Chapter Six
Amélie offered Sidney the cigarette, and he took a long drag, staring up at the blue sky framed by the walls of hedges around them.
“Do you ever miss home?” she asked in lilting French.
No, he wanted to say. This life was so much more interesting than the Cumberland pit village he’d enlisted into the army to escape from. But what sort of person preferred the war-ravaged French countryside to their home? “Sometimes.”
Amélie laughed. “Liar. I enjoy the work too.” She tapped his shoulder and then hers. “You and I are the same, my friend. We need the danger to keep life sharp.”
Day bled into night as he stared into her eyes, and for the first time he could remember, Sidney was content to stand still. When her hand slipped down, angling toward his against the hedge’s sharp leaves, the rest of his life vanished beyond the point where their skin touched—
He hardly heard the footsteps pounding the earth before the soldiers rounded the corner with their guns drawn.
Sidney jerked awake and rolled onto his back.
It took a few minutes of slow breathing to calm his pulse, to remind himself that stupid hedge maze was far away, across the Channel.
He was in Oxford, in Swithun, and groggy from pondering Tolliver’s barmy sentences far too late into the night.
Sidney turned onto his side, head cradled on his thin pillow, and blinked in the morning light.
There were two envelopes on his floor.
One of the scouts shuffling in the corridor must have delivered them, but he wasn’t expecting messages—was he?
Sidney slid off the bed and threw a thin housecoat over his undershirt and flannels.
The cold floorboards nipped at his bare feet, and he wriggled his toes to ward off the chill.
Stiffly, he picked up the letters. The handwriting of the first he recognized right away.
It was a hasty message from his brother about attending an Oxford Dramatic Society production later that month, asking if Sidney wanted to grab a pint after, and yet another reminder for Sidney to call their parents, underlined with the earnestness that characterized all of Felix’s life.
Sidney tossed it onto his desk. If something was amiss, his parents would have called him; this was Felix playing nursemaid.
Sidney had cut short his stay during the Christmas and Easter vacations under the pretense of custodial jobs to be completed while school was out, reasons his parents had accepted graciously enough.
But Felix had been dogged to cheer him up since that god-awful outing to the pub the day before Tolliver died, and this interference reeked of the same misplaced charity.
Sidney didn’t like feeling like a special project.
The second letter he scrutinized with more care. He had half expected another message from the Rook, but this scrawling hand was different from the last. The notepaper was finer than Felix’s with a delicate floral aroma, and its message far more succinct:
Botanic Gardens, today, noon sharp.
A tiny symbol was drawn beneath as though in signature: a small circle balanced upon an elongated, slim oval with a flattened base. It reminded Sidney of a chess piece. A pawn, maybe?
No—a bishop.
At eleven fifty, Sidney Braithwaite strode across High Street.
He had donned his nicest suit, shined his shoes, and wavered over the tie for an embarrassing length of time.
If he had chosen the tie his mother insisted made his eyes striking, it was only to appear professional and authoritative, like someone Ginevra Bishop would recognize as an equal.
Sidney had only ever visited the Botanic Gardens once, but judging by the lack of foot traffic, Bishop had chosen their meeting time with care.
He entered through the stone archway, serenaded by songbirds, and strolled toward a fountain down the lane.
The deep quiet made his shoulders soften as he progressed deeper into the garden.
At the fountain, he trailed his fingers through the rippling water, and the nip of cold steadied him.
Bishop was likely only impatient for a progress report. There was no need to fight today.
“You got my note then.”
Sidney dried his hand on his jacket sleeve and turned.
She sat cross-legged on a bench, regarding him with sphinxlike amusement and wariness.
Her dark trousers and cream blouse looked like lecture attire, but the wall of ivy behind her made her green eyes shimmer like the northern lights.
She rose and slid a silver cigarette case from her handbag. “Care for a smoke?”
“I don’t smoke anymore. Lost the taste for it during the war.” At her confusion he added, “I brought a pack to fake it if needed while scoping out Olenev’s. It’s good cover.”
Bishop nodded as though cataloging the information, a tiny movement that created a nervous flutter in Sidney’s stomach, and returned the case to her handbag. “Have you made progress decoding?”
Bishop seemed surprisingly calm—dangerously so. Sidney had expected excitement or demands or more of that irresistible energy that frothed about her. A calm Bishop foreboded a greater storm just out of sight, and Sidney pulled the slip of paper from his pocket to delay its arrival.
“I told you it wouldn’t be quick. I think it’s a Caesar shift of some sort, where you adjust the letters according to a set number.”
“But wouldn’t that create a string of gibberish?” Bishop’s brow wrinkled. “Tolliver’s sentences were lucid, if not slightly ludicrous.”
“They are,” Sidney conceded. “But something about the phrasing isn’t right. Take Bartleby saw Zelda Zimmermann Saturday, for example. Most people would say on Saturday, and I’d wager a man like Tolliver would too. So why drop the preposition?”
“Because only certain letters matter,” Bishop murmured. “And it must be the first, else why use Zelda Zimmermann when there’re innumerable words that end with a or n, but zed is more limited.”
“Precisely.” Bishop was better at this than he expected, and her sparkle of pleasure at the faint praise made Sidney return quickly to the paper.
“So, if we only use the first letter of each word, there’s your gibberish.
Without knowing the amount shifted, it’s lots of tedious counting to see if anything clicks. That’s where I’m currently at.”
Bishop grabbed his sleeve. “Let’s look at it now—together.”
Sidney hadn’t much experience with debutantes, and her interest surprised him.
He allowed her to drag him into a glass house full of fronded plants, and they sat on a bench by a lily pond.
He fished a pencil out of his inner jacket pocket and spread the paper on his knee beside hers.
“I started with Violet and Cathy since it’s shortest.”
“So using only the first letter,” Bishop said, peering at the phrases, “that leaves us with VTCV. Which means the first and last letter of the real word will be the same too?”
“Right. I tried a couple of shifts with letters I thought most likely to double like that and turned methodical after that went nowhere. I got as far as an eight-letter shift before I dozed off.”
Bishop’s eyes widened. “Goodness, that does sound tedious.”
“A bit.” Sidney frowned at the page, tapping his other knee with the pencil to keep track of the shifting letters as he increased the amount.
It was harder to focus in the greenhouse than his bedroom, Bishop’s perfume mixing with the lilies’ aroma in a heady concoction that blunted his ability to process.
Sidney loosened his tie and drew a breath of fresh air.
And then he saw it. It was an eleven-letter shift, and relief welled up as he scratched out a name. Kirk.
“You did it!” Bishop grabbed his shoulder but then released him, primly tucking her hands back to her sides. “Do you think it’s a first name or last?”
Her enthusiasm was infectious, and it propelled him to press on. Sidney removed his jacket and hat and rolled up his sleeves, unknotting the tie completely to drape loosely around his neck. “Let’s do another and see.”
With Bishop’s prodding, he worked at the list for another two hours.
None of the other gibberish words responded to the eleven-letter shift, so starting over each time prolonged the exercise.
Sometimes it felt impossible, and he paced around the lily pond to keep his brain churning, snatching after the right numbers before they slipped away.
The result of his labor was four names, each one shifted by a different number.
Kirk. Hughes. Neville. Watkins.
Sidney frowned at the paper. “Dr. Samuel Neville and Dr. Jacqueline Watkins are both Classics tutors. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“The Rook said the informant was using the code name Cassius,” Bishop breathed. “Perhaps there is a Classics connection.”
“True,” Sidney said, reviewing the names and faces he’d encountered in lectures or met at department events.
“There’s a Lewis Hughes and a Miss Kirk among the postgraduate students.
He’s American.” He scratched the pencil against his temple.
“She tried to poll me for one of the student papers earlier this year.”
“Marion Kirk?” Bishop’s eyes brightened. “I’m quite sure she writes for The Blue with one of my friends. Iris whinges about her all the time. Goodness, that’s most convenient that you know all of them.”
“Very,” Sidney muttered. Tolliver had probably already worked out the informant’s departmental connections, and the Rook had obfuscated that information to seem more desperate.
It was yet another link drawing Sidney into the case, making him more useful than he wished to be—but he would not be so easily ensnared.
He started to fold the paper, ready to depart and clear his head, when Bishop’s hand fell upon his.
Gently, she drew the list from his grasp.
“If these are the final suspects Mr. Tolliver was going to send to the Rook before he died, then did one of them murder him?”