Episode 28: The Keyword

Season 1: The World Unseen

Newmarket, Suffolk / London

May 1900

‘Are you alright, son?’ said Mr Smiggins, gripping Kiran’s arm.

Kiran wasn’t sure. But at least he hadn’t blacked out the way he had when dining with Major Lock two nights before. This was a less intense experience, but disturbing all the same. He glanced back along the platform. The boy had gone. Had he boarded the Cambridge train as they were about to or disappeared back onto the streets of Newmarket?

‘Yes, I’m alright, Mr Smiggins. I had a funny turn, that’s all.’

‘A funny turn’ was an English phrase Kiran had only picked up recently, a phrase he had found amusing. Until now.

What did the boy want? Why was he bothering him? How did he do it? It was extraordinary. He had some kind of special power — like the children Major Lock had spoken of. Could the boy be one of them? But if he was, surely he knew that Kiran, by trying to help Major Lock, was trying to help him…

Then Kiran remembered the beggar boy who had grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. He was certain that, beneath the grime, it was the same child.

‘You looked like you were going to keel over,’ Mr Smiggins said, releasing his arm.

‘Yes, I suddenly felt a bit unsteady. But I’m alright now.’ And he was. The intrusion — Kiran was sure now this was the best word for it — was over. Was the intruder getting subtler or more practiced at it? Or was he like a thief returning to a house he had already entered? He knew the layout now, he knew his way around. That was a chilling thought. Will it reach the point where I won’t even notice him coming? Kiran shuddered.

The Chester race meeting turned out to be a very profitable occasion for Mr Smiggins and he was in such high spirits at the end of it he paid Kiran a guinea bonus. Now they were to return to London for a few days before heading out again to Epsom.

They parted company at Euston Station and Kiran made his way home by catching the Underground train to Mark Lane and then continuing on foot.

When he reached Red Lion Street, a street of terraced houses with soot-encrusted bricks, he saw his landlady Mrs Collins outside the front door beating the dust from a rug with impressive force

A group of children were playing football in the street and the ball happened to spin off in Kiran’s direction. He was no sportsman and his attempt to kick it back to them only succeeded in spraying the ball towards Mrs Collins. He winced and held his breath as it narrowly missed his landlady’s head and thumped into the rug.

Mrs Collins, red-faced and sweating from her rug-beating, turned and bawled at the children: ‘What have I told you urchins before about playing ball when folks are trying to keep the place clean?!’

A woman standing in the doorway of a house opposite called back to her, ‘Don’t you be calling any of my nippers urchins, Nellie Collins, when it was your lodger there what kicked the ball at your rug.’

Mrs Collins fixed her fearsome gaze on Kiran.

‘I — I’m afraid it was me,’ Kiran said. ‘My natural clumsiness…but look, I have a gift for you.’ He took a box of fudge from his overcoat pocket.

Mrs Collins took the box, eyed it, eyed Kiran, and then said, ‘Well, no harm done, Mr Nam, I’m sure.’

‘Pah!’ said the woman opposite.

‘And you can mind your business, Molly Flanders.’ Mrs Colins said. ‘Come in, Mr Nam, and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea. You must be parched after all that travelling. And how was the trip?’

‘Profitable, thank you — though not to the point of riches,’ he added hastily. He didn’t want Mrs Collins to get any ideas about putting his rent up.

‘And how were the provinces?’ she said.

‘Peaceful, I have to say. Peaceful and prosperous.’

Mrs Collins always enquired after what she called ‘the provinces’ when Kiran returned from his travels with Mr Smiggins. The provinces being anywhere outside London. The only times in her life Mrs Collins had left London were to go hop picking in Kent. She had only recently given up this annual expedition with her extended family because of her failing body, particularly her back.

Once Mrs Collins had made Kiran a cup of tea — and she always made it the way he liked it with condensed milk and extra sugar — he went up to his room, a small sparsely furnished space on the first floor, with a window looking out onto the street. Mrs Collins had left his post on a chair. He picked up the letters and scanned the envelopes. One from his father, one from his brother, and one from Sitara. And one with a handwriting he didn’t recognize. He opened the envelope and found a single sheet of paper with a terse message from Major Lock:

Dear Mr Nambudiri,

I got your letter.

Please come to Great Russell Mansions on Sunday afternoon at two o’clock.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur Lock

That evening, Kiran reviewed all the notes and frequency analysis tables he had made for what he now called the Lock problem. His intuition, and the dreams that Lord Ganesha had sent him, had convinced him that Dr Lock had used the Vigenère cipher. This was once known as ‘ the indecipherable cipher’, and comprised 26 cipher alphabets, each beginning with a different letter. The keyword determined which of the 26 alphabets was used for each letter of the plaintext.

The Vigenère cipher could be decrypted without knowledge of the keyword, but the process relied on identifying certain repeated letter sequences and so far none of those Kiran had found had led him to a solution. He had no doubt he could solve the problem, given enough time, but he sensed that Major Lock was growing impatient.

After a few hours, Kiran put the work aside and picked up his current entertainment, The Island of Doctor Moreau, by Mr HG Wells. It was a strange book and Kiran found it by turns horrifying and fascinating. He was a great admirer of Wells’ work, but there was something very unsettling about this tale of a doctor creating a new race of half-human/half-animal creatures.

With a delicious shiver, he plunged back into the weird world of Wells.

Kiran rang the bell of the apartment in Great Russell Mansions at two o’clock sharp the next afternoon. He was surprised when a young woman dressed in the black crêpe of mourning opened the door. Kiran was struck by the thickness of her chestnut hair piled neatly on the top of her head, and her large brown eyes, which seemed part of her personality.

‘Ah, Mr Nambudiri, is it?’ she said, in an accent that Kiran couldn’t place. Scottish, or perhaps Liverpudlian? Though English regional accents were not as plentiful as those of India, there were certainly enough to confuse the non-native.

‘It is, Miss..?’

‘Miss Lock. Pleased to meet you.’

Kiran shook her hand and found it pleasantly warm, firm, and dry.

‘Ah, you are the major’s daughter?’

‘His niece. Please come this way.’

Kiran followed her along a corridor and into a large, airy drawing room, through whose windows he could see could the impressive bulk of the British Museum. The furnishings and decorations had the sheen of newness and expense. It was unlike any room Kiran had yet experienced in England.

Major Lock was sitting on a sofa reading the Times and put the newspaper down to greet Kiran. After they had shaken hands, he said, ‘How has the bookmaking business been since I last saw you?’

‘Profitable, major, though not as profitable as Mr Smiggins would like.’

‘Will you have some tea?’ Miss Lock said.

‘I would like some tea, thank you,’ Kiran said. ‘This London air seems always to dry my throat.’

‘Grand,’ Miss Lock said. ‘Tea for three, then. I’ll be right back.’

Kiran sat on a sofa opposite Major Lock.

‘Let’s have your report then,’ Lock said.

Kiran was slightly wrong-footed by the question’s directness. ‘Well, I..er…I started by trying a simple shift cipher…’

Kiran talked through the various methods and types of cipher he had tried, leaving out little detail because he thought this was what the major meant by a ‘report’. He was still talking when Miss Lock returned with the tea tray and was becoming more and more alarmed by the major’s evident impatience, signified by a rapid puffing on his cigar and a drumming of fingers on the arm of the sofa.

Kiran was relieved when it was Miss Lock who interrupted him rather than her uncle.

‘Here you are,’ she said, handing him a cup. ‘Will you help yourself to milk and sugar? I could hear from the kitchen that Arthur was keeping you talking, and you with your parched throat. He’s a merciless man when he wants to be.’ She winked at him.

The major ignored his niece and said, ’So we still don’t know what the ciphertext means?’

‘No, major. As I said, I think your brother may have used the Vigenère cipher. Once all the simple ciphers are ruled out, which they are, this one is well-known, simple to use, and difficult to decipher.’

‘But not impossible?’

’No, not impossible. But simple frequency analysis will not suffice. One of our major difficulties is the small amount of text we have to work with.’

‘It seems that Henry left us a fiendish problem to solve,’ Lock said.

‘The Vigenère cipher requires a keyword,’ Kiran said. ‘If Dr Lock was like most of us, then the keyword he chose would not have been random. May I suggest we spend a few hours making a list of words you think may have had some significance for Dr Lock?’

‘Seems like a long shot,’ Lock said, frowning.

‘Yes, it is. But long shots sometimes win.’

‘Very well, but I think Peggy might be a better collaborator than me when it comes to Henry’s thought processes.’

Kiran looked at Miss Lock, who nodded.

‘Ah, Dr Lock was your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry. I —’

‘Don’t be sorry, Mr Nambudiri. There’s nothing for you to be sorry about.’

Kiran opened the cardboard suitcase and took out the notebooks and his working papers.

‘I suggest we start with family names, Miss Lock. Immediate family, that is. All the Christian names.’

Miss Lock listed the Christian names of her parents, her aunts and uncles, and cousins. Kiran learnt from this she was an only child. It took more than an hour to try this list of names against the Vigenère cipher tables. And none of them produced anything but gobbledegook.

‘Let us try places that Dr Lock may have fond memories of,’ Kiran said. ‘Towns, resorts, lakes, mountains, perhaps even some street names.’

This was a longer list, encompassing Britain, Ireland, France and Italy. But as with the family names, the places did not yield the secret of the cipher.

‘Very well,’ said Kiran, undaunted. ‘Let us explore Dr Lock’s artistic side. The names of favourite novels, poems, songs, musical pieces, paintings. And we had better add the names of the writers, artists, composers, and so on.’

Kiran was very aware that Major Lock’s patience was again wearing thin. The ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece had lost its homely tone and now seemed like a reproach. But Miss Lock was still game. By six-thirty in the evening, however, all three of them were subdued, disappointed, and bored by the fruitless exercise.

‘Are you willing to try something else, Miss Lock?’ Kiran said.

‘Yes, of course,’

‘Then I want you to close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and empty your mind. Simply relax and concentrate on your breath. Don’t strain after anything. If a thought or word or image or comes to you, just name it and let it go.’

Major Lock stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

Kiran said nothing, but this was probably the best thing for all of them. His fidgetiness would not help Miss Lock to relax.

Once the two of them were alone, Miss Lock closed her eyes and took some deep breaths as Kiran had instructed.

‘Don’t rush anything, Miss Lock. We will sit in silence until you are quite relaxed.’

Ten minutes later, some words came to her. Most of them meant nothing to Kiran, but he wrote them all down. A period of silence followed. And then Miss Lock opened her eyes and said, ‘Postcard!’

She got up from the sofa and dashed from the room. She soon returned, holding a postcard, which she handed to Kiran.

The front of the postcard was a photograph showing a rocky piece of land fringed with sand, curving round a bay. To one side were a range of formidable looking stone ramparts.

‘Where is this?’ Kiran asked.

‘It’s the Bay of Calvi in Corsica.’

‘But you didn’t mention this when we made that list of places.’

‘I didn’t, because so far as I know, my father never went there. But I just remembered that we found that postcard in a safe deposit box he had. And it seemed quite incongruous there. It’s worth a try, anyway.’

Kiran nodded. ‘Yes, it’s worth a try.’

He worked through several variations on the Bay of Calvi. But none of them led anywhere.

‘Try Corsica,’ Miss Lock said.

Kiran did. Then he looked up from his workings and said, ‘I think we have it, Miss Lock. I think we have it.’

Author’s note

If, reader, you wish to decipher the ciphertext shown in Episodes 6, 12. 18, and 24 yourself, go to https://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/hollywood/breaking/v.htm, and use the keyword ‘corsica’.