The Anatomy of Deception - Lawrence Goldstone [127]
For twenty minutes, I told Simpson of my past with relief but not trepidation, while she listened with sympathy but not judgment. When I was done, she smiled shyly, thanked me for my trust, and then said simply, “Now let’s find something to save poor Farnshaw.”
I was buoyed. With her help, I felt, for the first time, that I might find my way through the thicket.
Since I had already been through the materials, at least cursorily, I examined the journal while Simpson familiarized herself with some of the more common techniques of encryption. Even when we engaged in individual tasks, we worked together, as if at the autopsy table, two students of science applying logic and method to unravel an enigma.
“If Turk employed an exotic cipher, I’m not all at sure we can penetrate it,” she concluded, “but if not, since we are able to form a solid hypothesis as to the subject matter that he wished to hide, we may be able to work backward to set us on the road to a solution.”
I agreed. Inference would be vital in forming working hypotheses. We began with a page of the journal containing a number of entries. For the next hours, we tried substitutions, transpositions, the Caesar cipher, transliteral cipher, and polyalphabetic ciphers. We performed elementary frequency analysis, and tried some obvious keys for the Vigenère code. Once or twice, we seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough, only to have our edifice crumble and collapse. At one point, Mrs. Mooney poked her head into the room to report that Samuel was asleep in her spare room.
By midnight I was deeply fatigued of the effort, despite Mrs. Mooney’s indulgence with a large pot of coffee, but Simpson seemed unruffled. Finally, however, she put down the book.
“Ephraim,” she said. “I do believe we may be wasting our time.”
“Is it unbreakable, then?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, but it certainly seems so to us. Not every puzzle can be solved.”
“But if this book holds the secret of Farnshaw’s innocence …”
“I’m as frustrated as you, Ephraim, be we cannot simply divine a solution. I’m beginning to suspect another possibility, however. Have you considered that this journal may be nothing more than an elaborate hoax?”
“A hoax? I had suspected that myself with the journal Borst unearthed, but there is no such obvious direction here. If it were not to implicate another, why would Turk go to all that trouble just to create a specious clue?”
“I’m starting to know Turk,” she said. “He might well have done it for the very purpose of setting a couple of fools like us to frustration.
“We have been examining this book as if it were a heart or a liver. Cut it open and its secrets will be revealed. But this is not the Dead House. The character of the person is as important as the artifact. I have come to see that, despite all his pretensions to wealth, Turk did not do all of this just for the money. Turk needed to get even. He needed to get away with it, to laugh at everyone who he thought had laughed at him his whole life … motivation each of us can understand, I warrant. Perhaps Turk did not blackmail Dr. Halsted, but he would have. Gleefully. Halsted was rich, from a good family. He went to Yale. Turk would have done anything to bring him down, to prove that he was the smarter man, that it was only accident of birth that had prevented him from attaining similar heights. All of those silly precautions—hiding where he lived, that room on Wharf Lane—everything had to be so complicated. Leaving a key in a book. How silly. The best place to hide a key was with his other keys.
“Don’t you see, Ephraim? There were no real practical advantages to his intrigues … he left plenty of hints that anyone interested could follow … he wanted things complicated because he had decided complicated meant clever. I can just see him, hunched over his desk at night, chortling to himself as he created his fakes. ‘Let them try and figure this out,’ he would have thought. He was so desperate to show everyone how smart he was. Well, he wasn’t smarter than you and he definitely wasn’t smarter