Chapter Three

Blathers said, “I sees your pint be empty, Miss Martin.”

“I see your pint is empty.”

“Yes, it is too.”

“No, no! You should say, I see your pint is empty. Remember, you must make the verb agree with the noun. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes! I see your pint is empty, Miss Martin.”

“Much better, but I think you and Mr. Duff should get used to calling me Alice. And I would like to call you by your first names, but I don’t know what they are.”

Blathers looked at me. I shook my head and explained to Alice, “We don’t use first names. There is a reason, but we won’t go into that now. Just call us Blathers or Duff. Never mind the Mister part.”

“Well, I’ll respect that, but you will call me Alice. I insist.”

Blathers said carefully, “Well, Alice, both of our pints are still empty.”

“That they are, Blathers. Shall we go down to the taproom?”

Alice took Blathers’ arm and started toward the crooked stairway. “Will you be joining us, Duff?”

“I’ll be along in a bit. I wish to spend a little time to see if I can make anything out of this cipher. Be careful on the stairs. They are quite old and not at all straight. There may be a loose board or two, so watch your step.”

****

Once Alice and Blathers were off to imbibe, I was able to concentrate on the puzzle before me. I have some limited experience working with codes, from the time Blathers and I were detectives with the Bow Street Runners. That was before our short time with the Metropolitan Police. Back in ’29, Sir Robert Peel melded the Runners into the Metropolitan Police. Blathers and I tried it for a while, but we couldn’t get used to the formal ways of a modern police department.

Based on my experience, I agreed with Alice’s brother about it being traditional to separate messages into units of five letters. This avoids the use of word length as an aid to breaking the code. In this case there were six letters, except for the last word, where a dash appeared. I thought maybe this wasn’t a substitution code at all.

I recalled there was another type of code where groups of letters arranged in some geometric form would reveal the message. I tried the most obvious and came up with nothing.

I did notice the last letters in each group were in sequence J K L A B C D E F G H I. Perhaps the last letter was some kind of indicator. I tried several possibilities, adjusting the sequence and geometric form. Still nothing.

I decided to make a list of the things I knew about the cipher. This would help me to think logically and would, I hoped, point to some other ways to decode the message. As I withdrew another sheet of paper from the box on my desk, I heard a ruckus in the taproom. At least it sounded like a ruckus to me. To Blathers and Alice and Clara, it sounded like singing.