Challenge 4
RULE REMINDER: Rapid fire multiple submissions put an unreasonable load on the servers and make it difficult for others to submit. Anyone who makes an unreasonable number of submissions will be open to disqualification. In the first instance this will mean that anyone who submits more than 20 times in 10 minutes will be disqualified.
A nice shade of pink
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Top Secret: For your eyes only
Despite his strange discovery, Harper seems to have had very little influence on the police investigation at that stage, and my investigation of local files shows that the only activity in the two months following the death were letters exchanged between Maisie, Rogers, Harper and White. Rogers continued to try to quieten the fuss while Maisie, increasingly anxious about her precious library, worked hard to get them all to take her concerns seriously. In the end Maisie seems to have lost patience and to have commissioned her own investigation, led by the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency. I am not sure why she chose them, especially given the cost, but it may have related to their Rogues Gallery, a national database which contained photos and descriptions of a large number of known and suspected criminals. It was the first of its kind, and Maisie may have hoped that it would reveal the identity of her interloper. The current librarian at the Mansion kindly gave me access to Maisie’s private records, a series of diaries and letters, many of them encrypted, that were stored in the office behind the fireplace in the library. I am gradually working through them all, or at least the ones that seem to be related to this case, and will post anything relevant. For starters, here is the report from the Pinkertons agent assigned to the original enquiry. I haven’t had a chance to crack the cipher yet so I don’t know if the Rogues Gallery played a role in their investigations, but perhaps you can check that for me. A quick inspection shows that the letter frequencies match the usual distribution pretty closely, suggesting that this was not encrypted using a substitution cipher, so you will need to use a different approach to crack it. Good luck, HarryA stylish man
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Top Secret: For your eyes only
Report for Miss Maisie Styles The library Our agents have completed their enquiries and are now in a position to report their findings. They are summarised below. We would be happy to take further instructions. If you prefer to terminate the investigation now, then we would be grateful to receive notification so that we can settle your account. a) The body was that of a young man, approximately twenty-three years old, with blond hair and a distinctive scar on his left cheek. No members of the household reported knowing or having any recollection of meeting with him. b) He carried no papers so it was not possible to establish his identity at that stage of the enquiry with any certainty, although the style of his shoes and the marque of his pocket watch were European, suggesting that he was well travelled. c) Enquiries at the local carriage company yielded the information that he had arrived on a coach from New York the day before his body was discovered. d) His image was not in our Rogues Gallery, but we added the description and circulated it to our New York office. e) Aided by the distinctive nature of the young man’s appearance our agents were able to follow his trail back to Ellis Island, where he had arrived on the SS Paris, a ship carrying nearly two hundred passengers from Southampton, England. f) The cabin staff recall our passenger as rather reclusive, suffering from sickness for much of the voyage. g) Records from the shipping company show that he travelled under the name Stanley Isles, and that his passage had been paid for by a bookshop in the small Hampshire village of Alresford. h) Isles was not known to the local constabulary, but the bookshop was of minor interest, as besides a small but profitable trade in incunabula it was also suspected of trading in items with a more dubious provenance. i) We were unable to investigate our subject further without alerting the bookseller to our interest, so, for now, we have paused the enquiry. j) If you have any reason to believe that the book found next to the body had particular value, or that your collection includes items which might have attracted the attention of international book smugglers, then it might be worth extending the investigation to cover the booksellers, but the evidence we have gathered so far is only circumstantial, and the costs of further enquiries could be substantial.This challenge closed on 08/11/2023. Please click the Official Decrypt button above to see the correct answers.
RULE REMINDER: Rapid fire multiple submissions put an unreasonable load on the servers and make it difficult for others to submit. Anyone who makes an unreasonable number of submissions will be open to disqualification. In the first instance this will mean that anyone who submits more than 20 times in 10 minutes will be disqualified.