Enigma (30 page)

And we, too, thought Jericho, as they overtook yet another
stooped figure trudging beside the road, don’t we look slightly
worse each year? In 1940 there had at least been the galvanising
energy unleashed by the threat of invasion. And in 1941 there had
been some hope when Russia and then America had entered the war.
But 1942 had dragged into 1943, the U-boats had wrought murder on
the convoys, the shortages had worsened and, despite the victories
in Africa and on the eastern front, the war had begun to look
endless—an unbroken, unheroic vista of rationing and exhaustion.
The villages seemed almost lifeless—the men away, the women drafted
into factories—while in Stony Stratford and in Towcester the few
people who were about had mostly formed into queues outside shops
with empty windows.

Beside him, Hester Wallace was silent, monitoring their progress
with obsessive interest on Atwood’s atlas. Good, he thought. With
all the signposts and place names taken down, they would have no
idea where they were if they once got lost. He didn’t dare drive
too quickly. The Austin was unfamiliar and (he was discovering)
idiosyncratic. From time to time the cheap wartime petrol caused it
to emit a loud bang. It tended to drift towards the centre of the
road, and the brakes weren’t too hot, either. Besides, a private
car was such a rarity, he feared some officious policeman would
pull them over if they went too fast and demand to see their
papers.

He drove on steadily for more than an hour until, just before a
market town she declared was Hinckley, she told him to turn off
right on to a narrower road.

They had left Bletchley under a clear sky but the further north
they had gone, the darker it had become. Grey clouds heavy with
snow or rain had rolled across the sun. The tarmac pushed across a
bleak, flat landscape, with not a vehicle to be seen, and for a
second time Jericho experienced the curious sense that history was
going backwards, that not for a quarter of a century could the
roads have been this empty.

Fifteen miles further on she made him turn right again and
suddenly they were climbing into much more hilly country, thickly
wooded, with startling outcrops of bare rock striped white by
snow.

“What place is this?”

“Charnwood Forest. We’re almost there. You’d better pull over in
a minute. Here, look,” she said, pointing to a deserted picnic area
set just off the road. “Here will do. I shan’t be long.”

She hauled her bag from the back seat and set off towards the
trees. He watched her go. She looked like a farm boy in her jacket
and trousers. What was it Claire had said? She’s got a bit of a
crush on me? More than a bit, he thought, much more than a bit, to
risk so much. It struck him that she was almost the exact physical
opposite of Claire, that where Claire was tall and blonde and
voluptuous, Hester was short and dark and skinny. Rather like him,
in fact. She was changing her clothes behind a tree which wasn’t
quite wide enough and he got a sudden glimpse of her thin white
shoulder. He looked away. When he looked back she was emerging from
the dark woodland in an olive-green dress. The first drop of rain
plopped on to the windscreen just as she got back into the car.

“Drive on then, Mr Jericho.” She found their position on the
atlas again and rested her finger on it.

His hand paused on the ignition key. “Do you think, Miss
Wallace,” he said, hesitantly, “in view of the circumstances, we
might now risk first-name terms?”

She gave him a faint smile. “Hester.”

“Tom.”

They shook hands.

♦

They followed the road through the forest for about five miles
and then the trees thinned and they were into high, open country.
The rain and melted snow had turned the narrow lane into a mud
track and for five minutes they were forced to crawl in second gear
behind a pony and trap. At last the driver raised his whip in
apology and turned off to the right, towards a tiny village with
curls of smoke rising from half a dozen chimneys, and very soon
afterwards Hester shouted: “There!”

If they hadn’t been travelling so slowly, they might have missed
it: a pair of lodge gates, a private road with a red-and-white pole
slung across it, a sentry box, a cryptic sign: WOYG, BEAUMANOR.

War Office Y Group, Beaumanor, Y being the code name for the
wireless interception service.

“Here we go.”

Jericho had to admire her nerve. While he was still fumbling
sweatily for his pass, she had leaned across him to proffer hers to
the guard and had announced briskly that they were expected. The
Army private checked her name off on a clipboard, went round to the
back of the car to make a note of their registration number,
returned to the window, gave Jericho’s card a cursory glance, and
nodded them in.

Beaumanor Hall was another of those huge, secluded country
houses that had been commandeered by the military from their
grateful, almost bankrupt owners, and that would never, Jericho
guessed, return to private use. It was early Victorian, with an
avenue of dripping elms to one side and a stable yard to the other,
into which they were directed. They drove under a fine arch. Half a
dozen giggling ATS girls, their coats held over their heads like
tents to ward off the rain, ran out in front of them and
disappeared into one of the buildings. The courtyard held a couple
of small Morris commercial trucks and a row of BSA motorcycles. As
Jericho parked, a uniformed man hurried over to them carrying a
vast and battered umbrella.

“Heaviside,” he said, “Major Heaviside, as in the eponymous
layer. And you must be Miss Wallace and you must be…?”

“Tom Jericho.”

“Mr Jericho. Excellent. Splendid.” He shook their hands
vigorously. “This is a treat for us, I must say. A visit from head
office to the country cousins. Commander sends a thousand sorrows
and says d’you mind if I do the honours? He’ll try and catch us
later. ‘Fraid you’ve missed lunch, but tea? Cup of tea? Filthy
weather…”

Jericho had been braced for some suspicious questions, and had
used the journey to rehearse some careful answers, but the major
merely ushered them under his leaking umbrella and guided them into
the house. He was young, tall and balding, with spectacles so
smeared with debris it was a wonder he could see through them. He
had sloping shoulders, like a bottle, and the collar of his tunic
was blanched white with dandruff. He took them into a cold and
musty drawing room and ordered tea.

By now he’d finished his potted history of the house (“designed
by the same bloke who built Nelson’s Column, so they tell me”) and
was well embarked on a detailed history of the wireless
interception service (“started out in Chatham till the bombing got
too bad…”). Hester was nodding politely. A woman Army private
brought them tea as thick and brown as shoe polish and Jericho
sipped it and glanced impatiently around the empty walls. There
were holes in the plaster where the picture hooks had been pulled
out, and grimy shadows traced the outlines of large frames, now
removed. An ancestral seat without ancestors, a house without a
soul. The windows looking out on to the garden were crossed with
strips of sticky tape.

He pointedly took out his watch and opened it. Almost three
o’clock. They would need to be moving soon.

Hester noticed he was fidgeting. “Perhaps,” she said, leaping
into a brief lull in the major’s monologue, “we might take a look
around?”

Heaviside looked startled and clattered his teacup into his
saucer. “Oh, crumbs, sorry. Right. If you’re fit, then, we’ll make
a start.”

The rain was mixed with snow now, and the wind was blowing it
hard, in waves, from the north. It lashed their faces as they came
around the side of the big house and as they picked their way
through the mud of a flattened rose garden they had to raise their
arms against it, like boxers warding off blows. There was an odd
keening, howling noise, like nothing Jericho had ever heard before,
coming from beyond a wall.

“What the devil’s that?”

“The aerial farm,” said Heaviside.

Jericho had only visited an intercept station once before, and
that had been years ago, when the science was still in its infancy:
a shack full of shivering Wrens perched on top of the cliffs near
Scarborough. This was of a different order. They went through a
gate in the wall and there it was—dozens of radio masts laid out in
odd patterns, like the stone circles of the Druids, across several
acres of fields. The metal pylons were bound together by thousands
of yards of cable. Some of the taut steel hummed in the wind, some
screamed.

“Rhombic and Beveridge configurations,” shouted the major above
the racket. “Dipoles and quadra-hedrons…Look!” He tried to point
and his umbrella was abruptly snapped inside out. He smiled
hopelessly and waved it in the direction of the masts. “We’re about
three hundred feet up here, hence this bloody wind. The farm’s got
two main harvests, can you see? One’s pointing due south. That
picks up France, the Med, Libya. The other’s targeted east to
Germany and the Russian front. The signals go by coaxial cables to
the intercept huts.” He spread his arms wide and bellowed,
“Beautiful, isn’t it? We can pick up everything for the best part
of a thousand miles.” He laughed and waved his hands as if he were
conducting an imaginary choir. “Sing to me, you buggers.”

The wind slashed sleet in their faces and Jericho cupped his
hands to his ears. It felt as though they were interfering with
nature, tapping into some rushing elemental force they had no
business dabbling in, like Frankenstein summoning down lightning
into his laboratory. Another gust of wind knocked them backwards
and Hester clutched at his arm for support.

“Let’s get out of here,” yelled Heaviside. He gestured for them
to follow him. Once they were on the other side of the wall they
had some shelter from the wind. An asphalt road girdled what
looked, at a distance, to be an estate village nestling in the
grounds of the big house: cottages, farm sheds, a greenhouse, even
a cricket pavilion with a clock tower. All dummy frontages,
explained Heaviside, cheerfully, designed to fool German air
reconnaissance. This was where the work of interception was done.
Was there anything they were especially interested in?

“How about the eastern front?” said Hester.

“Eastern front?” said Heaviside. “Fine.”

He bounded ahead of them through the puddles, still trying to
shake out his broken umbrella. The rain worsened and their fast
walk turned into a run as they sprinted for the hut. The door
banged shut behind them.

“We rely on the feminine element, as you can see,” said
Heaviside, taking off his spectacles and drying them on the corner
of his tunic. “Army girls and civilian women.” He replaced his
glasses and blinked around the hut. “Good afternoon,” he said to a
stout woman with sergeant’s stripes. “The supervisor,” he
explained, then added in a whisper: “Bit of a dragon.”

Jericho counted twenty-four wireless receivers, arranged in
pairs, on either side of a long aisle, each with a woman hunched
over it wearing headphones. The room was quiet apart from the hum
of the machines and the occasional rustle of intercept forms.

“We’ve three types of sets,” Heaviside went on quietly. “HROs,
Hallicrafter 28 Skyriders and American AR-88
s
. Each
girl has her own frequencies to patrol, though we’ll double back if
things get busy.”

“How many people d’you have working here?” asked Hester.

“Couple of thousand.”

“And you intercept everything?”

“Absolutely. Unless you tell us not to.”

“Which we never do.”

“Right, right.” Heaviside’s bald head was glistening with
rainwater. He bent forwards and shook himself vigorously, like a
dog. “Except that time the other week, of course.”

♦

Afterwards, what Jericho would remember most was how coolly she
handled it. She didn’t even blink. Instead she actually changed the
subject and asked Heaviside how fast the girls had to be (“we
insist on a speed of ninety Morse characters a minute, that’s the
absolute minimum”) and then the three of them began to stroll down
the central aisle.

“These are sets tuned to the eastern front,” said Heaviside,
when they were about halfway down. He stopped and pointed to the
elaborate pictures of vultures stuck on the side of several of the
receivers.

“Vulture’s not the only German Army key in Russia, of course.
There’s Kite and Kestrel, Smelt for the Ukraine—”

“Are the nets particularly active at the moment?” Jericho felt
it was time he should say something.

“Very much so, since Stalingrad. Retreats and counterattacks all
along the front. Alarms and excursions. You’ve got to hand it to
these Reds, you know—they can’t half fight.”

Hester said casually: “It would have been a Vulture station you
were told not to intercept?”

“That’s right.”

“And this would have been around the 4
th
of
March?”

“Bang on. About midnight. I remember because we’d just sent four
long signals and were feeling fairly well chuffed when your chap
Mermagen comes on the blower in a frightful panic and says: ‘No
more of that, thanks very much, not now, not tomorrow, not for ever
more.’ ”

“Any reason?”

“No reason. Just stop. Thought he was going to have a heart
attack. Oddest damned thing I ever heard.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Jericho, “knowing you were busy, they
wanted to knock out low-priority traffic?”

“Balls,” said Heaviside, “pardon me, but really!” His
professional pride was wounded. “You can tell your Mr Mermagen from
me that it was nothing we couldn’t handle, was it, Kay?” He patted
the shoulder of a strikingly pretty ATS operator, who took off her
headphones and pushed back her chair. “No, no, don’t get up, didn’t
mean to interrupt. We were just discussing our mystery station.” He
rolled his eyes. “The one we’re not supposed to hear.”