Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  ‘That’s clever Scott, that’s really bloody clever. Just remind me, you got your degree did you?’ and then Amy was heading for the door. ‘I’d really been looking forward to spending the evening with you, but seeing as the genius with the degree seems intent on behaving like an emotionally crippled teenager I think I’d rather go out with Joth. If that’s all right with you, of course?’ She didn’t wait for his reply. ‘And don’t bother texting.’

  That night, the day’s events fresh in his mind and Amy’s words still ringing in his ears, Hunter’s insomnia had been worse than ever. After brooding some he’d continued to work at the new codes Sinclair had given him. Then, worn out and frustrated, and in danger of nodding off in front of his laptop, he’d kicked around the kitchen for a while feeling sorry for himself, careering wildly between anger and ignominy. In an effort to clear his head and with the house strangely quiet, he’d contemplated sitting up and waiting for Amy to return. He composed and then re-composed his apology, but when she didn’t reply to his texts Hunter decided to call it a night. He checked his laptop before getting into bed. The algorithm was still working away at the problem and so he left the machine glowing busily on his table and tried, wholly unsuccessfully, to sleep.

  Hunter wasn’t sure what time it was when Joth and Amy returned. He listened as they scaled each creaking stair and then, with Amy teetering unsteadily by their bed, he pretended to sleep. Slowly she took off her top, then awkwardly eased out of her jeans, giggling with the effort. Hunter watched her in her bra and pants, her beautiful hair falling over her breasts. She took a gulp of water from the glass by their bed, then she was unhooking her bra, shaking it down her arms, letting it fall to the floor. Hunter was breathing hard as she slipped into bed next to him.

  ✽✽✽

  With Amy sleeping peacefully by his side Hunter sank once more, deep into insomnia’s abusive grasp. He stared at their bedroom walls, finding new and terrifying creatures in every cheerless shadow and unlit corner. Eventually he knew he would get out of bed and prowl around the house, but for now he was desperate to cling to the suggestion of sleep. Every night there was the hope that his body would reset itself, like an unreliable clock, its cogs would suddenly align, its movement synchronize and he would fall into a blissful and unchallenged slumber, and yet every night, at exactly 2 o’clock he would tire of waiting and, angry with himself and his inability to achieve what everybody else seemed to take for granted, would capitulate. This evening however his routine, such as it was, had been disturbed. He watched the glowing figures of the clock radio next to their bed, he watched as the minutes ticked inexorably by. It was 4 o’clock in the morning and he had still not slept. Perhaps he would give Amy’s DVD collection another chance, even if there wasn’t a film which interested him, he thought with a crooked grin, it might help him sleep? Then there were the pills he’d discovered earlier. He left their bed and quietly opened the drawer in his desk. There they were. He couldn’t tell exactly what they were in the dark of their room but one sleeping tablet was much the same as another. Reluctantly he made the decision and was just about to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen when he noticed the screen on his laptop light up. A new plain text. Hunter put any plans of sleep firmly and determinedly behind him. With Amy snoring drunkenly, he tapped away at his MacBook and then the Brother Printer was producing a black and white copy of the five lines. He read them through quickly to confirm that he couldn’t translate them himself, threw on an old dressing gown and went into the hall and along to Joth’s bedroom, the sleeping tablets reassuringly forgotten. He didn’t knock. Joth never had any of his girlfriends back to stay. He made it a rule and Hunter often wondered how many of them actually knew where he lived. Confident his friend would be alone he bowled in and threw the main light switch.

  ‘Time to go to work my little South African friend,’ he said cheerfully pulling duvet and pillows from Joth’s head.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding, Scott? What time is it?’

  ‘I’ve got a new one. Plain text. Just came through. German.’

  ‘Scott, it’s...’ Joth screwed up his eyes and tried to focus on the clock by his bed, ‘Christ Scott, it’s a quarter past four.’

  ‘It’s German, not Italian.’

  ‘I don’t care. Go to bed.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling...’

  ‘Scott! We both know you don’t have feelings, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. The only way I’m doing anything right now is if the house is on fire. Is the house on fire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well will you please fuck off then. I’m sure there are better things you could be doing with Amy?’

  The initial excitement was beginning to wear off and Hunter began to wonder if perhaps he had taken things a little too far. He placed the A4 sheet at the bottom of Joth’s chaotic bed and made to leave. As he reached the door he turned back into the bedroom to check if Joth had reconsidered.

  ‘Sod off, Scott.’

  Clearly he had not.

  ‘And turn the bloody light off.’

  ✽✽✽

  At breakfast Amy sat in her pyjamas, her hair piled with practised indifference on top of her head, listlessly pushing a mug of coffee around whilst Hunter scrambled some eggs.

  ‘How’s the head?’

  ‘Better than Joth’s I should image. God, that boy can drink.’ She took another pull on her coffee and shook her head. ‘Plus I think he may have had an unwanted visitor in the night?’

  ‘He wasn’t the only one.’

  ‘I didn’t notice you complaining at the time.’

  Beneath her tousled hair Amy’s eyes twinkled at Hunter and he could have dragged her back to bed there and then had she not needed to go to work. A truce had definitely been declared and perhaps sensing Hunter’s intentions Amy changed the subject.

  ‘You’ll think about it, won’t you?’ she asked as tactfully as her hangover would allow.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The job. Alec.’

  Hunter hadn’t given Alec or his job a great deal of thought because he’d never seriously contemplated approaching Amy’s ex or relying on his benevolence.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  They sat quietly and listened to the sounds of Joth coming to terms with the world before finally hauling himself out of bed.

  Breakfast was nearly over when the muscular South African belatedly drew up to the table. Amy took one look at him, his bloodshot eyes, and deathly pallor and both she and Hunter burst out laughing.

  ‘Jah, jah. Very funny waking me up in the middle of the night with your silly bloody schoolboy games.’ Joth threw two pieces of paper in Hunter’s direction before shakily pouring himself a coffee. ‘I should charge you for those.’

  Hunter snatched them up. The first was indeed from a weather station confirming that everything was as it had been the previous day. At the end of the message were temperatures, barometric readings and co-ordinates which he was happy leaving to the professor to decypher. After reading the transcript through several times Hunter felt a terrible wave of anti-climax. He eagerly took up the second sheet.

  ‘I think you’ll like that one better,’ Joth spluttered through a mouthful of breakfast cereal.

  Forced to submerge during attack, depth charges. Last enemy location 08:30h, Marqu AJ 9863, 220 degrees, 8 nautical miles, I am following the enemy. Barometer 1014 Millibar tendency falling, NNO 4, visibility 10.

  ‘Now that’s the sort of thing. Bloody Hell, Joth, this is actually from a U-boat. Wait until Sinclair sees this, he’ll shit a brick,’ and before Amy could say another word, Hunter rushed upstairs to change and, all thoughts of any job long forgotten, take the first bus into Cambridge.

  ✽✽✽

  David stood at his kitchen window and looked out over the walled garden below. The garden which in recent years had become his own private sanctuary. The previous autumn two large trees had come down allowing in more light to the shadier areas. He’d taken gr
eat care in replanting those beds, testing and re-testing the soil before choosing plants he hoped would flourish. Then the ground had been meticulously prepared, here with lime, there potash or bone meal. In the months which followed David had created two new paths. He’d laid special cloth to keep the weeds down and then painstakingly raked over tonnes of fine pea gravel. All his hard work had been worth it and now he was able to enjoy the fruits of the previous year’s labours. He took a sip of coffee and nodded slowly to himself. It was time. Everything was in place and he’d been avoiding this for far too long. He put down his coffee and considered his clothes. His top would do, he supposed, but perhaps he ought to roll up his sleeves and put on some different shoes.

  A puff of dust issued from the attic as David released the hatch door, causing him instinctively to look away. He hooked a long metal rod into the legs of the extendable ladders and pulled, but this time as the ladders awkwardly descended towards him and more dust fell from the space above, he shaded his eyes. The house was nearly three hundred years old and consequently the loft space was small and cramped, initially comprising of nothing more than bare brickwork and beams, but David had worked solidly through one long hot summer to insulate and floor the area, the attic becoming his own private sauna at times. Although he hadn’t been up there for years, he held a clear mental picture of where everything was to be found, right down to the electric light switch he’d screwed into a ceiling joist conveniently at arm’s length. He briefly groped around before flicking the switch, the naked bulb, hanging from its joist above, flooding the room with thin pale yellow light.

  Although David was confident what he would find, when his head poked above the floor and into the body of the attic he was still surprised. There were a pair of well-loved boat rods, their rings covered in cobwebs, next to them a slightly rusty and shamefully neglected set of golf clubs. When David had moved out to the country an old work colleague had suggested he take up the game, but it had never suited him. Golf, it was said, was a good walk ruined, but for David the issues were not with the game itself, but with its players. He found the many social interactions and conventions a struggle. The men were individually pleasant enough, but put them in a group and they enjoyed nothing more than to moan apologetically about their wives and crow about the money they earned in a way which David found both offensive and vulgar in equal measure. If it had purely been a case of propelling a dimpled white ball a couple of hundred yards and then into a hole with a stick, David imagined he might well have quite enjoyed the sport. It was the people who ruined it for him.

  Next to the golf bag a wall of carefully stacked cardboard boxes. These he knew were full of old tax returns and documents relating to the purchase of the house. The box he was looking for had been placed somewhere on its own and not with other things. His mother’s sewing machine. Old suit cases from a time when they’d travelled. A set of hi-fi speakers which, even if they still worked, would need a hell of a clean. And there, at the far end of the loft space, two cardboard boxes standing very much apart from the others. Silently cursing himself for not bringing a torch he stooped and struggling with the dark debilitating shadows cast by that one solitary bulb David was soon crouched over the boxes. The first he discounted immediately, understanding what that contained. It’s neighbour he carefully prised open. Peering inside the dark void, he moved round to let as much of the limited light shine in as possible. No, not a void, a black plastic bin bag carefully wrapped in brown packing tape to keep the dust out. Yes, this was it and no further investigation was needed. He closed the box and after one last look around the space to see what other treasures languished within, turned off the light and left.

  2

  Professor Frederick Sinclair had been every bit as excited by the latest Enigma codes as Hunter had predicted. Contacts from U-boats were extremely rare and the implication of their latest find was not wasted on the professor. His stock was rising. Hunter handed over the sheets of recently printed German with Joth’s hurriedly scrawled translations and then his work was done and the familiar wave of disappointment and regret swept over him. To make matters worse, the professor had no fresh codes for him to work on. Hunter reflected as he left his study that he had become a victim of his own success. Now he would have to find a job. On that point Amy had made herself abundantly clear and if he was going to take a job which would satisfy himself in any way intellectually, he would probably have to approach her ex-boyfriend, Alec Bell.

  He sat in his favourite spot in Fellows’ Gardens, his back pushed up hard against a cherry tree. The rhododendrons and azaleas were in full flower and putting on an unashamedly impressive display of pinks and reds, each bidding to outdo its neighbour. Usually he came to the gardens with a crossword or to work on his laptop but today there was something more serious on his mind. Alec Bell had been his closest friend and rival throughout university. They had done everything together; got drunk together, studied together, holidayed together. They’d spent a glorious week wandering Tuscany’s ancient hill top villages, eating pizza, drinking cheap, week local red wine and talking maths. Always talking maths. Their families had become close too, with dinner parties and idle promises of shared holidays. And then there had been Amy.

  When Hunter first met Amy she and Alec had been a couple. The three had hung out together, gone drinking and Amy had tried, much to Hunter’s annoyance and confusion, to set him up with any number of friends. Then Alec’s career had taken off and he had started spending more and more time out of the country, the university sending their latest prodigy to seminars around the world, initially to attend and network and then latterly as a lecturer in his own right. Amy and Alec were becoming ships that passed in the night, whilst she and Hunter were spending more and more time together. Then one evening they’d finally summoned up the courage to talk about their feelings for one another. The following morning they’d woken up in the same bed and everything had changed. Alec, in that way that he had, shrugged it off. He’d even seemed genuinely pleased for his friends. Hunter couldn’t help feeling that perhaps Alec hadn’t always been as devoted to Amy as he might have whilst halfway around the world on the lecture circuit and to assuage his guilt had pictured his friend conducting sordid little affairs in grubby foreign hotel rooms. Hunter was no fool. He knew that if things had been different, if Alec had been more attentive, more dependable, Amy would probably have stayed with him. Although he didn’t doubt she loved him, in the back of his mind was the ever present notion that he was in some way inferior, second best, a poor substitute for his playboy, globetrotting rival and friend. But, for whatever reason, and for the timebeing at least, she had decided to stay with him.

  When they graduated the university immediately offered Alec a job on its staff, making him one of the youngest lecturers in its history. Hunter attended some of his early talks, and grudgingly had to admit that his friend wasn’t just a gifted mathematician, he was an engaging and charismatic speaker too. Alec’s lectures, which had started rather modestly less than a year before were now eagerly anticipated events in the College diary, with students, particularly young female undergraduates, coming from far and wide to attend. In the meantime Hunter sat in his student digs working on his algorithm and his Enigma codes. And now Amy was asking, no insisting, that he go and beg Alec for a job. A job which he knew entailed being Alec’s dogsbody. He grabbed at a tuft of grass and yanked it violently from the ground. He wasn’t sure he could do that. He was damned if he was going to be Alec’s flunky. He would rather get a job sweeping the roads.

  Hunter had been sitting in the same spot for over an hour and yet he felt every bit as confused and conflicted as he had done on leaving the house. Dejectedly he gathered up his paper, its crossword disappointingly incomplete, and thrust it into his messenger bag. Maybe the bus ride home would clear his head, bring him some answers? And if that didn’t help he would just have to sit down with Amy and talk it through. Perhaps if Joth would lend him some money he might even take her o
ut for a romantic evening, something to eat and then maybe a film? The Picturehouse was showing Casablanca.

  The bus stopped on the other side of a busy roundabout and Hunter walked the remaining three hundred yards along a row of terraced houses. He opened his front door and saw immediately the thin brown envelope, folded neatly in half to ease negotiations with their dangerously aggressive letter box. Even before he had had a chance to examine it Hunter was surprised by its very presence. The post didn’t normally come until much later in the day. But then again there really was no particular pattern to the post these days. He swung the bag off his shoulder, bent down and picked up the envelope. No stamp or postmark. That explained the Royal Mail’s involvement, or lack there of. Hand delivered, the fold leaving a creased ridge which ran the length of the carefully typed white rectangular sticker bearing his name.

  Without thinking Hunter opened the self-adhesive strip and removed the envelope’s contents. A single sheet of white A4 paper. He turned it over. Four rows of letters, fifty-one in total, each in upper case, each grouped together in a batch of four and separated from the next by a hyphen. Four groups on each row except the last one which contained only one short group of three. Clearly a code. He frowned. Aside from that the page was blank. Nothing to say where or who it had come from. He looked closely at the letters themselves. They had been typed in the centre of the page. He couldn’t swear to it but the font appeared modern, Verdana or Helvetica. Either way certainly not from the nineteen-forties and certainly not the product of a typewriter but of a modern printer which meant a modern source, probably a computer or laptop, and probably a laser printer as the quality seemed good having none of the inconsistencies associated with inkjet printing. He turned it over several more times in an effort to glean any last piece of information. Perhaps it was a practical joke sent by someone at the university. Alec was the most obvious candidate. It was just the sort of thing he might do. Hunter briefly considered not bothering to decode it at all but that thought soon passed. Maybe the deliverer of the mysterious code was still in the neighbourhood? He didn’t remember passing anyone as he’d walked from the bus stop, certainly no one he’d recognised. But then he supposed they could just as equally have left in the opposite direction. Amy was still at work, but maybe Joth had seen someone? Perhaps this was Joth’s handiwork? Payback for Hunter’s nocturnal escapade the other day. But that didn’t sit quite right, it wasn’t the South African’s style.