Enigma
Authors: Robert Harris
Robert Harris
Enigma
1995, EN
It is March 1943 and the War hangs in the
balance…At Bletchley Park Tom Jericho, a brilliant young
codebreaker, is facing a double nightmare. The Germans have
unaccountably changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening a
massive Allied defeat. As suspicion grows that there may be a spy
inside Bletchley, and Jericho is suspected, his girlfriend, the
beautiful and mysterious Claire Romilly, suddenly disappears. With
the help of Claire’s best friend, Hester, Jericho sets out to find
Claire, clear his name and unmask the spy. The answers will change
his life forever…Steeped in the atmosphere of wartime England,
based around an actual event, Enigma is a thriller of genius: a
compelling mystery of codes and codebreaking, love and betrayal set
inside the birthplace of the secret state.
Table of contents
WHISPERS
WHISPERS: the sounds made by an enemy wireless
transmitter immediately before it begins to broadcast a coded
message.A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)
CAMBRIDGE IN THE fourth winter of the war: a ghost town.
A ceaseless Siberian wind with nothing to blunt its edge for a
thousand miles whipped off the North Sea and swept low across the
Fens. It rattled the signs to the air-raid shelters in Trinity New
Court and battered on the boarded-up windows of King’s College
Chapel. It prowled through the quadrangles and staircases,
confining the few dons and students still in residence to their
rooms. By mid-afternoon the narrow cobbled streets were deserted.
By nightfall, with not a light to be seen, the university was
returned to a darkness it hadn’t known since the Middle Ages. A
procession of monks shuffling over Magdalene Bridge on their way to
Vespers would scarcely have seemed out of place.
In the wartime blackout the centuries had dissolved.
It was to this bleak spot in the flatlands of eastern England
that there came, in the middle of February 1943, a young
mathematician named Thomas Jericho. The authorities of his college,
King’s, were given less than a day’s notice of his arrival—scarcely
enough time to reopen his rooms, put sheets on his bed, and have
more than three years’ worth of dust swept from his shelves and
carpets. And they would not have gone to even that much trouble, it
being wartime and servants so scarce—had not the Provost himself
been telephoned at the Master’s Lodge by an obscure but very senior
official of His Majesty’s Foreign Office, with a request that “Mr
Jericho be looked after until he is well enough to return to his
duties”.
“Of course,” replied the Provost, who couldn’t for the life of
him put a face to the name of Jericho. “Of course. A pleasure to
welcome him back.”
As he spoke, he opened the college register and flicked through
it until he came to: Jericho, T.R.G.; matriculated, 1935; Senior
Wrangler, Mathematics Tripos, 1938; Junior Research Fellow at two
hundred pounds a year; not seen in the university since the
outbreak of war.
Jericho? Jericho? To the Provost he was at best a dim memory, a
fuzzy adolescent blob on a college photograph. Once, perhaps, he
would have remembered the name, but the war had shattered the
sonorous rhythm of intake and graduation and all was chaos—the Pitt
Club was a British Restaurant, potatoes and onions were growing in
the gardens of St John’s…
“He has recently been engaged upon work of the gravest national
importance,” continued the caller. “We would appreciate it if he
were not disturbed.”
“Understood,” said the Provost. “Understood. I shall see to it
he is left alone.”
“We are obliged to you.”
The official rang off. “Work of the gravest national
importance”, by God…The old man knew what that meant. He hung up
and looked thoughtfully at the receiver for a few moments, then
went in search of the domestic bursar.
♦
A Cambridge college is a village, with a village’s appetite for
gossip—all the keener when that village is nine-tenths empty—and
the return of Jericho provoked hours of analysis among the college
staff.
There was, for a start, the manner of his arrival—a few hours
after the call to the Provost, late on a snowy night, swaddled in a
travelling rug, in the back of a cavernous official Rover driven by
a young chauffeuse in the dark blue uniform of the Women’s Royal
Navy. Kite, the porter, who offered to carry the visitor’s bags to
his rooms, reported that Jericho clung to his pair of battered
leather suitcases and refused to let go of either, even though he
looked so pale and worn out that Kite doubted he would make it up
the spiral staircase unaided.
Dorothy Saxmundham, the bedder, saw him next, when she went in
the following day to tidy up. He was propped on his pillows staring
out at the sleet pattering across the river, and he never turned
his head, never even looked at her, didn’t seem to know she was
there, poor lamb. Then she went to move one of his cases and he was
up in a flash—“Please don’t touch that, thank you so much, Mrs Sax,
thank you”—and she was out on the landing in a quarter of a
minute.
He had only one visitor: the college doctor, who saw him twice,
stayed for about fifteen minutes on each occasion, and left without
saying a word.
He took all his meals in his room for the first week—not that he
ate very much, according to Oliver Bickerdyke, who worked in the
kitchens: he took up a tray three times a day, only to take it away
again an hour later, barely touched. Bickerdyke’s great coup, which
led to at least an hour of speculation around the coke stove in the
Porter’s Lodge, was to come upon the young man working at his desk,
wearing a coat over his pyjamas, a scarf and a pair of mittens.
Normally, Jericho “sported his oak”—that is to say, he kept the
heavy outer door to his study firmly shut—and called politely for
his tray to be left outside. But on this particular morning, six
days after his dramatic arrival, he had left it slightly ajar.
Bickerdyke deliberately brushed the wood lightly with his knuckles,
so quietly as to be inaudible to any living creature, save possibly
a grazing gazelle, and then he was across the threshold and within
a yard of his quarry before Jericho turned round. Bickerdyke just
had time to register piles of papers (“covered in figures and
circuits and Greek and suchlike”) before the work was hastily
covered up and he was sent on his way. Thereafter the door remained
locked.
Listening to Bickerdyke’s tale the next afternoon, and not
wishing to be outdone, Dorothy Saxmundham added a detail of her
own. Mr Jericho had a small gas fire in his sitting room and a
grate in his bedroom. In the grate, which she had cleaned that
morning, he had obviously burned a quantity of paper.
There was silence while this intelligence was digested.
“Could be The Times,” said Kite eventually. “I puts a copy of
The Times under his door every morning.”
No, declared Mrs Sax. It was not The Times. They were still in a
pile by the bed. “He doesn’t seem to read them, not as I’ve
noticed. He just does the crosswords.”
Bickerdyke suggested he was burning letters. “Maybe love
letters,” he added, with a leer.
“Love letters? Him? Get away.” Kite took off his antique bowler
hat, inspected its frayed brim, then replaced it carefully on his
bald head. “Besides, he ain’t had any letters, not a single one,
not since he’s been here.”
And so they were forced to the conclusion that what Jericho was
burning in his grate was his work—work so secret, nobody could be
allowed to see even a fragment of the waste. In the absence of hard
fact, fantasy was piled upon fantasy. He was a government
scientist, they decided. No, he worked in Intelligence. No, no—he
was a genius. He had had a nervous breakdown. His presence in
Cambridge was an official secret. He had friends in high places. He
had met Mr Churchill. He had met the King…
In all of which speculation, they would have been gratified to
learn, they were absolutely and precisely correct.
♦
Three days later, early on the morning of Friday 26 February,
the mystery was given a fresh twist.
Kite was sorting the first delivery of mail, stuffing a small
sackful of letters into the few pigeon holes whose owners were
still in college, when he came across not one but three envelopes
addressed to T.R.G. Jericho Esq, originally sent care of the White
Hart Inn, Shenley Church End, Buckinghamshire, and subsequently
forwarded to King’s. For a moment, Kite was taken aback. Did the
strange young man, for whom they had constructed such an exotic
identity, in reality manage a pub? He pushed his spectacles up on
to his forehead, held the envelope at arm’s length, and squinted at
the postmarks.
Bletchley.
There was an old Ordnance Survey map hanging at the back of the
lodge, showing the dense triangle of southern England enclosed by
Cambridge, Oxford and London. Bletchley sat astride a big railway
junction exactly midway between the two university towns. Shenley
Church End was a tiny hamlet about four miles north-west of it.
Kite studied the more interesting of the three envelopes. He
raised it to his bulbous, blue-veined nose. He sniffed it. He had
been sorting mail for more than forty years and he knew a woman’s
handwriting when he saw it: clearer and neater, more looped and
less angular than a man’s. A kettle was boiling on the gas ring at
the back of the stove. He glanced around. It was not yet eight, and
barely light outside. Within seconds he had stepped into the alcove
and was holding the flap of the envelope to the steam. It was made
of thin, shoddy wartime paper, sealed with cheap glue. The flap
quickly moistened, curled, opened, and Kite extracted a card.
He had just about read through to the end when he heard the
lodge door open. A blast of wind shook the windows. He stuffed the
card back into the envelope, dipped his little finger into the glue
pot kept ready by the stove, stuck down the flap, then casually
poked his head round the corner to see who had come in. He almost
had a stroke.
“Good heavens—morning—Mr Jericho—sir…”
“Are there any letters for me, Mr Kite?” Jericho’s voice was
firm enough, but he seemed to sway slightly and held on to the
counter like a sailor who had just stepped ashore after a long
voyage. He was a pale young man, quite short, with dark hair and
dark eyes—twin darknesses that served to emphasise the pallor of
his skin.
“Not as I’ve noticed, sir. I’ll look again.”
Kite retreated with dignity to the alcove and tried to iron out
the damp envelope with his sleeve. It was only slightly crumpled.
He slipped it into the middle of a handful of letters, came out to
the front, and performed—even if he said so himself—a virtuoso
pantomime of searching through them.
“No, no, nothing, no. Ah, yes, here’s, something. Gracious. And
two more.” Kite proffered them across the counter. “Your birthday,
sir?”
“Yesterday.” Jericho stuffed the envelopes into the inside
pocket of his overcoat without glancing at them.
“Many happy returns, sir.” Kite watched the letters disappear
and gave a silent sigh of relief. He folded his arms and leaned
forward on the counter. “Might I hazard a guess at your age, sir?
Came up in ‘thirty-five, as I recall. Would that make you, perhaps,
twenty-six?”
“I say, is that my newspaper, Mr Kite? Perhaps I might take it.
Save you the trouble.”
Kite grunted, pushed himself back up on his feet and fetched it.
He made one last attempt at conversation as he handed it over,
remarking on the satisfactory progress of the war in Russia since
Stalingrad and Hitler being finished if you asked him—but, of
course, that he, Jericho, would surely be more up to date about
such matters than he, Kite…? The younger man merely smiled.
“I doubt if my knowledge about anything is as up to date as
yours, Mr Kite, not even about myself. Knowing your methods.”
For a moment, Kite was not sure he had heard correctly. He
stared sharply at Jericho, who met his gaze and held it with his
dark brown eyes, which seemed suddenly to have acquired a glint of
life. Then, still smiling, Jericho nodded “Good morning”, tucked
his paper under his arm and was gone. Kite watched him through the
lodge’s mullioned window—a slender figure in a college scarf of
purple and white, unsteady on his feet, head bowed into the wind.
“My methods,” he repeated to himself. “My methods?”
That afternoon, when the trio gathered for tea as usual around
the coke stove, he was able to advance a whole new explanation for
Jericho’s presence in their midst. Naturally, he could not disclose
how he came by his information, only that it was especially
reliable (he hinted at a man–to–man chat). Forgetting his earlier
scorn about love letters, Kite now asserted with confidence that
the young fellow was obviously suffering from a broken heart.