Rolling Stone Read Free Page A

it—say the twenty-seventh letter of the sixteenth line on the tenth page. No, that was a wash-out, because in the next group it would give you page 1 line 103, which was absurd.… Come back to page 10 line 16.
    He flicked the pages over and found the place. Round about line 16 a girl called Gloria was putting on a yellow hat. The Y of yellow had a faint pencil mark under it. It was the second letter in the line, the first being A—“a yellow hat”—just like that.
    Peter wrote the Y down on a slip of paper and turned to page 27 line 1. The first letter of line 1 had a just visible pencil mark under it. It was an O—“‘One life, one love, one fate,’ said Lord St. Maur.” Peter said “Well, well,” and wrote the O down after the Y.
    On page 103 line 8 the ninth letter was marked, and it was a U. Peter said “Eureka!” He had a perfectly whole possible word on his paper, and he saw how the thing was worked. The first number, 10, was a page number, and the second, 16, was a line number, and the next number, 27, was a page number; but to get the letter number of page 10 line 16, you took the 2 from 27, which was the next page number. The next group gave page 27 line 1, and the 1 from the next page number, 103, as the letter number. And so forth and so on. Simplicity itself, and a quite unbreakable cipher if Spike Reilly hadn’t been so free with his pencil marks, and so careless as to carry only one novel in his suit-case.
    If Her Great Romance had been unmarked and lost in a crowd of other similar romances, a lot of things might have happened differently. One man might have lived, and more than one might have died. Terry Clive would probably have come to a sticky end.
    As it was, it took Peter no more than a quarter of an hour to collect the dotted letters and arrange them in words and sentences. He tried to hold his mind back from making sense of them, because something kept telling him to hurry, but some of the meaning got through and he finished the job in a state of tingling excitement. The deciphered message ran:
    â€œYou are to come over here. I have work for you. Double pay and bonuses. Cross Thursday. Go Preedo Library Archmount Street. S.W. noon Friday. Say you expect call. Await instructions.”
    There was no signature.
    Peter sat and looked at the words. This was Tuesday. If one crossed on Thursday as the note suggested, one would naturally make a point of being on hand to take that call in Preedo’s Library, wherever that might be. And someone could be told off to find out who was at the other end of the line. A word to Garrett would fix that all right. These thoughts moved on the surface. They fell into place and made a neat picture. But underneath something disturbed and disturbing took shape and came blundering into view.
    Peter got to his feet, got to the door, got to the head of the stairs, and stood there listening.… Nothing. Nobody. He went back to his own room, half drew out his pocket-book, and slid it back again.
    Crazy—that’s what it was.
    Well, with a strong enough motive you took a crazy risk.
    In this case just how strong was the motive?
    And the answer to that was, ask Garrett.
    For his own part, he had an idea that Garrett was fussed—and Garrett didn’t fuss easily.
    He thought about Garrett’s last letter: “The thing is a snowball. I don’t know where it’s going to roll or what it’s going to pick up on the way. It started with picture-lifting, fairly plastered itself with blackmail from the insurance companies, and has now added a murder. No knowing where it’ll stop—” Well, he had been roped in because he had stumbled on something odd, and because he wasn’t a regular agent. The novelist is a privileged Nosey Parker. It is his job to watch people and listen to them. It flatters some, and flutters some but no one suspects him of being in with Scotland Yard or the