Dorothy Sayers - The Nine Tailors

He knelt to examine it, and new thoughts went swooping and turning through his brain like bats. Why should anybody trouble to swab the floor of a belfry, unless to remove some very sinister stain. He saw Cranton and Legros climbing to the belfry, with the cipher in their hands for guidance. He saw the green glint of the jewels, dragged from their old hiding-place in the light of the lantern. He saw the sudden leap, the brutal blow, and the blood gushing to the floor, the cipher fluttering, unheeded, into a corner. And then the murderer, trembling and glancing over his shoulder, as he snatched the emeralds from dead fingers, took up the body and stumbled panting down the creaking ladders. The sexton’s spade from the crypt, the bucket and scrubbing-brush from the vestry, or wherever they were kept, the water from the well—

There he stopped. The well? The well meant the rope, and what had the rope to do with this? Had it been used merely as a convenient means to carry the corpse? But the experts had been so sure that the victim had been bound before he was dead. And besides, there were the blow and the blood. It was all very well making horrible pictures for one’s self, but there had been no blow till the man had been dead too long to leave any pool of blood. And if there was no blood, why scrub the floor?

He sat back on his heels and looked up again to the bells. If their tongues could speak, they could tell him what they had seen, but they had neither speech nor language. Disappointed, he again took up the torch and searched further. Then he broke out into harsh and disgusted laughter. The whole cause of the mystery revealed itself absurdly. An empty quart beer-bottle lay there, rolled into an obscure place behind a quantity of worm-eaten beams that were stacked against the wall. Here was a pretty ending to his dreams! Some unlicensed trespasser on consecrated ground — or possibly some workman legitimately engaged in repairs to the bell-cage — had spilt his beer and had tidily removed the stains, while the bottle, rolling out of sight, had been forgotten. No doubt that was all. Yet a lingering suspicion caused Wimsey to take up the bottle very carefully, by means of a finger inserted into the neck. It was not very dusty. It could not, he thought, have lain there long. It would bear somebody’s finger-prints — perhaps.

He examined the rest of the floor very carefully, but could find only a few jumbled footprints in the dust — large, male prints, he thought. They might be Jack Godfrey’s or Hezekiah Lavender’s, or anybody’s. Then he took the ladder and made an exhaustive search of the bells and timbers. He found nothing. No secret mark. No hiding-place for treasure. And nothing whatever suggestive of fairies or elephants, enchanters or Erebus. After several dirty and fatiguing hours, he descended again, carrying the bottle as his sole reward.

* * *

Curiously enough, it was the Rector who solved the cipher. He came into the schoolroom that night as the hall-clock struck eleven, thoughtfully bearing a glass of hot toddy in one hand and an old-fashioned foot-muff in the other.

“I do hope you are not working yourself to death,” he said, apologetically. “I have ventured to bring a little comfort for the inner man. These nights of early summer are so chilly. And my wife thinks you might like to put your feet in this. There is always a draught under that door. Allow me — it is slightly moth-eaten, I fear, but still affords protection. Now, you must not let me disturb you. Dear me! What is that? Are you pricking out a peal? Oh, no — I see they are letters, not figures. My eyesight is not as good as it was. But I am rudely prying into your affairs.”

“Not a bit, padre. It does look rather like a peal. It’s still this wretched cipher. Finding that the number of letters formed a multiple of eight, I had written it out in eight columns, hoping forlornly that something might come of it. Now you mention it, I suppose one might make a simple sort of cipher out of a set of changes.”

“How could you do that?”

“Well, by taking the movements of one bell and writing the letters of your message in the appropriate places and then filling up the places of the other bells with arbitraries. For instance. Take a Plain Course of Grandsire Doubles, [1] and suppose you want to convey the simple and pious message ‘Come and worship.’ You would select one bell to carry the significants — let us say, No. 5. Then you would write out the beginning of your plain course, and wherever No. 5 came you would put in one letter of your message. Look.”

He rapidly scribbled down the two columns:

123456

213546

231456

324156

342516

435216

453126

541326

514236

152436

125346

215436

251346

523146

532416

etc.

* * * C* *

* * * * * O*

* * * * * M*

* * * E* *

* * A* * *

* N* * * *

D* * * * *

W* * * * *

* O* * * *

* * R* * *

* * S* * *

* H* * * *

I* * * * *

P* * * * *

“Then you could fill up the other places with any sort of nonsense letters — say XLOCMP JQIWON, NAEMMB TSHEZP and so on. Then you would write the whole thing out in one paragraph, dividing it so as to look like words.”

“Why?” inquired the Rector.

“Oh, just to make it more difficult. You could write, for example, ‘XLOC MPJQI. WON, NAE M MBTS! HEZP?’ and so on to the end. It wouldn’t matter what you did. The man who received the message and had the key would simply divide the letters into six columns again, run his pencil along the course of No. 5, and read the message.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Venables, “so he would! How very ingenious. And I suppose that with a little further ingenuity, the cipher might be made to convey some superficial and misleading information. I see, for instance, that you already have the word WON and the Scotch expression NAE. Could not the idea be extended further, so that the entire passage might appear completely innocuous?”

“Of course it could. It might look like this.” Wimsey flicked Jean Legros’ communication with his finger.

“Have you—? But pardon me. I am unwarrantably interfering. Still — have you tried this method on the cryptogram?”

“Well, I haven’t,” admitted Wimsey. “I’ve only just thought of it. Besides, what would be the good of sending a message like that to Cranton, who probably knows nothing about bell-ringing? And it would take a bell-ringer to write it, and we have no reason to suppose that Jean Legros was a ringer. It is true,” he added thoughtfully, “that we have no reason to suppose he was not.”

“Well, then,” said the Rector. “Why not try? You told me, I think, that this paper was picked up in the belfry. Might not the person to whom it was sent, though not himself a ringer and not knowing how to interpret it, have connected it in his mind with the bells and supposed that the key was to be found in the belfry? No doubt I am very foolish, but it appears to me to be possible.”

Wimsey struck his hand on the table. “Padre, that’s an idea! When Cranton came to Fenchurch St. Paul, he asked for Paul Taylor, because Deacon had told him that Tailor Paul or Batty Thomas knew where the emeralds were. Come on! Have at it. We’ll ask Tailor Paul ourselves.”

He picked up the paper on which he had already written the cryptogram in eight columns.

“We don’t know what method the fellow used, or which bell to follow. But we’ll take it that the bell is either Batty Thomas or Tailor Paul. If the method is Grandsire Triples, it can’t be Tailor Paul, for the Tenor would be rung behind the whole way and we should find the message running down the last column. And it’s not likely to be Grandsire Major, because you never ring that method here. Let us try Batty Thomas. What does the 7th bell give us? GHILSTETHGWA. That’s not very encouraging. For form’s sake we’ll try the other bells. No. No. No. Could the man possibly have started off with a bob or single?”