Quite graphic, but to the point.
We spent a bit of additional time exploring other collections from Egypt as well as India, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, along with the different weapons for each that had been collected.
Upon leaving the museum we found a driver and gave him the address at Sussex Square.
Lily was unusually quiet when she normally would have had a barrage of questions, and we were well on our way across the city to my aunt’s residence.
“The first letter makes no sense,” she said staring out of the coach. “But if you look at the next ones, there is a pattern,” she commented quite unexpectedly.
“I beg your pardon,” I replied.
“That’s it, miss!” she said with a great deal of excitement. “It’s a code, and not all that difficult.” She grinned.
“It’s not complicated and not all that different from the messages the ladies used to send back and forth to each other regarding the men they entertained at the Church. They used to let each other know who paid well and who might try to get away with… Well, you know.”
Having been at the “Church” in question, I did know quite well. However that didn’t explain what she was talking about.
“Ye just have to figure out the sequence, then when it repeats, the words are there. The note that fell out of yer bag. It took me a while, but I figured it out.”
I stared at her. She seemed to think that she had found the code to decipher that message. This from a girl who had been a lady’s maid in a brothel and didn’t know how to read!
I immediately signaled for the driver to change direction and take us to the office on the Strand.
Eleven
We worked together.Lily read off the letters and numbers in that note and I then wrote them on the blackboard in precisely the same order.
It was brief, there was only one row, but it meant something to someone, intercepted by a man in Luxembourg who worked for the Agency and had paid dearly for it.
In her former life in the brothel, one of Lily’s responsibilities was to keep track of letters, notes, and bills that came into the “Church.” In addition there was some sort of code the ladies used that not only warned which customers paid and which did not, but also apparently rated the men according to… thedeed,as she put it.
Lily had learned to decipher the messages in those notes, but I suspected it was more than merely clever observation. She was obviously quite gifted in ways we were only beginning to discover— her awareness of things, and her ability to learn something and remember it in short order with just a glance, much like a photograph.
I laughed at her comment— that men might be rated according to how well they“performed.”I did wonder if the ladies awarded points or some other method.
Most interesting.
“Miss?” she drew my attention back to the task at hand.
It was time to put to use the sequence she was certain would determine what the message was.
“Please continue,” I told her. “Let’s see what you have.”
“The letters dinnae make sense at first,” she began. “But the first one is usually important in a message, right?
“The first letter is an X,” she pointed out. “And the next three letters make no sense either, T, R, and another X.”
I listened intently.
“If ye follow the number of places— then ye come to the letter ‘A.’ The first letter in the message is an ‘A.’ Then four more, and the next letter is L, followed by…” she counted off the same number once more, “another L.”
A-L-L. The wordall.
Had she actually discovered the key to the coded message?
Using the same sequence, I applied it to the remainder of the message.
When the next letters had been revealed I stood back from the board to view what had emerged. The letters I had circled all ran together.
