Authors: Robert Harris
He realised suddenly that despite his fear he was actually
beginning to treasure the cryptograms, as another man might
treasure a favourite snapshot of a girl. Only these were better
than any photographs, weren’t they, for photographs were merely
likenesses, whereas these were clues to who she was, and therefore
wasn’t he, by possessing them, in a sense, possessing her…? He
would give her just one chance. No more. He looked at his watch.
Twenty minutes had passed since breakfast. It was time to go. He
slipped the cryptograms behind the picture, reassembled the frame
and replaced it on the mantelpiece, then opened the door a
fraction. Mrs Armstrong’s regular guests had all come in from the
night-shift. He could hear their murmured voices in the dining
room. He put on his overcoat and stepped out on to the landing.
Such were his efforts to seem natural, Mrs Armstrong would later
swear she heard him humming to himself as he descended the
stairs.
I see you smiling in the cigarette glow;
Though the picture fades too soon;
But I see all I want to know;
They can’t black out the moon…
From Albion Street to Bletchley Park was a walk of less than
half a mile—left out of the door and along the street of terraced
houses, left under the blackened railway bridge and sharp right
across the allotments.
He strode quickly over the frozen ground, his breath steaming
before him in the cold sunshine. Officially it was almost spring
but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter. Patches of
ice, not yet melted from the night before, cracked beneath the
soles of his shoes. Rooks called from the tops of skeletal
elms.
It was well past eight o’clock by the time he turned off the
footpath into Wilton Avenue and approached the main gate. The shift
change was over; the suburban road was almost deserted. The
sentry—a giant young corporal, raw-faced from the cold—came
stamping out of the guard post and barely glanced at his pass
before waving him into the grounds.
Past the mansion he went, keeping his head down to avoid having
to speak to anyone, past the lake (which was fringed with ice) and
into Hut 8, where the silence emanating from the Decoding Room told
him all he needed to know. The Type-X machines had worked their way
through the backlog of Shark intercepts and now there was nothing
for them to do until Dolphin and Porpoise came on stream, probably
around mid-morning. He caught a glimpse of Logie’s tall figure at
the end of the corridor and darted into the Registration Room.
There, to his surprise, was Puck, sitting in a corner, being
watched by a pair of love-struck Wrens. His face was grey and
lined, his head resting against the wall. Jericho thought he might
be asleep but then he opened a piercing blue eye.
“Logie’s looking for you.”
“Really?” Jericho took off his coat and scarf and hung them on
the back of the door. “He knows where to find me.”
“There’s a rumour going around that you hit Skynner. For God’s
sake tell me it’s true.”
One of the Wrens giggled.
Jericho had forgotten all about Skynner. He passed his hand
through his hair. “Do me a favour, Puck, will you?” he said.
“Pretend you haven’t seen me?”
Puck regarded him closely for a moment, then shut his eyes.
“What a man of mystery you are,” he murmured, sleepily.
Back in the corridor Jericho walked straight into Logie.
“Ah, there you are, old love. I’m afraid we need to have a
talk.”
“Fine, Guy. Fine.” Jericho patted Logie on the shoulder and
squeezed past him. “Just give me ten minutes.”
“No, not in ten minutes,” Logie shouted after him, “now!”
Jericho pretended he hadn’t heard. He trotted out into the fresh
air, walked briskly round the corner, past Hut 6, towards the
entrance to Hut 3. Only when he was within twenty paces of it did
his footsteps slow, then stop.
The truth was, he knew very little about Hut 3, except that it
was the place where the decoded messages of the German Army and
Luftwaffe were processed. It was about twice the size of the other
huts and was arranged in the shape of an L. It had gone up at the
same time as the rest of the temporary buildings, in the winter of
1939—a timber skeleton rising out of the freezing Buckinghamshire
clay, clothed in a sheath of asbestos and flimsy wooden
boarding—and to heat it, he remembered, they had cannibalised a big
cast-iron stove from one of the Victorian greenhouses. Claire used
to complain she was always cold. Cold, and that her job was
“boring”. But where exactly she worked within its warren of rooms,
let alone what this “boring” job entailed, was a mystery to
him.
A door slammed somewhere behind him and he glanced over his
shoulder to see Logie emerging from around the corner of the naval
hut. Damn, damn. He dropped to one knee and pretended to fumble
with his shoelace but Logie hadn’t seen him. He was marching
purposefully towards the mansion. That seemed to settle Jericho’s
resolve. Once Logie was out of sight, he counted himself down then
launched himself across the path and through the entrance into the
hut.
He did his best to look as if he had a right to be there. He
pulled out a pen and set off down the central corridor, thrusting
past airmen and Army officers, glancing officiously from side to
side into the busy rooms. It was much more overcrowded even than
Hut 8. The racket of typewriters and telephones was amplified by
the membrane of wooden walls to create a bedlam of activity.
He had barely gone halfway down the passage when a colonel with
a large moustache stepped smartly out of a doorway and blocked his
path. Jericho nodded and tried to edge past him, but the colonel
moved deftly to one side.
“Hold on, stranger. Who are you?”
On impulse Jericho stuck out his hand. “Tom Jericho,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“Never mind who the hell I am.” The colonel had jug ears and
thick black hair with a wide, straight parting that stood out like
a firebreak. He ignored the proffered hand. “What’s your
section?”
“Naval. Hut 8.”
“Hut 8? State your business here.”
“I’m looking for Dr Weitzman.”
An inspired lie. He knew Weitzman from the Chess Society: a
German Jew, naturalised British, who always played Queen’s Gambit
Declined.
“Are you, by God?” said the colonel. “Haven’t you Navy people
ever heard of the telephone?” He stroked his moustache and looked
Jericho up and down. “Well, you’d better come with me.”
Jericho followed the colonel’s broad back along the passage and
into a large room. Two groups of about a dozen men sat at tables
arranged in a pair of semicircles, working their way through wire
baskets stacked high with decrypts. Walter Weitzman was perched on
a stool in a glass booth behind them.
“I say, Weitzman, d’you know this chap?”
Weitzman’s large head was bent over a pile of German weapons
manuals. He looked up, vague and distracted, but when he recognised
Jericho his melancholy face brightened into a smile. “Hello, Tom.
Yes, of course I know him.”
“‘Kriegsnachrichten Fur Seefahrer,’ ” said Jericho, a fraction
too quickly. “You said you might have something by now.”
For a moment, Weitzman didn’t react and Jericho thought he was
done for, but then the old man said slowly, “Yes. I believe I have
that information for you.” He lowered himself carefully from his
stool. “You have a problem, colonel?”
The colonel thrust his chin forward. “Yes, actually, Weitzman, I
do, now you mention it. “Inter-hut communication, unless otherwise
authorised, must be conducted by telephone or written memorandum.”
Standard procedure.” He glared at Weitzman and Weitzman stared
back, with exquisite politeness. The belligerence seemed to leak
out of the colonel. “Right,” he muttered. “Yes. Remember that in
future.”
“Arsehole,” hissed Weitzman, as the colonel moved away. “Well,
well. You’d better come over here.”
He led Jericho to a rack of card-index files, selected a drawer,
pulled it out and began riffling through it. Every time the
translators came across a term they couldn’t understand, they
consulted Weitzman and his famous index-system. He’d been a
philologist at Heidelberg until the Nazis forced him to emigrate.
The Foreign Office, in a rare moment of inspiration, had dispatched
him to Bletchley in 1940. Very few phrases defeated him.
“‘Kriegsnachrichten Fur Seefahrer,’ ‘War notices for Marines.‘
First intercepted and catalogued, November ninth last year. As you
knew perfectly well already.” He held the card within an inch of
his nose and studied it through his thick spectacles. “Tell me, is
the good colonel still looking at us?”
“I don’t know. I think so.” The colonel had bent down to read
something one of the translators had written, but his gaze kept
returning to Jericho and Weitzman. “Is he always like that?”
“Our Colonel Coker? Yes, but worse today, for some reason.”
Weitzman spoke softly, without looking at Jericho. He tugged open
another drawer and pulled out a card, apparently absorbed. “I
suggest we stay here until he leaves the room. Now here’s a U-boat
term we picked up in January: “Fluchttiefe.””
“‘Evasion depth,’ ” replied Jericho. He could play this game for
hours. Vorhalt-Rechner was a deflection-angle computer. A
cold-soldered joint was a kalte Lotstelle. Cracks in a U-boat’s
bulkheads were Stirnwandrisse…
“‘Evasion depth,’ ” Weitzman nodded. “Quite right.”
Jericho risked another look at the colonel. “He’s going out of
the door…now. It’s all right. He’s gone.”
Weitzman gazed at the card for a moment, then slipped it back
among the rest and closed the drawer. “So. Why are you asking me
questions to which you already know the answers?” His hair was
white, his small brown eyes overshadowed by a jutting forehead.
Wrinkles at their edges suggested a face that had once creased
readily into laughter. But Weitzman didn’t laugh much any more. He
was rumoured to have left most of his family behind in Germany.
“I’m looking for a woman called Claire Romilly. Do you know
her?”
“Of course. The beautiful Claire. Everyone knows her.”
“Where does she work?”
“She works here.”
“I know here. Here where?”
“‘Inter-hut communication, unless otherwise authorised, must be
conducted by telephone or written memorandum. Standard procedure.’
” Weitzman clicked his heels. “Heil Hitler!”
“Bugger standard procedure.”
One of the translators turned round, irritably. “I say, you two,
put a sock in it, will you?”
“Sorry.” Weitzman took Jericho by the arm and led him away. “Do
you know, Tom,” he whispered, “in three years, this is the first
time I have heard you swear?”
“Walter. Please. It’s important.”
“And it can’t wait until the end of the shift?” He gave Jericho
a careful look. “Obviously not. Well, well again. Which way did
Coker go?”
“Back towards the entrance.”
“Good. Follow me.”
Weitzman led Jericho almost to the other end of the hut, past
the translators, through two long narrow rooms where scores of
women were labouring over a pair of giant card indexes, around a
corner and through a room lined with teleprinters. The din here was
terrific. Weitzman put his hands to his ears, looked over his
shoulder and grinned. The noise pursued them down a short length of
passage, at the end of which was a closed door. Next to it was a
sign, in a schoolgirl’s best handwriting: GERMAN BOOK ROOM.
Weitzman knocked on the door, opened it and went inside. Jericho
followed. His eye registered a large room. Shelves stacked with
ledgers and files. Half dozen trestle tables pushed together to
form one big working area. Women, mostly with their backs to him.
Six, perhaps, or seven? Two typing, very fast, the others moving
back and forth arranging sheaves of papers into piles.
Before he could take in any more, a plump, harassed-looking
woman in a tweed jacket and skirt advanced to meet them. Weitzman
was beaming now, exuding charm, for all the world as if he were
still in the tearoom of Heidelberg’s Europaischer Hof. He took her
hand and bowed to kiss it.
“Guten Morgen, mein liebes Fraulein Monk. Wie geht’s?”
“Gut, danke, Herr Doktor. Und dir?”
“Danke, sehr gut.”
It was clearly a familiar routine between them. Her shiny
complexion flushed pink with pleasure. “And what can I do for
you?”
“My colleague and I, my dear Miss Monk—” Weitzman patted her
hand, then released it and gestured towards Jericho “—are looking
for the delightful Miss Romilly.”
At the mention of Claire’s name, Miss Monk’s flirtatious smile
evaporated. “In that case you must join the queue, Dr Weitzman.
Join the queue.”
“I am sorry. The queue?”
“We are all trying to find Claire Romilly. Perhaps you, or your
colleague, have an idea where we might start?”
♦
To say that the world stands still is a solipsism, and Jericho
knew it even as it seemed to happen—knew that it isn’t ever the
world that slows down, but rather the individual, confronted by an
unexpected danger, who receives a charge of adrenaline and speeds
up. Nevertheless, for him, for an instant, everything did freeze.
Weitzman’s expression became a mask of bafflement, the woman’s of
indignation. As his brain tried to compute the implications, he
could hear his own voice, far away, begin to babble: “But I
thought…I was told—assured—yesterday—she was supposed to be on duty
at eight this morning…”
“Quite right,” Miss Monk was saying. “It really is most
thoughtless of her. And terribly inconvenient.”
Weitzman gave Jericho a peculiar look, as if to say, What have
you got me into? “Perhaps she’s ill?” he suggested.
“Then surely a note would have been considerate? A message?
Before I let the entire night-shift go? We can barely cope when
there are eight of us. When we’re down to seven…”