The Reichenbach Problem, Page 26

  Stevenson believes this to be the case. In Jekyll and Hyde, he explores this hidden potential in us all. We all seek to become superhuman. We all believe we have a destiny. But in our pursuit of determining our calling, do we run the risk of following the wrong path and end up unlocking the monster in us all? On the other hand, there are many academics who nowadays believe that evil is inherent. We are either born with the propensity for wrongdoing or we are not. They believe that this inclination is evident in our facial features, and even the length and characteristics of our limbs. There has been much extensive research in this area.

  And then, of course, we are different people in different relationships. We can appear a fool to one person and a hero to others. Like a consummate actor, we are able to adjust our personality to accommodate the person we are talking to; to conform to their image of us. This alchemy could easily unlock whatever evil may or may not be lying dormant inside any individual.

  I looked across briefly at Werner. Yes, he could slip, just as easily as may any of us.

  Having achieved a degree of intimacy with the Bavarian, through discussing something as precious and painstaking as a manuscript born of his spiritual, creative soul, I felt emboldened enough to address another matter that had been occupying my thoughts.

  “Günther.”

  “Yes, Herr Doctor?”

  “May I speak frankly?”

  “You may.”

  “Mevrouw van Engels. When I left her with you to go and track down her husband, she was unmarked. When I next saw her, she had collected an abrasion on her face. Do you know anything about this?”

  His face assumed an expressionless aspect. His eyes became as flat, dark and emotionless as an ancient furnace pond deep in the Sussex Weald. I recognized this emptying. It was the face of contumacy. The eyes betrayed a lie. That is to say, liars do not realize that this studied “innocence” is the strongest evidence of the exact reverse.

  “Nein.” He stood abruptly, gathered his masterpiece, bid me good-day and left. This was all done, it seemed, in one simple, flowing movement that left me barely able to raise myself from my seat as a courtesy towards a departing guest.

  “Well,” I said to myself out loud. “Well, well, well,” I continued as I pottered around my room, tidying this and that for no apparent reason. I was trying to gather my thoughts in order that I may make either head or tail, or perhaps both, of Werner’s curious, precipitous departure. It occurred to me a moment later that he had been looking over my shoulder during the course of his lie. Looking over my shoulder would mean looking at the balcony next to mine. A balcony attached to the van Engelses’ room. I stepped outside and noted that there was nobody there; in evidence, at least. That there might have been someone there was, naturally, a possibility. That they had heard me ask my question would therefore also be a possibility. Although there could also be another reason why Werner had felt it necessary to leave as quickly as possible. On the one hand, I had been reading, and commenting on, his manuscript. On the other, I had not yet begun to peruse van Engels’ red ribbon-wrapped stories. My Bavarian friend might conceivably have felt, if he had glimpsed a van Engel on their balcony, that he had jumped the queue.

  I made my way downstairs to order lunch in my room. I did not feel like facing anyone over the dining room table. I needed time and space to think things through. I hoped, as I went down and came back up, that I would not encounter anyone, either. In the event, I did not. Anton, in the meantime, had been as distant but as diligent as ever.

  My lunch was a surly, solitary affair. I could enjoy neither the good, Swiss mountain food nor the good, Swiss mountain scenery. Preoccupied, I found that I had returned to a fretful state and was unable to make sense of anything again. I wished, most earnestly, that I could receive some sudden “dog that barked in the night” revelation. I longed for an event that would explain all or, at the very least, show me the clear path ahead. Alas, to no avail. As I worked and reworked the details of the past few days over and over again in my mind, I found that they were growing more and more tangled. By the end of my lunch I was exhausted, frustrated and furious both with myself and with the entire situation. Frau van Denecker was right. I would be best advised to simply chuck it all. Throw the whole affair into the air like a deck of cards and walk away, liberated.

  I sat and smoked a pipe briefly and then wandered back into my room. Presently I noted a scratching sound, like a mouse behind the skirting. I realized that something was being pushed under my door. I crossed to it and picked it up.

  Another telegram.

  I inspected it. It had been slit and resealed in the traditional manner. The paper along the bottom was still damp with glue. My fingers trembled slightly as I opened it. I knew that it was from Flemyng and that it would give me at least a start along some of the avenues I was exploring. Once open, the wire confirmed the sender.

  The cricket scores. Now we are getting somewhere, I thought. Good for you, Flemyng.

  But my eager expectation was short-lived.

  What I had in my hands was simply a stream of ticker-tape, set out on a telegram form, but not broken up. Despite myself, I noted with some amusement that the Swiss clerk had been unable to make head nor tail of them, being English cricket scores, a code in themselves. I consequently had to spend the first fifteen minutes transposing the strips into a recognizable scorecard at my escritoire.

  Once I had set out the initial batting scores and bowling analysis in some sort of order, I bent to the task of analysing the first few names and figures. Unusually, they seemed to be the details of an obscure tour match, the visit of a Netherlands team to Yorkshire. The batting order consisted of a list of names such as Eyken, de Haas, de Groot, van den Bosch and van Oosterzee.

  I took up my Bible, turned to the Psalms and dallied a little with the figures attached to the names. I quickly found, to my exasperation, that they had no secrets to reveal to me at all.

  It was evident, as far as I could tell, that Flemyng had missed the point entirely.

  Or he had not come to terms with my cipher at all.

  Either way, I felt suddenly very much at a loss as to what to do next. With a creeping desperation, I returned to the figures and wrestled with them, trying to apply my format every which way. None of them produced any fruit.

  I cast my pen down upon the blotter and let out a whoosh of air in bitter frustration.

  I stood up from my seat and, I confess, in a fit of petulance, flung myself backwards onto my bed. I felt, embarrassing though it is to admit, close to tears. I turned my head to one side and stared unseeingly at the wall for quite some considerable time.

  Had Flemyng missed the point entirely? Was he inept? Could I trust him? If I could not trust him… was he implicated in all of this in some way? Were there dark and mysterious forces at work beyond my own superficial understanding of events? Was, perhaps, Whitehall infiltrated by some secret organization bent upon the destruction of the British government? Perhaps even Steen was involved? It would explain much. Brown, possibly, was their agent. He had been discovered and killed. Conceivably Frau von Denecker knew more about this than I understood also. Was she trying to get me out of the way, to avoid having to have me disposed of, just as she had done with Brown? If indeed he had been disposed of on her orders… Was this why Francesca was so keen for me to leave? Had she, as I had had occasion to speculate before, used the subterfuge of a “psychic” message that I was in danger to frighten me into such a course of action?

  Had cruel and wilful chance, having thrown me into this cauldron, caused me to contact the very man in Whitehall who needed to know, for the worst reasons, what was going on in Switzerland?

  It explained a lot.

  I sat up on my bed with a lurch. My heart surged with anxiety. My breath was shallow and I became intensely fearful. I tried to calm myself and retain some sense of perspective. But to no avail. I tried to tell myself that my imagination was running away with me. The mind that had conceived
Sherlock Holmes had started to see shadows and hobgoblins where, most probably, there were none. I forced myself to think. To rationalize. But then I slipped back into irrationality and took the last absurd step of my current fixation. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes’s spirit had indeed been manifested in this place. Perhaps all the weird and convoluted conspiracies I had conjured up over the past two or three years had been manifested with him. I emitted a whimper of dismay and flopped upon my back again.

  It is to the credit of the mind, rather than its owner, that despite my personal alarm and paranoia, it chose to carry on mulling the matter over somewhere down in its deeper recesses while I fiddled away inanely up top. As the time passed, it started to send messages of encouragement and insight up onto the surface of my consciousness. Little signals that said: Hold hard, old man. Think I’ve got something. Bear with me, there’s a good fellow. Eventually, my subconscious mind’s assiduousness and downright doggedness paid off. Soon after, my superficial self began to listen to the signals being sent repeatedly from below.

  Flemyng was no fool. Not according to all the admittedly limited evidence so far. He had said in his last message that he had, eventually, understood what was being asked of him. Therefore, my mind told me, he would have sent what was required. Just in a different form. It was I who was the sluggard when it came to unlocking my own cipher.

  So, armed with that logic, I decided to return to the scores and work out exactly what my contact had done.

  Sitting at the desk, I gazed at the wire again. What had I called these scores? Obscure. One might also have called them dull and uninteresting. The Dutch do not excel at cricket. This is why they come on tours to play Yorkshire club sides, rather than full-blown national teams. No doubt, one day, being the determined and proud race that they are, they will eventually come up with a side that can compete at the highest level.

  Nevertheless, these scores appeared of very little general interest. I began to wonder whether, far from being addled, Flemyng had added an extra dimension to my cipher, so he could cover the tracks and protect me. In short, if the Dutch cricketers would forgive me, he had made the information uninteresting; at least, to the casual reader. Certainly, it was unremarkable. This was definitely the effect that it had on me. Would it have had the same effect upon the person or persons unknown who had decided to read my messages? They would have received this one, begun to unpick it, and then rapidly tired of the task. Or they may have felt it so insurmountable as to be beyond them. Perhaps this was why the glue was still wet? Perhaps it had been passed on to me much more quickly than usual because it had been deemed of no consequence.

  It fell to me, therefore, to persevere, and set out every last statistic that Flemyng had forwarded.

  After a few more minutes of painstaking endeavour, I found lying before me in scorecard form the remainder of the Dutch match and, much more hopefully, the entire first innings of a Surrey versus Nottinghamshire match at the Kennington Oval. This was more like it, I thought. Steen may well have told Flemyng that I was a Surrey man. This may have been why he had chosen this particular match, and a further clue that I may, at last, be into the substance of the thing.

  Surrey vs Nottinghamshire at the Kennington Oval

  SURREY 1st Innings

  1

  R. Abel

  b. Shacklock

  1

  2

  Mr W. W. Read

  c. Robinson b. Shacklock

  16

  3

  G. A. Lohmann

  b. Shacklock

  10

  4

  J. M. Read

  run out

  45

  5

  *Mr J. Shuter

  c. and b. Shacklock

  2

  6

  R. Henderson

  c. Dixon b. Attewell

  7

  7

  W. H. Lockwood

  st. Dunn b. Shacklock

  0

  8

  Mr E. C. Streatfeild

  b. Barnes

  22

  9

  W. Brockwell

  b. Shacklock

  5

  10

  J. W. Sharpe

  c. Dunn b. Flowers

  17

  11

  †Mr A. F. Clarke

  not out

  0

  Extras

  Byes

  4

  Total

  129

  NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 1st Innings

  1

  A. Shrewsbury

  b. Lockwood

  6

  2

  *Mr J. A. Dunn

  run out

  12

  3

  W. Gunn

  b. Lockwood

  58

  4

  W. Barnes

  c. Lohmann b. Abel

  6

  5

  W. Flowers

  b. Lockwood

  27

  6

  F. J. Shacklock

  c. Clarke b. Lockwood

  3

  7

  W. Attewell

  b. Lockwood

  6

  8

  Mr J. S. Robinson

  c. Abel b. Lockwood

  10

  9

  Mr A. O. Jones

  b. Lockwood

  6

  10

  H. B. Daft

  not out

  2

  11

  †M. Sherwin

  c. Brockwell b. Lockwood

  0

  Extras

  Byes

  9

  Total

  145

  Nottinghamshire Bowling

  Overs

  Maidens

  Runs

  Wickets

  Attewell

  15

  2

  42

  1

  Shacklock

  16

  3

  59

  6

  Barnes

  10

  4

  12

  1

  Flowers

  7

  2

  12

  1

  Surrey Bowling

  Lohmann

  8

  1

  20

  0

  Lockwood

  21

  7

  37

  8

  Abel

  21

  6

  18

  1

  Sharpe

  17

  1

  40

  0

  I took up my Psalms again and began to write out the numbers in the sequence I had put forward to Flemyng, bowlers first. First bowler: Attewell of Nottinghamshire. Good man, as it happened. Number of overs bowled, 15. Number of maidens bowled (overs bowled from which there resulted no score), 2. So that was Psalm 15 verse 2. I then turned to the batting figures. Batsman Abel (Abel by name, able by nature), one run (though not so able on this occasion). I turned to the fifteenth psalm and looked at the first word of the second verse. It was “he”.

  “Promising, very promising,” I muttered under my breath. I continued working through the procedure and found that the scores were producing words that displayed a certain structure and logic; nouns and verbs. It was most encouraging. Moreover, Flemyng had added a wonderful little finesse of his own. I had suggested, to break the cipher up and give it a further irregularity, that Run Outs and Not Outs should not be counted. He, the bright young fellow in Whitehall, had turned that to his advantage and was using those elements as punctuation.

  I sat back in my chair and looked at the words I had extracted from the mass of names and figures before me, and which the Psalms had graciously yielded up as fruit of my labours.