Birth of a Spy

by Duncan Swindells

  Sir John Alperton looked away, over The Serpentine. Moorhens were noisily pecking at the weeds and each other as, further out geese patrolled in pairs. Geese. He hated geese, except at Christmas, of course. He would have to watch his step around here if he were to avoid their poisonous green shit. Perched on one of the many sturdy wooden structures erupting from the lake, their purpose unknown to him, an equally mystifying tall thin black bird, sitting quite still and imperious whilst in the distance faded green and white deck chairs pushed and pulled in the spring breeze and indolent cranes slipped gracefully between church steeples. If it weren’t for the geese and the damn tourists, even the Canadian ones Sir John reflected sadly, Hyde Park could be Heaven.

  Another puff on his cigarette and then he’d consult his watch. It was unlike him to be late, to keep him waiting and he’d picked this spot because it was only a short walk from the man’s apartment. But then on reflection the gentleman he had arranged to meet must be quite elderly by now. In truth he hadn’t seen him for a number of years although there had been a time when they had regularly shared drinks at Sir John’s club in Knightsbridge. He supposed the man’s advancing years had put paid to that too. The Canadians had gone he realised with relief, the boy teasing his sister whilst their parents struggled to open a street map of London. He stubbed out his cigarette on top of the bin at his elbow and sat back on the park bench, scanning the horizon against the low sun. Peering into the distance he caught sight of the man, causing him, involuntarily, to consult his wrist watch. A slight, hunched figure wearing an overcoat in the centre of London on a sultry spring evening, the man seemed to be doing his level best to arouse suspicion. At a second glance Sir John realised he appeared to be playing cricket, or at least returning a ball to a group of young Asian lads who were enthusiastically putting willow to leather. Their ball had come to rest in his path and he stooped and, with a little effort, threw it back to them. There was pride in that delivery. A glimpse of the elderly man’s youth, of sticky summer Sundays, flat warm beer and limited overs. The throw wasn’t challenging, it was offering. I’m one of you it said, or used to be. But for the passage of time and, Sir John recalled, a brief spell under the surgeon’s knife which had robbed him of much of his peripheral vision, we might be friends, adversaries, combatants over twenty-two yards.

  Sir John had picked this spot so the old boy wouldn’t overexert himself. As he drew closer Alperton slid along the bench to create more room. Ah, a brogue. Of course. A distinguished old mahogany brogue, well-kept and Sir John presumed, regularly returned to its original last. A solid, dependable, honest shoe. Well, what had his father known anyway? All this proved was that appearances could be deceptive. Honesty, as well as any number of other traits could and regularly were bought. And every man, despite what they might tell you to the contrary, did have his price. The elderly gentleman took a cautious glance around, reached under his coat and produced a thick Manilla envelope which he placed in the middle of the bench before creakily sitting down at the other end. Sir John shot him a conspiratorial smile. A pair of old troopers from a bygone age enjoying one last act of tradecraft. He picked up the envelope, ran a manicured hand down the thigh of his trousers and was on his way. The whole exchange had taken seconds.

  ✽✽✽

  Through time Professor Freddie Sinclair had developed his own understated yet distinctive dress code and he wore it now; ivory slacks, a linen jacket dancing loosely over a delicately checked shirt endorsing a dark monochrome knitted woollen tie, usually green. Hunter noted the shoes, only worn by men of a certain age; a dusty sailor-boy blue, with laces so incidental they were almost a slip on. They looked comfortable whilst simultaneously appearing asexual and effete, their cream rubber soles as softly spoken as their host. Sinclair’s hair was silver and cropped short. He liked to boast quietly that he’d been visiting the same barbers every fortnight since his appointment at the university almost thirty years ago. A product of the Grammar school system, Hunter suspected that, even though he was preeminent in his field, some of the other lecturers, brimming with their easy sense of over entitlement, did not always credit Professor Sinclair with the respect he was due. Hunter was certain there was an old boys network for the so called “Great Public Schools” of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and the like and that, try as he might, Sinclair would never be accepted and he knew it.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said with a careworn smile.

  Hunter let the warmth of the professor’s study envelop him, the familiar smell of old books, warm leather and rising above it all the faintest aroma of lemon and week tea. The professor’s walls were covered with neo-classical scenes in antiquity, David, Ingres and Hunter’s personal favourite, Moreau’s Meeting of the Sphinx. Amongst the prints and the many trappings of academia, the framed citations and first editions, and scattered respectfully between the great masters, the professor’s own forays into the world of art. Watercolours of the beach at Aldburgh, a sloop picked out against the setting sun in delicately applied sable. Snape, The Maltings, each perfectly realised yet next to Delacroix and Courbet sadly insipid and inert. On one wall a long oak shelf set aside solely for the professor’s diaries. A line of identical black leather-bound note books which Hunter knew to contain unlined pages, their corners elegantly clipped on an angle and always bought from the same tiny independent bookshop. Hunter wondered whether, if for any reason the shop should stop selling them, or worse still go out of business all together, the professor would be able to continue? Only on rare occasions had he ever witnessed Sinclair make an entry. He would reverentially draw down the current year, sometimes pausing to re-read a previous day’s deliberations before, in the same dull black ink of his paintings, writing in his flawless hand, a hand so particular and uniform that Hunter felt incapable of reading more than a few sentences. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine that, once the professor had gone, his diaries might be read and even published, but Hunter did not envy the scholar who undertook such a task. Sinclair stood by his desk toying expectantly with his fine rimless spectacles.

  ‘Well Scott, were we right? A weather report?’

  Hunter nodded slowly, enjoying the drama and eager to retain some last semblance of ownership before handing over his latest discovery.

  ‘I’ve not seen Joth today, but even with my schoolboy German it seems to be a report from a weather station.’

  ‘Norway?’

  ‘Possibly.’ His last chance. Once the code ceased to be a jumble of meaningless letters and reverted to its original German, Hunter’s work was done and it fell completely under Sinclair’s eager ownership.

  ‘I knew it. Are you thinking Svalbard and Spitsbergen?’

  Hunter smiled and it was gone. The professor was so desperate to place the origin of the transmission on the Norwegian archipelago. There had been so much speculation regarding its on-off existence as a Nazi base. This could confirm it once and for all and in the small community of amateur historians Sinclair inhabited, that would be considered something of a coup.

  ‘Let’s just wait until I’ve spoken to Joth and we’ve had a closer look at some of the co-ordinates,’ Hunter cautioned.

  Professor Sinclair however had made up his mind and moved on. He turned to the mirror above his writing desk, removed his spectacles and carefully ran a comb through his thinning silver-grey hair.

  ‘I knew it. Spitsbergen,’ he said reaching for his student’s latest reward.

  ✽✽✽

  Hunter sat on the top deck of the bus back to his bedsit, in his hand the new set of Enigma codes Professor Sinclair had given him. Sometimes the professor was unable to immediately obtain his next challenge and there would be a frustrating wait whilst letters were written and clandestine phone calls made, but on this occasion there had been no such delay and Hunter found himself staring at two sheets of photocopied paper. Two new messages to be de-coded. He looked at the corresponding groups, trying to breathe fresh life and meaning to them and wondering what secrets they held.
Another weather station perhaps or maybe this time they were from a U-boat? One that had been depth charged and forced to dive. Fancifully he let his mind roam and play. Troop movements on the Western Front, a tank battle in the African desert, the prospect of Nazi gold, stolen works of art or other unimaginable treasures. The reality would probably be infinitely more mundane, a routine communications check relaying that everything was as it had been the day before. And then there was always the chance it would be the traffic he hoped he’d never read.

  Train times and destinations. Numbers of people dispatched. Numbers received. Numbers processed.

  Even before he opened the front door Hunter could hear Amy and Joth’s raised voices. Another lively political debate no doubt. Joth was the new breed of South African, brimming with confidence, bullish and outdoorsy in a way which made Hunter heartily sick, but politically reconstituted, open minded and having grown up under Mandela, charmingly naive and idealistic. Hunter had first met him in The Fountain, the pair hitting it off immediately. The abuse, the banter, on Joth’s country of birth or his nation’s cricket or rugby teams had never let up in the three years they had lived together. Amy was debating the pros and cons of positive discrimination as Hunter entered the kitchen. Joth, bleached hair, deep olive tan and Boardriders t-shirt was literally being backed into a corner. Hunter winced. She was advancing on him with a raised finger and a mug of steaming coffee. She shot him a look. I’m nearly finished here, it said, I’ll deal with you in a minute, before returning to harangue his flatmate. Hunter knew better than to try and intercede and so drew up a kitchen chair and, like a celebrity at a prize fight, waited to see who would draw first blood.

  Amy was fierce and wonderful when she was like this. She was only a couple of inches over five feet tall but that made her no less formidable. Today, complementing her charcoal grey skirt and jacket she wore a pair of black suede ankle boots that gave her an extra inch. She cracked her coffee mug down on the table next to Hunter and ran both hands through her long dark hair. Hunter almost felt sorry for Joth. Amy was just about to make good her point when abruptly, catching herself, she stopped and rounded on him.

  ‘Your father phoned.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’ She looked down at him, the dark hazel eyes that he loved so much suddenly soft and pleading.

  ‘Come on Scott. He wants to know how you are.’

  ‘Well I’m fine, aren’t I?’

  ‘Great,’ she said shaking her head, ‘very mature.’

  He knew what she was trying to do. Why wouldn’t she just let it go? He wasn’t interested in reconciliation, some wounds ran too deep and whatever they might tell you to the contrary, time was not always the great healer. She didn’t understand, but this was the way it had been for years now and this, Hunter thought with only a slight twinge of regret, was the way it would remain. Out of the corner of his eye he watched as Joth tried to slink out of the kitchen, but Hunter wasn’t about to let him escape that easily.

  ‘I’ve got another code for you.’

  Amy looked away. She’d heard enough, long since having tired of his obsession.

  ✽✽✽

  In their bedroom Hunter slid the MacBook from its protective cover and onto the table by the window, letting the magnetic power cable snap into place, the machine’s green light blinking on. Quickly he called up the algorithm, examining it with paternal pride. He took down a blue ring binder from the shelves which ran down his side of the bed and carefully shook the new codes from the anonymous brown envelope Sinclair had given him. Now when he studied the documents he was no longer looking at the Enigma code but searching for any other information the pages might yield.

  It was not unusual for the professor to obtain them directly from Bletchley Park. Hunter had never liked to ask because the one time he had hinted at the subject he had received an uncharacteristically frosty rebuke. He suspected though, that they had to have come from one of the museum’s curators. Clearly although most of the material was declassified there was still a huge amount of secrecy surrounding both Enigma and Station X. All the nearly ten thousand men and women who had worked there had signed the official secrets act and all, with only a handful of exceptions had abided by it right through to the nineteen-seventies when the existence of Bletchley Park had first been acknowledged. Even so, much of the material from Bletchley had remained a closely guarded secret well into the new millennia.

  Hunter took in the familiar War Office insignia and the professor’s immaculately handwritten suggestion that the message, in his opinion, could be Italian in origin. He noted that much of the usual information had been redacted many years before. The documents, photocopies, were covered in marks and date stamps which, had Hunter been more interested, would have told him their journey from locked filing cabinet to locked filing cabinet. Unusually they appeared to have come from the Imperial War Museum and not Bletchley Park, but this wasn’t of any great concern to Hunter either. He was looking for clues as to the dates and locations of their original transmission. Either of these would help narrow down the model of machine used to encrypt the messages and aid an educated guess as to its many settings. The messages had been intercepted in 1942 which indicated they could have only been sent by a small number of Enigma machines, which in turn meant fewer wheels, fewer cables, fewer permutations and with a little luck a quicker resolution.

  As he started to make the necessary adjustments to his algorithm Hunter ran the A4 sheets through his scanner. Only fare to share. The new scans pinged onto his desktop, he opened his account and prepared to send a group email. Once the JPEGs were attached he typed;

  Latest from the Prof.

  Think one might be Italian?

  Good Luck. SH

  and clicked send. The email whooshed from his Outbox to the group’s seven recipients. Next he sent the file to the Brother Laser Printer which quickly churned out two more hard copies. Hunter rifled through a drawer of pens and pencils, finding an old calculator, its battery long dead, a half-finished course of sleeping tablets and under a hole punch, a pad of lurid pink post it notes.

  3rd May 2012, IWM? 14th June 1942 Italy?

  He stuck the note to the top right corner of the copy, punched a couple of holes down one side and placed the page carefully with the others in his blue ring binder. He was just about to check on the algorithm’s progress when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He had been so wrapped up in his work he’d failed to hear Amy enter. She planted a conciliatory kiss on the top of his head.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said without looking up or really meaning it.

  She ruffled his already messy hair.

  ‘When are you going to talk to him? He worries about you.’

  No response. This, Hunter knew, was the real reason she had come. Not to see how he was, but to badger him about his father.

  ‘So do I, as it happens,’ she continued as if reading his mind.

  Still no response, but now that she’d said she was worried about him Hunter forced himself to turn and face her.

  ‘Have you got any further with...’ Amy stopped herself. Hunter had started to frown. She had jumped from one difficult topic to the next without hesitating, even though she knew it was not the way to handle him.

  ‘I bought the bloody paper,’ he snapped surprised by his own anger, ‘but if you really want me to go and sweep the streets then fine.’

  ‘Jesus. No one’s suggesting...’ Why did it have to be like this every time either subject was raised?

  ‘I just think that might be a bit of waste of my degree?’ Hunter put in unhelpfully.

  My degree. My degree. Why was it always about his bloody degree? Amy was beginning to wish she had never broached the subject. She had studied too, graduated too. Why was she being made to feel guilty for putting her qualifications to good use? In fact, why was she being made to feel guilty at all? Perhaps marketing wasn’t such a noble pursuit but she was damned if she was having that debate again.

  ‘Yes, Scott,’ she re
plied wearily, ‘I said, no one is suggesting that.’

  Impasse. Stalemate. Amy took her hand from his hair and moved to the window. If she was going to say what she needed to say she didn’t want to have to see his reaction. Hunter continued to tap at the MacBook as if everything was fine.

  ‘I went to see Sinclair today,’ he muttered in a perfunctory attempt at changing the subject.

  ‘About a job?’ Even as Amy heard the words leave her mouth, she knew she was nagging.

  ‘No. Not about a job.’

  More awkward silence, with neither knowing quite how to continue. Amy chewed her bottom lip. She had to say it. She loved him and wanted only the best for him.

  ‘Have you thought about giving Alec a ring?’

  And there it was. Hunter let the wind go out of him. His shoulders drooped and he slid forward on his chair like a rag doll, staring at the patchy carpet between his feet.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d bring him up,’ he said trying but failing to sound buoyant.

  ‘Oh, come on Scott, he’s your friend, or at least he used to be. For Christ’s sake swallow that ridiculous pride of yours and give him a ring.’

  ‘I won’t be a charity case. I don’t need the help of your ex-boyfriends or anyone one else for that matter.’ Hunter knew he was behaving unreasonably, but he had wanted to fire off that salvo even if it were the hollowest of victories. In fact, he realised, what he’d really wanted to do was to make the situation worse. Boyfriends, he’d said, without ever really thinking what he was implying.