I wonder continually about Sherlock. He takes it for granted he can bank on me – which he can, of course – but once some new mystery is on his mind, he barges in like a rogue elephant, no thought of anyone else.
Take this morning, for example. There I am in my underpants and vest, in the middle of getting dressed, and I look up to see him there. I’m getting the impression he doesn’t believe in door bells.
“Ah, John,” he says, “I’ve been going through the condolence cards from my funeral.”
I pull on my trousers and make an attempt to quip, “It must be interesting to see what people don’t think about you.”
He looks up from something in his hand and, amazingly, for once my words seem to have penetrated his single-mindedness. But not for long.
“Going for the jugular, eh? Well, get over it.” He waves a small card in the air. “There’s a cryptic message from Jim Moriarty.”
My mouth must have dropped open, for he looks at me with one of those patronising stares. “Yes, I know he shot himself, but he was a man to think ahead. Here. Read this.”
Taking the card from his outstretched hand I read aloud. It is unsigned.
“Around, over the width of a circle, Hitler’s bodyguards are separated
from a unit of resistance”, the Danish prince would say logically.
“How does that prove it’s from Moriarty?” I say, and attempting to decrypt it, continue, “Width of a Circle – that’s from the Bowie album The Man Who Sold The World. Is that anything to do with it?”
Sherlock puffs out his lips in despair, then starts to explain.
“Take each bit in turn. ‘Width of a Circle’, that’s the diameter. ‘Around’ – that’s the circumference. Divide one by the other, and you get?”
“Pi.”
“And Hitler’s bodyguards?”
“The S.S.”
“The unit of electrical resistance?”
“Ohm.”
“So that’s ‘O’. And Hamlet is the Danish prince. Who is famous for the quote ‘To be…’”
“’…or not to be’. Yes, I know. Get to the point.”
“The card says ‘logically’. So if we write the quotation as an expression using Hex numbers –
2B OR NOT 2B – and minimise this using some Boolean logic, what do we get?”
“Enlighten me.”
“We get ‘FF’.”
“So?”
“Put them all together, and that’s why I know it’s from Jim Moriarty – PI. SS. O. FF.”
