“Betser, King’s Arms Hotel, Norwich.—Don’t deal directly demand delay execute slowly.—Glover.”
Next day he had found himself reflecting upon that message, and returning to the wireless cabin, he copied it. For a whole day he puzzled over it, when at last—used as he was to all sorts of ciphers and codes—he discovered in it a four-figure code. The initial letter of the first five words was “D”—the fourth letter of the alphabet. Then “E”—the fifth letter—and “S”—the nineteenth. Hence the message was no doubt in figure-code, and read “4519.”
From that moment onward he had viewed the man Glover with considerable suspicion, but on landing at Southampton he had lost sight of him. And now he was much surprised to find him as guest of the rich widow.
Sight of the thick-set, clean-shaven man had brought that strange message back to his memory, and the more so because on deck late one night he had seen the man talking in confidence to a stout, flashily-dressed woman, yet next day they had passed each other on deck as strangers!
As the trio sat at supper, Glover was most genial and full of merriment. That Sylvia liked him was plain, yet whether it was intuition or jealousy, Geoffrey, as later on he sat with his father in the last train from Liverpool Street, pondered again and again.
On his return from Chelmsford each evening during the week that followed, Falconer sat down at a quarter past seven at his own wireless set, when, without fail, there came that strange, inexplicable and unreadable signal always at eighteen-and-a-half minutes past seven.
Of operators at the great Marconi stations at Towyn, in Wales, and Clifden, in Ireland, as well as of several operators whom he knew at the busy coast stations at the North Foreland, Niton, and Cleethorpes, he made inquiry as to whether they had heard the same signal. Strangely enough, all the replies were in the negative.
Indeed, one night he himself listened on the great aerial which is such a prominent feature in the landscape at Chelmsford, but failed to catch a single sound.
Therefore, he proved beyond doubt that his own set was supersensitive, and that his improvement of the multi-valve amplifying detector was a considerable achievement.
He, however, said nothing. At present it was his own secret. But he was not so much concerned with the new invention as in the solution of the mystery. By his research work in the wide field of radio-telegraphy he had developed a keen interest in anything that was mysterious, and here was presented an extremely curious problem. That oblong metal box with its seven little glowing glass tubes was the only instrument which picked up that inexplicable signal.