Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,132

in England. I also told him to be extremely cautious if he was ever to find himself dealing with Moriarty or his underlings again.”

“Did you tell him about the small notices in the papers? That they pointed to keys necessary to work out ciphers used by Moriarty’s people?”

“No. He never asked me about them, and I don’t believe his case in the summer concerned them either.”

“If Inspector Treadles didn’t know about them, then Mr. Longstead must have succeeded in deciphering at least some of the telegrams pasted in here on his own,” said Miss Redmayne. “I wonder which ones.”

“My guess would be the ones sent at the end of summer,” said Charlotte. “The biblical verses are already in plain text, and the cipher key each verse points to is simply the title of the book it comes from. If Mr. Longstead realized that the telegrams from that time were wheatstone ciphers, then it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to work them out. My lord, would you explain to the ladies how wheatstone ciphers work?”

While Lord Ingram did that, with the ladies taking notes, Charlotte copied the coded texts of the telegrams—there had been a number of them in the latter half of the summer. After she’d checked to make sure she had not made any mistakes, she distributed a telegram to each person at the table, with its key already written on the same sheet of paper.

The decoded cables, in chronological order, read:

If nothing else will put him off, you may proceed.

Expect cancer remedy delivered by tomorrow afternoon.

I trust you will have a plan for the sister.

Things are unstable here. Fend for yourself until further notice.

“Does ‘the sister’ refer to Mrs. Treadles?” asked Mrs. Watson, her voice low and raspy. “If so, would that make the ‘he’ in the first cable her brother, the younger Mr. Cousins? Did he know something?”

He had been such an uninspired man of business. Had he at last sensed something wrong at Cousins? Or was he told?

Charlotte’s stomach tightened. She remembered her half brother, Mr. Myron Finch, who had once been Moriarty’s cryptographer. Mr. Finch had been in London during that time. Had he tried to alert the owner of Cousins that his company had been hollowed out from underneath him?

She tapped her fingertips on the table. It had been too long since she last heard from Mr. Finch. Was he still safe? And if not . . .

Lord Ingram was watching her—she rarely fidgeted; her finger-tapping would have struck him as highly uncharacteristic. She took her hand off the table and gave him a nod to show that she was all right.

Mrs. Watson’s voice remained strained. “It’s easy for us to deduce the identity of those referred to here, because we already know it was Mr. Sullivan who received these cables and that he’d been up to no good at Cousins. How would Mr. Longstead have been able to tell what these telegrams were about?”

“He would have recognized the dates, or at least one of the dates,” said Charlotte. “Miss Longstead said that her uncle was more affected by Mr. Barnaby Cousins’s passing than he’d let on. The younger Mr. Cousins was the only son of his beloved friend, gone in the blink of an eye. And this third cable, the one about having a plan for the sister, was sent on the day he died.”

“What was the cancer remedy for?” asked Miss Redmayne. “What did the younger Mr. Cousins die of?”

Her questions were usually launched with vigor and relish. This time her shoulders were hunched and she did not look at anyone, as if she already dreaded the answer.

“The papers said malaria.” Charlotte was almost as reluctant to unearth anything else. She took a deep breath. “Mr. Longstead, by the way, inquired after cancer remedies at Sealy and Worcester, a pharmaceutical chemists’ shop. He also spoke to Dr. Motley, the Cousins family’s physician, around that time.”

She now believed that when Mr. Longstead had written “physician” in his appointment book, he had not meant Dr. Ralston, his own physician, but Dr. Motley. What he’d recorded as meetings at Cousins had been his condolence call on Mrs. Cousins and his tête-à-têtes with Inspector Treadles, who was also inextricably related to both the Cousins clan and the Cousins enterprise. All those sessions at the “Reading Room of the British Library” would have been the time he’d spent deciphering the codes—or otherwise working on his own to find out the truth. And his visits