The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [122]
“What was the point of this destruction, Holmes? Why attack the clothes, and not us? Even Billy wasn’t badly hurt, just parked to one side. Do you mind if I open the window a bit?”
“It is a bit thick in here, isn’t it? That’s good. Better close it in a minute or two, though, we don’t want our voices heard. Why indeed, as you say, might a foe be content with a few clothes and the seat cush-ions of an old cab? Except to show us that she knew where we were, and that she could as easily have done the same to our bodies as your clothes. And finally, to thumb her nose at me by pulling my own trick of leaving reversed footsteps, and topping it off with Baker Street mud. It was a demonstration, no doubt about that, but was that all? I think not. Look closely at the slashes on the seats, there.” He arranged the last set of photographs so that they overlapped, to place the seats in a continuous line. “Do you see something?”
I looked at the shredded seats, the cuts that crossed, met at their lower ends, and ran parallel. I laid my spectacles to one side and squinted hard at the clear black and grey images. “Is there a pattern?” I asked, hearing the excitement in my voice. “Hand me that pencil and pad, would you, Holmes?” The first two cuts crossed each other in the middle, and I wrote an X on my pad. The next two met at the lower edge of the seat, a V. After some minutes and discussion with Holmes, I had a string of Xs, Vs, and straight lines on my pad that looked like this:
XVXVIIXXIIXIIXXIIXXIVXXXI
“Roman numerals?” I wondered. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked Holmes, whose steely eyes were studying the page in-tently. I could see that it did not, so I put on my glasses and sat back.
“A string of twenty-five Roman numbers. Do they add up to some-thing?” I did the simple sum in my head, ten plus five plus ten and so on. “One hundred forty-five, if they make up twenty-five separate numbers. Of course, they could say fifteen, seventeen, twenty-two, twelve, and so forth.”
“What would that come to?”
“There won’t be much difference, because of the nature of Roman numerals, but it comes to, let’s see—143.”
“Interesting. And the number between them is 144, a dozen dozen.”
“And the two sums added together make 288, which is the number of dollars my father had in his desk when he died. Holmes, these num-bers games could go on forever.”
“What if we translated the numbers into letters, one of the more simplistic codes?”
We scribbled and thought, but came up with nothing. Reading it as 15, 17, 22, 12, 22, 24, 20, 11 yielded gibberish as OQVLVXTK, and no other combination made any sense either. I finally pushed it away.
“There are just too many variables, Holmes. Without a key we can’t even know if it’s a word, or the combination to a safe, or a map coordinate, or—”
“Yet she left it for us to find. Where could she have put the key?”
“Judging from her previous style, I should say that the key is both hidden and completely obvious, which is always the most effective means of hiding something.”
It was very late now, and my eyes felt gritty. I picked up the con-versation where we had left it before the slash pattern had appeared.
“I agree that she was demonstrating her cleverness. She won a number of points in that round. I wonder what her next move might have been had we not been spirited away by Mycroft. Cutting off Wat-son’s nose to show that she could have taken his head?”
“More to the point, what will her move be now, when we walk openly home? For how long will her wariness last before she thinks it is perhaps not a trap, that we truly are divided and the trauma of it has made me an empty wreck? Mere extermination is not what she wants, apparently. She wishes to ruin me first. Very well, we’ll