But what was it Miss Monk had said of Claire? ‘She’d really become much more attentive of late …’ Naturally she had. She had begun to read what was passing through her hands. And at the end of February or the beginning of March she had seen something that had changed her life. Something to do with a German rear-echelon signals unit whose wireless operator played Morse code to the Gestapo as if it were a Mozart sonata. Something so utterly ‘un-boring, darling’, that when Bletchley had decided they couldn’t bear to read the traffic any more, she had felt compelled to steal the last four intercepts herself.
And why had she stolen them?
He didn’t even need to pose the question. Hester had reached the answer ahead of him, although her voice was faint and disbelieving and almost drowned out by the rain.
‘She stole them to read them.’
She stole them to read them. The answer slid beneath the random pattern of events and fitted it like a crib.
She stole the cryptograms to read them.
‘But is it really feasible?’ asked Hester. She seemed bewildered by the destination to which her logic had led her. ‘I mean, could she really have done it?’
‘Yes. It’s possible. Hard to imagine. Possible.’
Oh, the nerve of it, thought Jericho. Oh, the sheer breathtaking bloody nerve of it, the cool deliberation with which she must have plotted it. Claire, my darling, you really are a wonder.
‘But she couldn’t have managed it on her own,’ he said, ‘not locked away at the back of Hut 3. She’d have needed help.’
‘Who?’
He raised his hands from the steering wheel in a hopeless gesture. It was hard to know where to begin. ‘Someone with access to Hut 6 for a start. Someone who could look up the Enigma settings for German Army key Vulture on March the 4th.’
‘Settings?’
He glanced at her in surprise, then realised that the actual workings of an Enigma was not the sort of information she would have needed to know. And in Bletchley, what you didn’t need to know you were never told.
‘Walzenlage,’ he said. ‘Ringstellung. Steckerverbindungen. Wheel order, ring setting and cross-plugging. If Vulture was being read every day, they’d already have had those in Hut 6.’
‘Then what would you have had to do?’
‘Get access to a Type-X machine. Set it up in exactly the right way. Type in the cryptograms and tear off the plaintext.’
‘Could Claire have done that?’
‘Almost certainly not. She’d never have been allowed anywhere near the decoding room. And anyway she wasn’t trained.’
‘So her accomplice would have needed some skill?’
‘Skill, yes. And nerve. And time, come to that. Four messages. A thousand cipher groups. Five thousand individual characters. Even an expert operator would need the best part of half an hour to decode that much. It could have been done. But she would have needed a superman.’
‘Or woman.’
‘No.’ He was remembering the events of Saturday night: the sound downstairs in the cottage, the big male footprints in the frost, the cycle tracks and the red rear light of the bicycle shooting away from him into the darkness. ‘No. It’s a man.’
If only I’d been thirty seconds quicker, he thought. I’d have seen his face.
And then he thought: Yes, and maybe got a bullet in my own for my trouble: a bullet from a stolen Smith and Wesson .38, manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He felt a sudden prickle of ice-cold moisture on the back of his wrist and glanced up. He followed its trajectory to a spot in the roof, just before the windscreen. As he watched, another dark bubble of rainwater slowly swelled, ripened to a rich rust colour, and dropped.
Shark.
He realised guiltily he had nearly forgotten it.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Almost five.’
‘We should be getting back.’
He rubbed at his hand and reached for the ignition.
The car wouldn’t start. Jericho twisted the key back and forth and pumped away frantically at the accelerator but all he managed to coax from the engine was a dull turning noise.
‘Oh, hell!’
He turned up his collar, got out and went round to the boot. As he opened the lid a brace of pigeons took off behind him, wings snapping like firecrackers. There was a starting handle under the spare can of petrol and he inserted that into the hole in the front bumper. ‘You do this the wrong way, lad,’ his stepfather had told him, ‘and you can break your wrist.’ But which was the right way? Clockwise or anticlockwise? He gave the handle a hopeful tug. It was horribly stiff.
‘Pull out the choke,’ he shouted to Hester, ‘and press your foot down on the third pedal if she starts to fire.’
The little car rocked as she slid across into the driver’s seat.
He bent to his task again. The forest floor was only a couple of feet from his face, a pungent brown carpet of decaying leaves and fir cones. He heaved a couple more times until his shoulder ached. He was beginning to sweat now, perspiration mingling with the rainwater, dripping off the end of his nose, trickling down his neck. The insanity of their whole undertaking seemed encapsulated in this moment. The greatest convoy battle of the war was about to start, and where was he? In some primeval bloody forest in the middle of bloody nowhere poring over stolen Gestapo cryptograms with a woman he barely knew. What in the name of reason did they think they were doing? They must be – he tightened his grip – crazy … He jerked viciously on the starting handle and suddenly the engine caught, spluttered, nearly died, then Hester revved it loudly. The sweetest sound he’d ever heard, it split the forest. He slung the handle into the boot and slammed the lid.
The gearbox whined as he reversed along the track towards the road.
The overhanging branches made a tunnel of the soaking lane. Their headlights glinted on a film of running water. Jericho drove slowly around and around the same course, trying to find some landmark in the gloom, trying not to panic. He must have taken a wrong turning coming out of the clearing. The steering wheel beneath his hands felt as wet and slippery as the road. Eventually they came to a crossroads beside a vast and decaying oak. Hester bent her head again to the map. A lock of long black hair fell across her eyes. She used both hands to pile it up. She clenched a pin between her teeth and muttered through it: ‘Left or right?’
‘You’re the navigator.’
‘And you’re the one who decided to drive us off the main road.’ She skewered her hair savagely back in place. ‘Go left.’
He would have chosen the other way but thank God he didn’t because she was right. Soon the road ahead began to brighten. They could see patches of weeping sky. He pressed his foot down and the speedometer touched forty as they passed out of the forest and into the open. When, after a mile or so, they came to a village, she told him to pull up outside the tiny post office.
‘Why?’
‘I need to find out where we are.’
‘You’d better be quick.’
‘I’ve really no intention of sight-seeing.’
She slammed the door behind her and ran through the rain, sidestepping the puddles with a gym mistress’s agility. A bell tinkled inside the shop as she opened the door.
Jericho glanced ahead, then checked in his mirror. The village appeared to consist of nothing more than this one street. No parked vehicles that he could see. No one about. He guessed that a private car, especially one driven by a stranger, would be a rarity, a talking-point. In the little red-brick cottages and the half-timbered houses he could already imagine the curtains being twitched back. He turned off the windscreen wipers and sank lower in his seat. For the twentieth time his hand went to the bulge of cryptograms in his inside pocket.
Two Englands, he thought. One England – this one – familiar, safe, obvious. But now another, secret England, secluded in the grounds of stately houses – Beaumanor, Gayhurst, Woburn, Adstock, Bletchley – an England of aerial farms an
d direction finders, clattering bombes and, soon, the glowing green and orange valves of Turing machines (‘it should make the calculations a hundred times, maybe a thousand times as fast’). A new age beginning to be born in the parklands of the old. What was it that Hardy had written in his Apology? ‘Real mathematics has no effect on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers.’ The old boy couldn’t guess the half of it.
The bell tinkled again and Hester emerged from the post office holding a newspaper over her head like an umbrella. She opened the car door, shook the paper and threw it, not very gently, into his lap.
‘What’s this for?’ It was the Leicester Mercury, the local rag: that afternoon’s edition.
‘They print appeals for help, don’t they? From the police? When someone is missing?’
It was a good idea. He had to concede it. But although they checked the paper carefully – twice, in fact – they could find no photograph of Claire and no mention of the hunt for her.
Dropping southwards, heading for home. A different route for the return journey, more easterly – this was Hester’s plan. To keep their spirits up, she occasionally recited the names of the villages and checked them in the gazetteer as they rattled down their empty high streets. Oadby, she said, (‘note the early English to Perpendicular church’), Kibworth Harcourt, Little Bowden, and on across the border out of Leicestershire and into Northamptonshire. The sky over the distant pale hills brightened from black to grey and finally to a kind of glossy, neutral white. The rain slowed, then stopped. Oxendon, Kelmarsh, Maidwell … Square Norman towers with arrow-slits, thatched pubs, tiny Victorian railway stations nesting in a bosky countryside of high hedges and dense copses. It was enough to make you want to burst into a chorus of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ except that neither of them felt like singing.
Why had she run? That was what Hester said she couldn’t understand. Everything else seemed logical enough: how she would have got hold of the cryptograms in the first place, why she might have wanted to read them, why she would have needed an accomplice. But why then commit the one act guaranteed to draw attention to yourself? Why fail to turn up for your morning shift?
‘You,’ she said to Jericho, after she had thought it over for a few more miles. There was a hint of accusation in her voice. ‘I think it must be you.’
Like a prosecuting counsel she took him back over the events of Saturday night. He had gone to the cottage, yes? He had discovered the intercepts, yes? A man had arrived downstairs, yes?
‘Yes.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you say anything?’
‘I may have shouted “Who’s there?” or something of the sort.’
‘So he could have recognised your voice?’
‘It’s possible.’
But that would mean I knew him, he thought. Or at least that he knew me.
‘What time did you leave?’
‘I don’t know exactly. About half past one.’
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘It is you. Claire returns to the cottage after you’ve gone. She discovers the intercepts are missing. She realises that you must have them because this mysterious man has told her you were there. She believes you’ll take them straight to the authorities. She panics. She runs …’
‘But that’s madness.’ He took his eyes off the road to stare at her. ‘I’d never have betrayed her.’
‘So you say. But did she know that?’
Did she know that? No, he realised, returning his attention to the wheel, no, she did not know that. Indeed, on the basis of his behaviour on the night she found the cheque, she had good reason to assume he was a fanatic about security – a pretty ironic conclusion, given he now had eleven stolen cryptograms stuffed inside his overcoat pocket.
A twenty-year-old bus with an outside staircase to its upper deck, like something out of a transport museum, pulled over to the grass verge to let them overtake. The schoolchildren on board waved frantically as they passed.
‘Who were her boyfriends? Who was she seeing apart from me?’
‘You don’t want to know. Believe me.’ There was relish in the way she threw back at him the words he had used to her in church. He couldn’t blame her for it.
‘Come on, Hester.’ He gripped the steering wheel grimly and glanced into the mirror. The bus was receding from view. A car was emerging from behind it. ‘Don’t spare my blushes. Let’s keep it simple. Just confine it to men from the Park.’
Well, they were impressions, she said, rather than names. Claire had never mentioned names.
Give me the impressions, then.
And she did.
The first one she’d encountered had been young, with reddish hair, clean-shaven. She’d met him on the stairs with his shoes in his hand one morning in early November.
Reddish hair, clean-shaven, repeated Jericho. It didn’t sound familiar.
A week later she’d cycled past a colonel parked in the lane in an Army staff car with the headlights dowsed. And then there was an Air Force man called Ivo Something, with a weird vocabulary of ‘prangs’ and ‘crates’ and ‘shows’ that Claire used to mimic fondly. Was he Hut 6 or 3? She was fairly sure Hut 3. There was an Honourable Evelyn double-barrelled someone-or-other – ‘thoroughly ,dishonourable, darling’ – whom Claire had met in London during the Blitz and who now worked in the mansion. There was an older man who Hester thought had something to do with the Navy. And there was an American: he was definitely Navy.
‘That would be Kramer,’ said Jericho.
‘You know him?’
‘He’s the man who lent me the car. How recent was that?’
‘About a month ago. But I got the impression he was just a friend. A source of Camels and nylons, nothing special.’
‘And before Kramer there was me.’
‘She never talked about you.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘Given the way she used to talk about the others, you should be.’
‘Anyone else?’
She hesitated. ‘There may have been someone new in the last month. She was certainly away a good deal. And once, about two weeks ago, I had a migraine and came home early off shift and I thought there was a man’s voice coming from her room. But if there was they stopped talking when they heard me on the stairs.’
‘That’s eight then, by my count. Including me. And leaving out any others you’ve forgotten or don’t know about.’
‘I’m sorry, Tom.’
‘It’s quite all right.’ He managed to arrange his face into a parody of a smile. ‘If anything it’s rather fewer than I’d thought.’ He was lying, of course, and he guessed she knew it. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that I don’t hate her for it?’
‘Because that’s the way she is,’ said Hester, with unexpected ferocity. ‘Well, she never made much secret of it, did she? And if one hates her for what she is – then, really, one can’t have loved her very much in the first place, can one?’ Her neck had blushed a deep pink. ‘If all one wants is a reflection of oneself – well, honestly, there’s always the mirror.’
She sat back, apparently as surprised by this speech as he was.
He checked the road behind them. Still empty apart from the same, solitary car. How long since he’d first noticed it? About ten minutes? But now he came to think of it, it had probably been there a good while longer, certainly since before they overtook the school bus. It was lying about a hundred yards back, low and wide and dark, its belly close to the ground, like a cockroach. He squeezed his foot harder on the accelerator and was relieved to see the gap between them widen until at last the road dipped and turned and the big car disappeared.
A minute later it was back again, maintaining exactly the same distance.
The narrow lane ran between high, dark hedges flecked with buds. Through them, as through a magic lantern, Jericho caught odd glimpses of tiny fields, a ruined barn, a bare, black elm, petr
ified by lightning. They came to a longish stretch of flat road.
There was no sun. He calculated there must be about half an hour of daylight left.
‘How far is it to Bletchley?’
‘Stony Stratford coming up, then about six miles. Why?’
He looked again in the mirror and had just begun to say, ‘I fear –’ when a bell started to clamour behind them. The big car had finally tired of following and was flashing its headlights, ordering them to pull over.
Until this moment, Jericho’s encounters with the police had been rare, brief and invariably marked by those exaggerated displays of mutual respect customary between the guardians of the law and the lawful middle classes. But this one would be different, he saw that at once. An unauthorised journey between secret locations, without proof of ownership of the car, without petrol coupons, at a time when the country was being scoured for a missing woman: what would that earn them? A trip to the local police station, for sure. A lot of questions. A telephone call to Bletchley. A body search.
It didn’t bear contemplating.
And so, to his astonishment, he found himself measuring the road ahead, like a long-jumper at the start of his run. The red roofs and the grey church spire of Stony Stratford had begun to poke above the distant line of trees.
Hester grabbed the edges of her seat. He jammed his foot down hard to the floor.
The Austin gathered speed slowly, as in a nightmare, and the police car, responding to the challenge, began to gain on them. The speedometer climbed past forty, to fifty, to fifty-five, to nearly sixty. The countryside seemed to be racing directly at them, only swerving at the last second to flash by narrowly on either side. A main road appeared ahead. They had to stop. And if Jericho had been an experienced driver that is what he would have done, police or no police. But he hesitated until there was nothing he could do but brake as hard as he dared, change down into second gear and yank the steering wheel hard left. The engine screamed. They spun and cornered on two tyres, he and Hester pitched sideways by the force. The clanging bell was drowned by the roar of an engine and suddenly the radiator grille of a tank transporter was rushing to fill the rear-view mirror. Its bumper touched them. An outraged blast from its hooter, as loud as a foghorn, seemed to blow them forwards. They shot across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal and a swan turned lazily to watch them and then they were doglegging through the market town – right, left, right, shuddering over cobbled alleys, the wheel shaking in Jericho’s hands – anything to get off this wretched Roman road. Abruptly the houses receded and they were out in open country again, running alongside the canal. A narrowboat was being towed by a weary carthorse. The bargeman, lying stretched out beside the tiller, raised his hat to them.