A Presumption of Death (15 page)

She stopped in her tracks, arrested as she pulled off her left glove, with fear raising her heartbeat, and constricting her throat. ‘Peter?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

She could feel a strange sensation on her cheeks which must be her colour draining from them, and it must be visible as well as palpable.

‘You had better sit down, Lady Peter,’ the stranger said. ‘Can I get you a glass of water? Can I ring for someone?’

She did sit down. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but who are you?’

‘Call me Bungo,’ he said. The silly name rang a distant bell with her, but she couldn’t place it.

‘With news of Peter?’

‘Perhaps. There is an indecipherable in from him.’

‘A what?’

‘Sorry. An encoded message that our people cannot decode. He knows as much. There are four words in clear: “Donne undone – only Harriet.”’

‘What does he mean?’ she asked.

‘Almost certainly that only you can guess his cipher text. The established one was John Donne’s
Songs and Sonnets
, used at random.’

‘I would have guessed that,’ Harriet said.

‘Someone has, I’m afraid. So for that, or some other reason, he has chosen something else, something we do not know about. And he thinks you will know. May I ask how much you understand about codes, Lady Peter?’

‘Very little. I was once involved in a case in which there was a letter to be decoded. It was a thing with a grid and a key-word.’

‘There are various ways of using grids,’ he said. ‘That sounds like a Playfair cipher of some sort. This is a different idea – a book code. May I tell you how it works?’

‘Is Peter in danger?’ she asked. ‘Will this help Peter?’

‘I cannot tell you for certain. I can only say that he might be, and that it might.’

‘Then I must give it all the strength of mind I can command,’ she said.

‘Good girl,’ said Bungo. ‘The difficulty with many codes is that you have to send the key at some time. Or, worse, your agent has to carry the key. I need hardly spell out the dangers. Whereas if you use an agreed text as a key, then the agent can memorise it, and if he or she is captured there is nothing that can be discovered.’

‘I see. But how does a book work as a key?’

‘First you number all the words in the key text; it needs to be a certain minimum length, although even with quite a chunky one some letters – q, x – can be difficult. Then you use the number assigned to the word to stand for the initial letter of the word. Or sometimes another letter – third, last, or whatever. It’s a fairly robust code, because you can usually use several different numbers for each letter of the alphabet, so the frequency decode doesn’t work very well.’

‘You’ll have to explain some more. What is a frequency decode?’

‘Basically a method of guessing and trying based on the idea that whatever symbol is the most frequent in the encoded message is likely to represent E, the next most frequent T and so on. But look, don’t bother about that, just take my word for it. Book codes are difficult to crack quickly unless you know the key text, although one can sit patiently with a copy of the
Oxford Anthology of English Verse
, and the complete works of Shakespeare, or Magna Carta or something. But if you know the key text it’s a piece of cake. And your husband thinks you, and you alone, will be able to guess it.’

‘Let me think, let me think about this. It’s an emergency, otherwise he would use his established key.’

‘It would seem so.’

Harriet gazed at the stranger with a sudden wave of loathing. How could he talk calmly about this? Didn’t he know that without Peter the world would be at an end? Well, no, she thought, struggling to get a grip on herself, he might not even have met Peter.

‘This is the message,’ he said. He held out a flimsy loose-leaf sheet of paper, and Harriet took it.

It said: ‘Donne undone. Only Harriet.’ Then:

78 17 38 104 75

3 91 87 106 49

114 17 83 49 10

20 62 27 55 49

5 42 32 63 10

36 62 2 1 26 68

99 106 3 79 11

121 94 37 106 99

18 84 53 62 20

69 63 114 40 58

44 101 117 77 29

101 112 38 64 34

81 99 94 35 38

32 102 110 21 49

6 9 88 18 19

81 7 49 61 8

18 62 6 3 56

19 68 7 20 21

49 59 1 32 9

20 69 68 20 68

55 64 42 64 24 41 102

119 118 32 112 50 3

36 105 121 69 33

62 15 108 69 121

64 53 13 49 11

21 51 68 7 106

25 62 7 32 5

72 20 11 3 31 61

‘But what sort of message is this? Did somebody bring it? Did they see Peter?’

‘Oh, no. It’s a radio message sent in Morse code. And rather dangerous, because all the time they are transmitting they can be detected by the enemy. Our radio operators move about a lot, and never send twice from the same location. So these numbers have been taken down as a series of blips on a radio receiver.’

‘I see. What do I have to do?’ she asked.

‘You suggest things that might be the cipher text, and we try them till something makes sense.’

‘Leave it with me and I’ll do what I can.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You’ve grasped how to try it? I’ll wait in your very pretty garden, if I may.’

He appalled her. She had thought he would go back to London and she would send news by and by. However long it took. But if he was going to wait in the garden . . .

‘It’s that urgent?’ she said.

‘It might be,’ he said. ‘We need to crack it before an enemy could. Do your best, for everyone’s sake.’

Harriet took the paper upstairs to her bedroom. She was trembling. This was no mood in which to try to climb intellectual monkey puzzles. But the room contained memories. Peter wildly riding a chair like a rocking-horse, crying out to her while she recited:
‘I am the Queen Aholibah’
, and she had broken in to implore Peter not to break the chair. She had called him a madman. Could Aholibah be what he meant? She took a pencil and began to number the words as she wrote them down.

She put the indecipherable page down beside it, and began to work. But there were not enough words. The first line of the message contained the number 104. There were – she counted quickly to the end – only fifty-six words in the stanza. How did it go on? In the great sequence of ghostly queens, who came next? Herodias, Aholibah, Cleopatra; could Peter know all this by heart? She herself could not remember Cleopatra, and had to go downstairs to fetch Swinburne from the shelf. Bungo was visible at the end of the garden as she glanced through the window, peacefully holding
The Times
, apparently at work on the crossword.

Harriet found herself unable to hate him now, because she was inwardly alight with memory, with the horseman riding a chair, and her horseman had called for Aholibah, not Cleopatra. Well, she could hardly have figured as Cleopatra even in Peter’s inflamed nuptial vision! She returned to the bedroom and began to number the words in ‘Cleopatra’. Even in this emergency she couldn’t help noticing that it was a horribly bad stanza:

Oh, really! It simply beggared belief that Peter, who had stuffed away somewhere in his head a vast conspectus of English poetry, should choose to hang his fate on this. She was on the wrong track surely.

So what was the right track? What about ‘
Auprès de ma Blonde
.’? He had sung that, rather scandalously, on their honeymoon, and Bunter had had to shush him, because there was, after all, a dead body hauled out of the cellar and requiring to have notice taken of it, and due respect paid.

She stared again at the encoded message. Only Harriet. Only she. Nobody else would be able to crack it, and so logically it wasn’t Swinburne or anyone else in the corpus of English literature. However unlikely any obscure poem might be, Peter could not be absolutely sure that a code-breaker would not try it. There might be, there probably were, teams of code-breakers working day and night on these things, trying one text after another. That would take time, of course. Could he have been relying on her for a short cut to something that might be found by others, but would not be found quickly? But he could have said ‘Try Harriet’ or something like that.

‘Let’s take him literally,’ she told herself. ‘He doesn’t use words sloppily, even when nothing depends on it. So assume that the code text isn’t published; it really is something only I would know.’ What about the wonderful Donne autograph letter on sacred and profane love which she had ingeniously contrived to buy for his wedding present? That wasn’t published anywhere; but no, the other two of his four words said it wasn’t Donne. They didn’t say it wasn’t the
Songs and Sonnets
which he had been using, but that it wasn’t Donne. So all right, it wasn’t.

Harriet felt as though she were blundering about in the mist. She was so frightened for Peter she simply couldn’t see straight. How much time had she already wasted on the harlot Aholibah? The shadows on the lawn were lengthening, and Bungo had retreated from the garden seat. Was Sadie or Mrs Trapp offering him tea? Should she go down and make sure he had been offered tea?

‘Hell!’ she told herself angrily. ‘This isn’t a social call! Keep your mind on it, Harriet.’ But the thought of tea had started another memory. Tea in a punt, a punt moored up under a willow tree, containing a lord who was then her suitor, but not her husband. She had handed him a dossier of everything she had recorded about the poison-pen menace at Shrewsbury College, and she had accidentally left in it a page containing an incomplete sonnet. When he had given the dossier back to her the octet had sprouted a sestet – rather a good one.

Suddenly certain, Harriet went to her filing cabinet to look for the notes. Were they here? Most of the paperwork had been brought up from London lest it be incinerated by enemy action. The sitting-room at Talboys wasn’t a place for filing cabinets, even handsome ones with art deco handles bought on the Tottenham Court Road, so they were in a cupboard in the back hallway. But the dossier was there; whatever you thought of the secretary, Miss Bracey, who had left rather than be dragged into Hertfordshire, she had been a whizz at filing.

Harriet retrieved the dossier with a growing sense of triumph. This would be it. Of course it would. She found the poem, sat down to her desk again, and began to number the words.