A Surprise Discovery

A Surprise Discovery

A ‘Gary Jackson’ short story

Finally, we had the keys!

Granted, the place wasn’t great. A two-bedroom end terraced house that, to be honest, was in dire need of some freshening up. Maria, the landlady, had at least made sure the place was liveable even if she hadn’t done a lot about its aesthetics. The electrics were safe, the combi boiler worked fine, and there were no signs of damp in the kitchen or bathroom. Her argument that we could renovate it as we saw fit was nice if you’re young and naïve as we were, but as my dad had pointed out, Maria still owned the place and we’d effectively be paying to renovate her house.

On the plus side, Michelle and I had managed to secure a 12-month tenancy agreement. The standard was just 6-months, but Maria’s previous tenants had absconded after just 4-months, without paying the remainder of the rent. She was looking for a bit of security for herself, and had decided that a young couple with a baby on the way, and on a longer lease, was probably her safest bet.

Our first evening in our own home felt weird. Sat in the lounge on a second-hand sofa we’d acquired from a charity shop, eating a Chinese takeaway off paper plates, and watching the news on a below average size TV which only contained the free-to-air channels. Michelle was struggling without a proper dining table, as she was currently sporting a 7-month baby bump, meaning she was struggling to fit the plate on her lap. Still, we finally felt like proper grown-ups and, being proper grown-ups, we sat there watching the news.

The newsreader was reporting on a robbery that occurred a few months ago in Barchester town centre. It had been a remarkable story at the time and had made international headlines. A major power failure had occurred, which had resulted in numerous alarms being triggered at homes and businesses across both Barchester and its neighbouring town of Badminton. Initially it was deemed to just be unfortunate, but the next morning it became clear that the failure had been part of a bigger plot. Three major banks, all side-by-side on the high street, had been cleaned out that same night. Safes and cash machines had been emptied in all three, and it was estimated that the gang had made away with close to £2 million. Despite this, the police had made no arrests and didn’t appear to have the first idea who had been responsible. Tonight’s report was announcing the offering a £20,000 reward for information that led to a conviction.

“Dad thinks this is the same gang that turned the dealership over last year,” Michelle said. “They never caught them either.”

Michelle’s dad owned a car dealership, Peyton’s, on the main Barchester Road, and last October a robbery had occurred which resulted in four cars being stolen.

“Gaz, turn this off,” she added. “It’s depressing me.”

I changed channels, and we ended up watching a quiz show.

“That better?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, until I start feeling thick when I get the answers wrong.”

“We’ll just blame your baby brain,” I joked.

The next day I was up in the loft; it was the first time I’d ventured up there. I didn’t like lofts; I always think of them as being dark and full of spiders. Happily, this one did at least have a light fitted up there, with the light switch being conveniently located right next to the loft hatch. It wasn’t boarded however, meaning I had to ensure I stayed on the beams in order to avoid crashing through the plasterboard and into one of the bedrooms. There was a fair amount of stuff already up there, which I assumed to be either the landlady’s or one of the previous tenants. However, there was still ample space for the things we needed to store, given that once we’d converted the second bedroom into a nursery, we wouldn’t have a spare room to keep junk in.

“Anything valuable up there?” Michelle asked cheekily from the bottom of the loft ladder.

“Not that I can see,” I answered. “There’s an old fax machine up here, a box that looks like it has ornaments in it, but they’re covered in bubble wrap. There’s a couple of boxes just of paperwork too.”

“Paperwork can be interesting,” said Michelle. “You can tell a lot about someone from their bank statements.”

“I rarely look at my own bank statements,” I replied. “I don’t think I’ll be reading through other peoples. What’s this?”

“What’s what?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. There was a little black book on top of one of the boxes, but it’s just a diary for last year.”

“As in a journal?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t opened it. I just saw the year on the front.”

“Chuck it down, let me have a look.”

“You’re so nosey,” I laughed.

“It’s interesting though, don’t you think?”

“Could be I guess,” I answered, dropping the little black book down to her.

I decided that the best thing to do would be to move all the existing stuff over to the far wall, meaning the space nearer the loft hatch would be free for our own stuff. It would also make it easier to remember what was ours at the point we come to move out.

“Ahh, it’s no good,” Michelle called back up. “It’s written in a foreign language, I can’t read it.”

“Unlucky,” I teased, picking up the box that the diary was sitting on and moving it carefully to the far side.

“You don’t realise how heavy paper is,” I called down to her, but she wasn’t listening.

“Gaz, come and look at this,” she said.

“What is it?” I answered.

“This diary, it’s not written in another language at all. It’s written in code.”

“Code?”

“Yeah. Well, unless you think ‘HTNZGFL, WQKEITLZTK KGQR’ can be translated into English.”

“It sounds like it’s been written in Klingon,” I chortled.

“No, seriously,” she continued. “Why would you write diary entries in code?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done it.”

“Do you think they were up to no good?” she said, excitedly.

“See if you can crack the code and work it out,” I said, tongue-in-cheek.

“Will you come and help me?”

I peered down at her from the loft hatch.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Deadly,” she answered.

“What about finishing all this off?”

“Leave it until later,” she said insistently. “This is much more fun.”

I rolled my eyes but came down the ladder. Five minutes later, we were back on our used sofa with the diary, a pad, and a pen.

“This is a waste of time,” I said.

“You’re such a misery guts,” she teased.

“Ok then clever clogs,” I retorted. “How do you suggest we start?”

“There aren’t entries for every day, but there’s one for October 23rd. I picked that as it’s the date Dad got robbed. Let’s see if we can work it out.”

“And how do we begin?”

“It’s probably just a substitution cypher, we just need to work out the key.”

“A substitution cypher?” I asked, incredulously.

“Yes. Oh for goodness sake Gary, don’t you read crime fiction.”

“No,” I admitted.

“A substitution cypher is when every letter of the alphabet represents another one. So, all A’s become B’s, all B’s become C’s for example.”

“Ok, so you suggest we go up by one letter of the alphabet?”

“It’s as good a place as any to start.”

“Fair enough. So that first word, ‘HTNZGFL’ becomes ‘IUOAHGM’. That makes much more sense,” I said sarcastically.

“Oh shush,” she said jovially. “It’s not necessarily that, it was just an example. We should probably start by working out what the vowels are.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

“Well, the most common letter in the English language is the letter E, she said. So which letter appears the most times?”

“T, I think. There’s three of them.”

“Ok, so let’s imagine that T represents E,” she said.

“This is beginning to sound a bit like A-level maths,” I joked.

“Maybe, are there any other letters that appear more than once?”

“There’s two G’s and two Q’s. They appear next to each other in the last word, and that’s only four letters long.”

“They may not be vowels though. R, S and T are common letters too. We need to find more entries.”

“There’s one for the previous day look,” I pointed out. “You can see where the imprint through the page.”

I was correct. At the 3pm time slot on the previous day was written the letters WOSSN.

“That could be a person’s name,” Michelle suggested.

“What could it be?” I asked.

“Well, its 5 letters, and has a double letter in positions 3 and 4. There can’t be that many of them.”

“Donna,” I said, which happened to be my elder sister’s name. I also had a younger sister called Nikki.

“I don’t think so,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Because the O is in the same place.”

“Nikki has a double letter in her name too,” I suggested.

“Yeah, but there’s also two I’s. There’s only one repeated letter in this.”

“How about ‘Billy’?”

“As good a guess as anything, let’s go with that and see what it gives us.”

It didn’t get us very far. There was a single W and a single N, but that was it.

“At least it gives us the first letter of the second word,” Michelle said. “Assuming it’s right of course.”

“This is like playing Hangman,” I said. “How many letters is it?”

“Ten in the second word,” she said, counting them up.

“Could be ‘Barchester’ I said, that has ten letters.”

Michelle looked at the letters we had so far.

“Do you know, that does fit actually. The E’s are in the correct place to replace the T’s like we said earlier.”

“Ok,” I said, finally getting excited by this. “So, if you substitute the other letters, what have we got left?”

Michelle wrote it out on the page. Our current workings out had got us to:

_E_T___, BARCHESTER R_A_

“If your theory about vowels is correct,” I said. “The G might stand for an O, and make the last word ROAD.”

She spelt it out; we now had.

_E_TO__, BARCHESTER ROAD

I glanced down at the page, and it hit me in an instant. A, B, C, D and E had been substituted for Q, W, E, R and T.

“It’s a keyboard layout!” I exclaimed. Look, QWERT off the top row of a keyboard are the first five letters.”

“You’re a genius,” she said, and we quickly scribbled down the rest. Once we’d decoded the last four letters we discovered, to our horror, that the entry read.

PEYTONS, BARCHESTER ROAD.

“The people that lived here are the people that robbed Dad,” she said, her face a shade paler than it had been.

“In that case, they could be the bank robbers off the news last night,” I added.

“We need to get this to the police,” she said.

It proved worthwhile. With the diary, and our decryption notes, the police managed to tie several other diary entries to other robberies that had occurred in the local area. A call through to our landlady gave us the names of the former tenants, whilst the bank statements in our loft gave us their address history.

They were apprehended and charged within the week and, happily, it meant we qualified for the £20,000 reward. It allowed us to buy our own furniture, prepare the babies nursery, and spruce up the place before Michelle gave birth. The rest went into a savings account where, hopefully, we’ll be able to add to it in order to, one day, have enough for a full house deposit. Then, we can finally have a place we really can call our own home.