The Address Book (An Inspector Kelly Mystery)

Inspector Kelly sat in his office turning the blue leather bound address book over in his hands while, looking up only slightly, he noted, with some concern, that the lock on the office window had been recently broken and that a nearby closet door was slightly ajar.

He had flipped through the pages of the book a thousand times, studied the crudely scribbled names and addresses in it almost ten times that, as intensely as one would if trying to decipher some ancient language, without even a glimmer of an idea in his brain as to what it all added up to before, suddenly, it had all started to become crystal clear.

“A man is murdered in the middle of a busy street by an assassin in a crowd”, said Kelly to himself, turning over, in his head, the facts of the incident in which the address book was found, “Injected with a rare exotic venom. The body is searched for evidence and we find upon the body, among other things, a small blue, leather bound address book hidden in the lining of his coat. Neither the murdered man nor his assassin has as yet been identified. At first glance the address book seems perfectly normal except that the names and addresses written within it are of people and places which do not, as far as we have been able to ascertain, exist and, furthermore, there is only one name and address written in each alphabetical section of the address book; even within the X and Z sections of the address book, a foreign sounding gentleman named Xerxes Armani and a lady with the equally unusual name of Zelda Rocca”.

“I know all that”, said Lambert, Kelly’s Chief Super intendent, irritably,entering the office, “But what does it all mean? I’ve got a lot of military intelligence types breathing down my neck who think that the dead man and the fellow that killed him were part of some Prussian spy ring”.

“I certainly don’t think that these men were spies”, replied Kelly, “Although doubtless the killer was affiliated with an organization of some kind but I believe that the man who was killed simply put on the wrong jacket by mistake, perhaps because it looked like the killers jacket”.

“What makes you say that”, asked his chief, lighting up a pipe of tobacco which he always smoked to calm his nerves.

“Well. I’ve worked out, quite irrefutably what this address book is. You see, the postal code for every address in this book ends with a different letter of the alphabet. Why?  Because it’s the key to a code”, said Kelly, “The first letter of each alphabetically ordered name is equivalent to the letter at the end of each postal code”.

“Well that certainly sounds to me like Spy stuff”, said his chief.

“Yes, sir”, said Kelly, “But using the key in this book I have managed to decode several of the names and addresses written in the book and they’re names that I recognize; names of people who have all been murdered within the past month; some of whom certainly were not spies, at least not to my knowledge, such as police informants. No sir, I believe that the person to whom this address book belonged was not a spy but a professional killer, perhaps part of some criminal syndicate, and that this book contains a list of names and addresses of people whom he was hired to kill”.

“Well what do think we should do about it?”, asked Lambert.

“Well, firstly, sir”, said Kelly, lowering his voice and taking an old army revolver out of his pocket with which he gestured to his nearby closet, “I think we should arrest the man who, I believe is at present, hiding in my closet having earlier broken in through my office window with the intention, I'm certain, of killing me”.

The chief inspectors face turned pale,

“What?”, he asked, flabbergasted.

 “The last name in the book, you see, sir”, replied Kelly, “It’s mine”.