‘I’m coming back to my original opinion,’ grumbled the inspector. ‘I believe the fellow was dotty and cut his own throat and there’s an end of it. He probably had a mania for collecting girls’ photographs and sending himself letters in cipher.’
‘And posting them in Czechoslovakia?’
‘Oh, well, somebody must have done that for him. As far as I can see, we’ve no case against Weldon and no case against Bright, and the case against Perkins is as full of holes as a colander. As for Bolsheviks — where are they? Your friend Chief-Inspector. Parker has put out inquiries about Bolshevik agents in this country, and the answer is that none of ’em are known to have been about here lately, and as regards Thursday, 18th, they all seem to be accounted for. You may say it’s an unknown Bolshevik agent, but there aren’t as many of those going about as you might think. These London chaps know quite a lot more than the ordinary public realises. If there’d been anything funny about Alexis and his crowd, they’d have been on to it like a shot.’
Wimsey sighed, and rose.
‘I’m going home to bed,’ he declared, ‘We must wait till we get the photographs of the paper. Life is dust and ashes. I can’t prove my theories and Bunter has deserted me again. He disappeared from — Wilvercombe on the same day as William Bright, leaving me a message to say that one of my favourite socks had been lost in the wash and that he had lodged a complaint with the management.’ Miss Vane, Harriet, if I may call you so, will you marry me and look after my socks, and, incidentally be the only woman-novelist who ever accepted a proposal of marriage in the presence of a superintendent and inspector of Police?’
‘Not even for the sake of the headlines.’
‘I thought not. Even publicity isn’t what it was. See here,’ Superintendent, will you take a bet that Alexis didn’t commit suicide and that he wasn’t murdered by Bolsheviks?’
The Superintendent replied cautiously that he wasn’t a sporting, man.
‘Crushed again!’ moaned his lordship. ‘All the same,’ he added, with a flash of his old spirit, ‘I’lI break that alibi if I die for it.’
Chapter XXVI. The Evidence Of The Bay Mare
‘Hail, shrine of blood!’
— The Bride’s Tragedy
Wednesday, I July
THE photographs of the paper found on the corpse duly arrived next morning, together with the original and Wimsey, comparing them together in the presence of Glaisher and Umpelty, had to confess that the experts had made a good job of it. Even the original paper was far more legible than it had been before. The chemicals that remove bloodstains and the stains of dyed leather, and the chemical that restore the lost colour to washed-out ink had done their work well, and the colour-screen that so ingeniously aid the lens to record one colour and cut out the next had produced from the original, thus modified, a result in which only a few letters here and there were irretrievably lost. But to read is one thing; to decipher; another. They gazed sadly at the inextricable jumble of letters.
XNATNX
RBEXMG
PRBFX ALI MKMG BFFY, MGTSQ JMRRY. ZBZE FLOX P.M. MSIU FKX FLDYPC FKAP — RPD KL DONA FMKPC FM NOR ANXP.
SOLFA TGMZ DXL LKKZM VXI BWHNZ MBFFY
MG, TSQ A NVPD NMM VFYQ CJU ROGA K.C. RAC RRMTN S.B. IF H.R HNZ ME? SSPXLZ DFAX LRAEL TLMK XATL RPX BM AEBF HS MPIKATL TO HOKCCI HNRY. TYM VDSM SUSSX GAMKR, BG AIL AXH NZMLF HVUL KNN RAGY QWMCK, MNQS TOIL AXFA AN IHMZS RPT HO KFLTI M. IF;MTGNLU H. M. CLM KLZM AHPE ALF AKMSM, ZULPR FH. Q— CMZT SXS RSMKRS GNKS FVMP RACY OSS QESBH NAE UZCK CON MGBNRY RMAL RSH NZM, BKTQAP MSH NZM TO ILG MELMS NAGMJU KC KC.
TQKFX BQZ NMEZLI BM ZLFA AYZ MARS UP QOS KMXBJ SUE UMIL PRKBG MSK QD.
NAP DZMTB N.B. OBE XMG SREFZ DBS AM IMHY GAKY R. MULBY M.S. SZLKO GKG LKL GAW XNTED BHMB XZD NRKZH PSMSKMN A.M. MHIZP DK MIM, XNKSAK C KOK MNRL CFL INXF HDA GAIQ.
GATLM Z DLFA A QPHND MV AK MV MAG C.P.R. XNATNX PD GUN MBKL I OLKA GLDAGA KQB FTQO SKMX GPDH NW LX SULMY ILLE MKH BEALF MRSK UFHA AKTS.
At the end of a strenuous hour or two, the following facts were established:
I. The letter was written on a thin but tough paper which bore no resemblance to any paper found among the effects of Paul Alexis. The probability was thus increased that it was a letter received, and not written by him.
2. It was written by hand in a purplish ink, which, again, was not like that used by, Alexis. The additional inference was drawn that the writer either possessed no typewriter or was afraid that his typewriter might be traced.
3. It was not written in wheel-cipher, or in any cipher which involved the regular substitution of one letter of the alphabet for another.
‘At any rate,’ said Wimsey, cheerfully, ‘we have plenty of material to work on. This isn’t one of those brief, snappy “Put goods on sundial’ messages which leave you wondering whether E really is or is not the most frequently recurring letter in the English language. If you ask me, it’s either one of those devilish codes founded on a book — in which case it must be one of the books in the dead man’s possession, and we only have to go through them — or it’s a different kind of code altogether — the kind I was thinking about last night, when we saw those marked words in the dictionary.’
‘What kind’s that, my lord?’.
‘It’s a good code,’ said Wimsey, ‘and pretty baffling if you don’t know the key-word. It was used during the War. I used it myself, as a matter of fact, during a brief interval of detecting under a German alias: But it isn’t the exclusive property of the War Office. In fact, I met it not so long ago in a detective story. It’s just-’
He paused, and the policemen waited expectantly.
‘I was going to say, its just the thing an amateur English plotter might readily get hold of and cotton on to. It’s not obvious, but it’s accessible and very simple to work. It’s the kind of thing that young Alexis could easily learn to encode and decode; it doesn’t want a lot of bulky apparatus; and it uses practically the same number of letters as the original message, so that it’s highly suitable for long epistles of this kind.’
‘How’s it worked?’ asked Glaisher.
‘Very prettily. You choose a key-word of six letters or more, none of which recurs. Such as, for example, SQUANDER, which was on Alexis’ list. Then you make a diagram of five squares each way and write the key-word in the squares like this: