The Hawk Is Dead

49

Friday 24 November 2023

‘OK,’ Roy Grace asked, ‘anyone here good at puzzles?’

It was 5.30 p.m. He stared around the conference room at the thirty members of his team crammed in here for the evening briefing. Behind him were three large screens showing the crime scene photographs of Sir Peregrine, his family tree, and the association chart listing Buckingham Palace staff and all others with whom the dead man had had dealings.

With his team expanding to over fifty people by the end of the weekend, future briefings would have to take place in a bigger venue, and he’d taken steps for that to happen.

A few people raised their hands, including Norman Potting, Polly Sweeney, Luke Stanstead, EJ Boutwood and DI Brent Dean from the Met Police.

‘How about cryptic crosswords?’ Grace asked.

All five raised their hands again as well as a few more.

Grace held up a sheaf of papers. ‘What I have here are photocopies of a number of pages from Sir Peregrine’s diary, which are written in code. From the date, we can establish this is the last entry he made very shortly prior to his death.’

He had their full attention.

‘Polly has told us his widow, Lady Greaves, believes he wrote these recent entries in code because he had real concerns — which he wouldn’t share with her — about someone in the Royal Household who was up to something suspicious. Someone who might therefore also be behind Sir Peregrine’s murder. Maybe more than one person. I want you all to take a look and see if anything pops into your mind on how to figure this code out. I’ve tried my damnedest for the past hour but I can’t make head or tail of it.’

He pointed at one of the screens on the wall, clicked the remote and an image of the first page came up. Maths had never been his strong point, and he had no real clue where to start with the blocks of numbers and letters that appeared.

A row of numbers ran across the page finishing with two letters, as they did on every page he had looked at in Sir Peregrine’s diary. The ones they all saw now were:

Underneath were twenty-three rows of letters, in blocks and in columns. The top line was:

Below that was another row of figures, separated by a divide.

Below them were five columns of rows of letters and numbers. The top one read:

There were further columns with combinations of letters of the alphabet and numbers after those.

Desperate though Grace was to get the code cracked, he did take a certain perverse pleasure in seeing the baffled looks on all his team member’s faces. Maybe he wasn’t as rubbish at maths as he feared, after all?

The Met Detective Inspector, Brent Dean, raised a hand. ‘Boss, the Army might be a good place to get help if we’re stuck; Sir Peregrine was a military man — in Naval Intelligence, I understand — this could well be a code he was familiar with back in the time of his service. Although I would suggest the first port of call be the National Crime Agency — their Major Crime Investigative Support Team will have contacts. They keep a register of expert witnesses.’

Grace looked at the sharply suited, shorn-headed and confident — borderline arrogant — detective. ‘I’ve dealt with them before, but thank you, Brent. I can’t go through a load of bureaucracy from them. You know what will happen if we ask them? Some time next week we’ll be sent a bunch of CVs of people from the private sector — academics, practitioners, former cops, you name it, who might be able to help. The stakes are too high. We haven’t got the luxury of time, we can’t wait until next week in the vague hope we may find a code-breaker — we need to know right now what Sir Peregrine said.’

The DI nodded, looking pensive rather than chastened. ‘Maybe GCHQ would be a better bet, sir.’

‘Have you ever had dealings with GCHQ?’

The DI shook his head. ‘No, boss.’

‘I’ll tell you how it works,’ Grace said. ‘The protocol is that we’d have to put our request to them through Counter Terrorism Policing South East — CTPSE for long.’

There was a titter of laughter. Acronyms in the police force had pretty much become a language in themselves — and because they were constantly changing, they were a bane of life for everyone. He paused for a brief moment, then continued.

‘They might or might not send us back a code and an inbox address. We’d then have to send our request using that code — and CTPSE would transfer it onto the National Secure Network, from where it would then go on to its trusted partners. It’s just possible, if you are very lucky, that sometime afterwards — days, weeks, maybe months — you might get an intelligence log disseminated to you from an unknown source with the code partially or totally cracked. In view of this being top-level national importance, we might get a response in weeks rather than months,’ Grace said.

Dean nodded. ‘Sounds like you’ve been there before, boss. I do appreciate that standard territorial policing doesn’t have easy access to GCHQ or MI5 — but this is, as we all know, a very exceptional situation. I believe you would find them more cooperative than you think.’

‘Maybe,’ Grace said acerbically. ‘But I’m not prepared to take that risk.’

‘Chief,’ Norman Potting cut in. ‘Might be worth a word with DCI Westinghouse.’ The detective was one of the four SIOs, along with Grace, on his Major Crime Team.

‘Detective Superintendent,’ Grace corrected him. ‘Andy Westinghouse has just been promoted.’

‘And very well deserved it is too,’ Glenn Branson commented.

There was a general murmur of assent.

‘I think you’ll be working for him soon, and not the other way round, boss,’ Branson quipped, ‘the way he’s been rising through the ranks.’

‘I can think of worse people to have as a boss,’ Grace said with a grin, then turned to Potting. ‘Why do you think Andy Westinghouse can help us, Norman?’

‘He used to be in the Army,’ Potting said. ‘He and I worked together some years back. He told me one day that he came top in the Signals exam when he was at the officer training course in Sandhurst. He said that he was very good at cracking codes.’

‘Seriously?’ Grace asked.

‘Scout’s honour, chief!’ Potting held up his right arm and gave the signal, covering the nail of his little finger and raising the middle three fingers.

Grace thanked him, telling him he would call the newly promoted Detective Superintendent as soon as the briefing meeting was finished.