The Trojan Horse (4 page)

Five minutes later the aged lift was staggering up with me to the top floor of 495 Shaftesbury Avenue. With the aid of an assistant and a secretary, David carried on a great deal of photographic work from the studio. He went all over the place, taking films as the spirit and the film companies moved him, and in his more prosaic moments he hired out cameras, executed any still work that came his way and let his dark-rooms out to all and sundry. By my sister's marriage into a Border family, he was technically my nephew, but he had never evinced any signs of respect on that account, and he was a friend rather than a
relation. Many a cheerful evening I had spent at somewhat Bohemian parties that had spread haphazardly from his rooms to the studio. He rented the entire top floor and lived on the premises, partly because his camera-hire service was a day and night service and partly because it was cheaper and more convenient.

The antiquated lift stopped with a jerk and I stepped out into a bare corridor. At the end was a glass door with ‘David Shiel's Photographic Centre' painted on it in black, and four empty milk bottles ranged against the wall below it. He answered my ring himself and let out a whoop at the sight of me. ‘The very man,' he said. ‘Come right in, Andrew. If there's any man I could have wished to see it would have been a lawyer.'

‘I'm a barrister,' I reminded him as he dragged me into the room. He was a great bear of a man with long dark hair and a wide friendly face.

‘What the hell's it matter?' he said, as he helped me off with my coat. ‘You know your legal onions, so to speak, and I want advice. How do you get money out of a company that's less yielding than a stone?' He crossed over to a barrel that was a permanent office fixture and returned with a foaming tankard of beer. ‘There, drink that and tell me what I do. I've received a red slip from the telephone people. They're going to cut me off if I don't pay them by the 23rd – that's Friday. And these bastards owe me a hundred quid, and they won't pay.'

‘What's the matter?' I said. ‘Are you broke?'

He buried his face in his tankard and shrugged
his shoulders. ‘Business is pretty bad and this place eats money, what with the rent and Miriam and the telephone bills. John has joined up – he's under the reserve age, that's one blessing. If I can hold on for another six months, I'll be all right. There'll be plenty of work when the American stock is exhausted and it's all-British films. But, in the meantime, I can't carry on without the phone. It makes you curse when you're owed the better part of four hundred pounds and can't get the money because people are too bloody lazy to pay up. Meanwhile, I'm short of cash and that means a camera will have to go, and what sort of price will it fetch now? I haven't got a single one out on hire.'

I said, ‘Give me their address and I'll see what I can do. What do they owe you the money for anyway?'

‘That's very nice of you, Andrew. I did some film work for them. The company is Calboyd Diesel. I went up to their Oldham works to take shots for publicity purposes. They beat me down to a lousy price as it was.'

‘Calboyds,' I murmured. The hand of Fate, it seemed. Then I said, ‘Look, David, I want you to do something for me.' I pulled
The Face from the Barbican
out of the pocket of my overcoat. ‘Did you know there was a solution which can be used as an invisible ink and which only becomes visible when placed under a mercury vapour light?'

‘Several,' was the reply. ‘But I never heard of them being used as invisible inks. They're of the genus tar
and are soluble in benzine. They become fluorescent under an ultra-violet ray.'

‘And a mercury vapour lamp gives off an ultraviolet ray?' I asked.

‘Certainly.'

‘Then I wonder if you'd mind placing the blank pages at the end of this book under an ultra-violet ray?' I passed the book over to him and he opened it and glanced at the blank pages. Then he looked at me.

‘So,' he said, ‘you are the master mind behind the British Secret Service? I always knew you couldn't really be a lawyer. Or perhaps you're a spy? Anyway we can discuss that when we've found what's written in the Book of Books.' He drained his tankard. ‘My God!' he said, as he glanced at the title, ‘you have a lurid taste in thrillers.' Then he glanced across at me. He was suddenly serious. ‘You really mean there's some writing here?'

I nodded.

He rose to his feet. ‘Well, we'll soon see if it's one of the benzine solutions,' he said, and led me to the largest dark-room.

He soon had the first of the blank pages fixed under the enlarger. Then he switched out the light and turned on the mercury vapour lamp of the enlarger. Instantly, the blank page became covered with parallel luminous lines, as though a snail had drawn itself backwards and forwards across it. ‘By God, yes,' David said, ‘we've got something here all right.' I leaned closer, peering at the page, so that the
brightness of it hurt my eyes. I could see that the luminous lines were of writing, but it seemed a jumble of unintelligible letters.

‘The first thing to do is to photograph the paper,' David announced. ‘Then we'll be able to see what it's all about.'

He got a Leica and set to work. When he had taken photographs of all six of the blank pages, he said, ‘You go outside and swill some beer. I'm going to develop them now.'

I left the dark-room very conscious of his capability at his job. I suppose I had always taken his photographic centre for granted before. I had never been here when he was actually working. My only clear recollection of the man was of him lounging around in the most amazing clothes, drinking vast quantities of beer and telling dirty stories. But I had heard from friends how he had built the business up from nothing, starting with a single camera in a cellar office in Frith Street. I knew, too, that he had decorated the studio himself with the help of an odd carpenter.

It was a big room, running the whole length of the frontage, and it was panelled throughout in a good oak plywood. The dark-rooms were on the inner wall. There were four of them, well appointed, with their own sinks, enlargers, lights and telephones. The place was cluttered with apparatus. I knew, of course, that he must be capable to stand on his own two feet in such a precarious profession. It was just that I had not been conscious of it before. I had taken him as I
had found him, a good-natured friendly fellow, who led rather a peculiar life and ran a somewhat unusual business.

Now that I had seen him at work, I looked at him from a different angle. He was, as I have said, a great bear of a man. The wide shoulders and the fine head, with its mane of dark hair, made him a striking figure. He wore a pair of old brown corduroys, a dark-green polo sweater and sandals. But though his height and breadth were striking, it was his hands I had noticed. They were fine hands, with long and slender fingers. They were the hands of an artist, but capable hands.

When he had hung the films in the drying cupboard, he came over to where I was sitting, obediently drinking beer. ‘Now,' he said, ‘whilst that's drying off, perhaps you'll tell me something of what it's all about – or is that a deadly secret?'

‘No, it's not altogether a secret,' I said. ‘At any rate, I'll tell you something of what it's about.' So I told him that part of Schmidt's story which was directly connected with the book. I did not tell him who my visitor had been. But I told him sufficient to explain the book. And when I had finished, he shook his head and said, ‘Mon, if I didna ken ye were a guid Scotsman, I'd say ye had been drinking. It all sounds very melodramatic, but at least you've got the writing in the book to prove your story.' Then he got up and went over to the drying cupboard and took out the negative. ‘Now let's have a look at it under the enlarger.' He led the way back into the dark-room and closed the door behind us. Then he switched on
the enlarger and a square of light was flung on to the printing table. He fitted the end of the negative into the slot below the lens of the instrument and immediately the blurred outline of the photograph appeared on the white paper clamped to the printing table. He manoeuvred it into position and then adjusted the enlarger. And suddenly the photograph was in focus and the lines of print, written lightly with a pen, showed below it.

But it made no sense at all. The first line ran: SDGME DOLI R BXONSOVCO NGN XCOH BSOH. And the rest of it was the same jumble of meaningless letters. Yet, even in these printed letters, I thought I could discern the neat hand of Schmidt. David shifted the negatives along to the next photograph. They were all much the same as the first, though the last negative was blank and the one before it only two-thirds completed. He ran the whole length of celluloid through the enlarger and in all the five pages, with their lines of closely printed words, there was not one that made sense.

‘Your boy friend is either pulling your leg,' said David, ‘or else this is in code. Don't you know something about codes?'

I shook my head. ‘Not much,' I admitted. ‘But one thing I do know, and that is that, if you don't know the key, a good code takes three to six months' hard work by experts to break down.'

‘Well, I'll take a print of each one of these, and then we'll see whether we can make anything of it.'

But we couldn't. I copied the first few lines of the
first page from the image cast by the light from the enlarger, and worked on this whilst David took a print of it. But it was no good. I knew something about the theory of codes and I tried to break it down by the usual method of picking out the letters that occurred most frequently and changing them to the letters most commonly in use. But I had no success by the time David had completed the print. I decided that the clue was probably in the book. I flicked through the pages to see if at any point the author had given a method for breaking down a code. Rows of meaningless capital letters would have stood out quite clearly against the background of ordinary print. But there was nothing of that sort and I realised that the only thing to do was to read through the book. I told David so and he grunted. He was absorbed, as I had been for the last half-hour, in trying to work it out for himself.

I read that book through from beginning to end and, in the whole story, there wasn't a single mention of codes. When I had finished, I threw it from me in disgust. David was no longer in the studio and I heard the rattle of tea-cups in the back premises. The print he had been working on was lying amongst a heap of old stock and hypo dishes. I lit a cigarette. A moment later he came in with tea. He glanced at the book lying sprawled on its side on the couch. ‘You don't seem to have been any more successful than I have,' he said.

‘I'm fed up with the thing,' I replied savagely.

‘Never mind,' he said, as he poured out some tea, ‘I gathered you enjoyed the book. Whilst I was
working, I heard several appreciative chuckles.'

That was true enough. I had enjoyed the book. But, as so often happens, the return to reality had produced a mood of depression. I felt convinced that the supposed code had no meaning, that Schmidt was mad and had been living melodrama in real life. I told David so and he shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know best,' he said. ‘But don't you know anyone who understands codes? I mean, after all, we've only been working on this a very short time and we're not experts. I know something about them, and I haven't nearly exhausted the possibilities. I tried the Playfair Code – you know, the one that depends on a keyword and you put the letters down in fives together with the rest of the alphabet and then work on rectangles. It's one of the few you can't break down by placing the letter that recurs most frequently. I tried using The Face from the Barbican as the key-word, but that didn't make much sense. If there is any sense in the words, it must be a code like that. I can't believe a man who was just jotting down meaningless letters would have gone on with it for five whole pages.'

‘You may be right,' I said, ‘but I'm still fed up with the whole business.'

‘Well, it's your affair, not mine. But don't you know anyone at the Foreign Office? They have decoding experts.'

I stretched myself and clambered stiffly to my feet. ‘Yes, I suppose it would be worth trying. There's Graham Aitken, he'd be able to get them to have a look at it for me.'

‘All right then. If not, there's my godfather, Sir Geoffrey Carr, at the Home Office. Anyway, leave the book with me and, if you come round any time after, say eleven tomorrow, I'll have some good prints for you. I want to retake two of the pages, as they haven't come out very well.' He picked the print he had been working on up from the litter in which it lay. ‘You might like to take this to bed with you. Nothing like sleeping on a puzzle.'

I nodded and tucked it into my overcoat pocket. Then I thanked him and said I'd be round some time after eleven. I don't remember leaving the studio. The beer on top of my dinner had made me very sleepy. But the cold air of Shaftesbury Avenue soon woke me up. I decided to walk back to my rooms, and I cut down into Leicester Square, where a nearly full moon sailed serenely over the trees and the dark outline of the Odeon tower.

Back at my rooms in the Temple, I found the walk had driven away my sleepiness. I lay in bed and struggled ceaselessly for the clue to the code. With my sleepiness I found my incredulity had also vanished. I reviewed the whole evening and began to wonder once more whether it had been just an accident that that man had cannoned into me in the Charing Cross Road. But for the chance of a passer-by, his hand would have closed on the book, and I wondered whether he would have given it back to me. My mind drifted back to Schmidt himself and I tried to deduce from what he had told me whether or not he was mad. His story had been convincing and I came back,
of course, to the melodramatic close of the interview.