Secret Breakers: The Power of Three

by H. L. Dennis

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You are! It makes total sense. All the people you hoped to interview yesterday used to be connected to MS 408.’

  Smithies could feel the panic rising in his chest. It was usually a source of pride to him that his secretary was thorough in her work and meticulous in her quest for details. Now, it was particularly awkward.

  ‘Tandi, please. Maybe we’re going to be looking at MS 408.’ She made a yelping noise then which he couldn’t be entirely sure signalled distress or pleasure. ‘But no one must know. It’s entirely confidential. It’ll be like a secret in a secret. I’ve waited years to look again at MS 408 but since the ban on the manuscript, what I’m doing is highly risky.’ He hesitated a little. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘But a Code and Cipher School. You want to use children?’ It was clear she was finding it hard to breathe. ‘What about the rules? What about the risks?’

  ‘No one’ll know. I’ll be careful.’ Smithies wished he was as confident as he sounded.

  Her forehead wrinkled again. ‘Let me come with you.’

  He stepped back against the shelf and the tin of furniture wax toppled to the floor again. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I want to come. If you’re looking at MS 408 then I want to be part of it. What greater challenge is there than trying to read an unread book?’

  Smithies tried to argue but no sound came out.

  ‘I was a teacher. In Jamaica. Before all this.’ She waved her hands around and the tins on the shelving wobbled. ‘Teaching’s what I did. And I loved it.’ She drew herself up tall to her full height. ‘Let me come and teach.’

  Finding any words at all was now impossible.

  ‘Smithies, if you’re packing up and going to work as part of a secret Code and Cipher School then I want you to count me in. I can’t believe for a minute you thought I’d stay behind and work here without you.’

  He lifted the tin of wax once more and this time she took it from him and placed it on the shelf. ‘You sure?’ he said. The idea was brilliant. It might just work.

  Her smile told him that when he left for Bletchley Park, Miss Tandari would not be far behind.

  ‘Well, whoever it is, isn’t coming,’ Brodie’s granddad said quietly, leaning his weight on the lamppost.

  Brodie pretended not to hear. What was the point in arranging to meet someone and going to all the trouble of sending them a map if you weren’t going to turn up? It wasn’t worth looking at either of her watches. She knew how long they’d stood there. She’d counted the minutes in her head.

  ‘Shall we give them till eleven?’

  That just made her feel worse. Granddad being all understanding and patient. It’d been much better when he’d suggested the note was from someone at school and perhaps she should ignore it.

  ‘No one,’ she said at last. ‘We’ve seen absolutely no one. A whole hour and not a single person’s walked by. No one ever uses this bridge – that’s the problem. Don’t know why they bother having a light here,’ she snapped, kicking out with her foot at the base of the lamppost. ‘No one needs it.’

  Her granddad chuckled. ‘Well it’s good to kick out at when you’re angry. Good to lean on when you’re tired. I think it’s great it’s here,’ he said.

  The light flickered in the bulb.

  ‘Doesn’t even turn off,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t be on in the day. It’s wasting money. And we’re wasting time.’ She linked her arm through her granddad’s and pulled the scooter from where it was leaning against the railings and began to roll it forward. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Her granddad didn’t answer. He just walked along beside her, his helmet hanging from the handlebars and the bicycle clips linked like bracelets around his wrist. ‘Light is knowledge,’ she sniffed. ‘What a joke.’

  They’d just reached the door of the Pig and Whistle pub when it suddenly dawned on her.

  ‘Granddad, I need your scooter!’

  ‘What?’

  She could tell her granddad had half a mind on a pint of shandy and a packet of pork scratchings.

  ‘Your scooter. I need to borrow your scooter.’

  It took less than three minutes, but every one of them felt endless. She couldn’t believe she could have been so stupid. If no one used the footbridge then she wasn’t supposed to look for a person at the bridge. She was supposed to look for a thing. And there was only one thing on the bridge. That was the lamp. A streetlamp that’d flickered on just before ten o’clock and now blazed brightly in the middle of the day.

  She skidded to a halt and threw the scooter down. Her heart was racing. She circled, looking up at the flickering bulb. ‘Come on,’ she hissed. ‘Come on.’ Light is knowledge, the note said. She circled again, running her hands along the post. She knelt on the tarmac and scrabbled at the floor. Then, when she could think of nothing else, she slid down to the ground and sat with her back against the post, and looked up at the sky.

  There was a click.

  Pressure in the small of her back.

  She twisted round and behind her, in the base section of the post, a tiny door latched open.

  Once on her knees it was easier to see. The door opened to reveal what looked like a tiny cupboard. Inside was a sheaf of paper tacked together in a thick Manila folder tied with red ribbon. On the front of the folder was a picture of an elephant holding a key in his trunk. The word VERITAS was written at the top and along one side the name ‘Brodie Elizebeth Bray’.

  By the time Brodie reached out to take the folder, her granddad was beside her. He was panting and beads of sweat were across his brow. He nodded as she looked up at him. Then she closed her fingers around the folder and took it out of its hiding place.

  There was a gentle hiss, a soft click and the light from the lamp went out.

  Smithies lifted the paper from the table and stood up slowly. A list of names. The chosen ones. All the children he’d invited.

  He was anxious about their safety. He’d be careful. He’d have to be.

  He made his way across the room towards the shredder then pushed the sheets carefully between the cutting blades. It no longer mattered who’d been asked. It only mattered who accepted the challenge to come.

  ‘I’m not going.’

  Brodie Bray had spent the last hour discussing the contents of the document from the lamppost with her granddad, and as far as she was concerned, it was the most ridiculous idea she’d ever heard.

  ‘There’s no way I’m going to go and live in a museum.’

  ‘It’s a mansion. Bletchley Park Mansion, otherwise known as Station X actually.’ Her granddad was rummaging around in the bottom cupboard of the dresser, searching for something he’d obviously decided was absolutely vital to find while in the middle of rowing with his granddaughter.

  ‘That document said it’s a museum,’ she snapped to the back of his head. ‘How come you know different?’

  ‘Because I used to live there.’

  Brodie slumped down to her knees beside him. ‘You what?’

  ‘Used to live there.’

  ‘And you never thought to mention it?’

  ‘Not until now. There were strict rules until the Veritas section of the Black Chamber was recalled.’ He added the second part of the sentence almost apologetically. ‘But I did believe this day would come, you know. If we just waited long enough. I bet others have given up. But me … I believed it would happen.’ He seemed at last to have found what he was searching for. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ In his hand he held a metal biscuit tin. He put it down on the table and tapped the lid almost ceremoniously, opened it and took out a small discoloured photograph.

  ‘Veritas,’ he said deliberately. ‘It’s Latin for “truth” and that’s what we were after. The truth, you see.’

  ‘Who’s we? What truth?’

  He waved the yellowed photograph in his hand. ‘Look. Here’s me,
looking pretty dandy if I do say so myself. And there’s your grandmother. Splendid woman. Truly splendid. And there’s your mother. Must’ve been about your age then. Next to her friends, Jon and Robbie. Not officially part of the team, what with them being only kids, but that didn’t stop them

  trying to help.’ He let the memory wash over him. ‘Fantastic times. All of us together from all parts of the world working to find the truth.’

  Brodie was getting exasperated now. ‘Yes. You keep saying. What are you talking about? What truth?’

  Her granddad peered at her over the edge of the photograph. ‘You know we believed then it was the only truth worth knowing. The truth of MS 408. Of course it wasn’t called that then. We knew it simply as the Voynich Manuscript. It was named after the man who found it one hundred years ago. A book with pictures of places we couldn’t understand and words we couldn’t read. But a book that drew you in, like a fly being pulled into a spider’s web. There was no escaping the pull once you’d seen the pages of the book for yourself.’ He ran his fingers through his thinning grey hair. ‘You know, Brodie, I’ve dreamt of this day. Longed for it to come. The day when Veritas was recalled. Your mother would’ve been so proud to know you’d been chosen. So very, very proud.’

  ‘My mum?’

  ‘MS 408 wrapped her tightly in its web, I can tell you. She spent much of her life trying to break the secrets of that book. And on her very last trip to Belgium, when she was so cruelly taken from us, she thought she was on to something new about the document, you know. She really did.’

  ‘Veritas and this weird book were important to my mum?’ Brodie asked softly.

  Her granddad looked uncomfortable.

  Brodie picked up the yellowed photograph. ‘And she’d want me to go to this Code and Cipher School then?’

  Her granddad looked more uncomfortable still. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She could sense it.

  ‘You’ll need to be brave,’ he said.

  ‘To look at a book?’ she laughed.

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Bet it is, if it’s all in code.’

  ‘No. I mean things are complicated.’

  ‘But I should go?’

  Her granddad thought for a moment. ‘You should. If Smithies is involved.’

  ‘Smithies,’ she said. ‘You know him?’

  Her granddad pointed to a small boy in the photograph who had a wide and cheeky grin. ‘Oh yes. And so did your mother. Jon Stephen Smithies was one of her very closest friends.’

  It was perhaps putting it a little too strongly to suggest that Ms Kerrith Vernan hated Mr Smithies. But it really wasn’t so very far from the truth. Smithies, in her opinion, stood for everything that was wrong with the state of the Black Chamber. He was old-fashioned, stuck in his ways and a terribly bad dresser.

  Kerrith Vernan prided herself on three things. The first was her fast, and some would say exceptional, acceleration through the ranks amongst the staff at the Black Chamber. The second was her acceptance and love of the new order, the improved way of doing things, the future. And the third was her very carefully managed appearance. You didn’t get to be as good-looking or as well presented as she was today without expending a lot of energy at the gym, or spending a lot of money on your stylist, two words she knew without doubt didn’t even exist in Smithies’ vocabulary.

  Smithies was the thorn in Kerrith’s side. And also the man in the next-door office, and simply sharing the same floor level as him, and therefore occasionally the same elevator, made her unhappy.

  But Kerrith had heard a rumour, a rumbling among the staff at the office, and she longed with all her heart for the rumour to be true.

  It was Thursday. In forty minutes Kerrith had an appointment with her box-a-thon trainer followed by two hours with her beauty therapist. She shuffled the papers on the desk into a neat pile and slid them into a Manila folder labelled ‘CLASSIFIED’ before opening the top drawer of her filing cabinet and slipping the folder inside. When she looked up, her secretary was standing in the doorway.

  ‘It’s true,’ the secretary said purposefully.

  Kerrith’s fingers clutched tighter to the key in her hand. Her heart began to skip a little. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  ‘Confirmed just now. He’s off to work at Bletchley Park Museum. Some sort of early retirement package.’

  Kerrith stood up, flexing her neck a little like an animal in the wild focusing on its prey before preparing to pounce.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said, her tongue lingering over each syllable. ‘Now at last this department can move out of the shadow of the past.’ She smiled a rather uneven smile. (The work with the orthodontist hadn’t been entirely satisfactory and she was awaiting a follow-up appointment to complete the corrections.) ‘Absolutely perfect. We need to keep an eye on what he does there though. He may be out of sight but after what he did, he’ll never be out of mind.’ There was a sense of venom laced through her words that caused the secretary to leave the room rather quickly.

  Mr Bray snapped on the light. His heart was pressing hard against his ribs. He looked at the bedside clock. Four fifty-two. Less than eight hours left.

  He could change his mind. Tell her he’d thought things through. That he needed her to stay.

  If he said that, she’d never leave.

  He rubbed his chest.

  It was important then, that he said nothing. Despite all the rules and all the risks, surely he had to let Brodie go.

  It was a week since Brodie Bray had found the document in the lamppost and there was about an hour to go before the car arrived to take her to Bletchley.

  Her granddad sat down on the edge of the bed and sniffed a little.

  ‘Here,’ he said, after wiping his nose on a rather garishly patterned handkerchief. ‘I want you to have this.’ Brodie thought for a moment he was talking about the handkerchief (a prospect she found a little worrying) but then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in yellowed tissue paper. Brodie held out her hand. ‘It was your mother’s. It was with her things when she died. She was a mighty fine code-breaker, you know. One of the best. I think she’d want you to have it.’

  Brodie unwrapped the tissue paper carefully to reveal a silver locket. Pressed into the centre was a large oval stone that appeared at first to be white and blue. Brodie moved the locket in the light and the stone flashed pink. It hung on a thick twisted chain. She held it up and it swung freely in her hand, catching the light like a bevelled glass. ‘It’s beautiful, Granddad,’ she said. ‘I’ll wear it every day.’

  ‘Here,’ he said, slowing the swing of the locket with his hands. ‘Open it. My fingers can’t manage the catch any more.’

  Brodie rested the locket in the flat of her palm and pressed her fingernail against the seam. The locket sprang open. Inside was a small sketched drawing of what looked like a castle. Brodie peered up at her granddad for an explanation.

  He blew his nose loudly. ‘It’s a picture copied from MS 408,’ he said. ‘The picture fascinated your mother. Your grandmother too. It was as if all the mysterious words and diagrams from the Voynich Manuscript would eventually lead to this place. This hidden place.’

  Brodie traced her finger across the towers of the castle, the ridges of its walls.

  ‘It was always our hope one day to find the castle,’ whispered Granddad.

  Brodie pressed the locket closed and held it tight for a moment.

  Then she hugged him and together they put the chain around her neck and fixed the clasp. The locket was warm against her skin.

  Brodie tried to think of something sensible to say, something important about how she’d carry on the quest and that she’d try her best. But in the end no words came.

  Several hours later, Brodie stopped crying. Her stomach was knotted. She wasn’t sure if this was due to travel sickness, the fact she’d eaten half a bag of toffees or because she missed her granddad.

  ‘So,
what d’you reckon?’ the driver asked as the car climbed up a hill towards a large gateway. Brodie was too busy trying to take everything in to answer.

  At the end of the drive was a sprawling, red-brick mansion. There was a mixture of designs; some window frames painted white, others black and edged with stone. There were sections of pitched roofs, some turrets and green-topped domes. In places there were thick black beams criss-crossed along the plaster, but some walls were covered in a creamy pebbledash. There were high chimneys and jagged archways, wooden doors and glazed ones, and in front of the main entrance a gravelled forecourt with a circular lawn. It looked to Brodie as if no one builder had ever quite taken control. It looked unfinished, as if things here still needed completing.

  The car slowed to a halt.

  Brodie stared at the front door of the mansion. In the story she told herself in her head, it looked like an opening to a new world. She was scared. Unsure again, if she wanted to go inside. Two stone statues stood like guards either side of the door and above their heads hung a single lantern. A candle burned inside, the light of the flame bouncing against something small and shiny.

  Brodie bit her lip as the driver of the car unloaded her cases from the boot. She thanked him, checked the time on both her watches and the car pulled slowly back down the drive.

  Then she turned and ploughed straight into the path of a boy riding a unicycle.

  The crash wasn’t pretty. Her case burst open, spilling an embarrassing load of clothing and books on to the ground. Brodie landed in a heap next to the boy, who’d fallen with an ominous crunch on top of the unicycle. As Brodie fought to catch her breath, chocolate toffees rained down on the pair of them.

  ‘Where the deep-fried Mars bar did you come from?’ His voice tailed away as he rose from the ground and rested the unicycle in his place. The wheel looked more than a little bent.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Brodie groaned through teeth clamped tight together.

  ‘Well, you better toasted sandwich believe it. Unless it’s raining sweets and knickers and you’ve decided to take a quick kip on the pavement, then we’ve really just crashed. It’s my nineteenth circuit and the path’s been totally clear every time.’