The Mermaid in the Basement (36 page)

“Yes, sir. I’ll drive pretty fast on the way back. You hang on now.”

As soon as Dylan was in the coach, he heard Albert call out to the horses, who lunged ahead, throwing him against the backseat with some force. “I hope he doesn’t kill us getting there,” he muttered. As they moved along, he saw that people were just beginning to fill the streets.

The wheels rumbled over the cobblestones, and Albert drove the horses as if he were in a chariot race.

Finally the coach pulled up, Albert shouting, “Whoa there! Whoa!”

At once Dylan got out and gave Albert a cynical look. “Well, you didn’t run over anybody.”

“No, sir, I ain’t never done nothing like that. You’d better go on. She’s in a real tizzy.”

Dylan walked quickly up the front steps and knocked on the door.

Almost at once it opened, and Serafina herself answered. “What is it, Serafina?” he demanded.

Serafina laughed. “I take it Albert gave you quite an exciting ride.”

“He did too.”He waited and saw that there was a peculiar expression on her face. She was smiling, and her eyes were dancing. “It must be good news,” he said.

“It is. Come along to the study.”

He followed her down the hall into the study. She closed the door, and he saw that she was breathing quickly with an excitement he had never seen in her. “I’ve got good news, Dylan. I think I’ve solved the cypher.”

“Why, that’s wonderful, Serafina!”

“Well, I’m not 100 percent sure. Maybe 95. Come here and let me show you.”

She moved over to a long hunt table with one chair before it, and she pulled up another. “Here, sit down, and I’ll show you what I’ve come up with.”

The two sat down, and he could smell the faint odor of lavender, a familiar scent with her. She did not use perfume as a rule, but her clothes always smelled like lavender, and he concluded that she put it, somehow, in the water when the dresses were washed. He looked down at the table and saw that it was littered with sheets of paper.

“All these are failures. I’ve been trying for days now to figure it out. Do you know how cyphers usually work?”

“I don’t know much about them.”

“Usually you just substitute one letter for another, or a number. In other words, in the simplest kind of code, you just assign the letter
A
to the number one, and
B
would be number two. So what anyone reading it would find is simply a series of numbers.”

“That sounds simple enough.”

“Too simple.What we have here is something far more complicated.” She turned to him, and he could see a very faint line of freckles across her nose that he had never noticed before. He was aware of the beauty of her violet-coloured eyes, the only eyes he had seen of that shade, and she had a way of smiling, as she was now, that was desirable. Her chin tilted up, and her lips curved in an attractive fashion. A small dimple appeared at the left of her mouth, and humour danced in her eyes. “That kind of code isn’t too hard to figure out.”

“It seems to me it would be.”

“Not really. You see, some letters appear very often in our words and others very rarely. For example, the most common letter, if you counted them all up in a book, would be the letter
E
. Probably the least common would be the letter
X
. So if you see whichever number, symbol, or sign occurs the most, in all probability, it’s the letter
E
, and the one that occurs the least would be the
X
. Then you can figure out the second most common number, which might be
A
. You see?”

“It sounds easy the way you say it.”

“Well, this wasn’t that easy. Look at this, Dylan.”

Dylan looked down at the diary of Kate Fairfield. He had seen it before and now shook his head. “It just looks like a meaningless bunch of numbers.”

“Let’s just look at the first line here,” she said. She put the tip of her finger on the first line, which read: “123-16-4 210-10-2 323-5-6 98-7-1 269-21-5 322-18-3.”

“I tried to find some pattern in these numbers, and, as usual, once you see it, it’s easy. But seeing it the first time is what’s hard.”

“I just don’t see any rhyme or reason to it,” Dylan said. “Does each one stand for a word?”

“That’s what I’ve always thought, but it’s necessary to discover
how
the numbers make a word. I nearly lost my mind trying to find a pattern.

When the answer came, it just came to me like a flash. It happens that way in science, Dylan.You wear yourself out and have nothing—and then out of nowhere, the answer comes. It can be frustrating.”

“But you know how it works?”

“I think so. Just run your eyes down the page and you’ll see that the first number is almost inevitably the largest number.”

“Yes, I see that.What does that mean?”

“Let me go on,” she said. “The second number is always relatively small compared to the first number. It hardly ever goes over twenty or twenty-five.”

Dylan looked at the numbers and said, “That’s right. What does it mean?”

“Look at the last number. It’s the smallest of all. It never goes over ten or twelve at the most.” She smiled at him then and said, “So we have one very large number and then two numbers much smaller, but the third much smaller than the second.”

Dylan was aware that her arm was pressed against him as they sat at the table. “I’m not very good at games.”

“I’m
very
good at them. I went to sleep last night thinking about this, and I woke up very early this morning, about four o’clock, and it was like a light went on in my mind. I suddenly was almost certain that I knew how to break the code.”

“Tell me.”

“The code is based on words in a book. The first number, which is always larger, is the page number of the book. That’s why the first number may be as much as three or four hundred. The largest number I’ve found so far in the diary is four hundred and twenty. Nothing larger than that.”

“What’s the second number?”

“Why, you should be able to figure that out.”

“I’m too tired. Tell me.”

“The second number is the number of the line on the page. For instance, this one right here. The first number is one hundred and twenty-three. The second number is sixteen. So you go to page one hundred and twenty-three, and go down to the sixthteenth line.”

“And the third number, four, is the word in that line.”

“Very good! You can see how easy it is to find what the word is.”

“But there would have to be one specific book.”

“Ah, you’re right about that.”

“Which book is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Dylan stared at her with consternation. “There are millions of books in the world. The only way you could read this would be to find the particular book that Kate used to make the code.”

“Yes, we must find that book.”

Dylan’s smooth brow furrowed. “There was a bookshelf in her room. We looked through the books.”

“Yes, we looked behind them, we opened them up to find a note, but we found nothing. I believe that she had to keep the book in her room so that when she made an addition to her diary, she’d have the book there to make the code.” Serafina then took out a single sheet of paper with a list of names written on it. Beside each name was what was obviously a nickname. The writing was brown, and the paper seemed to be brittle and tended to curl.

Dylan read the first entry. “James Fitzsimmons Hartwell. Why, he was a prominent member of the House of Lords, him! Where did you get this paper, Viscountess?”

“It was in the box where we found the diary. I paid no heed to it, then I wondered why she would have a blank sheet of paper in the box. Finally it came to me.” She smiled, then added, “She had written the names in invisible ink. I tested my theory, and this is what I found.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as invisible ink.”

“It’s not too mysterious.” Serafina smiled slightly. “Many things will work. In this case, I suspect, it was lemon juice.”

“How do you make it visible?”

“You heat it up, usually over a hot stove, being careful not to let the paper catch on fire.You see how brown and crisp it is? I carefully warmed up part of it, and those few names are very legible.”

Dylan glanced at the sheet of names before Serafina continued, “Now you know what we must do.”

Dylan’s mind was working quickly. “Yes, we’ve got to go look at those books again, but it will be dangerous to break in a second time.We’ll raise our odds of being caught.”

“Yes, you’re right. We’ll have to come up with something else.” She sat there for a long moment, her mind racing, then said, “I’ll go ask Superintendent Winters to let us look. He’s been very sympathetic. I think he will give us his permission.”

“Well, you have more confidence in policemen than I do, although I don’t have any reason to distrust Winters any more than the rest. I would have thought that Grant would be the one to go to.”

“I doubt if he has the authority. No, I’ll go today and ask the superintendent for permission to look in Kate Fairfield’s room.”

“How are you, Superintendent?”

Winters had risen when Serafina entered his office. He was studying her face carefully and somewhat warily. “Good morning, Viscountess. You’re up early.”

“Yes, and like most people who come through your door, I have a favour to ask.”

Winters smiled. He looked down at her from his greater height and said, “You’re right about that. Does it have to do with your brother?”

“In a way it does.”

“What’s your request?”

“I’d like your permission to go to Miss Fairfield’s room and look around.”

Winters frowned. “Whatever for, Viscountess?”

“Oh, I think I might find a clue to what has happened in the bookcase. She had quite a few books, I understand.”

“How did you know that?”

Serafina realised she had made a mistake but quickly recovered. “Oh, I overheard Inspector Grant talking to one of the sergeants. I think he mentioned it.”

“And you think looking at her books would help find someone that killed Kate Fairfield?”

“I would like to think so. Time’s passing very quickly. The trial is next week.”

“I am sorry, but what you ask is a violation of our policy here at the Yard. We’ve also warned you about how dangerous your investigation could be for you.” Then something changed in his face, and he stepped forward and put his hand on her arm.“I’m grieved over this,Viscountess. I will do what I can, but I can’t break my own rules.”

“Well, I can understand that, Superintendent Winters.”

“Anything else I can do . . .”

“No, there’s nothing.”

Suddenly Winters said, “I understand your grief and your sense of fear. It’s only natural. I wish I could do more to help.”

“I’m sure you would.”

Winters gave a strange gesture. He held out his hands to the side and said vehemently, “You must know your brother is guilty. All the evidence points to it. You are a woman of science,Viscountess. You must weigh the facts as you do in your laboratory.”

Serafina knew that this was true, but she could not be so clinical when the life of her beloved brother was at stake. “I thought I was a pure scientist, but I find sometimes the heart overrules the head. Thank you for your time, Superintendent.”

Winters watched as she left and shook his head. He gave her time to clear the building and then left his office. He moved down the hall and entered Grant’s office without knocking. Grant was sitting at his desk writing, and he looked up in surprise. “What is it, Superintendent?”

“The viscountess has been here. She thinks she’s got some sort of idea that will clear her brother’s name.”

An alarm went off in Grant’s head. “What sort of idea, sir?”

“It had something to do with the murdered woman’s books. There were a number of books in the room, as I recall.”

“Yes, sir, but we looked in all of them. We examined every page, thinking maybe she had left a note, but we found nothing.”

“Well, we can’t have her destroying evidence.”

“Do you want me to do something?”

“Yes, I want you to go to the woman’s house and confiscate the books. Bring them in here. I don’t have any idea what her thought was, but we’ll have to look at those books again.”

“I was supposed to go to Dillingham this afternoon. I wouldn’t have time to get the books until tomorrow.”

“That will do, I suppose, but make sure you have them here first thing in the morning.”