The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (87 page)

We turned away to the carriages that had brought us from the railway.

‘All the same,' I said, trying to cheer him, ‘Jackie Fisher has got Tirpitz snookered. There are five of these monsters building in yards on the Clyde and the Tyne. Tirpitz has not one. If he had one, he could not use it without deepening and widening the Kiel Canal to get from the North Sea to the Baltic, and dredging the approach to every dockyard. If he deepened those sea lanes, our thirty-three battleships could sail in and bombard him at close range.'

Holmes stamped impatiently over the downland.

‘It will not end there,' he said firmly, ‘mark my words.'

In this, he was right. Kaiser Wilhelm and his Grand Admiral spent many millions of pounds deepening and widening the Kiel Canal for the new High Seas Fleet, as well as dredging the sea routes to naval bases on the North Sea. The keels of their first Dreadnoughts were laid: A submarine fleet was under construction. Fisher's battleship had bought him time but not victory in the race. A new advantage must be sought but, for the present, the matter rested there. I heard no more from Holmes than the venomous insults exchanged between the First Sea Lord and Admiral von Tirpitz.

Tirpitz began putting about a story that Sir John Fisher had deliberately engineered a German naval scare in England in order to get increased naval estimates passed by Parliament. Indeed, Tirpitz claimed that Fisher had admitted this to the German naval attaché in London. On hearing this, Fisher sought out the attaché at an evening party, at which both were guests, and told him, ‘Tell Tirpitz—using the immortal words of Dr. Johnson—“You lie, sir, and you know it.”' Not another word was spoken. Such was the unhappy state of relations between the two great naval powers.

I now move forward to the point where these powers became antagonists in a period of preparation for a great European war. How tragic it seemed to those of us who remembered England and Germany as close allies during the reign of our great Queen Empress, Victoria. At her deathbed, King Edward and Kaiser Wilhelm had knelt in prayer together, as they were soon to walk behind her coffin, the one her son and the other her grandson. All this was put aside as the war hounds of Europe growled ever more menacingly across the narrow seas.

2

It was an afternoon of early autumn, when the trees in the park had lost very little of their summer green. The air of Baker Street was as warm as June and the shops still had their striped awnings pulled out above greengrocers' baskets and booksellers' tables. By instinct, Holmes and I could now tell when a cab or a carriage slowed to a halt outside the door of our lodgings. On the present occasion, however, I rose from my chair with a feeling that this vehicle lacked the cheerful harness rattle of the cabs that usually brought our visitors.

Through the net curtains I saw a twopenny bus on its way to Marble Arch, the sides placarded with advertisements for Old Gold Virginia Tobacco, Van Houten's Cocoa, and a new production of
The Rivals
at the Haymarket Theatre. On the far side of the street, hidden from view until the bus had passed, was a closed carriage. Its black coachwork gleamed, its brass lamps were immaculately polished, and a horse fit for the Ascot Gold Cup stood patiently between its shafts. A liveried coachman held open its door. Two men stepped down and prepared to cross the street. My attention was caught by a small discreet gold crown emblazoned on the black gloss of the carriage door panel.

There was no mistaking the first man as he came across the street. He had taken the precaution of wearing mufti, but even without his uniform Sir John Fisher was known to thousands from his photograph in the picture papers and his caricature in
Vanity Fair
. It was an open, honest face with a dour humour in the lines of the mouth and a quiet merriment in the pale eyes. The dark hair was short and neat, the complexion sallow, for he had been born in Ceylon. His enemies murmured that his mother had been a Cingalese princess—hence his wicked cunning and duplicity.

When I saw the man behind him, I understood the gold crown on the door panel. These two men had been friends for more than twenty years, since Viscount Esher supported Fisher in demanding a modern Royal Navy for a modern world and in reforming the Committee for Imperial Defence. It was believed that no two public men in England held such power. Twelve years earlier, Lord Esher had been appointed by the prime minister, Mr. Balfour, as permanent secretary to the Board of Works. Behind this banal title lay the reality of such influence behind the scenes as only a gray eminence can exert. Lord Esher's task was to superintend and maintain the homes, comforts, and ritual of the royal family. He had the ear of the monarch to an extent that most prime ministers would envy. He had installed the lift at Windsor Castle for the ailing Queen Victoria and had pushed her bath chair when she expressed a wish to see once more her childhood home at Kensington Palace. In 1897 he had staged the dazzling imperial pageant of her Diamond Jubilee, and persuaded his ‘Dear and Honoured Lady' to extend the route of her procession south of the River Thames, so that she might be seen and applauded by her poorer subjects. Small wonder that in the new reign, Esher remained the intimate of her son, Edward VII.

‘Hello,' said Holmes, standing behind me. ‘It seems they mean business. I suppose Jackie Fisher or Reggie Esher alone might suggest a pleasant social visit. Two of them together can only mean trouble of some kind.'

Presently there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Hudson, more flustered than was customary, ushered in our two distinguished visitors. There was a cordial babble of greetings, in the course of which I was introduced to Lord Esher, whom I had already recognised from his photograph in the
Illustrated London News
of the previous week. Then, from the depths of the armchair in which my friend had installed him, Fisher said: ‘My dear Holmes, I must come to the point of our visit with somewhat indecent haste. In a moment you will understand why. So far, the full details of this matter are known only to Esher and myself—and to one other person whose identity you will readily guess.'

‘Not Mr. Asquith, I think,' Holmes interrupted sardonically.

Esher shook his head.

‘No, gentlemen. Not even the prime minister is privy to the entire story. We are here with the knowledge and approval of King Edward himself. It seems that he reposes a good deal of confidence in the name of Sherlock Holmes.'

I thought that Holmes sounded a little too suave in his reply.

‘I was able to render His Majesty a small service some years ago in the so-called Baccarat Scandal. A most disagreeable affair of an officer and gentleman cheating at cards in his presence. It came, in the end, to a trial for libel. The Prince of Wales, as His Majesty then was, had been required to give evidence.'

Fisher turned a little and stared at him directly.

‘Cast your mind back to certain other cases that came your way at the time. The affair of the Naval Treaty, the blackmail of a crowned head by Miss Irene Adler, and, perhaps especially, the disappearance of the secret plans for the Bruce Partington submarine.'

‘Naturally I still have the papers relating to every case.'

Fisher's impatience was a driving force of his character. He turned to Holmes.

‘Never mind the papers. Did you—then or at any other time—acquire information relating to the ciphers of the German High Seas Fleet?'

‘Or any German system of codes, come to that,' added Lord Esher quietly.

Holmes looked at them for a moment as if he suspected a trick. He had filled his pipe but, perhaps out of deference to our guests, had not yet lit it.

‘The Imperial German Navy has had nothing to do with any case of mine,' he said presently, waving a match to extinguish it. ‘So far as I am aware.'

There was no mistaking the disappointment in the faces of our two visitors.

‘However,' he continued, ‘a practical working knowledge of coded messages is certainly necessary in my profession. I have deciphered the hieroglyphics of the Dancing Men and the riddle of the Musgrave Ritual. As you are no doubt aware, my solution in the Musgrave case led to the recovery of the ancient crown of the kings of England, lost by the Royal Stuarts after the execution of Charles I. You may also care to take away with you a small monograph of mine on the use of secret communications in the war of Greece against Persia during the fifth century
BC
. Despatches from Athens to Sparta were sent as meaningless strings of letters on a strip of cloth. When the strip was wound round a particular wooden baton, in a spiral and at precisely the angle known only to the sender and the recipient, the random letters formed themselves into words.'

‘Very interesting, Mr. Holmes,' said Lord Esher, who looked as though he did not find this story interesting in the least. ‘The question is whether, from your experience or your researches, you can break the German naval code—and do it within the next fortnight.'

‘If it is to be done, by all means let it be done quickly,' Holmes replied with that languid air of self-assurance that so irritated both his adversaries and Scotland Yard. ‘I daresay any fool could do it, given time. A fortnight sounds like a generous allowance for a man of moderate intelligence.'

‘I have to tell you,' Fisher interposed, ‘that our best cryptographers at the Admiralty have tried for two months without success.'

‘That does not surprise me in the least. Pray tell me what, if anything, is known about these most interesting ciphers. What are they used for?'

The First Sea Lord and Viscount Esher looked at one another and, by the slightest change of expression, seemed to agree silently that they must reveal more than they had intended.

‘Our instructions …' Fisher began.

‘From His Majesty, I presume?'

‘Our instructions are to tell you all that you may need to know in order to accomplish this. You will also understand why it must be done. It seems that we have a spy at the very heart of Admiralty intelligence. He has apparent access to warship design, speed, gunnery performance, and the devil knows what else. Let us not be self-righteous about it. I may tell you in strictest confidence that we have our own man in Berlin. He makes his reports to our naval attaché at the embassy.'

‘I should have been surprised had it not been so,' said Holmes equably.

‘According to this source, information is being passed by the traitor in our ranks to an enemy agent in this country. The encrypted messages are then transmitted by Morse code over a relatively short distance. We must assume that they are picked up by a German naval vessel in international waters, perhaps no more than five or ten miles from Dover or Harwich. The coded transcript then goes to the Ministry of Marine in Berlin, to the Wilhelmstrasse. Our man there has no official access to decoded messages and has seen only two, at considerable risk. Both related to Royal Navy gunnery signals. He has seen a number of transcripts, still encoded, and provided us with sequences of letters. These match certain sequences in Morse transmissions that our monitors have intercepted. It has been impossible to decipher more than a few words in all. Even that is mere luck. It seems plain that the code not only differs in every transmission; it differs from word to word in a single message.'

‘His Majesty is determined,' added Esher, ‘that the turncoat in our service shall be hunted out and put behind bars in the shortest possible time. He regrets only that in time of peace the scoundrel cannot be hanged or shot.'

Holmes raised his eyebrows.

‘Have a care, my lord! With my humble duty to His Majesty, he must do no such thing as hunt the rascal out and expose him to the world. Do you not see? In this game, the turncoat is your most valuable piece upon the board. If you can pick him out and leave him be, all may yet be well. If he is clapped behind bars, Tirpitz will close down the entire business and you will have lost the only thread that guides you through the maze. Let well alone.'

I do not think Lord Esher, to judge from the expression on his face, relished returning to his royal master and telling him that Sherlock Holmes thought his instructions mistaken.

‘If time is at a premium,' said Holmes enthusiastically, ‘may we have sight of these unusual documents?'

Sir John Fisher cast his eyes round the room. The disagreeable truth was that there was no surface large enough to display the transcripts except the worktable of Sherlock Holmes. This disreputable piece of furniture was stained by overzealous chemical experiments, while a medical scalpel lay in a butter dish, near a dismantled Eley revolver and a blood-stained nightstick peeping from its newspaper wrapping. Unabashed by this, Holmes all but swept the contents of the table to the floor in his eagerness to have the coded messages before him.

We arranged four chairs round the table. Admiral Fisher opened his briefcase. A folder containing fifty or sixty transcriptions of intercepted transmissions was laid before us. If I describe the first, it will do for all the rest. There were no words, merely blocks of fourteen letters at a time. The first line may suffice.

WTRYILJGDVJNLS DDPYUGSHMKRWEX CNBJJUSDTINCRL

How on earth such drivel could contain details of warship design, gunnery trials, speed at full steam, diesel consumption, and armored plating was beyond me. Fisher looked up at us.

‘You may save yourselves the trouble of trying to substitute one letter of the alphabet for another. Our cipher clerks have run the entire gamut in the past few months.'

‘I should not dream of such a thing.' Holmes stood and walked across to the window in easy strides. He turned and came back towards us. ‘The message may elude us at the moment. The nature of the code can scarcely be in doubt.'

‘Can it not?' asked Esher skeptically. He was in no mood to let Holmes play the prima donna at such a time as this.

Holmes sat down again. ‘If your information is correct, it is quite plainly a looking-glass code.'