Authors: Robert Harris
♦
THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH says:
Coughs and sneezes spread diseases;
Trap the germs by using your handkerchief;
Help to keep the Nation Fighting Fit;
♦
There is nowhere to sit. Behind the counter is a large clock
with “RAF” stamped on its face—so large, in fact, that Hester can
actually see the big hand moving. Four minutes pass. Five minutes.
The Registry is unpleasantly hot. She can feel herself starting to
sweat. The stench of paint is nauseating. Seven minutes. Eight
minutes. She would like to flee, but the corporal has taken her
identity card. Dear God, how could she have been so utterly stupid?
What if the clerk is now on the phone to Hut 6, checking up on her?
At any instant, Miles will come crashing into the Registry: “What
the hell d’you think you’re doing, woman?” Nine minutes. Ten
minutes. Try to focus on something else. Coughs and sneezes spread
diseases…
She’s in such a state, she actually fails to hear the clerk come
up behind her.
“I’m sorry to have been so long, but I’ve never come across
anything like this. The girl, poor thing, is rather shaken.”
“Why?” asked Jericho.
“The file,” said Hester. “The file I’d asked her for? It was
empty.”
♦
There was a loud metallic crack behind them and then a series of
short scrapes as the church door was pushed open. Hester closed her
eyes and dropped to her knees on one of the cassocks, tugging
Jericho down beside her. She clasped her hands and lowered her head
and he did the same. Footsteps came halfway up the aisle behind
them, stopped, and then resumed slowly on tiptoe. Jericho glanced
surreptitiously to his left in time to see the elderly priest
bending to retrieve his vestment.
“Sorry to interrupt your prayers,” whispered the vicar. He gave
Hester a little wave and a nod. “Hello there. So sorry. I’ll leave
you to God.”
They listened to his fussy tread fading towards the back of the
church. The door was tugged shut. The latch fell with a crash.
Jericho sat back on the pew and laid his hand over his heart and
swore he could feel it beating through four layers of clothing. He
looked at Hester—“I’ll leave you to God?” he repeated—and she
smiled. The change it wrought in her was remarkable. Her eyes
shone, the hardness in her face softened—and for the first time he
briefly glimpsed the reason why she and Claire might have been
friends.
♦
Jericho contemplated the stained-glass window above the altar
and made a steeple of his fingers. “So what exactly are we to make
of this? That Claire must have stolen the entire contents of the
file? No—” he contradicted himself immediately “—no, that can’t be
right, can it, because what she had in her room were the original
cryptograms, not the decodes…?”
“Precisely,” said Hester. “There was a typewritten slip in the
Registry file which the clerk showed me—words to the effect that
the enclosed serial numbers had been reclassified and withdrawn,
and that all enquires should be addressed to the office of the
Director-General.”
“The Director-General! Are you sure?”
“I can read, Mr Jericho.”
“What was the date on the slip?”
“March the 4
th
.”
Jericho massaged his forehead. It was the oddest thing he’d ever
heard. “What happened after the Registry?”
“I went back to the hut and wrote my note to you. Delivering
that took the rest of my meal break. Then it was a matter of
getting back into the Index Room whenever I could. We deep a daily
log of all intercepts, made up from the blists. One file for each
day.” Once again she rummaged in her bag and withdrew a small
index-card with a list of dates and numbers. “I wasn’t sure where
to start so I simply went right back to the beginning of the year
and worked my way through. Nothing recorded till February the
6
th
. Only eleven interceptions altogether, four of
which came on the final day.”
“Which was what?”
“March the 4
th
. The same day the file was removed
from the Registry. What do you make of that?”
“Nothing. Everything. I’m still trying to imagine what a
rear-echelon German signals unit could possibly say that would
warrant the removal of its entire file.”
“The Director-General is who, as a matter of interest?”
“The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. “C”. I don’t know
his real name.” He remembered the man who had presented him with
the cheque just before Christmas. A florid face and hairy country
tweeds. He had looked more like a farmer than a spy master. “Your
notes,” he said, holding out his hand. “May I?”
Reluctantly she handed him the list of interceptions. He held it
towards the pale light. It certainly made a bizarre pattern.
Following the initial interception, just after noon on 6 February,
there had been two days of silence. Then there had been another
signal at 1427 hours on the 9
th
. Then a gap of ten
days. Then a broadcast at 1807 on the 20
th
, and
another long gap, followed by a flurry of activity: two signals on
2 March (1639 and 1901), two on the 3
rd
(1118 and
1727), and finally four signals, in rapid succession, on the night
of the 4
th
. These were the cryptograms he had taken
from Claire’s room. The broadcasts had begun just two days before
his final conversation with Claire at the flooded clay pit. And
they had ended a month later, while he was still at Cambridge, less
than a week before the Shark blackout.
There was no shape to it at all.
He said: “What Enigma key were they transmitted in? They were
enciphered in Enigma, I take it?”
“In the Index they were catalogued as Vulture.”
“Vulture?”
“The standard Wehrmacht Enigma key for the Russian front.”
“Broken regularly?”
“Every day. As far as I know.”
“And the signals—how were they sent? They were, what, just
carried on the usual military net?”
“I don’t know, but I’d say almost certainly not.”
“Why?”
“There’s not enough traffic, for a start. It’s too irregular.
And the frequency’s not one I recognise. It feels to me like
something rather more special—a private line, as it were. Just the
two stations: a mother and a lone star. But we’d need to see the
log sheets to be certain.”
“And where are they?”
“They should have been in the Registry. But when we checked we
found they’d all been removed as well.”
“My, my,” murmured Jericho, “they really have been
thorough.”
“Short of tearing the sheets out of the Control Room Index, they
couldn’t have done much more. And you think she’s behaving
suspiciously? I’ll have that back now, if I may.”
She took the record of the interceptions and bent forwards to
hide it in her bag.
Jericho rested his head on the back of the pew and stared up at
the vaulted ceiling. Special? he though. I’ll say it was special,
more than special for the Director-General himself to palm the
entire bloody file, plus all the log sheets. There was no sense to
it. He wished he weren’t so damned tired. He needed to shut his
study door for a day or two, sport his oak, find a good, fresh pile
of clean notepaper and a set of sharpened pencils…
He slowly let his gaze descend to take in the rest of the
church—the saints in their windows, the marble angels, the stone
memorials to the respectable dead of Bletchley parish, the ropes
from the belfry looped together like a hanging spider beneath the
gloomy organ loft. He closed his eyes.
Claire, Claire, what have you done? Did you see something you
weren’t supposed to in that “deadly dull” job of yours? Did you
rescue a few scraps from the confidential waste when nobody was
looking and spirit them home? And if you did that, why? And do they
know you did it? Is that why Wigram’s after you? Have you learned
too much?
He saw her on her knees in the darkness at the foot of his bed,
heard his own voice slurred with sleep—“ What on earth are you
doing?”—and her ingenuous reply: “I’m just going through your
things…”
You were always looking for something, weren’t you? And when I
couldn’t provide it, you just went on to someone else. (“ There’s
always someone else,” you said: almost the last words you ever
spoke to me, remember?) What is it, then, this thing you want so
badly?
So many questions. He realised he was beginning to freeze. He
huddled down into his coat, burying his chin in his scarf,
thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. He tried to recall the
images of the four cryptograms—LCNNR KDEMS LWAZA—but the letters
were blurred. He had found this before. It was impossible mentally
to photograph pages of gibberish: there had to be some meaning to
them, some structure, to fix them in his mind.
“A mother and a lone star…”
♦
The thick walls held a silence that seemed as old as the church
itself—an oppressive silence, interrupted only occasionally by the
rustling of a bird nesting in the rafters. For several minutes
neither of them spoke.
Sitting on the hard bench, Jericho felt as though his bones had
turned to ice, and this numbness, combined with the silence and the
reliquaries everywhere and the sickly smell of incense, made him
morbid. His father’s funeral came to him for the second time in two
days—the gaunt face in the coffin, his mother forcing him to kiss
it goodbye, the cold skin beneath his lips giving off a sour reek
of chemicals, like the school lab, and then the even worse stench
at the crematorium. “I need some air,” he said.
She gathered her bag and followed him down the aisle. Outside
they pretended to study the tombs. To the north of the churchyard,
screened by trees, was Bletchley Park. A motorcycle passed noisily
down the lane towards the town. Jericho waited until the crack of
its engine had dwindled to a drone in the distance and then said,
almost to himself: “The question I keep asking myself is why did
she steal cryptograms? I mean, given what else she could have
taken. If one was a spy—” Hester opened her mouth to protest and he
held up his hand. “All right, I’m not saying that she is, but if
one was, surely one would want to steal proof that Enigma was being
broken? What earthly use is an intercept?” He lowered himself to
his haunches and ran his fingers over an inscription that had
almost crumbled away. “If only we knew more about them…To whom they
were sent, for instance.”
“We’ve been over this. They’ve removed every trace.”
“But someone must know something,” he mused. “For a start,
someone must have broken the traffic. And someone else must have
translated it.”
“Why don’t you ask one of your cryptanalyst friends? You’re all
terrifically good chaps together, aren’t you?”
“Not especially. In any case I’m afraid we’re encouraged to lead
quite separate lives. There is a man in Hut 3 who might have seen
them…” But then he remembered Weitzman’s frightened face (“please
don’t ask me, I don’t want to know…”) and he shook his head. “No.
He wouldn’t help.”
“Then what a pity it is,” she said, with some asperity, “that
you burned our only clues.”
“Keeping them was too much of a risk.” He was still rubbing
slowly at the stone. “For all I knew, you might have told Wigram
I’d asked you about the call sign.” He looked up at her uneasily.
“You didn’t, I take it?”
“Credit me with some sense, Mr Jericho. Would I be here talking
to you now?” She stamped off down the row of graves and began
furiously studying an epitaph.
♦
She regretted her sharpness almost at once. (“He that is slow to
anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than
he that taketh a city.” Proverbs 16.xxxii.) But then, as Jericho
pointed out later, when relations between them had improved
sufficiently for him to risk the observation, if she hadn’t lost
her temper, she might never have thought of the solution.
“Sometimes,” he said, “we need a little tension to sharpen our
wits.”
She was jealous, that was the truth of it. She had thought she
knew Claire as well as anyone but it was fast becoming apparent
that she knew her hardly at all, scarcely better even than he
did.
She shivered. There was no warmth in this March sun. It fell on
the stone tower of St Mary’s as cold as light from a looking
glass.
Jericho was back on his feet now, moving between the graves. She
wondered whether she might have been like him if she’d been allowed
to go to university. But her father wouldn’t stand for it and her
brother George had gone instead, as if it were God’s law: men go to
university, men break codes; women stay at home, women do the
filing.
“Hester, Hester, just in time. Will you talk to Chicksands,
there’s a good girl, and see what they can do? And while you’re on,
the Machine Room reckon they’ve got a corrupt text on the last
batch of Kestrel—the operator needs to check her notes and re-send.
Then the eleven o’clocks from Beaumanor…”
She had been standing slack with defeat, gazing at a tombstone,
but now she felt her body slowly coming to attention.
“The operator needs to check her notes…”
“Mr Jericho!”
He turned at the sound of his name to see her stumbling through
the graves towards him.
♦
It was almost ten o’clock and Miles Mermagen was combing his
hair in his office, preparatory to returning to his digs, when
Hester Wallace appeared at his office door.
“No,” he said, with his back to her.
“Miles, listen, I’ve been thinking, you were right, I’ve been an
utter fool.”
He squinted suspiciously at her in the mirror.
“My application for a transfer—I want you to withdraw it.”
“Fine. I never submitted it.”
He returned his attention to himself. The comb slid through the
thick black hair like a rake through oil.