5 Breaking the Code

Chapter 5 Breaking the Code The doctor departed to see his patients, and the constable went to telegraph Norwich Constabulary for a wagon and two armed policemen. Only Holmes, the inspector, and myself remained. Holmes led us into the drawing room. "All we can do now is wait for events to take their course, gentlemen," he said. "Perhaps this might be a good time for you to explain how you know so much about this case," suggested Inspector Martin. "Of course," said Holmes, and he outlined quickly all that had happened since Mr. Cubitt's first visit to Baker Street. Then he beckoned us to join him at a table where he spread out the "dancing men" papers before us and began to explain how he had deduced their secrets.

"I am familiar with most forms of coded writing," said Holmes, "but this one, I admit, was entirely new to me. The inventor of this code clearly wanted to hide the fact that it's a code at all and deliberately made it look like a random child's sketch. I, however, quickly realized that each dancing man stood for a letter of the alphabet.

"The first message was too short to learn much from, except that one of the symbols appeared four times in just 15 letters: "I guessed this symbol probably stood for E, which, as you must know, is the most common letter in the English language. I also noticed, in some cases, that the figures were holding flags, and I presumed that these represented breaks between words.

"Hilton soon brought me more samples. One of these was only five letters long and without a flag, so it had to be a single word: "The second and fourth letters were E. It could have been 'sever' or 'lever,' but I thought it most likely to be 'never,' as it had appeared as a reply to another message on the toolshed door. That gave me the symbols for N, V, and R. "Another thought also occurred to me. If these messages were coming from someone who had been close to Mrs. Cubitt in her earlier life, then he probably addressed her by her first name— Elsie. So any five-letter words that began and

ended in E could be her name. I quickly found examples: "That was how I deduced the symbols for L, S, and I. "Next, I turned to the word before 'Elsie': "It had just four letters and ended in E, and I thought if the sender is appealing to Elsie, then surely that word has to be COME. This gave me C, O, and M. "With several letters now decoded, I was able to attack the first message again, and this was what I got: -M -ERE --E SL-NE-.

"The first letter, I realized, had to be A, which was useful as it appears three times in this sentence. I further reasoned that the missing letter in the second word was H, which gave me: AM HERE A-E SLANE-. From there, it was a simple task to fill in the blanks and arrive at AM HERE ABE SLANEY. "I now had so many letters that I could move confidently onto the second message, which I decoded as A-ELRI-ES. This made sense when you added T and G for the missing letters, giving us AT ELRIGES, which I assumed to be a local inn."