Sherlock Holmes In Montague Street Volume 2 (29 page)

“About the Wedlake jewels, as I said. Now you can go and make a bargain with Luker and Birks. The only other part of the message is an address, and that they already know, if they have been telling the truth about the house they intend taking. You can offer to tell them what I have told you of the message, after they have told you where the house is, and proved to you that they are taking the steps they talked of. If they won't agree to that, I think you had best treat them as common rogues and charge them with obtaining your money under false pretenses.”

Nothing more would Holmes say than that, despite Hooker's many questions; and when at last Hooker had gone, almost as troubled and perplexed as ever, my friend turned to me and said, “Now, Brett, if you haven't lunched and would like to see the end of this business, hurry!”

“The end of it?” I said. “Is it to end so soon? How?”

“Simply by a police raid on Jerry Shiels's old house with a search warrant. I communicated with the police this morning before I came here.”

“Poor Hooker!” I said.

“Oh, I had told the police before I saw Hooker, or heard of him, of course. I just conveyed the message on the music slip - that was enough. But I'll tell you all about it when there's more time; I must be off now. With the information I have given him, Hooker and his friends may make an extra push and get into the house soon, but I couldn't resist the temptation to give the unfortunate Hooker some sort of sporting chance - though it's a poor one, I fear. Get your lunch as quickly as you can, and go at once to Colt Row, Bankside - Southwark way, you know. Probably we shall be there before you. If not, wait.”

Colt Row was not difficult to find. It was one of those places that decay with an excess of respectability, like Drury Lane and Clare Market. Once, when Jacob's Island was still an island, a little farther down the river, Colt Row had evidently been an unsafe place for a person with valuables about him, and then it probably prospered, in its own way. Now it was quite respectable, but very dilapidated and dirty. Perhaps it was sixty yards long - perhaps a little more. It was certainly a very few yards wide, and the houses at each side had a patient and forlorn look of waiting for a metropolitan improvement to come along and carry them away to their rest.

I could see no sign of Holmes, nor of the police, so I walked up and down the narrow pavement for a little while. As I did so, I became conscious of a face at the window of the least ruinous house in the row, a face that I fancied expressed particular interest in my movements. The house was an old gabled structure, faced with plaster. What had apparently once been a shop window on the ground floor was now shuttered up, and the face that watched me - an old woman's - looked out from the window above. I had noted these particulars with some curiosity, when, arriving again at the street corner, I observed Holmes approaching, in company with a police inspector, and followed by two unmistakable plainclothesmen.

“Well,” Holmes said, “you're first here after all. Have you seen any more of our friend Hooker?”

“No, nothing.”

“Very well - probably he'll be here before long, though.”

The party turned into Colt Row, and the inspector, walking up to the door of the house with the shuttered bottom window, knocked sharply. There was no response, so he knocked again, equally in vain.

“All out,” said the inspector.

“No,” I said; “I saw a woman watching me from the window above not three minutes ago.”

“Ho, ho!” the inspector replied. “That's so, eh? One of you - you, Johnson - step round to the back, will you?”

One of the plainclothesmen started off, and after waiting another minute or two the inspector began a thundering cannonade of knocks that brought every available head out of the window of every inhabited room in the Row. At this the woman opened the window, and began abusing the inspector with a shrillness and fluency that added a street-corner audience to that already congregated at the windows.

“Go away, you blaggards!” the lady said, “you ought to be 'orse-w'ipped, every one of ye! A-comin' 'ere a-tryin' to turn decent people out o' 'ouse and 'ome! Wait till my 'usband comes 'ome - 'e'll show yer, ye mutton-cadgin' scoundrels! Payin' our rent reg'lar, and good tenants as is always been - and I'm a respectable married woman, that's what I am, ye dirty great cow-ards!” - this last word with a low, tragic emphasis.

Holmes remembered what Hooker had said about the present tenants refusing to quit the house on the landlord's notice. “She thinks we've come from the landlord to turn her out,” he said to the inspector. “We're not here from the landlord, you old fool!” the inspector said. “We don't want to turn you out. We're the police, with a search warrant, and you'd better let us in or you'll get into trouble.”

“'Ark at 'im!” the woman screamed, pointing at the inspector. “'Ark at 'im! Thinks I was born yesterday, that feller! Go 'ome, ye dirty pie-stealer, go 'ome!”

The audience showed signs of becoming a small crowd, and the inspector's patience gave out. “Here, Bradley,” he said, addressing the remaining plainclothesman, “give a hand with these shutters,” and the two - both powerful men - seized the iron bar which held the shutters and began to pull. But the garrison was undaunted, and, seizing a broom, the woman began to belabor the invaders about the shoulders and head from above. But just at this moment, the woman, emitting a terrific shriek, was suddenly lifted from behind and vanished. Then the head of the plainclothesman who had gone round to the back appeared, with the calm announcement, “There's a winder open behind, sir. But I'll open the front door if you like.”

In a minute the bolts were shot, and the front door swung back. The placid Johnson stood in the passage, and as we passed in he said, “I've locked 'er in the back room upstairs.”

“It's the bottom staircase, of course,” the inspector said; and we tramped down into the basement. A little way from the stairfoot Holmes opened a cupboard door, which enclosed a receptacle for coals. “They still keep the coals here, you see,” he said, striking a match and passing it to and fro near the sloping roof of the cupboard. It was of plaster, and covered the underside of the stairs.

“And now for the fifth dancer,” he said, throwing the match away and making for the staircase again. “One, two, three, four, five,” and he tapped the fifth stair from the bottom.

The stairs were uncarpeted, and Holmes and the inspector began a careful examination of the one he had indicated. They tapped it in different places, and Holmes passed his hands over the surfaces of both tread and riser. Presently, with his hand at the outer edge of the riser, Holmes spoke. “Here it is, I think,” he said; “it is the riser that slides.”

He took out his pocketknife and scraped away the grease and paint from the edge of the old stair. Then a joint was plainly visible. For a long time the plank, grimed and set with age, refused to shift; but at last, by dint of patience and firm fingers, it moved, and was drawn clean out from the end.

Within, nothing was visible but grime, fluff, and small rubbish. The inspector passed his hand along the bottom angle. “Here's something,” he said. It was the gold hook of an old-fashioned earring, broken off short.

Holmes slapped his thigh. “Somebody's been here before us,” he said “and a good time back too, judging from the dust. That hook's a plain indication that jewelry was here once. There's plainly nothing more, except - except this piece of paper.” Holmes's eyes had detected - black with loose grime as it was - a small piece of paper lying at the bottom of the recess. He drew it out and shook off the dust. “Why, what's this?” he exclaimed. “More music!”

We went to the window, and there saw in Holmes's hand a piece of written musical notation.

Holmes pulled out from his pocket a few pieces of paper. “Here is a copy I made this morning of the Flitterbat Lancers, and a note or two of my own as well,” he said. He took a pencil, and, constantly referring to his own papers, marked a letter under each note on the last-found slip of music. When lie had done this, the letters read:

You are a clever cove whoever you are but there was a cleverer says Jim Snape the horney's mate.

“You see.” Holmes. said handing the inspector the paper. “Snape, the unconsidered messenger, finding Legg in prison, set to work and got the jewels for himself. The thing was a cryptogram, of course, of a very simple sort, though uncommon in design. Snape was a humorous soul, too, to leave this message here in the same cipher, on the chance of somebody else reading the Flitterbat Lancers.”

“But,” I asked, “why did he give that slip of music to Laker's father?”

“Well, he owed him money, and got out or it that way. Also, he avoided the appearance of ‘flushness' that paying the debt might have given him, and got quietly out of the country with his spoils.”

The shrieks upstairs had grown hoarser, but the broom continued vigorously. “Let that woman out,” said the inspector, “and we'll go and report. Not much good looking for Snape now, I fancy. But there's some satisfaction in clearing up that old mystery.”

We left the place pursued by the execrations of the broom wielder, who bolted the door behind us, and from the window defied us to come back, and vowed she would have us all searched before a magistrate for what we had probably stolen. In the very next street we hove in sight of Reuben B. Hooker in the company of two swell-mob-looking fellows, who sheered off down a side turning in sight of our group. Hooker, too, looked rather shy at the sight of the inspector.

“The meaning of the thing was so very plain,” Holmes said to me afterwards, “that the duffers who had the Flitterbat Lancers in hand for so long never saw it at all. If Shiels had made an ordinary clumsy cryptogram, all letters and figures, they would have seen what it was at once, and at least would have tried to read it; but because it was put in the form of music, they tried everything else but the right way. It was a clever dodge of Shiels's, without a doubt. Very few people, police officers or not, turning over a heap of old music, would notice or feel suspicious of that little slip among the rest. But once one sees it is a cryptogram (and the absence of bar lines and of notes beyond the stave would suggest that) the reading is as easy as possible. For my part I tried it as a cryptogram at once. You know the plan - it has been described a hundred times. See here - look at this copy of the Flitterbat Lancers. Its only difficulty - and that is a small one - is that the words are not divided. Since there are positions for less than a dozen notes on the stave, and there are twenty-six letters to be indicated, it follows that crotchets, quavers, and semiquavers on the same line or space must mean different letters. The first step is obvious. We count the notes to ascertain which sign occurs most frequently, and we find that the crotchet in the top space is the sign required - it occurs no less than eleven times. Now the letter most frequently occurring in an ordinary sentence of English is
e
. Let us then suppose that this represents
e
. At once a coincidence strikes us. In ordinary musical notation in the treble clef the note occupying the top space would be
E
. Let us remember that presently.

“Now the most common word in the English language is
the
. We know the sign for
e
, the last letter of this word, so let us see if in more than one place that sign is preceded by two others identical in each case. If so, the probability is that the other two signs will represent
t
and
h
, and the whole word will be
the
. Now it happens in no less than four places the sign
e
is preceded by the same two other signs - once in the first line, twice in the second, and once in the fourth. No word of three letters ending in
e
would be in the least likely to occur four times in a short sentence except the. Then we will call it
the
, and note the signs preceding the
e
. They are a quaver under the bottom line for the
t
, and a crotchet on the first space for the
h
. We travel along the stave, and wherever these signs occur we mark them with
t
or
h
, as the case may be.

“But now we remember that
e
, the crotchet in the top space, is in its right place as a musical note, while the crotchet in the bottom space means
h
, which is no musical note at all. Considering this for a minute, we remember that among the notes which are expressed in ordinary music on the treble stave, without the use of ledger lines,
d
,
e
and
f
are repeated at the lower and at the upper part of the stave. Therefore, anybody making a cryptogram of musical notes would probably use one set of these duplicate positions to indicate other letters, and as
A
is in the lower part of the stave, that is where the variation comes in. Let us experiment by assuming that all the crotchets above
f
in ordinary musical notation have their usual values, and let us set the letters over their respective notes. Now things begin to shape. Look toward the end of the second line: there is the word
the
and the letters
f f t h
, with another note between the two
f
's. Now that word can only possibly be
fifth
, so that now we have the sign for
i
. It is the crotchet on the bottom line. Let us go through and mark the
I
's.

“And now observe. The first sign of the lot is
i
, and there is one other sign before the word the. The only words possible here beginning with
i
, and of two letters, are
it
,
if
,
is
and
in
. Now we have the signs for
t
and
f
, so we know that it isn't
it
or
if
. Is would be unlikely here, because there is a tendency, as you see, to regularity in these signs, and
t
, the next Idler alphabetically to s, is at the bottom of the stave. Let us try
n
. At once we get the word dance at the beginning of line three. And now we have got enough to see the system of the thing. Make a stave and put
G A B C
and the higher
D E F
in their proper musical places. Then fill in the blank places with the next letters of the alphabet downward,
h i j
, and we find that
h
and
i
fall in the places we have already discovered for them as crotchets. Now take quavers, and go on with
k l m n o
, and so on as before, beginning on the
A
space. When you have filled the quavers, do the same with semiquavers - there are only six alphabetical letters left for this -
u v w x y z
. Now you will find that this exactly agrees with all we have ascertained already, and if you will use the other letters to fill up over the signs still unmarked you will get the whole message: