The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  Miss Lind continued, listening to what Baer said and then going on again. ‘Baer turned out to be right, but Moritz was in charge, so when they were forced into a corner and cooked up the idea of defecting, Moritz brought Althammer along. And that’s exactly what Althammer wanted: a chance to destroy their secret on the ground.’

  She and Felix Baer spoke together in quick, fluent German, nodding in agreement, comparing notes. She reached into her uniform pocket, fished out a handkerchief, and gave it to him so he could wipe his face.

  I didn’t know what the German meant, but I knew what she was telling him.

  Althammer failed. He’s dead. Your boss, Eberhard Moritz, isn’t hurt. My commanding officer is on his way back from Africa. Felix Baer straightened up a little. I have the Enigma machine, and copies of the documents you brought, and they are safe. Beneath the bruising and the grime, his face was alight with hope. He glanced at me.

  ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to understand,’ I said. I meant it for both of them.

  He said something else. Elisabeth Lind’s mouth twisted into a crooked little smile as she translated. ‘He asks if you would play some music.’

  The gramophone was gone. If I started at the piano – Jane was upstairs waiting for breakfast, and she wouldn’t stay put if she caught wind of music down here without her. To be honest, why should she? I knew how she hated to miss anything. But she couldn’t come down the stairs.

  ‘I want Jane to be able to hear,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my flute and play it in the hall.’

  The tea on Jane’s breakfast tray had cooled. I knew she wouldn’t care, and took it up with me.

  She sat gazing out the big bay window in Room Number Four, staring far away over the rooftops of the village and the wide sea beyond.

  But she turned her head as I came in and gave me a small half-smile.

  ‘I was wondering where you’d got to!’ she said.

  ‘Felix Baer is here,’ I told her. ‘He asked for music.’ I screwed the pieces of the flute together. The case was cracked and battered, but my flute was all right. Like me: jarred but undamaged. I stood up, took a deep breath, and played an F-scale. Still warming up, I started ‘Jane and Louisa’.

  Jane hadn’t forgotten the words. She sang in harmony with the flute, a third below the melody. ‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home …’

  She broke off.

  ‘Are they going to arrest me again?’ she asked.

  A chatty police inspector had come round in the afternoon yesterday, and he hadn’t said anything about arresting her. But he hadn’t let her off, either. Sorry about your fall, I expect you are quite dazed – you must have a doctor in to look at your arm! Don’t be careless with the gas fire.

  I wondered if she was hoping that they would arrest her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  I stood halfway down the stairs, exactly between Felix Baer in the public bar and Jane Warner in the best double room. What can I play for them both? I wondered, feeling self-conscious and awkward.

  Put your shoulders back, Lula, I imagined Mummy saying. Make your Daddy proud.

  Mendelssohn.

  But I couldn’t remember the intricacies of the middle part of the Hebrides Overture. Rhapsody in Blue? I wouldn’t make it the whole way through that, either; not without reading music.

  And then I remembered the Bach ‘Ave Maria’, whose glorious long slow tones were easier to pick out and linger over: Johanna von Arnim’s first record.

  And as I played, I wondered if there had been music on Daddy’s sinking ship, a bugle playing ‘Reveille’ or ‘The Last Post’. Or had he sung hymns in his deep, rolling voice, the way we’d sung in the storm-tossed rowboat at Lime Cay? I wondered if Mummy had been humming to herself when the bomb fell, one of her students’ exam pieces, or a hymn for someone’s wedding. Music, right till the end.

  I’d never know. I hadn’t been with them.

  I thought of Jamie in the moonlight over the North Sea last night, with Silver next to him and Chip Wingate alone in the back.

  I didn’t finish the Bach. In the hall below me, the telephone rang, and Ellen ran to answer it.

  Ellen:

  ‘The Limehouse, Volunteer McEwen speaking,’ I croaked into the receiver.

  ‘Hello, Ellen, pet, it’s Phyllis.’ She was hoarse too. ‘I thought Mrs C. should know the latest.’

  Dread clung like a strangling rope around my throat and I didn’t ask her to go on. But she did anyway.

  ‘Harry Morrow landed at Deeside five hours ago. Textbook landing. He didn’t taxi, though, just shut down the engines on the runway, so the ground crew ran out to see what was going on. And when they opened up the hatch they found all three of those Australian boys were already dead.’

  ‘All three of them!’ I gasped.

  She’d told it without a sob, but now she began to weep.

  ‘However did they get home if they were already dead?’ I cried.

  ‘Dougie and Gavin had been dead for hours. But Harry, that lovely boy, I was dancing with him only last week—’ She sobbed. ‘He hung on and hung on until he made it home. One lung and his stomach full of holes and somehow he just kept flying until he was home, and he even managed to land safely, and – what was he thinking all that time that he managed to hang on so long? How he tried to kiss me in the porch of the Limehouse that warm night last December? Or just staring desperately at that stupid picture of his dogs taped to his instrument panel and longing to see them again? And then—’

  I sat bent over myself on the stool in the telephone cupboard under the stairs, listening to her keening, and I felt as if those bullets were in my own lungs and stomach.

  ‘The rest of Pimms?’ I choked.

  ‘Failed to return.’ Phyllis took a breath. ‘They might have got away, though. You know what Scotty and Ignacy are like, flying foxes. They’ll hide in cloud, hedge-hop at sea level, whatever it takes. If they had to ditch in the water or make a crash landing in the middle of the Highlands, it might be days before we hear from them …’

  Phyllis’s blethering trailed off. If they ditched in the North Sea or crashed on some mountaintop they’d likely just drown or freeze to death.

  ‘I’m glad Rob’s lads in A-Flight made it,’ I breathed. ‘Give him our best.’

  ‘I will,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘And ring us again when you hear anything else.’

  My throat closed up, thinking about those three young lads bringing themselves home on luck and hope, dead men even before they landed.

  ‘I will,’ Phyllis repeated. ‘Tell Mrs Campbell.’

  Louisa:

  I couldn’t believe they were all gone.

  I just couldn’t believe it.

  But the day crawled by, and Phyllis didn’t ring back. Next morning Elisabeth Lind went with Felix Baer and Eberhard Moritz in a transport plane to deliver the Enigma machine to Intelligence. She caught hold of me before she left, smart and official in her uniform with her peaked cap fixed neatly over her braided hair. But she was pale and pink-eyed beneath the perfect make-up, as if she’d spent the night crying.

  ‘Louisa, can I borrow you downstairs?’ she said. ‘I’ve only ever flown once before, so—’

  She held up a sixpence.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me which wishing coins are Pimms’s ones. I want to put mine with them.’

  ‘They don’t do a thing,’ I said hollowly. ‘They’re superstitious nonsense. They—’

  My voice rose to a sob. Couldn’t I have done anything else – convinced Jamie not to fly that way, that night? What if I’d got Felix Baer and Elisabeth Lind together earlier? What if I’d gone straight to Wing Commander Cromwell?

  None of it seemed possible, but the what-ifs kept spinning in my head like a gramophone turntable that wouldn’t stop.

  Miss Lind reached up and caressed my cheek with soft fingertips.

  ‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘I know.’

  I couldn’t imagine
what it was like having to pretend your brother hadn’t just been lost at sea. Or wherever he was lost.

  ‘I want my sixpence to be there too,’ she said. ‘And I’m never coming back for it. I want it to be up there forever with the rest of them.’

  I swallowed and nodded. ‘I’ll show you which is Jamie’s,’ I told her softly.

  *

  The moon was waning and the freezing fog returned and Windyedge was quiet.

  Phyllis wrote her horrid reports by the fire in the Limehouse. The ground crew helped with the heavy work as we tidied up Room Five. I did not believe anyone could ever sleep in it again, but we put it back to being Mrs Campbell’s second-best double room. Everything in it still worked.

  The policemen didn’t come back straightaway, but a doctor looked at Jane’s wrist, and said it would be fine and gave her strengthening exercises. After a few days, Ellen helped me bring her downstairs. Nobody fooled about on the piano. We couldn’t play records, though we read some of the album notes out loud. We swapped newspapers, doing the crosswords and fine-combing the casualty lists. The telephone never rang, and there were no planes to count in.

  Exactly one week after the limekilns were bombed, as permitted hours began at half past five, I unlocked the front door for Mrs Campbell. Standing in the vestibule, I heard tyre chains and an unfamiliar engine labouring up the lane. I opened the door to look, just as a low-slung red motor car coughed to a stalled halt in front of the Limehouse.

  Flight Lieutenant James Gordon Erskine Murray Beaufort-Stuart climbed out.

  He didn’t bother to open the car door. He crouched on the seat and swung his legs over the edge of the open top as if it were a hatch on a Blenheim bomber.

  For a moment I thought he was a ghost.

  Never mind all my modern education and not being a fool-fool country gal. I actually thought he must be a dead man walking. I thought it must be a ghost-car driven by a ghost.

  He was wearing the same flight suit and sheepskin-lined leather jacket he’d taken off in a week ago. They were stiff with water damage and crusted with salt. The thin, fair beginnings of a beard stubbled his filthy face. His eyes were unchanged, clear, bright hazel with a touch of madness in them.

  ‘Hello, Louisa,’ he rasped, and I held the front door open for him.

  I was too shocked to touch him. I didn’t dare. I didn’t – he’d suffered something I didn’t understand, and it scared me like nothing had ever scared me before. What if it was my fault? Had I helped send him into that hell?

  I couldn’t do anything but follow him into the house.

  He limped to the bar.

  Nancy Campbell looked up and dropped a glass. It smashed into a thousand pieces on the cold stone floor.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Jamie Stuart,’ Ellen whispered. ‘God be thanked.’

  He didn’t look at any of us. He raised his head and scanned the oak beam above the bar, all shiny with shillings and sixpences and threepenny bits. He reached up and twitched out one coin.

  ‘Silver promised to buy me a pint,’ he said hoarsely. His voice grated as if he hadn’t used it since the last time we saw him.

  The thin sixpence clinked on the brass top of the bar as Jamie slapped it down. For a few seconds he held his hand spread out there over the coin, staring at his fingers in fascination and disgust. Ellen and Phyllis and Jane were all sitting and couldn’t see his hand. But Mrs Campbell could see it from where she faced him over the bar, and I was standing just one step behind him and I saw it too.

  His little finger and ring finger were black as tar, black as bitumen, as if he had dipped them in ink to the second knuckles. The skin faded through grey and blue and green and purple back to where his fingers joined his hand. The rest of the hand was pale and filthy and covered with angry red blisters. But it was alive. The black fingers were dead.

  Mrs Campbell let out another sob. ‘What—?’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘The others are the same,’ he said. He laid his left hand on the bar lined up with his right hand, all ten fingers spread flat. The last two fingers of his left hand were mostly as blackened and dead as the ones on the right.

  ‘Frostbite,’ he said. ‘It happened on the boat that picked me up. I was all right in the water – it was warmer than the air.’ He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. ‘I got lucky. It was a fishing boat working with the Norwegian resistance – they had machine guns hidden in oil barrels. They heard my Mayday on their radio and came looking for us. But it took two more days to make landfall in Shetland, and it was bloody cold sitting on the deck.’

  ‘Us?’ whispered Mrs Campbell.

  ‘Give us a drink and I’ll tell you what happened,’ Jamie said, rapping the sixpence on the countertop. ‘I’m parched.’

  Ellen:

  He told his dreadful tale in a dull voice. We listened without daring to speak, though Nancy sobbed quietly all through the last bit. When he’d finished he wrapped both hands around his heavy ale as if it could warm them, and raised his glass.

  ‘Flying Officer David Silvermont,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Absent friends. Madeira and Pimms. Now we’re official aces.’

  He drank slowly, and that’s when I saw his blackened fingers.

  ‘Och, Jamie-lad!’ I exclaimed in alarm. ‘Why aren’t you in hospital?’

  ‘I had to come here. Silver told me to buy myself a drink with his tanner at Nancy’s, and I’m doing it.’

  I wanted to shake him. Here he was alive, his two hands ripe with gangrene, and he’d nothing better to do than toss back a pint in the pub?

  ‘You know my own twin brother nearly lost a leg with blood poisoning after Dunkirk last spring!’ I said furiously. ‘If you don’t get those fingers off they will kill you.’

  He shrugged. ‘Can’t feel ’em. Stopped worrying about ’em when they stopped hurting. Can’t feel my toes, either, but I haven’t looked. I can drive. I bet I can fly, too.’

  He sighed, and put his head down on his arms on the bar.

  ‘I went home first,’ Jamie mumbled, his head sticking out of the wool collar of his leather jacket like a tortoise. ‘One boat to Orkney and another to the mainland, and then I got a ride with a forestry crew. But I should have come straight here. The moment I got down from the lorry I wanted to be here. So I took the car and drove myself. It’s not far.’

  ‘Did you come in your mother’s car? Does she know you took it? Where did you get the petrol? Is there enough left to get to Aberdeen?’

  ‘Yes, no, don’t know,’ he answered wearily. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Hospital,’ I ordered. ‘Now. I’ll drive.’

  Louisa:

  We heard the car motor start, stop, start again. Then it roared away down the hill with its tyre chains clattering.

  Jane bent at the waist, leaned over, and toppled a stack of peat bricks with one hand. She shoved them into the fire with her foot.

  ‘Louisa is shivering,’ she said. ‘Louisa is always cold.’

  ‘Well goodness, let’s build the fire up at once,’ Phyllis exclaimed. ‘This place is never properly warm. What did Sergeant Lind say – the ghosts will leave if they get warm enough!’

  Practical, well-behaved Phyllis suddenly leaped to her feet and slammed peat bricks into the fire. She grabbed the bellows and fanned the flames. Jane tried to reach around her with the poker and banged it on the hearth, not doing much but making a great noise. Phyllis shoved more peats on. Flames licked around the corners of the blocks and grew taller.

  It was wonderful.

  In a minute it became the biggest, brightest blaze we ever had in that house. It filled the room with rosy light and threw streamers of gold up the chimney. As it burned higher, light caught on the rows of copper and silver pressed into the wood, dull and burnished and shining.

  ‘Build it up—’

  I couldn’t in a million years work out who to blame for what happened next.

  It was Jane urging us on. She is the one who ke
pt saying, ‘More fuel! Another log!’ But it was me who took the poker from Jane’s frail grasp and stirred up the embers and turned over the flaming blocks of peat. Phyllis is the one who kept putting more of them in the fire. And Nan Campbell didn’t ever tell us to stop.

  In the blazing heat, something fell gleaming like a raindrop full of sunlight and hit the stone hearth with a clink.

  Then there was another. Clink. Clink – another. Then half a dozen all at once, clinkclinkclinketyclinketyclink – as if someone had thrown a handful of coins into the fireplace.

  We all fell still, listening and staring.

  The heat of our inferno was sucking moisture out of the mantel, shrinking it as it dried, and the old wood was letting go of its wishing coins.

  One by one they popped out of the black oak beam and plinked on the hearth, pennies and tuppences and silver threepenny bits put there by generations of fishermen and crofters, and by the young men who died in the first Great War.

  Alan Anderson. Ben Knox. Cammy McBride.

  The fire was warming them up, and the coins and the ghosts were leaping from the thick walls.

  Duncan Campbell.

  With a great sob, Mrs Campbell grabbed her heather broom and tried to sweep the coins from the hearth into the fire. But they fell out of the mantel faster than she could sweep.

  Clinkclinkclinkety clink-clink-clink

  It was like Morse code spelling the names of dead men.

  In a frenzy, Nan accidentally swept the bundle of dried heather into the fire too. The broom flared up in her hands like an incendiary bomb.

  She yelped and dropped it. Her apron was on fire as well. She ripped it off, threw it into the blaze, and leaped away from the hearth.