He was surprised when Tyler answered after the second ring.
“It’s Lawrence,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but perhaps you could answer a quick question?”
“Sure.”
“Were you there when the papers were discovered behind the frieze?”
“I was at the house that day, yes.”
“Do you recall if there were just the three sheets, or were they in an envelope?”
“They were in an envelope. I remember because it was an unusual shape.”
“Do you still have it?”
“I believe so. Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s sheer speculation on my part. Was anything written on the envelope? Was it addressed to anyone? Dated? Anything else?”
“Odd you should ask, because we wondered what they meant.”
“They?”
“The letters written on the inside flap of the envelope.”
“What do you mean by letters?”
“A long sequence of letters of the alphabet, separated by a vertical line with an arrow pointing to another, longer, sequence. Gibberish. We made a scan of it. I could send it to you.”
Kingston couldn’t hold back his exuberance. “Absolutely. Please.”
“Do you mind telling me what the hell’s going on here, Lawrence?”
“It’s a long story, as they say, but I’ve every reason to believe that those letters you’ve described could be some kind of code. They could be the key to solving a riddle that goes back more than two hundred years.”
“You’re kidding? Only in England!”
“I really appreciate this, Tyler…”
“I happen to be on the computer, so I’ll send it right away.”
Five minutes later, Kingston’s Mac dinged. He opened Holbrook’s e-mail with the attachment and read his note:
Dr. Kingston,
I guess I should have mentioned the envelope before. It was larger than a standard one and the face of it was blank. We thought nothing of it ’til Libby noticed the writing inside in black ink. We had no idea what it all meant other than it could have been some kind of secret message, so we saved it. Do you think that’s what it is?
Tyler
Kingston opened the attachment and smiled. The scan showed two long lines made up of random letters of the alphabet. Underneath them was a vertical arrow pointing to seven more lines of jumbled letters below. All told, he figured there could be as many as two hundred characters. For a moment he flashed back to the letters on the monument at Sturminster.
It was a code of some kind. It had to be.
TWENTY-TWO
Kingston printed it out. He was relieved to see that all the letters were readable, though some had faded somewhat. He studied them closely. With the nine lines separated by a vertical arrow, he reasoned that there were probably two separate codes and that solving the first would provide information that unlocked the key to the second. To begin, he decided to focus on the first two lines:
There was no longer any question in his mind that it was a cipher, a code of some kind. If so, what sort of message? Short sentences? Places? People? Geographic coordinates? Directions? He closed his eyes for several seconds, dredging up what he knew about codes, the fundamentals he’d been taught in army intelligence. Cryptography generally, he knew, could be divided into two branches, known as transposition and substitution. If this were a transposition cipher, the letters of the message would have been rearranged systematically, effectively generating an anagram. If it were a substitution cipher, each letter of the Roman alphabet would have been paired with a different letter.
There was only one problem, and it was significant. To decipher the code, the receiver must possess what is commonly referred to as a “key,” a shift pattern that specifies the exact details of how the encryption or code was devised.
The Winterborne code, as he’d decided to call it, represented a huge potential breakthrough but, as it stood, the string of letters meant nothing without the key. He thought of calling the man at GCHQ who had looked at the message found on Endicott’s body, knowing that he could probably make faster progress, but he decided against it for now. In any case, without the key, he doubted that even the most expert cryptanalyst could do anything with the letters on the envelope.
About to close down the computer, there was a ding announcing another e-mail. It was from Muriel Williams, secretary of the Midlands Dahlia Society. A response to his query, he hoped.
Dear Dr. Kingston,
In answer to your inquiry regarding Mr. William Endicott and Mr. Tristan Veitch, I am sad to report that both men were victims of recent homicides. I can provide the following information, which we sent recently to the Nottinghamshire police who made a similar inquiry:
Both men exhibited and won awards in several local dahlia shows in the years between 2002 and 2005. Mr. Endicott won prizes at the National, Royal Bath & West Show at Shepton Mallet in 2003 and again in 2005. Mr. Veitch won similar local awards and a National award at Harrogate in 2004.
Both were members of the National Dahlia Society and the Brookside Garden Club in Derby.
I hope this helps in your inquiry.
Sincerely,
Muriel Williams
Secretary, Midlands Dahlia Society
Kingston printed the letter and read it a second time, always a habit. For starters, it confirmed that Wheatley had followed through on the garden connection between Veitch and Endicott. “Interesting,” he muttered, recalling Wheatley’s saying that this thread had led nowhere. Nevertheless, he still intended to follow up. The police were not always right.
Establishing a direct relationship between Endicott and Veitch represented a critical step in the case. Apart from anything else, it meant that the probability of Endicott having worked with Veitch on his project had increased exponentially. But something puzzled him. It was logical to assume that Veitch had been killed to silence him and to steal the volatile information that he’d dredged up, but what motive could those same people have for killing Endicott? It seemed far-fetched that their both belonging to the same garden club held the answer.
Putting the letter aside, he decided to call Ms. Williams sooner rather than later and try to arrange for a meeting with one of the officers of Brookside Garden Club. Perhaps he could arrange for a visit with Amanda as well, since he’d be in the area anyway.
* * *
Later that evening, he and Andrew met for dinner and a couple pints in the upstairs bar at the Antelope. While they were waiting for their food, Kingston reached in his pocket and took out the sequence of letters copied from Holbrook’s envelope. He placed the paper on the table in front of Andrew.
“What do you make of this?” he said.
Andrew studied it for a few seconds, then looked up, frowning. “What are those letters supposed to be? Welsh postal codes?”
Kingston smiled. “Good try. No, I believe they’re ciphertexts—codes of some sort.”
“Really? How did you come by it?”
“They were written on an envelope that contained historical papers found concealed in the wall of an old house near Banbury—behind a frieze, actually.”
“This has to do with the Sturminster case, I take it?”
“I’ve reason to believe it does. The house dates back to the early part of the eighteenth century, so it’s reasonable to conclude that the envelope could have been placed there a long time ago.”
“Over two hundred years?”
“Maybe.”
“How did you find out about all this?”
“The house and the frieze were mentioned in Veitch’s notes. No details, just a brief comment. The frieze was also mentioned in the hidden historical papers.”
“So how are these cipher things decoded, deciphered, whatever the word is?”
“It requires what is called a key phrase. It’s like a PIN, in a manner of speaking. Only two parties have access to it, usually the sender and the receiver. Though it could be co
mposed of numbers, it’s invariably a series of letters, a word or phrase that can be committed to memory.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I thought you knew—courtesy of Her Majesty. I took intelligence courses at JSSI, Joint Services School of Intelligence, in Ashford, back in the fifties.”
“Like Bletchley?”
“Somewhat. Let me show you the basic methodology.” He took a pen from his inside pocket and wrote the alphabet in capital letters on an empty space on the paper place mat.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
“All right,” he said. “Cryptography 101. First I’ll show you a substitution cipher used by Julius Caesar. As you might guess, it’s referred to as the Caesar shift cipher or simply the Caesar shift.”
“Cipher meaning…?”
“In simple terms, a system of substituting letters or symbols. A secret way of writing or a code.”
Andrew nodded, looking only mildly interested, and sipped his beer.
“One type of substitution cipher our friend Julius used—and it’s well documented, by the way—was to replace each letter in the message with the letter three or more places farther along the alphabet. Like this,” he said, writing under the plain alphabet. “This is referred to as the cipher alphabet.”
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC
“So if the message to be sent—the plaintext, as it’s called—is ‘Key is under mat,’ the cipher text would be: NHB LV XQGHU PDW.” He wrote a check mark above the paired letters to further demonstrate.
“Even I can understand that,” said Andrew, now appearing more interested. “To decipher the code you’d have to know how many letters to shift.”
“Exactly. However, therein lies a small problem. If the sender and receiver keep the shift number or cipher alphabet written on a piece of paper, enemies could capture it or someone could steal it, discover the key, and immediately read any communications encrypted with it.” He put down the pen and looked at Andrew. “You’re a high-tech sort. Think of it much in the same way as today’s passwords. Rarely are they numerical, they’re nearly always a word or name, or a combination thereof—one that’s easy to remember.” He paused to take a sip of beer and continued. “So the emperor soon realized that a key phrase, easily committed to memory by both the sender and the receiver, was essential. Here’s what he did.”
Kingston quickly scribbled another plain alphabet on the place mat, then glanced at Andrew to make sure that he wasn’t losing interest, which he wasn’t. “To make it easy,” he said, “I’m going to use the emperor’s name as the password—the key phrase, or key for short.” He wrote JULIUS CAESAR on the corner of the place mat, then continued. “For it to function as a cipher, we must eliminate any letters in the password that are duplicated, which leaves us with JULISCAER.” He looked at Andrew again. “Are you with me, so far?”
“Yes, Professor.” Andrew smiled.
“Good. Instead of the simple three-letter shift we used before, we substitute our key phrase followed by the remaining letters of the alphabet after the R, making sure not to repeat any that already appear in our key phrase.” He wrote quickly as he spoke. “Like this.”
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
JULISCAERTVWXYZBDFGHKMNOPQ
Andrew leaned closer, studying the two rows of letters. “Clever,” he muttered. “The lower row contains all the letters of the alphabet with no duplicates.”
“Exactly,” Kingston replied, handing Andrew his pen. “Now let’s see if you can create the ciphertext, the code for our original message: ‘Key is under mat.’”
“Piece of cake,” said Andrew, starting to pair off the letters. Within thirty seconds he’d written, VSP RG KYISF XJH.
“Excellent,” said Kingston. “You’ve earned another beer.”
“Much obliged, but I see the problem already.”
“You do, eh?”
“You now have a Winterborne ciphertext but no key. No password. Right?”
“Go to the top of the class.”
“How can you … we find it?”
“I wish I knew. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it has something to do with Winterborne Manor or, more specifically, the frieze, since that’s where it was hidden.”
“What does this frieze look like?”
Kingston described the alphabet frieze and what little he knew of its history, mentioning the Holbrooks and how cooperative they’d been. By now, each had consumed two pints of Chiswick Bitter and had finished a bottle of Muscadet with dinner. Kingston recognized that it was now pointless to go on talking about Winterborne and the basics of cryptography. This was borne out when he looked up from signing the credit card slip to see Andrew trying to make eye contact with a redhead seated across the crowded room with another woman. Kingston smiled, wondering what Andrew’s reaction was going to be if they turned out to be partners and not just friends. Ten minutes later, they left the warmth of the Antelope, feeling no pain, braced for the walk back to Cadogan Square. Kingston opened the pub’s door to face a howling gale and drenching rain.
“I have a key phrase for this,” Andrew yelled over the tumult.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Kingston shouted back. “Let’s call for a cab.”
TWENTY-THREE
At breakfast the next morning, after working on the Times crossword for twenty minutes, Kingston had managed to pencil in half a dozen answers. One clue struck him as being particularly ingenious in its brevity: Happy with what’s inside. The seven-letter answer was content. Feeling pleased with himself and clearheaded, he put the puzzle aside and picked up Holbrook’s envelope, looking abjectly at the sequences of letters that had been written on it more than two hundred years ago. It was as if they were taunting him. Nine lines of scrambled letters of the alphabet—a couple of hundred at least, he estimated—stood between him and, in all likelihood, the incriminatory secret Veitch had uncovered. Without divine intervention or his discovering something that he’d overlooked in Veitch’s notes, he knew that finding the key was next to impossible. By now he’d dredged up every possible word, phrase, and sequence of letters he could think of that might be the key to reading the first of the two encrypted messages. He’d tried the letters found in Endicott’s pocket, the sequence of letters on the Arcadian monument, and a dozen others, all without success. He got up and made a fresh pot of tea.
Staring abstractedly out into the small, walled garden, he watched a gray squirrel scamper along the blackened brick wall and recalled the philosopher Heroux’s words to live by: “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.” Spooning the loose Darjeeling into the warmed pot, he decided to start at square one, to conduct yet another overview of the case, making notes as he went. Back at the kitchen table, cup of tea at hand, he began by jotting down dates, random thoughts, questions, reminders of conversations, and people’s names—some connected by lines and arrows—in an attempt to refresh his memory on all the information he’d accumulated since starting on the case.
By the time an hour had passed he’d filled out a dozen sheets of paper. He went slowly through his disorganized notes, then reread them, hoping to find details or minutiae that he’d overlooked: a slip of the tongue, conflicting facts, contradictions, anything that could point to duplicity or guilt, or provide a clue to revealing the key phrase to the Winterborne code. He found nothing.
He poured himself some more tea and thought harder on it.
While he’d focused mostly on who was behind the murders, those trying to suppress Veitch’s putative bombshell, he hadn’t considered how much his antagonists might know about Veitch’s discovery. Whoever had rifled Veitch’s house and taken all his notes, writings, and everything related to his research might already have found out what the secret was, what impact it would have, and what repercussions might follow. That supposition, if correct, meant that they would also know about the Winterborne cipher, wou
ld have found out what the key phrase or phrases were, and could already have decrypted one or both codes. Kingston seriously doubted the last—solving the second code would certainly require expert help, but it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. He was convinced, too, that it was they—whoever they were—who had been following him and had sent the pressed flower to warn him off, knowing that he was getting closer to the truth and bent on exposing them.
There was an easy way to find that out, he realized. He needed to call Holbrook anyway. He reached for the phone, then hesitated. Was he making a nuisance of himself? he wondered. All these calls must be making the man wonder just what Kingston was so persistent about. He brushed aside the thought and picked up the phone.
His misgivings were unfounded. Holbrook seemed to welcome the call.
“You’ve got us all excited about the secret code now,” he said. “It’s all Libby talks about these days. What can I do for you?”
“Other than yourself, the architectural restorer, and the people at the archives company, Tyler, how many other people know about the existence of the letters on the envelope?”
A pause followed. “Well, no one … other than my wife and daughter. Why?”
“It’s not important,” Kingston answered quickly. “Just curious, that’s all.”
“Someone else did call asking about the frieze, though.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A woman. She said she was researching listed buildings in the county.”
“Did she leave a name?”
“I didn’t speak to her. My wife did. The name, though … I think it was Baker or Barker, maybe—” He hesitated. “Erase that. Just to be sure, I’d better ask Cassie. She’ll remember, but she’s not here right now. I’ll have to call you back.”
“Did your wife tell the woman about the papers?”
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