Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,131

room. “Poor Inspector Treadles indeed. But who was that assailant and what did he want with Inspector Treadles?”

“To know that, I shall first need to do something about the box of ciphers.” Charlotte rubbed her temples. “Have I ever told anyone that I’d already wearied of ciphers by the time I was sixteen?”

Twenty-one

Mr. Mears brought in coffee. But coffee was not enough for Charlotte to survive another late night; she must have cake, plenty of cake.

She took a fortifying bite—sponge roll, whipped cream filling, chocolate ganache. In a few hours, even this heavenly combination would pale before her need for sleep. But at the moment, the idea of staying awake long enough to merit an extra slice or two still excited her.

Mrs. Watson, Miss Redmayne, and Lord Ingram were already working, each dealing with a notebook from the box. Small notices from the papers often used fairly straightforward substitution ciphers. To be on the safe side, Lord Ingram had given the ladies a quick tutorial on transposition ciphers, which also appeared regularly.

Charlotte allowed herself another bite of cake and opened the notebook before her, the one with the earliest dates. In the carriage, as it drove through puddles of streetlamp light, she’d scanned the contents of the box and felt only dread at the thought of more ciphers, possibly convoluted and tortuous ones. But now, paging through this first notebook, pasted neatly with small notices in code and an occasional telegram, she was instead enveloped in a strange and strangely chilling sense of familiarity.

From the dates themselves.

The small notices were weekly—and punctual: In this notebook, which covered almost two years, only once did a notice appear one day later than usual.

She had come across something of the sort before.

Or had she come across this exact thing?

Lord Ingram looked up. “Holmes.”

His voice was tight, an expression of incipient—or was it already outright—dismay on his face. “Look at these.”

He had the most recent notebook, the small notices at the front of which were coded, but the last ten or twelve were not. They were in plain text—and they were biblical verses.

Posted every ten days.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Watson, always sensitive to mood shifts in a room.

Lord Ingram waited for Charlotte. Charlotte’s fingers tightened around her pencil, but she nodded. He handed his notebook to Mrs. Watson, who gasped as she saw the small notices inside.

“But these are—these were—”

She stopped, as if unable to continue.

These had been notices disseminated to Moriarty’s minions, each notice pointing to a single word in a book, which acted as the key to any messages encoded during that period, until a new key was posted.

Miss Redmayne took the notebook from her aunt’s hands and even her perpetually sunny expression darkened. “Moriarty. So Mr. Sullivan wasn’t only lining his own pockets, he was lining Moriarty’s pockets, too?”

All the while keeping this meticulous record.

On second thought, that he had done so didn’t seem quite as odd. Mr. Sullivan’s two leading characteristics had been malice and spite. He had likely viewed the rewards he had received from being Moriarty’s minion as being less than commensurate with the work he had put in and the risks he had assumed.

This record then was something he had believed he could hold over Moriarty. Or, if not that, then at least must have felt that its exposure would have led to some headaches for his master, whom he’d probably never met.

Charlotte turned to Lord Ingram. “Can you tell me what Inspector Treadles knows about Moriarty?”

The inspector had been involved in several cases that had Moriarty looming in the background, but he would have only heard the name directly during the investigation at Stern Hollow.

The notebook with the biblical verses pasted inside had returned to Lord Ingram’s hands. He leafed through its pages. “After I was released from police custody, before I took the children home to Stern Hollow, I met with the inspector for this specific purpose. He wanted to know more about Moriarty—mainly, whether Moriarty had anything to do with a case from this past summer that saw the death of a man named de Lacey, but he was convinced the body had been that of a random bloke, identified as de Lacey so that the case would close.”

He shut the notebook and pushed it into the table, as if wishing it would never open again. “I agreed with Inspector Treadles that de Lacey was not dead—de Lacey was but a nom de guerre, taken on by whoever acted as Moriarty’s chief lieutenant