The Blue Last (42 page)

Quickly, he turned, nearly dropping the lighter. “Polly!”

Polly Praed smiled as Melrose jumped up, mouth unhinged. He'd caught the cigarette as it fell.

Polly ran her eyes from his head to his toes and then back up again. “
Way
cool.” She plopped down in a leather chair, companion to his own. She said, “I may have to revise my opinion.”

“What the devil are you doing here in
Boring's
?”

“Oh, don't be such a stick, Melrose. These places let anybody in nowadays. Light?”

He lit the cigarette she was waggling in her mouth. She hadn't changed a jot in these last couple of years. She still had the only amethyst eyes in the world, excepting Elizabeth Taylor's.

“But how did you know I'd be here? Sit down, sit down.”

Polly sat in the wide leather chair opposite him and placed a brown paper parcel she'd been carrying between herself and the arm.

“Did you come here to see me or what?”

“To see my editor.”

Melrose looked around the room. “He's here?”

“No-
o.
I mean I came to London to see him.”

“How did you know
I'd
be here?”

“It was really hard, like tracking down the Jackal. I called your house.” She blew smoke in his direction. “Ardry End,” she added, as if he might have forgotten.

“We haven't seen each other in over two years. Last time was when I came to Littlebourne—”

“Looking for Jenny Kennington.”

More smoke. “I wasn't looking for her for
myself.
” Was she jealous?

“Who, then, were you looking for her for?”

“J—” He caught himself before he said
Jury
and just in time to substitute “Jenny was wanted by the Shakespeare police.”

“The what?”

“Stratford-upon-Avon police.”

“Why did they want Jenny Kennington?”

“She was chief suspect in a murder—didn't you read it in the paper?”

“Was she convicted?” She sat eagerly forward.

What shameful hope he saw in her amethyst eyes! “No. She didn't do it.”

“Oh.” Hope sinking, she fell back in her chair.

“Polly!”

They both looked around to see Richard Jury. Polly's expression changed immediately from the sardonic to the devotional. Oh, she could treat
him,
Melrose, all any-old-how, but when it came to Richard Jury, who she ranked with a total eclipse of the sun or a lunar meltdown (sun and moon coming in second and third)—well, that was quite another matter. Her eyes widened, her black curls shivered around as if they were being launched into space.

Melrose said, “I didn't know you were coming. Did you leave a message here?”

“Nope. Didn't come to see you, actually.” He turned and sketched a salute to Neame and Champs. “I came to have a chat with Colonel Neame, over there.”

Melrose frowned. “Really?”

Jury nodded and returned his attention to Polly, who gave every indication of not wanting it, looking here, there, everywhere except at Jury, who now sat down on the arm of her chair. “How'd you storm this bastion of male enterprise, Polly?”

Rubbing her thumb across her wrinkled forehead, she mumbled, “Oh, you know . . .”

“She's in London for the day to see her editor.” Melrose helped her out. “She cleverly found out my whereabouts. Good detective, Polly.”

Polly once more sat back and rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven's sake! Why do people think just because you write mysteries you're Sam Spade?”

“No one would take you for Sam Spade, Polly,” said Jury. His proximity, there on the chair arm, would probably bring on a seizure at any minute. “Have you got a new book in the works?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you bring a manuscript along here for your friend to read?” He cocked his head at Melrose.

“Uh-huh.”

Melrose sat forward. Was that an “
uh-
huh” or a “
nu
-huh”? He hoped it was a
nu-huh
for he really was in no temper for Polly's prose. Yet there was that brown paper-wrapped package squashed between her and the chair arm. Maybe if no one mentioned it, it would ooze down farther and under the seat . . .
Oooze,
Melrose prayed.

“This it?” Jury whisked it out.

Stupidly, she nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Jury smiled and excused himself. He saw Colonel Neame; he would be back. Dinner, perhaps?

“Uh-huh,” said Melrose.

 

 

 

“Bletchley Park, 1939. Yes, it was after I'd finished at Oxford and before I joined up. RAF, I think I told you. Some days those were! Bletchley. Crazy,” said Colonel Neame.

“What took you there, Colonel?”

“Oh, call me Joss, please do. What took me there was recruitment. You see, they needed many more people . . . Thank you, Higgins.”

Jury had ordered whiskey all around and Major Champs, upon receiving his, rose. “You two have business; I'll just sit over there and read my paper.”

Jury invited him to stay, but he walked off, making little backward waves with his downturned hand and resettled himself on a sofa.

Neame sipped his whiskey. “Anyway, cracking a code as complex as the Enigma needed an odd combination of the artistic and the bookkeeping mind. Hard to find. They weren't, you see, just after mathematicians. It took a different sort of mind altogether. You can imagine how much plodding had to be done in working through the range of possible matches—”

“How did it work? The Enigma code?”

“Codes, Superintendent. Different codes and different machines. To explain how the damned thing worked would take more time than I dare-say you have. The Poles broke it in the thirties. Didn't help them much, poor devils. At that point the Germans were using a monalphabetic code—you know, the simpler kind. But they used a dozen
different
monos, so it was hardly simple. Now, when we graduated to the polyalphabetic ciphers, it became even harder.

“The machine was made up of rotors—wheels—so you had your wheels, your ring settings, your steckers. That was a plugboard on the machine that scrambled the identity of letters. Now all of that was difficult enough, but the Germans changed the settings every day to make matters worse. It would have been impossible to break the code by pure plodding; at some point, intuition, the ability to actually think
irrationally
was needed. Genius was needed, like Turing's and a few others'. They could see the ghost behind the scrambled letters, if you understand what I mean. It's impossible to obliterate language completely. There's always a ghost of the original meaning, and if you're good at it, you can see the ghost; you can see the pattern. I'm not doing the whole thing justice, the way I'm explaining it. It was infernally complicated, that Enigma stuff. Devilishly.” He tossed back the remainder of his whiskey. “You know the type of person who makes a good cryptanalyst? A paranoid.”

Jury was startled. “Why do you say that? I don't see that thinking people are out to get you would do much by way of making you good at decoding.”

“No, no.” Impatiently, Colonel Neame shook his head. “You're using only one definition of the word. “I mean ‘paranoid' in the sense of being able to think irrationally. Being able to see something that no one else can see.
That
is ‘paranoid.' You see something no one else does. In the way you used the word, which is the way most people use it, you mean you alone see danger and must therefore be imagining it. But that's a dilution of the meaning of ‘paranoid.' ”

“Did you ever know a young fellow named Ralph Herrick? RAF, also. And what's more, awarded the Victoria Cross. As I believe you were?”

“My stint came later, but Ralph Herrick?” He gave the name the other pronunciation:
Rafe.
“Absolutely! Don't forget, I was young once too, though a bit younger than Herrick. Ralph was at Oxford, also, though I hadn't known him there. My goodness, yes, I remember him. He was in the Crib room, if memory serves me correctly. That's what he had this incredible knack for. He was brilliant when it came to cribs—you know, the ‘educated guess' sort of thing. You guess at some words and then see if those letters could be decoded into others. Ralph had an uncanny ability to do this. They sent him to Chicksands; that was the RAF intercept. Myself, I was in hut three. I was working on the Red key—the Luftwaffe.”

“Red key?”

“Yes. The keys were colors, a different color assigned to each branch of the service. Red, was the Luftwaffe. Green, army.”

Jury had pulled Simon Croft's book from his pocket, and now opened it to one of the notations. “What about these dates in September of 1940?”

“Hmm. Well, I do remember in August and September of that year the Luftwaffe very nearly crippled the RAF with attacks on our airfields. If Göring had stuck to it, bombing the Isle of Wight—that was the Ventron station—radar, you know—I have no doubt they would have won the war in the air. But it was a strange thing about both of those men, Göring and Hitler; they had no patience; they expected to win quickly. I wonder if it's the earmark of a megalomaniac that he thinks what he wants will happen quickly and painlessly. That it
should
happen that way and if it doesn't, and he doesn't get immediate results, he pulls out. I can tell you one thing, though: it's a mistake Churchill never made. That man was tenacious; he believed in hanging on like a pit bull.”

Jury turned the book around so that Neame could read Simon Croft's notations.

Which he did, after adjusting the monocle in his eye.

“Is that the place you mentioned, Chicksands? It's abbreviated here.”

“Indeed. Yes. It's in Bedfordshire.” Neame's eye fell on the other abbreviated words in the list. “
Cov.
Coventry. Ah, yes. You know about Coventry. No, you wouldn't have been born then.”

“I was born, believe me. But I have only a foggy notion.”

“Of Coventry. Terrible destruction. Bloody awful. We got word there was to be an attack, but not that Coventry was the target. London, Manchester, maybe Reading. Industrial cities. Never Coventry. Remember, one thing about breaking a code is, you obviously have to go to some pains not to let it be known you've broken it. Because of that, Churchill came in for a horrendous attack, being accused of having known ahead of time that Coventry was the mark and not doing anything about it because he didn't want the Germans to know we'd broken the code. That's rubbish. It's vile. Churchill might have had his dirty little secrets, but Coventry wasn't one of them. We didn't get the right decrypt, that's all. The Chicksands unit didn't have as much experience, and all you have to do—”

“The decrypt came from Chicksands?”

“Far as I know, yes.”

“You said Ralph Herrick was assigned there.”

Furrowing his brow, Neame took another drink of whiskey. “Yes, but you know, I think Ralph had clearance for just about everywhere. He was able to go between the huts at Bletchley Park, one of the few who had that kind of clearance.” Still holding the book, Neame looked back down at the rest of Croft's list. “What is this, then? Whose is it?”

Jury told him about Croft's relationship to Herrick and about the account of the war Croft was writing.

Colonel Neame handed the book back to Jury; the monocle fell from his eye. “Hmm.” Neame studied his nearly empty glass. “What you need is someone who was in GC and CS—”

“Is that ‘Code and Cypher'?”

“Government Code and Cypher School, right. I'm trying to think who's left who still—Ah! There's Maples. At least he was alive a couple of years ago. His picture was in the paper. Got an OBE and also the George Cross for the work he did at Bletchley. Sir Oswald Maples. I expect he'd be easy enough to find.”

Jury smiled. “You were certainly a much-decorated bunch.” He rose and when Colonel Neame started up, Jury waved him back down. “Please don't get up. You've been an enormous help, Colonel.”

“Seem to have left you with questions instead of answers.”

Jury smiled. “That might be what's helpful.”

 

 

 

“What happened to Polly?” asked Jury, returning to Melrose's chair. “Isn't she having dinner?”

“Gone. We're having breakfast tomorrow. She's staying in Bloomsbury. I think she hopes the literary swank will rub off on her.” Melrose polished off his whiskey. “How about you? Ready for some more oxblood soup?”

“Any time.”

 

 

 

Having brought the wine, Young Higgins floated off like milkweed. The wine was a Bâtard-Montrachet, “the finest white wine,” Melrose had said, “in the world.” They raised their glasses and drank.

“What on earth were you into with Colonel Neame?”

“Bletchley Park. The Enigma code. Codes.” Jury smiled. “Neame isn't just taking up space in Boring's.”

“Did I say he was? He's a nice old codger.”

“I expect that's it; we tend to condescend to old guys like that.”

“What about Bletchley Park?”

Jury pulled Croft's book from his pocket. “The book Croft was writing about the war. Since there was no manuscript, no laptop, no notes I could find, I had a look at a few of his books, presumably ones he used to research his subject. He wrote stuff in the margins—” Jury turned to the list on the last page, held it up for Melrose to see.

Melrose frowned.