In the Mouth of the Tiger (113 page)

I told Denis that night how much I had enjoyed Kathleen's company. ‘And the woman has absolutely no side at all,' I babbled on blithely. ‘She may be the noble Lady Drax, but she told me quite openly that dear old Reggie, our Lord High Admiral with the long, long name, was once just plain Mr Plunkett.'

Denis laughed. ‘You goose! Reggie's Plunketts are the Lords of Dunsany! The man was taking second best when he became a Drax.'

Denis's trip to London had been to select a tutor for the children, and the lady he had chosen arrived by train a day or so later. Mrs Heppenstall was an MA from Oxford, and I liked her on sight. She was big and comfortable, with an infectious laugh and complete confidence that she could handle our three charges despite their different ages and dispositions. ‘I've been an Education Officer in the Air Force for the past six years,' she told me cheerfully as I showed her the schoolroom we had made out of one of the bedrooms. ‘Your little rascals should be pretty easy after that.' Her principal task was to get the boys up to entrance level for Taunton, but she was also going to help Frances. Our little girl was developing an intelligent, questioning mind and I had Girton College in mind for her.

The same day our gardener arrived and moved into the flat above the garage. Giles was over sixty, but he was as strong as an ox, of a friendly, obliging nature, and he came with the highest recommendations. With the Framptons and two young ladies from Almer, Delma and Nancy, who came in for the day, that completed our small circle of domestic staff. As I dozed off that night, I thought how lucky we had been. We had a lovely home, superb
people to look after us, the nicest possible neighbours, and we lived in the prettiest, most interesting county in all of England.

We'd done rather well, I felt, and the future stretched ahead of us, a bed of roses.

In late April, Malcolm Bryant went down to Bletchley Park to be inducted into Venona, the deepest, darkest secret of Western Intelligence. Venona had been started almost by accident in the middle of the war. Carter Clarke, chief of the US Army's Special Branch, had heard rumours that the Russians were secretly negotiating a separate peace with Germany, and he had passed copies of intercepted cables sent from the Russian Embassy to his experts to decode. Their task was to try and find out if there was any truth in the rumours – a task that had seemed impossible at first because the Russian had encrypted their cables using one-time pads. But Clarke's experts did the job. They didn't crack the code completely, because the work was horrendously complicated, but they could read enough to know that there were no plans by the Russians to secure a separate peace.

But the partially decoded messages did reveal something even more sinister: that Russia had established a network of spies in the highest ranks of the American Government. Presumably, they had such a network in Britain also, and so Venona was born, a massive but highly secret US-British effort to decode Russian cable traffic from around the world and to catch the secret army of Russian spies.

Meredith Gardner, the quietly spoken American who had led the most significant decoding breakthroughs, inducted Malcolm to Venona. Gardner was at Bletchley Park to help his British counterparts get their side of the project off the ground, and they met in his oak-panelled office with cups of tea and cake, and with stacks of coded messages everywhere around them including on the floor.

‘It's a bit like a game,' Gardner said, shuffling a bundle of messages like large, floppy playing cards. ‘These . . .,' he shook the bundle of messages above his head, ‘these are all pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Every time we decode a word in one message, we can look for that word in all the others messages. Sometimes we can make a match, sometimes not. The matches occur because the Soviets made one dreadful mistake: they limited the choice of one-time pads to only five. The whole
point
of one-time pads is that they should be used only one time. Because the Soviets used the same five pads over and over
again, they have given us a chance to reconstruct the pads themselves.'

‘How does all this help me?' Malcolm asked. He was a little bored and perhaps a little angry to be involved with cipher work at all. He was a bigpicture man and to him this toying with words and phrases from old, musty messages seemed a waste of time.

‘You are trying to break the Soviet's coded traffic out of Australia,' Gardner reminded him patiently. ‘I think we can help you, and if you do make any progress you can help us in return. I'll give you all the words and phrases we've broken out, and your job will be to find matches in the Australian material. Sometimes, even if you only have a word or two, you can guess the missing words in between. When that happens you can decode a whole sentence. You can be even luckier than that. If you stumble across an order of words that seems familiar, it might turn out to be a quotation. We've made some huge leaps by recognising our own documents – messages, briefing notes and so on – that are being quoted. So your first job should be to familiarise yourself with anything of ours that the Soviets might have wanted to get hold of in Australia. If you know that material well enough, you'll recognise it if it's quoted.'

Malcolm was still unimpressed. ‘There's nothing Canberra had that the Russians would want to quote. Dammit, Australia was a backwater as far as the Russians were concerned. They had no vital interests there at all.'

Gardner gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘We found that the Soviets were getting a lot of useful material out of Ottawa,' he said. ‘Don't forget, intelligence material was circulating amongst all the Allies throughout the war. If I could give you a tip, look out for anything important or sensitive that was going
into
Australia.'

Malcolm nodded thoughtfully. That was a bit more like it. He remembered reading once that the Australian DNI had been on Menzies' list for the distribution of Ultra material.

Ultra material, by far the most secret information of the war. German operational signals decoded in real time by the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park. The material that had won the war for England.

Material so secret that its very
existence
had been kept from the Soviets.

Malcolm Bryant scribbled himself a reminder note.

We made our first call on the Draxes on a beautiful afternoon in early May. Mr Frampton had polished the Wolseley until the whole world was reflected in
its lustrous enamel, we had all dressed up, and as we purred through the Stag Gate into Charborough Park I felt like a character from a novel by Charlotte Bronte.

‘Welcome to our humble home,' Admiral Drax said as he handed me out of the car. He had dressed in what he called his ‘Charborough kit' – grey flannels, a Harris tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a soft brown country hat, a battered Meerschaum stuck in his top pocket.

‘False modesty does not become you,' I said with mock severity. ‘This – ', I gestured to the stately mansion behind him, lapped by its emerald lawns and with its windows glittering in the sunlight, ‘this would take anyone's breath away.'

The tea things had been laid out on the patio and we sat in the warm sunshine getting to know each other. It was quite a party. Three of the four Drax girls were there, as was the local doctor and the rector of St Mary's and his wife. Peacocks strutted around the tea table, Soames the butler hovered in the background, and plate after plate of scones, cakes and sandwiches arrived to keep the children happy.

‘Norma, you must come and see my surprise,' Kathleen said, getting up and taking my arm. ‘It's called the Hanging Tree, and I'll guarantee it will give you goose bumps.' The Hanging Tree was at the point where the manicured gardens gave way to the wildness of the Park itself, a huge and obviously ancient oak lying on its side like a tumbled giant. It was still alive, its tortured, tangled branches covered with a misting of fresh green leaves.

‘It's very, very old – well over five hundred years old,' Kathleen said. ‘It was toppled by a huge storm that swept in from the Channel sixty years ago. When they came to have a look next morning, they saw that the upturned roots had dragged human skeletons and bits of armour out of the ground. The police had to investigate of course, and they found a score of bodies, all very old indeed. The bits of armour identified them as members of the Bankes family and their retainers, and it was clear that they had all been murdered. Probably hanged from the tree itself.'

‘That must have been a bit rich for the Bankes, on top of blowing up Corfe Castle,' I said. ‘How did they react?'

Kathleen grimaced. ‘They'd just made up their differences with us at the time, but of course the discovery caused the row to break out afresh. The Bankes did a little historical sleuthing and discovered that the murdered men must have been members of a group which had visited Charborough Park
after the Civil War and simply disappeared.'

‘Is the row still going on in earnest?' I asked.

‘It's childish, I know, but yes, the feud is still very real even today. I saw Mary Bankes at the library in Bournemouth yesterday, and the silly woman actually joggled me as we passed each other. But I'm just as stupid. On the way out I said to the librarian – loud enough for Mary to hear – “Can the Bankes actually read?” It's a disease, Norma. Hatred is a disease.'

We stood beside that awful old tree and I suddenly shivered. ‘There is a man who hates Denis and me,' I said. ‘I think he used to love me, but it has turned into hatred. He's hurt us once or twice in the past, and I feel sure he'll try again one day. It's not a nice feeling.' I don't know why I mentioned Malcolm, but Kathleen took my hand and smiled so warmly that I was glad I had.

‘You're safe in Almer Manor,' she said. ‘I think there is a spirit in the Manor that won't allow anything bad to happen there. Don't you sometimes feel it? As if there's just a whiff of fairy dust floating in the air.'

I remembered the first night we'd prowled around the Manor by torchlight, and nodded my head in agreement.

After tea Reggie – he insisted on being called Reggie – took the five of us on a tour of the house. Our first stop was a huge oak chest in the hallway, carved with the Drax arms and sealed with a ferocious-looking bronze padlock. ‘Behold – the Drax family fortune!' Reggie said. He produced an ancient key, unlocked the padlock, and threw open the vast old chest.

It was empty except for a small pyramid of mothballs.

It was clearly a much-practised jape, and the children laughed as they were meant to. But I found it a little sad. Reggie was one of hundreds of English landed gentry who were fighting tooth and nail to cling on to the heraldic properties that had defined their families for centuries. The new government's tax on unproductive land, and soaring death duties, were grinding the landed gentry into the dust. Reggie and Kathleen had loved Almer Manor, but had sacrificed it in order to keep the Park and all that it represented.

We climbed Charborough Tower, a folly built during the Draxes' affluent years, and looked out over the rolling countryside. This was where the heroine of
Two in a Tower
had fallen in love, and where Thomas Hardy himself had caught the influenza from which he had died. It was also here where officers of the Dorset Volunteers had posted lookouts to warn of any landing by Napoleon Bonaparte.

History was everywhere, just waiting to be touched.

History had very nearly touched Reggie up here, too. He told us the story propped up against the stone parapet, his Meerschaum puffing Turkish smoke out over the Dorset countryside. ‘The Draxes have suffered from a scarcity of male heirs for generations, so when my son was born I came up here on the double to raise the family standard. We hadn't flown a flag in ages and the cord had jammed at the top of the flagpole, so like an ass I shinned up the post to clear it. I'd just come down when the whole bag of tricks – banner, rope and the flagpole itself – toppled gently over the side and crashed to the bottom. The flagpole was rotten to the core. Ten seconds earlier and I'd have gone with it.'

‘A case of heir today, gone tomorrow,' Denis smiled.

We sat in the thin gold sunshine for quite half an hour, mesmerised by the sea of trees beneath us and the hills and dales, copses and neatly quartered fields that stretched to the misty horizon. Almer Manor lay like a tiny doll's house just outside the walls of the park, its apple orchard ablaze with blossom and daffodils picking out the curve of the driveway. My heart was suddenly racing, and I had to steady my breathing to contain the happiness that welled up in my breast like a tidal wave.

We really were home and safe at last.

In his musty London office, Malcolm Bryant was also happy. Happier than he had been in ages. He sat at his desk contemplating the pile of yellowing Ultra message forms on his blotter, and smiled. Across the room, his assistant also smiled. Ann Last had felt sorry for Malcolm, dragged back to London at the whim of the MI5 mandarins and thrust into the boring, arcane world of ciphers, presumably as ‘punishment' for some imagined sin. But Venona was proving to be far from boring. In fact, from a poisoned chalice it had been transformed into the Holy Grail of the Intelligence world almost overnight.

Venona had unearthed an extraordinarily successful Soviet spy network – a network that had tentacles stretching into the highest echelons of the US and British Governments. It had even penetrated Project Manhattan, the West's most secret undertaking. Manhattan had produced the atom bomb that had knocked Japan into submission, and the thought that the Soviet Union was trying to steal its secrets had put Washington and London in a flat spin.

And then, just weeks before, cables had been decoded that suggested the
worst of all possible scenarios – that there were Russian double agents at the very heart of Western Intelligence. Orders had gone out to give Venona the highest possible priority, and to identify and catch any traitors it uncovered at all costs. Something close to paranoia was sweeping the usually stolid corridors of Leconfield House, MI5 headquarters in central London. Anyone resisting Venona, or even showing reluctance to cooperate with it, was automatically suspected of being a spy.