‘A Corpse Floating in the Estuary’

Entry in Dr Alberto Souto’s journal, containing a clipping of a news item published by O Povo de Aveiro on 9 February 1919

A Corpse Floating in the Estuary

Last Monday, 3 February, a corpse was found in the central channel of Aveiro’s estuary, near the Ponte dos Arcos.

The macabre discovery was made by a local farmer, Mr António Macedo, while he was navigating the canal in his usual practice of harvesting seaweed. He immediately called the guards, who quickly removed the body. According to some of the locals who witnessed the event, the body belonged to an adult man, whose age was difficult to determine due to the swelling of his features. It was rumoured among those with the knowhow, who were used to seeing animals rotting in the canals, that it had been dead for at least a week.

No cause of death has been put forward, which is even more difficult to discover given the general state of his clothes and flesh, so it could be a simple drunk who fell into the water during his wine-fuelled wanderings, and for the time being the people have no reason to fear going out into the street. Let’s wait for the doctor-surgeon’s report, in the hope that he will tell us the identity of the deceased and what caused his early demise.

The captain general of the guard also said that in one of the pockets of his jacket was a document, protected by layers of oilcloth, which is believed to have been valuable to its owner. As it contains an apparently meaningless message, we reproduce it here in the hope that some esteemed reader will be able to make sense of it, and that its content will provide some clue to identifying the deceased:

XIOF JT UIF LFZ. UNJHMGBDL

O Povo de Aveiro, 9th February, 1919

***

Such a curious thing.

After experimenting with various codes, I tried a simple shift cipher, with success. If we replace each letter with the previous one,

XIOF JT UIF LFZ

becomes

WINE IS THE KEY

Wine.

Bairrada? Dão Porto?

Damn monarchists, infiltrating our city with spies.

One word left.

What to say about UNJHMGBDL?

This one eludes me.

Using the same cipher, we get

TMIGLFACK

If we skip two letters instead of one, we get

SLHFKEZBJ

What if, instead of going backwards, we go forwards?

VOKINHCEM

Maybe.

At first glance it looks like just another set of meaningless letters, but a closer look reveals a structure, a logic to the fit of vowels and consonants that is reminiscent of a real word.

Perhaps by reversing the letters?

MECHNIKOV

Voilà! Finally, something that resembles a word. Perhaps from some Slavic language. But what does it refer to? Or to whom? A soviet? What does it have to do with the rest of the sentence?

As usual, solving one puzzle only leads to a more complex one. We must be patience; the difficulties won’t stop it from being solved. We cannot allow obscurantism to return. Monarchy. That cursed word. I shall send a letter to the Loja de Águeda today, while the town is still free, in the hope that it will reach the Grand Master.

With knowledge, we overcome ignorance. With the Order’s light, we overcome darkness.

Alberto Souto

Journal. 9th February 1919