Authors: Robert Harris
Jericho didn’t notice the drift of people towards the door. He
had both elbows on the table and was leaning over the cryptograms,
his knuckles pressed to his temples. His mind was eidetic—that is
to say, it could hold and retrieve images with photographic
accuracy, be they mid-game positions in chess, crossword puzzles or
enciphered German naval signals—and he was working with his eyes
closed.
“‘Below the thunders of the upper deep,’ ” intoned a muffled
voice behind him,“ ‘Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,⁄His
ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep…’ ”
“‘…The Kraken sleepeth.’ ” Jericho finished the quotation and
turned to find Atwood pulling on a purple balaclava.
“Coleridge?”
“Coleridge?” Atwood’s face abruptly emerged wearing an
expression of outrage. “Coleridge? It’s Tennyson, you barbarian. We
wondered whether you’d care to join us for refreshment.”
Jericho was about to refuse, but decided that would be rude. In
any case, he was hungry. He’d eaten nothing except toast and jam
for twelve hours.
“That’s kind. Thank you.”
He followed Atwood, Pinker and a couple of the others along the
length of the hut and out into the night. At some stage while he’d
been lost in the cryptograms it must have rained and the air was
still moist. Along the road to the right he could hear people
moving in the shadows. The beams of torches glistened on the wet
tarmac. Atwood conducted them past the mansion and the arboretum
and through the main gate. Discussing work outside the hut was
forbidden and Atwood, purely to annoy Pinker, was declaiming on the
suicide of Virginia Woolf, which he held to be the greatest day for
English letters since the invention of the printing press.
“I c-c-can’t believe you mmm-mmm-mmm…” When Pinker snagged
himself on a word, his whole body seemed to shake with the effort
of trying to get himself free. Above his bow-tie, his face bloomed
scarlet in the torchlight. They stopped and waited patiently for
him. “Mmm-mmm…”
“Mean that?” suggested Atwood.
“Mean that, Frank,” gasped Pinker with relief. “Thank you.”
Someone came to Atwood’s support, and then Pinker’s shrill voice
started to argue again. They moved off. Jericho lagged behind.
The canteen, which lay just behind the perimeter fence, was as
big as an aircraft hangar, brightly lit and thunderously noisy,
with perhaps five or six hundred people sitting down to eat or
queuing for food.
One of the new cryptanalysts shouted to Jericho: “I bet you’ve
missed this!” Jericho smiled and was about to say something in
return but the young man went off to collect a tray. The din was
dreadful, and so was the smell—a blended steam of institutional
food, of cabbage and boiled fish and custard, laced with cigarette
smoke and damp clothes. Jericho felt simultaneously intimidated by
it and detached from it, like a prisoner returning from solitary
confinement, or a patient from an isolation ward released on to the
street after a long illness.
He queued and didn’t pay much attention to the food being
slopped on his plate. It was only after he had handed over his two
shillings and sat down that he took a good look at it—boiled
potatoes in a curdled yellow grease and a slab of something ribbed
and grey. He stabbed at the lump with his fork, then lifted a
fragment cautiously to his mouth. It tasted like fishy liver, like
congealed cod liver oil. He winced.
“This is perfectly vile.”
Atwood said, through a full mouth: “It’s whale meat.”
“Good heavens.” Jericho put his fork down hurriedly.
“Don’t waste it, dear boy. Don’t you know there’s a war on? Pass
it over.”
Jericho pushed the plate across the table and tried to swill the
taste away with the milk-water coffee.
The pudding was some kind of fruit tart, and that was better,
or, rather, it tasted of nothing more noxious than cardboard, but
halfway through it, Jericho’s wavering appetite finally died.
Atwood was now giving them his opinion of Gielgud’s interpretation
of Hamlet, spraying the table in the process with particles of
whale, and at that point Jericho decided he’d had enough. He took
the leftovers that Atwood didn’t want and scraped them into a milk
churn labelled “PIG SWILL”.
When he was halfway to the door he was suddenly overcome with
remorse at his rudeness. Was this the behaviour of a good
colleague, what Skynner would call “a team player?” But then, when
he turned and looked back, he saw that nobody had missed him.
Atwood was still talking, waving his fork in mid-air, Pinker was
shaking his head, the others were listening.
Jericho turned once more for the door and the salvation of the
fresh air.
♦
Thirty seconds later he was out on the pavement, picking his way
carefully in the darkness towards the guard post, thinking about
Shark.
He could hear the click click of a woman’s heels hurrying about
twenty paces in front of him. There was no one else around. It was
between sittings: everyone was either working or eating. The rapid
footsteps stopped at the barrier and a moment later the sentry
shone his torch directly in the woman’s face. She glanced away with
a murmur of annoyance, and Jericho saw her then, for an instant,
spot-lit in the blackout, looking straight in his direction.
It was Claire.
For a fraction of a second, he thought she must have seen him.
But he was in the shadows and reeling backwards in panic, four or
five steps backwards, and she was dazzled by the light. With what
seemed like infinite slowness she brought her hand up to shield her
eyes. Her blonde hair gleamed white.
He couldn’t hear what was said but very quickly the torch was
quenched and everything was dark again. And then he heard her
moving off down the path on the other side of the barrier, click
click click, obviously in a rush about something, fading into the
night.
He had to catch her up. He stumbled quickly to the guard post,
searching for his wallet, searching for his pass, nearly tripping
off the kerbstone, but he couldn’t find the damned thing. The torch
came on, blinding him—“evening sir”, “evening corporal”—and his
fingers were useless, he couldn’t make them work, and the pass
wasn’t in his wallet, wasn’t in his overcoat pockets, wasn’t in his
jacket pockets, breast pocket—he couldn’t hear her footsteps now,
just the sentry’s boot tapping impatiently—and, yes, it was in his
breast pocket, “here you are”, “thank you sir”, “thank you
corporal”, “night sir”, “night corporal”, night, night, night…
She was gone.
The sentry’s light had robbed him of what little vision he had.
When he closed his eyes there was only the imprint of the torch and
when he opened them the darkness was absolute. He found the edge of
the road with his foot and followed its curve. It took him once
again past the mansion and brought him out close to the huts. Far
away, on the opposite bank of the lake, someone—perhaps another
sentry—started to whistle “We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring
Again”, then stopped.
It was so quiet, he could hear the wind moving in the trees.
While he was hesitating, wondering what to do, a dot of light
appeared along the footpath to his right, and then another. For
some reason Jericho drew back into the shadows of Hut 8 as the
torches bobbed towards him. He heard voices he didn’t recognise—a
man’s and a woman’s—whispered but emphatic. When they were almost
level with him, the man threw his cigarette into the water. A
cascade of red points ended in a hiss. The woman said: “It’s just a
week, darling,” and went to embrace him. The fireflies danced and
separated and moved on.
He stepped out onto the path again. His night vision was coming
back. He looked at his watch. It was 4.30. Another ninety minutes
and it would start to get light.
On impulse he walked down the side of Hut 8, keeping close to
the blastproof wall. This brought him to the edge of Hut 6, where
the ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe were broken. Straight
ahead was a narrow alleyway of rough grass separating Hut 6 from
the end wall of the Naval Section. And at the end of that, crouched
low in the darkness, just about visible, was the side of another
hut—Hut 3—to which the decrypted ciphers from Hut 6 were sent for
translation and dispatch.
Hut 3 was where Claire worked.
He glanced around. There was no one in sight.
He left the path and started to stumble down the passage. The
ground was slippery and uneven and several times something grabbed
at his ankle—ivy, maybe, or a tendril of discarded cable—and almost
sent him sprawling. It took him about a minute to reach Hut 3.
Here, too, was a concrete wall, designed, optimistically, to
shield the flimsy wooden structure from an exploding bomb. It was
neck-high, but although he was short he was just about able to peer
over the top.
A row of windows was set into the side of the building. Over
these, from the outside, blackout shutters were fastened every day
at dusk. All that was visible was the ghosts of squares, where the
light seeped around the edges of the frames. The floor of Hut 3,
like Hut 8’s, was made of wood, suspended above a concrete base,
and he could hear the muffled clumps and thuds of people moving
about.
She must be on duty. She must be working the midnight shift. She
might be three feet from where he stood.
He was on tiptoe.
He had never been inside Hut 3. For reasons of security, workers
in one section of the Park were not encouraged to stray into
another, not unless they had good reason. From time to time his
work had taken him over the threshold of Hut 6, but Hut 3 was a
mystery to him. He had no idea of what she did. She’d tried to tell
him once, but he’d said gently that it was best he didn’t know.
From odd remarks he gathered it was something to do with filing and
was “deadly dull, darling”.
He stretched out as far as he could, until his fingertips were
brushing the asbestos cladding of the hut.
What are you doing, darling Claire? Are you busy with your
boring filing, or are you flirting with one of the night-duty
officers, or gossiping with the other girls, or puzzling over that
crossword you can never do?
Suddenly, about fifteen yards to his left, a door opened. From
the oblong of dim light a uniformed man emerged, yawning. Jericho
slid silently to the ground until he was kneeling in the wet earth
and pressed his chest against the wall. The door closed and the man
began to walk towards him. He stopped about ten feet away,
breathing hard. He seemed to be listening. Jericho closed his eyes
and shortly afterwards he heard a pattering and then a drilling
noise and when he opened them he saw the faint silhouette of the
man pissing against the wall, very hard. It went on for a
wondrously long time and Jericho was close enough to get a whiff of
pungent, beery urine. A fine spray was being borne downwind on the
breeze. He had to put his hand to his nose and mouth to stop
himself gagging. Eventually, the man gave a deep sigh—a groan,
almost—of satisfaction, and fumbled with the buttons of his fly. He
moved away. The door opened and closed again and Jericho was
alone.
There was a certain humour in the situation, and later even he
was to see it. But at the time he was on the edge of panic. What,
in the name of reason, did he think he was doing? If he were to be
caught, kneeling in the darkness, with his ear pressed to a hut in
which he had no business, he would have—to put it mildly—a hard
time explaining himself. For a moment he considered simply marching
inside and demanding to see her. But his imagination recoiled at
the prospect. He might be thrown out. Or she might appear in fury
and create a scene. Or she might appear and be the soul of
sweetness, in which case what did he say? “Oh, hello, darling. I
just happened to be passing. You look in good form. By the way,
I’ve been meaning to ask you, why did you wreck my life?”
He used the wall to help him scramble to his feet. The quickest
way back to the road was straight head, but that would take him
past the door of the hut. He decided that the safest course would
be to go back the way he had come.
He was more cautious after his scare. Each time he took a step
he planted his foot carefully and on every fifth pace he paused to
make sure that no one else was moving around in the blackout. Two
minutes later he was back outside the entrance to Hut 8.
He felt as if he had been on a cross-country run. He was out of
breath. There was a small hole in his left shoe and his sock was
wet. Bits of damp grass were sticking to the bottoms of his trouser
legs. His knees were sodden. And where he had rubbed against the
concrete wall the front of his overcoat was streaked luminously
white. He took out his handkerchief and tried to clean himself
up.
He had just about finished when he heard the others coming back
from the canteen. Atwood’s voice carried in the night: “A dark
horse, that one. Very dark. I recruited him, you know,” to which
someone else chimed in: “Yes, but he was once very good, wasn’t
he?”
Jericho didn’t stop to hear the rest. He pushed open the door
and almost ran down the passage, so that by the time the
cryptanaiysts appeared in the Big Room he was already seated at his
desk, bent over the intercepts, knuckles to his temples, eyes
closed.
♦
He stayed like that for three hours.
At about six o’clock, Puck stopped by to drop on the table
another forty encrypted signals, the latest batch of Shark traffic,
and to enquire—not without a degree of sarcasm—if Jericho had
“solved it yet?” At seven, there was a rattle of step ladders
against the outside wall and the blackout shutters were unfastened.
A pale grey light filtered into the hut.
What was she doing, hurrying into the Park at that time of
night? That was what he did not understand. Of course, the mere
fact of seeing her again after a month spent tiying to forget her
was disturbing. But it was the circumstances, in retrospect, that
troubled him more. She had not been in the canteen, he was sure of
that. He had scrutinised every table, every face—had been so
distracted he had barely even looked at what he was being given to
eat. But if she had not been in the canteen, where had she been?
Had she been with someone? Who? Who? And the way she was walking so
hurriedly. Was there not something furtive, even panicky, about
it?