“More than simple,” Cheyne answered with unwilling admiration in his tone. “A dangerous toy, but I admit, deuced ingenious. But I don’t follow even yet. That would have left the drugged remains in the cup.”
“Quite so, but you have forgotten my other two bottles and my cloth. I poured the dregs from your cup into the empty bottle, washed the cup with water from the other, wiped it with my cloth, poured out another cup of coffee and drank it, leaving harmless grounds for any inquisitive analyst to experiment with.”
“By Jove!” said Cheyne, then adding regretfully: “If we had only tried the handle of the cup for fingerprints!”
“I put gloves on after you went over.”
Cheyne smiled.
“You deserved to succeed,” he admitted ruefully.
“I succeeded in drugging you,” Blessington answered, “but I did not succeed in getting what I wanted. Now, Mr. Cheyne, you would like to see the tracing. Show it to him, Dangle, while I go back to the other house for Miss Merrill.”
Dangle left the room, returning presently with the blue-gray sheet which had been the pivot upon which all the strange adventures of the little company had turned. Cheyne saw at a glance it was the tracing which he had secured in the upper room in the house in Hopefield Avenue. There in the corners were the holes made by the drawing-pins which had fixed it to the door while it was being photographed. There were the irregularly spaced circles, with their letters and numbers, and there, written clockwise in a large circle, the words: “England expects every man to do his duty.” Cheyne gazed at it with interest, while Dangle and Sime sat watching him. What on earth could it mean? He pondered awhile, then turned to his companions.
“Have you not been able to read any of it?” he queried.
Dangle shook his head.
“Not so much as a single word—not a letter even!” he declared. “I tell you, Mr. Cheyne, it’s a regular sneezer! I wouldn’t like to say how many hours we’ve spent—all of us—working at it. And I don’t think there’s a book on ciphers in the whole of London that we haven’t read. And not a glimmer of light from any of them! Blessington had a theory that each of these circles was intended to represent one or more atoms, according to the number it contained, and that certain circles could be grouped to make molecules of the various substances that were to be mixed with the copper. I never could quite understand his idea, but in any case all our work hasn’t helped us to find them. The truth is that we’re stale. We want a fresh brain on it, and particularly a woman’s brain. Sometimes a woman’s intuition will lead her to a lucky guess. We hope it may in this case.”
He paused, then went on again: “Another thing we tried was this. Suppose that by some system of numerical substitution each of these numbers represents a letter. Then groups of these letters together with the letters already in the circles should represent words. Of course it is difficult to group them, though we tried again and again. At first the idea seemed promising, but we could make nothing of it. We couldn’t find any system either of substitution or of grouping which would give a glimmering of sense. No, we’re up against it and no mistake, and when we think of the issues involved we go nearly mad from exasperation. Take the thing, Mr. Cheyne, and see what you and Miss Merrill can do. That is the original, but I have made a tracing of it, so that we can continue our work simultaneously.”
Cheyne felt himself extraordinarily thrilled by this recital, and the more he examined the mysterious markings on the sheet the more interested he grew. He had always had a penchant for puzzles, and ciphers appealed to him as being perhaps the most alluring kind of puzzles extant. Particularly did this cipher attract him because of the circumstances under which it had been brought to his notice. He longed to get to grips with it, and he looked forward with keen delight to a long afternoon and evening over it with Joan Merrill, whose interest in it would, he felt sure, be no whit less than his own.
Certainly, he thought, his former enemies had made a good beginning. So far they were playing the game, and he began to wonder if he had not to some extent misjudged them, and if the evil characters given them by the gloomy Speedwell were not tinged by that despondent individual’s jaundiced outlook on life in general.
Dangle had left the room, and he now returned with a bottle of whisky and a box of cigars.
“A drink and a cigar to cement our alliance, Mr. Cheyne,” he proposed, “and then I think our business will be done.”
Cheyne hesitated, while a vision of the private room in the Edgecombe Hotel rose in his memory. Dangle read his thoughts, for he smiled and went on:
“I see you don’t quite trust us yet, and I don’t know that I can blame you. But we really are all right this time. Examine these tumblers and then pour out the stuff yourself, and we’ll drink ours first. We must get you convinced of our goodwill.”
Cheyne hesitated, but Dangle insisting, he demonstrated to his satisfaction that his companions drank the same mixture as himself. Then Dangle opened the cigar box.
“These are specially good, though I say it myself. The box was given to Blessington by a rich West Indian planter. We only smoke them on state occasions, such as the present. Won’t you take one?”
Cheyne felt it would be churlish to refuse, and soon the three were puffing such tobacco as Cheyne at all events had seldom before smoked. Sime then excused himself, explaining that though business might be neglected it could not be entirely ignored, and Cheyne, thereupon taking the hint, said that
