Page 107 of Murder on Cold Street
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“What is it?” asked Mrs. Watson, always sensitive to mood shifts in a room.
Lord Ingram waited for Charlotte. Charlotte’s fingers tightened around her pencil, but she nodded. He handed his notebook to Mrs. Watson, who gasped as she saw the small notices inside.
“But these are—these were—”
She stopped, as if unable to continue.
These had been notices disseminated to Moriarty’s minions, each notice pointing to a single word in a book, which acted as the key to any messages encoded during that period, until a new key was posted.
Miss Redmayne took the notebook from her aunt’s hands and even her perpetually sunny expression darkened. “Moriarty. So Mr. Sullivan wasn’t only lining his own pockets, he was lining Moriarty’s pockets, too?”
All the while keeping this meticulous record.
On second thought, that he had done so didn’t seem quite as odd. Mr. Sullivan’s two leading characteristics had been malice and spite. He had likely viewed the rewards he had received from being Moriarty’s minion as being less than commensurate with the work he had put in and the risks he had assumed.
This record then was something he had believed he could hold over Moriarty. Or, if not that, then at least must have felt that itsexposure would have led to some headaches for his master, whom he’d probably never met.
Charlotte turned to Lord Ingram. “Can you tell me what Inspector Treadles knows about Moriarty?”
The inspector had been involved in several cases that had Moriarty looming in the background, but he would have only heard the name directly during the investigation at Stern Hollow.
The notebook with the biblical verses pasted inside had returned to Lord Ingram’s hands. He leafed through its pages. “After I was released from police custody, before I took the children home to Stern Hollow, I met with the inspector for this specific purpose. He wanted to know more about Moriarty—mainly, whether Moriarty had anything to do with a case from this past summer that saw the death of a man named de Lacey, but he was convinced the body had been that of a random bloke, identified as de Lacey so that the case would close.”
He shut the notebook and pushed it into the table, as if wishing it would never open again. “I agreed with Inspector Treadles that de Lacey was not dead—de Lacey was but a nom de guerre, taken on by whoever acted as Moriarty’s chief lieutenant in England. I also told him to be extremely cautious if he was ever to find himself dealing with Moriarty or his underlings again.”
“Did you tell him about the small notices in the papers? That they pointed to keys necessary to work out ciphers used by Moriarty’s people?”
“No. He never asked me about them, and I don’t believe his case in the summer concerned them either.”
“If Inspector Treadles didn’t know about them, then Mr. Longstead must have succeeded in deciphering at least some of the telegrams pasted in here on his own,” said Miss Redmayne. “I wonder which ones.”
“My guess would be the ones sent at the end of summer,” said Charlotte. “The biblical verses are already in plain text, and the cipher key each verse points to is simply the title of the book it comes from. If Mr. Longstead realized that the telegrams from that time were wheatstoneciphers, then it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to work them out. My lord, would you explain to the ladies how wheatstone ciphers work?”
While Lord Ingram did that, with the ladies taking notes, Charlotte copied the coded texts of the telegrams—there had been a number of them in the latter half of the summer. After she’d checked to make sure she had not made any mistakes, she distributed a telegram to each person at the table, with its key already written on the same sheet of paper.
The decoded cables, in chronological order, read:
If nothing else will put him off, you may proceed.
Expect cancer remedy delivered by tomorrow afternoon.
I trust you will have a plan for the sister.
Things are unstable here. Fend for yourself until further notice.
“Does ‘the sister’ refer to Mrs. Treadles?” asked Mrs. Watson, her voice low and raspy. “If so, would that make the ‘he’ in the first cable her brother, the younger Mr. Cousins? Did he know something?”
He had been such an uninspired man of business. Had he at last sensed something wrong at Cousins? Or was hetold?
Charlotte’s stomach tightened. She remembered her half brother, Mr. Myron Finch, who had once been Moriarty’s cryptographer. Mr. Finch had been in London during that time. Had he tried to alert the owner of Cousins that his company had been hollowed out from underneath him?
She tapped her fingertips on the table. It had been too long since she last heard from Mr. Finch. Was he still safe? And if not...
Lord Ingram was watching her—she rarely fidgeted; her finger-tapping would have struck him as highly uncharacteristic. She took her hand off the table and gave him a nod to show that she was all right.
Mrs. Watson’s voice remained strained. “It’s easy for us to deduce the identity of those referred to here, because we already know it was Mr. Sullivan who received these cables and that he’d been up to no good at Cousins. How would Mr. Longstead have been able to tell what these telegrams were about?”
