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“I suppose so. When I try to explain, it seems so commonplace.”
“But you do remember a profound emotion?” Her voice was urgent now.
“Yes,” he said with certainty.
“Then that will be what Stoney meant you to see. The numbers must refer to what he was working on. We just have to figure it out. What does it all refer to?”
“I think we went there in…Oh God, it seems like another lifetime. It must have been in the early 1880s, or even before. I was young, I know that.” He felt strange even saying it aloud.
The woman who had broken complicated codes in wartime was staring at the figures on the backs of the photographs. There were twice as many on some, even three times as many. “It may not have anything to do with the photographs.” She was thinking aloud. “He put these numbers on them because he knew the memory would catch you. They don’t look like dates, but there’s a group here that could be. See? Several that are in 1933 or 1932. They could be months, and these could be days.”
“All in the last two years,” he observed. “But everything put into numbers. This is what really matters. The other numbers we’ve seen as we’ve looked through Stoney’s papers are just calculations. This is information.”
Josephine thought silently for a moment. “These could be map coordinates, but they are all sorts of places far apart, hundreds of miles. Different countries even. But
you could identify people by their addresses, I suppose. It seems a heavy-handed way of doing it, very approximate.” She laid out four photographs and then pointed to the sequence of numbers on the back of each that could be coordinates. She was frowning. “But even if it identifies the appropriate place where someone lived or worked, without more it doesn’t mean much…or even anything.”
“Then the last figures must be something that explains it.” He was guessing, grasping at straws. Had Stoney left him all the clues he had? There must be something else that he was missing.
Josephine was looking at him.
“What is it?” he asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
“Lucas, we can’t stay here much longer,” she said gravely. “If the police come back, they’ll take these from us, and neither of us has the ability to memorize these apparently random numbers. If he left anything else, we’ve got to find it and then leave, and quickly. Someone could easily return…” She did not bother to add what danger that would be.
Lucas nodded. She was saying it as if it were an apology. She knew him so well. No matter how he tried to disguise it or control it, she could always feel the distress in him as palpably as if it were electricity in the air. He thought it was one of the greatest gifts in life, to have someone know you so well and still love you. It was also a limitless responsibility.
“Yes,” he agreed. “We’ll take these photographs, give the house one last quick look around, and then leave. What are we going to do with Stoney’s things? Who do we give them to?”
“That’s tomorrow’s problem, not today’s,” she said firmly. “They’ll suit somebody. They’re of good quality. Let’s look around. If he knew this much, he knew the man intended to kill him, and that’s a horrible thought.”
“I know,” Lucas agreed. He stared around the room with no idea of what he was looking for. If Stoney knew that, in a matter of minutes, he was going to be killed by the man who was with him, what sign would he leave? What would he expect Lucas to find, other than the little pile of photographs, which obviously had been placed here long in advance, in case this should happen? Stoney had known of the danger, even understood it. Lucas felt slightly sick at the idea.
Josephine was thinking aloud. “It seems there was no weapon, except something to hit him over the head, like the spade I thought of before. The assassin was probably younger and a good deal fitter than Stoney.”
It was a terrible thought, walking around your own home with a man you knew was going to kill you. Lucas wanted to leave this place, at least get Josephine away from it. He was as cold as if the walls were made of ice. He was torturing himself, thinking of Stoney’s last minutes, and he knew it was pointless, but he still went on doing it.
And then something caught his eye. “Jo, that pile of books on the floor: Did you put them there when you were looking for something?” He pointed to them, stacked as if waiting to be returned to the correct shelves.
“What are they?” And then she looked at them and read the titles. She looked puzzled. “They don’t seem to have anything in common. What was he trying to say?”
Lucas kneeled down and studied them without moving anything. They were about all sorts of subjects: poetry, bird watching, a couple of novels, poetry again. What on earth had they in common? The first author was Robert Browning, the last William Butler Yeats. The rest were people he did not know: someone called Roland, others called Alan, Dawson, Lovell, and Evans. And Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat.
Then he saw it, as clear as day.
Josephine was staring at him. “Lucas?”
He said nothing.
“Lucas? What is it?”
He turned his eyes to her, his face pale. “Bradley.”
She looked confused.
“Look at the authors’ names, Jo. It’s not the subject at all, it’s the first letter of each name!” He pointed to all the titles. “Look closely! What does it spell?” Before she could answer, he said, “Bradley!”
“But Bradley is—”
