The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Tell me about him,” said Denise interestedly. “Isn’t he the fella Alice Thing is hot on?”

  “Was. Till she met your monocled friend. Incidentally, don’t forget those two are dining with us tomorrow, so you better brush up your best English-type words.”

  “Don’t be nasty.When in Rome do as Romans do. Especially when they happen to be an Earl.” She saw his face. “Okay, so he isn’t an Earl. But he darn well looks like one, that’s all.”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem, you beautiful, stoopid creature. Go on, off to bed with you, sexy! And don’t leave your things all over the bathroom floor, or I’ll throw them in the bath, and you with them.”

  “In my pyjamas? You wouldn’t dare!”

  But Cy just didn’t seem to have his mind on such things. He put on his glasses and peered at her thoughtfully. “Things aren’t always as they seem, are they?”

  She looked perplexed. “What?” she demanded, screwing up her face into an expression that might have been markedDeep Thought. “I thought you were going to throw me in the bath, in my pyjamas,” she said disappointedly.

  He came back to earth. “Oh. Yes of course. In a minute, dear.”

  She left the room, shaking her head sadly. “There must be some way of tuning a man in so that he stays on the station,” she muttered to herself.

  Left to himself, Cy contemplated a totally blank wall. “I wonder how often Joel Cummings has his piano tuned?” he posed to an empty room.

  Cy picked up the telephone, and dialled the special number that operated the direct line to Miles’ office. Only a handful of people knew it, or even the fact that there was a direct line at all.

  As Cy suspected, Miles was still there.

  “Yes?” demanded a clipped, precision-engineered voice, that sounded even more impersonal through the medium of the telephone.

  “Harford here, sir. I’ve just had a thought. Or ahunch, as they say on the television.”

  “My name’sFriday,” said the voice at the other end without change of intonation, “and all I want is the facts. Go on.”

  “Cummings is a musician. Right?”

  “Right,” said Miles, keeping to the script. Actually, he felt very far from being frivolous, but after twelve solid hours of beating his brains out even mild facetiousness was a release.

  “Well, he must have had his piano tuned regularly, then.”

  There was a long pause at the other end. Then: “I should have my head examined!Ten-four?”

  “Ten-four,” grinned Harford, and replaced the receiver.

  Denise was waiting in the doorway in her pyjamas.

  “I’m all ready,” she said.

  “You know,” said Cy, getting up, “you got no right to look like that when I’m talking to the boss! I might say something he would be rather surprised to hear, if he thought I was talking to him.”

  “Why were you calling him at this hour?” she demanded, leaning against the door pillar and looking adorable.

  “Just an idea,” said Cy, and putting an arm round her he escorted her from the room.

  *

  Miles put his hand on the receiver rest, and then dialled another number. It was answered almost immediately. “No,” said Jill, “I wasn’t asleep, sir.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “Yes, thank you. Sir George was very good to me. But I couldn’t sleep. I’m just having coffee.”

  “You too! Well, I’m glad I haven’t got you out of bed. I rang you at this ungodly hour because I need your help. It concerns Joel.”

  She felt she wanted to say she was sorry for her outburst at the meeting, and yet she wasn’t really sorry because she knew she was right. In the end she compromised. “I want to be a help,” she said. “I realize that I wasn’t much help by just throwing a temperament, however much I disagreed with you.”

  “I quite understood,” said Miles kindly, “and you needn’t worry a bit. You may prove us all to be wrong; I certainly hope so, for everybody’s sake.” He didn’t sound as if he thought this very likely.

  “Please tell me what I can do,” she said.

  “Something you may be able to tell me,” said Miles. “When was Joel’s piano last tuned?”

  She thought about this one. “I don’t know,” she said at length, “but I can find out. He has it tuned pretty regularly. Although it looks awful on the outside, he’s very particular about the works.”

  “Do you think it has been done since he came out of Murtha House?”

  “Oh yes, sure to have been.”

  “But you can check? When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Not soon enough. I want to know within the hour. Do you have a key to Cummings’ flat?” It was a straight question, requiring a straight answer.

  “Yes,” said Jill. Then, enlightened: “Yes, of course! The number will be in the telephone pad. I’ll go round there right away.”

  “Good girl! I’ll send a car — it may not be safe for you to go there alone. It will be outside by the time you’re dressed. Try and get hold of the piano tuner on Joel’s telephone, and call me as soon as you have done so — whatever the result. Got it?”

  “Mr. Prescott-Healey!” she said urgently, before he had a chance to ring off. Her voice was tense and brittle to her own ears. “What will it prove — I mean, if the tuner’s been?”

  “Well, I’m afraid it won’tprove anything. But it will show one of about three things. Firstly, if the documents were there when the tuner called, it won’t help Cummings very much — especially if it were done in about the first week that he was back.

  “But if they weren’t there when he came we get a different picture. You see, a lot of those documents date back some weeks. If they weren’t there, therefore, it could mean that they were planted afterwards by someone else. Or, of course, Cummings might have changed the hiding-place. But why? And especially, why put them in the piano where they would have to be shifted again anyway — that is, if he had thought of this particular danger from the tuner.”

  “Surely, he would have thought of that if he’d been guilty.”

  “Well,we didn’t. It’s often the obvious things that catch people out. All right. You wait for the car; it will be there in a few minutes.”

  *

  After arranging for her transport, Miles went through the green baize door, along the corridor, and stopped at a fireproof, steel bulkhead which bore a notice carrying the inscription:

  NO ADMITTANCE

  CIPHER PERSONNEL

  He pressed the button and waited a few seconds. Soon the door was opened by a man who must have been sixteen stone if he weighed a pound. He had a pleasant, rather purple face and thick, generous lips. His stomach inclined downwards and outwards like the profits graph of a particularly unsuccessful company. The total effect ought to have been repulsive, but wasn’t. Brian Mockridge was somebody everybody liked.

  He greeted Miles with his throaty, fifty-cigarettes-a-day rasp.

  “Miles! Come in, old boy.” He called over his shoulder. “Get the beer, Henry. The beer! In the top-secret file.” To Miles. “Cigarette? It’s practically illegal not to smoke while you’re in here.” He waved his huge arms vaguely. “In fact, old boy, I doubt if this equipment would work at all in a pure atmosphere after all this time. Come and sit down.”

  ‘This equipment’ left little room for the luxury and comfort of an ordinary chair. There were, however, a few rotatable stools planted here and there in what little space there was. How Brian found room to exist at all in the mêlée was altogether incomprehensible.

  The cipher office proper was quite an unpretentious little room that led off this one; for most signals designated for R7 came by special messenger from the War Office. But here in this strange, overcrowded, madhouse of a place was conducted the specialized task of ‘breaking down’ mechanical and electronic codes and ciphers. With its oscillographs, computers, tape-recorders and high-speed counters it looked, to anyone who was
unfamiliar with this type of work, like a cross between the control room of a television station and the firing point on a nuclear testing range.

  During the day, by some miracle, six men besides Brian Mockridge worked in this room. But now there was only that fat, amiable giant with the sweat showing through his horrible green, open-neck shirt, and his assistant, Henry, who was positively the most uncommunicative man in the whole building. Like the orgy of electrical instruments around him (except for the tape-recorders, which became voluble enough at times) he was silent and quite frighteningly efficient. But now he brought three bottles of beer and some glasses, and plonked them down on top of an oscilloscope, whose fluorescent image gave a wild jump at the impact. Brian gave the delicate instrument a hearty kick and the trace went back to its normal curve again.

  “Well, here’s how, Miles! “ he gasped. He always seemed to be fighting for air, and as if to make it as difficult as possible for himself he had neglected to provide any ventilation at all in this stuffy little room.

  Miles gulped some beer, put the glass back on the oscilloscope, watched the trace jump out of line again, and kicked it back to normal once more.

  Brian gave a wheezy laugh. “That’s right, old boy; you’re getting the hang of it already! The more complicated the equipment, the more vicious you’ve got to be with it. Or so I find. Like a woman.”

  “Tell me,” said Miles, “are you making any progress? Because I really came in here to send you off to bed. I don’t think you’ve left the building, have you, since you started on this one?”

  Brian Mockridge’s chins waggled as if in protest. But he didn’t give Miles a direct answer; he seldom did — three-quarters of his mind was always either considering calculations which he had just made, or other combinations he was about to try; and his brain therefore being minutes ahead or behind the clock it was only when it was jumping backwards and forwards, so to speak, between the two, that he happened to be living in the present. Sometimes he would reply to a question so long after it was asked that the original question had been forgotten by all except him. “Brian is so used to tape-recorders,” Gy would say, “that he has almost become one himself. The only thing that can have a conversation with him is another tape-recorder. One day he’ll meet a pretty little girl tape machine, and they’ll both live happily ever after!” This wasn’t entirely fair, since Brian was very much a human being. Still, it was true that he was very hard to interest in the art of reciprocal conversation. At times, if you talked to him, it was difficult to convince yourself that he was taking anything in at all, or indeed that he spoke the same language. But if you waited, and allowed him to conduct the conversation in his own zany manner, the answer came out all right at the other end.

  “I’ve heard some ‘scrambling’ in my time, but this one fascinates me!” he said. “It just doesn’t sound like speech at all.”

  “How do you know itis speech?”

  “Just doesn’t sound like speech at all, old boy. But I know itisspeech. I justknow. For one thing, you wouldn’t need such a complicated wave-form to conceal any other form of communication — morse, two-tone teleprinter ... that sort of thing. Too complex, this stuff. I would say that it has to be decoded by synchronizing it with a known and constantly varying signal, in opposite phase. You subtract one from the other and,hey-presto! you’re left with the signal you want.”

  “I’m afraid that’s absolute Greek to me!”

  “It’s quite simple in principle, dear boy. Come here; I’ll show you.” He walked across the jam-packed little room and switched on a tape machine. It produced a noise very similar to the sounds Miles had heard when he played the recording of the original intercepted radio signal.

  “That’s just a jumble of meaningless noise,” he explained, raising his voice slightly to be heard above the din. “Actually, it’s anendless tape, or aloop. Or in other words, I’ve joined the two ends of a piece of tape together so that it goes round and round, repeating itself about every ten seconds. If you listen carefully enough, you’ll notice that. Now I’m going to switch on another machine, and play it through the same loudspeaker. This second machine has an identical recording on it, and it is synchronized with the other machine. Now’ listen carefully.” He pressed a button, and the second machine started.

  “But that’s made the noise much quieter,” said Miles.

  “Yes, because it is exactly equal and opposite — or as exactly so that I can make it.” He switched off the second machine, and left the first one running, at the same time turning off the loudspeaker. “Now I’m going to start number three machine.”

  “How many more have you got, for Pete’s sake?”

  “There are eight in here altogether,” he explained imperturbably, “but we only need three for this little experiment.” He started the third machine. “Now, this last recorder is picking up the noise you were hearing from number one, and also anything you say into this microphone. Go on, say something!”

  “Brian Mockridge,” said Miles into the mike, “Aa raving lunatic,who should be kept in a padded cell together with sixty tape-recorders,all playing at once. Will that do?”

  “Fine. Now, I stop number three (that’s the recording of your voice), wind it back” — he did so — “and now play all three back together.”

  Although there was a good deal of the original noise, Miles’ voice could be clearly heard above it.

  “Now,” he said, winding back number three machine again, “I’ll just play numbers one and three — that is, what you would hear over the air if you didn’t have the ‘key’ recording. Your voice is still there, but you won’t hear it, because it will be lost in the general jumble of sound.”

  Again, just a jumble of noise.

  “I get it,” said Miles. “One known, and one unknown. Subtract the known, and you get the answer. But surely, that must have been thought of before?”

  Brian switched off the machines, and sat down heavily, receiving the usual protest on the screen of the oscilloscope. This time, no amount of kicking restored it to its normal state. “Oh well,” said Brian, “I suppose the impact of me sitting down is enough to throw anything off beam.” He drained his glass. “Yes, you’re right. It has often been thought of before. And it doesn’t work.”

  “Well, then ... ?”

  “It’s all right in laboratory conditions — if you can call this a laboratory — but over the radio you get fading ... phase shift ... double and treble reflections from the ionosphere ... static interference. It’s totally impracticable. Or was. But I think these people have found a way round it. Don’t ask me how. But I don’t see that this noise, if it is a signal at all, could be anything else. The trouble is, unless we can find the ‘known’ quantity — the equivalent of the recording on machine number one — I don’t think we have a hope in hell of breaking it down.”

  “What form would this ‘known’ quantity take? A reel of tape?”

  “Perhaps. Or a strip of film, or a gramophone record. Any sort of recording. But whatever it is, of one thing I am convinced. Without it, we’re stuck.”

  “If you had it,” said Miles, getting up, “would you be able to tell me what these birds were saying?”

  “Can’t promise that either,” said Brian. “They’ve solved a problem which we don’t know the answer to — as I explained. Whether we can break down their code depends on how they’ve gone about that.”

  “That sounds distinctly gloomy.”

  “Yes, old boy. Still, we won’t give up yet, even without the ‘missing link’. I’m going to try and synthesize it, by trial and error. It could take years, but it’s worth trying.” Miles went to the door. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’ll go to bed some night! I’ve just got to go back to my office where I’m expecting a call shortly. Then I’m hitting the hay.”

  “Lucky beggar!” wheezed the cipher expert. “Well, I couldn’t sleep right now. All I’d hear would be that crazy tweeting noise going on in my ears all night. The fu
nny part about it is, I keep thinking I’ve heard it somewhere before. But I can’t think where.”

  “I’d hate to think where!” observed Miles, “except possibly in Purgatory. Good-night, Brian.”

  “Good-night,” said the fattest man in R7, as he shut that heavy steel door.

  “I wish, Henry,” said Brian to his ever-silent colleague, “I could remember where I heard that noise before.” He passed a hand around his damp neck. “Oh well, I probably imagined it. Let’s go on with the symphony. Where have we got to? Let’s see: combination 117 ... come on, let’s get cracking.” He paused for a moment. “I wonder what the chances are of arriving at it this way?” he mused at length.

  Henry spoke, almost for the first time since the new day had begun, at 0001 hours. “I’ve been working them out,” he said. “It’s about six million against.”

  Brian wasn’t in the least put out. “Really? That’s not as bad as I thought. Let’s get on with it — we’ve still got 5,999,883 combinations to try ...”

  CHAPTER 17

  I MADE it through the tunnel, and a few minutes later the last of a million lights that glistened from across the East River faded below the glass horizon of my driving mirror. So far so good; but it was impossible to tell whether or not I was being followed — there were too many cars about. Actually, I felt I had been pretty clever — or extremely lucky.

  The main danger now came from a very different direction — my own drug-starved, screaming nerves. I knew I could not hold out much longer without the vital injection. My hands were shaking as I lit cigarette after cigarette. Half the time I could not feel the steering-wheel; the hands that were gripping it were not mine. They obeyed me, but there was no feed-back. The wheel moved with careful deliberation, sometimes this way, sometimes that, and the car remained on the right-hand side of the road; but the control seemed to be carried out by thought transference alone.

  To try and calm my runaway mind, I concentrated on other things.

  I thought about Jill and, strangely, I suddenly experienced the illusion of hearing her voice. Very clearly, not as in a dream.