Claire, of course, had known immediately what to do.
‘Oh, darling, poor you, and I suppose he’s got a wife?’
‘He says they were married too young.’
‘Well, she’s your answer. Tell him you think it’s only fair you go and have a talk with her first. Tell him you want to be her friend.’
‘But what if he says yes?’
‘Oh, God! Then I suppose you’ll just have to kick him in the balls.’
Hester smiled at the memory. She shifted her position in the bed again and the cotton sheet rode up and corrugated beneath her. It was quite hopeless. She reached out and switched on the little bedside lamp, fumbling around its base for her glasses.
Ich lerne deutsch, ich lernte deutsch, ich habe deutsch gelernt …
German, she thought: German would be her salvation. A working knowledge of written German would lift her out of the grind of the Intercept Control Room, away from the clammy embrace of Miles Mermagen, and propel her into the rarefied air of the Machine Room, where the real work was done – where she should have been put in the first place.
She propped herself up in bed and tried to focus on Abelman’s German Primer. Ten minutes of this was usually quite enough to send her off to sleep.
‘Intransitive verbs showing a change of place or condition take the auxiliary sein instead of haben in the compound tenses …’
She looked up. Was that a noise downstairs?
‘In subordinate word order the auxiliary must stand last, directly after the past participle or the infinitive …’
And there it was again.
She slipped her warm feet into her cold outdoor shoes, wrapped a woollen shawl about her shoulders, and went out onto the landing.
A knocking sound was coming from the kitchen.
She began to descend the stairs.
There had been two men waiting for her when she arrived back from church. One had been standing on the doorstep, the other had emerged casually from the back of the cottage. The first man was young and blond with a languid, aristocratic manner and a kind of decadent Anglo-Saxon handsomeness. His companion was older, smaller, slim and dark, with a northern accent. They both had Bletchley Park passes and said they’d come from Welfare and were looking for Miss Romilly. She hadn’t turned up for work: any idea where she might be?
Hester had said she hadn’t. The older man had gone upstairs and had spent a long time searching around. The blond, meanwhile – she never caught his name – had sprawled on the sofa and asked a lot of questions. There was something offensively patronising about him, for all his good manners. This is what Miles Mermagen would be like, she found herself thinking, if he’d had five thousand pounds’ worth of private education. What was Claire like? Who were her friends? Who were the men in her life? Had anyone been asking after her? She mentioned Jericho’s visit of the previous night and he made a note of it with a gold propelling pencil. She almost blurted out the story of Jericho’s peculiar approach in the churchyard (‘ADU, Miss Wallace …’) but by this time she had taken so strongly against the blond man’s manner she bit back the words.
Knock, knock, knock from the kitchen …
Hester took the poker that stood beside the sitting-room fireplace and slowly opened the kitchen door.
It was like stepping into a refrigerator. The window was banging in the wind. It must have been open for hours.
At first she felt relieved, but that lasted only until she tried to close it. Then she discovered that the metal catch, weakened by rust, had been snapped clean off. Part of the wooden window frame around it was splintered.
She stood in the cold and considered the implications and quickly concluded there was only one plausible explanation. The dark-haired man who had appeared from behind the cottage on her return from church had obviously been in the process of breaking in.
They had told her there was nothing to worry about. But if there was nothing to worry about, why had they been prepared to force entry into the house?
She shivered and drew the shawl around her.
‘Oh Claire,’ she said aloud, ‘oh, Claire, you silly, stupid, stupid girl, what have you done?’
She used a piece of blackout tape to try and secure the window. Then, still holding the poker, she went back upstairs and into Claire’s room. A silver fox was hanging over the end of the bed, its glass-bead eyes staring, its needle teeth bared. Out of habit, she folded it neatly and placed it on the shelf where it normally lived. The room was such an expression of Claire, such an extravagance of colour and fabric and scent, that it seemed to resonate with her presence, even now, when she was away, to hum with it, like the last vibrations of a tuning fork … Claire, holding some ridiculous dress to herself and laughing and asking her what she thought, and Hester pretending to frown with an older sister’s disapproval. Claire, as moody as an adolescent, on her stomach on the bed, leafing through a pre-war Tatler. Claire combing Hester’s hair (which, when she let it down, fell almost to her waist), running her brush through it with slow and languorous strokes that made Hester’s limbs turn weak. Claire insisting on painting Hester in her make-up, dressing her up like a doll and standing back in mock surprise: ‘Why, darling, you’re beautiful!’ Claire, in nothing but a pair of white silk knickers and a string of pearls, prancing about the room in search of something, long-legged as an athlete, turning and seeing that Hester was secretly watching her in the mirror, catching the look in her eyes, and standing there for a moment, hip thrust forward, arms outstretched, with a smile that was something between an invitation and a taunt, before sweeping back into motion …
And on that cold, bright Sabbath afternoon, Hester Wallace, the clergyman’s daughter, leaned against the wall and closed her eyes and pressed her hand between her legs with shame.
An instant later the noise from the kitchen started again and she thought her heart might burst with panic. She fled across the landing and into her room, pursued by the dry whine of the vicar of St Mary’s – or was it really the voice of her father? – reciting from the Book of Proverbs:
‘For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell …’
6
For the first time in more than a month, Tom Jericho found that he was busy.
He had to supervise the copying of the Short Signal Code Book, six typewritten transcripts of which were duly produced and stamped MOST SECRET. Every line had to be checked, for a single error could spell the difference between a successful break and days of failure. The intercept controllers had to be briefed. Teleprintered orders had to be sent to all the duty officers of every Hut 8 listening post – from Thurso, clinging to the cliffs on the northernmost tip of Scotland, right down to St Erth, near Land’s End. Their brief was simple: concentrate everything you have on the known Atlantic U-boat frequencies, cancel all leave, bring in the lame and the sick and the blind if you have to, and pay even greater attention than usual to very short bursts of Morse preceded by E-bar – dot dot dash dot dot – the Germans’ priority code which cleared the wavelength for convoy contact reports. Not one such signal was to be missed, understand? Not one.
From the Registry, Jericho withdrew three months’ worth of Shark decrypts to bring himself back up to speed, and, that afternoon, sitting in his old place by the window in the Big Room, proved by slide-rule calculation what he already knew by instinct: that seventeen convoy contact reports, if harvested in the same twenty-four-hour stretch, would yield eighty-five letters of cipher encode which might – might, if the cryptanalysts had the requisite percentage of luck – give them a break into Shark, provided they could get at least ten bombes working in relay for a minimum of thirty-six hours …
And all the time he thought of Claire.
There was very little, practically, he could do about her. Twice during the day he managed to get out to the telephone box to t
ry to call her father: once as they all went off to lunch, when he was able to drop back, unnoticed by the rest, just before they reached the main gate; and the second time in the late afternoon when he pretended he needed to stretch his legs. On each occasion, the connection was made, but the phone merely rang, unanswered. He had a vague but growing feeling of dread, made worse by his powerlessness. He couldn’t return to Hut 3. He didn’t have the time to check out her cottage. He would have liked to go back to his room to rescue the intercepts – hidden behind a picture on top of the mantelpiece? was he insane? – but the round trip would have taken him the best part of twenty minutes and he couldn’t get away.
In the event, it was to be well past seven before he got away. Logie was passing through the Big Room when he stopped off at Jericho’s table and told him, for God’s sake, to get back to his digs and get some rest. ‘There’s nothing more for you to do here, old love. Except wait. I expect it’ll be around this time tomorrow that we’ll start to sweat.’
Jericho reached thankfully for his coat. ‘Did you talk to Skynner?’
‘About the plan, yes. Not about you. He didn’t ask and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.’
‘Don’t tell me he’s forgotten?’
Logie shrugged. ‘There’s some other flap on that seems to have taken his mind off things.’
‘What other flap?’
But Logie had moved away. ‘I’ll see you in the morning. You just make sure you get some kip.’
Jericho returned the stack of Shark intercepts to the Registry and went outside. The March sun, which had barely risen above the trees all day, had sunk behind the mansion, leaving a fading streak of primrose and pale orange at the rim of an indigo sky. The moon was already out and Jericho could hear the sound of bombers, far away, a lot of them, forming up for the night’s attack on Germany. As he walked, he gazed around him in wonder. The lunar disc on the still lake, the fire on the horizon – it was an extraordinary conjunction of lights and symbols, almost like a portent. He was so engrossed he had almost passed the telephone box before he realised that it was empty.
One last try? He glanced at the moon. Why not?
The Kensington number still wasn’t answering so he decided, on a whim, to try the Foreign Office. The operator put him through to a duty clerk and he asked for Edward Romilly.
‘Which department?’
‘I don’t know, I’m afraid.’
The line went silent. The chances of Edward Romilly being at his desk on a Sunday night were slim. He rested his shoulder against the glass panel of the booth. A car went past slowly, then pulled up about ten yards down the road. Its brake lights glowed red in the dusk. There was a click and Jericho returned his attention to the call.
‘Putting you through.’
A ringing tone, and then a cultured female voice said: ‘German Desk.’
German Desk? He was momentarily disconcerted. ‘Ah, Edward Romilly, please.’
‘And who shall I say is calling?’
My God, he was there. He hesitated again.
‘A friend of his daughter.’
‘Wait, please.’
His fingers were clamped so tight around the receiver that they were aching. He made an effort to relax. There was no good reason why Romilly shouldn’t work on the German Desk. Hadn’t Claire told him once that her father had been a junior official at the Berlin Embassy, just as the Nazis were coming to power? She would have been about ten or eleven. That must have been where she learned her German.
‘I’m afraid, sir, Mr Romilly’s already left for the evening. Who shall I say called?’
‘Thank you. It doesn’t matter. Good night.’
He hung up quickly. He didn’t like the sound of that. And he didn’t like the look of this car, either. He came out of the telephone box and began to walk towards it – a low, black machine with wide running boards, edged white for the blackout. Its engine was still running. As he came closer it suddenly catapulted forwards and shot round the curving road towards the main gate. He trotted after it but by the time he reached the entrance it had gone.
As Jericho went down the hill, the vague outline of the town evaporated into the darkness. No generation for at least a century could have witnessed such a spectacle. Even in his great-grandfather’s day there would have been some illumination – the gleam of a gaslight or a carriage lantern, the bluish glow of a night watchman’s paraffin lamp – but not any more. As the light faded, so did Bletchley. It seemed to sink into a black lake. He could have been anywhere.
He was aware, now, of a certain paranoia, and the night magnified his fears. He passed an urban pub close to the railway bridge, an elaborate Victorian mausoleum with FINE WHISKYS, PORTS AND STOUTS inlaid in gold on the black masonry like an epitaph. He could hear a badly tuned piano playing ‘The Londonderry Air’ and for a moment he was tempted to go in, buy a drink, find someone to talk to. But then he imagined the conversation –
‘So, what’s your line then, pal?’
‘Just government work.’
‘Civil service?’
‘Communications. Nothing much. Look, I say, can I get you another drink?’
‘Local are you?’
‘Not exactly …’
– and he thought: no, better to keep clear of strangers; best, really, not to drink at all. As he was turning into Albion Street he heard the scrape of a footstep behind him and spun round. The pub door had opened, there was a moment of colour and music, then it closed and the road was dark again.
The guesthouse was about half way down Albion Street, on the right and he had almost reached it when he noticed, on the left, a car. He slowed his pace. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one that had behaved so oddly at the Park, although it looked quite similar. But then, when he was almost level with it, one of the occupants struck a match. As the driver leaned over to cup his hand to the light, Jericho saw on his sleeve the three white stripes of a police sergeant.
He let himself into the guesthouse and prayed he could make the stairs before Mrs Armstrong rose like a night fighter to intercept him in the hall. But he was too late. She must have been waiting for the sound of his key in the latch. She appeared from the kitchen through a cloud of steam that smelled of cabbage and offal. In the dining room, somebody made a retching noise and there was a shout of laughter.
Jericho said weakly, ‘I don’t think I’m very hungry, Mrs Armstrong, thanks all the same.’
She dried her hands on her apron and nodded towards a closed door. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’
He had just planted his foot defiantly on the first stair. ‘Is it the police?’
‘Why, Mr Jericho, whatever would the police be doing here? It’s a very nice-looking young gentleman. I’ve put him,’ she added, with heavy significance, ‘in the parlour.’
The parlour! Open nightly to any resident from eight till ten on weekdays, and from teatime onwards, Saturday and Sunday: as formal as a ducal drawing room, with its matching three-piece suite and antimacassars (made by the proprietress herself), its mahogany standard lamp with tasselled shade, its row of grinning Toby jugs, precisely lined above its freezing hearth. Who had come to see him, wondered Jericho, who warranted admission to the parlour?
At first he didn’t recognise him. Golden hair, a pale and freckled face, pale blue eyes, a practised smile. Advancing across the room to meet him, right hand outstretched, left hand holding an Anthony Eden hat, fifty guineas’ worth of Savile Row coat draped over manly shoulders. A blur of breeding, charm and menace.
‘Wigram. Douglas Wigram. Foreign Office. We met yesterday but weren’t introduced properly.’
He took Jericho’s hand lightly and oddly, a finger crooked back into his palm, and it took Jericho a moment to realise he had just been the recipient of a masonic handshake.
‘Digs all right? Super room, this. Super. Mind if we go somewhere else? Whereabouts are you based? Upstairs?’
Mrs Armstrong was still in the hall, fluffing up
her hair in front of the oval mirror.
‘Mr Jericho suggests we might have our little chat upstairs in his room, if that’s OK with you, Mrs A?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Let’s go then, shall we?’
He held out his arm, still smiling, and Jericho found himself being ushered up the stairs. He felt as though he had been tricked or robbed but he couldn’t work out how. On the landing he rallied sufficiently to turn and say, ‘It’s very small, you know, there’s barely room to sit.’
‘That’s perfectly all right, my dear chap. As long as it’s private. Onwards and upwards.’
Jericho switched on the dim light and stood back to let Wigram go in first. There was a faint whiff of eau de cologne and cigars as he brushed past. Jericho’s eyes went straight to the picture of the chapel, which, he was relieved to note, looked undisturbed. He closed the door.
‘See what you mean about the room,’ said Wigram, cupping his hands to the glass to peer out of the window. ‘The hell we have to go through, what? And a railway view thrown in. Bliss.’ He closed the curtains and turned back to Jericho. He was cleaning his fingers on a handkerchief with almost feminine delicacy. ‘We’re rather worried.’ His smile widened. ‘We’re rather worried about a girl called Claire Romilly.’ He folded the blue silk square and thrust it back into his breast pocket. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
He shrugged off his overcoat and laid it on the bed, then hitched up his pinstriped trousers a fraction at the knees to avoid damaging the crease. He sat on the edge of the mattress and bounced up and down experimentally. His hair was blond; so were his eyebrows, his eyelashes, the hairs on the back of his neat white hands … Jericho felt his skin prickle with fear and disgust.
Wigram patted the eiderdown beside him. ‘Let’s talk.’ He didn’t seem the least put out when Jericho stayed where he was. He merely folded his hands contentedly in his lap.