals ‘ER’. You recall that they will be opposite corners of a rectangle, or neighbors in a column, or a row. The first thing that strikes the eye is that for ‘N’ to equal ‘Z’ in that first pairing, the keyword must contain a ‘Z’ in it somewhere, and possibly even the ‘N’. Likewise, in order for ‘MB’ to equal ‘TA’, logic dictates that at least three of those four letters must be in the keyword, if not all four.”

  “I can hardly say that I follow,” I said. “Why must the keyword contain a Z?”

  “Because ‘N’ and ‘O’ are consecutive letters in the alphabet, my dear Watson,” said Holmes. “Unless ‘N’ is in the keyword, you will find no other set of circumstances whereby ‘N’ may appear over ‘O’ in columnar form. It may be that ‘N’ may be the last letter in an upper row, and that ‘O’ may be the first letter of the one immediately beneath it, but in that case, there would be no simultaneous situation whereby ‘Z’ would share a row with ‘N’. On the other hand, it’s perfectly within reason for ‘O’ and ‘Q’ to reside in close company upon the same row. The third set of circumstances would have ‘N’ and ‘Z’ above each other in columnar form, but where does that leave you for the ‘O’ and ‘Q’ half of the digraph, when in ordinary circumstances, they are separated by but one letter? Hence, when trawling for a keyword, I found myself considering words in English which contain the letters ‘P’ and ‘NZ’ together, or have an ‘N’ and a ‘Z’ separated by a single letter.”