Free The House of Puzzles by Richard Newsome Page A

‘So, what do you think, Gerald?
Can we solve this thing, or should I get some pudding to keep me going?’
    Gerald cleared some space in the lunchtime debris on the table and unfolded a sheet
of paper.
    Another group of hikers arrived in the hall, full of stories of snow and tents and
wandering lost in the dark. Gerald, Sam, Ruby and Felicity ignored them, concentrating
on the note in front of them. The paper was creased and grubby from being unfolded
and refolded so many times, but the letters were still quite clear:
    Xers blu c axtb pxfbi pab cilbnixg hxracib jl snbeebg xis rjiocuibs cp pj pab sbkpao
eqp hy rjiorcbirb co cgg xp nbop c xh lclpy hcgbo ib jl rqgkbkkbn cogxis c sj ijp
fijv cl c sbobntb nborqb oj c nbgy ji pab dqsuhbip jl pab jib vaj lciso paco hbooxub
hxy yjqn ojqg eb nxcobs ji eqppbnlgy vciuo.
    Midshipman Jeremy Davey, October 1835. May God have mercy on his humble servant’s
soul .
    Sam took in a long breath. ‘Well, that makes no sense at all.’ He pushed his chair
back. ‘Anyone fancy some dessert? They’ve got hot chocolate pudding and custard.’
    Ruby did not look up from scribbling in a notebook. ‘Sam, is it possible for you
to forget about food for just five minutes? This is important.’ She tapped the end
of a pencil against her teeth and looked up to her brother. ‘Actually, that does
sound pretty good. I’ll have one.’
    ‘Me too,’ said Gerald.
    Felicity said a polite, ‘No thank you,’ and Sam wandered off to the kitchen. Felicity
nodded at the coded message. ‘Where do we even start in trying to solve that?’
    Ruby consulted her pad again. ‘Our mum and dad used to leave coded messages in our
school lunches,’ she said. ‘ Ruby, work hard and be the best you can be. Sam, don’t
be such a colossal arse your entire life . That type of thing.’
    Gerald grinned. ‘How did you go about solving them?’
    Ruby held up her pad for Gerald and Felicity to see. On it she had drawn a rough
grid:

    ‘They were simple substitution ciphers,’ she said. ‘They had to be if Sam was ever
going to solve them. You just replace one letter for another. So A might become B,
B becomes C, C becomes D and so on.’
    Gerald grunted. ‘So all we have to do is substitute the right letters using the grid
and it solves itself.’
    ‘That’s the theory,’ Ruby said. ‘But every combination I’ve tried has gone nowhere.’
    Sam arrived back at the table with a tray of steaming pudding bowls. He glanced at
Ruby’s notepad as he handed around the plates. ‘That looks like the notes mum and
dad used to put in our lunches,’ he said. ‘ Sam, today is the first day of the rest
of your life. Ruby, try not to be such an insufferable know-it-all .’
    Ruby ignored him. ‘Sometimes, to make it more challenging, mum would use a keyword.
Those ones were really tough.’
    ‘How did that work?’ Felicity asked.
    Ruby scribbled into the grid in her pad. ‘Say the keyword was RUBY. You fill in the
first squares with those letters, then complete it in alphabetical order, so it looks
like this.’

    ‘Here—try to decode this.’ She wrote down: Prj fp r yliq
    Gerald took the pencil from Ruby and a few moments later declared, ‘Sam is a dolt.’
    ‘Hey!’ said Sam.
    Ruby retrieved her pencil. ‘If you and the person you’re sending the note to are
the only people who know the keyword, then the code is almost impossible for anyone
else to crack. There are just too many combinations.’
    ‘Unless you can guess the key,’ Gerald said. His mind was spinning at a million miles
an hour. The odds were long, but at least it was a start. ‘I think we need to find
out a bit more about Jeremy Davey,’ he said. ‘He might give us a clue to finding
the keyword.’
    Sam and Ruby nodded, but Felicity did not look convinced.
    ‘What’s the problem, Flicka?’ Gerald asked.
    Felicity tucked her hands under her thighs and rocked gently on the bench seat. ‘I’ve
heard you talk about Sir Mason Green