Page 41 - the-thirty-nine-steps

rite authors. I never saw the grandmother, so I guessed she
was bedridden. An old woman called Margit brought me
my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all hours. I
wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He
had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the
daily paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late
afternoon. I told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make
note of any strange figures he saw, keeping a special sharp
look-out for motors and aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real
earnest to Scudder’s note-book.
He came back at midday with the SCOTSMAN. There
was nothing in it, except some further evidence of Paddock
and the milkman, and a repetition of yesterday’s statement
that the murderer had gone North. But there was a long ar-
ticle, reprinted from THE TIMES, about Karolides and the
state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no mention
of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the af-
ternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search for the
cypher.
As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elab-
orate system of experiments I had pretty well discovered
what were the nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word,
and when I thought of the odd million words he might have
used I felt pretty hopeless. But about three o’clock I had a
sudden inspiration.
The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory.
Scudder had said it was the key to the Karolides business,
and it occurred to me to try it on his cypher.
It worked. The five letters of ‘Julia’ gave me the position

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