I dropped into the other chair and looked again at the sheet of paper we’d used for our latest attempt at a cipher. “My daily woman says she can keep Pickwick for the night,” I said. I’d gone down the hall to use the boardinghouse’s only telephone.
James shook his head, staring down at the paper. “God knows how you picked up a dog.”
“It doesn’t matter how,” I said, not wanting to think about Mr. Bagwell. “But I’ve been a dog owner for less than a day, and already I’ve fallen down on the job.” I motioned to the paper, which was on the table next to the three telegrams and the three photographs, which I’d also shared with James. “I thought that last one would work.”
“Bloody hell. It doesn’t.”
I was quiet for a moment, rubbing my stockinged feet. Despite everything—the fear, the uncertainty, Ramona’s murder, the fact that it had almost been my murder, too—part of me was humming with excitement at being here, alone with James in his little flat. I liked watching him work. I liked what the rainy light did to his handsome, intelligent face. After that scorching kiss in the doorway, I wasn’t certain I’d be able to concentrate. But we had quickly become immersed in the puzzle of Gloria’s final week, working together as easily as if we’d done it for years, the seriousness of it doing nothing to diminish the quiet pulse of excitement in my veins.
James gazed down at the desktop, unseeing, his head still in his hands. “It’s the three-digit sequence that makes no sense,” I said. “Except for ‘44,’ which is two digits.”
We’d tried everything to figure out what the numbers meant, marrying numbers to letters in a code. We knew which client the Dubbses were—277—and we had tried to work backward, cracking the other names from there. We’d tried master code words—guessed, of course—used as a key, numeric patterns, mathematical algorithms, everything we could think of. It made sense that a combination of either two or three letters would represent a set of initials: first name, last name, and a third letter for the middle name inserted whenever there was a possibility of duplicates. But it seemed that what made sense was obviously not the case.
What mattered most to us, of course, was not the week’s schedule, but the number Gloria herself had written in—321B—on the day before she died. If we could crack her code, we could figure out where she’d gone that day, the appointment so secret that even Davies hadn’t known about it.
“It can’t possibly be a simple list, can it?” James asked. “A simple list of names in order, with every new client given a number?”
“The highest number on that list is 321,” I replied. “Even if that entry isn’t part of the same code, the second highest number is 277. That means that Gloria knew some three hundred names, associated with their random numbers, in her head.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Tell me, did you meet Gloria?”
“I know, I know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem likely. And if she had a written codebook marrying the names to the numbers, then there would have been no reason to have a code at all in the first place.” He lifted his head and leaned back in his chair again. “There’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to ask Merriken at Scotland Yard.”
I bit my lip. Davies had supposedly given the inspector Gloria’s schedule, so if we got the information in turn, we could use it to map the code for the missing name. “He’s going to want to know why. That means we have to show him this paper with the unknown name.”
“So we show it to him,” James said. “He’s the police, after all. What do we have to lose?”
If Inspector Merriken saw the paper with Gloria’s unknown appointment on it, he’d write it up in his files. And that meant George Sutter would see it. And George Sutter would get no more information from me. “I don’t want to.”
“Ellie, this could be the key. Gloria went somewhere the day before she died, and she didn’t tell anyone. Then she left a note for her brother saying, ‘Tell Ellie Winter to find me.’ There must be a connection. There simply must be.”
“The number sign,” I said, changing the subject. “Before the mystery number. None of the others has a number sign, but the mystery number says ‘#321B.’ That looks like an address to me. Maybe it isn’t part of the other code at all.”
James ran a hand over his jaw. I could hear the rasp of his stubble. It was a light shadow, blond mixed with caramel brown, and the sound of his hand traveling over it reminded me of its rough feel on my skin. “That is a possibility, yes.”
“Then there’s no point telling the inspector about it, because the information Davies gave him can’t help us.”
He sighed. He picked up the near-empty bottle of wine, filled my glass, slid it toward me on the desk. He’d had very little wine, I noticed—barely half a glass. Since there was no one else here, I supposed I must have drunk the rest of it. Against the wall, the sacks of mail—the deathbed visions, the accounts of fairies and pixies and poltergeists—hulked in the shadows. “All right, Ellie. You win. Keep your secrets.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, then shut it again. There was no point in lying to him.
“It isn’t because I don’t trust you,” I said finally.
He shrugged. He’d folded back the sleeves of his white shirt, and I watched the strong, fine bones of his wrist, the faint trace of blue veins through the warm skin. “Of course not. It’s just that you want me to help you without giving me all of your information.”
“James, I simply don’t know,” I said, pushing back my chair and standing. I picked up my wineglass and took it with me as I started to pace again. All I had were theories about who George Sutter worked for; if I talked to James about George, was I putting him in danger? “I haven’t put all of it together myself. Besides, I don’t think you’ve told me everything, either.”