'We'll come back here later,' said the Superintendent. 'First I want to see the contents of the warehouse.'
They trooped out behind him and up the stone stairs to the first floor. It was an empty barn like room; containing only several stacks of cases. The Superintendent pointed: Wells and the extra detective pulled one out from the middle of a stack, and, by means of a jemmy which the lock man produced from his bag of tools, opened it up. It was a longish coffin shaped case and contained tins of leaf tobacco.
They hammered back the nails carefully, so that it should not appear to have been opened, and replaced it in the centre of the stack.
The contents of four other cases were investigated from different portions of the room and the Superintendent noted down particulars of the goods they contained in his pocket book. Then they visited the upper floor and the same process was gone through with other consignments of merchandise which they found there. The top floor and the one below it were empty.
'We'll get down to the offices now,' the Superintendent said and, with an elephantine tread, led the way downstairs again.
They all had torches and began a rapid search through the clerks' desks and papers. It was impossible to examine them all in so short a time but the police officers made various notes of invoices, addresses, and dates of correspondence, without coming across a single item which tied up the place with its illegal source of supply.
Gregory wandered into the inner room. If there were any, it was there, he felt certain, that important papers would be kept.
The lock expert had already opened the roll top desk and the Superintendent had gone carefully through it without finding any papers other than those connected with apparently legitimate business. Gregory stared round the place, scrutinising the photographs upon the grey white walls and the miscellaneous collection of samples and trade papers, hoping for inspiration. Then his eye fell upon the lower shelf of the bookcase.
Half buried under stacks of dusty documents there were a long row of books. He bent down and flashed his torch on them. It was a set of Shakespeare's works in forty volumes. As a book collector himself he knew it well. It had been published by an American company, just after the war, and remained at an exceptionally low price. The volumes were bound in grey boards with a strip of blue cloth down their spines on which were paper labels. Each contained one of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, except the last three, which were devoted to the sonnets and poems.
He stared at them for a moment; thinking how queer it was that the owner of this grim business office should be sufficiently interested in Shakespeare to keep a set in his depressing work room. Then he noticed that whereas the tops of thirty-nine volumes were grey with dust, the fortieth, number sixteen in the set, was comparatively clean and stood out a little from the others as though it had been recently used and hastily put back.
'When you are ready,' he said to the Superintendent who was standing in the doorway, 'we'll quit. I don't think you'll find much here but, if you'll provide me with a copy of The Tempest, when we get back to the Yard, I think I'll be able to decode that famous telegram for you.'
18
The Deciphering of the Code
At Scotland Yard Gregory settled down in the Superintendent's room with a thin paper edition of Shakespeare's plays, a pencil, and some blank sheets of foolscap. He knew that any ordinary combination of figures could have been deciphered by the decoding department at the Admiralty, to which Sir Pellinore had first sent the Corot telegram. The fact of its having defeated the experts showed quite clearly that the numerals referred to the lines of a certain book known only to the sender and recipient or their associates. His discovery of The Tempest as the only book in the set of Shakespeare, reposing so incongruously in the dusty warehouse of Mitbloom & Allison, which had recently been used, made him feel certain it held the key to the cipher.
He spread out the telegram before him and reread it:
COROT CAFE DE LA CLOCHE CALAIS SIXTH 41 44 II 15 THENCE 46 SEVENTH 43 47 EIGHTH AGAIN 47.
Turning to the play he looked up line 41, which read:
'… drown? Have you a mind to sink?'
Then line 44: 'Work you then.1
Next, line 11; which only had the single word: 'Enough!'
Line 15 was, 'Where is the master, boatswain?'
And line 46: '… noisemaker. We are less afraid to be drowned than…'
It simply did not make sense so he tried another method.
Treating the first numeral in each pair as indicating an act of the play, and the second numeral the line, which gave him:
41 'If I have to'
44 'Amends; for F
11 'Here, master: what'
15 'Ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.'
This did not seem to make sense either so, for a quarter of an hour, he worked on all sorts of other possibilities; trying out the numbers against full speeches or as lines in various acts and scenes, but none of them gave any results until it occurred to him to try the songs of the Fairy Ariel.
There were four songs in the play and he wrote them down.
I. Act I. Scene II.
1. Come unto these yellow sands,
2. And then take hands:
3. Curtsied when you have and kiss'd
4. The wild waves whist:
5. Foot it featly here and there;
6. 'And, sweet sprites, the burthern bear.
7. Hark, hark!
8. Bow wow.
9. The watchdogs bark:
10. Bow wow.
11. Hark, hark! I hear
12. The strain of strutting chanticleer:
13. Cry, cockadiddle dow.
2. Act I. Scene II.
1. Full fathom five thy father lies;
2. Of his bones are coral made;
3. Those are pearls that were his eyes;
4. Nothing of him that doth fade,
5. But doth suffer a seachange
6. Into something rich and strange
7. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
8. Ding dong.
9. Hark! now I hear them Dingdong, bell.
3. Act II. Scene I.
1. While you here do snoring lie,
2. Open eyed conspiracy