Unnoticed for three weeks, Mr Justice Peter Smith embedded his own code in his recent Da Vinci Code judgment. Starting in paragraph 1 (page 5) he highlighted 42 letters in bold italic, the first ten spelling “smithy code” and the remainder (ending on page 13) a jumble yet to be decoded.

Yesterday’s New York Times reports him as saying that the different ways codes are broken in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code should be considered.

He then suggested moving on to The Da Vinci Code and applying one of the code-breaking methods used by its protagonists to solve the mystery of the jumbled letters. “Think mathematics,” he wrote at one point. He drew attention to his own entry in Who’s Who – in which he lists an interest in the history of Jackie Fisher, an admiral who modernized the British Navy, a possible reason that his e-mail address contains the word “pescator,” implying fisherman – and said that the date 2006 was significant.

He even mentioned a page number in The Da Vinci Code by way of trying to help. But he declined to go further, saying that “anything else gives it on a plate.”

For you DVC code-breakers out there, with the help of Google I’ve prepared an html version of the judgment which clearly highlights the code letters.