Ashby went with Wells, back to the office. Although he didn’t feel like doing any work that day, he pushed himself to go into his father’s room as he knew that time was growing short. Already, it was Wednesday and there were only four working days left before the Stratos hearing.
As soon as he got in the door, he saw a telex sitting on the desk. It was addressed to his father which wasn’t unusual. Most of Plantation’s clients were in different parts of the world and weren’t aware that his father had died, only a few days earlier.
The telex was unusual : it was around a foot in length after being rattled off by the teleprinter machine ; the ‘message’ comprised two lines of four digit numbers in columns and nothing else. It wasn’t signed and the identity of the sender wasn’t given.
Anyone else would have thrown it in the bin. But with an interest in numbers, he could see a pattern – it was a code. After five minutes, he’d unravelled it. The message said : “Information of interest. Speak soon.”
The girls in the teleprinter room told him that one or two similar telexes had arrived like that for his father in the past. But they couldn’t tell him the identity of the sender or the country it came from. When telexes like this had been taken to his father, he hadn’t appeared concerned that someone was sending them in error.
“He seemed to know what they were and always put them to one side to look at later,” said Tara, his secretary.
No telephone number for the sender was given so there was no way of finding out where they were coming from or who the author was.
Someone, somewhere was sending confidential information which only his father was intended to see. And the sender didn’t know that his father had already journeyed across the river Styx.
He decided to leave it for the time being. The sender might telephone him. Yet, all of this didn’t accord with how his father used to operate. Until he could somehow identify the sender, there was no way of knowing what the ‘information of interest’ was. It could have been about anything.