I took a different route home to England, once again returned to my villa upon the southern slope of the downs, commanding a great view of the Channel. My old housekeeper, and my bees have once again become my close and consistent companions. I once more gave myself up entirely to that soothing life of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of the callous criminal world of London. I had a peaceful respite that would last until national duty recalled me in 1912 with a precursor to the gathering storm of that terrible year 1914 and rousted me once again from my quiet life of Retired Consulting Detective. Jack’s Notebook The loss of Jack Grimm, my nephew, my only close relative was bitter. He had caused my darling Christy to be murdered, something I could not forgive. But he was an upstanding fellow and my brother’s only offspring. As I have gotten older and time for me is shorter, I become conscious that I had no children from my marriages. Gustav Swartz had given me the notebook, something Jack had slipped to him along with his mission report notebook and the letter of apology to me and Holmes. I had just shoved it into my pocket when it was presented to me, with no word of thanks. I didn’t even attempt to read it until after the funeral ceremony of my departed wife. It was a small cardboard bound notebook that one would use to jot down quick notes. It was not a diary that one would expect to keep for memories. In fact, when I had flipped through it, it was illegible, an uninterrupted string of letters having no sense at all. That is except for the one sentence at the front inside cover and one on the back inside cover. The first sentence just said: ‘A letter means nothing.’ The sentence on the back cover said: ‘The following is the preceding:’ then a gibberish string of letters at the bottom of the page which ran: ‘basfuufmatobfnahojiupo’. So Jack had encoded a notebook, but apparently left the key in an enigma of a clue. Most keys to codes are sent separately so without the key the code is undecipherable. But Jack could not be sure I was given a key so he included it, but made it veiled. I had put the notebook away for several weeks again, until my anger had cooled and my curiosity of his last words kept my peace of mind disturbed. Moriarty was dead, the bastard, the weapons destroyed and without the meteor our scientists and technician’s cannot hope to duplicate the experiments. They had reconstructed a similar device, of inferior design, but as close as they could from the sketches provided by Holmes and I (detailed plans had been destroyed in all three incidents). But they could not explain the fierceness of the explosions; no known scientific explanation was possible from known theories of matter. Maybe at some later date our scientists could come up with some theory, but now they were stumped. Maybe the meteor has some unknown mineral, something even more exceptional than the uranium. One of the scientists was trying to tell me some mumbo jumbo about some crazy theory from an obscure Swiss patent office clerk named Einstein had come up with. Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Jack knew that Holmes and I had worked several ciphers in Holmes many cases, some such as the Dancing Men did not even appear to be code to the casual observer, just child scrawlings. Jack had given me the notebook so he apparently wanted me to decipher it. I would just have to use Holmes’s method and work this out. What if ‘A letter means nothing’ was in fact to be taken literally. If I deleted the letter ‘a’ from the string of letters, then they formed words, unintelligent, but words never the less. What I got was: ‘b sfuufm tobfn hojiupo’ Gibberish, but using Holmes admonition to observe, I had to think what it could mean. Well, since Jack had only given two readable sentences, comparing the gibberish to both I noticed that the first sentence had four words with the exact number of letters of each word of the coded sentence. And the second sentence had said the following was the first sentence. There are two English words of one letter, ‘I’ and ‘a’. ‘A’ was the first letter of the first sentence so it fit. Plus it fit the meaning of the second readable sentence, the letters of the following sentence would actually be the preceding in the alphabet. The words then became: ‘A rettel snaem gnihton’ But that was gibberish too. Then I looked at the second word apart from the entire sentence and low and behold I recognized that ‘rettel’ was ‘letter’ spelled backwards. Using the fact that each word was reversed and then coded the gibberish ‘basfuufmatobfnahojiupo’ read ‘A letter means nothing.’ He was able to use the letter ‘a’ as a spacer since the decoded letter would be z, not used much in English words. So it only encumbered me to decode the entire notebook to read the last words of my nephew. This is what the first line he wrote on the first page came out decoded: ‘glib ntok wobls pkkotok ransibo’. Pure gibberish.