Challenge 7

Top Secret: For your eyes only

Jodie, I have been working through the stash of letters we discovered here in the library and found the message below. It was a handwritten letter from Maisie to Tom Harper demanding that he continues the investigation. In it she promised to send him the text of an encrypted telegram sent from the Manor to the booksellers in Alresford with the hope that he would be able to decipher it. I found the telegram itself in the Police archives and I can see why Maisie couldn’t break it: the hasty typing and the abbreviated phrasing makes it hard to read, added to which it is encrypted using a transposition cipher reading off by columns instead of rows. It was only when I spotted the pattern that I worked out what was going on. I know you will be able to break it, but I wonder how the new recruits will get on. Anyway, here is Maisie’s letter to the Chief: Dearest Chief Harper, I understand that the Medical Examiner and the Attorney General have both accepted your recommendation to record the cause of Mr Isles’ death as misadventure and that you do not plan to conduct any further investigation into the circumstances surrounding the accident. As head of the library at the Manor I object most strongly to this decision. While we cannot know for certain how the unfortunate young man came to be lying at the foot of the ladder, the book he had taken from the shelves was just one of the very valuable items in our collection, and the investigations by Pinkertons’ established that it was extremely likely that he was engaged in theft at the time of his fall. Given that he seems to have been engaged by an established gang of book thieves to visit us, there must surely be a risk that they will send another in his place to do their bidding. If that were not enough then consider the most recent discovery by Pinkertons’: that some of the telegrams received by the Alresford dealers were sent from the Manor itself. Furthermore, they conducted their own tests and established that the note found in the spine of the book was typed on our very own Sholes and Gidden typewriter. It is clear that something is very wrong in our household and no policeman worth his office would overlook the circumstances, however close he may be to the investigation. I will forward the text of the message sent to England for your own perusal. It defeated my own attempt to decrypt it, but if you are prepared to work with the Pinkertons’ agents then I am sure you will be able to break the cipher and shed some light on this awful affair. Yours sincerely, Miss Maisie Styles