The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  He bent his head. ‘I don’t know, someone has to be doing The Nutcracker suite, don’t they? Can’t promise you Vaslav Nijinsky but I’m sure one of the Christ Church boys looks all right in a pair of tights. That Turing fellow or the one in the navy blazer.’

  ‘Or the Captain?’ Honey laughed, her chest suddenly thawing. The adrenaline faded. She was paranoid. She was Joan Fontaine again. He passed her his cigarette and she took a draw, warming up her lungs. ‘I’d love to come to a concert with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s jolly lovely news for me . . . I’m glad I ran into you.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ She bent down and stroked the dog’s forehead. He sniffed her breath in twitches.

  ‘He’s got such eyes,’ she said. ‘You’d think they could see through anything. They’ll always tell the truth.’

  ‘That’s the thing I like most about dogs,’ said Felix, beginning to walk back up the path. ‘They always tell the truth. Quite incapable of lying.’

  ‘Quite incapable of speaking, you mean,’ Honey called after him. But he was already halfway up the street, trotting in step with the dog. Nijinsky looked up and barked once, sharp and playful. There was a dancing quality to Felix’s step that hadn’t been there before. He looked lighter and more fun than the brooding amused man she had just walked with. It was only when the dog barked a second time, she remembered the bark she’d heard at the base at Wavendon, and she realised she hadn’t thought to ask Captain Tiver exactly who it was that had passed the information to the Park about her unexpected meeting with Piotr Górecki.

  Chapter 12

  Securely pressed behind her bedroom door she took off her coat and brought from under the bed the other pieces of amber. She pulled the rug from the warm spot again and sat down on the wood. Mrs Steadman was listening to a thundering Gilbert and Sullivan on the wireless below.

  Carefully she slotted the amber box together, trying not to grate too much dust as the joins ground. Once assembled she removed the firebird from her cardigan and slotted it into the hole at the front of the base.

  It didn’t quite fit.

  The base of the bird went into the dip but it wobbled about and wouldn’t stand straight. She tried again from various angles but couldn’t make it work. It seemed childish, the disappointment she felt. Of course it couldn’t be perfect, if he was smuggling out fragments, if he was sending them one by one from exile. God knew where he was and what he was using to carve them. She turned over the panels and looked again. There must be something she was missing, some instruction hidden. She wished Dickie would telegram or telephone or simply turn up.

  The sound of the national anthem on the wireless drifted up through the floorboards. Honey heard creaks as Mrs Steadman moved across the parlour and then the sharp severing of the sound. Across the hall Rebecca’s bedroom door opened and closed, and a smell of soap-steam came filtering in. Honey had never seen Rebecca. They passed only as noises in the billet; they always seemed to be on different schedules at the Park. They communicated in notes under bedroom doors, knocks on the bathroom. She had come across her name once; she worked in the main house’s Index Room. Everything was logged in shoeboxes up there, rather like the Hut 6 index. Any time a new word came up – for example, an officer’s name — they would create a reference for it and keep all the notes together, to try to build a pattern of who that officer was. They kept everything, so that they would know everything.

  She wished she had a log now, of back references to her own past. She thought about trying to find a telephone box to place a trunk call to London but didn’t know whether Dickie would be at home or in the theatre and besides Mrs Steadman would want to know why she was going out again, and without a scrambler on both ends of the line you couldn’t be sure who was listening. How horrid it was to be living surrounded by lies, so that you yourself were forced to lie too.

  She put the pieces away, went downstairs and washed her face and throat miserably in tepid water from the bathroom tap, then burrowed into bed. Her finger still shivered with the residue of Felix’s touch. She hadn’t imagined it, that movement towards her palm. He had touched her with his thumb. But then the image of Moira’s tangled hair crept into view, and as she began to drift off her sleepiness was tainted with a sickly feeling.

  The next day, she thought to herself; tomorrow. I don’t begin work until midnight. She would heap the pieces into a bag, and take them to Moira’s. Moira was the one with the brain that worked. Of the two of them it was Moira who had been plucked from top of the mathematics pile, Moira who had spent time in Dilly Knox’s Research Cottage. Moira was the codebreaker.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘She’s gone. Been taken away. This morning. They had official papers, I didn’t know what to do.’

  Moira’s landlady had the baby braced against her hip. It watched them calmly, batting its eyes from face to face with an infant’s sixth sense. With a mother’s sense the woman spoke quietly, and watched the baby back with half an eye, as if she were clutching a bomb.

  ‘Was it to her home? Where were they taking her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hospital? They had an ambulance.’

  ‘But she’s not ill. How can they spare a hospital bed with all the bombing going on? This is absurd.’

  In the crisp morning light Honey could see that veins had popped across the woman’s nose. Beneath her skin her bones were visible, sharp. She looked like a survivor, like a woman Honey had seen once in London crawling through the shards of a burnt-out house with her toddler clutched to her.

  ‘I was talking to her last night. She was on bromide but she seemed . . .’ A dread feeling began to thread round her. It started at her shoulders, very cold, and worked down into a hot lava in her belly. ‘When you say official. . . were they from the Park?’

  The baby threw back its head and let rip a piercing shriek.

  The woman looked at Honey cold and hard. Honey saw her again in that moment the night before, her head bent, seated on the couch. She had regained her strength now; it had doubled, tripled. She was in charge of her house and Honey was an intruder.

  Through this though, another vision persisted; two sheets of thin tissue, scrawled in blue, the rubbings of the cipher standing out. Next to them two scraps of white paper covered in equations. Slowly she said, ‘Did she leave anything in her room?’

  The landlady sighed. ‘Whatever she left the men will have taken. One of them was definitely a doctor. The other looked like an orderly. He wore overalls. But the Park must know because they sent the billeting officer round hot on their heels. I’m to have a new girl by this afternoon.’ She shifted the baby on her hip. For a second the wailing sank to a gurgle. Honey heard the woman’s next words perfectly. ‘Sweetheart, she’s not coming back.’

  It was only when she had reached the gate that the landlady called out to her again. ‘Actually, wait a second. Is your name Honey?’

  Honey turned. The landlady’s hand was stuffed into her pinny pocket, scrabbling. She cast her eyes sideways at the hedges. ‘I didn’t know what she meant when she first said it, “for Honey”. Before she left she said “for Honey”. I thought . . . I thought perhaps she’d lost her marbles, she was meaning honey for toast or . . . I don’t know what I thought she meant but she gave me these. Mean anything to you?’

  Honey met the woman’s eye, for she already knew what was in her hand. When she did look down, the two pieces of tissue-thin paper were folded, containing the two other small papers. She could make out notes and diagrams on the outer edges and her stomach tripped. She pulled her mind back from straying too far onto what would have happened had the Park men found cryptanalytic equations in a billet.

  The papers crackled with static charge as Honey stuffed them into her pocket, and they continued to rustle, loud, incriminating, even as she began to walk. She didn’t dare look back at the woman; she took the path at a clip in the direction of the Park. But in a bramble thicket she pulled the papers out, separating t
hem from the tissue rubbings.

  When she pulled them out, it was the opposite side to Moira’s lurching bold hand that was face up, and as she unfolded them, the typing printed on the back of each slip caught her off guard — the paper Moira had chosen for her scribblings.

  I don’t know why I did it.

  As Honey gazed in growing horror she began to realise just what Moira had discovered, and why it might have been so important those Park men get rid of her as quickly as they could.

  She banged her knuckles into the panel of Tiver’s door, sending the impact of the wood right back into her bones. Katie Brewster looked up. ‘Deschamps, what the devil are you . . .?’ Honey knocked again, twice.

  The door snapped open. Tiver took a couple of slow breaths. His eyes travelled down from her burnt cheeks to her scuffed shoes.

  ‘You’d better not just stand there, you hot-headed little wretch. Come inside and mind how you talk to me.’

  She took the leather seat opposite the Captain’s desk again, biting her tongue as he pulled a small green bottle from his top drawer and poured himself a sherry. In the silence that followed she noticed more of the details of his office: the rivets holding the leather to the wood frame of his chair, a curlicue swivel chair, a Captain’s chair. On his desk he had sheaves of paper stamped in Cabinet red. The battleship seemed to have swelled upwards under a wave of new documents and memos.

  His voice was more measured than before. ‘You’re supposed to be adept at keeping secrets. But it seems over the past day or so you’ve been party to more than your fair share.’

  Honey tried to keep her face level. She was still stinging from being called a ‘hot-headed little wretch’. Flametemper, that was what the teachers at school said. Had she been blonde or mousy they never would have.

  ‘I’m only telling you this because I hear you’ve been making a fuss in the village and you know as well as I do, Deschamps, that simply doesn’t do here.’

  ‘There are a lot of things that don’t do here.’

  Tiver didn’t flinch, but neither did he try to conceal a flutter of confusion that came onto his brow. ‘You’re worried about your friend. I understand. But we have more reason than you to worry about her.’

  There were things she wanted to say. She phrased and recast them in her head. But at the final barrier of her mouth, each time, they dissolved and she couldn’t. Eventually she said, ‘It isn’t fair what you did, taking her away, for that.’ She kept her voice soft to stop it cracking as she felt the tide rising.

  ‘Miss Draper needs a rest. The work is too taxing for her, personal matters were playing on her nerves and she disobeyed a boundary. You know as well as I discretion is not just a standard we aim for here, it is of mortal necessity.’

  ‘But you haven’t sent her for a rest, have you? You sent her away because she found you out.’ I don’t know why I did it. She had stolen those pieces of paper, one of them at least. She had chosen to write on them for a reason, and she had passed that reason on to Honey; another code.

  Tiver’s face was furrowed into lines. He was not a man who enjoyed being on the cloudy side of a conversation. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.

  She had the impression she was being invited to tell him he had misheard. But ‘hot-headed’; she couldn’t get away from that. It was nagging at her, and she wouldn’t let a friend be dragged away without kicking up a fuss.

  ‘I found them in her room. The two payslips.’

  Now Tiver let his confusion show. ‘Sorry, what do you mean?’

  Her hand paused on the crackle of her pocket. The pieces of paper Moira had scribbled on. Playing with equations, cipher-breaking, making notes for her amber messages. Betty Somebody had been disciplined for writing to her boyfriend in code. Honey moved her hand back onto her lap. ‘She showed me two payslips with very different wages.’

  The Captain deflected his eyes, the way he had done when he passed her the ‘Fraternising with Foreigners’ memo.

  ‘You haven’t sent her home,’ Honey said. ‘You sent her away because she found out that the junior men in Hut 6 earn more than twice as much as the women working at the top level in the Research Cottage. Isn’t that true?’

  One of Tiver’s eyebrows floated into an arch. ‘Miss Draper is not well.’

  ‘She was well enough to collect the evidence when she saw it.’

  ‘Where is this evidence?’

  Honey blushed. She looked at Tiver’s desk, a barricade between them. ‘I don’t have them. She showed me them last night.’

  ‘Whose payslips?’

  ‘I won’t say.’

  She wasn’t ready for his crimson face barrelling across the desk, swelling vengefully close to her own, incendiary and quivering. His hands braced him up. ‘You’ll say all right. You’ll say because I won’t be bullied by one typist any more than I’ll stand for the histrionics of another.’

  ‘Rupert Findlay. Rupert Findlay, Hut 6. The one they call Poo,’ Honey blurted.

  The words had an instant effect on Tiver. It was as if he had woken to his rage, as if someone else had thrown it over his head like a rag, startling him, and now he had managed to get a clutch on it, pull it back off. He blinked and sat back down.

  Honey went on. ‘He’s a junior in the crib room. He’s a Cambridge boy but only twenty if that. And yet Moira found out his wage slip is £6 2s a week. When she worked at the Cottage, as well you know she earned -£3. Like me. Like all of us. They’re talking about this in parliament, this difference between the women’s and the men’s wages and you know as well as I it just isn’t fair.’

  Tiver raised his hand to his brow and tamped on each of his weak, papery eyelids in turn. While Honey waited he shook his head and took a sip of sherry. ‘Miss Deschamps, whether or not you lot are vulgar enough to swap confidential money matters with each other, I won’t discuss it with you. Whatever gripes Draper had with her pay she never brought them to me. This is the first I’ve heard of any of it. You ladies do get some funny notions, but it’s one thing I’ll say for that girl; she wasn’t the sort to come in the middle of a war and demand more money. You work for your country, and your country rewards you with what it thinks you’re worth, and what it thinks you need.’

  ‘Who decides that?’

  Tiver sighed. His eyes fell on his pipe and Honey could tell immediately that now they were no longer talking at cross purposes, he wanted rid of her. ‘You came to me about Draper, didn’t you?’

  ‘Who sets the tariffs?’

  But Tiver just reached into his desk drawer again and retrieved a piece of paper torn from a magazine. Honey recognised the half-shine of the page; Country Lady or some other weekly, one of the type Moira liked. On the back was a pattern for turning old lace curtains into a wedding veil. He unfolded it and smoothed it onto the leather blotter. The headline was about a parlour maid who had spilled the beans on an affair with Baron Glenkinchie. There was a picture of him on one of his polo ponies outside some castle. In the inset was a grainy photograph of a voluptuous young woman in her Sunday best, a cloche hat and suit. Further down was a picture of the Baron and his wife at a fete. ‘Downfall of a Lord: the Other Woman Speaks.’

  ‘This was left on Lieutenant MacCrae’s desk.’ He paused. ‘Miss Draper went into Hut 3 and left it on his desk.’

  Honey looked down at the picture, imagined Moira tearing it carefully, sneaking past the forbidden boundary into the hut, her vengeance bigger and harder than any of the rules that were set at the Park.

  ‘You see, Miss Deschamps, we all speak in codes, all the time, when it boils down.’

  Honey took a second to swallow. Her mouth felt tight and hot. She remembered Moira’s dribbles into the pillow. I don’t know why I did it. I was just so sad. Such sadness as Honey couldn’t conjure in her imagination, not in her wildest attempts. She had never been in love. She had never placed in another person so much trust, to be so wretchedly betrayed. Of course it could not be as simple, as cold as money. She had
misread the notes. Of course there was more to it. But . . .

  ‘I don’t understand. You can’t take away a woman because of an affair. You can’t whisk her away. When will she . . . when can I . . . where have you taken her?’

  ‘She walked into a hut that wasn’t her own, and we won’t have scandal at the Park.’ The pitch of his voice cut through Honey. The silence that followed it was hostile. She sensed in that outburst all of his impatience; she saw herself for what she must be – a nuisance to him. Moira, nothing but a nuisance too, a nuisance to Lieutenant MacCrae, to be removed. The silence seemed to reach past and around her like a smothering pillow and she saw it travel right through the wood of the door, into the lobby, into the other offices, strangling, smothering sound, gagging everyone it touched on its way. Silence was the only thing that mattered here, and if you broke it, it would be forced back on you.

  When Tiver spoke again his voice was quiet, and the black marks in his face from the last war seemed to shine. ‘There are men whose lives depend on your ability to keep your mouths shut and bloody well get on with it. And that’s exactly what your friend couldn’t do.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have said a word about the affair.’

  ‘We can’t take that risk.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where your friend is now. But she’s safe. Remember, Deschamps, you signed the Official Secrets Act. I said then that if you broke the terms I’d take you out and shoot you myself.’ He held her gaze. ‘That still stands.’

  The lady at the cafeteria counter made jovial chatter about marmalade and predicted the war would be finished up in less than three months. She was unhappy about bacon rationing, found rabbit too flavourful to entertain cooking with, and there were never any of the soup brands she liked left at the grocer’s. Honey took the black tea with the floating dead leaves and chose a table.