Authors: Robert Harris
“Hear?” Jericho looked at Hester sharply. “You mean it’s still
broadcasting?”
“Kay?”
“Yes, sir.” She had a rather melodious Welsh accent. “Not so
often now, sir, but he was awful busy last week.” She hesitated. “I
don’t, like, try to listen, on purpose, sir, but he does have the
most beautiful fist. Real old school. Not like some of the kids—”
she spat out the word “—they’re using nowadays. Nearly as bad as
the Italians, they are.”
“A man’s style of Morse,” said Heaviside pompously, “is as
distinctive as his signature.”
“And what is his style?”
“Very fast but very clear,” said Kay. “Rippling, I’d say. Fist
like a concert pianist, he has.”
“Think she rather fancies this chap, don’t you, Mr Jericho?”
Heaviside laughed and gave her shoulder another pat. “All right,
Kay. Good work. Back to it.”
They moved on. “One of my best,” he confided. “Can be pretty
ghastly, you know, eight hours listening at a stretch, just taking
down gibberish. Specially at night, in the winter. Bloody freezing
out here. We have to issue ‘em with blankets. Ah, now, here, look:
here’s one coming in.”
They stood at a discreet distance behind an operator who was
frantically copying down a message. With her left hand she kept
fractionally adjusting the dial on the wireless set, with her right
she was fumbling together message forms and carbon paper. The speed
with which she then started to take down the message was
astonishing. “GLPES,” read Jericho over her shoulder, “KEMPG
NXWPD”
“Two forms,” said Heaviside. “Log sheet, on which she records
the whispers: that’s tuning messages, Q-code and so forth. And then
the red form which is the actual signal.”
“What happens next?” whispered Hester.
“There are two copies of each form. Top copy goes to the
Teleprinter Hut for immediate transmission to your people. That’s
the hut we passed that looks like the cricket pavilion. The other
copies we keep here, in case there’s a garble or something goes
missing.”
“How long do you keep them?”
“Couple of months.”
“Can we see?”
Heaviside scratched his head. “If you want. Not much to it,
though.”
He led them to the far end of the hut, opened a door, turned on
the light and stood back to show them the interior. A walk-in
cupboard. A bank of about a dozen dark green filing cabinets. No
window. Light switch on the left.
“How are they arranged?” asked Jericho.
“Chronologically.” He closed the door.
Not locked, noted Jericho, continuing his inventory. And the
entrance not really visible, except to the four operators nearest
to it. He could feel his heart beginning to thump.
“Major Heaviside, sir!”
They turned to find Kay standing, beckoning to them, one of her
headphones pressed to her ear.
“My mystery piano player, sir. He’s just started doing his
scales again, sir, if you’re interested.”
Heaviside took the headset first. He listened with a judicious
expression, his eyes focused on the middle distance, like an
eminent doctor with a stethoscope being asked to give a second
opinion. He shook his head and shrugged and passed the headphones
to Hester.
“Ours not to reason why, old chap,” he said to Jericho. When it
was Jericho’s turn, he removed his scarf and placed it carefully on
the floor next to the cable form that connected the wireless set to
the aerials and the power supply. Putting on the headphones was
rather like putting his head under water. There was a strange rush
of sounds. A howl that reminded him of the wind in the aerial farm.
A gunfire crackle of static. Two or three different and very faint
Morse transmissions braided together. And suddenly, and most
bizarrely, a German diva singing an operatic aria he vaguely
recognised as being from the second act of Tannhauser. “I can’t
hear anything.”
“Must have drifted off frequency,” said Heaviside. Kay turned
the dial minutely anticlockwise, the sound wowed up and down an
octave, the diva evaporated, more gunfire, and then, like stepping
into an open space, a rapid, staccato dah-dah-dah-dah-dah of Morse,
pulsing clearly and urgently, more than a thousand miles distant,
somewhere in German-occupied Ukraine.
♦
They were halfway to the Teleprinter Hut when Jericho raised his
hand to his throat and said, “My scarf.”
They stopped in the rain.
“I’ll get one of the girls to bring it over.”
“No, no, I’ll fetch it, I’ll catch you up.”
Hester took her cue. “And how many machines did you say you
have?” She began to walk on.
Heaviside hesitated between the two of them, then hurried after
Hester. Jericho could have kissed her. He never heard the major’s
answer. It was whipped away by the wind.
You are calm, he told himself, you are confident, you are doing
nothing wrong.
He went back into the hut. The woman sergeant had her fat back
to him, leaning over one of the interceptors. She never saw him. He
walked swiftly down the central aisle, looking straight ahead, and
let himself into the storeroom. He closed the door behind him and
turned on the light.
How long did he have? Not long.
He tugged at the first drawer of the first filing cabinet.
Locked. Damn it. He tried it again. Wait. No, it wasn’t locked. The
cabinet was fitted with one of these irritating anti-tilt
mechanisms, which prevented two drawers being opened at once. He
looked down and saw that the bottom drawer was protruding slightly.
He closed it gently with his foot and to his relief the top drawer
slid open.
Brown cardboard folders. Bundles of smudged carbons, held
together by metal paperclips. Log sheets and W⁄T red forms. Day,
Month and Year in the top right-hand corner. Meaningless jumbles of
handwritten letters. This folder for 15 January 1943.
He stepped back and counted quickly. Fifteen four-drawer
cabinets. Sixty drawers. Two months. Roughly a drawer a day. Could
that be right?
He strode over to the sixth cabinet and opened the third drawer
down. February the 6
th
. Bingo.
He held the image of Hester Wallace’s neat notation steady in
his mind. 6.2.⁄1215. 9.2⁄1427. 20.271807. 2.3.⁄1639, 1901…
It would have helped if his fingers hadn’t swollen to the size
of sausages, if they weren’t shaking and slippery with sweat, if he
could somehow catch his breath.
Someone must come in. Someone must hear him, surely, opening and
closing the metal drawers like organ stops, pulling out two, three,
four cryptograms and the log sheets, too (Hester had said they’d be
useful), stuffing them into his inside coat pocket, five,
six—dropped it, damn—seven cryptograms. He almost gave up at
that—“Quit while you’re ahead, old love”—but he needed the final
four, the four Claire had hidden in her room.
He opened the top drawer of the thirteenth filing cabinet, and
there they were, towards the back, virtually in sequence, thank
you, God.
A footstep outside the storeroom. He grabbed the logs and red
forms and had just about got them into his pocket and the drawer
shut when the door opened to silhouette the trim figure of Kay the
intercept girl.
“I thought I saw you come in,” she said, “only you left your
scarf, see?” She held it up and closed the door behind her, then
slowly advanced down the narrow room towards him. Jericho stood
paralysed with an idiot grin on his face.
“I don’t mean to bother you, sir, but it is important, isn’t
it?” Her dark eyes were wide. He dimly registered again that she
was very pretty, even in her Army uniform. The tunic was belted
tight at her waist. Something about her reminded him of Claire.
“I’m sorry?”
“I know I shouldn’t ask, sir—we’re never meant to ask, are
we?—but, well, is it? Only no one ever tells us, see? Rubbish,
that’s all it is to us, just rubbish, rubbish, all day long. And
all night, too. You try to go to sleep and you can still hear
it—beep-beep-bloody-beep. Drives you barmy after a bit. I joined
up, see, volunteered, but it’s not what I expected, this place.
Can’t even tell my mum and dad.” She had come up very close to him.
“You are making sense of it? It is important? I won’t tell,” she
added, solemnly, “honest.” “Yes,” said Jericho. “We are making
sense of it, and it is important. I promise you.”
She nodded to herself, smiled, looped his scarf around his neck
and tied it, then walked slowly out of the storeroom, leaving the
door open. He gave it twenty seconds, then followed her. Nobody
stopped him as he went out through the hut and into the rain.
§
Heaviside didn’t want them to leave. Jericho tried feebly to
protest—the light was bad, he said, they had a long journey ahead,
they had to beat the blackout—but Heaviside was horrified. He
insisted, insisted they at least take a look at the direction
finders and the highspeed Morse receivers. He was so enthusiastic,
he looked as though he might burst into tears if they said no. And
so they trailed meekly after him across the slick wet concrete,
first to a row of wooden huts dressed up to look like a stable
block and then to another fake cottage.
The chorus of the aerial farm sang weirdly in the background,
Heaviside became increasingly excited describing abstruse
technicalities of wavelength and frequency, Hester pretended
heroically to be interested and carefully avoided meeting Jericho’s
eye, and all the time Jericho walked around unhearing, in a cocoon
of anxiety, nerved for the distant sounds of discovery and alarm.
Never had he been more desperate to get away from anywhere. From
time to time his hand stole into his inside coat pocket, and once
he left it there, reassured to feel the roughness of the intercepts
safely between his fingers, until he realised he was doing a
passable impersonation of Napoleon, whereupon he promptly snatched
it out again.
As for Heaviside, such was his pride in Beaumanor’s work, he
clearly would have kept them there for another week if he could.
But when, an interminable half-hour later, he suggested a visit to
the motor pool and the auxiliary generators, it was Hester, so cool
until then, who finally snapped and said, rather too firmly in
retrospect, that no, thank you, but really they did have to get
going.
“Honestly? It’s a heck of a long way to have come for just a
couple of hours.” Heaviside looked mystified. “The commander will
be disappointed to miss you.”
“Alas,” said Jericho. “Some other time.”
“Up to you, old boy,” said Heaviside huffily. “Don’t want to
press ourselves on you.” And Jericho cursed himself for hurting his
feelings.
He walked them round to their car, halting on the way to point
out an antique ship’s figurehead of an admiral, perched on top of
an ornamental horse trough. Some wit had draped a pair of Army
knickers over the admiral’s sword and they hung limply in the raw
damp. “Cornwallis,” said Heaviside. “Found him in the grounds. Our
lucky charm.”
When they said goodbye he shook hands with them each in turn,
Hester first, then Jericho, and saluted as they got into the
Austin. He turned as if to go, then froze, and suddenly ducked down
to the window.
“What was it you said you did again, Mr Jericho?”
“Actually, I didn’t.” Jericho smiled and turned the engine on.
“Cryptanalytic work.”
“Which section?”
“Can’t say, I’m afraid.”
He jammed the gear stick into reverse and executed a clumsy
three-point turn. As they pulled away he could see Heaviside in the
rear-view mirror, standing in the rain, his hand protecting his
eyes, watching them. The curve of the drive took them off to the
left and the image vanished.
“Pound to a penny,” muttered Jericho, “he’s on his way to the
nearest telephone.”
“You got them?”
He nodded. “Let’s wait till we get clear of here.”
Out through the gates, along the lane, past the village, towards
the forest. The rain was blowing across the dark slope of woodland
in ghostly white columns, like the banners of a phantom army. A
large and lonely bird was flying through the cloudburst, very high
and far away. The windscreen wipers scudded back and forth. The
trees closed in around them.
“You were very good,” said Jericho.
“Until the end. By the end it was unendurable, not knowing if
you’d managed it.”
He started to tell her about the storeroom, but then he noticed
a track coming up, leading off from the side of the road into the
privacy of the wood.
The perfect spot.
They bounced along the rough trail for about a hundred yards,
plunging into puddles that turned out to be potholes a foot deep.
Water fountained out on either side of them, tearing against the
underside of the chassis. It spouted through a hole at Hester’s
feet and drenched her shoes. When at last the headlights showed a
patch of bog too wide to negotiate, Jericho turned off the
engine.
There was no sound except for the pattering of the rain on the
thin metal roof. Overhanging branches blotted out the sky. It was
almost too dark to read. He turned on the interior light.
♦
“VVVADU QSA?K,” said Jericho, reading off the whispers on the
first log sheet. “Which, if I remember my days in traffic analysis,
roughly translates as: This is station call sign ADU requesting
reading of my signal strength, over.” He ran his finger down the
carbon copy. Q-code was an international language, the Esperanto of
wireless operators; he knew it off by heart. “And then we get
VVVCPQ BT QSA4 QSA?K. This is station call-sign CPQ, break, your
signal strength is fine, what is my signal strength? Over.”
“CPQ,” said Hester, nodding. “I recognise that call sign. That
has something to do with Army High Command in Berlin.”
“Good. One mystery solved, then.” He returned his attention to
the log sheet. “WVADU QSA3 QTCI K: Smolensk to Berlin, your signal
strength is reasonable, I have one message for you, over. QRV, says
Berlin: I am ready. QXH K: broadcast your traffic, over. Smolensk
then says QXA109: my message consists of 109 cipher groups.”