Authors: Robert Harris
♦
“Exactly who or what are we dealing with here?” said Wigram. He
had taken out a small black leather notebook and a gold propelling
pencil.
Claire Alexandra Romilly. Born: London, twenty-first
of the twelfth, ‘twenty-two. Father: Edward Arthur Macauley
Romilly, diplomat. Mother: the Honourable Alexandra Romilly, nee
Harvey, deceased in motor accident, Scotland, August ‘twenty-nine.
The child is educated privately abroad. Father’s postings:
Bucharest, ‘twenty-eight to ‘thirty-one; Berlin, ‘thirty-one to
‘thirty-four; Washington, ‘thirty-four to ‘thirty-eight. A year in
Athens, then back to London. The girl by now is at some fancy
finishing school in Geneva. She returns to London on the outbreak
of war, aged seventeen. Principal occupation for the next three
years, as far as one can gather: having a good time.
Wigram licked his finger and turned the page.
Some voluntary civil defence work. Nothing too
arduous. July ‘forty-one: translator at the Ministry of Economic
Warfare. August ‘forty-two: applies for clerical position, Foreign
Office. Good languages. Recommended for position at Bletchley Park.
See attached letter from father, blah, blah. Interviewed
10
th
of September. Accepted, cleared, starts work
the following week.
Wigram flicked the pages back and forth. “That’s the lot. Not
exactly a rigorous process of selection, is it? But then she does
come from a frightfully good family. And Papa does work down at
head office. And there is a war on. Care to add anything to the
record?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“How’d you meet her?”
For the next ten minutes Jericho answered Wigram’s questions. He
did this carefully and—mostly—truthfully. Where he lied it was only
by omission. They had gone to a concert for their first date. After
that they had gone out in the evenings a few times. They had seen a
picture. Which one? In Which We Serve.
“Like it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell Noel.”
She had never talked about politics. She had never discussed her
work. She had never mentioned other friends.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Mind your own bloody business.”
“I’ll put that down as yes.”
More questions. No, he had noticed nothing odd about her
behaviour. No, she had not seemed tense or nervous, secretive,
silent, aggressive, inquisitive, moody, depressed or elated—no,
none of these—and at the end, they hadn’t quarrelled. Really? No.
So they had…what, then?
“I don’t know. Drifted apart.”
“She was seeing someone else?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“Perhaps. You don’t know.” Wigram shook his head in wonder.
“Tell me about last night.”
“I cycled over to her cottage.”
“What time?”
“About ten, ten-thirty. She wasn’t there. I talked with Miss
Wallace for a bit. Then I came home.”
“Mrs Armstrong says she didn’t hear you come in until around two
o’clock this morning.”
So much for tiptoeing past her door, thought Jericho.
“I must have cycled around for a while.”
“I’ll say you did. In the frost. In the blackout. You must have
cycled around for about three hours.”
Wigram gazed down at his notes, tapping the side of his nose.
“Not right, Mr Jericho. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but
definitely not right. Still.” He snapped the notebook shut and gave
a reassuring smile. “Time to go into all that later, what?” He put
his hand on Jericho’s knee and pushed himself to his feet. “First,
we must catch our rabbit. You’ve no idea where she might be, I
suppose? No favourite haunts? No little den to run to?” He gazed
down at Jericho, who was staring at the floor. “No? No. Thought
not.”
By the time Jericho felt he could trust himself to look up
again, Wigram had draped his beautiful overcoat back around his
shoulders and was preoccupied picking tiny pieces of lint from its
collar.
“It could all be a coincidence,” said Jericho. “You do realise
that? I mean, Donitz always seems to have been suspicious about
Enigma. That’s why he gave the U-boats Shark in the first
place.”
“Oh absolutely,” said Wigram cheerfully. “But let’s look at it
another way. Let’s imagine the Germans have got a whisper of what
we’re up to here. What would they do? They couldn’t exactly chuck
out a hundred thousand Enigma machines overnight, could they? And
then what about all those experts of theirs, who’ve always said
Enigma is unbreakable? They’re not going to change their minds
without a fight. No. They’d do what they look as though they might
be doing. They’d start checking every suspicious incident. And in
the meantime, they’d try and find hard proof. A person, perhaps.
Better still, a person with documentary evidence. God, there are
enough of them about. Thousands right here, who either know all the
story, or a bit of it, or enough to put two and two together. And
what kind of people are they?” He withdrew a sheet of paper from
his inside pocket and unfolded it. “This is the list I asked for
yesterday. Eleven people in the Naval Section knew about the
importance of the Weather Code Book. Some rum names here, if you
stop to think about them. Skynner we can exclude, I suppose. And
Logie—he seems sound enough. But Baxter? Now Baxter’s a communist,
isn’t he?”
“I think you’ll find that communists don’t have much time for
Nazis. As a rule.”
“What about Pukowski?”
“Puck lost his father and his brother when Poland was invaded.
He loathes the Germans.”
“The American, then. Kramer. Kramer! He’s a second-generation
German immigrant, did you know that?”
“Kramer also lost a brother to the Germans. Really, Mr Wigram,
this is ridiculous.”
“Atwood. Pinker. Kingcome. Proudfoot, de Brooke. You…Who are you
all, exactly?” Wigram looked around the tiny room with distaste:
the frayed blackout curtains, the tatty wardrobe, the lumpy bed.
For the first time he seemed to notice the print of the chapel
above the mantelpiece. “I mean, just because a bloke’s been to
King’s College, Cambridge.”
He picked up the picture and held it at an angle under the
light. Jericho watched him, transfixed.
“E. M. Forster,” said Wigram thoughtfully. “Now he’s still at
King’s, isn’t he?”
“I believe so.”
“Know him?”
“Only to nod to.”
“What was that essay of his? How did it go? The one about
choosing between your friend and your country?”
“‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have
the guts to betray my country.’ But he did write that before the
war.”
Wigram blew some dust off the frame and set the print carefully
back on the top of Jericho’s books.
“So I should hope,” he said, standing back to admire it. He
turned and smiled at Jericho. “So I should frigging well hope.”
♦
After Wigram had gone, it was some minutes before Jericho felt
able to move.
He lay full length on the bed, still wearing his scarf and
overcoat, and listened to the sounds of the house. Some mournful
string quartet which the BBC judged suitable entertainment for a
Sunday night was scraping away downstairs. There were footsteps on
the landing. A whispered conversation ensued which ended with a
woman—Miss Jobey, was it?—having a fit of the giggles. A door
slammed. The cistern above his head emptied and refilled. Then
silence again.
When he did move, after about a quarter of an hour, his actions
had a frantic, fumbling haste. He carried the chair over from the
bedside to the door and tilted it against the flimsy panelling. He
took the print and laid it face down on the threadbare carpet,
pulled out the tacks, lifted off the back, rolled the intercepts
into a tube, and took them over to the grate. On top of the little
bucket of coal beside the hearth was a matchbox containing two
matches. The first was damp and wouldn’t strike but the second did,
just, and Jericho twisted it round to make sure the yellow flame
caught and grew, then he applied it to the bottom of the
intercepts. He held on to them as they writhed and blackened until
the very last moment, until the pain obliged him to drop them in
the grate, where they disintegrated into tiny flakes of ash.
CRIB
CRIB: a piece of evidence (usually a captured code
book or a length of plaintext) which provides clues for the
breaking of a cryptogram; “without question, the crib…is the single
most essential tool of any cryptanalyst” (Knox et al., op. cit.,
page 27).A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)
THE WARTIME LIPSTICK was hard and waxy—it was like trying to
colour your lips with a Christmas candle. When, after several
minutes of hard rubbing, Hester Wallace replaced her glasses, she
peered into the mirror with distaste. Make-up had never featured
much in her life, not even before the war, when there had been
plenty in the shops. But now, when there was nothing to be had, the
lengths one was expected to go to were quite absurd. She knew of
girls in the hut who made lipstick out of beetroot and sealed it in
place with Vaseline, who used shoe polish and burnt cork for
mascara and margarine wrappers as a skin softener, who dusted
bicarbonate of soda into their armpits to disguise their sweat…She
formed her lips into a cupid’s bow, which she immediately drew back
into a grimace. Really, it was quite, quite absurd.
The shortage of cosmetics seemed to have caught up at last even
with Claire. Although there was a profusion of pots and bottles all
over her little dressing table—Max Factor, Coty, Elizabeth Arden:
each name redolent of pre-war glamour—most of them turned out on
closer inspection to be empty. Nothing was left except a trace of
scent. Hester sniffed at each in turn and her mind was filled with
images of luxury—of satin cocktail dresses by Worth of London and
gowns with daring decolletage, of fireworks at Versailles and the
Duchess of Westminster’s summer ball, and a dozen other wonderful
nonsenses that Claire had prattled on about. Eventually she found a
half-f pot of mascara and a glass-stoppered jar with an inch of
rather lumpy face powder and set to work with those.
She had no qualms about helping herself. Hadn’t Claire always
told her she should? Making-up was fun, that was Claire’s
philosophy, it made one feel good about oneself, it turned one into
someone else, and, besides, if this is what it takes, then, darling
heart, this is simply what one does. Very well. Hester dabbed
grimly at her pallid cheeks. If this was what it bloody well took
to help persuade Miles Mermagen to approve a transfer, this was
what he’d bloody well get.
She regarded her reflection without enthusiasm, then carefully
replaced everything in its proper place and went downstairs. The
sitting room was freshly swept. Daffodils above the hearth. A fire
laid. The kitchen, too, was spotless. She had made a carrot flan
earlier in the evening, enough for two, with ingredients she had
grown herself in the little vegetable patch outside the kitchen
door, and now she laid a place for Claire, and left a note telling
her where to find the flan and instructions on how to heat it. She
hesitated, then added at the end: “Welcome back—from wherever
you’ve been!—much love, H.” She hoped it didn’t sound too fussy and
inquisitive; she hoped she wasn’t turning into her mother.
“ADU, Miss Wallace…”
Of course Claire would come back. It was all a stupid panic, too
absurd for words.
She sat in one of the armchairs and waited for her until a
quarter to midnight, when she dared leave it no longer.
As her bicycle bounced along the track towards the lane she
startled a white owl which rose silently like a ghost in the
moonlight.
♦
In a way it was all Miss Smallbone’s fault. If Angela Smallbone
hadn’t pointed out in the common room after prep that the Daily
Telegraph was holding a crossword competition, then Hester
Wallace’s life would have gone on undisturbed. It was not a
particularly thrilling life—a placid, provincial life in a remote
and eccentric girls’ preparatory school near the Dorset town of
Beaminster, less than ten miles from where Hester had grown up. And
it was not a life much touched by war, either, save for the pale
faces of the evacuee children on some of the nearby farms, the
barbed wire along the beach near Lyme Regis, and the chronic
shortage of teaching staff—a shortage which meant that when the
Michaelmas term began in the autumn of 1942, Hester was having to
take divinity (her usual subject) and English and some Latin and
Greek.
Hester had a gift for crosswords and when Angela read out that
night that the prize-money was twenty pounds…well, she thought, why
not? The first hurdle, an abnormally difficult puzzle printed in
the next day’s paper, she passed with ease. She sent off her
solution and a letter arrived almost by return of post inviting her
to the final, to be held in the Telegraph’s staff canteen, a
fortnight hence, a Saturday. Angela agreed to take over hockey
practice, Hester caught the train from Crewkerne up to London,
joined fifty other finalists—and won. She completed the crossword
in three minutes and twenty-two seconds and Lord Camrose himself
presented her with the cheque. She gave five pounds to her father
for his church restoration fund, she spent seven pounds on a new
winter coat (second-hand, actually, but good as new), and the rest
she put in her Post Office savings account.
It was on the Thursday that the second letter had arrived, this
one very different. Registered post, long buff envelope. On His
Majesty’s Service.
Afterwards, she could never quite decide. Had the Telegraph held
the competition at the instigation of the War Office, as a way of
trawling the country for men and women with an aptitude for word
puzzles? Or had some bright spark at the War Office merely seen the
results of the competition and asked the Telegraph for a list of
the finalists? Whatever the truth, five of the most suitable were
summoned to be interviewed in a grim Victorian office block on the
wrong side of the Thames, and three of them were ordered to report
to Bletchley.