CHAPTER 22: THE TRANSLATION
St. Bartholomew's Hospital, West Smithfield — August 23, 2010, 1:45 PM
The medical library at Bart's was on the second floor, past the administrative wing, through a fire door that required a visitor badge to open. The badge I'd "forgotten" to return in June had been flagged and cancelled — the receptionist had told me as much when I'd called the main switchboard yesterday evening, asking about research access.
But the woman on the phone had also told me something useful: Bart's offered limited archival access to external researchers with a valid referral. My NHS amnesia documentation counted. I'd booked a two-hour slot for Monday afternoon, and here I was, fifteen minutes early, standing in a library that smelled of old paper and floor polish.
The historical archive occupied three shelves at the back of the room, wedged between a row of immunology journals and a window that overlooked an internal courtyard. I'd told the librarian — a thin woman in her fifties with half-moon glasses and the particular patience of someone accustomed to dealing with lost medical students — that I was researching historical counting systems in medical texts. She'd pointed me to the right section and returned to her desk without further questions.
Thank God for academic librarians. Ask a specific question, get a specific answer, no small talk required.
I pulled books. History of Mathematical Notation by Cajori. Chinese Mathematics: A Concise History by Li Yan and Du Shiran. A slim volume on Traditional Numeration Systems of East Asia that hadn't been checked out since 2004, judging by the stamps.
The Suzhou numerals were there.a notation system used in Chinese markets since the Song Dynasty, a positional system similar to Arabic numerals but with distinct character forms. Vertical and horizontal strokes representing digits, used for pricing, accounting, and — here was the key — encoding numerical messages.
I photographed the relevant pages. Compared them against the photographs from Hoyt's door frame.
The match was exact. The symbols on the door were Suzhou numerals, arranged in pairs — one large number, one small. Page and line references. A book code.
[Research Progress: Cipher system confirmed — Suzhou numeral book code. Source text unidentified.]
The question was: which book?
A book code required that both sender and receiver owned identical copies of the same text. Every symbol on every door referenced a specific page and line in that book. The murdered men — Van Coon, Lukis — had both been involved in Chinese trade. Whatever book the Tong used, it had to be something common to that world. Something every operative would own without it looking suspicious.
I made a list. Trade directories. Chinese-English dictionaries. Phrasebooks. Import regulation handbooks. Travel guides. The list filled half a notebook page, and each entry was a dead end until I could test it against the actual numbers.
My stomach growled. Two o'clock. I'd eaten a banana at seven and nothing since — the kind of oversight that happened when the brain was consuming more calories than the body.
I gathered my notes and headed for the cafeteria.
---
The cafeteria at Bart's hadn't changed since June. The same fluorescent lighting that turned everyone's skin slightly green. The same sandwich display with the same optimistic pricing. The same coffee machine that produced something with the colour and approximate flavour of ditch water.
I bought tea — the woman at the till gave me the same instruction she'd given the last time: "Milk's by the napkins, love" — and carried it to a table near the window.
She was three tables away. Same spot as last time — or close enough to it that the symmetry felt deliberate, though it probably wasn't. Half-eaten salad, phone on the table beside her plate, staring at nothing with the particular blankness of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely.
Molly Hooper. White lab coat over a floral blouse. Hair pulled back. The faintest trace of formaldehyde that clung to pathologists the way chalk dust clung to teachers — an occupational scent that most people would have found disturbing and Molly probably didn't notice anymore.
I'd called Bart's switchboard last night and asked for the pathology department. A night-shift technician had told me Dr. Hooper worked days, Monday through Friday, usually in the morgue or the histology lab. I hadn't asked for her personal number. I'd asked about library access hours and hung up.
Don't be weird about this. She won't remember you. It was five minutes in a cafeteria two months ago.
I picked up my tea and walked over.
"The coffee's still terrible, isn't it?"
She looked up. Blinked. For a moment — nothing. Then something moved behind her eyes, a filing cabinet being opened and searched.
"Oh! You're the — the memory research man. The American."
"Nathan Cole. We talked about hospital beverages. You were right — the tea's the safer option."
A smile. Small, surprised, genuine. "I can't believe you remembered that."
"I remember useful intelligence." I gestured at the empty chair. "Mind if I...?"
"No, no — please."
I sat. She pushed the salad around her plate — cherry tomatoes chasing cucumber slices in a circuit that suggested she'd been doing this for a while. Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it, and something crossed her face — a flicker, quickly suppressed, that looked like hope curdling into disappointment.
Someone at work. Someone who texts her enough to create expectations and then doesn't follow through.
Sherlock. He's been at Bart's recently — the Van Coon case would have brought him here for lab access. He'd have been charming and dismissive in equal measure, the way he always was with Molly. Enough warmth to keep her helpful. Never enough to mean anything.
I didn't mention it. "Busy day?"
"Always. Three post-mortems before lunch. One of them was — well, you don't want to hear about that while you're eating."
"I'm not eating. And I'm harder to put off than most people."
She studied me for a moment. "The second post-mortem was a drowning victim. Except the water in his lungs was fresh water and he was found in the Thames, which is brackish. So either he drowned somewhere else and was moved, or..." She trailed off. Caught herself. "Sorry. I do this. Talk about dead people at lunch. It's why I eat alone."
"You eat alone because other people are squeamish. That's their problem, not yours."
The smile again. Wider this time. "That's — actually, that's a nice way to put it."
We talked. Not about dead people — about her work, her interests, the specific passion she had for forensic pathology that lit her up when she forgot to be self-conscious. She'd chosen pathology, she told me, because the dead couldn't lie. "Living patients tell you what they think is wrong. Dead ones tell you what actually happened." She said it with the conviction of someone who'd found her vocation and was still surprised that other people didn't find it as fascinating as she did.
I listened. Not the way Sherlock listened — cataloguing data, assessing utility, filing information for future manipulation. I listened the way a person listens to another person when they're being interesting. Which she was.
"What about you?" she asked, after ten minutes. "Still researching your memory issues?"
"Actually — I'm here about something different. I'm working on an investigation. Private detective work." I pulled out the photographs. "These symbols keep appearing on a building in central London. They're threats. I've identified them as Suzhou numerals, but I need help understanding the coding system."
Molly leaned forward. The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.
"Suzhou numerals?" Her eyes sharpened — the pathologist emerging from behind the shy woman. "Like the ones they used in traditional Chinese markets? Hang on—" She pulled out her own phone, scrolled through saved images. "I did a rotation in medical anthropology during my MSc. There was a whole module on historical numbering systems in medical texts. The Suzhou system was..." She found what she was looking for. A reference image — Suzhou characters with their Arabic numeral equivalents. "These?"
I compared her image to my photographs. "These. Exactly these."
"They're page and line numbers, aren't they? Like a book code." She said it casually, the way someone mentions that the sky is blue. For Molly Hooper, decoding a cipher system was apparently the same level of difficulty as identifying a drowning victim's water source.
"That's my working theory. The problem is identifying which book."
"Something common. Something every target would have." She thought about it. Head tilted, finger tapping her chin. "If it's Chinese trade people... a phrasebook? One of the standard ones you'd buy at Heathrow before a business trip?"
[+15 SP. Research collaboration. Social progress: M. Hooper.]
I stared at her. "A phrasebook."
"There are only about four or five common ones. Collins Mandarin Phrasebook, the Lonely Planet one, the Rough Guide one, and there's a BBC one that came out a few years ago. If your targets all travel to China for business, they'd probably own one of those."
A phrasebook. Common. Standard. Exactly the kind of book that would be unremarkable on a businessman's shelf but could encode any message if you knew the system.
"Molly. That's—" I stopped. Recalibrated. "That's genuinely helpful."
She flushed. A visible, spreading pink that started at her collar and climbed to her cheeks. "It's just — I mean, it's obvious if you think about it."
"It wasn't obvious to me, and I've been thinking about it for three days."
She gathered her things — the salad abandoned, the phone tucked into her coat pocket. "I should get back. There's a — I have a meeting at three." She hesitated. "If you need more help with the numerals, you could email me. I'm at Bart's most days." She wrote her email address on a napkin. The handwriting was small, precise, the pen strokes of someone accustomed to writing on specimen labels. "It's just my work email. For the research."
"Thank you. I mean it."
"Most people don't ask," she said. And then, realising what she'd said, she corrected herself: "About the numerals. Most people don't ask about numerals." She left, walking quickly, the lab coat fluttering behind her.
I sat at the table with a napkin and a list of phrasebooks and the peculiar warmth that comes from watching someone discover they're worth talking to.
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