Spiral by David Lindsey

Author:David Lindsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lindsey, Mystery, Stuart Haydon, Suspense, Series, Crime
Publisher: David Lindsey
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

Haydon worked on the code another two and a half hours, guessing, making more trial runs, backing up and repeating approaches with only a minor twist in the technique, running it all in reverse, guessing again, using a small calculator he kept in his desk to doublecheck his formulas.

One of the major difficulties in deciphering codes was not discovering the patterns of the characters, but discovering what was not a part of a pattern, identifying characters thrown in arbitrarily with no meaning other than the intent to create the illusion of a pattern where none existed. It was this arbitrary character that Haydon began to look for first. He had a hunch that the best candidates were the double letters that occurred at various places within each series. With the calculator, he began computing the letter-to-number equivalents for each series, making the doubled letters represent, in turn, their own valuations independent of the others in the series.

He filled several pages with combinations of numbers in his peculiar handwriting, a stylized, spare scratch that Nina claimed, with some justification, resembled Assyrian cuneiform more than Arabic numerals. Nothing worked. Next he decided to treat the only occurrence of a pair of consonants—the two F's in the primary position in the second series—as being the only arbitrary descriptors, while the doubled vowels were treated as representing a single digit numeral, since they fell within the first nine letters of the alphabet. After nearly an hour, he had still made no headway. None of the systems he derived from manipulating the second series produced any success when applied to the other three. He retraced his steps and reexamined his initial assumptions.

Gradually he realized that the first letter in each of the four series of letters had nothing to do with the combinations of numerical equivalents that followed. It was indeed a letter, not a letter representing a number. In fact, it represented itself. All other letters did represent numbers. But the key to the cryptogram was the doubling of vowels. The second vowel was the true arbitrary descriptor. When EE appeared in the series it did not represent 55, but simply 5. The second letter in each pair was the red herring.

Working quickly now, Haydon deciphered each series using this method, and discovered that he had four local telephone numbers, each preceded by a single letter: V, F, W, and L. He guessed the letters represented names, and he guessed the first was Valverde. Using a crisscross directory, one of numerous kinds of directories he kept in the library, he checked each of the four numbers. He was not surprised to find they were unlisted.

He looked at his watch. It was two hours before Jack Crowell's shift ended at the telephone company. Crowell answered almost before the first ring stopped. As soon as he heard Haydon's voice, he said how sorry he had been to read about Mooney in the papers. Haydon got away from that as soon as he could without being rude and told Crowell he had four unlisteds.

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