Chapter 60: CASE 4. Upside Down, Inside Out (4)

“What? The letter is a murder order? That makes no sense.”

I shook my head at Lure’s opinion.

“That letter was addressed to Mr. Renner. Why would someone send a letter to Mr. Renner telling him to kill himself?”

“No. It’s not an impossible scenario.”

“Mr. Walter?!”

Unexpectedly, Walter touched his chin with a serious expression.

“A strange letter consisting only of numbers. Usually, when people receive such an incomprehensible letter, they tend to show it to those around them, saying they received something weird. Or, because they don’t know what it means, they just leave it somewhere in the house. At any rate, the probability of them burning it immediately is low.”

“Huh…. So even if Mr. Utu received the letter, since the culprit is someone close to him, they could naturally check the contents of the letter?”

“Yes. From the perspective of the person receiving a murder order, it would have been safer to have it pass through Mr. Utu like this rather than receiving the order directly.”

I suppose that’s true. Even I would have thought the recipient was the most suspicious if the person who received the letter hadn’t been the victim.

“If that’s the case, then Mr. Renner wouldn’t be the culprit.”

“Yes? Why is that?”

“Unlike a wife or a housekeeper who could naturally read a letter sent to Mr. Utu, Mr. Renner, who is merely a business associate, would have difficulty accessing the letter. Also, if it were Mr. Renner, he wouldn’t need to receive the letter through Mr. Utu in the first place. Since he runs a shop, he could have easily made an excuse that the contents were related to the price of goods or transaction volumes.”

‘Oh no!’

Renner is the culprit, but now he’s being ruled out!

“But then again, that’s probably not the case.”

Walter said with a smirk.

“Where in the world is there a murder order that gets delivered only after the target is already dead? Miss Lure’s opinion was certainly valid, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the answer in this case.”

Phew.

‘He’s not just messing with people, is he?’

Was he being considerate so Lure wouldn’t feel embarrassed? Or did he still have a grudge against me for being a former soldier?

Regardless, seeing that relaxed attitude of his….

“It seems you have an idea of what’s going on.”

“Indeed.”

Walter nodded. I knew it.

“At the very least, I think I know the intent behind sending this letter.”

“The intent? What is it?”

“The recipient of this letter was Mr. Utu from the beginning. It doesn’t seem to be an order sent to a killer. However, it’s also hard to say it has nothing to do with the murder. In that case…, wouldn’t this letter have been a warning after all?”

“A warning?”

Walter nodded.

“Mr. Utu was one of the core pillars of the Herbert Clan. He had many organization members who were like brothers to him. If an order came down from the organization to eliminate Mr. Utu, one or two of them would have surely opposed it. Perhaps one of them sent a warning letter to Mr. Utu?”

It was a fairly plausible story.

“If my guess is correct, the culprit’s name should be written inside this letter. The problem is….”

Walter let out a sigh.

“There are no clues at all to decipher this code.”

“I take it you don’t have much expertise in code-breaking?”

“How could that be?”

Walter looked slightly offended.

“I can decipher almost any code. A code used by a bottom-tier organization like this should be easy to—”

“Easy to?”

“—is what I’d like to say, but the other side has a formidable genius of their own.”

Walter sighed.

“If this is a Herbert Clan code, Balthazar must have had a hand in it.”

“Balthazar?”

“He’s the only brain in that stupid organization, and he’s a real headache. He often creates codes that are simple enough for the idiots in the Herbert Clan to use, yet tricky to decipher.”

Walter ground his teeth, as if he had suffered a lot while tracking the Herbert Clan.

“That last code using the crossword puzzle in a horse racing magazine… I really felt like I’d been hit over the head. That bastard, he caught me off guard as if he’d been waiting the moment I blocked the order disguised as wall graffiti. He’s like a ghost. I’d really love to see what his face looks like….”

“Um, Mr. Walter?”

As the story veered off track, Lure waved the letter to get Walter’s attention.

“So, does that mean you can’t decipher this code?”

“…It seems difficult for now.”

Walter reluctantly admitted his inability.

“It’s a shame Mr. Utu couldn’t receive this letter sooner. He would have been able to decipher it. Surely, the culprit’s name would have been written in here to warn him….”

“I suppose so.”

While politely agreeing, my mind was racing.

‘Wait. Is this actually solvable?’

Walter said that if this code were deciphered, the culprit’s name could be found.

Then, by working backward, if I plugged in the culprit’s name, wouldn’t I be able to decipher the code?

Besides, I already knew the culprit’s name.

Renner.

What if I applied that name to this strange letter?

≪331244441233 1781 1744 92123325123301 21169344. 2512 21933312353616. 13338201122101 138233011793.≫

If I could somehow decode the full text and then tell Walter the reverse order….

I could tell him that I found Renner’s name after decoding the letter.

‘Yes!’

I found a way to solve this case.

***

Mr. Walter and I decided to split up for the time being.

“It doesn’t seem like holding onto the letter without a clue to solve the code will lead anywhere. I’ll search Mr. Utu’s room to find more clues.”

“I’ll…, check the letter a bit more.”

Walter gave me a very polite smile that nonetheless showed he didn’t trust me in the slightest.

“Alright, I’ll be rooting for you.”

And so, a moment later.

In the small room on the second floor, only Lure, the encrypted letter, and a mountain of paper scraps remained.

Oh, where did the paper scraps come from?

They were the pages torn and crumpled from the notebook (or what used to be one) that Mr. Walter had kindly lent me.

Code-breaking wasn’t as easy as I thought.

≪331244441233 1781 1744 92123325123301 21169344. 2512 21933312353616. 13338201122101 138233011793.≫

“Argh, what on earth is this?!”

It’s not like I found out nothing at all.

At first glance, it looks like just a sequence of numbers, but if you look closely, there are spaces and periods.

So, these numbers in the letter likely represent the alphabet.

Among those sequences separated by spaces, one of them surely represents the word RENNER, but….

‘So, which one of all those number clusters is the culprit’s name? The beginning? The middle? The end?’

There are various ways to say it.

[Renner! That man is the assassin targeting you!]

It could be written like that, or….

[There is an assassin targeting you. It’s Renner!]

It could be written like that, or….

[The assassin is Renner. Be prepared.]

It could even be written like that.

I couldn’t find an answer.

Caught in deep thought, I leaned over the desk and saw my so-called assistant scribbling some doodles on a piece of paper instead of thinking of ways to help the detective.

“What’s that? A smiley face?”

“Pardon? What are you talking about?”

“That thing you drew on the paper.”

“Haha! This isn’t a person’s face. I was writing Mr. Utu’s name.”

What? That’s text, not a drawing?

I straightened my body and checked Lure’s notebook.

[uTu]

“Ah, you’re right.”

Because I was lying down, my field of vision was upside down.

When I looked at it upside down, I thought it looked exactly like a smiling emoticon, but now I see it was letters.

“If these letters looked like a drawing, it’s probably because Mr. Utu’s name is a palindrome.”

“A palindrome?”

“Yes. A word that is the same even when read backward.”

Ah, like kayak, deed, or rotor.

‘Come to think of it, in our language, you can tell right away if it’s a palindrome because the pronunciation is the same backward, but for English words, you can’t tell if it’s a palindrome just by the sound unless you write it down.’

To think the name Utu was a palindrome.

Wait, hold on.

“Now that I think about it, isn’t Mr. Renner’s name also a palindrome?”

“Huh? Oh, yes. It is.”

renner.

The front and back of the name were the same.

‘Let’s see.’

These numbers are replacing the alphabet.

If it’s the same forward and backward alphabetically, wouldn’t it also be the same forward and backward numerically?

Thinking that way, one sequence of numbers immediately caught my eye.

331244441233

It’s the sequence of numbers at the very beginning of the cipher.

It looks like a palindrome at a glance, but….

‘No, if you look closely, it’s not a palindrome.’

Since it starts with ‘3312’, it would have to end with ‘2133’ to be a palindrome, but it ends with ‘1233’.

The positions of 1 and 2 at the back should be swapped….

‘Then…, what if I break it down like this?’

33/12/44/44/12/33

This makes it a palindrome.

Moreover, the number of units matches perfectly.

renner. There are six letters, and there are six clusters of numbers.

‘Yes! Two numbers represent one letter!’

33 is ‘R’. 12 is ‘E’, and 44 is ‘N’.

Based on the information I found, I reorganized the contents of the letter.

≪Renner 17/81 17/n 92/er/25/er/01/ 21/16/93/n. 25/e 21/93/re/35/36/16. 13/r/82/01/e/21/01 13/82/r/01/17/93.≫

It was much easier to read.

There were still far more mysterious numbers than actual letters, but I was starting to get a feel for it.

‘Let’s see…. A long word might be impossible, but I could probably guess a two-letter word.’

If one of the two letters is revealed, then 50% of the word is essentially known.

Besides, as far as I know, there aren’t that many two-letter words in everyday language.

25 e

‘Maybe 25 is B?’

A two-letter word that appears at the start of a sentence.

Hmm, “Be” is indeed the most plausible guess.

Next.

Renner 17/81 17/n

‘If it’s a two-letter word appearing right after the name Renner…, “is” seems the most likely.’

Then the word after that becomes “in.”

‘That makes sense. Let’s try it.’

To summarize, 25 is B, 17 is I, and 81 is S.

With those assumptions, I plugged them in again.

≪Renner is in 92/er/25/er/01/ 21/16/93/n. Be 21/93/re/35/36/16. 13/r/82/01/e/21/01 13/82/r/01/17/93.≫

Most of the letters for one long word were revealed.

92/erber/01

Given the context of the story so far, that word is definitely “Herbert.”

Naturally, I also figured out the identity of the four-letter word that follows it and ends in “n.”

Plugging the information I found back in….

“Dammit!”

I threw my pen aside and hurriedly jumped up from my seat. If what I deciphered was true….

I didn’t have time for this!

“Si-Sir? Where are you going all of a sudden?”

“To save someone!”

I didn’t have time to explain.

I immediately ran down the stairs.

***

“Si-Sir? Sir?”

Left alone, Lure muttered in bewilderment.

“What on earth is going on?”

She had accepted it when he was scribbling away, saying he would try to solve the code that even Mr. Walter hadn’t dared to touch.

Her master wasn’t someone who showed extraordinary deductive reasoning in every everyday moment like a typical detective, but he was someone who would readily challenge and accomplish things that no one else seemed capable of.

But to suddenly throw away his pen and notebook and run out in such a hurry.

‘Did he actually solve the code? What on earth was in the cipher that made him so agitated?’

Unable to overcome her curiosity, Lure picked up the notebook her master had thrown and checked its contents.

“Thi-this is…!”

≪Renner is in Herbert clan. Be care35/36/16. 13/r/82/tect 13/82/rtia.≫

There were still a few undeciphered letters, but given the context of the words, it wasn’t difficult to fill in the blanks.

≪Renner is in Herbert clan. Be careful. Protect Portia.≫

Miss Portia, who was downstairs, was in danger.