Authors: Robert Harris
And so, at last, to Claire’s room. He was quite clear now about
what he was going to do, even though conscience told him it was
wrong and logic told him it was stupid. And, in principle, he
agreed. Like any good boy he had learned his Aesop, knew that
“listeners never hear good of themselves”—but since when, he
thought, as he began opening drawers, since when has that pious
wisdom stopped anybody? A letter, a diary, a message—anything that
might tell him why—he had to see it, he had to, even though the
chances of its yielding any comfort were nil. Where was she? Was
she with another man? Was she doing what all the girls in London,
darling, call a wall job?
He was suddenly in a rage and he went through her room like a
housebreaker, pulling out drawers and upending them, sweeping
jewellery and trinkets off the shelves, pulling her clothes down on
to the floor, throwing off her sheets and blankets and wrenching up
her mattress, raising clouds of dust and scent and ostrich
feathers.
After ten minutes he crawled into the corner and laid his head
on a pile of silks and furs.
“You’re a wreck,” Skynner had said. “You’re ruined. You’ve lost
it. Find someone more suitable than the person you were
seeing.”
Skynner knew about her, and Logie had seemed to know as well.
What was it he’d called her? The “arctic blonde?” Perhaps they all
knew? Puck, Atwood, Baxter, everybody?
He had to get out, get away from the smell of her perfume and
the sight of her clothes.
And it was that action that changed everything, for it was only
when he stood on the landing, leaning with his back to the wall and
his eyes closed, that he realised there was something he’d
missed.
He walked back slowly and deliberately into her room. Silence.
He stepped across the threshold and repeated the action. Silence
again. He got down on his knees. One of auntie’s Kensington rugs
covered the floorboards, something oriental, stained, and
tastefully threadbare. It was only about two yards square. He
rolled it up and laid it on the bed. The wooden planks which had
lain beneath it were bowed with age, worn smooth, fixed down by
rust-coloured nails, untouched for two centuries—except in one
place, where a shorter length of the old planking, perhaps,
eighteen inches long, was secured by four very modern, very shiny
screws. He slapped the floor in triumph.
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my
attention, Mr Jericho?”
“To the curious incident of the creaking floorboard.”
“But the floorboard didn’t creak.”
“That was the curious incident.”
In the mess of her bedroom he could see no suitable tool. He
went down into the kitchen and found a knife. It had a
mother-of-pearl handle with an “R” engraved on it. Perfect. He
almost skipped across the sitting room. The tip of the knife
slotted into the head of the screw and the thread turned easily, it
came away like a dream. So did the other three. The floorboard
lifted up to reveal the horsehair and plaster of the downstairs
ceiling. The cavity was about six inches deep. He took off his
overcoat and his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. He lay on his
side and thrust his hand into the space. To begin with he brought
out nothing except handfuls of debris, mostly lumps of old plaster
and small pieces of brick, but he kept on working his way around
until at last he gave a cry of delight as his hand touched
paper.
♦
He put everything back in its place, more or less. He hung the
clothes back up from the beams, piled her underclothes and her
scarves back into the drawers and replaced the drawers in the
mahogany chest. He heaped the trinkets of jewellery into their
leather case and draped others artfully along the shelves, together
with her bottles and pots and packets, most of which were
empty.
He did all this mechanically, an automaton.
He remade the bed, lifting off the rug and smoothing down the
eiderdown, throwing the lace cover over it where it settled like a
net. Then he sat on the edge of the mattress and surveyed the room.
Not bad. Of course, once she began looking for things, then she
would know someone had been through it, but at a casual glance it
looked the same as before—apart, that is, from the hole in the
floor. He didn’t know yet what to do about that. It depended on
whether or not he replaced the intercepts. He pulled them out from
under the bed and examined them again.
There were four, on standard-size sheets, eight inches by ten.
He held one up to the light. It was cheap wartime paper, the sort
Bletchley used by the ton. He could practically see a petrified
forest in its coarse yellow weave—the shadows of foliage and
leaf-stalks, the faint outlines of bark and fern.
In the top left-hand corner of each signal was the frequency on
which it had been transmitted—12260 kilocycles per second—and in
the top right its TOI, Time of Interception. The four had been sent
in rapid succession on 4 March, just nine days earlier, at roughly
twenty-five-minute intervals, beginning at 9.30 a.m. and ending
just before midnight. Each consisted of a call sign—ADU—and then
about two hundred five-letter groups. That in itself was an
important clue. It meant, whatever else they were, they weren’t
naval: the Kriesgmarine’s signals were transmitted in groups of
four letters. So they were presumably German Army or Luftwaffe.
She must have stolen them from Hut 3.
The enormity of the implications hit Jericho for a second time,
winding him like a punch in the stomach. He arranged the intercepts
in sequence on her pillow and tried very hard, like a defending
King’s Counsel, to come up with some innocent explanation. A piece
of silly mischief? It was possible. She had certainly never paid
much attention to security—shouting about Hut 8 in the station
buffet, demanding to know what he did, trying to tell him what she
did. A dare? Again, possible. She was capable of anything. But that
hole in the floorboards, the cool deliberation of it, drew his gaze
and mocked his advocacy.
A sound, a footstep downstairs, dragged him out of his reverie
and made him jump to his feet.
He said, “Hello?” in a loud voice that suggested more courage
than he felt. He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he repeated. And then
he heard another nose, definitely a footstep, and definitely
outside now, and a charge of adrenaline snapped in. He moved
quickly to the bedroom door and turned the light off, so that the
only illumination in the cottage came from the sitting room. Now,
if anyone came up the stairs, he would be able to see their
silhouette, while remaining hidden. But nothing happened. Perhaps
they were trying to come round the back? He felt horribly
vulnerable. He moved cautiously down the stairs, flinching at every
creak. A blast of cold air struck him.
The front door was wide open.
He threw himself down the last half-dozen steps and ran outside,
just in time to see the red rear light of a bicycle shoot out of
the track and vanish down the lane.
He set off in pursuit but gave up after twenty paces. He didn’t
stand a chance of catching the cyclist.
There was a heavy frost. In every direction the ground shone a
dull and luminous blue. The branches of the bare trees were raised
against the sky like blood vessels. In the glittering ice, two sets
of tyre-tracks were imprinted: incoming and outgoing. He followed
them back to the door, where they ended in a series of sharp
footprints.
Sharp, large, male footprints.
Jericho looked at them for half a minute, shivering in his
shirtsleeves. An owl shrieked in the nearby copse and it seemed to
him that its call had the rhythm of Morse: dee-dee-dee-dah,
dee-dee-dee-dah.
He hurried back into the cottage.
Upstairs, he rolled the intercepts very tightly into a cylinder.
He used his teeth to tear a small hole in the lining of his
overcoat and pushed the signals into it. Then he quickly screwed
down the floorboards and replaced the rug. He put on his jacket and
coat, turned off the lights, locked the door, replaced the key.
His bicycle added a third set of impressions in the frost.
At the entrance to the lane he stopped and looked back at the
darkened cottage. He had a strong sensation—foolish, he told
himself—that he was being watched. He glanced around. A gust of
wind stirred in the trees; in the blackthorn hedge beside him,
icicles clinked and chimed.
Jericho shivered again, remounted the bike and pointed it down
the hill, towards the south, towards Orion and Procyon, and to
Hydra, which hung suspended in the night sky above Bletchley Park
like a knife.
KISS
KISS: the coincidence of two different cryptograms,
each transmitted in a different cipher, yet each containing the
same original plaintext, the solution of one thereby leading to the
solution of the other.A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)
HE DOESN’T KNOW what wakes him—some faint sound, some movement
in the air that hooks him in the depths of his dreams and hauls him
to the surface.
At first his darkened room seems entirely normal—the familiar
jet-black spar of the low oak beam, the smooth grey plains of wall
and ceiling—but then he realises that a faint light is rising from
the foot of his bed.
“Claire?” he says, propping himself up. “Darling?”
“It’s all right, darling. Go on back to sleep.”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m just going through your things.”
“You’re…what?”
His hand jumbles across the bedside table and switches on the
lamp. His Waralarm shows him it is half past three.
“That’s better,” she says, and she turns off the blackout torch.
“Useless thing, anyway.”
And she is doing exactly what she says. She is naked except for
his shirt, she is kneeling, and she is going through his wallet.
She removes a couple of one-pound notes, turns the wallet inside
out and shakes it.
“No photographs?”she says.
“You haven’t given me one yet.”
“Tom Jericho,” she smiles, replacing the money, “I do declare,
you’re becoming almost smooth.”
She checks the pockets of his jacket, his trousers then shuffles
on her knees across to his chest of drawers. He laces his hands
behind his head and leans back against the iron bedstead and
watches her. It is only the second time they have slept together—a
week after the first—and at her insistence they have done it not in
her cottage but in his room, creeping through the darkened bar of
the White Hart Inn and up the creaking stair. Jericho’s bedroom is
well away from the rest of the household so there is no danger of
them being overheard. His books are lined up on the top of the
chest of drawers and she picks up each in turn, holds it upside
down and flicks through the pages.
Does he see anything odd in all this? No, he does not. It merely
seems amusing, flattering, even—one further intimacy, a
continuation of all the rest, a part of the waking dream his life
has become, governed by dream rules. Besides, he has no secrets
from her—or, at least, he thinks he hasn’t. She finds Turing’s
paper and studies it closely.
“And what are computable numbers with an application to the
Entscheidungsproblem, when they’re at home?”
Her pronunciation of the German, he registers with surprise, is
immaculate.
“It’s a theoretical machine, capable of an infinite number of
numerical operations. It supports the assumptions of Hilbert and
challenges those of Godel. Come back to bed, darling.”
“But it’s only a theory?”
He sighs and pats the mattress next to him. They’re sleeping in
a single bed. “Turing believes there’s no inherent reason why a
machine shouldn’t be capable of doing everything a human brain can
do. Calculate. Communicate. Write a sonnet.”
“Fall in love?”
“If love is logical.”
“Is it?”
“Come to bed.”
“This Turing, does he work at the Park?”
He makes no reply. She leafs through the paper, squinting with
disgust at the mathematics, then replaces it with the books and
opens one of the drawers. As she leans forwards the shirt rides
higher. The lower part of her back gleams white in the shadows. He
stares, mesmerised, at the soft triangle of flesh at the base of
her vertebrae as she rummages among his clothes.
“Ah,” she says, “now here is something.” She withdraws a slip of
paper. “A cheque for a hundred pounds, drawn on the Foreign Office
Contingency Fund, made out to you—”
“Give me that.”
“Why?”
“Put it back.”
He is across the room and standing beside her within a couple of
seconds, but she is quicker than he is. She is on her feet, on
tiptoe, holding the cheque aloft, and she—absurdly—is just that
half-inch taller than him. The money flutters like a pennant beyond
his reach.
“I knew there would be something. Come on, darling, what’s it
for?”
He should have banked the damn thing weeks ago. He’d quite
forgotten it. “Claire, please.”
“You must have done something frightfully clever in that naval
hut of yours. A new code? Is that it? You broke some new important
code, my clever, clever darling?” She may be taller than he is, she
may even be stronger, but he has the advantage of desperation. He
seizes the firm muscle of her bicep and pulls her arm down and
twists her round. They struggle for a moment and then he throws her
back on the narrow bed. He prises the cheque out of her bitten-down
fingers and retreats with it across the room.
“Notf unny, Claire. Some things just aren’t that funny.”
He stands there on the rough matting—naked, slender, panting
with exertion. He folds the cheque and slips it into his wallet,
puts the wallet into his jacket, and turns to hang the jacket in
the wardrobe. As he does so, he is aware of a peculiar noise coming
from behind him—a frightening, animal noise, something between a
rasping breath and a sob. She has curled herself up tight on the
bed, her knees drawn up to her stomach, her forearms pressed to her
face.