CHAPTER
Twenty-Nine
It’s a pleasure to see you again, sir,” John Griffin said, shaking Douglas’s hand.
Griffin was the chief telegrapher for Henley and Company’s office in Liverpool. He also oversaw the other telegraphers and clerks who worked there. This was the first time Douglas had come to Liverpool without sending advance notice, so Griffin was bound to be curious. “Everything all right in London, sir?”
He must have heard the rumors of trouble within the company. Douglas wasn’t surprised. The comptrollers at both offices had been in constant communication with each other over the past week. Mr. Rosser, who oversaw financial matters in Liverpool, had in fact been called to London and was there today.
Douglas answered, “We’ve had a bit of a setback, but we’re getting it sorted out. The company remains on solid footing.” This was overstating things, but Douglas wanted to set Griffin at ease. Besides, he had confidence the company wasn’t going to fold. He was doing everything he could to ensure it didn’t. “I’m here to do a bit of research, to see if I can locate more details about our communications to America on the matter of a recent order of cotton. I’d like to view your copies of the incoming and outgoing telegrams from that time.”
Griffin nodded. “Certainly. I’ll take you to our filing room.”
They walked downstairs to a room where shelves filled with filing boxes lined every wall. Several rows of tall, freestanding shelves were equally full. At one end of the rows stood a young woman who was placing a stack of telegrams into a box. She paused, looking up from her work as Douglas and Griffin entered the room. She pushed her spectacles up her nose, looking surprised to have visitors.
“This is Miss Davies, who has the unenviable job of filing the telegrams,” Griffin explained. “Miss Davies, this is Mr. Shaw from the head office. He wants to review copies of some recent messages.”
Miss Davies quickly smoothed back a few wisps of hair and tugged at the cuffs of her shirtwaist. “Good afternoon, sir. I’m sure you’ll find everything is in proper order.”
Douglas heard the note of worry in her voice. “Don’t be alarmed, Miss Davies. I’m not here to do an audit. I simply wish to track down the copy of a telegram that came through this office a few weeks ago. I would appreciate your help in locating it—especially as I can see you have everything so well organized.”
Looking relieved, Miss Davies said, “Certainly, sir! Do you know the precise date? Everything is filed chronologically and is separated as to incoming and outgoing. We should be able to find what you’re looking for with relative ease.”
“I’d like to see everything sent on the twelfth of this month, both incoming and outgoing.”
“The twelfth . . .” She turned back toward the shelves. “Those would be located in these boxes.”
Douglas followed her down the row and lifted one of the two boxes she indicated. “We’ll start with this one.”
Griffin returned to his work upstairs, while Douglas and Miss Davies set the boxes on a table and began to look through the telegrams inside. It didn’t take long to find the one sent from London regarding the cotton purchase.
Douglas read it carefully. It matched word for word the copy Henley had shown him. As was customary, the signature of the sender was recorded: AM. Had the receiving telegrapher somehow misheard the second initial as M when it should have been C? It was highly unlikely, given that the codes for C (dash, dot, dash, dot) and M (dash, dash) were very different. The fact that the message was received at 1:35 p.m., when Clapper would have been at lunch and only Alice would have been at the telegraph, made it even more unlikely.
The telegram included the notation that the message had been repeated back to the sender for confirmation. This procedure was often used when important information was being sent and accuracy was critical. In the outgoing batch, they found the other telegrams related to this one, showing confirmation all down the line. From the transatlantic cable to the final destination in Atlanta, the message had been sent and repeated back precisely as it had been received from London.
Douglas stared at the line of telegrams laid out on the table before him, willing them to divulge some new piece of information. He didn’t know what he expected. After all, he’d already scoured every inch of them.
Then, suddenly, the small numbers at the top right-hand corner of each form caught his eye. As with most telegraph stations, these were preprinted forms. At the top was the Henley and Company name, along with the addresses of the offices in Liverpool and London. Below were lines to write in the address of the recipient, the time, and the message, plus spaces designated for other information, such as the initials of the receiver and sender. The seven-digit numbers in the upper corner ran in chronological order. Douglas’s eye had skimmed over these numbers before, but now he noticed one significant detail: the telegrams were laid out before him in order of the time received, but the sequential order of the form numbers was off. The number on the telegram purportedly received from Alice was lower than the ones around it.
Galvanized, Douglas sat up straighter, rubbed his eyes, and reviewed the numbers again.
Apparently noticing the difference in his demeanor, Miss Davies said, “Did you find something, Mr. Shaw?”
“Look at this.” He turned the forms around to face her. “This telegram is numbered 4931955. Wouldn’t you expect the ones that arrived just before and after it to end with the numbers 954 and 956?”
“Yes, I suppose they would.” She scrutinized the forms, just as Douglas had. “How very curious.”
“In your experience, are these forms ever out of chronological order?”
She sat back in her chair, giving it some thought. “To be honest, I’ve never paid much attention to the numbering. My job is to file them by date and time so they are easy to retrieve if needed. The telegraph clerks keep a logbook upstairs recording date and time of the message and who the sender is.”
“Do they also record this seven-digit number in the logbook?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Excellent.” He picked up the original telegram again, intending to take it with him.
Something else struck him. The sender’s initials were noted as AM. Alice signed as AXM. He’d asked her about it during one of their conversations. She’d told him it was something she developed while working at the Central Telegraph Office to distinguish herself from another telegrapher with the same initials. She’d kept that signature after coming to work at Henley and Company. Other telegrams he’d seen in the archive stack sent by Alice had the signature AXM.
It was a small discrepancy. But Douglas didn’t mind grasping at any straw that presented itself.
Returning to the main floor, he went searching for Griffin and located him at a desk near the telegraph machines.
Griffin stood up as Douglas approached. “Did you find what you needed?”
“I believe so.”
Douglas asked to see the logbooks for the telegrams. Sure enough, the numbers there were oddly out of order.
Referring back to the original telegram, Douglas said, “It notes here that JS received the message. That’s Jimmy Smith, isn’t it? I’d like to ask him a few questions. Where is he?” Douglas remembered Smith from previous visits to this office. The man currently seated at the telegraph was someone he didn’t know.
Griffin shook his head. “Unfortunately, we had to let Smith go three days ago.”
“What was the reason?”
“Dereliction of duty. He kept missing work, on account of being in jail. Kept getting picked up by constables for drunk and disorderly conduct. Fights and such.”
“We had such a person working for us?” Douglas found that hard to believe. During his few interactions with Smith, he hadn’t noticed anything objectionable, although the man did seem to keep to himself.
“He wasn’t always that way,” Griffin said. “The problem came on slowly and got worse over the past two months. The last fight was with his landlord, who was trying to evict him. We found out Smith is a big gambler on horse races and owes a lot of money to some disreputable people. I feel sorry for his family—he has a wife and baby. But I’m sure you understand why we could not risk keeping such a man as one of our telegraph clerks, with access to a lot of sensitive information.”
“I understand.” Douglas sighed. That was a blow. He’d wanted to ask if Smith recalled hearing the X in the signature. Perhaps he’d missed it or simply left it off the transcription. On the other hand, if he had not been performing his work properly, any number of errors might have arisen.
“Smith was a good telegrapher, though,” Griffin insisted, perhaps guessing where Douglas’s thoughts were going. He pointed toward the paper. “As it notes here, the message was sent back and confirmed by the originating sender.”
This was all true, and Douglas couldn’t deny any of it. Still, it bothered him. He began to recall other things about Smith, such as the hazing he’d been giving Alice on the day Douglas met her, and a comment Alice had made once about how Smith and Clapper were thick as thieves.
At a loss as to what to do next, he stood watching as the man at the telegraph finished a transmission and set the form into a box marked SENT.
“Was there a particular reason you wanted to talk to Smith?” asked Griffin. “Perhaps I can answer your questions.”
“I doubt it. I wanted to ask him about a detail in this message—”
He stopped short as the sounder announced an incoming message. Immediately the telegrapher sent back a “ready” reply. In another moment, the sounder started up again.
So, too, did the Morse printer. This was a device attached to the telegraph machine that contained a roll of half-inch-wide paper tape. The printer recorded the dots and dashes of the Morse code as it came over the sounder. In the early days of telegraphy, operators would read the tape and then transcribe the message. Nowadays, the best operators trained their ears to pick up the dots and dashes, bypassing the tape.
He remembered Alice’s words to him: “You might want to go back to reading Morse code off the tape, Mr. Shaw. Your hearing doesn’t seem to work very well anymore.”
She had spoken in anger, yet Douglas wondered if she’d inadvertently given him another brilliant suggestion.
“Griffin, do you always have the printer on?”
“Yes. That was Mr. Henley’s direction. It provides a backup in case we should need it, which isn’t often.”
“How long do you keep the tape?”
“We purge the spools after a few months. We had been setting them out for the dustman, but then we realized some unscrupulous person who knew Morse code could intercept them to gather confidential information.”
“So you would still have the spool from the twelfth?”
“Undoubtedly. I’ll take you to the storage room.”
Once more the two of them went downstairs. In a smaller room across the hall from the filing room were stacks of boxes, each filled with spools of tape.
“There is a paper in each box, listing the dates,” Griffin said.
After searching for several minutes, Douglas found the box with the dates he was looking for. He took it to the filing room, where there was a table to work at and the light was better.
Finally, he found the message. Reading to the end, he confirmed that the initials for the sender were AM, not AXM. But then he noticed something. The message immediately following it on the tape was one he could have sworn had an earlier time notation on the transcribed version.
He looked up. “Miss Davies, I’m afraid we need to pull those records again.”
Comparison of the tape to the transcribed messages confirmed that this telegram, the one sent by AM, had been transcribed out of order. Based on the tape, it was received between noon and 1:00 p.m.—the time when Alice would have been out of the office at lunch. It appeared that the telegrapher who’d received this message, Jimmy Smith, had deliberately recorded the wrong time. Given what Douglas had learned today about Smith and his money problems, he would lay odds Smith had done it for money.
Douglas and Griffin sat at the table, reviewing everything once more.
“I can’t believe it,” Griffin said. “I’m sorry now that I’ve already dismissed him. That means I can’t dismiss him for deliberately falsifying our records. But why would he have done this?”
“Do you know whether he was particularly friendly with Archie Clapper?”
“The man at your London office?” Griffin shrugged. “I presume so. Smith always spoke well of him as a telegrapher. In fact, I believe Smith had a letter of reference from someone in London, and that was one reason we hired him. That was several years ago, and I don’t remember the details. I’m sorry that I can’t say whether Clapper had anything to do with that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Douglas said. He was elated to be holding the proof that would clear Alice’s name. “I have everything I need.”
Douglas caught the night train back to London, not caring that he got precious little sleep. He was in the office bright and early the next morning, insisting on a meeting with Clapper and Henley the moment they’d both arrived.
Once the three of them were in Henley’s office with the door closed, Henley said, “All right, Shaw. What is this important matter you wish to discuss with us?”
Douglas had spent the train ride working out exactly what he planned to say. He didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “I know that Clapper conspired with Jimmy Smith, one of the telegraph clerks at our Liverpool office, to send the infamous telegram that has done so much damage to our company. I know Smith agreed to forge the time the message was sent in order to make it appear as though Alice—that is, Miss McNeil—had sent it.”
Using Alice’s Christian name was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, revealing just how close his relationship with her had gotten. He’d been hoping to keep any whisper of that fact out of this conversation. He wanted to keep Clapper on the defensive.
Even though Clapper said nothing about Douglas’s slip, he did give a sneer before answering. “What gives you the right to make such accusations?”
“Smith also forged Miss McNeil’s signature—which, by the way, was incorrect. That was sloppy of you, Clapper.”
Archie turned a furious gaze to their employer. “Mr. Henley, do you know of any reason I should stand here and accept insults from this man? You know I am loyal to this company! And you know why.” He gave a pointed glance at the photograph of Mrs. Henley that was on Henley’s desk. “I would never try to deliberately sabotage it. I had no reason! Whereas Miss McNeil had plenty. She was jealous and underhanded—”
Henley held up a hand. “We’ve been through all of this already.” He looked wearily at Douglas. “Mr. Shaw, I have to ask your reasons for these allegations against Mr. Clapper.”
“I’ve just returned from Liverpool, where I carefully perused the telegrams, the logbook, and the tape from the Morse printer. I found some discrepancies. Mr. Griffin can confirm everything I tell you.”
This introduction got the attention of both men.
“Go on,” Henley directed. “What were the discrepancies?”
“First, Alice’s signature was listed on the telegram as AM when, in fact, it is AXM.”
“A mere slip on Smith’s part,” Archie said with a scoff. “That proves nothing.”
“Second, there was an issue with the seven-digit numbers printed on the forms,” Douglas continued. “Those numbers are recorded in the logbook. The number of the telegram supposedly sent by Alice was much lower than the ones around it. That would indicate it had been sent earlier in the day—say, perhaps when Miss McNeil was out at lunch, rather than Mr. Clapper.”
“You’re grasping at straws, Shaw,” Clapper said. “It would be very easy for a loose stack of forms to get out of order. Especially on warm weather days, when the windows are open and there is a breeze. Happens in our office all the time.” Once more he turned toward Henley. “If you examine our own logbook, you’ll see the numbers aren’t always in exact order. As I have just pointed out, that is through no fault of our own. Surely you can’t believe any of that implicates me.”
Archie’s tone was belligerent, yet Douglas thought he heard a note of worry creeping into it.
Henley sat silently for a moment. He didn’t look happy at being placed in the middle of this thorny situation. Finally, he said, “I have to agree with Mr. Clapper. Those two issues might be put down to mere chance or sloppiness.”
Very naturally, Clapper took this statement as proof that his argument had won the day. “So you must also agree that it’s evident this man is trying to smear my good name. He wants to make me appear guilty, when we all know it was a craven attack by a woman whose morals were unhinged for love. And over this very man! Mr. Henley, if you really want to see justice done and preserve this company, you’ll send Shaw packing, off to join his paramour.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere just yet,” Henley said, although he turned an angry gaze on Douglas. “Would you mind telling me exactly what you are trying to do?”
“Thank you, sir, because I haven’t finished telling you everything yet.” Douglas spoke calmly, but he could see he needed to finish making his case quickly, lest Henley become angry enough to do as Archie suggested. “You see, there’s the matter of the Morse printer. It confirms the time this telegram was received, and that it couldn’t possibly have been Miss McNeil who sent it. Perhaps Smith figured no one would think to check it. But I did.”
Archie was seething, his fists clenched. “Why you—”
Douglas cut him off before he could complete the epithet. “By the way, I also discovered why Smith was sacked. I even went to see him at the jail. He wanted me to tell you that you still owe him the fifty pounds you promised for doing the job.”
“Fifty pounds! It was nowhere near that! He—”
This time, Clapper cut himself off, realizing too late the trap Douglas had set.
Henley’s eyebrows rose. “And just how much did you offer to pay him for forging that telegram?”