Rolling Stone Read Free

just what I mean to do, so it’s no use your asking me about when I knew her before, or how I knew her again, or where she is, because, as I said to start with, I think we’ll both be a lot safer if I hold my tongue. I’ve got my own ideas, and I’m keeping them to myself, and if you’ll take my advice you’ll clear out of this job you’re in and keep clear, because I don’t like the sound of it.
    Yours affectionately,
    Louie.”
    This was queer stuff if you like. What was it Spike Reilly had said in his voice of delirious triumph? “I know—I know—Maud Millicent Simpson—what have you got to say to that? If I can find her, I can find you—can’t I? And I’m going to find you—” Maud Millicent Simpson—Mrs. Simpson—encountered in a bus sixteen years after some unspecified event—a person whom it was safer not to know—“If I can find her, I can find you—can’t I?”
    Peter thought Garrett would be interested. He put the letter away carefully and went on turning out the pocket-book.
    Notes. Spike Reilly carried quite a lot of money—a great deal more than one would have expected—enough for a long journey. That made you think a bit.… A passport made out the name of James Peter Reilly. So wherever he was bound for with that bulging pocket-book, it was under his own name.…
    But Pierre Reil here . Why?… Protective colouring—a most natural desire to melt into the landscape. Riel in Belgium. Reilly—well, where would one be Reilly? England, Scotland, Ireland, or the United States of America. Quite a nice wide field for speculation, but Peter had a hunch that the first and nearest of these countries would fill the bill. He reflected in passing that the photograph on the passport wasn’t very much like the man on the bed. Of course he was dead.… His own passport photograph would have fitted a dozen people he knew.
    The thought just slid over the surface of his mind and was forgotten, because the next thing that came out of the pocket-book was a sheet of cheap greyish paper with lines of figures written across it—
    10. 16. 27. 1. 103. 8. 9.… They went on like that, row after row of them, all down one side of the sheet and all down the other. Peter’s finger-tips tingled. He slipped the pocket-book back into the pocket from which it had come and threw the coat across the chair, because this, most unmistakably, was the goods. A cipher, and Mr. Spike Reilly’s marching orders no doubt. His eye travelled down the paper, looking for repetitions of the same number or group of numbers—something which might stand for the commonest letter E, or for such words as a, and , or the .
    When he had turned the page and come to the bottom of it, he whistled softly. There was no help that way. He began to wonder—and then with extreme suddenness he stopped wondering.
    A pencil mark—a thing which he had seen without noticing, and which came up now as invisible writing comes up when you hold it to the fire. A pencil mark.… He had the suit-case open and the paper-covered novel out of it in a flash. A well thumbed book. That ought to have attracted his attention at the very outset. Read and re-read by the look of it, the pages dog-eared and thumbed—dirty pages, with here and there a pencil mark, and here and there a smear as if indiarubber had been used. He called himself a dull fool for having seen no more than a dirty trashy novel, because now he was prepared to eat the pages if they did not hold the key to the cipher.
    He went through into his own room again and sat down to Her Great Romance , the sheetful of figures propped before him.
    10. 16. 27. 1. 103. 8. 9.… On the simplest plan this would be page 10 line 16, page 27 line 1, page 103 line 8. But then how did you know which word or letter of line 16 to pick? If it was a letter, perhaps the third number gave