Enigma (23 page)

Baxter grunted. “I still don’t see it.”

“Nor do I,” said Puck.

“I suppose you don’t see it, Baxter,” said Atwood, “because it
doesn’t represent a triumph for the world proletariat?”

Baxter’s hands curled into fists. “One of these days, Atwood,
someone’s going to knock your bloody smug block off.”

“Ah. The first impulse of the totalitarian mind: violence.”

“Enough!” Logie banged his pipe like a gavel on one of the
trestle tables. None of them had ever heard him shout before and
the room went quiet. “We’ve had quite enough of that already.” He
stared hard at Jericho. “Now, it’s quite right we should be
cautious. Puck, your point’s taken. But we’ve also got to face
facts. We’ve been blacked out four days and Tom’s is the only
decent idea we’ve got. So bloody good work, Tom.”

Jericho stared at an ink stain on the floor. Oh God, he thought,
here comes the housemaster’s pep talk.

“Now, there’s a lot resting on us here, and I want every man to
remember he’s part of a team.”

“No man is an island, Guy,” said Atwood, deadpan, his chubby
hands clasped piously on his wide stomach.

“Thank you, Frank. Quite right. No they’re not. And if ever any
of us—any of us—is tempted to forget it, just think of those
convoys, and all the other convoys this war depends on. Got it?
Good. Right. Enough said. Back to work.”

Baxter opened his mouth to protest, but then seemed to think
better of it. He and Puck exchanged grim glances on their way out.
Jericho watched them go and wondered why they were so determinedly
pessimistic. Puck couldn’t abide Baxter’s politics and normally the
two men kept their distance. But now they seemed to have made
common cause. What was it? A kind of academic jealousy? Resentment
that he had come in after all their hard work and made them look
like fools?

Logie was shaking his head. “I don’t know, old love, what are we
to do with you?” He tried to look stern, but he couldn’t hide his
pleasure. He put his hand on Jericho’s shoulder.

“Give me my job back.”

“I’ll have to talk to Skynner.” He held the door open and
ushered Jericho out into the passage. The three Wrens watched them.
“My God,” said Logie, with a shudder. “Can you imagine what he’s
going to say? He’s going to love it, isn’t he, having to tell his
friends the admirals that the best chance of getting back into
Shark is if the convoys are attacked? Oh, bugger, I suppose I’d
better go and call him.” He went halfway into his office, then came
out again. “And you’re quite sure you never actually hit him?”

“Quite sure, Guy.”

“Not a scratch?”

“Not a scratch.”

“Pity, said Logie,” half to himself. “In a way. Pity.”

§

Hester Wallace couldn’t sleep. The blackout curtains were drawn
against the day. Her tiny room was a study in monochrome. A nosegay
of lavender sent a soothing fragrance filtering through her pillow.
But even though she lay dutifully on her back in her cotton
nightgown, her legs pressed together, her hands folded on her
breast, like a maiden on a marble tomb, oblivion still eluded
her.

“ADU, Miss Wallace. Angels Dance Upwards”

The mnemonic was infuriatingly effective. She couldn’t get it
out of her brain, even though the arrangement of letters meant
nothing to her.

“It’s a call sign. Probably German Army or Luftwaffe…”

No surprise in that. It was almost bound to be. After all, there
were so many of them: thousands upon thousands. The only reliable
rule was that Army and Luftwaffe call-signs never began with a D,
because D always indicated a German commercial station.

ADU…ADU…

She couldn’t place it.

She turned on her side, brought her knees up to her stomach and
tried to fill her mind with soothing thoughts. But no sooner had
she rid herself of the intense, pale face of Tom Jericho than her
memory showed her the wizened priest of St Mary’s, Bletchley, that
croaking mouthpiece of St Paul’s misogynies. “It is a shame for
women to speak in the church…” (1 Corinthians 14.xxxv). “Silly
women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts…” (2 Timothy
3.vi). From such texts he had woven a polemical sermon against the
wartime employment of the female sex—women driving lorries, women
in trousers, women drinking and smoking in public houses
unaccompanied by their husbands, women neglecting their children
and their homes. “As a jewel of gold in a swine’s mouth, so is a
fair woman which is without discretion.” (Proverbs 11.xxii).

If only it were true! she thought. If only women had usurped
authority over men! The Brylcreemed figure of Miles Mermagen, her
head of section, rose greasily before her inner eye. “My dear
Hester, a transfer at the present moment is really quite out of the
question.” He had been a manager at Barclays Bank before the war
and liked to come up behind the girls as they worked and massage
their shoulders. At the Hut 6 Christmas Party he had manoeuvred her
under the mistletoe and clumsily taken off her glasses. (“Thank
you, Miles,” she’d said, trying miserably to make a joke of it,
“without my spectacles you too look almost tolerably attractive…”)
His lips on hers were unpleasantly moist, like the underside of a
mollusc, and tasted of sweet sherry.

Claire, of course, had known immediately what to do.

“Oh, darling, poor you, and I suppose he’s got a wife?”

“He says they were married too young.”

“Well, she’s your answer. Tell him you think it’s only fair you
go and have a talk with her first. Tell him you want to be her
friend.”

“But what if he says yes?”

“Oh, God! Then I suppose you’ll just have to kick him in the
balls.”

Hester smiled at the memory. She shifted her position in the bed
again and the cotton sheet rode up and corrugated beneath her. It
was quite hopeless. She reached out and switched on the little
bedside lamp, fumbling around its base for her glasses.

Ich lerne deutsch, ich lernte deutsch, ich habe deutsch
gelernt…

German, she thought: German would be her salvation. A working
knowledge of written German would lift her out of the grind of the
Intercept Control Room, away from the clammy embrace of Miles
Mermagen, and propel her into the rarefied air of the Machine Room,
where the real work was done—where she should have been put in the
first place.

She propped herself up in bed and tried to focus on Abelman’s
German Primer. Ten minutes of this was usually quite enough to send
her off to sleep.

“Intransitive verbs showing a change of place or condition take
the auxiliary
sein
instead of
haben
in the compound
tenses.”

She looked up. Was that a noise downstairs?

“In subordinate word order the auxiliary must stand last,
directly after the past participle or the infinitive.”

And there it was again.

She slipped her warm feet into her cold outdoor shoes, wrapped a
woollen shawl about her shoulders, and went out onto the
landing.

A knocking sound was coming from the kitchen.

She began to descend the stairs.

There had been two men waiting for her when she arrived back
from church. One had been standing on the doorstep, the other had
emerged casually from the back of the cottage. The first man was
young and blond with a languid, aristocratic manner and a kind of
decadent Anglo-Saxon handsomeness. His companion was older,
smaller, slim and dark, with a northern accent. They both had
Bletchley Park passes and said they’d come from Welfare and were
looking for Miss Romilly. She hadn’t turned up for work: any idea
where she might be?

Hester had said she hadn’t. The older man had gone upstairs and
had spent a long time searching around. The blond, meanwhile—she
never caught his name—had sprawled on the sofa and asked a lot of
questions. There was something offensively patronising about him,
for all his good manners. This is what Miles Mermagen would be
like, she found herself thinking, if he’d had five thousand pounds’
worth of private education. What was Claire like? Who were her
friends? Who were the men in her life? Had anyone been asking after
her? She mentioned Jericho’s visit of the previous night and he
made a note of it with a gold propelling pencil. She almost blurted
out the story of Jericho’s peculiar approach in the churchyard
(“ADU, Miss Wallace…”) but by this time she had taken so strongly
against the blond man’s manner she bit back the words.

Knock, knock, knock from the kitchen…

Hester took the poker that stood beside the sitting-room
fireplace and slowly opened the kitchen door.

It was like stepping into a refrigerator. The window was banging
in the wind. It must have been open for hours.

At first she felt relieved, but that lasted only until she tried
to close it. Then she discovered that the metal catch, weakened by
rust, had been snapped clean off. Part of the wooden window frame
around it was splintered.

She stood in the cold and considered the implications and
quickly concluded there was only one plausible explanation. The
dark-haired man who had appeared from behind the cottage on her
return from church had obviously been in the process of breaking
in.

They had told her there was nothing to worry about. But if there
was nothing to worry about, why had they been prepared to force
entry into the house?

She shivered and drew the shawl around her.

“Oh Claire,” she said aloud, “oh, Claire, you silly, stupid,
stupid girl, what have you done?”

She used a piece of blackout tape to try and secure the window.
Then, still holding the poker, she went back upstairs and into
Claire’s room. A silver fox was hanging over the end of the bed,
its glass-bead eyes staring, its needle teeth bared. Out of habit,
she folded it neatly and placed it on the shelf where it normally
lived. The room was such an expression of Claire, such an
extravagance of colour and fabric and scent, that it seemed to
resonate with her presence, even now, when she was away, to hum
with it, like the last vibrations of a tuning fork…Claire, holding
some ridiculous dress to herself and laughing and asking her what
she thought, and Hester pretending to frown with an older sister’s
disapproval. Claire, as moody as an adolescent, on her stomach on
the bed, leafing through a pre-war Tatler. Claire combing Hester’s
hair (which, when she let it down, fell almost to her waist),
running her brush through it with slow and languorous strokes that
made Hester’s limbs turn weak. Claire insisting on painting Hester
in her make-up, dressing her up like a doll and standing back in
mock surprise: “Why, darling, you’re beautiful!” Claire, in nothing
but a pair of white silk knickers and a string of pearls, prancing
about the room in search of something, long-legged as an athlete,
turning and seeing that Hester was secretly watching her in the
mirror, catching the look in her eyes, and standing there for a
moment, hip thrust forward, arms outstretched, with a smile that
was something between an invitation and a taunt, before sweeping
back into motion…

And on that cold, bright Sabbath afternoon, Hester Wallace, the
clergyman’s daughter, leaned against the wall and closed her eyes
and pressed her hand between her legs with shame.

An instant later the noise from the kitchen started again and
she thought her heart might burst with panic. She fled across the
landing and into her room, pursued by the dry whine of the vicar of
St Mary’s—or was it really the voice of her father?—reciting from
the Book of Proverbs:

“For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her
mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps
take hold on hell…”

§

For the first time in more than a month, Tom Jericho found that
he was busy.

He had to supervise the copying of the Short Signal Code Book,
six typewritten transcripts of which were duly produced and stamped
MOST SECRET. Every line had to be checked, for a single error could
spell the difference between a successful break and days of
failure. The intercept controllers had to be briefed. Teleprintered
orders had to be sent to all the duty officers of every Hut 8
listening post—from Thurso, clinging to the cliffs on the
northernmost tip of Scotland, right down to St Erth, near Land’s
End. Their brief was simple: concentrate everything you have on the
known Atlantic U-boat frequencies, cancel all leave, bring in the
lame and the sick and the blind if you have to, and pay even
greater attention than usual to very short bursts of Morse preceded
by E-bar—dot dot dash dot dot—the Germans’ priority code which
cleared the wavelength for convoy contact reports. Not one such
signal was to be missed, understand? Not one.

From the Registry, Jericho withdrew three months’ worth of Shark
decrypts to bring himself back up to speed, and, that afternoon,
sitting in his old place by the window in the Big Room, proved by
slide-rule calculation what he already knew by instinct: that
seventeen convoy contact reports, if harvested in the same
twenty-four-hour stretch, would yield eighty-five letters of cipher
encode which might—might, if the cryptanalysts had the requisite
percentage of luck—give them a break into Shark, provided they
could get at least ten bombes working in relay for a minimum of
thirty-six hours…

And all the time he thought of Claire.

There was very little, practically, he could do about her. Twice
during the day he managed to get out to the telephone box to try to
call her father: once as they all went off to lunch, when he was
able to drop back, unnoticed by the rest, just before they reached
the main gate; and the second time in the late afternoon when he
pretended he needed to stretch his legs. On each occasion, the
connection was made, but the phone merely rang, unanswered. He had
a vague but growing feeling of dread, made worse by his
powerlessness. He couldn’t return to Hut 3. He didn’t have the time
to check out her cottage. He would have liked to go back to his
room to rescue the intercepts—hidden behind a picture on top of the
mantelpiece, was he insane?—but the round trip would have taken him
the best part of twenty minutes and he couldn’t get away.