The Lost Labyrinth

THIRTY
I

A furious barking accompanied Iain's departure, but the German shepherd must have realised its impotence, for the fury was soon replaced by a self-pitying snuffling that distracted Gaille from her efforts to decipher Petitier's code. She went to the door, stood there watching indecisively from the shadows. There was enough slack between the two leashes to allow the dog a little movement. It began to turn in circles, so that she worried it might choke itself; but it stopped in time and went the other way, unwinding itself. A fly buzzed by Gaille's ear; she flapped it away. The movement caught the dog's eye. Instantly, its whimpers turned back to yowls of fury, it started straining at the rope, trying to get at her.

She fought her instinct to retreat indoors, lest it think it had won a victory. Instead, she took a couple of steps outside into the pleasant freshness of the morning. Sunlight glinted on a pair of steel bowls by the door, presumably food and water for the dog, empty except for a few caked-on scabs; and next to them was what looked like the thighbone of a goat or sheep, gnawed bare of meat. She felt a swell of irritation at Petitier, that responsibility for his wretched dog should fall onto her. But fall on her it had. And suddenly she noticed how thin the German shepherd was, its ribs showing, its coat patchy and speckled with sores and scabs where he-it was a he, Gaille now saw-had scratched himself against the stone walls. And he was slightly favouring his left hind leg too. And despite his still furious barking, her heart went out to him.

They hadn't finished their conchiglie in tomato sauce the night before. She fetched the leavings down from the roof, scraped them into one of the bowls, refreshed them with some water, then added slivers of ham from the joint hanging in the pantry. Then she filled the second bowl with water and took them both out. He raged to see her, hurled himself so violently towards her that she couldn't help but jump back and splash water over her leg. 'You stupid fucking dog!' she cried. 'I'm only trying to feed you.'

But he continued to snarl until she shrugged her shoulders and took the bowls back inside. The barking stopped at once, the whimpering resumed. She gave a wail of exasperation and went back out. This time she defied his barking to set both bowls down on the ground as near to him as she dared. Then she went back inside and fetched the Mauser and held it by its barrel and pushed the bowls with its stock close enough to him that he could feed. He didn't even look at them, not while she was there, just continued to rage, so she returned inside and replaced the Mauser and picked her notebook once more, tried to focus on the journals.

She strongly suspected a simple substitution cipher. Petitier would surely have wanted to be able to consult them without going through elaborate decipherment every time. People who devised their own ciphers were often so familiar with them that they could read them almost as easily as though they were in plain text. No code could hope to defeat sophisticated modern decipherment techniques anyway, so all he'd have hoped to do was confound a casual visitor-and a substitution cipher would have been plenty for that.

The trick with cracking such ciphers was to find repeating sequences of symbols, which would indicate the same original word. It wasn't long before she'd identified several of these, enabling her to take some guesses at what those words might be, then applying the letters she'd broken back to the journals. But though she tried in a variety of languages, all she got was gibberish. She put it aside for the moment, took a different tack, totting up all the different symbols he'd used, hoping to discover at least what alphabet the deciphered text was in. The Greek alphabet had twenty-four symbols, for example, as opposed to the standard twenty-six of the Roman or the twenty-eight of the Arabic. But she quickly counted forty-two different symbols, suggesting his cipher included numerals and mathematical or grammatical symbols, as well as letters. She tried a third approach, noting down the relative frequency of each of the symbols and combinations of symbols; but that didn't prove much help either, for she didn't know what language she was working in.

She put her pad down in frustration. There was silence outside. Or not silence, exactly. Her ears pricked up at the sound. She rose stealthily and tiptoed to the door. The dog had his muzzle deep in the bowl of pasta, and as she watched he threw back his head to gobble a mouthful down, and the glad squelching noises of his swallowing were a kind of music to her ears.