THE judge who embedded a code in his ruling on the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case explained its final mystery yesterday.

The Times was the first newspaper to publish the correct solution to Mr Justice Peter Smith’s riddle, using the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which is integral to the plot of The Da Vinci Code.

While the Daily Mail was still offering readers £1,000 if they could successfully decode the judge’s puzzle, Times readers were already aware that the answer should read: “Smithy Code: Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought”.

“Smithy Code” was obviously designed to alert the reader to the existence of a hidden text, and “Jackie Fisher” was a naval reformer who revolutionised the British Navy in the early 20th century. His greatest achievement was the development of the Dreadnought class of battleships. But the origin of the phrase “Jackie Fisher, who are you?” remained elusive until yesterday.

“The question ‘Jackie Fisher, who are you?’ is not my question,” Mr Justice Smith said. “It is a quote from Fisher’s rival Beresford.”

Admiral Beresford, the naval commander preferred to Fisher by George V, used the words as an insult during an argument with his great rival, the judge said.

The codebreaker, he said, should take the letters which appeared to be randomly italicised, giving “SMITHYCODEJAEIEXTOSTGPSACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVZ”.

“The code is created by letter substitution . . . by applying the Fibonacci sequence numbers above letter by letter. The relevant number shows where you start for each letter to substitute. Thus the first letter is identified by rewriting the alphabet starting at the first letter in the alphabet, ie, for the first letter A = A. The second letter is also started at 1; the third at 3. When 21 is reached the code reverts back to 1, etc, and repeats that until all the letters are substituted. A message ought then to be revealed.”

Mr Justice Smith’s explanation presumably means that the Daily Mail’s competition is now closed.

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