Authors: Robert Harris
“Will you try and find her?”
“I don’t know,” said Jericho. “Perhaps.”
The death certificate was still lying on the letter-stand in the
hall. “Then you’ll need this,” said Romilly, picking it up. “You
must show it to Wigram. If you like, you can tell him you’ve seen
me. In case he tries to deny everything. I’m sure he’ll have to let
you see her then. If you insist.”
“Won’t that get you into trouble?”
“Trouble?” Romilly gave a laugh. He gestured behind him, at his
mausoleum of a house. “D’you think I care about trouble? Come on,
Mr Jericho. Take it.”
Jericho hesitated, and in that moment he had a vision of
himself—a few years older, another Romilly, struggling vainly to
breathe life into a ghost. “No,” he said at last. “You are very
kind. But I think I ought to leave it here.”
♦
He left the silent street with relief and walked towards the
sound of traffic. On Cromwell Road he hailed a cab.
The spring evening had brought out the crowds. Along the wide
pavements of Knightsbridge and in Hyde Park it was almost like a
festival: a profusion of uniforms, American and British,
Commonwealth and exile—dark blue, khaki, grey—with everywhere the
splashes of colour from the summer dresses.
She was probably here, he thought, tonight, somewhere in the
city. Or perhaps that would have been considered too risky, and she
had been sent abroad by now, to lie low until the whole business
had been forgotten. It occurred to him that a lot of what she had
told him might actually be true, that she could well be a
diplomat’s daughter.
On Regent Street, a blonde-haired woman on the arm of an
American major came out of the Cafe1 Royal.
He made a conscious effort to look away.
ALLIED SUCCESS IN NORTH ATLANTIC
read a newspaper
placard on the opposite side of the street.
NAZI U-BOATS
SUNK
.
He pulled down the window and felt the warm night air on his
face.
And here was something very odd. Staring out at the teeming
streets he began to experience a definite sense of—well, he could
not call it happiness, exactly. Release, perhaps, would be a better
word.
He remembered their last night together. Lying beside her as she
wept. What had that been? Remorse, was it? In which case, perhaps
she had felt something for him.
“She never talked about you,” Hester had said.
“I’m flattered.”
“Given the way she used to talk about the others, you should
be…”
And then there had been that birthday card:
Dearest Tom…always see you as a friend…perhaps in the
future…Sorry to hear about…in haste…Much love.
It was a solution, of a sort. As good a solution, at any rate,
as he was likely to get.
At King’s Cross Station he bought a postcard and a book of
stamps and sent a message to Hester asking her to visit him in
Cambridge as soon as she could.
On the train he found an empty compartment and stared at his
reflection in the glass, an image which gradually became clearer as
the dusk gathered and the flat countryside disappeared, until he
fell asleep.
♦
The main gate to the college was closed. Only the little doorway
cut into it was unlocked and it must have been ten o’clock when
Kite, dozing beside the coke stove, was woken by the sound of it
opening and closing. He lifted the corner of the blackout curtain
in time to see Jericho walking into the great court.
Kite quietly let himself out of the Porter’s Lodge to get a
better view.
It was unexpectedly bright—there were a lot of stars—and he
thought for a moment that Jericho must have heard him, for the
young man was standing at the edge of the lawn and seemed to be
listening. But then he realised that Jericho was actually looking
up at the sky. The way Kite told it afterwards, Jericho must have
stood that way for at least five minutes, turning first towards the
chapel, then the meadow, and then the hall, before moving off
purposefully towards his staircase, passing out of sight.
I
OWE A debt of
gratitude to all those former employees of Bletchley Park who spoke
to me about their wartime experiences. In particular, I would like
to thank Sir Harry Hinsley (Naval Section, Hut 4), Margaret
Macintyre and Jane Parkinson (Hut 6 Decoding Room), the late Sir
Stuart Milner-Barry (former head of Hut 6), Joan Murray (Hut 8) and
Alan Stripp (Japanese ciphers).
♦
Roger Bristow, Tony Sale and their colleagues at the Bletchley
Park Trust answered my questions with great patience and allowed me
to wander about the site at will.
♦
None of these kind people bears any responsibility for the
contents of this book, which is a work of the imagination, not of
reference.
♦
For those readers who would like the facts on which this novel
is based, I strongly recommend Top Secret Ultra by Peter
Calvocoressi (London, 1980), Codebreakers edited by F.H. Hinsley
and Alan Stripp (Oxford, 1993), Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn
(Boston, USA, 1991), The Enigma Symposium by Hugh Skillen
(Middlesex, two volumes, 1992 and 1994), The Hut 6 Story by Gordon
Welchman (New York, 1982) and GC⁄⁄Q by Nigel West (London,
1986).
♦
Details of the action in the North Atlantic are drawn from the
original, decoded signals of the U-boats, held at the Public Record
Office in London, and also from Convoy by Martin Middlebrook
(London, 1976) and The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943 by
Jürgen Rohwer (English translation, London, 1977).
♦
Finally, I would like to record my special thanks to Sue
Freestone and David Rosenthal, neither of whom ever lost faith in
Enigma, even on those occasions when it was a mystery to its
author.
♦
Robert Harris
June 1995
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