‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll make a start, then, shall we? Claire Romilly. Twenty. Clerical grade staff. Officially missing for –’ he looked at his watch ‘– twelve hours. Failed to show for her morning shift. Actually, when you start to check, not seen since midnight, Friday – dear oh dear, that’s nearly two days ago now – when she left the Park after work. Alone. The girl she lives with swears she hasn’t seen her since Thursday. Her father says he hasn’t seen her since before Christmas. Nobody else – girls she works with, family, so forth – nobody seems to have the foggiest. Vanished.’ Wigram snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that.’ For the first time he’d stopped smiling. ‘Rather a good friend of yours, I gather?’
‘I haven’t seen her since the beginning of February. Is this why there are police outside?’
‘But good enough? Good enough that you’ve tried to see her? Out to her cottage last night, according to our little Miss Wallace. Scurry, scurry. Questions, questions. Then, this morning, into Hut 3 – questions, questions, again. Phone call to her father – oh, yes,’ he said, noticing Jericho’s surprise, ‘he rang us straight away to say you’d called. You’ve never met Ed Romilly? Lovely bloke. Never achieved his full potential, so they say. Rather lost the plot after his wife died. Tell me, Mr Jericho, why the interest?’
‘I’d been away for a month. I hadn’t seen her.’
‘But surely you’ve got plenty more important things to worry about, especially just now, than renewing one acquaintance?’
His last words were almost lost in the roar of a passing express train. The room vibrated for fifteen seconds, which was the exact duration of his smile. When the noise was over, he said: ‘Were you surprised to be brought back from Cambridge?’
‘Yes. I suppose I was. Look, Mr Wigram, who are you, exactly?’
‘Surprised when you were told why you were needed back?’
‘Not surprised. No.’ He searched for the word. ‘Shocked.’
‘Shocked. Ever talk to the girl about your work?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not. Strike you as odd, though – possibly more than a coincidence, possibly even sinister – that one day the Germans black us out in the North Atlantic and two days later the girlfriend of a leading Hut 8 cryptanalyst goes missing? Actually on the same day he comes back?’
Jericho’s gaze flickered involuntarily to the print of the chapel. ‘I told you. I never talked to Claire about my work. I hadn’t seen her for a month. And she wasn’t my girlfriend.’
‘No? What was she then?’
What was she then? A good question. ‘I just wanted to see her,’ he said lamely. ‘I couldn’t find her. I was concerned.’
‘Got a photo of her? Something recent?’
‘No. Actually, I don’t have any pictures of her.’
‘Really? Now here’s another funny thing. Pretty girl like that. But can we find a picture? We’ll just have to use the ID copy from her Welfare file.’
‘Use it for what?’
‘Can you fire a gun, Mr Jericho?’
‘I couldn’t hit a duck at a funfair.’
‘Now that’s what I would have thought, though one shouldn’t always judge a chap by his looks. Only the Bletchley Park Home Guard had a little burglary at their armoury on Friday night. Two items missing. A Smith and Wesson .38 revolver, manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts, issued by the War Office last year. And a box containing thirty-six rounds of ammunition.’
Jericho said nothing. Wigram looked at him for a while, as if he were making up his mind about something. ‘No reason why you shouldn’t know, I suppose. Trustworthy fellow like you. Come and sit down.’ He patted the eiderdown again. ‘I can’t keep shouting the biggest frigging secret in the British Empire across your frigging bedroom. Come on. I won’t bite, I promise.’
Reluctantly, Jericho sat down. Wigram leaned forwards. As he did so, his jacket parted slightly, and Jericho glimpsed a flash of leather and gunmetal against the white shirt.
‘You want to know who I am?’ he said softly. ‘I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the man our masters have decreed should find out just what’s what down here in your little anus mundi.’ He was speaking so quietly, Jericho was obliged to move his head in close to hear. ‘Bells are going off, you see. Horrible, horrible bells. Five days ago, Hut 6 decoded a German Army signal from the Middle East. General Rommel’s becoming a bit of a bad sport. Seems to think the only reason he’s losing is that somehow, by some miracle, we always appear to know where exactly he’s going to attack. Suddenly, the Afrika Korps want an enquiry into cipher security. Oh dear. Ding dong. Twelve hours later, Admiral Dönitz, for reasons as yet unknown, suddenly decides to tighten Enigma procedure by changing the U-boat weather code. Ding dong again. Today, it’s the Luftwaffe. Four German merchant ships loaded with goodies for the aforementioned Rommel were recently “surprised” by the RAF and sunk halfway to Tunisia. This morning, we read that the German C-in-C, Mediterranean, Field Marshal Kesselring himself, no less, is demanding to know whether the enemy could have read his codes.’ Wigram patted Jericho’s knee. ‘Peals of alarms, Mr Jericho. A Westminster-Abbey-on-Coronation-Day peal of alarms. And in the middle of them all, your lady friend disappears, at the same time as a shiny new shooter and a box of bullets.’
‘Exactly who or what are we dealing with here?’ said Wigram. He had taken out a small black leather notebook and a gold propelling pencil. ‘Claire Alexandra Romilly. Born: London, twenty-first of the twelfth, ’twenty-two. Father: Edward Arthur Macauley Romilly, diplomat. Mother: the Honourable Alexandra Romilly, née Harvey, deceased in motor accident, Scotland, August ’twenty-nine. The child is educated privately abroad. Father’s postings: Bucharest, ’twenty-eight to ’thirty-one; Berlin, ’thirty-one to ’thirty-four; Washington, ’thirty-four to ’thirty-eight. A year in Athens, then back to London. The girl by now is at some fancy finishing school in Geneva. She returns to London on the outbreak of war, aged seventeen. Principal occupation for the next three years, as far as one can gather: having a good time.’ Wigram licked his finger and turned the page. ‘Some voluntary civil defence work. Nothing too arduous. July ’forty-one: translator at the Ministry of Economic Warfare. August ’forty-two: applies for clerical position, Foreign Office. Good languages. Recommended for position at Bletchley Park. See attached letter from father, blah, blah. Interviewed 10th of September. Accepted, cleared, starts work the following week.’ Wigram flicked the pages back and forth. ‘That’s the lot. Not exactly a rigorous process of selection, is it? But then she does come from a frightfully good family. And Papa does work down at head office. And there is a war on. Care to add anything to the record?’
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘How’d you meet her?’
For the next ten minutes Jericho answered Wigram’s questions. He did this carefully and – mostly – truthfully. Where he lied it was only by omission. They had gone to a concert for their first date. After that they had gone out in the evenings a few times. They had seen a picture. Which one? In Which We Serve.
‘Like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell Noël.’
She had never talked about politics. She had never discussed her work. She had never mentioned other friends.
‘Did you sleep with her?’
‘Mind your own bloody business.’
‘I’ll put that down as yes.’
More questions. No, he had noticed nothing odd about her behaviour. No, she had not seemed tense or nervous, secretive, silent, aggressive, inquisitive, moody, depressed or elated – no, none of these – and at the end, they hadn’t quarrelled. Really? No. So they had … what, then?
‘I don’t know. Drifted apart.’
‘She was seeing someone else?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps. You don’t know.’ Wigram shook his head in wonder. ‘Tell me about last night.’
‘I cycled over to her cottage.
’
‘What time?’
‘About ten, ten-thirty. She wasn’t there. I talked with Miss Wallace for a bit. Then I came home.’
‘Mrs Armstrong says she didn’t hear you come in until around two o’clock this morning.’
So much for tiptoeing past her door, thought Jericho.
‘I must have cycled around for a while.’
‘I’ll say you did. In the frost. In the blackout. You must have cycled around for about three hours.’
Wigram gazed down at his notes, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Not right, Mr Jericho. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but definitely not right. Still.’ He snapped the notebook shut and gave a reassuring smile. ‘Time to go into all that later, what?’ He put his hand on Jericho’s knee and pushed himself to his feet. ‘First, we must catch our rabbit. You’ve no idea where she might be, I suppose? No favourite haunts? No little den to run to?’ He gazed down at Jericho, who was staring at the floor. ‘No? No. Thought not.’
By the time Jericho felt he could trust himself to look up again, Wigram had draped his beautiful overcoat back around his shoulders and was preoccupied picking tiny pieces of lint from its collar.
‘It could all be a coincidence,’ said Jericho. ‘You do realise that? I mean, Dönitz always seems to have been suspicious about Enigma. That’s why he gave the U-boats Shark in the first place.’
‘Oh absolutely,’ said Wigram cheerfully. ‘But let’s look at it another way. Let’s imagine the Germans have got a whisper of what we’re up to here. What would they do? They couldn’t exactly chuck out a hundred thousand Enigma machines overnight, could they? And then what about all those experts of theirs, who’ve always said Enigma is unbreakable? They’re not going to change their minds without a fight. No. They’d do what they look as though they might be doing. They’d start checking every suspicious incident. And in the meantime, they’d try and find hard proof. A person, perhaps. Better still, a person with documentary evidence. God, there are enough of them about. Thousands right here, who either know all the story, or a bit of it, or enough to put two and two together. And what kind of people are they?’ He withdrew a sheet of paper from his inside pocket and unfolded it. ‘This is the list I asked for yesterday. Eleven people in the Naval Section knew about the importance of the Weather Code Book. Some rum names here, if you stop to think about them. Skynner we can exclude, I suppose. And Logie – he seems sound enough. But Baxter? Now Baxter’s a communist, isn’t he?’
‘I think you’ll find that communists don’t have much time for Nazis. As a rule.’
‘What about Pukowski?’
‘Puck lost his father and his brother when Poland was invaded. He loathes the Germans.’
‘The American, then. Kramer. Kramer? He’s a second-generation German immigrant, did you know that?’
‘Kramer also lost a brother to the Germans. Really, Mr Wigram, this is ridiculous …’
‘Atwood. Pinker. Kingcome. Proudfoot. de Brooke. You … Who are you all, exactly?’ Wigram looked around the tiny room with distaste: the frayed blackout curtains, the tatty wardrobe, the lumpy bed. For the first time he seemed to notice the print of the chapel above the mantelpiece. ‘I mean, just because a bloke’s been to King’s College, Cambridge …’
He picked up the picture and held it at an angle under the light. Jericho watched him, transfixed.
‘E. M. Forster,’ said Wigram thoughtfully. ‘Now he’s still at King’s, isn’t he?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Know him?’
‘Only to nod to.’
‘What was that essay of his? How did it go? The one about choosing between your friend and your country?’
‘“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” But he did write that before the war.’
Wigram blew some dust off the frame and set the print carefully back on the top of Jericho’s books.
‘So I should hope,’ he said, standing back to admire it. He turned and smiled at Jericho. ‘So I should frigging well hope.’
After Wigram had gone, it was some minutes before Jericho felt able to move.
He lay full length on the bed, still wearing his scarf and overcoat, and listened to the sounds of the house. Some mournful string quartet which the BBC judged suitable entertainment for a Sunday night was scraping away downstairs. There were footsteps on the landing. A whispered conversation ensued which ended with a woman – Miss Jobey, was it? – having a fit of the giggles. A door slammed. The cistern above his head emptied and refilled. Then silence again.
When he did move, after about a quarter of an hour, his actions had a frantic, fumbling haste. He carried the chair over from the bedside to the door and tilted it against the flimsy panelling. He took the print and laid it face down on the threadbare carpet, pulled out the tacks, lifted off the back, rolled the intercepts into a tube, and took them over to the grate. On top of the little bucket of coal beside the hearth was a matchbox containing two matches. The first was damp and wouldn’t strike but the second did, just, and Jericho twisted it round to make sure the yellow flame caught and grew, then he applied it to the bottom of the intercepts. He held on to them as they writhed and blackened until the very last moment, until the pain obliged him to drop them in the grate, where they disintegrated into tiny flakes of ash.
FIVE
CRIB
CRIB: a piece of evidence (usually a captured code book or a length of plaintext) which provides clues for the breaking of a cryptogram; ‘without question, the crib … is the single most essential tool of any cryptanalyst’ (Knox et al., op. cit., page 27).
A Lexicon of Cryptography
(‘Most Secret’, Bletchley Park, 1943)
1
THE WARTIME LIPSTICK was hard and waxy – it was like trying to colour your lips with a Christmas candle. When, after several minutes of hard rubbing, Hester Wallace replaced her glasses, she peered into the mirror with distaste. Make-up had never featured much in her life, not even before the war, when there had been plenty in the shops. But now, when there was nothing to be had, the lengths one was expected to go to were quite absurd. She knew of girls in the hut who made lipstick out of beetroot and sealed it in place with Vaseline, who used shoe polish and burnt cork for mascara and margarine wrappers as a skin softener, who dusted bicarbonate of soda into their armpits to disguise their sweat … She formed her lips into a cupid’s bow, which she immediately drew back into a grimace. Really, it was quite, quite absurd.
The shortage of cosmetics seemed to have caught up at last even with Claire. Although there was a profusion of pots and bottles all over her little dressing table – Max Factor, Coty, Elizabeth Arden: each name redolent of pre-war glamour – most of them turned out on closer inspection to be empty. Nothing was left except a trace of scent. Hester sniffed at each in turn and her mind was filled with images of luxury – of satin cocktail dresses by Worth of London and gowns with daring décolletage, of fireworks at Versailles and the Duchess of Westminster’s summer ball, and a dozen other wonderful nonsenses that Claire had prattled on about. Eventually she found a half-full pot of mascara and a glass-stoppered jar with an inch of rather lumpy face powder and set to work with those.
She had no qualms about helping herself. Hadn’t Claire always told her she should? Making-up was fun, that was Claire’s philosophy, it made one feel good about oneself, it turned one into someone else, and, besides, ‘if this is what it takes, then, darling heart, this is simply what one does’. Very well. Hester dabbed grimly at her pallid cheeks. If this was what it bloody well took to help persuade Miles Mermagen to approve a transfer, this was what he’d bloody well get.
She regarded her reflection without enthusiasm, then carefully replaced everything in its proper place and went downstairs. The sitting room was freshly swept. Daffodils above the hearth. A fire laid. The kitchen, too, was spotless. She had made a carrot f
lan earlier in the evening, enough for two, with ingredients she had grown herself in the little vegetable patch outside the kitchen door, and now she laid a place for Claire, and left a note telling her where to find the flan and instructions on how to heat it. She hesitated, then added at the end: ‘Welcome back – from wherever you’ve been! – much love, H.’ She hoped it didn’t sound too fussy and inquisitive; she hoped she wasn’t turning into her mother.
‘ADU, Miss Wallace …’
Of course Claire would come back. It was all a stupid panic, too absurd for words.
She sat in one of the armchairs and waited for her until a quarter to midnight, when she dared leave it no longer.
As her bicycle bounced along the track towards the lane she startled a white owl which rose silently like a ghost in the moonlight.
In a way it was all Miss Smallbone’s fault. If Angela Smallbone hadn’t pointed out in the common room after prep that the Daily Telegraph was holding a crossword competition, then Hester Wallace’s life would have gone on undisturbed. It was not a particularly thrilling life – a placid, provincial life in a remote and eccentric girls’ preparatory school near the Dorset town of Beaminster, less than ten miles from where Hester had grown up. And it was not a life much touched by war, either, save for the pale faces of the evacuee children on some of the nearby farms, the barbed wire along the beach near Lyme Regis, and the chronic shortage of teaching staff – a shortage which meant that when the Michaelmas term began in the autumn of 1942, Hester was having to take divinity (her usual subject) and English and some Latin and Greek.
Hester had a gift for crosswords and when Angela read out that night that the prize-money was twenty pounds … well, she thought, why not? The first hurdle, an abnormally difficult puzzle printed in the next day’s paper, she passed with ease. She sent off her solution and a letter arrived almost by return of post inviting her to the final, to be held in the Telegraph’s staff canteen, a fortnight hence, a Saturday. Angela agreed to take over hockey practice, Hester caught the train from Crewkerne up to London, joined fifty other finalists – and won. She completed the crossword in three minutes and twenty-two seconds and Lord Camrose himself presented her with the cheque. She gave five pounds to her father for his church restoration fund, she spent seven pounds on a new winter coat (second-hand, actually, but good as new), and the rest she put in her Post Office savings account.