Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [62]
Sherlock read the advert out to Matty, who frowned. ‘Bit long-winded,’ he said, ‘and a bit creepy as well. Don’t strike me as the kind of place ordinary people stay.’
‘It’s not a real hotel,’ Sherlock said.
‘How do you know?’
Sherlock indicated the first three words. ‘The Sigerson Hotel. My father’s name is Siger – Siger Holmes. That makes me Siger’s son. The advert is aimed at me.’
Matty looked dubious. ‘Could be a coincidence. Maybe there is a Sigerson Hotel.’
‘Possible,’ Sherlock conceded, ‘but these adverts are paid for by the word. There are a lot of words here – more than you need to tell people how good your hotel is, but enough to contain a hidden message.’
‘So Mr Crowe and Virginia are in Kirkaldy Town.’ Matty scowled. ‘That’s miles away. I thought they were supposed to be in Edinburgh.’
‘The mention of Kirkaldy is a red herring. That’s not where they are.’
‘Then where are they?’
Sherlock shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have to decode the message.’
He looked at it again. If it had been a set of random letters or numbers then he would have tried a substitution cipher, the way that Amyus Crowe had taught him. Substitution ciphers were based around the principle of substituting one thing for another – replacing every letter a with a number 1, for instance, every letter b with a 2, and so on. Decoding them, if you didn’t know what the substitution strategy was, depended on knowing the relative frequency with which particular letters occurred in normal writing. E was the most common letter, followed by t, a, i, o and n. So all you had to do was look for the most commonly occurring letter or number, and replace that with e, then work your way down the list – although you did need quite a large sample of code to break in order to have a good chance of getting it right. Scanning the message, though, Sherlock realized that it wasn’t a substitution cipher. For one, it made a strange kind of sense. It read as an advertisement. Replacing the letters of a sentence or a paragraph with other letters would result in a completely scrambled set of meaningless words. So the code had to be something else. He took a pen out of his pocket and quickly scribbled down the initial letters of the words in the margin of the newspaper, but he only got a little way – f t i p t r a r . . . – before he realized that he was on the wrong track.
Perhaps it was the last letters, he thought. He scribbled another set of letters – d e l e o t d x . . . No, that didn’t look right either.
Perhaps he should start from the end, rather than the beginning. He tried both options again – first letters and last letters – but all he got for his trouble was f i t k n u l . . . and e n n y r s e . . . Unless Amyus Crowe was deliberately confusing the issue by writing in a foreign language, Sherlock was on the wrong track.
Maybe he should be looking at words rather than letters. He tried every first word of a sentence – find tell two mr locate – then every second word – the us days and us. With the proviso that the second one sounded a bit like bad poetry, it was no good.
He sighed and bit the inside of his lip, aware that Matty was intently watching what he was doing. He was running out of ideas. Maybe this thing was too complicated for him to decipher.
Something was nagging at the back of his brain. He tried to force himself to relax, to stop thinking so that the thought could work its way to the surface. He had tried first words of sentences, and second words. What if . . . what if he tried the first word of the first sentence, the second word of the second sentence, and so on?
He knew the advertisement so well by now that he could write down the words from memory.
Find us in Cramond Town.
‘Got it!’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘They’re in a place called Cramond,’ he said.
Matty looked dubious. ‘I thought you said Cramond was the name of the people who owned the hotel.’
‘There is no hotel,’ Sherlock explained again. ‘It’s a code. Mr Crowe had to get the name of the place in there, but he made it look like something else