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“Then finish your coffee and let’s go.”
Ambrose McDonald’sflat was housed in the handsome red-brick Park Mansions, located in Kensington. The exclusive address hinted at the luxury inside, but I was still surprised to see a porter as well as a lift. We waited for the porter to be occupied with a resident before slipping past him and taking the stairs. We didn’t want either the porter or lift operator to be witnesses to our presence.
The carpeted corridor softened our footsteps as we hurried to the fourth door on the fifth floor. I kept watch as Harry went to work with his lock picks. He had the door open in moments and we snuck inside.
I released a relieved breath as I closed the door, then followed Harry across the marble floor to the sitting room.
The flat was spacious with high ceilings, a sitting room that took up more space than my entire suite at the hotel, and a grand bathroom with all the modern conveniences. A brass speaking tube in the wall of the sitting room must be connected to a service area in the basement. The furniture was stylishly modern and well made. A chandelier hung from a ceiling rose in the sitting room, its crystal drops glinting despite the low light. Dead flowers in a vase on the central table marred the otherwise elegant room. Mr. McDonald had good taste. Expensive, too.
Ambrose McDonald wasn’t short of money.
“I found the studio,” Harry said from the doorway to one of the rooms off the hallway.
He searched through it while I entered the study. It was more masculine than the other rooms, with the mahogany bookshelves and desk. I switched on the electric lamp and searched through the contents on top of the desk then looked through the drawers. I pulled out a book of accounts and sat to inspect it.
Mr. McDonald kept thorough records, noting down his income and expenditures in neat columns. The problem was, the income sources were a jumble of letters that didn’t make words. They might refer to paintings he’d sold. The amounts were in plain numerals, however, so it was easy for me to see that he had a steady income and was very well off.
I took the book into the main bedroom where I found Harry looking through the bedside table drawers. “Found anything?”
“He liked books on Ancient Rome.” He indicated the weighty tome titled THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JULIUS CAESAR on the table. “There are photographs in the sitting room of an elderly couple, probably his parents who died a few years ago, my father told me. I haven’t found any correspondence of a personal nature.”
“What about in the studio?”
“Just a few paintings, one of them unfinished. There are portraits of a man I assume is McDonald. I never saw him, but the subject looks like his picture in the newspapers.” He nodded at the ledger I held. “What did you find?”
I sat on the bed and showed him. “It’s his income and expenses. What do you think these entries mean?”
He studied them for a few moments, then shook his head. “It could be a code representing a person or a service he rendered.”
“A painting he sold?”
“It’s possible. We need the key to break the code.”
We split up again and I searched the study for a reference to the code’s key. Finding nothing, I tried the sitting room, but again, found nothing. He had some fine things on display, several of them artefacts that appeared to have been dug up from archaeological sites. He certainly liked his Ancient Roman objects. Aside from incomplete pottery pieces, there were tiles and coins, clay tablets and even some jewelry. Some would have cost a fortune, but from the look of the amounts in the account book, he could afford them.
I sat on one of the armchairs and listened to Harry quietly moving about in another room. If I were Ambrose McDonald, where would I keep my code’s key? Did I even need one? Perhaps I kept it in my head. Perhaps the letters referred to the initials of something. They couldn’t be the initials ofsomeone. There were too many. The interesting thing about them was that they were repeated. There were four unique ones, but each of those four appeared several times, at regular intervals and with the same amounts listed next to them. There was only one reason for a pattern like that.
I closed the book with a thud and leapt up. I found Harry looking under the mattress in a spare bedroom. “They’re names of people he’s blackmailing,” I said. “People are paying him to keep quiet.”
Chapter7
Ipointed out the four unique entries in the ledger, each one repeated on a monthly basis. “There are four people, all paying differing amounts on different days.”
Harry peered over my shoulder. His chest brushed my back, but if our close proximity affected him as much as it did me, he showed no sign. He was entirely preoccupied with the book. “If those codes refer to names, it won’t be too difficult to crack it. We already know he might be blackmailing the Bunburys.”
“But not the Livingstones,” I added. “Mr. Livingstone refused to pay, and that’s why Amelia’s secret got out—her father refused to pay the blackmail Mr. McDonald demanded for his silence.” I pointed to the letter E in each of the codes. It appeared twice in several entries. “E is the most commonly used letter in the English language.”
Harry shook his head. “But not necessarily in codes.”
“Could it represent the letter B? B for Bunbury?” I counted on my fingers as I spelled the name in my head. “It appears in the right spot and there are seven letters in those entries and seven in Bunbury.”
Harry clicked his fingers then strode out of the room. I followed and joined him at the dressing table in the main bedroom. He picked up the book on Caesar and flipped to the index then found the page he wanted. He tapped his finger on a table with two columns, each listing the letters of the alphabet. In the left-hand column, the letters were ordered from A to Z. In the right-hand column, the alphabet started at D and ended at C, but was otherwise in order.
“I thought so,” he said. “It’s the Caesar Cipher.”
“The what?”
“It’s the code Julius Caesar developed while on military campaign. If his plans fell into enemy hands, they couldn’t be deciphered without knowing the cipher. It’s very simple. All you do is shift the alphabet along by a particular number of places, like in this table. The number of shifted places is called the key. Caesar usually used three, as it does here as well as in McDonald’s ledger. So the letter A is now represented by the letter D, B is represented by E, C is represented by F and so on until the letter Z is represented by C. All one needs to know to break it is what numerical key is used.”
