“What if it’s the same scarf as you found? It could be important, couldn’t it?”
We discuss another approach to the police, even as I recount the number of times we’d been in touch with them already this week.
“They’ll think we’re time-wasters,” Jess says with a sigh. “Attention-seekers.”
“I think some of them already do.”
Leah wanders in with a grin, her phone in hand, to show us a video on TikTok. It’s titled “Weird Embarrassing Dads on Holiday Vol. 3” and features a middle-aged guy and all the ways he embarrasses his teenage children.
“This issoyou, Dad.” She leans on my shoulder, giggling as I watch, her arm warm through my shirt. In the video, a middle-aged man is making awkwardly self-conscious moves on the dance floor to “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, watched by a pair of cringing teens. As the clip finishes and rolls onto the next one, she points at the crumpled, half-burnt notepaper next to my laptop. “What’s that?”
“I think it’s some kind of coded message. Found it hidden upstairs.”
She wrinkles her nose. “A reflecting cipher’s not really much of a code though, is it?”
“A what?”
“We did them in computer science. Like, a few years ago.”
She pulls up a browser on my laptop and typesreflecting cipherinto the search bar, clicking on the first result. The page has a few lines of text about reflecting ciphers—also apparently called mirror codes, or Atbash ciphers—and a text box that says “Enter message here”…
My daughter types in the first entry on the notepaper.
xlmurin nvvgrmtbecomesconfirm meeting.
She points to a graphic on the screen, the alphabet laid out A to Z from left to right. Below it, the sequence of letters is reversed so it runs from right to left.
“See?” Leah says. “You pair each letter with its reverse in the sequence so A becomes Z, B is Y, C is X, and so on. Not really much of a code. Too easy.”
I type one word after another into the text box, writing the decrypted entries in pencil next to the originals.
location
access
traffic
call log
Decoded, the heading at the top of this column isbarrow.
“What’s that?” Jess says. “A place, a person?”
“It’s a town not far from the Lake District. Cumbria, I think.”
“Or Barrow-on-Soar, near Loughborough? That’s a lot closer to us here.”
Leah studies the list over my shoulder. “Isn’t a barrow a Viking burial mound, or something?”
I type in the coded heading above the right-hand column and getparker.
The three of us study the scribbled column of decoded words. I guess this list might have been written before Google existed. Before unscrambling it was as easy as typing letters into a web page. It wouldn’t have troubled any serious investigator for more than a minute, but it would have been enough to disguise what it was from a casual viewer, from someone who just stumbled upon it.
Someone else in the house who came across it by accident, perhaps.
“I don’t get it,” Jess says. “Was there anything else in the tin?”
“A lighter, some matches. The tin was on top of a little pile of ash, like paper had been burned there before.”
