The Caterpillar Cop by James McClure

Author:James McClure [McClure, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2010-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

9

WHILE WAITING for Zondi to report back, Kramer had Pembrook fetch the toffee tin from the safe so that they could study its contents afresh in the light of a drizzly morning. Little wonder people caught colds in such an unpredictable climate.

“Pull over Zondi’s stool but don’t sit too close to me,” he said.

Pembrook complied with a sniff.

“I went round to the Swanepoels’ at breakfast time, sir,” he said. “That reference the father made to Boetie oversleeping one Sunday and missing church for the first time—it was on November the sixteenth.”

“Fine! Now we have narrowed it right down to the morning after, so to speak.”

“And that reminded Bonita that Boetie had been in high spirits the morning before. He’d exchanged his bike for a better one with a dynamo lamp—said he’d be out late testing it.”

“Even better. But it still beats me why his parents never asked him what he was up to.”

“They keep saying the same thing: they trusted him and—”

“Who, man?”

“God.”

Kramer wrote the name on his blotter. Then he opened the tin, giving two of the squares of tissue to Pembrook and opening the other one out himself.

“I have a feeling,” he said, “that these things might tell us a lot about what our young friend knew. The trouble is finding out how they work.”

“Well, isn’t the first thing deciding whether it’s a code or a cipher, sir?”

“Hey? Come again? And stick to Afrikaans this time.”

The probationer squirmed.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know the word for ‘cipher.’ ”

“What does it mean, then?”

“That you give each letter of the alphabet a number or something, perhaps switch the letters around, and write like that.”

“Bugger it, Pembrook, that is a code!”

“No, sir—at least not according to what I read once. A code is where one letter stands for a whole word—or where a drawing, say a circle, stands for ‘battleship.’ The trouble is you can’t write just anything and you must have a codebook to do it.”

Kramer made a show of peering into the tin.

“Nothing there,” he said.

“That’s also the trouble, sir,” Pembrook went on, rather apprehensively. “You can’t get anywhere without one.”

“Uhuh.”

A prisoner from the cells shuffled in to sweep the floor and was waved out again.

“Seeing you know so much about it, my boy, which one is this in?”

Pembrook caught a sneeze in a tissue and spent some time folding it away.

“Couldn’t we ask them through in Security, sir? They’re supposed to know all there is to know—more than me.”

“What? And make a bloody fool of myself if it’s a lot of twaddle? We’re dealing with a kid of twelve, remember.”

“Sir.”

“Well?”

“I think it’s in code, sir. You’ll notice how each line of letters stays straight and keeps inside a sort of square. There’s a pattern to it you wouldn’t need if you were just switching letters around. It must match up with something.”

“Of course! That explains the tracing paper!”

Pembrook flushed with embarrassed pride.

“Shall I have another go at his room, sir?”

Kramer did not hear him. He was closely examining all four slips, putting one on top of another and holding them to the light.

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