The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (92 page)

On Sunday he was content with a riverside stroll round the circuit of Addison's Walk, where that famous essayist of the
Spectator
used to take his constitutional as an undergraduate at Magdalen. I noticed, however, that after breakfast he had withdrawn to the hotel writing room and penned a note. As he handed it to the page boy I was able to read the address: ‘J. L. Strachan-Davidson, Esquire, The Master's Lodging, Balliol College.' On our return, as the river mists began to halo the lamps of the street, Holmes inquired of the concierge and was handed a small neatly written envelope in reply.

On Monday morning we set out to walk a few hundred yards down ‘TheTurl' in search of our adviser. I knew little of the Master, as I must now call him, except as a younger man, ‘the lean, unbuttoned ciga-retted dean.' He was a tall and angular Scot of luxuriant eyebrows and formidable reputation, an authority on Cicero and Roman criminal law. Holmes assured me that I should find all I needed to know of him as a tutor in one of the famous college rhymes.

Take a pretty strong solution

Of the Roman constitution
,

Cigarettes not less than three

And mix them up with boiling tea
.

Then a mighty work you've done
,

For you've made Strachan-Davidson
.

‘I was once able to do the Master a small service concerning a scrape that one of his undergraduates was in—a nasty but petty blackmail. As you know, I do not expect favor returned for favor. However, he is good enough to write to me that he welcomes the opportunity to renew our rather slight acquaintance.'

Once inside the lodgings on the college's Broad Street front, we were shown up immediately to the Master's sitting room. The door stood open and from within came the sounds of a tutorial in progress. Two young men were sitting in arm chairs and Strachan-Davidson, his back to the fireplace and his arms stretched out at either side along the mantelpiece, was in full flow on the subject of Sparta's invasion of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

‘Do come in!' he said enthusiastically. ‘Lord Wroughton and Mr. Sampson are just construing for us book four of Thucydides. Find chairs, if you can.'

We found them among the comfortable disorder of the room, books piled here and there, papers gathered untidily.

‘Now, my lord, if you please.'

Lord Wroughton was a dark-haired and fresh-faced young man with the embarrassed look of one who had spent the previous evening dining not wisely but too well, when he should have had Thucydides as his sole companion.

‘
Tou de-pe-gig-no-menou therou
,' he muttered, ‘
Peri sitou ek-boleen …
‘In the following summer, when the corn was in full ear.”'

‘Yes, yes,' said the Master with Scots impatience, ‘and when was that?'

‘It was … that is to say, Master, I believe.…'

Sherlock Holmes took pity on the unfortunate young nobleman and intervened.

‘I believe, Master, that we are safe in dating the expedition of the Syracusans against Messina as 1 June 425
B
.
C
.'

The Master's eyebrows rose.

‘Really, Mr. Holmes? After two and a half thousand years in which even the season has been a matter of debate, you are able to tell us the precise day?'

‘It is really very simple, Master. Climate and season of every kind are necessary subjects upon which the criminal investigator must be informed. In this case, given the dates of ripening corn in Attica lying between 20 May and 10 June, the corn in full ear would scarcely be before the end of May. No reference is made to harvest, however, which suggests that the date of sailing was well before the end of the first week in June. Though I would allow a little latitude, I believe you will find that the tides necessary for embarking and landing the invading force would give very little alternative to 1 June. The coastline is not an easy one for shallow draft.'

‘Dear me,' said our host genially. ‘Well, if Thucydides is to become a matter of criminal investigation, perhaps we had better leave him there. Lord Wroughton and Mr. Sampson, I shall be pleased to receive you both at the same time next week, in the hope that the first five chapters of book four will be firmly in your minds by then. Good morning to you.'

As the two young men excused themselves deferentially to Holmes and myself, the Master shut the door and turned to us.

‘My dear Mr. Holmes,'—only now did he shake our hands—‘though it is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance again, I confess I have been puzzling what use Linear B could have for you. One moment and I will put the kettle on.'

Holmes stretched his dark-suited legs before him.

‘Every possible use, Master. The matter is in strict confidence, of course.'

‘Of course. I imagine you would not be here otherwise.'

‘You are a collector of seal rings and coins from the ancient world, I believe.'

Strachan-Davidson turned round with the kettle in his hand, beaming at us.

‘You have heard of my winter journeys to the Middle East, I imagine. A numismatist in a dahabeeah, as my young men call me here, a coin collector in an Egyptian sailing boat. I have one or two seal rings. You may still pick them up from market stalls in Cairo and in western Crete, you know.'

‘And Linear B?'

‘I have followed the work of Sir Arthur Evans with great interest. A good many of the texts were published lately in his book
Scripta Minoa
. Unfortunately he is still in Crete, so you cannot very well consult him.'

Holmes nodded.

‘The question is a simple one, Master. Could Linear B be used as the basis of a code? I beg you to consider the question most carefully.'

The Master's ample eyebrows rose once more.

‘Oh yes, indeed. Linear B
is
a code, Mr. Holmes. Nothing else. It is a code so remarkable that no one has yet resolved it. A few decipherments here and there but very few and amounting to very little. Much of the rest of our understanding is guesswork. A school of thought, to which I am inclined to belong, believes these symbols to be early forms of classical Greek. From that there has been an attempt to evolve pronunciation. There is far to go.'

‘Deciphered or not, its structure might form a modern naval or military code?'

The Master handed us tea in silence.

‘The subject matter is the palace of Knossos, particularly its ships and arsenal. However, to draw each pictogram would be laborious. Nor could you print them, for no printer's type would be available.'

‘How do scholars make texts available to each other? I imagine that must often happen.'

‘Indeed, Mr. Holmes. The problem has been solved by certain scholars in Etruscan and Babylonian by reducing ancient symbols to modern numerals. Each symbol is given a number, as a kind of shorthand.'

‘Could each Linear B symbol be a letter of an alphabet expressed as a number?'

The Master shook his head.

‘No, Mr. Holmes. It is early days but, it seems, each symbol is a syllable rather than a single letter.'

Sherlock Holmes let out the long sigh of a man who is vindicated after all.

‘Thus,' Strachan-Davidson continued, ‘a modern message in Linear B would consist of several double digit numbers in groups, each double digit representing a syllable or whatever unit the code-maker chose and each group making up a word. It could serve for whatever message you wished to send. You would not have to decipher Linear B to use its signs as such a form of communication, though you might choose to do so.'

Holmes was in his familiar attitude, listening with eyes closed and fingertips pressed together.

‘One further point, Master,' he said, now looking up. ‘What advantage would this system have to distinguish it from any other form of code?'

Strachan-Davidson looked surprised.

‘Only one, Mr. Holmes. Every other form of code, in letters or numbers, is adapted from something commonly understood in its uncoded form. It may be a word, a book, a numerical formula. However disguised or distorted, common knowledge lies behind it. In the case of Linear B, very little is known. Even that little knowledge is shared by only a handful of men throughout the world. The rest of mankind is excluded from the game, so to speak.'

‘Precisely,' said Holmes quietly, ‘how many of that handful live in Oxford?'

The Master thought for a moment.

‘Sir Arthur Evans, but he is in Crete. There are two of his assistants, but they are with him. There is the keeper of antiquities at the Ashmolean.'

‘And no others?'

‘Dr. Gross is not a member of the university. He was deputy keeper in the department of antiquities at the Royal Museum in Berlin. He retired and has lived in Oxford for a year or two.'

‘An elderly man with pince-nez who lives in Beaumont Street, I believe?' Holmes inquired innocently.

‘Then you are familiar with him?'

‘A passing acquaintance.' Yet those who knew Sherlock Holmes well, medical men above all, would have detected a quickening beat at the temples accompanying such a lucky shot in the dark. We took our leave presently. Holmes did not ask the Master for a pledge of confidentiality. Anyone who had been in the presence of Strachan-Davidson for any length of time would know that such a request was quite unnecessary.

6

By that evening, we were before our own fireside again in Baker Street, though not before Holmes had insisted upon a detour to the St. James's Library, of which he was a member and from which he carried off that imposing volume which bears upon it the name of Sir Arthur Evans and the cryptic title
Scripta Minoa
.

We had just finished our supper of ‘cold fowl and cigars, pickled onions in jars,' as the poet has it, when Holmes filled his pipe again with the familiar black shag tobacco and crossed to his worktable. He laid a pile of blank paper and the intercepted signals on one side of his wooden chair and placed the
Scripta Minoa
on the other. He selected a fresh nib from the box for his Waverley pen, then sat down with a cushion behind him, as if for a prolonged study of the puzzle.

There would be no more conversation that night. I made the best of a bad job, selecting a volume of Sir Walter Scott from the shelf and retiring to my own quarters. I do not know at what hour, if at all, he went to bed that night. He was sitting at the table next morning, the air once again as thick with smoke as a ‘London particular' fog,
Scripta Minoa
at his side. There was no weariness about him but the exhilaration of the hunter at the chase.

‘We have them by the tail, Watson,' he said triumphantly. ‘In the past hours, I am convinced I have learnt Minoan arithmetic from Arthur Evans's drawings. A single vertical stroke is a one. A short horizontal dash is ten. A circle is a hundred. A dotted circle is a thousand. A circle with a horizontal bar is ten thousand. There are eighty-seven known syllabic signs in Linear B, but the double digits of the good Dr. Gross number ninety-two. There can be no doubt that those five extra double digits represent the means of counting.'

For the next two days and a good part of their nights he worked his way through intercepted signals that had previously been meaningless strings of double digits. Most of them remained so. Yet here and there he swore he was able to decipher numbers in the messages. Our sitting room bristled with his gasps of frustration and self-reproach as he failed to reclaim anything more. Elsewhere, sets of numerals were repeated, but it was not yet clear what they meant. It was on the afternoon of the second day that he thumped the table with his fist and uttered a loud cry.

‘Eureka! I believe we have it!'

Even now he could not decode the alphabet or syllables represented by the double digits of Dr. Gross's cipher. Yet on the previous day he had identified five separate double digits as the Mycenean system of counting. That was all he needed. In the scanning of the present document he had decoded sequences of such numbers, though the letters of the alphabet and all its words still eluded him. The numbers he had decoded began with the sequence, 685, 3335, 5660, 120 … Even though the adjacent words remained a mystery, these numbers struck a chord in the formidable memory of Sherlock Holmes. He had encountered them before, in one of the Admiralty plans.

He unlocked a drawer in the table and took out a thick folder containing a sheaf of papers entrusted to him by Sir John Fisher. These were copies of Admiralty documents. Holmes had requested them as being the most likely to attract our antagonists. Already, he had spent more than a day and a night working on these copies. Now a needle glimmered somewhere in the haystack.

We worked together. Holmes read out sequences of figures from the naval documents and I checked them silently from a list of numbers he had drawn up as he had worked on the German signals over the past few days. After more than two hours, none of the numerical sequences in the signals had matched any in the Admiralty papers. I lost count of our failures as we came to yet another paper. Still the double digits that stood for an alphabet in the German code meant nothing. Only the ancient system of counting, which Holmes had deciphered after several days' study, might help us.

He read out a sequence of almost fifty numbers from the present document. As I checked them against the list he had made from the code, I held my breath. We read again to check for errors, and, I confess, my hand holding the paper trembled. There was no mistake. Call it luck, but from first to last, every number in the coded signal matched its equivalent number in the Admiralty document. It was soon evident that this entire coded paper must be an exact copy. Having got the numbers, we could now read the adjacent code for the objects to which they referred. The weariness left the voice of Sherlock Holmes as he grasped the key that would unlock Dr. Gross's enigma.

‘Six hundred and eighty-five! Three thousand, three hundred and thirty-five! Five thousand, six hundred and sixty! One hundred and twenty! …'