Pigpen
Chapter Three
After I refuse Hammond-Clyde’s offer to pay for an Uber, I use my Travelcard to catch the bus back to Mayfair.
I like the anonymity of being among strangers on public transport.
One of those new glossy designs, the red London bus, has sleek curved edges and tinted windows.
On the upper deck, a few people—tourists, probably—are around, so I take a vacant seat at the back, pull up my grey hoodie and dig out my phone to check the time.
Now that I’m finally liberated, I need space to mentally regroup.
My time spent with Albert has softened me.
And I have allowed myself to be sidetracked by shock and confusion—maybe even a little grief—and have not considered how to move forward.
More importantly, I have not been paying attention to my hardwired instincts.
The news of Albert’s intention to renovate the ruins of a house in Italy, a derelict plot of land that now belongs to me, something he told me very little about, makes no sense.
For a man who keenly shared his enthusiasm with me and had an attention to detail that bordered on obsessive-compulsive, someone fixated on seeing any project through to the end, none of this adds up.
Victoria was right when she said that I had initially planned to travel with Albert and his friends in the minibus to enjoy the city of Brussels—my first time travelling abroad—while Albert attended the daytime lectures and official evening dinner on Saturday.
We had been set to leave on Friday evening, but somewhere along the way, he changed our plans.
On Thursday morning, Albert had claimed to have neglected to inform me that his group would be leaving early Friday morning instead.
I would need to travel later. For a man who had planned out each hour of his day, this is another omission of detail that appears entirely out of character.
We both knew the charity I work for had signed me up for an emergency first-aid programme on Friday, with a compulsory end-of-course test and certification.
After hearing about the new arrangements, sitting on the bed Thursday morning as Albert came out of the bathroom, I told him I would reschedule my attendance on the course.
Unusually for us, we had argued fiercely, with Albert eventually losing his temper and demanding that I, “Do as told, stop being obstinate, and stay behind one more bloody day.” I remember being irritated that he had already organised an open coach ticket for me, which meant I could travel out late Friday evening.
I accused him—somewhat petulantly—of purposely making the change to avoid having to apologise to his colleagues about the medical moron in their midst.
That Thursday evening, everyone had been invited to Callico House for dinner and to stay the night.
Even with its twelve bedrooms, Albert had rarely accommodated guests, with only our bedroom and the one occupied by Victoria and Coleman in constant use.
Edward and Alice have a penthouse in the heart of Marylebone.
Albert had often spoken of the absurdity and obscenity of having such a grand house with so many empty rooms. But his hands had been tied by his forefathers, who forbade inheritors from selling or signing the mausoleum over to a charity or other benevolent organisation.
Albert believed that not having children of his own to propagate their family line was nothing short of noble.
Not only had Albert arranged rooms for everyone that night, including his former colleagues Sylvie and Stephan, but he had brought in a favourite chef to cook dinner for them and the whole family.
Everyone else had been in good spirits, and after questions about the conference had dried up, Sylvie and Coleman had shared entertaining anecdotes about their college days.
When the discussions had broken into smaller groups, Sylvie and Coleman had kept chatting.
Victoria had seemed to have a difference of opinion with Edward about something, which was not unusual.
With Albert and Stephan deep in earnest conversation, I had had Alice pretty much to myself.
I had been petulant with Albert in the bedroom later that evening, threatening to unpack my rucksack and not join him in Brussels at all, telling him I might instead prefer to spend the weekend with gay friends in London—a threat I held in reserve to stoke his jealousy and one I never once capitalised upon.
Even now, I sense something had been troubling him, the way he’d kept insisting that my remaining behind was for the best. I had not even seen him off in the early morning when he’d left.
Instead, I’d stayed in the bedroom until I’d heard them leave, then went down to swim.
Only during a coffee break on the training course had I found his string of text messages and idiotic emojis.
At the time, I’d glanced at them once but had paid them little heed and replied to none.
Looking back, I can’t help thinking he unknowingly saved my life by insisting I travel later.
With time on my side now and out of morbid curiosity, I thumb open the app and find his texts.
They are easy to locate. Few people contact me.
Even as I read the first one from that fateful morning, my heart sinks at my pettiness during our last exchange.
Albert: Please don’t be mad. In the morning rush left my notebook in the bedroom ??????????
Albert: I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t screwed on! ??????????
Albert: Nothing important, just research notes ?????????
Albert: Can you bring with you on coach tonight? ????????????
And the list of messages went on. Getting texts from Albert with a string of nonsensical emoticons was not uncommon.
For an esteemed medical professional, he’d developed an aberrant fondness for them, a side of him that had surprised even me.
His family hated them. Victoria blamed me and said that after I showed him how to insert them, I must have infected his brain with the immaturity of my generation.
But he had always been that way and loved nothing better than to relax by playing card games, travel chess, online puzzles, or watching classic black-and-white films or old crime series like Inspector Morse, Dalgliesh or Luther on satellite television.
No, his use of emoticons was not unusual.
Receiving multiple messages in short succession most definitely was.
At the time, I‘d assumed he had nothing better to do, but on reflection, Albert would usually have slept. He told me he could fall asleep anywhere, something he had learnt at medical school and called a physician’s fast charge.
He often employed the technique to catnap during cab or coach rides or on short flights.
I am about to put my phone away when a cold revelation stops me. What if the emoticons contain a hidden message?
Albert had loved reading about code-breaking.
Before I met him, he had read everything written about Elizabeth Smith Friedman and Alan Turing.
Apart from dutifully following in his father’s footsteps, what Albert had learnt about Friedman and Turing had been a major factor in his decision to work in medical research.
He equated sickness, disease and viruses as riddles waiting to be solved.
He’d also had a fondness for old mystery shows or books in which the detective or mystery solver uses cards with holes punched in them to cover text and highlight individual letters.
Using this, a hidden message would be revealed.
He’d introduced me to Freemason’s cypher, more commonly known as pigpen cypher, where letters are arranged in grids—or pigpens—and exchanged for symbols.
We’d devised a simple cypher together using characters from our phones, substituting letters for emoticons, including ones to represent common double vowels or consonants.
Albert had enjoyed the exercise, and we’d used the cypher a couple of times, usually to send innocuous messages to each other during office hours or while enduring meetings with family members, adding the emoticon code to make later plans.
Eventually the novelty wore off, especially as I couldn’t keep up with his super-fast brain and his ability to memorise the entire letter-emoticon cypher.
I haul open the flap of my rucksack and pull up the old file on my tablet.
After searching around, I eventually find the note containing the pigpen and match the emoticons against the string Albert sent me on my phone.
The first line makes no sense. It includes symbols not assigned to our code.
Having come this far, though, I read down to the next line.
The emojis at the end of the second message decode as,
Albert: ??=G ??=E?=T ??=O ??=U?=T
GET OUT.