The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part IV

by David Marcum

  Z N

  O Q

  “Penzance?” I hazarded.

  “While I’m sure it is the first word that would occur to someone on the Bosphorous when racking his brains for a good keyword, neither ‘O’ nor ‘Q’ are in any useful alignment in the resulting table.”

  “Are you sure there wasn’t a Turkish word used for the keyword?” I asked.

  “The thought had occurred to me. But if ‘November’ is spelled out in English, for the time being, I chose to move forward with a working theory that the whole thing was in English, until proven otherwise.”

  “It was quite a lot of trouble for a message. Couldn’t the thing have been composed in Turkish? That would have been obscure enough.”

  “Yes, dear Watson, with the exception that presumably a large percentage of the men in Britain who were fluent in Turkish were living and working in close proximity to his rooms. A private man wished to maintain the privacy of his own business. If a ciphered message fell into the wrong hands, without any context, it would have been presumed to have been a stray item of business correspondence. And without the keyword, it would have been indecipherable to the casual reader who came across it.”

  “So, returning to the ‘MB’ and the ‘TA’?” I asked.

  “‘A’ is the first letter of the alphabet, of course. Without the presence of one or the other or both within the keyword, it would be difficult for ‘B’ to precede ‘A’ in a manner that fits with this cipher. Similarly, while the ‘M’ and the ‘T’ may be close enough partners in the alphabet to appear naturally, the fact that their natural proximity, even in the face of the aberration of the ‘B’ and the ‘A’, is thought-provoking in and of itself. One may readily find oneself in a situation where a ‘T’ wraps around and is encoded as ‘M’, but it is more difficult to find a situation where the ‘M’ becomes a ‘T’, when taken in conjunction with the shape that ‘A’ and ‘B’ must give.”

  B A

  T M

  “I take your word for it, Holmes. What about the ‘RW CSCS’?”

  “One limitation of this cipher is that it deals exclusively with letters, not numerals. There are various ways one would go about conveying numerals via letters. One, you could spell out the words. ‘November first’ rather than ‘1 November’ or ‘November 1’.”

  “I see the ‘CS CS’ you mentioned, which is intriguing. How do you account for it?”

  “With this cipher, it has the limitation of not being able to handle doubled letters within the same digraph. ‘Mannerly’, for example. Or ‘suppose’. Likewise, one needs an even number of letters in a word in order to cipher it properly. In each of those cases, it is the frequent habit to add in nulls to the message. They frequently take the form of ‘X’, but there are no hard and fast rules on the subject. So when I see a repeated digraph, I mentally read something-X, something-X, or the reverse.”

  “So it’s a possibility that, of ‘CS’, one or the other is to read ‘X’?”

  “Exactly, Watson. Now, looking at the alphabet, we see that ‘C’ is at the beginning of the alphabet, and ‘S’ is not far from ‘X’. Is it more reasonable to presume that ‘S’ and ‘X’ form the bottom corners of our rectangle, and that ‘C’ and some other letter form the upper? Or is it more reasonable to presume that ‘X’ is towards the end of the keyword, ‘C’ is close by, and ‘S’ and something else - say, ‘U’, ‘V’, ‘W’, or ‘Y’ - are at the bottom of our rectangle?”

  “There aren’t many English words that have an ‘X’ in them, in addition to having any number of Z’s, B’s, M’s, and so on,” I said doubtfully.

  “Excellent. So, for the purposes of our theory, we’ll write the digraph as such - we’ll hold our ‘C’ in reserve and pair it with something else in the future, and commit our ‘S’ and ‘X’ to the same row at the bottom.”

  ? C

  S X

  “But that still doesn’t tell us a thing about what ‘RW CSCS’ actually means,” I objected.

  “It tells us that we’re doubtful that it spells out an ordinal number. ‘Sixteenth’, for example, has a double set of letters that would require the use of nulls to split up, but you see there’s hardly any room for it. I’d say the date is expressed with four letters, plus our two S’s, which are really nulls. So we must look for a date that is expressed as ‘RWCC’.”

  “And of course, you lost no time in the discovery,” I said.

  “The facts were before me, just as they’re before you,” said Holmes. “I made it my working hypothesis that, perhaps, the date had been written in Roman numeral form for the purposes of encipherment. One readily finds such patterns as we seek within Roman numerals. II for two, XX for twenty, CC for two hundred. Obviously, it is not displaying the year, or else it would be a far longer string of letters - MDCCCL to get us as far as 1850, plus all the tens and ones to finish off whatever that particular year was. Come to think of it, it would have been rather helpful if our correspondent had bothered. So, we presumably seek a letter that’s less than XXX, which is thirty, which is the number of days in the month of November. Our building blocks are I, V, and X.”

  “With the manner in which Roman numerals are ordered and constructed, we have no other choice but XVII,” I said slowly.

  “Exactly, friend Watson. So, we have incidentally discovered that ‘RW’ is code for ‘XV’.”

  “I don’t see how you can make that fit into a rectangle,” I said. “‘V’, ‘W’, and ‘X’ are nearly the last letters of the alphabet. I can’t think of any words that would contain ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘X’, and ‘Z’ in the same keyword, so that means that ‘V’, ‘W’, and ‘X’ are all in a row at the bottom.”

  “Which also means that ‘R’ is at the bottom row, and that in order for ‘C’ and ‘I’ to appear on a different row together, ‘I’ is likely to be at the tail end of the keyword. So, you see, we’ve filled out our bottom row as such.”

  R S V W X

  “So you discovered that your keyword possessed the letters of ‘T’, ‘U’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’, because they’re missing from the final row? What a monstrous keyword it seems to be,” I said.

  “Not only that, but we additionally discovered that our ‘O’, ‘P’, and ‘Q’ may presumably remain intact at the end of the row above it, due to our earlier efforts,” said Holmes. “Remember that we have already deduced that ‘N’ and ‘Z’ must be part of the keyword, in addition to ‘A’, ‘M’, ‘I’, and ‘B’, at the very least.”

  “Gracious, Holmes. A word that is made up of TUYNZAMIB? ‘Byzantium’, of course!”

  “And thus we have our hypothesis, and thus we test it out.”

  B Y Z A N

  T I U M C

  D E F G H

  K L O P Q

  R S V W X

  “Under the date, we have RIMGZ KIO as the place name,” I said. “‘RI’ reads out to be ‘ST’. ‘MG’ - oh, dear, it’s a column.”

  “One takes the letter immediately beneath the first, and wraps around to the top when necessary,” said Holmes. “So ‘A’ drops down to become an ‘M’, and ‘M’ drops down to become a ‘G’.”

  “STAM. ‘ZK’ becomes ‘BO’. And ‘IO’ is ‘UL’. STAMBOUL, Holmes!”

  “Indeed, and all falls into place in an orderly fashion. I will save you the tedious trouble of translating out the next part of that letter. You will see it has been deciphered in its entirety here - “ and he produced a sheet to which the first had been kept pinned, all these years.

  Stamboul

  November xvii

  Dear Sirx

  In receipt of payment in full by Hx Please find enclosed two pounds of deli bal per your requestx Am sure you will find quite satisfactoryx Please make proper arrangements with Hx Advise if the product from Ordu was too potentx Next shipment will
post the tenth of Marchx The keyword is GOLDEN

  Mehmed

  “And after all that work, the matter’s still as foggy as it ever was,” I said.

  “Quite the contrary. Regardless of when this habit began, we have determined that Uncle Charles was in the habit of purchasing products by the pound from his source in Stamboul after his return to our fair isle. The product was a mysterious item known locally as deli bal.”

  “Opium?” I asked.

  “Indeed not. Deli bal was the weapon with which Queen Olga of Kiev avenged her husband’s murder by the Drevlians, and which Xenophon recorded in his Anabasis. Surely back in your youth, your schoolmasters did not spare you the Anabasis, in their attempts to make your young self a well-rounded individual?”

  “The Mad Honey?” I asked.

  “Indeed. The rhododendron thrives in the mountainous areas around the Black Sea. One needs vast concentrations of rhododendron flowers for bees to produce true deli bal. When consumed with reckless greed, it may be totally incapacitating, and even make the sufferer certain that death is imminent. But as we know from history, death rarely comes from the honey itself, but rather from one’s enemies taking advantage of one’s temporary incapacitation. However, in that country, it is considered to have a medicinal quality when consumed in moderation. Small amounts are taken daily, often mixed in milk, as a tonic for health and vigor. Thus we have possession of Uncle Charles’ secret.”

  “Incapacitating his enemies with mad honey? But for what motive?”

  “Hardly. Young Woodford had only himself to blame, for consuming his uncle’s private store of honey, kept in his uncle’s inner sanctum, when he concocted a series of hot toddies with a complete disregard for ordinary boundaries of social politeness. Here you have a man who, while not necessarily in the hoary December of life, certainly has at least fifty years of his lifespan behind him. And such a man is married to a young wife who is roughly a third of his age. If such a man in such a position feels he is in need of a harmless tonic, but hardly wishes to broadcast that fact to the world at large - who am I to divulge his secret? I reassured young Woodford that the packages were innocuous, and contained a traditional Eastern medication for a heart condition his Uncle Charles was not comfortable in divulging. He himself had made the mistake of ingesting the heart medication when he took it for honey, and that it was the cause for his recent severe ailment, as even the most healthful medicine quickly becomes poison when taken under improper circumstances. I advised him to respect his uncle’s privacy and to treat him with more regard, but to be cautious in the future about the casual consumption of foodstuffs of unknown origin, no matter how harmless they may appear to the eye. I believe he took my advice to heart, or perhaps his malady had been far more severe than I can imagine, for I seem to recall his manners much improved from that point on.”

  “Thank you for your service to your country,” I said.

  “Perhaps. See, Watson, this is the sort of adventure you should turn your pen towards. None of that sensationalism you’re so fond of; just plain logic. Still, in this particular instance, it would be difficult enough to disguise the facts enough to protect the privacy of those involved, as there’s a finite number of Turkish fruiterers. Perhaps, for the sake of your narrative, you could alter them into a family of Swiss cheese-importers. Or perhaps a family of French wine merchants. But if so, what parallels would preserve the narcotics element? And the mad honey itself? Neither tulip-honey nor lavender-honey would have the effects of a good batch of rhododendron-honey. No? Then, I admit I’m rather in the mood to set aside my monograph for a while and allow it further incubation. I shall resume my efforts in time. Would you mind handing me that large folio volume bound in reverse calf? Yes, the Thomas Hale. Thank you. He made some interesting observations upon diverse plants upon which bees feed, and how it affects the quality of honey in terms of characteristics of sweetness, colour, viscosity, aroma, and so on, both for the good and for the ill. Fascinating creatures, but not much opportunity to observe their habits in person in our locale. Perhaps someday, I will be in a position to trade these grey streets for the fresh air of the countryside. In the meantime, I shall seek refuge from the dreariness of London within my books.”

  The Adventure of the Missing Necklace

  by Daniel D. Victor

  How would it have been if she had not lost that necklace?

  Who knows? Who knows?

  How singular is life and how full of changes!

  How small a thing will ruin or save one!

  – Guy de Maupassant

  “The Diamond Necklace”

  I

  Throughout the decades that I chronicled the cases of my friend and colleague, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the criticism never wavered. Indeed, in looking back over the years, I can see how much his complaints had become a continual sticking point between us.

  Take as an example the cold February evening in ‘98 when Holmes and I were sitting before a blazing fire whilst a steady rain pelted our windows.

  “In your hands, Watson,” he observed yet again, “a story that should be edifying turns out to be merely diverting.”

  I’m afraid I rolled my eyes. I knew we had no intention of leaving our rooms as long as the downpour persisted. Yet my vision of a warm wool blanket and one of Mrs. Hudson’s hot toddies was dashed when I realized that to Holmes our evening together translated into another opportunity to resurrect the same tired criticism of my writing that he’d presented on so many previous occasions.

  To be clear, I am not alluding to the annoying little side-comments he would make from time to time as in his complaint during our investigation of Wisteria Lodge that I told stories “wrong end foremost”. I am, in fact, referring to the much broader kind of dissatisfaction he regurgitated with undue regularity towards my entire literary approach. In a nutshell, Holmes thought my emotional nature undermined his intellectual accomplishments. For instance, at the start of the case in which I met my late wife Mary, he argued that tingeing accounts of his investigations with romanticism made about as much sense as working a love story into the fifth proposition of Euclid. And on our way to the Abbey Grange just a month before our current dust-up, he’d complained about my love of the histrionic.

  “You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy,” he said to me as the Kentish train pitched and swayed, “in order to dwell upon sensational details, which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.”

  On a cold winter’s night like that which we were experiencing, one might not expect terms like “edifying” and “diverting” to draw attention away from the comforts of a crackling fire. But no sooner did I hear their juxtaposition than I sensed I had to prepare anew for a fresh argument over a familiar subject. Here we go again, I thought to myself, another discussion of how the few literary embellishments I occasionally employ serve to diminish the significance of Holmes’s intellectual triumphs.

  None of these charges surprised me. I’d always known that Holmes craved some sort of textbook to be derived from his criminal investigations. But as his promoter as well as the chronicler of his cases, I consistently sought means to engage my readers in the thrill of the hunt rather than putting them to sleep with descriptions of routine procedures.

  It was not that I disagreed with Holmes’s goal. Given the number of times he bested the traditional constabulary, the need for the kind of volume he desired seemed obvious. But I aimed for a grander audience than the local police force! The more success my writing achieved, the more I dreamed of presenting the adventures of Sherlock Holmes to a reading public that extended worldwide.

  To this day, I maintain that in some part of Holmes’s mind, he shared my point of view. Otherwise, how can one explain so contradictory a stance from a man so universally identified with rationality? At the same time he criticized my accounts of his exploits, he also appeared to sa
vour them. In his investigation of Irene Adler, did he not refer to me as his “Boswell”? At the start of our enquiry into the Baskervilles, did he not describe me as “a conductor of light”? In our search for the Bruce-Partington Plans, did he not call me his “trusted biographer”? And when the demon known as “the Lion’s Mane” prompted him to try his own hand at composition, did he not acknowledge how much more of the tale I could have made it?

  Such obvious encouragement did little to prod me to change my style. Let someone else write the textbook Holmes desired. For that matter, let Holmes himself complete the task. In point of fact, during the train ride in Kent, he had speculated that when it came time for him to retire, he just might compile such a volume on his own.

  On that cold night in Baker Street, however, Holmes couldn’t seem to let the matter rest. A flash of lightning punctuated my frustration, and suddenly I vowed to get to the bottom of our on-going contretemps. I would take advantage of our enforced time together to discover the source of his lingering dissatisfaction.

  “Why is it,” I asked him between rolls of thunder, “that you harbour so basic an objection to what the public find so engaging?”

  “Hah, Watson,” said he, filling his pipe. “You may ask such a question because you’ve never seen your own accomplishments twisted into something completely different - a true story made unrecognizable in a way that not even your romanticized writings have done. It happened early in my career, old fellow, and I’ve been fearful of similar distortions ever since.”

  Early in his career? Here was a history I’d never heard before.

  “Who was the architect of this distortion?” I asked, eager to learn more of my friend’s past.

  Sherlock Holmes flashed a quick smile. “I trust I won’t be the first Englishman to blame our rivals across the Channel for something I find distressing. It was the late French scrivener, Guy de Maupassant, who demonstrated to me how, in the hands of a fantasist, fundamental truth can be completely altered. The experience has served as a warning to me ever since.”