Injury Time (13 page)

‘These three from Department K agreed on the number with Sir Paul and programmed the system with it, finishing about six o'clock on Friday afternoon. Sir Paul immediately left by train for Cambridge to do some work in a laboratory there.' The ACC frowned. ‘Before eight o'clock that very same evening his house was entered via the front door using the code number and his research work on querremitte stolen.'

‘These people from Department K … did they go straight back to London afterwards?'

‘That is the interesting thing, Sloan. They stayed in Calleshire. One of them lives here and the other two had arranged to go back with him for the night …'

Detective Sloan dismissed any impure thoughts he might have had about whether they would still be claiming their subsistence allowances and said instead: ‘I take it they alibi each other?'

‘Yes, but the Department doesn't think it's a conspiracy, if that's what you mean.' The ACC frowned and went on: ‘The chap who told me all this—name of Cumming, George Cumming—their boss, said they needed to find out pretty quickly which one of them it was that the Ancient Mariner had got at.'

‘The Ancient Mariner, sir?'

‘“He stoppeth one in three”,' quoted the ACC. ‘There are three suspects.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Sloan dutifully. It all sounded more like the ‘three-card trick' to him—and that was more difficult to perform than most people thought.

‘And,' went on the ACC, ‘just to make it all more complicated they want to find out without letting him know they've found out.'

‘I can see that they might, sir.' It was what the police tried to do with the smaller drug pushers. Identify and observe.

‘Or her, actually. There's a Miss Elland—no oil painting but brains—and two men.'

‘I see, sir.' The other name for the ‘three-card trick' was ‘Spot the Lady'.

‘The man who lives in Calleshire is Andrew Birkby and the third one is called Farnley—Colin Farnley.' The ACC paused. ‘All three left Sir Paul's and went straight back to Birkby's house in the same car. They got a move on because Birkby had previously arranged to hold a wine-tasting at his home in aid of some local good cause. The church roof or some such thing.'

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. ‘I take it that no one stopped to make a telephone call or used a mobile phone while they were alone?'

‘The funny thing, Sloan, is that they don't appear to have been alone.' The ACC jerked his head. ‘That's bothering George Cumming more than somewhat. It's almost as if one of the three was making quite sure that none of them was in a position to pass on the number.'

‘And yet one of them,' pointed out Sloan ineluctably, ‘contrived to do so.'

‘Oh, yes. The burglary took place thirty miles away while all three of them were in sight of each other and they were the only ones who knew the code number.'

‘It could have been agreed beforehand.'

‘Sir Paul chose it himself on the spot after they arrived.' The ACC resumed his account. ‘They were a little late getting to Birkby's house—the audience was already assembled and waiting, not to say restive—and he was leading the tasting so he went straight to the main table in his drawing-room, fussed about a bit with the bottles that were there and then got cracking.'

Sloan wasn't sure if the ACC had meant to be punny so he didn't say anything.

‘Birkby got his bottles out as quickly as he could—the glasses were already set out on the front of the table …'

‘He didn't change the glasses about, did he, sir?' asked Sloan quickly. ‘Rearrange them into groups of—say four and seven—or do anything like that?'

‘No, but good thinking, Sloan.'

‘How do we know all this, sir?'

‘Their immediate superior, this chap George Cumming whom I've been telling you about, was there by invitation. He lives in the next county and he's come over ostensibly for the wine-tasting but actually for a rendezvous with his staff.'

‘I see, sir.'

The ACC said: ‘He now thinks he was invited so that he, too, could alibi one of them …'

‘Looks very like it, doesn't it, sir?'

‘And he doesn't like it.'

‘I don't blame him,' said Sloan immediately. No one liked being made a patsy of but especially, he imagined, not a high-ranking Intelligence officer. ‘But somehow or other the secret number was disclosed to someone else in the house …'

‘In the room, Sloan. Cumming's pretty sure about that.'

‘Who must have slipped out for a moment to telephone a confederate, who promptly proceeded to Sir Paul's to do the robbery.'

‘Disclosed by one of the three.' The ACC kept to the point at issue with a skill born of much practice with the County Council Police Committee.

‘Andrew Birkby, who was running the wine-tasting, or Colin Farnley or Miss Elland who were in the audience …'

‘In the front row of the audience, Sloan. They had reserved seats and sat with Mrs Birkby. George Cumming was in the row behind them.'

‘Which meant they couldn't see anything going on anywhere else in the room,' concluded Sloan. He thought for a moment. ‘They could have scratched their ears or something, sir.'

‘Cumming swears they didn't do anything like that.'

‘Something in Birkby's spiel about the wine?' Sloan didn't know a lot about wine but he knew men who waxed lyrical about it with a special, mannered prose all of their own.

‘Cumming says there wasn't anything he could spot.' The ACC started to fumble in the pocket of his uniform jacket. ‘He even wondered if something could have been made of the names of the wines …' He fished out a list.

‘Or their years,' suggested Sloan. Good wines had dates, surely, and dates were numbers.

‘Well, the cryptographers in Department K didn't have any bright ideas about that, Cumming says, but there's no harm in our trying.' The ACC looked at the list. ‘The first one was a 1991 Muscadet de Sevre-et-Maine which George Cumming thought was a good straightforward dry white wine.'

‘I suppose the S and M of Sevre-et-Maine could stand for figures,' said Sloan doubtfully.

‘The next one was a red—fruity purple was how Cumming described it to me. A 1992 Merlot—Vin du Pays des Coteaux de l'Ardèche … ever driven through the Ardèche Gorges, Inspector?'

‘No, sir.'

‘I gather it's standard practice at wine-tastings to serve a
vin du pays
to encourage the penniless.'

‘Really, sir? What came next?'

The ACC studied the list. ‘A rosé—to my mind a rosé wine is neither one thing nor the other—as Sir Winston Churchill said so famously about Sir Alfred Bossom. It was a Côtes de Provence 1992 and dry.'

‘That's one white, one red and one pink …'

‘Odd that, now you come to mention it,' said the ACC, frowning. ‘You'd have thought he'd have started with the whites and stayed with them instead of going on to a red next. Mind you, as I understand it, Birkby's only an amateur wine buff—doing it for charity and all that—and he might not have known any better.'

Sloan nodded, but didn't comment.

‘Then it was back to a white wine,' continued the ACC, the list still in his hand. ‘A Sauvignon de Touraine 1992. Actually, now I come to think of it, the number we're looking for couldn't have been the sum of the years of the wine because he—if it was he—couldn't have known in advance what they added up to.'

‘Very true, sir.'

‘Number five was another rosé—Domaine de Limbardie. I don't care what you say about them—sweet, fruity and a suspicion of raspberry was what Cumming said—I still think you're wasting your time drinking them.'

‘Yes, sir.' There was a lot to be said for beer.

‘The last one was a full-blooded red—strong vigorous flavour and all that. A Côtes de Ventoux 1990.'

‘That's another white, a rosé and a red, then, in that order … that all, sir?'

The ACC said: ‘I asked Cumming that. He said there was one other wine—a white that Birkby poured out into half a dozen glasses as soon as he got to the table but that he didn't talk about it. Cumming didn't know what it was and never did find out because he wasn't given a taste of that one.'

There was a silence.

Presently the ACC said lightly: ‘Now, if it had been port we could have said it was a two-pipe problem …'

‘Would I be right, sir, in saying that the only thing that strikes you as at all unusual about this list is the order in which the wines were presented for tasting?'

‘Well, it's not the batting order I would have chosen myself, Inspector,' agreed the ACC amiably enough. ‘I'd have put out the two whites first, the two rosés after them—except that I'd have left them out in the first place—and then the two reds last. Stands to reason, doesn't it?'

‘Yes,' said Sloan quietly. ‘So, I'm pretty sure, sir, that that's where the answer must be, though I don't know what it is.'

‘Start with the light whites and work your way up to the heavy reds. That would have been the right thing to do.'

‘The right thing in the wrong order,' mused Sloan, half aloud. ‘It must mean something.'

‘But what, Inspector? What?'

‘Ah, sir, there you have me. We don't know what the colours represent so we can't begin to work anything out …' He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘You can express numbers just using 0 and 1 in binary arithmetic, sir, because they do it for computers that way.'

‘I believe you, Inspector.' The ACC winced visibly. The Constabulary's computer was known throughout the Force to be anathema to the ACC. It had taken the blame for every mistake made by Headquarters ever since it had been installed.

‘You could have had the red standing for one and the white for nought …'

‘That still leaves the rosé …'

‘And it doesn't get us anywhere …' Sloan scribbled a row of numbers in his notebook before showing it to the ACC.

‘32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, Sloan? What do they mean?'

‘That if you put a nought or a one under them and add up the figures with a one underneath it, you can show a total.'

The ACC looked somewhat sceptical.

‘Look, sir,' said Sloan persuasively, retrieving his notebook, ‘if I put a one under the 32 and the 8 and the 2 and noughts under the other figures I can say it represents 42.'

‘Can you?'

‘You just add 32, 8 and 2 and ignore the 16, 4 and 1. But it doesn't help us now.'

‘No?'

‘If I know anything about security systems, sir, it'll be a four-figure number they've programmed in, and one that doesn't begin with a one.'

‘Nice idea, though. The red for a one and—say—the white for a nought. It still leaves the rosé, though …'

‘Say that again!' Sloan remembered just in time that he was speaking to a very superior officer. ‘I mean, would you mind repeating that, please, sir?'

‘That still leaves the rosé …'

‘Suppose it was all to the power of three, sir, instead of two? Not binary arithmetic but ternary.'

‘You've lost me, Inspector,' said the ACC with disarming honesty.

‘Suppose the numbers were 243, 81, 27, 9, 3 and 1. What would that give us?'

The ACC stared at the list of wines. ‘The first—the first, that is, from the speaker's left to right, Cumming's right to left—was a white …' ‘We'll call white nought.'

‘The next was a red—a Merlot.'

‘If that's three then we'd pick up six there …'

‘Would we?' The ACC looked exceedingly doubtful. ‘Then there was a rosé.'

‘We'll say rosé stands for the number one. That comes under the figure 9 so we can add one nine to the six we've got already, making fifteen,' said Sloan rapidly warming to the idea. ‘The next one was another white, wasn't it, sir?'

‘The Sauvignon.'

‘We can ignore that, then, because white means nought.'

‘Then another rosé.'

‘One under the figure 81. Eighty-one and fifteen brings us to ninety-six. The last one was a red, wasn't it?'

‘A Côtes de Ventoux. Ever been up Mont Ventoux, Inspector?'

‘No, sir.' Sloan felt that it was other—even dizzier—heights that he was scaling just at the moment. ‘The unit for that would be 243 and red means two so that is twice 243 which is 486 plus the 96 we'd got to already.'

‘If you say so, Inspector.'

Suddenly downcast, Sloan sank back on his chair in disappointment. ‘But that still only comes to 582 which isn't a four-figure number. It won't do. Sorry, sir … it was just an idea.'

‘Aren't you forgetting something, Sloan?' The ACC gave him a quizzical look.

‘Sir?'

‘There was another wine on the table.'

‘But Mr Cumming didn't taste that, sir.'

‘The first thing Birkby did when he got to the wines was pour out six glasses of one of them—even though he was late in getting started. Doesn't that strike you as rather odd?'

‘I hadn't thought of that.'

‘And all Birkby did with it at that stage was leave the empty bottle standing on the table.' The ACC looked positively cheerful now.

‘I still don't see …' Then Sloan slapped his thigh. ‘Of course, sir! An empty bottle at the end.' He looked a good deal more respectfully at the ACC who wasn't nearly as innumerate—nor as much of a figurehead—as he might have been forgiven for thinking. ‘An empty bottle. It's so simple …'

‘Representing a nought at the end of the number,' said the ACC, pardonably pleased with himself.

‘That was really clever,' said Sloan generously.

‘But not clever enough,' said the ACC, reaching for his telephone and dialling a London number. ‘Department K? Put me through to Mr George Cumming, would you, please? Thank you.' There was only the slightest of delays and then the ACC said: ‘Calleshire Constabulary here. About your little problem, Mr Cumming … the one you were telling me about. Have you solved it yet? No?'