Some instinct seemed to warn Glaisher that he was treading on thin ice.
‘Well,’ he said, ’it seemed a bit too obvious, so to say and besides, we couldn’t trace any, connection between you and the deceased.’
‘It was wise of you to make inquiries. Because, of course, you had only my word for everything, hadn’t you? And those photographs were evidence that I was pretty coldblooded? And my previous history was rather — shall we say, full of incident?’
‘Just so, miss.’ The Superintendent’s eyes were, expressionless.
‘Of whom did you make the inquiries, by the way?’
‘Of your charwoman,’ said Glaisher.
‘Oh! you think she would know whether I knew Paul Alexis?’
‘In our experience,’ replied the Superintendent, ‘charwomen mostly know things of that sort.’
‘So they do. And you’ve really given up suspecting’ me?’ ‘Oh, dear me, yes.’
‘On my charwoman’s testimony to my character?’
‘Supplemented,’ said the Superintendent, by our own observation.’
‘I see.’ Harriet looked hard at Glaisher, but he was proof against this kind of third degree, and smiled blandly in response. Wimsey, who had listened with his face like a mask, determined to give the stolid policeman the first prize for tact. He now dropped a cold comment into the conversation.
‘‘You and Miss Vane having made short work of each other’s theories,’ he said, ‘perhaps you would like to hear what we have been doing this evening.’
‘Very’ much, my lord.’
‘We began,’ said Wimsey, ‘by making a new search for clues among the corpse’s belongings, hoping, of course, to get some light on Feodora or the cipher letters. Inspector Umpelty kindly lent us his sympathetic assistance. In fact, the Inspector has been simply invaluable. He has sat here now for two hours, watching us search, and every time we looked into a hole or corner and found it empty, he has been able to assure us that he had already looked into the hole or corner and found it empty too.’
Inspector Umpelty chuckled.
‘The only thing we’ve found,’ went on Lord Peter, ’is Chambers’s Dictionary, and we didn’t find that this evening, because Miss Vane had found it before, while she was engaged in wasting her time on crossword instead of getting on with her writing. We’ve found a lot of words marked with pencil. We were engaged in making a collection of them when you came in. Perhaps you’d like to hear a few specimens. Here you are. I’m reeling them off at random: Peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight, chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason,cabriolet, rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct. There are lots more. Do these words say anything to you? Some of them have an ecclesiastical ring about them, but on the other hand, some of them have not. Courtesan, for example. To which I may add tambourine, wrestling and fashion.
Glaisher laughed.
‘Sounds to me as though the young fellow was a crossword fan himself. They’re nice long words.’
‘But not the longest, There are many longer, such as supralapsarian, monocotyledenous and diaphragmatic, but he hasn’t marked any of the real sesquipedalians. The longest we have found is rheumatics, with ten letters. They all have two peculiarities in common, though, as far as we’ve gone — that are rather suggestive.’
‘What’s that, my lord?’
‘None of them contains any repeated letter, and none of them is less than seven letters long.’
Superintendent Glaisher, suddenly flung up one hand like a child at school.
‘The cipher letters!’ he cried.
‘As you say, the cipher letters. It looks to us as though these might be key-words to a cipher, and from the circumstance that no letters are repeated in any of them, I fancy one might be able to make a guess at the type of cipher. The trouble is that we have already counted a couple of hundred marked words, and haven’t finished the alphabet yet. Which leads me to a depressing inference.’
‘What’s that?
‘That they have been changing the key-word in every letter. What I think has happened is this. I think that each letter contained in it the key-word of the next, and that these marks represent a stock of words that Alexis looked up beforehand, so as to be ready with them when it came to his turn to write.’
‘Couldn’t they be the key-words already used?’
‘Hardly. I don’t believe he has sent out over two hundred code-letters since March, when they first began to be exchanged. Even if, he wrote one letter a day, he couldn’t have got through that number.’
‘No more he could, my lord. Still, if the paper we found on him is one of these cipher letters, then the key-word will be one of those marked here. That narrows things a bit.’
‘I don’t think so. I think these are key-words for the letters Alexis sent out. In each letter he would announce his keyword for his next letter. But his correspondent would do the same, so that the key-word for the paper found on Alexis is much more likely to be one that isn’t marked here. Unless, of course, the paper is one of Alexis’ own writing, which isn’t very likely.’
‘We can’t even say that, then,’ moaned Glaisher. ‘Because the correspondent might very well hit on some word that, Alexis had marked in advance. It might be anything.’
‘Perfectly true. Then the only bit of help we get from this is that the cipher used was an English word, and that the letters were probably written in English: That doesn’t absolutely follow, because they might be in French or German or Italian, all of which have the same alphabet as English; but they can’t be in Russian at any rate, which has an alphabet totally different. So that’s one mercy.
‘If it’s anything to do with Bolsheviks’ said Glaisher, thoughtfully, it’s a bit surprising they didn’t write in Russian. It would have made it doubly safe if they had. Russian by itself would be bad enough, but a Russian, cipher would be a snorter.’
‘Quite. As I’ve said before, I can’t quite swallow the Bolshevik theory; And yet — dash it all! I simply cannot fit these letters in with the Weldon, side of the business.’
‘What I want to know,’ put in the Inspector, ’is this. How did the murderers, whoever they were, get Alexis out to the Flat-Iron? Or if it was Bolsheviks that got him there, how, did Weldon & Co. know he was going to be there? It must be the same party that made the appointment and did the throat-cutting. Which brings us to the point that either Weldon’s party wrote the letter or the foreign party did the murder.’
‘True, O king.’
‘And where,’ asked Harriet, ‘does Olga Kohn come in?’
‘Ah!’ said Wimsey, ‘there, you are. That’s the deepest mystery of the lot. I’ll swear that girl was telling the truth, and I’ll swear; that the extremely un-Irish Mr Sullivan was telling the truth too. Little flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, but, as the poet goes on to say, if I could understand I should know who the guilty man is. But I don’t understand. Who is the mysterious bearded gentleman who asked Mr Sullivan for the portrait of a Russian-looking girl, and how did the portrait get into the corpse’s pocket-book, signed with the name Feodora? These are deep waters, Watson.’