‘When I looked at your crossword puzzle earlier,’ said James, ‘the sentences all appeared to be normal, but they were strange, slightly nonsensical. Making sense but not making sense, all at the same time. That’s exactly what the letter was like. Everything’s wrong about it. Even the date.’
‘I agree,’ said Pritpal. ‘And that was only the smallest of the errors.’
‘What was the biggest?’ said James.
‘The names of the boys from the Crossword Society,’ said Pritpal. ‘Codrose and the Head weren’t to know. In fact I am probably the only person who would know. We don’t keep a membership list, after all.’
‘Know what?’ said James.
‘About Luc Oliver and Speccy Stevens.’
‘What about them?’ said James, who was growing more and more impatient.
‘Neither of them is in the Crossword Society,’ said Pritpal. ‘In fact I would bet you good money that they do not even exist.’
James stared at Pritpal.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘This is getting interesting.’
‘I believe the letter is a cipher,’ said Pritpal.
‘What’s a cipher?’
‘A coded message,’ said Pritpal. ‘A puzzle. To an outsider it might appear quite straightforward, but anyone here at Eton would pretty soon spot that it was full of mistakes. Though I think they are not mistakes at all. I think they are clues.’
‘It’s a pretty elaborate puzzle,’ said James. ‘A whole letter.’
‘It is exactly the sort of thing Fairburn would do,’ said Pritpal. ‘He always did have a somewhat odd sense of humour.’
‘Would he go so far as to pretend to quit?’ said James. ‘Because if it is a joke, then he hasn’t let the Head Master or Codrose in on it.’
‘He doesn’t play by the same rules as everyone else,’ said Pritpal. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him to write this letter as a sort of test. Maybe he even set it for us boys to solve. “The mystery of the disappearing master”.’
James smiled. ‘Do you really think he’d do a thing like that?’ he said.
‘I do.’ Pritpal nodded. ‘As I said, Fairburn is a very eccentric man. He loves codes and puzzles and mathematical problems.’
‘All right,’ said James, crossing his legs and pulling one ankle up on to his thigh. ‘Supposing it is some sort of a puzzle, where do we start?’
‘With Luc Oliver and Speccy Stevens, obviously,’ said Pritpal. ‘They are the most glaring false notes, the first thing I would be expected to notice. So we must first work out what they might mean.’
James stared at him blankly. ‘How?’ he said.
Pritpal grinned at James. His eyes gleaming with excitement.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘And I will show you…’
Pritpal settled himself at the table and wrote out the two names on a piece of paper.
‘They stand out in the letter like a pair of sore thumbs,’ he said. ‘Fairburn must have known they would be the first thing I spotted. They are the most obvious mistakes, so perhaps they are the most obvious type of clue.’
‘And what’s that?’ said James. ‘You must remember I’m new to this.’
‘The easiest and most obvious clues are anagrams,’ said Pritpal. ‘You know what an anagram is, I presume.’
‘I’m not a complete idiot,’ said James. ‘An anagram is when you muddle letters up and change their order to make a new meaning. Like “Same Hatred” is an anagram of Head Master.’
‘Or “Death Smear”,’ said Pritpal and the two of them laughed.
James stared at the letters in front of him.
LUC OLIVER SPECCY STEVENS
He tried jumbling them up and rearranging them in his head, but he was getting nowhere. The possibilities seemed endless.
‘Do you jab demons?’ said Pritpal after a while.
‘What are you talking about?’ said James.
‘It’s an anagram of James Bond.’
‘Very clever,’ said James, ‘but it’s not helping solve this puzzle. I haven’t a clue where to start.’
‘Aha!’ said Pritpal. ‘You’ve got it.’
‘I have?’
‘Yes. The first thing you must do with any code, or puzzle, is establish a context,’ said Pritpal.
‘You’re going to have to explain,’ said James. ‘Maybe I am a complete idiot after all.’
‘Well, let’s say, for example, I gave you the letters P-R-O-U-E-E,’ said Pritpal. ‘And said they were an anagram. You’d fiddle around, trying to rearrange them, and eventually, after a lot of head scratching, you would probably stumble across the answer.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ said James, trying to make a word from the letters.
‘But supposing I told you it was an anagram of a continent,’ Pritpal went on. ‘Then you’d get it straight away.’
‘Europe,’ said James.
‘Exactly,’ said Pritpal. ‘You have a context, you see? As another example, let us imagine that there is a war on, and our army intercepts a secret coded message from the enemy. They know it is from an airfield, so they assume that the message will be about aeroplanes and suchlike. There will be technical terms in it – makes of plane, numbers of planes, weather conditions, and words like fog or cloud. The code breakers will make up a list of likely words and then look through the message for coded words that might match the words they are looking for. And they will look for patterns and repeated words, until they find one word that fits. And once you solve one word, the rest will easily follow. You see, when you know what a message is about, you know where to start looking for clues. So what is this message from Fairburn about?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ said James.
‘Yes we do,’ said Pritpal. ‘It is a cipher, a puzzle. So what are we looking for?’
‘We’re looking for clues,’ said James, feeling like he was saying something stupid.
‘Exactly.’ Pritpal grinned at him. ‘So look at the letters again and tell me if you can see any clues.’
James looked again, but still saw nothing.
LUC OLIVER SPECCY STEVENS
‘Look at the name “Luc”,’ said Pritpal. ‘Does it not seem odd to you? Why did Fairburn choose that particular name? Those particular letters?’
‘I don’t know,’ said James crossly. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘A clue.’ Pritpal jabbed his finger down on the paper. ‘Look!’
‘Where…?’ said James, and then he saw it and laughed. ‘Rearrange “Luc” and you get “clu”. Add an “e” and you have your “clue”. It’s obvious once you see it,’ he said.
‘And what do you do with a clue?’ said Pritpal
‘You try to solve it,’ said James and even as he said it he saw the word solve, using the ‘S’ from ‘Speccy’ and some of the letters from ‘Oliver’.
He showed Pritpal who nodded enthusiastically.
‘Already we have two possible words,’ he said crossing the letters out. ‘ “Solve clue”, or, more likely, “Solve clues”.’
James looked at what they were left with.
I R P C C Y S T E V E N
‘We have fewer letters,’ said Pritpal, tapping his teeth with his pencil. ‘But it is harder; there are no obvious words to go with the two we already have.’
‘What about “seven”?’ said James. ‘ “Solve seven clues”?’
‘You are learning fast,’ said Pritpal. ‘That feels right. But what would it leave us with?’
‘I-R-P-C-C-Y-T,’ said James and he sighed. ‘We need to think again. There’s no word you can make out of those letters.’
‘You don’t think so?’ said Pritpal, scribbling something down on the paper. He turned it round so that James could read it.
SOLVE SEVEN CRYPTIC CLUES
James whistled and sat back in his chair. ‘That’s surely no coincidence,’ he said. ‘It is a puzzle.’ He grinned at Pritpal. ‘One clue solved and six to go. Do you suppose there’s a prize?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pritpal. ‘With Fairburn, the fun is always in solving the puzzle. The solution is its own reward.’
‘But surely this is something bigger,’ said James. ‘Why would he go to all the trouble of actually disappearing off the scene?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pritpal, jumping up and rubbing his hands together. ‘We must get to work and solve the rest of the clues.’
‘There’s only one small problem,’ said James.
‘What is that?’
‘Codrose has the letter.’
‘Ah. That is tricky,’ said Pritpal and he sank on to James’s bed, deflated. ‘I don’t suppose he would give it back to me.’
‘Fat chance,’ said James. ‘They’re worried about Fairburn. They think he’s gone crackers. No. Codrose will have locked that letter safely away in his study somewhere.’
‘Then we will just have to get it back,’ said Pritpal.
‘You’re not normally this bold,’ said James.
‘Ah, but this is a puzzle,’ said Pritpal. ‘I love puzzles. Can you get the letter out for me?’
James looked at his friend. He couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across his face. A familiar feeling of excitement had already gripped his heart, making it beat faster. He felt like someone waking up after a long sleep.
He leant back in his chair and stretched, his joints cracking.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
3
The Raid on Codrose’s
The following afternoon at three o’clock James was hiding in the dark, cramped space beneath a sideboard in the House dining room. He had been waiting there since lunchtime, surrounded by the smell of floor polish and dust. He looked at his pocket watch. It was time. If all had gone to plan the other members of the Danger Society should be in position.
The Danger Society had been founded by Perry Mandeville and was a club made up of boys like himself who wanted a bit of extra excitement in their lives. The society had been quiet lately. The damp, cold weather didn’t inspire the boys to be doing anything more adventurous than huddling round a fire trying to keep warm.
But not today.
James’s friend, Andrew Carlton, was on the roof. Just before lunch Carlton had come over from his own House and James had shown him his secret route to get up on to the top of the building, using a crawl space beneath the bathroom floor that led to a disused storeroom with a skylight. It was a route that James used if he ever needed to get out of the House after lock-up. Carlton was a couple of years older than James and, although a keen member of the Danger Society, he had a level head and could be relied on not to panic or get carried away.
He was crouching by a large glass dome that looked down into Codrose’s study, flattened against the sloping side of the roof, and keeping perfectly still. He had a clear view of Codrose sitting at his desk, reading a letter. Carlton could see right down on to the top of his head were there was a perfectly circular bald patch about as large as a penny.
Ten minutes earlier, as arranged, Pritpal had asked Codrose if he had heard anything more from Mr Fairburn and then talked about a couple of passages from the letter. Afterwards, as hoped, Codrose had come straight up to his study, removed a key from inside a hinged wooden globe that opened out into two halves, unlocked a drawer in his desk, and taken a letter out.
Carlton had watched the whole thing. He was as sure as he could ever be that it was the letter from Fairburn.
He heard a whistle that meant that Perry and Gordon Latimer were in place below, and he gave his answering signal by flicking a small pebble over the top of the roof. It clattered down the other side into the gutter.
Everything was set and ready to go.
Perry and Latimer heard the rattle of the pebble. They looked both ways along Judy’s Passage to double-check that there was no one coming, then Perry lifted his hat to reveal a half-brick carefully balanced on top of his head.
‘Here goes,’ he said, weighing it in his hand, and then he hefted it as hard as he could at a ground-floor window.
There was a loud, satisfying smash, and the two boys started up a terrible racket, shouting and yelling.
‘There he goes!’
‘Did you see him?’
‘He went that way.’
‘Catch him, somebody!’
There was movement within the building, boys were coming to the windows and peering out to see what was going on.
Presently the Dame appeared.
‘What on earth is going on?’ she said, and Perry and Latimer started jabbering away at her, both at the same time.
‘It was a boy.’
‘We saw him.’
‘A local boy.’
‘From the town.’
‘He ran up and threw a brick through the window.’
‘We tried to catch him.’
‘He looked a terrible ruffian.’
The Dame bustled back inside, tutting and clucking.
The next person to see her was Carlton, up on the roof. He watched as she came into Codrose’s study and told him what had happened.
In a moment, Codrose was up. He hastily returned the letter to the drawer, locked it and put the key back inside the globe before folding it shut.
As soon as he had left the room, Carlton flicked another pebble over the roof and hastily started scribbling on a large piece of paper he had brought with him.
From his hiding place beneath the sideboard James heard footsteps and in a moment he saw Codrose’s feet as they marched across the wooden floor closely followed by the Dame. As soon as he was quite sure that they had gone he slid out and ran over to the door that led into Codrose’s private quarters.
If he was caught here James would surely be beaten, but he wasn’t thinking about that now. He just had to get on and do the job as quickly and efficiently as possible.
He had been summoned to Codrose’s study on a few occasions so he knew the way well enough, and he ran up the carpeted stairway all the way to the top floor and pushed open the study door.
He glanced up at the dome in the ceiling where Carlton was holding the piece of paper against the glass for him to see.
Written on the paper in thick charcoal were the words:
KEY IN GLOBE – LETTER IN DESK – TOP RIGHT DRAWER
James soon had the drawer open and the letter out.
He had with him a camera, the very latest Leica mark III. It was the prize possession of Gordon Latimer, who was a member of the Eton Camera Club, and he had been very reluctant to let James borrow it.
There was daylight coming from the windows and the dome, but James switched on the ceiling light and a desk lamp to get as much illumination on to the letter as possible.
He hoped it would be enough.
He steadied his elbows on the back of a chair and held the camera as still as he could, focusing on the letter. Latimer had given him a crash course in photography that morning, showing James all the dials on the camera and explaining what they meant. Luckily James was a fast learner and had a good head for mechanical things.
The Leica had a slow shutter speed, which was vital in this low indoor light, and James fired off five pictures with slightly different exposures.
He flipped the letter over and took five more pictures of the back.
He was done.
The letter went back into the drawer. The key went back into the globe.
Then he switched off the lights and gave the thumbs up to Carlton who scurried away across the roof to make his escape.
James left the room, closing the door behind him.
The whole thing had taken less than two minutes.
He ran down the stairs three at a time and was soon back in the dining room, from where he cautiously peered out into the hallway.
Pritpal was waiting there for him, looking nervous and jumpy. He nodded that it was all clear. James crossed the hallway and passed the camera to Pritpal.
As casually as he could manage, Pritpal saunter
ed outside. Codrose and the Dame were still there, along with most of the senior boys from the House.
When they saw Pritpal come out into the alleyway, Perry and Latimer knew that James had got away safely and they could allow Codrose to go.
It had taken them all their ingenuity to keep him there. Perry had had to go so far as to say that the mysterious local hooligan had attacked him. He had made a big song and dance about showing Codrose the bruise, pulling up his shirt and vest and showing him some marks on his side.
Codrose wasn’t to know that Perry had got the marks playing the Field Game the day before.
At last the crowd began to disperse and Codrose went back inside after sending a younger boy off to fetch the caretaker to mend the broken window. Pritpal secretly handed the camera to Gordon Latimer and watched with some relief as the boy followed Perry back down Judy’s Passage.
It was over. Pritpal let out his breath and dried his sweaty palms on his trouser legs.
He hadn’t enjoyed the last half an hour one little bit. He wasn’t cut out for this kind of life. Solving puzzles was one thing, but break-ins, lying and vandalism were something else. In future he would leave this sort of escapade to James and his reckless friends.
That evening, just before six o’clock, Latimer delivered two decent prints, one of each side of the letter, which clearly showed Fairburn’s handwriting.
James hid the 35mm film behind a loose skirting board and sat down with his messmates to copy everything out in larger letters on to a big piece of card. When they had finished James stashed the two prints in the hiding place with the film.
They stuck the card to the back of a map of the world that James had hanging on his wall. Now they could all study the clues together and when they were done they could simply turn the map the right way round again and the cipher would be safely hidden from view.
‘Where do we start, then?’ said James, staring at the words on the card.
‘We know there are seven clues hidden here,’ said Pritpal, picking up a pencil and walking over to the wall. ‘And we have already solved one.’
He carefully circled the list of names from the Crossword Society, then underlined the two fake ones – Luc Oliver and Speccy Stevens.