Garden of Secrets Past

TWENTY-THREE


At breakfast the next morning, after working on the Times crossword for twenty minutes, Kingston had managed to pencil in half a dozen answers. One clue struck him as being particularly ingenious in its brevity: Happy with what’s inside. The seven-letter answer was content. Feeling pleased with himself and clearheaded, he put the puzzle aside and picked up Holbrook’s envelope, looking abjectly at the sequences of letters that had been written on it more than two hundred years ago. It was as if they were taunting him. Nine lines of scrambled letters of the alphabet—a couple of hundred at least, he estimated—stood between him and, in all likelihood, the incriminatory secret Veitch had uncovered. Without divine intervention or his discovering something that he’d overlooked in Veitch’s notes, he knew that finding the key was next to impossible. By now he’d dredged up every possible word, phrase, and sequence of letters he could think of that might be the key to reading the first of the two encrypted messages. He’d tried the letters found in Endicott’s pocket, the sequence of letters on the Arcadian monument, and a dozen others, all without success. He got up and made a fresh pot of tea.

Staring abstractedly out into the small, walled garden, he watched a gray squirrel scamper along the blackened brick wall and recalled the philosopher Heroux’s words to live by: “There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.” Spooning the loose Darjeeling into the warmed pot, he decided to start at square one, to conduct yet another overview of the case, making notes as he went. Back at the kitchen table, cup of tea at hand, he began by jotting down dates, random thoughts, questions, reminders of conversations, and people’s names—some connected by lines and arrows—in an attempt to refresh his memory on all the information he’d accumulated since starting on the case.

By the time an hour had passed he’d filled out a dozen sheets of paper. He went slowly through his disorganized notes, then reread them, hoping to find details or minutiae that he’d overlooked: a slip of the tongue, conflicting facts, contradictions, anything that could point to duplicity or guilt, or provide a clue to revealing the key phrase to the Winterborne code. He found nothing.

He poured himself some more tea and thought harder on it.

While he’d focused mostly on who was behind the murders, those trying to suppress Veitch’s putative bombshell, he hadn’t considered how much his antagonists might know about Veitch’s discovery. Whoever had rifled Veitch’s house and taken all his notes, writings, and everything related to his research might already have found out what the secret was, what impact it would have, and what repercussions might follow. That supposition, if correct, meant that they would also know about the Winterborne cipher, would have found out what the key phrase or phrases were, and could already have decrypted one or both codes. Kingston seriously doubted the last—solving the second code would certainly require expert help, but it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. He was convinced, too, that it was they—whoever they were—who had been following him and had sent the pressed flower to warn him off, knowing that he was getting closer to the truth and bent on exposing them.

There was an easy way to find that out, he realized. He needed to call Holbrook anyway. He reached for the phone, then hesitated. Was he making a nuisance of himself? he wondered. All these calls must be making the man wonder just what Kingston was so persistent about. He brushed aside the thought and picked up the phone.

His misgivings were unfounded. Holbrook seemed to welcome the call.

“You’ve got us all excited about the secret code now,” he said. “It’s all Libby talks about these days. What can I do for you?”

“Other than yourself, the architectural restorer, and the people at the archives company, Tyler, how many other people know about the existence of the letters on the envelope?”

A pause followed. “Well, no one … other than my wife and daughter. Why?”

“It’s not important,” Kingston answered quickly. “Just curious, that’s all.”

“Someone else did call asking about the frieze, though.”

“Really?”

“Yes. A woman. She said she was researching listed buildings in the county.”

“Did she leave a name?”

“I didn’t speak to her. My wife did. The name, though … I think it was Baker or Barker, maybe—” He hesitated. “Erase that. Just to be sure, I’d better ask Cassie. She’ll remember, but she’s not here right now. I’ll have to call you back.”

“Did your wife tell the woman about the papers?”

“I’m not sure. She might have.”

Kingston could hear a note of puzzlement in Holbrook’s voice and decided he’d let things go at that. Any more questions, he might start to get truly suspicious.

“I promise not to bother you again for a while, Tyler. Thanks for being so cooperative. It means a lot to me.”

The conversation ended there.

Standing at the kitchen counter, looking out the window, he thought about Winterborne and Holbrook’s disclosure. A woman researching listed houses would not be unusual, but nevertheless her interest could have been more than purely architectural. As he thought about it, “researching listed houses” was a rather vague job description, but those may have been Holbrook’s wife’s words. How many women were on Veitch’s list? he asked himself. He went to his study, retrieved the list, and brought it back to the kitchen. He laid the list on the table and wrote the names of the women only on a separate piece of paper, making a brief note alongside each name to remind him who was who. He quickly eliminated the two young women, Bridget Morley and Molly Henshawe, as he’d done before, and for the same reasons. Five names remained:



Victoria Morley

Graham Morley’s wife. Active in local politics and community issues.



Nicole Morley

Wife of Adrian Morley (retired).



Daisy Morley-Lytton

Lytton’s wife of 25 years. Antiques dealer.



Vanessa Decker

Distant cousin. Living abroad?



Jessica Henshawe

Oliver Henshawe’s ex-wife.



After studying them, he eliminated Victoria Morley as being too elderly and also living too far from Staffordshire, in Torquay. Then he crossed off Nicole Morley’s name for much the same reasons. He wrote a question mark by Daisy Morley-Lytton’s name and circled the remaining two, Vanessa Decker and Jessica Henshawe. Locating Jessica Henshawe shouldn’t be difficult. Her former husband would surely be able to help in that regard. Vanessa Decker was another problem entirely. If an Internet search came up empty, he would have to drop her from the list.

He cleaned up the kitchen and went to his study. After checking for new messages in his mail program—there were none—he turned his attention to Vanessa Decker. As he’d expected, Googling her name brought up pages of Facebook and Myspace listings, nearly all of them teenagers or young women. As a shot in the dark, he tried “Vanessa Morley,” getting the same results. He might have to give up on Vanessa Decker, he decided. That left one last person to contact, Oliver Henshawe, who should know the whereabouts of his ex-wife.

Later that afternoon, Kingston called Amanda. Dialing her number, he was embarrassed to realize that he’d been so consumed with the unexpected and unsettling events of the past days that a week had passed since they’d last talked. While he didn’t want to give her the impression that he was being oversolicitous, neither did he want her to feel that he’d forgotten her. Mostly because of the questions that Inspector Wheatley had asked about her, his guarded suspicions, Kingston had thought about the call and what he should say and had even toyed with the idea of asking her to Andrew’s lunch. She picked up after several rings, sounding out of breath.

“I’m sorry, Lawrence. I was out in the garden.”

“I won’t keep you long,” he said, trying to be as genial as possible.

“Just wanted to see how you’re doing. I’ve been meaning to call all week, but Andrew returned from a trip, and between spending time with him and a wasted drive down to Berkshire for an interview, the week just disappeared. Added to that, Andrew’s Open Garden is coming up and I try to help him with it every year.”

“Yes, I remember. You told me about it.”

Her tone was noticeably lackluster, but Kingston remained upbeat. “Perhaps you’d come down for the day. I know you would enjoy it and Andrew would like to meet you—I’ve told him about you, of course. You could stay overnight if you like. The house has four bedrooms and he’s doing a special brunch on Monday.”

“That would be nice—if I’m not behind bars.”

“Behind bars?”

Kingston winced. Wheatley had told her, then?

“Inspector Wheatley called me a couple of days ago. He wants me to go to the police station for questioning. Frankly, I’m beginning to dislike the man. I insisted that I’ve told him everything I know and it would be a waste of time, but he got very snippy, said ‘that remains to be seen.’”

“I met him this week. I was about to tell you. He wanted to compare notes, as he put it, and I must agree, he’s not exactly the most civil of civil servants. You’ve nothing to worry about, Amanda. It’s what they call a routine inquiry.”

“That’s hardly how he put it.”

Kingston tried to ease the conversation away from her upcoming interview with the inspector, but he knew by now that, despite his reassurances, her mind was elsewhere; she wasn’t the same Amanda he’d spent time with two weeks ago. He could only assume that Wheatley’s call had upset her more than she was ready to admit. She ended the conversation abruptly, promising to call Kingston after she’d met with Inspector Wheatley, to let him know how the interview went. Lowering the phone, Kingston wondered if inviting her to Andrew’s event had been a good idea. He wouldn’t tell Andrew he had done so, he decided. He thought no more of the call, and though the sun was not quite yet over the yardarm, poured himself a glass of Macallan and settled down with the crossword for a half hour or so.

* * *

That evening, after watching BBC News, Kingston took out the Winterborne cipher again with the faint hope that simply looking at it long enough might trigger a thought, a subtle clue, or an epiphany that would lead to finding the key phrase. He was still convinced that the arrow had been placed there to signify that there were two separate codes. For now, though, he would ignore the last seven lines and focus on the first two. Logically, the key phrase would be connected in some way to the frieze itself. He thought of the Ecclesiastes excerpt. That would certainly make sense. He pulled out the folder that contained everything connected to the case, took out the quotation and read it aloud:

Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

He studied it, trying to imagine which words or phrase he would select as a key phrase if he were encrypting the message. After a minute, he concluded that at least eight stood out. He took a sheet of paper and wrote down his first choice, WISDOM, followed by the remaining letters of the alphabet, excluding those that already appeared in WISDOM, as he had done when he’d demonstrated the Caesar shift to Andrew. He then placed this cipher alphabet under the plain alphabet. Under those two lines, he wrote the first two lines of the Winterborne code using a red pen.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ





WISDOMNPQRTUVXYZABCEFGHJKL





HEPYEVUAOTJGOTNPGVITUGINICHUM





ZCGIPYHUAUASJUYIGUVVEARGUOXH





He then tried to decode the Winterborne code using WISDOM as his key phrase. He started by matching the first red letter of the Winterborne code, H, to the H on the second-line cipher alphabet. It resulted in the letter W on the upper, plain alphabet, line. This wasn’t an encouraging start because to make an English word, there were only six letters that could follow W: four consonants and the letters H and R. If the next letter in the code was none of these, then the key phrase was incorrect.

The next letter of the code was E. He ran his fingers across the second line to find that E matched T in the upper, plain alphabet. He leaned back, disappointed. No English words started with WT. He checked his cipher alphabet to make sure he hadn’t made an error, then tried decoding it with each of the seven other words he’d chosen earlier, including ECCLESIASTES. None worked.