Enigma

by Robert Harris

  ‘You don’t want to know, Walter. Believe me.’

  ‘Troubles of the heart?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Weitzman mumbled a couple of words in Yiddish that might have been a curse and continued to smoke.

  About thirty yards away, a group of workmen were huddled around a brazier, finishing a tea break. They dispersed reluctantly, trailing pickaxes and spades across the hard ground, and Jericho had a sudden memory of himself as a boy, holding hands with his mother, walking along a seaside promenade, his spade clattering on the concrete road behind him. Somewhere beyond the trees, a generator kicked into life sending a scattering of rooks cawing into the sky.

  ‘Walter, what’s the German Book Room?’

  ‘I’d better get back,’ said Weitzman. He licked the ends of his thumb and forefinger and nipped off the glowing tip of his cigarette, slipping the unsmoked portion into his breast pocket. Tobacco was far too precious to waste even a few shreds.

  ‘Please, Walter …’

  ‘Ach!’ Weitzman made a sudden gesture of disgust with his arm, as if sweeping Jericho aside, and began making his way, unsteadily but wonderfully quickly for a man of his age, down the side of the hut towards the path. Jericho had to scramble to keep pace with him.

  ‘You ask too much, you know –’

  ‘I know I do.’

  ‘I mean, my God, Coker already suspects I am a Nazi spy. Can you believe that? I may be a Jew, but for him one German is no different from another. Which, of course, is precisely our argument. I suppose I should be flattered.’

  ‘I wouldn’t – it’s just – there’s nobody else …’

  A pair of sentries with rifles rounded the corner and strolled towards them. Weitzman clamped his jaw shut and abruptly turned right off the path towards the tennis court. Jericho followed him. Weitzman opened the gate and they stepped on to the asphalt. The court had been put in – at Churchill’s personal instigation, so it was said – two years earlier. It hadn’t been used since the autumn. The white lines were barely visible beneath the frost. Drifts of leaves had collected against the chain-link fence. Weitzman closed the gate after them and walked towards the net post.

  ‘It’s all changed since we started, Tom. Nine-tenths of the people in the hut I don’t even know any more.’ He kicked moodily at the leaves and Jericho noticed for the first time how small his feet were; dancer’s feet. ‘I’ve grown old in this place. I can remember a time when we thought we were geniuses if we read fifty messages a week. Do you know what the rate is now?’

  Jericho shook his head.

  ‘Three thousand a day.’

  ‘Good God.’ That’s a hundred and twenty-five an hour, thought Jericho, that’s one every thirty seconds …

  ‘Is she in trouble, then, your girl?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, yes – yes, she is.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. I like her. She laughs at my jokes. Women who laugh at my jokes must be cherished. Especially if they are young. And pretty.’

  ‘Walter …’

  Weitzman turned towards Hut 3. He had chosen his ground well, with the instinct of a man who has been forced at some time, as a matter of personal survival, to learn how to find privacy. Nobody could come up behind them without entering the tennis court. Nobody could approach from the front without being seen. And if anyone was watching from a distance – well, what was there to see but two old colleagues, having a private chat?

  ‘It’s organised like a factory line.’ He curled his fingers into the wire netting. His hands were white with cold. They clenched the steel like claws. ‘The decrypts arrive by conveyor belt from Hut 6. They go first to the Watch for translation – you know that, that’s my post. Two Watches per shift, one for urgent material, the other for back-breaks. Translated Luftwaffe signals are passed to 3A, Army to 3M. A for air, M for military. God in heaven, it’s cold. Are you cold? I’m shaking.’ He pulled out a filthy handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘The duty officers decide what’s important and give it a Z-priority. A single Z is low-grade – Hauptmann Fischer is to be transferred to the German Air Fleet in Italy. A weather report would be three Zs. Five Zs is pure gold – where Rommel will be tomorrow afternoon, an imminent air attack. The intelligence is summarised, then three copies are dispatched – one to SIS in Broadway, one to the appropriate service ministry in Whitehall, one to the relevant commander in the field.’

  ‘And the German Book Room?’

  ‘Every proper name is indexed: every officer, every piece of equipment, every base. For example, Hauptmann Fischer’s transfer may at first seem quite worthless as intelligence. But then you consult the Air Index and you see his last posting was to a radar station in France. Now he is going to Bari. So: the Germans are installing radar in Bari. Let them build it. And then, when it is almost finished, bomb it.’

  ‘And that’s the German Book?’

  ‘No, no.’ Weitzman shook his head crossly, as if Jericho were some dim student at the bottom of his class at Heidelberg. ‘The German Book is the very end of the process. All this paper – the intercept, the decode, the translation, the Z-signal, the list of cross-references, all these thousands of pages – it all comes together at the end to be filed. The German Book is a verbatim transcription of all decoded messages in their original language.’

  ‘Is that an important job?’

  ‘In intellectual terms? No. Purely clerical.’

  ‘But in terms of access? To classified material?’

  ‘Ah. Different.’ Weitzman shrugged. ‘It would depend on the person involved, of course, whether they could be bothered to read what they were handling. Most don’t.’

  ‘But in theory?’

  ‘In theory? On an average day? A girl like Claire would probably see more operational detail about the German armed forces than Adolf Hitler.’ He glanced at Jericho’s incredulous face and smiled. ‘Absurd, isn’t it? What is she? Nineteen? Twenty?’

  ‘Twenty,’ muttered Jericho. ‘She always told me her job was boring.’

  ‘Twenty! I swear it’s the greatest joke in the history of warfare. Look at us: the hare-brained debutante, the weakling intellectual and the half-blind Jew. If only the master race could see what we’re doing to them – sometimes the thought of it is all that keeps me going.’ He held his watch up very close to his face. ‘I must get back. Coker will have issued a warrant for my arrest. I fear I have talked too much.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Oh, I have, I have.’

  He turned towards the gate. Jericho made a move to follow but Weitzman held up a hand to stop him. ‘Why don’t you wait here, Tom? Just for a moment. Let me get clear.’

  He slipped out of the court. As he passed by on the other side of the fence, something seemed to occur to him. He slowed and beckoned Jericho closer to the wire netting.

  ‘Listen,’ he said softly, ‘if you think I can help you again, if you need any more information – please, don’t ask me. I don’t want to know.’

  Before Jericho could answer he had crossed the path and disappeared around the back of Hut 3.

  Within the grounds of Bletchley Park, just beyond the mansion, in the shadow of a fir tree, stood an ordinary red telephone box. Inside it, a young man in motorcycle leathers was finishing a call. Jericho, leaning against the tree, could hear his singsong accent, muffled but audible.

  ‘Right you are … OK, doll … See you.’

  The dispatch rider put the receiver down with a clatter and pushed open the door.

  ‘All yours, pal.’

  The motorcyclist didn’t move away at first. Jericho stood in the kiosk, pretending to fish in his pockets for change, and watched him through the glass. The man adjusted his leggings, put on his helmet, fiddled with the chin strap …

  Jericho waited until he had moved away before dialling zero.

  A woman’s voice said: ‘Operator speaking.’

  ‘Good morning. I’d like to make a call, please, to Kensington double-t
wo five seven.’

  She repeated the number. ‘That’ll be fourpence, caller.’

  A sixty-mile land line connected all Bletchley Park numbers to the Whitehall exchange. As far as the operator could tell, Jericho was merely calling one London borough from another. He pressed four pennies into the slot and after a series of clicks he heard a ringing tone.

  It took fifteen seconds for a man to answer.

  ‘Ye-es?’

  It was exactly the voice Jericho had always imagined for Claire’s father. Languid and assured, it stretched that single short syllable into two long ones. Immediately there was a series of pips and Jericho pushed the A-button. His money tinkled into the coin-box. Already, he felt at a disadvantage – an indigent without access to a telephone of his own.

  ‘Mr Romilly?’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘I’m so sorry to trouble you, sir, especially on a Sunday morning, but I work with Claire …’

  There was a faint noise, and then a pause, during which he could hear Romilly breathing. A crackle of static cut across the line. ‘Are you still there, sir?’

  The voice, when it came again, was quiet, and it sounded hollow, as if emanating from a vast and empty room. ‘How did you get this number?’

  ‘Claire gave it me.’ It was the first lie that came into Jericho’s head. ‘I wondered if she was with you.’

  Another long pause. ‘No. No, she isn’t. Why should she be?’

  ‘She’s not turned up for her shift this morning. Yesterday was her day off. I wondered if she might have gone down to London.’

  ‘Who is this speaking?’

  ‘My name is Tom Jericho.’ Silence. ‘She may have spoken of me.’

  ‘I don’t believe so.’ Romilly’s voice was barely audible. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Mr Jericho. I’m afraid I can’t help you. My daughter’s movements are as much a mystery to me as they seem to be to you. Goodbye.’

  There was a fumbling noise and the connection was broken off.

  ‘Hello?’ said Jericho. He thought he could still hear somebody breathing on the line. ‘Hello?’ He held on to the heavy bakelite receiver for a couple of seconds, straining to hear, then carefully replaced it.

  He leaned against the side of the telephone box and massaged his temples. Beyond the glass, the world went silently about its business. A couple of civilians with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas, fresh from the London train, were being escorted up the drive to the mansion. A trio of ducks in winter camouflage came in to land on the lake, feet splayed, ploughing furrows in the grey water.

  ‘My daughter’s movements are as much a mystery to me as they seem to be to you.’

  That was not right, was it? That was not the reaction one would expect of a father on being told his only child was missing?

  Jericho groped in his pocket for a handful of change. He spread the coins out on his palm and stared at them, stupidly, like a foreigner just arrived in an unfamiliar country.

  He dialled zero again.

  ‘Operator speaking.’

  ‘Kensington double-two five seven.’

  Once again, Jericho inserted four pennies into the metal slot. Once again there was a series of short clicks, then a pause. He tightened his finger on the button. But this time there was no ringing tone, only the blip-blip-blip of an engaged signal, pulsing in his ear like a heartbeat.

  Over the next ten minutes Jericho made three more attempts to get through. Each met the same response. Either Romilly had taken his telephone off the hook, or he was involved in a long conversation with someone.

  Jericho would have tried the number a fourth time, but a woman from the canteen with a coat over her apron had turned up and started rapping a coin on the glass, demanding her turn. Finally, Jericho let her in. He stood on the roadside and tried to decide what to do.

  He glanced back at the huts. Their squat, grey shapes, once so boring and familiar, now seemed vaguely threatening.

  Damn it. What did he have to lose?

  He buttoned his jacket against the cold and turned towards the gate.

  3

  St Mary’s Parish Church, eight solid centuries of hard white stone and Christian piety, lay at the end of an avenue of elderly yew trees, less than a hundred yards beyond Bletchley Park. As Jericho walked through the gate he saw bicycles, fifteen or twenty of them, stacked neatly around the porch, and a moment later heard the piping of the organ and the mournful lilt of a Church of England congregation in mid-hymn. The graveyard was perfectly still. He felt like a late guest approaching a house where a party was already in full swing.

  ‘We blossom and flourish as leaves on a tree,

  And wither, and perish, but naught changeth thee …’

  Jericho stamped his feet and beat his arms. He considered slipping inside and standing at the back of the nave until the service ended, but experience had taught him there was no such thing as a quiet entry into a church. The door would bang, heads would turn, some officious sidesman would come hurrying down the aisle with a prayer sheet and a hymn book. Such attention was the last thing he wanted.

  He left the path and pretended to study the tombstones. Frosted cobwebs of improbable size and delicacy shone like ectoplasm between the memorials: marble monuments for the well-to-do, slate for the farmworkers, weathered wooden crosses for the poor and infants. Ebenezer Slade, aged four years and six months, asleep in the arms of Jesus. Mary Watson, wife of Albert, taken after a long illness, rest in peace … On a few of the graves, bunches of dead flowers, petrified by ice, testified to some continuing flicker of interest among the living. On others, yellow lichen had obscured the inscriptions. He bent and scratched away at it, hearkening to the voices of the righteous beyond the stained glass window.

  ‘O ye Dews and Frosts, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever.

  O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever …’

  Odd images chased through his mind.

  He thought of his father’s funeral, on just such a day as this: a freezing, ugly Victorian church in the industrial Midlands, medals on the coffin, his mother weeping, his aunts in black, everyone studying him with sad curiosity, and he all the time a million miles away, factoring the hymn numbers in his head (‘Forward out of error,/Leave behind the night’ – number 392 in Ancient and Modern – came out very prettily, he remembered, as 2 × 7 × 2 × 7 × 2 …)

  And for some reason he thought of Alan Turing, restless with excitement in the hut one winter night, describing how the death of his closest friend had made him seek a link between mathematics and the spirit, insisting that at Bletchley they were creating a new world: that the bombes might soon be modified, the clumsy electro-mechancial switches replaced by relays of pentode valves and GT1C-thyatrons to create computers, machines that might one day mimic the actions of the human brain and unlock the secrets of the soul …

  Jericho wandered among the dead. Here was a small stone cross garlanded with stone flowers, there a stern-looking angel with a face like Miss Monk. All the time he kept listening to the service. He wondered whether anyone from Hut 8 was among the congregation and, if so, who. With all else failing, might Skynner be offering up a prayer to God? He tried to imagine what fresh reserves of sycophancy Skynner would draw on to communicate with a being even higher than the First Lord of the Admiralty, and found he couldn’t do it.

  ‘The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with you always. Amen.’

  The service was over. Jericho wove quickly through the headstones, away from the church, and stationed himself behind a pair of large bushes. From here he had a clear view of the porch.

  Before the war the faithful would have emerged to an uplifting peal of grandsire triples. But church bells now were to be rung only in the event of invasion, so that when the door opened and the elderly priest stationed himself to say farewell to his parishioners, the silence gave the ceremony a subdue
d, even melancholy air. One by one the worshippers stepped into the daylight. Jericho didn’t recognise any of them. He began to think he might have come to the wrong conclusion. But then, sure enough, a small, lean young woman in a black coat appeared, still holding the prayer book from the night before.

  She shook hands briefly, even curtly, with the vicar, said nothing, looped her carpetbag over the handles of her bicycle and wheeled it towards the gate. She walked quickly, with short, rapid steps, her sharp chin held high. Jericho waited until she had gone some way past him, then stepped out from his hiding place and shouted after her: ‘Miss Wallace!’

  She stopped and glanced back in his direction. Her weak eyesight made her frown. Her head moved vaguely from side to side. It wasn’t until he was within two yards of her that her face cleared.

  ‘Why, Mr …’

  ‘Jericho.’

  ‘Of course. Mr Jericho. The stranger in the night.’ The cold had reddened the sharp point of her nose and painted two neat discs of colour, the size of half-crowns, on her white cheeks. She had long, thick, black hair which she wore piled up, shot through and secured by an armoury of pins. ‘What did you make of the sermon?’

  ‘Uplifting?’ he said, tentatively. It seemed easier than telling the truth.

  ‘Did you really? I thought it the most frightful rot I’ve heard all year. “Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence …”’ She shook her head furiously. ‘Is it a heresy, do you suppose, to call St Paul an ass?’

  She resumed her brisk progress towards the lane. Jericho fell in beside her. He had picked up a few details about Hester Wallace from Claire – that before the war she’d been a teacher at a girls’ private school in Dorset, that she played the organ and was a clergyman’s daughter, that she received the quarterly newsletter of the Jane Austen Society – just enough clues to suggest the sort of woman who might indeed go straight from an eight-hour night-shift to Sunday matins.

  ‘Do you attend most Sundays?’

  ‘Always,’ she said. ‘Although increasingly one wonders why. And you?’