Enigma (27 page)

He watched the little group for several minutes as they searched
the empty train. Then the two teams split up, one passing further
up the tracks and the other moving out of sight towards the little
railway cottages opposite. He snapped the telescope shut.

Four men and two dogs for the railway yard. Say, a couple more
teams to cover the station platforms. How many in the town? Twenty?
And in the surrounding countryside?

“Got a photo of her? Something recent?”

He tapped the telescope against his cheek.

They must be watching every port and railway station in the
country.

What would they do if they caught her?

Hang her?

Come on, Jericho. He could practically hear his housemaster’s
voice at his elbow. Brace up, boy.

Get through it somehow.

Wash. Shave. Dress. Make a little bundle of dirty laundry and
leave it on the bed for Mrs Armstrong, more in hope than
expectation. Go downstairs. Endure attempts to make polite
conversation. Listen to one of Bonnyman’s interminable, off-colour
stories. Be introduced to two of the other guests: Miss Quince,
rather pretty, a teleprincess in the naval hut, and Noakes, once an
expert on Middle High German court epics, now a cryptanalyst in the
weather section, vaguely known since 1940: a surly creature, then
and now. Avoid all further conversation. Chew toast as stale as
cardboard. Drink tea as grey and watery as a February sky.
Half-listen to the wireless news: “Moscow Radio reports the Russian
Third Army under General Vatutin is making a strong defence of
Kharkov in the face of the renewed German offensiv.”

At ten to eight Mrs Armstrong came in with the morning post.
Nothing for Mr Bonnyman (“thank God for that,” said Bonnyman), two
letters for Miss Jobey, a postcard for Miss Quince, a bill from
Heffers bookshop for Mr Noakes and nothing at all for Mr
Jericho—oh, except this, which she’d found when she came down and
which must have been put through the door some time in the
night.

He held it carefully. The envelope was poor-quality,
official-issue stuff, his name printed on it in blue ink, with “By
hand, Strictly Personal” added underneath and double-underlined.
The “e” in Jericho and in “Personal” was in the Greek form. His
nocturnal correspondent was a classicist, perhaps?

He took it into the hall to open, Mrs Armstrong at his
heels.

Hut 6, 4.45 A.M.

Dear Mr Jericho,

♦

As you expressed such a strong interest in medieval alabaster
figurework when we met yesterday, I wondered if you might care to
join me at the same place at 8 this morning to view the altar tomb
of Lord Grey de Wilton (15
th
cent, and really very
fine)?

Sincerely,

H.A.W.

“Bad news, Mr Jericho?” She couldn’t quite suppress the note of
hope in her voice.

But Jericho was already dragging on his overcoat and was halfway
out of the door.

♦

Even after taking the hill at a fast trot he was still five
minutes late by the time he passed the granite war memorial. There
was no sign of her or anyone else in the graveyard so he tried the
door to the church. At first he thought it was locked. It took both
hands to turn the rusty iron ring. He put his shoulder to the
weathered oak and it shuddered inwards.

The church inside was cave-like, cold and dark, the shadows
pierced by shafts of dusty, slate-blue light, so solid they seemed
to have been propped like slabs against the windows. He hadn’t been
in a church for years and the chilly stink of candle wax and damp
and incense brought memories of childhood crawling back. He thought
he could make out the shape of a head in one of the pews nearest
the altar and began to walk towards it.

“Miss Wallace?” His voice was hollow and seemed to travel a
great distance. But when he came closer he saw it wasn’t a head,
just a priest’s vestment, draped neatly over the back of the pew.
He passed on up the nave to the wood-panelled altar. To the left
was a stone coffin with an inscription; next to it, the smooth,
white effigy of Richard, Lord Grey de Wilton, dead these past five
hundred years, reclining in full armour, his head resting on his
helmet, his feet on the back of a lion.

“The armour is especially interesting. But then warfare in the
fifteenth century was the highest occupation for a gentleman.”

He wasn’t sure where she’d come from. She was simply there when
he turned round, about ten feet behind him.

“And the face, I think, is also good, if unexceptional. You
weren’t followed, I trust?”

“No. I don’t think so, no.”

She took a few steps towards him. With her dead complexion and
tapering white fingers she might have been an alabaster effigy
herself, climbed down from Lord Grey’s tomb.

“Perhaps you noticed the royal arms above the north door?”

“How long have you been here?”

“The arms of Queen Anne, but, intriguingly, still of the Stuart
pattern. The arms of Scotland were only added as late as 1707. Now
that is rare. About ten minutes. The police were just leaving as I
arrived.” She held out her hand. “May I have my note back,
please?”

When he hesitated she presented her palm to him again, more
emphatically this time.

“The note, please, if you’d be so good. I’d prefer to leave no
trace. Thank you.” She took it and stowed it away at the bottom of
her voluminous carpet bag. Her hands were shaking so much she had
trouble fastening the clasp. “There’s no need to whisper, by the
way. We’re quite alone. Apart from God. And He’s supposed to be on
our side.”

He knew it would be wise for him to wait, to let her come to it
in her own time, but he couldn’t help himself.

“You’ve checked it?” he said. “The call sign?”

She finally snapped the bag shut. “Yes. I’ve checked it.”

“And is it Army or Luftwaffe?”

She held up a finger. “Patience, Mr Jericho. Patience. First
there’s some information I’d like from you, if you don’t mind. We
might begin with what made you choose those three letters.”

“You don’t want to know, Miss Wallace. Believe me.”

She raised her eyes to heaven. “God preserve me: another
one.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I seem to move in an endless round, Mr Jericho, from one
patronising male to another, for ever being told what I am and am
not allowed to know. Well, that ends here.” She pointed to the
flagstone floor.

“Miss Wallace,” said Jericho, catching the same tone of cool
formality, “I came in answer to your note. I have no interest in
alabaster figurework—medieval, Victorian or ancient Chinese, come
to that. If you’ve nothing else to tell me, good morning to
you.”

“Then good morning.”

“Good morning.”

If he’d had a hat he would have raised it.

He turned and began his progress down the aisle towards the
door. You fool, said a voice at his inner ear, you bloody conceited
fool. By the time he’d gone half way his pace had slowed and by the
time he reached the font he stopped. His shoulders sagged.

“Checkmate, I believe, Mr Jericho,” she called cheerfully from
beside the altar.

“ADU was the call sign on a series of four intercepts our…mutual
friend…stole from Hut 3.” His voice was weary.

“How do you know she stole them?”

“They were hidden in her bedroom. Under the floorboards. As far
as I know, we’re not encouraged to take our work home.”

“Where are they now?”

“I burned them.”

They were sitting in the second row of pews, side by side,
facing straight ahead. Anyone coming into the church would have
thought it was a confession—she playing the priest and he the
sinner.

“Do you think she’s a spy?”

“I don’t know. Her behaviour is suspicious, to put it
charitably. Others seem to think she is.”

“Who?”

“A man from the Foreign Office called Wigram, for one.”

“Why?”

“Obviously because she’s disappeared.”

“Oh, come. There must be more to it than that. All this fuss for
one missed shift?”

He ran his hand nervously through his hair.

“There are…indications—and don’t, for God’s sake, ask me to tell
you what they are—just indications, all right, that the Germans may
suspect Enigma is being broken.”

A long pause.

“But why would our mutual friend wish to help the Germans?”

“If I knew that, Miss Wallace, I wouldn’t be sitting here with
you, passing the time of day breaking the Official Secrets Act.
Now, really, please, have you heard enough?”

Another pause. A reluctant nod of the head.

“Enough.”

She told it like story, in a low voice, without looking at him.
She used her hands a lot, he noticed. She couldn’t keep them still.
They fluttered like tiny white birds—now pecking at the hem of her
coat, pulling it demurely across her knees, now perching on the
back of the pew in front, now describing, in rapid, circling
motions, how she had gone about her crime.

She waits until the other girls have gone off on their meal
break.

She leaves the door to the Index Room open a fraction, so as not
to look suspicious and to ensure a good warning of anyone’s
approach.

She reaches up to the dusty metal shelf and drags down the first
volume.

AAA, AAB, AAC…

She flicks through to the tenth page.

And there it is. The thirteenth entry.

ADU.

She runs her finger along the line to the row and column entries
and notes their numbers on a scrap of paper.

She puts the index volume back. The row ledger is on a higher
shelf and she has to fetch a stool to get it.

She stops off on her way to bob her head around the door and
check the corridor.

Deserted.

Now she is nervous. Why? she asks herself. What is she doing
that’s so terribly wrong? She smooths her hands down over her grey
skirt to dry her palms, then opens the book. She turns the pages.
She finds the number. Again, she follows the line across.

She checks it once, and then a second time. There’s no
mistake.

ADU is the call sign of Nachrichten-Regimenter 537—a motorised
German Army signals unit. Its transmissions are on wavelengths
monitored by the Beaumanor intercept station in Leicestershire.
Direction-finding has established that, since October, Unit number
537 has been based in the Smolensk military district of the
Ukraine, presently occupied by Wehrmacht Army Group Centre under
the command of Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge.

♦

Jericho had been leaning forwards in anticipation. Now he drew
back in surprise. “A signals unit?”

He felt obscurely disappointed. What exactly had he been
expecting? He wasn’t sure. Just something a little more…exotic, he
supposed.

“537,” he said, “is that a front-line unit?”

“The line in that sector is shifting every day. But according to
the situation map in Hut 6, Smolensk is still about a hundred
kilometres inside German territory.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. That was my reaction—at first, anyway. I mean, this is a
standard, rear-echelon, low-priority target. This is workaday in
the extreme. But there are several…complications.” She fished in
her bag for a handkerchief and blew her nose. Again, Jericho
observed the slight trembling of her fingers.

♦

After replacing the row volume it is the work of less than a
minute to pull down the appropriate column book and make a note of
the intercept serial numbers. When she comes out of the Index Room,
Miles (“that’s Miles Mermagen,” she adds in parenthesis, “Control
Room duty officer: a bear of very little brain”)

Miles is on the telephone, his back to the door, oiling up to
someone in authority—“No, no, that’s absolutely fine, Donald, a
pleasure to be of service…”—which suits Hester beautifully for it
means he never even notices her collect her coat and leave. She
clicks on her blackout torch and steps out into the night.

A gust of wind swirls down the alley between the huts and
buffets her face. At the far end of Hut 8 the path forks: right
will take her to the main gate and the warm bustle of the canteen,
left leads into the blackness along the edge of the lake.

She turns left.

The moon is wrapped in a tissue of cloud but the pale light is
just luminous enough to show her the way. Beyond the eastern
perimeter fence lies a small wood which she can’t see, but the
sound of the wind moving through the invisible trees seems to pull
her on. Past A-and B-Blocks, two hundred and fifty yards, and there
it is, straight ahead, faintly outlined: the big, squat, bunkerlike
building, only just completed, that now houses Bletchley’s central
Registry. As she comes closer her torch flashes on steel-shuttered
windows, then finds the heavy door.

Thou shalt not steal, she tells herself, reaching for the
handle.

No, no. Of course not.

Thou shalt not, steal, thou wilt merely take a quick look, and
then depart.

And, in any case, don’t “the secret things belong unto the Lord
our God” (Deuteronomy 29.xxix)?

The rawness of the white neon is a shock after the gloom of the
hut, and so is the calm, ruffled only by the distant clatter of the
Hollerith punch-card machines. The workmen still haven’t finished.
Brushes and tools are stacked to one side of a reception area that
is thick with the smell of building work—fresh concrete, wet paint,
wood-shavings. The duty clerk, a corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary
Air Force, leans across the counter in a friendly way as if she is
serving in a shop.

“Cold night?”

“Rather.” Hester manages to smile and nod. “I’ve got some
serials to check.”

“Reference or loan?”

“Reference.”

“Section?”

“Hut 6 Control.”

“Pass?”

The woman takes the list of numbers and disappears into a back
room. Through the open door Hester can see stacks of metal
shelving, infinite rows of cardboard files. A man strolls past the
doorway and takes down one of the boxes. He stares at her. She
looks away. On the whitewashed wall is a poster, a Bateman cartoon
showing a woman sneezing, accompanied by some typical, fatuous
Whitehall busybodying: