Enigma

by Robert Harris

  The church inside was cave-like, cold and dark, the shadows pierced by shafts of dusty, slate-blue light, so solid they seemed to have been propped like slabs against the windows. He hadn’t been in a church for years and the chilly stink of candle wax and damp and incense brought memories of childhood crawling back. He thought he could make out the shape of a head in one of the pews nearest the altar and began to walk towards it.

  ‘Miss Wallace?’ His voice was hollow and seemed to travel a great distance. But when he came closer he saw it wasn’t a head, just a priest’s vestment, draped neatly over the back of the pew. He passed on up the nave to the wood-panelled altar. To the left was a stone coffin with an inscription; next to it, the smooth, white effigy of Richard, Lord Grey de Wilton, dead these past five hundred years, reclining in full armour, his head resting on his helmet, his feet on the back of a lion.

  ‘The armour is especially interesting. But then warfare in the fifteenth century was the highest occupation for a gentleman.’

  He wasn’t sure where she’d come from. She was simply there when he turned round, about ten feet behind him.

  ‘And the face, I think, is also good, if unexceptional. You weren’t followed, I trust?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so, no.’

  She took a few steps towards him. With her dead complexion and tapering white fingers she might have been an alabaster effigy herself, climbed down from Lord Grey’s tomb.

  ‘Perhaps you noticed the royal arms above the north door?’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘The arms of Queen Anne, but, intriguingly, still of the Stuart pattern. The arms of Scotland were only added as late as 1707. Now that is rare. About ten minutes. The police were just leaving as I arrived.’ She held out her hand. ‘May I have my note back, please?’

  When he hesitated she presented her palm to him again, more emphatically this time.

  ‘The note, please, if you’d be so good. I’d prefer to leave no trace. Thank you.’ She took it and stowed it away at the bottom of her voluminous carpet bag. Her hands were shaking so much she had trouble fastening the clasp. ‘There’s no need to whisper, by the way. We’re quite alone. Apart from God. And He’s supposed to be on our side.’

  He knew it would be wise for him to wait, to let her come to it in her own time, but he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘You’ve checked it?’ he said. ‘The call sign?’

  She finally snapped the bag shut. ‘Yes. I’ve checked it.’

  ‘And is it Army or Luftwaffe?’

  She held up a finger. ‘Patience, Mr Jericho. Patience. First there’s some information I’d like from you, if you don’t mind. We might begin with what made you choose those three letters.’

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

  She raised her eyes to heaven. ‘God preserve me: another one.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I seem to move in an endless round, Mr Jericho, from one patronising male to another, for ever being told what I am and am not allowed to know. Well, that ends here.’ She pointed to the flagstone floor.

  ‘Miss Wallace,’ said Jericho, catching the same tone of cool formality, ‘I came in answer to your note. I have no interest in alabaster figurework – medieval, Victorian or ancient Chinese, come to that. If you’ve nothing else to tell me, good morning to you.’

  ‘Then good morning.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  If he’d had a hat he would have raised it.

  He turned and began his progress down the aisle towards the door. You fool, said a voice at his inner ear, you bloody conceited fool. By the time he’d gone half way his pace had slowed and by the time he reached the font he stopped. His shoulders sagged.

  ‘Checkmate, I believe, Mr Jericho,’ she called cheerfully from beside the altar.

  ‘ADU was the call sign on a series of four intercepts our … mutual friend … stole from Hut 3.’ His voice was weary.

  ‘How do you know she stole them?’

  ‘They were hidden in her bedroom. Under the floorboards. As far as I know, we’re not encouraged to take our work home.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘I burned them.’

  They were sitting in the second row of pews, side by side, facing straight ahead. Anyone coming into the church would have thought it was a confession – she playing the priest and he the sinner.

  ‘Do you think she’s a spy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Her behaviour is suspicious, to put it charitably. Others seem to think she is.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A man from the Foreign Office called Wigram, for one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Obviously because she’s disappeared.’

  ‘Oh, come. There must be more to it than that. All this fuss for one missed shift?’

  He ran his hand nervously through his hair.

  ‘There are … indications – and don’t, for God’s sake, ask me to tell you what they are – just indications, all right, that the Germans may suspect Enigma is being broken.’

  A long pause.

  ‘But why would our mutual friend wish to help the Germans?’

  ‘If I knew that, Miss Wallace, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, passing the time of day breaking the Official Secrets Act. Now, really, please, have you heard enough?’

  Another pause. A reluctant nod of the head.

  ‘Enough.’

  She told it like story, in a low voice, without looking at him. She used her hands a lot, he noticed. She couldn’t keep them still. They fluttered like tiny white birds – now pecking at the hem of her coat, pulling it demurely across her knees, now perching on the back of the pew in front, now describing, in rapid, circling motions, how she had gone about her crime.

  She waits until the other girls have gone off on their meal break.

  She leaves the door to the Index Room open a fraction, so as not to look suspicious and to ensure a good warning of anyone’s approach.

  She reaches up to the dusty metal shelf and drags down the first volume.

  AAA, AAB, AAC …

  She flicks through to the tenth page.

  And there it is. The thirteenth entry.

  ADU.

  She runs her finger along the line to the row and column entries and notes their numbers on a scrap of paper.

  She puts the index volume back. The row ledger is on a higher shelf and she has to fetch a stool to get it.

  She stops off on her way to bob her head around the door and check the corridor.

  Deserted.

  Now she is nervous. Why? she asks herself. What is she doing that’s so terribly wrong? She smooths her hands down over her grey skirt to dry her palms, then opens the book. She turns the pages. She finds the number. Again, she follows the line across.

  She checks it once, and then a second time. There’s no mistake.

  ADU is the call sign of Nachrichten-Regimenter 537 – a motorised German Army signals unit. Its transmissions are on wavelengths monitored by the Beaumanor intercept station in Leicestershire. Direction-finding has established that, since October, Unit number 537 has been based in the Smolensk military district of the Ukraine, presently occupied by Wehrmacht Army Group Centre under the command of Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge.

  Jericho had been leaning forwards in anticipation. Now he drew back in surprise. ‘A signals unit?’

  He felt obscurely disappointed. What exactly had he been expecting? He wasn’t sure. Just something a little more … exotic, he supposed.

  ‘537,’ he said, ‘is that a front-line unit?’

  ‘The line in that sector is shifting every day. But according to the situation map in Hut 6, Smolensk is still about a hundred kilometres inside German territory.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes. That was my reaction – at first, anyway. I mean, this is a standard, rear-echelon, low-priority target. This is workaday in the extreme. But there are several … compli
cations.’ She fished in her bag for a handkerchief and blew her nose. Again, Jericho observed the slight trembling of her fingers.

  After replacing the row volume it is the work of less than a minute to pull down the appropriate column book and make a note of the intercept serial numbers.

  When she comes out of the Index Room, Miles (‘that’s Miles Mermagen,’ she adds in parenthesis, ‘Control Room duty officer: a bear of very little brain’) Miles is on the telephone, his back to the door, oiling up to someone in authority – ‘No, no, that’s absolutely fine, Donald, a pleasure to be of service …’ – which suits Hester beautifully for it means he never even notices her collect her coat and leave. She clicks on her blackout torch and steps out into the night.

  A gust of wind swirls down the alley between the huts and buffets her face. At the far end of Hut 8 the path forks: right will take her to the main gate and the warm bustle of the canteen, left leads into the blackness along the edge of the lake.

  She turns left.

  The moon is wrapped in a tissue of cloud but the pale light is just luminous enough to show her the way. Beyond the eastern perimeter fence lies a small wood which she can’t see, but the sound of the wind moving through the invisible trees seems to pull her on. Past A-and B-Blocks, two hundred and fifty yards, and there it is, straight ahead, faintly outlined: the big, squat, bunkerlike building, only just completed, that now houses Bletchley’s central Registry. As she comes closer her torch flashes on steel-shuttered windows, then finds the heavy door.

  Thou shalt not steal, she tells herself, reaching for the handle.

  No, no. Of course not.

  Thou shalt not steal, thou wilt merely take a quick look, and then depart.

  And, in any case, don’t ‘the secret things belong unto the Lord our God’ (Deuteronomy 29.xxix)?

  The rawness of the white neon is a shock after the gloom of the hut, and so is the calm, ruffled only by the distant clatter of the Hollerith punch-card machines. The workmen still haven’t finished. Brushes and tools are stacked to one side of a reception area that is thick with the smell of building work – fresh concrete, wet paint, wood-shavings. The duty clerk, a corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, leans across the counter in a friendly way as if she is serving in a shop.

  ‘Cold night?’

  ‘Rather.’ Hester manages to smile and nod. ‘I’ve got some serials to check.’

  ‘Reference or loan?’

  ‘Reference.’

  ‘Section?’

  ‘Hut 6 Control.’

  ‘Pass?’

  The woman takes the list of numbers and disappears into a back room. Through the open door Hester can see stacks of metal shelving, infinite rows of cardboard files. A man strolls past the doorway and takes down one of the boxes. He stares at her. She looks away. On the whitewashed wall is a poster, a Bateman cartoon showing a woman sneezing, accompanied by some typical, fatuous Whitehall busybodying:

  THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH says:-

  Coughs and sneezes spread diseases

  Trap the germs by using your handkerchief

  Help to keep the Nation Fighting Fit

  There is nowhere to sit. Behind the counter is a large clock with ‘RAF’ stamped on its face – so large, in fact, that Hester can actually see the big hand moving. Four minutes pass. Five minutes. The Registry is unpleasantly hot. She can feel herself starting to sweat. The stench of paint is nauseating. Seven minutes. Eight minutes. She would like to flee, but the corporal has taken her identity card. Dear God, how could she have been so utterly stupid? What if the clerk is now on the phone to Hut 6, checking up on her? At any instant, Miles will come crashing into the Registry: ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing, woman?’ Nine minutes. Ten minutes. Try to focus on something else. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases …

  She’s in such a state, she actually fails to hear the clerk come up behind her.

  ‘I’m sorry to have been so long, but I’ve never come across anything like this …’

  The girl, poor thing, is rather shaken.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jericho.

  ‘The file,’ said Hester. ‘The file I’d asked her for? It was empty.’

  There was a loud metallic crack behind them and then a series of short scrapes as the church door was pushed open. Hester closed her eyes and dropped to her knees on one of the cassocks, tugging Jericho down beside her. She clasped her hands and lowered her head and he did the same. Footsteps came halfway up the aisle behind them, stopped, and then resumed slowly on tiptoe. Jericho glanced surreptitiously to his left in time to see the elderly priest bending to retrieve his vestment.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your prayers,’ whispered the vicar. He gave Hester a little wave and a nod. ‘Hello there. So sorry. I’ll leave you to God.’

  They listened to his fussy tread fading towards the back of the church. The door was tugged shut. The latch fell with a crash. Jericho sat back on the pew and laid his hand over his heart and swore he could feel it beating through four layers of clothing. He looked at Hester – ‘I’ll leave you to God?’ he repeated – and she smiled. The change it wrought in her was remarkable. Her eyes shone, the hardness in her face softened – and for the first time he briefly glimpsed the reason why she and Claire might have been friends.

  Jericho contemplated the stained-glass window above the altar and made a steeple of his fingers. ‘So what exactly are we to make of this? That Claire must have stolen the entire contents of the file? No –’ he contradicted himself immediately ‘– no, that can’t be right, can it, because what she had in her room were the original cryptograms, not the decodes …?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Hester. ‘There was a typewritten slip in the Registry file which the clerk showed me – words to the effect that the enclosed serial numbers had been reclassified and withdrawn, and that all enquires should be addressed to the office of the Director-General.’

  ‘The Director-General? Are you sure?’

  ‘I can read, Mr Jericho.’

  ‘What was the date on the slip?’

  ‘March the 4th.’

  Jericho massaged his forehead. It was the oddest thing he’d ever heard. ‘What happened after the Registry?’

  ‘I went back to the hut and wrote my note to you. Delivering that took the rest of my meal break. Then it was a matter of getting back into the Index Room whenever I could. We keep a daily log of all intercepts, made up from the blists. One file for each day.’ Once again she rummaged in her bag and withdrew a small index-card with a list of dates and numbers. ‘I wasn’t sure where to start so I simply went right back to the beginning of the year and worked my way through. Nothing recorded till February the 6th. Only eleven interceptions altogether, four of which came on the final day.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘March the 4th. The same day the file was removed from the Registry. What do you make of that?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything. I’m still trying to imagine what a rear-echelon German signals unit could possibly say that would warrant the removal of its entire file.’

  ‘The Director-General is who, as a matter of interest?’

  ‘The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. “C”. I don’t know his real name.’ He remembered the man who had presented him with the cheque just before Christmas. A florid face and hairy country tweeds. He had looked more like a farmer than a spy master. ‘Your notes,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘May I?’

  Reluctantly she handed him the list of interceptions. He held it towards the pale light. It certainly made a bizarre pattern. Following the initial interception, just after noon on 6 February, there had been two days of silence. Then there had been another signal at 1427 hours on the 9th. Then a gap of ten days. Then a broadcast at 1807 on the 20th, and another long gap, followed by a flurry of activity: two signals on 2 March (1639 and 1901), two on the 3rd (1118 and 1727), and finally four signals, in rapid succession, on the night of the 4th. These were the cryptograms he had take
n from Claire’s room. The broadcasts had begun just two days before his final conversation with Claire at the flooded clay pit. And they had ended a month later, while he was still at Cambridge, less than a week before the Shark blackout.

  There was no shape to it at all.

  He said: ‘What Enigma key were they transmitted in? They were enciphered in Enigma, I take it?’

  ‘In the Index they were catalogued as Vulture.’

  ‘Vulture?’

  ‘The standard Wehrmacht Enigma key for the Russian front.’

  ‘Broken regularly?’

  ‘Every day. As far as I know.’

  ‘And the signals – how were they sent? They were, what, just carried on the usual military net?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d say almost certainly not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s not enough traffic, for a start. It’s too irregular. And the frequency’s not one I recognise. It feels to me like something rather more special – a private line, as it were. Just the two stations: a mother and a lone star. But we’d need to see the log sheets to be certain.’

  ‘And where are they?’

  ‘They should have been in the Registry. But when we checked we found they’d all been removed as well.’

  ‘My, my,’ murmured Jericho, ‘they really have been thorough.’

  ‘Short of tearing the sheets out of the Control Room Index, they couldn’t have done much more. And you think she’s behaving suspiciously? I’ll have that back now, if I may.’

  She took the record of the interceptions and bent forwards to hide it in her bag.

  Jericho rested his head on the back of the pew and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. Special? he thought. I’ll say it was special, more than special for the Director-General himself to palm the entire bloody file, plus all the log sheets. There was no sense to it. He wished he weren’t so damned tired. He needed to shut his study door for a day or two, sport his oak, find a good, fresh pile of clean notepaper and a set of sharpened pencils …

  He slowly let his gaze descend to take in the rest of the church – the saints in their windows, the marble angels, the stone memorials to the respectable dead of Bletchley parish, the ropes from the belfry looped together like a hanging spider beneath the gloomy organ loft. He closed his eyes.