Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

"Who was that, Holmes?" I asked, puzzled. "I'm sure I've never seen him before, yet he seems familiar."

"No doubt because Count Hoffenstein resembles his cousin, Von Bork, whom you… met, shall we say, some years ago."

I had indeed, having been with Holmes when he trapped that master spy in his own house on the Dover hills.

"Bad," Hans's angry interjection showed both his deep concern and bitter frustration. "I keep all others away, but he, this Count, he come anyway. Bother my master. He… lost, Herr Doktor, lost like child.You help, please, please, Herr Doktor."

I was already hastening into the inner room, with Holmes close behind me. That poor Hans had cause for worry was obvious from the first glance.

Prince Max stood by his desk in a shifting sea of paper letters, envelopes, memos, notepads. His hands were full, the desk top was covered, every drawer was open, the carpet littered.

The prince looked up at us with a flushed and despairing face. "I cannot find it!" he cried, his chest heaving. "I had it, I had it in my hands only moments ago, but it has gone! Where is it? Where?" He flung his arms wide, and paper flew like confetti.

"Your Highness, this is Doctor Watson. He – "

"I had it moments ago, Mr Holmes! Moments! Yet now it has gone!"

"Have you had the paper since Count Hoffenstein left, Your Highness?"

Awareness flickered briefly in the prince's strained face. "I had just taken it out of my pocket when Hans announced him, and I…" He turned his wild eyes on me. "I have always kept it in my inside pocket, always from the first, and when the new message came… I must… I must… Where is it?"

He was shaking from head to foot, panting for breath.

"Your Highness," I said firmly, grasping his arm, "you should be in bed."

"No, no, doctor, I cannot. Not until I have found it. I cannot otherwise answer, you understand… No, no, no!"

Between the three of us we finally managed to get the poor prince into bed, and, with Hans on one side and I on the other, to keep him under the covers until exhaustion at last claimed him. The respite, I knew, would be brief.

Meanwhile Holmes had quickly gone through the prince's outer clothing, removed a small ring of keys from a buttoned pocket, and returned to the office. When I joined him, he was sitting at the desk, on which now lay neat piles of papers, staring thoughtfully at one page, which had been ruled off into regular squares, all filled with letters.

"Your verdict was correct, Holmes," I said. "The prince is very sick and I'm afraid worsening."

Holmes looked at me with distant eyes in which awareness of my presence only slowly dawned. "Do you know the cause?"

"Some kind of influenza, I think," I replied. "It's spreading fast among the troops on both sides of the front."

"The outcome?"

"Some survive, though few when they're as close to pneumonia as the prince."

"Pneumonia," Holmes repeated grimly. "So at best he'll be incapacitated for days. Can you do nothing to hasten recovery? Time is so precious,Watson, even hours may make the difference between whether hundreds – thousands – live or die."

"I have had some small success with injections of morphine," I said. "I have nothing else."

"Then by all means try the injections, doctor. I had hoped that the prince might come to himself long enough to remember something – anything – that would help me with this, but…" He handed me the following.

I stared at the meaningless rows of consonants in bewilderment. "This is the latest message from the President of the United States?"

Holmes nodded. "I believe so. Certainly it is on American paper, was stored in a locked inner drawer of the prince's desk, and is obviously in code."

"Then what had the prince lost? Or was that merely a delusion of his illness?"

"Far from it, doctor. What he had lost – to be precise, what Count Hoffenstein carried away with him – is the key to this and all such communications from the American president. The prince kept it, as he said, in an inner pocket, and had no doubt just taken it out in order to read this message with its aid when the count forced his way past Hans and entered.

P M B F D R C S T C N

R W N T D H S T V S N

C Y C R S S S G N R R

F N T W H D R h S L B

D R T G T H C T K F M

R M T N H N N T T P H

R S M C P N T T R M P

N L T Y N V W T N L T

B N C C D N F C G V H

D J K N L M L N P B Q

R S R T T V Y W X W W

"Whether or not the count knew that the prince had, moments before, received this page from the president I do not know, thought I should think it highly likely. Certainly he used the prince's near delirium to remove the paper from wherever the prince had hastily shoved it – child's play for a man like the count."

I looked again at the page I held, with no more enlightenment than before. "What on earth would the key to this be like?"

"A page of lightly transparent paper of the same size and shape and with the same squares ruled on it, but with the random letters that are added as mere disguise blacked out. By placing that page over this, one can see at once the letters that form the true message."

"There are no vowels," I pointed out.

"Not necessary." Holmes scribbled on a notepad and handed it to me. "Can you read that?"

He had written HLMSNDWTSN.

"Holmes and Watson," I said.

"Precisely."

I stared back at the page of filled squares. "Without the key is it hopeless?"

"I won't concede that, doctor. It is only the pressure of time that worries me. At least we do start with some advantages."

"I can see none, Holmes, absolutely none."

Holmes tapped the top left and bottom right of the page. "We know that this is a personal message from the American president to the German chancellor. Since the first two letters here are PM and the last WW, surely it is probable that these stand for Prince Max and Woodrow Wilson."

"That is not much."

"There are other assumptions that we can, I think, safely make. For instance, since the prince is fluent in English and the president not in German, almost surely the language used is English. Also, though the two are naturally of the highest political status, they are amateurs in the employment of codes. Therefore the device selected is apt to be simple.

"Further, even sending such pages as this between them is becoming increasingly difficult to arrange safely: Count Hoffenstein will not be the only spy on the watch along the route. Therefore the same code will most probably have been meant for all their covert communications, meaning that ample space will have been allowed. You will note that the last three lines of the squares on this page have the consonants interspersed in regular alphabetical order, from B to X. That almost surely indicates that the message is contained in only the first eight lines.

"We're not beaten yet, doctor. Not while we both have work to do."

With that I certainly agreed, though heaving a deep sigh at our chances of success. I returned to the prince, who was struggling to get out of bed, and administered a small dose of morphine.

Though this quickly quietened him, he still had periods in which his whole body jerked, his eyes fluttered uneasily, and he would cry out thickly, "Where… where… where…" as long as he could find breath. These symptoms ceased after the second

injection, but his breathing became increasingly strained, his face even more flushed,, his skin burning. He was, for good or ill, nearing the crisis of his illness.

Hans was invaluable during these hours, doing unquestioningly whatever I bade. Even when, all else seeming to be failing, I turned to that simple nursery remedy of alternating hot and cold fomentations high on the chest and low on the back, for an hour at a time.