The Titanic Secret (16 page)

11 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne found Maria sitting by herself at a corner table in the lounge.

‘I’ve just been given this by a pageboy,’ he said, taking out the envelope and opening it again. ‘He told me that it’s a message from my London office.’

‘And I suppose you don’t need to tell me where your “London office” is located?’ Maria remarked. ‘I presume that’s some more information or instructions from Mansfield Cumming?’

‘Probably,’ Tremayne said, and showed her the sheet of paper, which was covered in what looked like groups of five entirely random letters. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve decoded it.’

He took a small notebook and pencil out of his pocket, turned to a fresh page in the book and wrote the word ‘OPERATIONAL’ across the top of the page, spacing the letters well apart.

‘Mansfield always likes his keywords to have a proper military ring to them,’ he remarked. ‘What he’s using here is a basic single transposition cipher, a very simple and effective encoding system. He made me memorize this keyword – and a few others – before we left London.’

‘How does it work?’ Maria asked, curious. ‘I’ve never been involved with codes or anything like that.’

‘It’s one of the simplest possible ways of encoding a message, and it’s virtually impossible to crack it without the keyword, because frequency analysis – that’s just a very simple way of guessing which letter in the alphabet is represented by which of the coded letters, based on how often they appear in a message – and most other tools simply don’t work on it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “frequency analysis”. How does that work?’ Maria asked.

‘It’s quite straightforward. If you analyse a piece of text in any language, you’ll find that some letters will appear much more frequently than others. In English, for example, the commonest letter of the alphabet is “E”, followed in sequence by “T”, “A”, “O”, “I”, “N” and so on. So if you think a coded message is written in English, and the letter “Z” appears more often than any other letter, it would be a reasonable guess that the person who encoded it substituted “Z” for “E”. Does that follow?’

Maria nodded. ‘So presumably using this single transposition method avoids that?’

‘Exactly. And if you’re paranoid about security, you can go through the operation twice, using two completely different keywords. That’s called a double transposition cipher, and is really secure.

‘With the keyword written out, you then make what’s called the number conversion. That means you begin at the left-hand side of the word and put the number one below the first letter in the alphabet that appears in the word. Now, in this case and using this keyword, that’s the first letter “A”. Then you put a number two below the next earliest letter, which is the second letter “A”, a number three below the third letter – that’s the “E” – and then continue from left to right, repeating the process until there’s a number beneath each of the letters.’

Tremayne put a ‘1’ below the first ‘A’ in the word, a ‘2’ below the second ‘A’, a ‘3’ under the letter ‘E’, and then continued working repeatedly from left to right until he had placed a number below each of the letters in the keyword.

Then he counted the number of groups of letters on the typewritten sheet, which came to thirty-three.

‘It’s important to do that,’ he explained, ‘because that tells me how many groups or letters to write below each number. The keyword is eleven letters long, and there are thirty-three groups of five letters each, so that means I have to put three groups vertically below each number, obviously starting with number “1”. Then I write the next three groups vertically below the number “2”, the next three under the number “3” and so on until I’ve copied all of the groups onto the grid.’

Tremayne glanced round, to ensure that nobody was close enough to overhear them, or to see what he was doing.

‘Does that make sense?’ he asked quietly.

Maria nodded. ‘Yes, I think so,’ she replied. ‘It’ll be clearer when you’ve done it, I expect. And presumably once you’ve written out all the groups you’ll be able to read the original message?’

‘Exactly. You just read it from left to right and top to bottom. Right, the first three groups are “RCSGU”, “MMHDE” and “SHVNI”.’ Tremayne wrote those below the ‘1’, then copied the second three groups of ‘MRWSN’, ‘ENDET’ and ‘HONEG’ under the ‘2’, then swiftly added all the rest of the groups of letters to the grid. Then the two of them studied the result:

Tremayne spoke, keeping his voice down. ‘Mansfield must have had a report sent to him from Berlin. The plain text reads: “Report from hotel confirms Voss and two bodyguards left building at the same time as SSB man vanished. His body found in Tiergarten yesterday shot through head. No doubt Voss and men involved. Mission is go”. The SSB man was obviously Paul Harrington, that officer who’d been ordered to follow Voss in Berlin.’

He folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket, then closed his notebook with a snap.

‘The news about the surveillance officer isn’t much of a surprise,’ Maria remarked. ‘If he’d just been ill or wounded, he would have made contact somehow. I think we all knew that when he didn’t check in he was most probably already dead. Does that, that report from the hotel, I mean, convince you that Voss was responsible?’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘In the strictly legal sense, no,’ he replied. ‘Three men walking out of a building at about the same time as another man disappears from the same building is hardly conclusive evidence. At best you could argue that there was a possible link, but that’s a long way from proof that they had anything to do with the killing. But in my gut, yes, I think Voss did it, or at the very least ordered one of his bodyguards to pull the trigger.’

The vehemence with which Tremayne spoke the last sentence surprised Maria, and when she looked at his face, his blue eyes were hard and cold.

‘Obviously Mansfield Cumming feels the same way,’ she said. ‘And the last sentence is unambiguous. He’s telling us to go ahead and complete the mission.’

Tremayne nodded. ‘Yes. And we can certainly take out Voss. Find him on the upper deck one night, or drag him out if we have to, and then push him over the side. But what about the two men with him? They were in the smoking room sitting and talking together. But we can’t just assume that they’re involved in this plot and kill them as well. They might be entirely innocent, just a couple of businessmen he met on board.’

He looked at Maria, then glanced around the lounge. ‘We have to be sure before we do something like this. What do you think?’

‘I don’t think those other two are just a couple of casual acquaintances. They seem too relaxed together to have only just met. But otherwise, I agree with you. We can’t just take two human lives, even on the word of somebody like Mansfield Cumming, just because he
believes
the people might be involved in a plot. We have to be certain, completely certain, of their guilt and complicity, and right now I don’t see how we’re going to achieve that.’

‘I think we’re back to Plan B,’ Tremayne said, his voice on an even keel again. ‘We have to identify Voss’s stateroom, and then I have to get inside.’

11 April 1912
HMS
D4

There are few places quite as lonely as the open ocean. Only people who have been to sea, and who have crossed the vast distances between the continents, can truly appreciate the fact that planet Earth is essentially a world of water, the deep-blue oceans scarred here and there by patches of land that rise above its surface. And the old expression ‘ships that pass in the night’ becomes particularly apposite when it is describing the reality – two tiny self-contained communities braving the waves in their fragile steel shells – rather than simply a metaphor.

Lieutenant Bernard Hutchinson had spent more months at sea than he could comfortably count, but most of the time he had either been within sight of land, or at the very least he had known that there were harbours within a day or two’s sail from his location. Ever since the west coast of Ireland had receded from view behind them, that comforting thought had vanished. He wasn’t venturing into uncharted territory – his boat had charts covering his entire route, of course, and his navigation instruments told him exactly where he was – but he was certainly breaking new ground in taking a submarine so far out into the ocean.

He was also uncomfortably aware that they had now travelled beyond the point where turning back was an option. Travelling on the surface at the boat’s best speed had consumed prodigious quantities of diesel fuel and, quite literally, if the oiler which had been tasked to rendezvous with them failed to appear, he had no hope of returning safely to any port. When the diesel fuel ran out, he could continue for perhaps fifty miles using battery power alone, but once that was exhausted as well, the boat would be dead in the water, and at the mercy of the waves.

Which was why Hutchinson had climbed up to the top of the conning tower at first light that morning, and had stayed there almost ever since, scanning the horizon for any sign of the vessel they were supposed to meet.

He’d reduced speed marginally, just by a knot or two, to conserve a little of the remaining fuel, and had altered course slightly to port to cope with a gentle swell that was running towards him from the south-west, and which had caused the boat to start corkscrewing. But neither the speed reduction nor the heading change had any significant effect on his route. Hutchinson knew exactly where his boat was, and precisely where the oiler was supposed to be.

But as far as he could see, it wasn’t.

The horizon seemed to be completely empty. No ships of any sort were visible in any direction, as indeed none had been the previous day either. They were completely alone in the vastness of the north Atlantic.

He swung his binoculars from the bow of the submarine around to the starboard beam, and then back again all the way to the port beam, covering an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees. Still nothing.

He rubbed his tired eyes with his hand, blinked a few times and then repeated the scan, with the same result. Or was it? A faint smudge, the slightest possible discolouration, above the horizon, fine on the starboard bow. There were a few clouds in the sky, quite low down, and for an instant he wondered if that’s what he was looking at: just a slightly darker cloud formation, maybe the harbinger of a storm.

Hutchinson altered the focus of his binoculars as he strained to make out exactly what he was seeing. It didn’t look like a cloud. It looked more like a faint almost vertical line, and for a few seconds he hardly dared to take a breath, his concentration was so absolute.

And then he did breathe again, because now there was no doubt. He knew exactly what he was looking at. It was a plume of dark smoke being emitted from the funnel of a steamship. And he knew that because now he could see the top of the funnel as well as it appeared over the horizon. Whatever the vessel was, it seemed to be heading directly towards his position.

Hutchinson bent to the voice pipe and ordered a slight change of heading, just enough to put the approaching ship directly in front of his bow, and continued to watch as the two vessels closed with each other.

Within twenty minutes, he was able to identify the ship, and knew that his silent prayers had been answered. The shape of the oiler was quite unmistakable, and as soon as it closed to a distance of a mile or so he confirmed the vessel’s identity using Morse code, the messages exchanged by signalling lamps.

Now they had to undertake the difficult task of manoeuvring alongside the much larger vessel. Again the signalling lamps proved invaluable, as the crew of the oiler explained precisely what their vessel was going to do, and how the submarine should react. The oiler commenced a gentle turn to take her bow around to the south-west, so that the ship was facing the oncoming swell. Once the vessel was established in that position, her screw turning slowly to give her steerage way, Hutchinson ordered the submarine to manoeuvre slowly around to the starboard side of her hull, where fenders had already been lowered to the waterline to prevent any collisions.

For a few seconds the two dissimilar vessels matched speed, side by side, then orders were shouted on the oiler, and two crew members threw lines down from their deck onto the much lower fore and aft decks of the submarine.

These ropes, of course, were only heaving lines, far too weak to secure the two vessels together, but they were attached to mooring lines, fat brown ropes of hemp with enormous tensile strength.

‘Get those lines secure, men, as quickly as you can,’ Hutchinson yelled from the conning tower, watching as members of his crew pulled on the heaving lines and dragged the heavier ropes down to the deck. The aft mooring rope was attached quickly, looped round the steel bollard on the rear deck of the submarine, but for some reason the forward rope seemed to be giving trouble. Two crewmen were struggling with it, trying to get it properly fastened. At last they seemed satisfied, and both men stepped back, moving out of the danger zone as the capstans on the oiler began taking up the slack in the mooring ropes.