“I thought of that,” French returned, “but we have to remember he prepared the cipher to mislead Germans, not English. In that case I think he was right to use English. It made the thing more difficult.”
He had scarcely finished speaking when the door opened, and a tall, alert-looking young man entered the room. French introduced him as Inspector Barnes and pointed to a chair.
“Seat yourself, Barnes, and listen to my tale. These gentlemen are concerned with a curious story,” and he gave a brief résumé of the strange events which had led up to the existing situation. “Now,” he went on, “when we found it was connected with the Silurian I rang up Sam Pullar at Lloyd’s, and this is what he told me. The Silurian sailed from this country on the 16th of February, 1917. She was bound for New York, and she had two and a half millions on her in bullion as well as a fair number of passengers. She was a big boat—an Anchor liner of some 15,000 tons. You remember about her?”
“Well, I should think so,” Barnes returned, as he lit a cigarette. “Why, I was on that job—getting her away, I mean. All kinds of precautions were taken. A tale was started that she would load up the gold at Plymouth and would sail—I forget the exact date now, but it was three days after she did sail. It was my job to see that the German spies about Plymouth got hold of this tale, and we had evidence that they did get it, and moreover sent it through to Germany, and that the U-boats were instructed accordingly. As a matter of fact the Silurian came from Brest, where she had landed army stores from South America, and the bullion went out in a tender from Folkestone, and was transferred at night in the Channel in the middle of a ring of destroyers. While preparations were being made at Plymouth for her arrival she was away hundreds of miles towards the States.”
“But they got her all the same.”
“Oh yes, they got her, but not all the same. She escaped the boats that were looking out for her. It was a chance boat that found her, somewhere, if I remember rightly, near the Azores.”
“That’s right,” French answered. “Instead of going directly west, so Sam Pullar told me, she went south to avoid those submarines you spoke of and which were supposed to be operating off the Land’s End. Her course was followed by wireless, down to near the Spanish coast, and then across fairly due west. She was last seen by a Cape boat some thirty miles west of Finisterre. Then a message was received from her when she was some 250 miles north of the Azores, that a U-boat had come along, and had ordered her to stop. The message gave her position and went on to say that a boat was coming aboard from the submarine. Then it stopped, and that was the last thing that was heard of her. Not a body or a boat or a bit of wreckage was ever picked up, and it was clear that every one on board was lost. Then after a time confirmation was obtained. Our intelligence people in Germany intercepted a report from the commander of the submarine who sank her, giving details. She had been sunk in latitude 41° 36′ north, longitude 28° 53′ west, which confirmed the figures sent out in her last wireless message. Four boats had got away, but the commander had fired on them and had sunk them one after another, so that not a single member of the passengers or crew should survive.”
“Dirty savages,” Barnes commented. “But people in open boats wouldn’t have had much chance there anyway, particularly in February. If they had been able to keep afloat at all, they would probably have missed the Azores, and it’s very unlikely they would have made the Spanish or Portuguese coast—it would have been too far.”
French pushed forward his atlas.
“Just whereabouts did she sink?” he inquired.