Da Vinci Code judge adds his own puzzle

Italics are placed in strange spots: the first is found in paragraph one of the 360-paragraph long document. The letter s in the word claimants is italicised. In the next para, claimants is spelled ‘claimant’ and so on. The italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out ‘‘smithy code,’’ playing on the judge’s name.

Lawyer Dan Tench, with the London firm Olswang, said he noticed the code when he spotted the striking italicised script in an online copy of the judgment. Tench said the judge teasingly remarked that the code is a mixture of the italicised font code found in the book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail—whose authors were suing Dan Brown’s publisher, Random House, for copyright infringement—and the code found in Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

After the “smithy code” series, there are an additional 25 jumbled letters contained on the first 14 pages of the document, Tench said, adding he thinks the series can be decoded using an anagram or an alphabet-inspired, code-breaking device.