Dennis Wheatley - Contraband

'When you are ready,' he said to the Superintendent who was standing in the doorway, 'we'll quit. I don't think you'll find much here but, if you'll provide me with a copy of The Tempest, when we get back to the Yard, I think I'll be able to decode that famous telegram for you.'

18

The Deciphering of the Code

At Scotland Yard Gregory settled down in the Superintendent's room with a thin paper edition of Shakespeare's plays, a pencil, and some blank sheets of foolscap. He knew that any ordinary combination of figures could have been deciphered by the decoding department at the Admiralty, to which Sir Pellinore had first sent the Corot telegram. The fact of its having defeated the experts showed quite clearly that the numerals referred to the lines of a certain book known only to the sender and recipient or their associates. His discovery of The Tempest as the only book in the set of Shakespeare, reposing so incongruously in the dusty warehouse of Mitbloom & Allison, which had recently been used, made him feel certain it held the key to the cipher.

He spread out the telegram before him and reread it:

COROT CAFE DE LA CLOCHE CALAIS SIXTH 41 44 II 15 THENCE 46 SEVENTH 43 47 EIGHTH AGAIN 47.

Turning to the play he looked up line 41, which read:

'… drown? Have you a mind to sink?'

Then line 44: 'Work you then.1

Next, line 11; which only had the single word: 'Enough!'

Line 15 was, 'Where is the master, boatswain?'

And line 46: '… noisemaker. We are less afraid to be drowned than…'

It simply did not make sense so he tried another method.

Treating the first numeral in each pair as indicating an act of the play, and the second numeral the line, which gave him:

41 'If I have to'

44 'Amends; for F

11 'Here, master: what'

15 'Ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.'

This did not seem to make sense either so, for a quarter of an hour, he worked on all sorts of other possibilities; trying out the numbers against full speeches or as lines in various acts and scenes, but none of them gave any results until it occurred to him to try the songs of the Fairy Ariel.

There were four songs in the play and he wrote them down.

I. Act I. Scene II.

1. Come unto these yellow sands,

2. And then take hands:

3. Curtsied when you have and kiss'd

4. The wild waves whist:

5. Foot it featly here and there;

6. 'And, sweet sprites, the burthern bear.

7. Hark, hark!

8. Bow wow.

9. The watchdogs bark:

10. Bow wow.

11. Hark, hark! I hear

12. The strain of strutting chanticleer:

13. Cry, cockadiddle dow.

2. Act I. Scene II.

1. Full fathom five thy father lies;

2. Of his bones are coral made;

3. Those are pearls that were his eyes;

4. Nothing of him that doth fade,

5. But doth suffer a seachange

6. Into something rich and strange

7. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

8. Ding dong.

9. Hark! now I hear them Dingdong, bell.

3. Act II. Scene I.

1. While you here do snoring lie,

2. Open eyed conspiracy

3. His time doth take.

4. // of life you keep a care,

5. Shake off slumber, and beware:

6. Awake, awake!

4. ActV. Scene I.

1. Where the bee sucks there suck I:

2. In a cowslip's bell I lie;

3. There do couch when owls do cry.

4. On a bat's back I do fly

5, After summer, merrily.

6. Merrily, merrily shall I live now

7. Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

On taking out the lines, in accordance with the numbers in the telegram, he arrived at the following:

(Song 4, line 1). 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I.' (Song 4, line 4). 'On the bat's wing I do fly.' (Song 1, line 1). 'Come unto these yellow sands' (Song 1, line 5). 'Foot it featly here and there.' (Song 4, line 6). 'Merrily, merrily shall I live now.' (Song 4, line 3). 'There do couch where owls do cry.' (Song 4, line 7). 'Under the blossom that hangs on the

bough.'

(Song 4, line 3). 'There do couch where owls do cry.' (Song 4, line 7). 'Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.'

This little collection seemed by far the most hopeful he had achieved yet. There was a reference to 'yellow sands' and another to 'owls', which suggested the Brown Owl Inn. The words 'foot it featly', too, immediately conjured up in his mind a vision of long dancing limbs clad in silk stockings.

Bearing in mind that the first four lines referred to the sixth of August, when he had witnessed the smugglers' operations at Calais, he went over them again. 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I', seemed to suggest the depot at Calais, from which the smugglers drew their supplies. He did not know where they had landed on that occasion but, now that he was acutely conscious of the vast stretch of yellow sands at Pegwell Bay and their base a little way inland from it at Ash Level, it looked as though that was the spot where the smugglers had dropped their cargo on the night of the SIXTH.

Going on to the seventh, the Brown Owl Inn on Romney Marshes was plainly indicated, as he knew that they had landed there that night, and the repetition of it for the eighth, when they had landed there again, confirmed his guess.

He was puzzled for a moment about the line 'Under the blossom that hangs on the bough', but, in view of the fact that they had discovered tobacco in Mitbloom and Allison's warehouse, he soon decided that the inference must be to leaves, and that both the cargoes he had seen landed at Romney on the two previous nights were shipments of tobacco. When he had finally redrafted the telegram on these assumptions, it read:

COROT, CAFE DE LA CLOCHE, CALAIS. SIXTH. / AM COLLECTING SUPPLIES FROM OUR BASE AT CALAIS. THEY WILL BE DESPATCHED BY PLANE TO PEGWELL BAY AND THE FREIGHT ON THIS OCCASION WILL BE A CONSIGNMENT OF SILKS. THENCE I SHALL PROCEED TO THE CARLTON AND ON THE SEVENTH A FURTHER CONSIGNMENT WILL BE LANDED AT THE BROWN OWL INN ON ROMNEY MARSHES CON SISTING OF TOBACCO. ON THE EIGHTH THE LAST OPERATION WILL BE REPEATED AND WE SHALL LAND AT THE BROWN OWL INN AGAIN WITH A FURTHER CARGO OF TOBACCO.

'There you are he pushed it over to Wells and the Superintendent, 'that all fits in doesn't it?'

The Superintendent nodded. 'Good work, sir. If you're ever out of a job I think we could find you a billet. Unfortunately, though, this telegram only carries us up to the night of the eighth and it's already the ninth, or rather the morning of the tenth I should say now, so we are stuck again. Otherwise, if I could only catch them red-handed landing a cargo, I'd bring them in now we've got on to Quex Park, Ash Level, Romney Marshes, Calais and at least one of their London depots.'

'Yes, we're at a bit of a dead end now,' Gregory confessed and the new moon's due in two days' time. They'll stop operations then until the dark period in September unless I'm much mistaken, I've a hunch, though, they'll put another lot of stuff over tonight and on the eleventh so if you get your people to cover their three known landing grounds you ought to be able to catch them at it and capture their fleet tonight or tomorrow night.'

'Well, I'm for bed,' said the Superintendent. 'I was up all night last night chasing down into Kent, after Sir Pellinore got on to me to pull the two of you out of the mess you'd landed yourselves in, and you've, both had a pretty sticky time, too. I think we'd best meet again here and talk things over later in the morning. How will eleven o'clock suit you?'