It was on the Thursday that the second letter had arrived, this one very different. Registered post, long buff envelope. On His Majesty’s Service.
Afterwards, she could never quite decide. Had the Telegraph held the competition at the instigation of the War Office, as a way of trawling the country for men and women with an aptitude for word puzzles? Or had some bright spark at the War Office merely seen the results of the competition and asked the Telegraph for a list of the finalists? Whatever the truth, five of the most suitable were summoned to be interviewed in a grim Victorian office block on the wrong side of the Thames, and three of them were ordered to report to Bletchley.
The school hadn’t wanted her to go. Her mother had cried. Her father had detested the idea, just as he detested all change, and for days beforehand he was filled with foreboding (‘He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more’ Job 7.x). But the law was the law. She had to go. Besides, she thought, she was twenty-eight. Was she doomed to live out the rest of her life in the same place, tucked away in this drowsy quilt of tiny fields and honey-stoned villages? Here was her chance of escape. She had picked up enough clues at the interview to guess that the work would be codes, and her fantasies were all of quiet, book-lined libraries and the pure, clear air of the intellect.
Arriving at Bletchley station in her second-hand coat on a soaking Monday morning, she was taken straight by shooting brake to the mansion and given a copy of the Official Secrets Act to sign. The Army Captain who inducted them laid his pistol on the desk and said that if any of them, ever, breathed a word of what they were about to be told, he’d use it on them. Personally. Then they were assigned. The two male finalists became cryptanalysts, while she, the woman who had beaten them, was dispatched to a bedlam called Control.
‘You take this form here, see, and in this first column you enter the code name of the intercept station. Chicksands, right, that’s CKS, Beaumanor is BMR, Harpendon is HPN – don’t worry, dear, you’ll soon get used to it. Now here, see, you put the time of interception, here frequency, here call sign, here number of letter groups …’
Her fantasies were dust. She was a glorified clerk, Control a glorified funnel between the intercept stations and the cryptanalysts, a funnel down which poured the ceaseless output of some forty thousand different radio call signs, using more than sixty separately identified Enigma keys.
‘German Air Force, right, they’re usually either insects or flowers. So you’ve got Cockroach, say, that’s the Enigma key for western fighters, based in France. Dragonfly is Luftwaffe in Tunis. Locust is Luftwaffe, Sicily. You’ve got a dozen of those. Your flowers are the Luftgau – Foxglove: eastern front, Daffodil: western front, Narcissus: Norway. Birds are for the German Army. Chaffinch and Phoenix, they’re Panzerarmee Afrika. Kestrel and Vulture – Russian front. Sixteen little birdies. Then there’s Garlic, Onion, Celery – all the vegetables are weather Enigmas. They go straight to Hut 10. Got it?’
‘What are Skunk and Porcupine?’
‘Skunk is Fliegerkorps VIII, eastern front. Porcupine is ground-air cooperation, southern Russia.’
‘Why aren’t they insects as well?’
‘God knows.’
The charts they had to fill in were called either ‘blists’ or ‘hankies’, the filing cabinet for miscellaneous trivia was known as Titicaca (‘an Andes lake fed by many rivers,’ said Mermagen portentously, ‘but with no outflow’). The men gave one another silly names – ‘the Unicorn-Zebra’, ‘the Mock Turtle’ – while the girls mooned after the handsomer cryptanalysts in the Machine Room. Sitting in the freezing hut that winter, compiling her endless lists, Hester had a sense of Nazi Germany only as an endless, darkened plain, with thousands of tiny, isolated lights, flickering at one another in the blackness. Oddly enough, she thought, it was all, in its way, as remote from the war as the meadows and thatched barns of Dorset.
*
She parked her bicycle in the shed beside the canteen and was borne along by the stream of workers to be deposited near the entrance to Hut 6. Control was already in a fine state of uproar, Mermagen bustling self-importantly between the desks, knocking his head against the low-hanging lampshades, sending pools of yellow light spilling crazily in all directions. Fourth Panzer Army was reporting the successful recapture of Kharkov from the Russians and the ninnies in Hut 3 were demanding that every frequency in the southern sector, eastern front, be double-backed immediately.
‘Hester, Hester, just in time. Will you talk to Chicksands, there’s a good girl, and see what they can do? And while you’re on, the Machine Room reckon they’ve got a corrupt text on the last batch of Kestrel – the operator needs to check her notes and re-send. Then the eleven o’clock from Beaumanor all need blisting. Grab someone to help you. Oh, and the Index could do with a sorting out.’
All this before she had even taken off her coat.
It was two o’clock before there was enough of a lull for her to get away and talk to Mermagen in private. He was in his broom-cupboard office, his feet up on the desk, studying a handful of papers through half-closed eyes, in a terrific man-of-destiny pose she guessed he’d copied from some actor in the pictures.
‘I wondered if I might have a word, Miles.’
Miles. She found this insistence on first-name terms a tiresome affectation, but informality was a rigid rule, an essential part of the Bletchley ethos: we, the civilian amateurs shall defeat them, the disciplined Hun.
Mermagen continued to study his papers.
She tapped her foot. ‘Miles?’
He flicked over a page. ‘You have my completely divided attention.’
‘My request for a transfer –’
He groaned and turned over another page. ‘Not that again.’
‘I’ve been learning German –’
‘How brave.’
‘You did say that not having German made a transfer impossible.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t say that having it made a transfer likely. Oh, bloody hell! Well, come in, then.’
With a sigh he put aside his papers and beckoned her over the threshold. Someone must have told him once that Brylcreem made him look racy. His oily black hair, swept back off his forehead and behind his ears, glistened like a swimmer’s cap. He was trying to grow a Clark Gable moustache but it was slightly too long on the left-hand side.
‘Transfers of personnel from section to section are, as I’ve told you before, extremely rare. We do have security to consider.’
Security to consider: this must have been how he turned down loans before the war. Suddenly he was staring at her intently and she realised he had noticed the make-up. He couldn’t have looked more startled if she’d painted herself with woad. His voice seemed to drop an octave.
‘Look here, Hester, the last thing I want is to be difficult. What you need is a change of scene for a day or two.’ He touched his moustache lightly and gave a faint smile of recognition, as if he were surprised to find it still in place. ‘Why don’t you go up and take a look round one of the intercept stations, get a feel for where you fit into the chain? I know,’ he added, ‘I could do with a refresher myself. We could go up together.’
‘Together? Yes … Why not? And find a little pub somewhere we could stop off for lunch?’
‘Excellent. Make a real break of it.’
‘Possibly a pub with rooms, so we could stay overnight if it got late?’
He laughed nervously. ‘I still couldn’t guarantee a transfer, you know.’
‘But it would help?’
‘Your words.’
‘Miles?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘I’d rather die.’
‘Frigid little bitch.’
She filled the basin with cold water and splashed her face furiously. The icy water numbed her hands and stung her face. It trickled down inside the neck of her shirt and up the sleeves. She welcomed the shock and the discomfort. She deserved it as a punishment for her folly and delusion.<
br />
She pressed her flat stomach against the edge of the basin and stared myopically at the chalk-white face in the mirror.
Useless to complain, of course. It was her word against his. She would never be believed. And even if she was – so what? My dear, it was simply the way of the world. Miles could ram her up against Lake bloody Titicaca if he liked, and put his hand up her skirt, and they’d still never let her go: nobody, once they’d seen as much as she had, was ever allowed to leave.
She felt a pricking of self-pity in the corners of her eyes and immediately lowered her head back over the basin and drenched her face, scrubbing at her cheeks and mouth with a sliver of carbolic soap until the powder stained the water pink.
She wished she could talk to Claire.
‘ADU, Miss Wallace …’
Behind her in the cubicle the toilet flushed. Hurriedly, she pulled the plug out of the basin and dried her face and hands.
Name of intercept station, time of interception, frequency, call sign, letter groups … Name of intercept station, time of interception, frequency, call sign, letter groups …
Hester’s hand moved mechanically across the paper.
At four o’clock the first half of the night-shift began drifting off to the canteen.
‘Coming, Hetty?’
‘Too much to do, unfortunately. I’ll catch you up.’
‘Poor you!’
‘Poor you and bloody Miles,’ said Beryl McCann, who had been to bed with Mermagen, once, and wished to God she hadn’t.
Hester bent her head lower over her desk and continued to write in her careful schoolmistress copperplate. She watched the other women putting on their coats and filing out, their shoes clumping on the wooden floor. Ah, but Claire had been so funny about them. It was one of the things Hester loved in her the most, the way she mimicked everyone: Anthea Leigh-Delamere, the huntswoman, who liked to come on shift in jodhpurs; Binnie with the waxy skin who wanted to be a Catholic nun; the girl from Solihull who held the telephone a foot away from her mouth because her mother had told her the receiver was full of germs … As far as Hester knew, Claire had never even met Miles Mermagen, yet she could impersonate him to perfection. The ghastliness of Bletchley had been their shared and private joke, their conspiracy against the bores.
The opening of the outside door let in a sudden blast of freezing air. Blists and hankies rustled and fluttered in the chill.
Bores. Boring. Claire’s favourite words. The Park was boring. The war was boring. The town was terrifically boring. And the men were the biggest bores of all. The men – my God, what scent was it she gave off? – there were always two or three of them at least, hanging round her like tomcats on heat. And how she mocked them, on those precious evenings when she and Hester were alone together, sitting companionably by the fireside like an old married couple. She mocked their clumsy fumblings, their corny dialogue, their absurd self-importance. The only man she didn’t mock, now Hester came to think of it, was the curious Mr Jericho, whom she had never even mentioned.
‘ADU, Miss Wallace …’.
Now that she had made up her mind to do it – and hadn’t she always known, secretly, that she was going to do it? – she was astonished at how calm she felt. It would only be the briefest of glances, she told herself, and where was the harm in that? She even had the perfect excuse to slip across to the Index, for hadn’t the beastly Miles, in everybody’s hearing, commanded her to ensure the volumes were all arranged in proper order?
She finished the blist and slotted it into the rack. She forced herself to wait a decent interval, pretending to check the others’ work, and then moved as casually as she could towards the Index Room.
2
Jericho drew back the curtains to unveil another cold, clear morning. It was only his third day in the Commercial Guesthouse but already the view had acquired a weary familiarity. First came the long and narrow garden (concrete yard with washing line, vegetable patch, bomb shelter) which petered out after seventy yards into a wilderness of weeds and a tumbledown, rotted fence. Then there was a drop he couldn’t see, like a ha-ha, and then a broad expanse of railway lines, a dozen or more, which led the eye, at last, to the centrepiece: a huge Victorian engine shed with LONDON MIDLAND & SCOTTISH RAILWAY in white letters just visible beneath the grime.
What a day in prospect: the sort of day one waded through with no aim higher than to reach the other end intact. He looked at his Waralarm. It was a quarter past seven. It would be dark in the North Atlantic for at least another four hours. By his reckoning there would be nothing for him to do until – at the earliest – midnight, British time, when the first elements of the convoy would begin to enter the U-boat danger zone. Nothing to do except sit around the hut and wait and brood.
There had been three occasions during the night when Jericho had made up his mind to seek out Wigram and make a full confession, on the last of which he had actually got as far as putting on his coat. But in the end the judgement was too fine a one to call. On the one hand, yes, it was his duty to tell Wigram all he knew. On the other, no, what he knew would make little practical difference to the task of finding her, so why betray her? The equations cancelled one another out. By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
And it could all still be some ghastly mistake – couldn’t it, just? Some prank gone badly wrong? Eleven hours had passed since his conversation with Wigram. They might have found her by now. More likely, she would have turned up, either at the cottage or the hut – wide-eyed and wondering, darlings, what on earth the fuss was all about.
He was on the point of turning away from the window when his eye was caught by a movement at the far end of the engine shed. Was it a large animal of some sort, or a big man crawling on all fours? He squinted through the sooty glass but the thing was too far away for him to make it out exactly, so he fetched his telescope from the bottom of the wardrobe. The window sash was stuck but a few heavy blows from the heel of his hand were enough to raise it six inches. He knelt and rested the telescope on the sill. At first he couldn’t find anything to focus on amid the dizzying crisscross of tracks but then, suddenly, it was filling his eye – an Alsatian dog as big as a calf, sniffing under the wheels of a goods wagon. He shifted the telescope a fraction to his left and there was a policeman dressed in a greatcoat that came down below his knees. Two policemen, in fact, and a second dog, on a leash.
He watched the little group for several minutes as they searched the empty train. Then the two teams split up, one passing further up the tracks and the other moving out of sight towards the little railway cottages opposite. He snapped the telescope shut.
Four men and two dogs for the railway yard. Say, a couple more teams to cover the station platforms. How many in the town? Twenty? And in the surrounding countryside?
‘Got a photo of her? Something recent?’
He tapped the telescope against his cheek.
They must be watching every port and railway station in the country.
What would they do if they caught her?
Hang her?
Come on, Jericho. He could practically hear his housemaster’s voice at his elbow. Brace up, boy.
Get through it somehow.
Wash. Shave. Dress. Make a little bundle of dirty laundry and leave it on the bed for Mrs Armstrong, more in hope than expectation. Go downstairs. Endure attempts to make polite conversation. Listen to one of Bonnyman’s interminable, off-colour stories. Be introduced to two of the other guests: Miss Quince, rather pretty, a teleprincess in the naval hut, and Noakes, once an expert on Middle High German court epics, now a cryptanalyst in the weather section, vaguely known since 1940: a surly creature, then and now. Avoid all further conversation. Chew toast as stale as cardboard. Drink tea as grey and watery as a February sky. Half-listen to the wireless news: ‘Moscow Radio reports the Russian Third Army under General Vatutin is making a strong defence of Kharkov in the face o
f the renewed German offensive …’
At ten to eight Mrs Armstrong came in with the morning post. Nothing for Mr Bonnyman (‘thank God for that,’ said Bonnyman), two letters for Miss Jobey, a postcard for Miss Quince, a bill from Heffers bookshop for Mr Noakes and nothing at all for Mr Jericho – oh, except this, which she’d found when she came down and which must have been put through the door some time in the night.
He held it carefully. The envelope was poor-quality, official-issue stuff, his name printed on it in blue ink, with ‘By hand, Strictly Personal’ added underneath and double-underlined. The ‘e’ in Jericho and in ‘Personal’ was in the Greek form. His nocturnal correspondent was a classicist, perhaps?
He took it into the hall to open, Mrs Armstrong at his heels.
Hut 6
4.45 A.M.
Dear Mr Jericho,
As you expressed such a strong interest in medieval alabaster figurework when we met yesterday, I wondered if you might care to join me at the same place at 8 this morning to view the altar tomb of Lord Grey de Wilton (15th cent. and really very fine)?
Sincerely,
H.A.W.
‘Bad news, Mr Jericho?’ She couldn’t quite suppress the note of hope in her voice.
But Jericho was already dragging on his overcoat and was halfway out of the door.
Even after taking the hill at a fast trot he was still five minutes late by the time he passed the granite war memorial. There was no sign of her or anyone else in the graveyard so he tried the door to the church. At first he thought it was locked. It took both hands to turn the rusty iron ring. He put his shoulder to the weathered oak and it shuddered inwards.
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