Here it crossed another trail, and became indecipherable. I looked at it, yet I could not believe it. It was too stark and simple. "You will find the pirates' treasure buried under the old elm-tree in the archbishop's garden": it had the same sort of hissing melodrama. It was as casual as an invitation to dinner. It lay on a blotting-pad as openly as though somebody had drawn an arrow to indicate it. And, above all, it was in English.
But why not? Round the Service there has grown up a phantom legend of codes and ciphers and secret passwords and similar flummery. Its members do not in reality go about hissing at each other, nor does the cipher exist which C2 department cannot solve. I can still remember the disappointment I once felt to learn that King's Messengers are not accustomed to traveling in wigs, with a couple of forged passports: they travel in a railway compartment labelled, Reserved for the King's Messenger. When a man has something to say, he usually says it straight out. This was not wartime. There was no reason why even the Post Office, let alone the War Office, should ordinarily be curious about letters written from a neat little villa in a neat little suburb not far from the sea.
"It looks terribly official," said Mrs. Antrim after a pause. She spoke uneasily. "I say, you don't suppose?’
I looked at Bowers. "You never saw the names of any of the people he wrote letters to?"
"No, I didn't. All I know is that they weren't letters to anybody in a European country."
"How do you know that?"
"Stamps," said Bowers instantly, and with some shrewdness. "I collect stamps, and that's 'ow I notice sometimes. You ought to know that postage to here or to America is three-halfpence to European countries it's more, see? Every letter the governor sent out, or at least every letter I ever noticed, had a brown three-halfpenny stamp. - 'Ullo!"
He turned round. I had picked up the newspaper, and as a sort of official gesture was wrapping up the blotting-paper in it, when back came those confounded dogging footsteps in the alley behind the house. They must just have been passing the rear gate, evidently still unsuspicious, when near at hand there was the sharp crack of a window being raised. It was not difficult to identify it as the window of the house next to this, from which the irate female had addressed me a while ago. This time the female, evidently to attract the attention of the searchers in the alley, made a noise like a soda-water syphon.
"Have you got him yet?" she bawled in a hoarse stage-whisper.
There was a silence. "Not yet, Mrs. M'Corseter," answered the voice of the sergeant who had arrested me. "But we'll get him: don't worry. The neighbourhood is patrolled. He can't get away."