Newton’s Fire

TWENTY-FIVE
I

After the big build-up from Luke, Rachel was a little disappointed by Jay Cowan. She’d expected him to stand out in some way, yet he could scarcely have been more ordinary: slight, neat and generally unobtrusive. He had an oblique way about him, too, never facing either of them directly, or looking them full in the eye. He also held himself unnaturally still, as if someone had once told him to stop fidgeting, and he’d taken the words too much to heart. And while his green shirt and black drainpipe trousers and brown brogues were each perfectly fine in themselves, they looked awful in combination. Not ordinary, then, so much as trying his very best to appear ordinary, and falling strangely short.

‘Luke,’ he said, opening his front door. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We didn’t wake you, did we?’

‘I was working.’

‘Working?’ asked Rachel, giving him her warmest smile. ‘At this time of day?’

He didn’t look at her so much as over her left shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned back to Luke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again.

‘We need help, mate.’

‘With what?’

‘Can we come in? If I don’t get a coffee soon, I’m going to keel.’

Jay stood there a moment longer, then nodded and let them in. A short corridor led to a dingy stairwell with worn brown carpeting. They went up to the first floor. Boxes stacked against the wall were covered by a white sheet. ‘What’s all this?’ asked Luke.

‘A project.’ He led them inside his flat and into a large, book-lined room that should have overlooked the street, except that the thick crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, leaving it lit by a table lamp and an array of six computer screens stacked in two rows of three, each of which showed a hand from a different online poker tournament.

‘That’s your work?’ asked Rachel. ‘Poker?’

‘This is the best time,’ he said. ‘People who’ve been playing all night are tired by now. They make more mistakes when they’re tired.’ He began cashing out of the games one by one, switching off the screens.

‘And you can make a living from it?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how bad some of them are. They bet in situations where there’s no possible benefit to betting. Then they do it again.’

‘Maybe they’re trying to prove themselves,’ suggested Luke.

‘Or maybe they just want to go to bed,’ said Rachel.

Jay looked directly at her for the first time. ‘Then why wouldn’t they just go to bed?’

With the screens gone black, the room suddenly felt a little spooky. ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Good point.’

‘How about that coffee?’ said Luke, setting down Olivia’s laptop. ‘We’ve had one hell of a night.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He led them through to an impeccably neat kitchen, turned on the kettle. ‘What do you need my help with?’

Luke fished his cipher text from Pelham’s pocket. It was badly smudged and crumpled, so Jay found him a fresh pad of paper on which to write it out clean. ‘Rachel and I found this last night,’ said Luke. ‘We think it’s a cipher, perhaps devised by Newton.’

‘A Newton cipher?’ Jay’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. I gave someone my word.’

‘You want my help and you won’t tell me?’

‘I’m sorry, Jay. If I gave you my word on something, you wouldn’t want me to break it, would you?’

Jay considered this for a moment, like a boy with a scraped knee wondering whether or not to start bawling. ‘It won’t help me solve the cipher.’

‘You can do it anyway. I’ve been telling Rachel how brilliant you are.’

For a moment, Rachel feared the flattery was too blatant, but Jay only nodded, so she decided to back Luke up. ‘It’s quite true,’ she said. ‘He’s been bragging shamelessly about you.’

Jay’s throat reddened slightly and he squinted at the architrave above the kitchen door. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

‘Of course not,’ said Luke, pouring boiling water into three mugs. ‘Just give it your best shot.’

He nodded and set the pad square in front of him on the countertop.

BE 22108 BF

BE 10460 BF

BH 01256

BC 10484

KD 11201

‘Five rows of five numbers,’ said Jay. He turned to Luke. ‘You’ve already checked for a grid, I assume.’

‘For a what?’

Jay sighed. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet. If you treat I and J or Y and Z as one letter, you can fit the entire alphabet into a five-by-five grid. Code-makers have been using that for centuries. It would have been old hat to someone like Newton.’ He pointed to the top row of numbers: 2 2 1 0 8. ‘If that’s what this is, then these numbers might indicate how many times each letter is used in the cipher text. This first 2, for example, would imply that the letter A appears twice.’ He wrote two capital As at the top of a fresh sheet of paper. ‘This second 2 would indicate two Bs.’

‘I’m with you,’ said Rachel. ‘One C. No Ds. Eight Es.’

‘How do you know the grid reads left to right?’ asked Luke, a little piqued. ‘Maybe it goes from top to bottom.’

‘E is by far the most common letter in the alphabet,’ said Jay. ‘Eight Es therefore makes sense. Under your system, we’d have just one E, but eight Us. Are you really arguing that eight Us are more likely than eight Es?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Plus my way also gives us six Os, which I’d say makes rather more sense than your six Ws. Maybe you’d disagree? Maybe you’d prefer your six Qs to my six Is. At least it would give you something to do with all those Us. ’ He glanced at Rachel, almost with a smirk, as though showing off for her. ‘And I get four Rs and eight Ss, not to mention three Ns and two As, Ms and Ts, all of which make sense. That’s why, incidentally, I can be confident that this is a YZ cipher rather an IJ one. Any other questions, or may I get on with it?’ He didn’t bother waiting for Luke to answer, but instead wrote out all the letters in sequence:

A A B B C E E E E E E E E

F H H H H I I I I I I

L M M N N N N N O O O O O O

P R R R R S S S S S S S S T T T T

U V W W Y/Z

‘What about the pairs of letters before and after the numbers?’ asked Rachel. ‘What are they for?’

‘The numbers stood for letters,’ said Jay. ‘So perhaps the letters stand for numbers.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A equals one. B equals two. E equals five. Add all the letter pairs up and what do you get?’

Luke shook his head. ‘What?’

‘My god, Luke! How long have you had this? Sixty. Now count up the numbers.’

‘Sixty?’ hazarded Rachel.

‘Exactly. Well done. Sixty. Now do you see?’

‘No,’ said Luke.

Jay took a fresh sheet of paper, set it next to the list of letters. He wrote two dashes on the left of the page, followed by a space and another five dashes, as in in a game of hangman. ‘There’s your first B and E,’ he said. He wrote two dashes and then six more on the right-hand side of the page. ‘And that’s your first B and F.’ He repeated it immediately beneath, then followed it with a third line of two dashes followed by eight, a fourth line of two and three dashes, with eleven and four dashes on the bottom line. ‘Now all we have to do is fit these sixty letters onto these sixty blank spaces until we’ve got a phrase that makes sense. Which would be easier if I knew where’d you found this thing, or what its context was.’ But he said this more to make the point than in reproach, for he was clearly enjoying the challenge now and didn’t want it made easier.

‘Maybe we should each have a go,’ suggested Luke.

‘Yes. Or maybe you could allow me some silence in which to work.’

‘Fine,’ said Luke. ‘We’ll leave you to it.’