Enigma

by Robert Harris

  ‘And what are computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, when they’re at home?’

  Her pronunciation of the German, he registers with surprise, is immaculate.

  ‘It’s a theoretical machine, capable of an infinite number of numerical operations. It supports the assumptions of Hilbert and challenges those of Godel. Come back to bed, darling.’

  ‘But it’s only a theory?’

  He sighs and pats the mattress next to him. They’re sleeping in a single bed. ‘Turing believes there’s no inherent reason why a machine shouldn’t be capable of doing everything a human brain can do. Calculate. Communicate. Write a sonnet.’

  ‘Fall in love?’

  ‘If love is logical.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Come to bed.’

  ‘This Turing, does he work at the Park?’

  He makes no reply. She leafs through the paper, squinting with disgust at the mathematics, then replaces it with the books and opens one of the drawers. As she leans forwards the shirt rides higher. The lower part of her back gleams white in the shadows. He stares, mesmerised, at the soft triangle of flesh at the base of her vertebrae as she rummages among his clothes.

  ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘now here is something.’ She withdraws a slip of paper. ‘A cheque for a hundred pounds, drawn on the Foreign Office Contingency Fund, made out to you –’

  ‘Give me that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Put it back.’

  He is across the room and standing beside her within a couple of seconds, but she is quicker than he is. She is on her feet, on tiptoe, holding the cheque aloft, and she – absurdly – is just that half-inch taller than him. The money flutters like a pennant beyond his reach.

  ‘I knew there would be something. Come on, darling, what’s it for?’

  He should have banked the damn thing weeks ago. He’d quite forgotten it. ‘Claire, please …’

  ‘You must have done something frightfully clever in that naval hut of yours. A new code? Is that it? You broke some new important code, my clever, clever darling?’

  She may be taller than he is, she may even be stronger, but he has the advantage of desperation. He seizes the firm muscle of her bicep and pulls her arm down and twists her round. They struggle for a moment and then he throws her back on the narrow bed. He prises the cheque out of her bitten-down fingers and retreats with it across the room.

  ‘Not funny, Claire. Some things just aren’t that funny.’

  He stands there on the rough matting – naked, slender, panting with exertion. He folds the cheque and slips it into his wallet, puts the wallet into his jacket, and turns to hang the jacket in the wardrobe. As he does so, he is aware of a peculiar noise coming from behind him – a frightening, animal noise, something between a rasping breath and a sob. She has curled herself up tight on the bed, her knees drawn up to her stomach, her forearms pressed to her face.

  My God, what has he done?

  He starts to gabble his apologies. He hadn’t meant to frighten her, let alone to hurt her. He goes across to the bed and sits beside her. Tentatively, he touches her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to notice. He tries to pull her towards him, to roll her over on her back, but she has become as rigid as a corpse. The sobs are shaking the bed. It is like a fit, a seizure. She is somewhere beyond grief, somewhere far away, beyond him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘It’s all right.’

  He can’t tug the bedclothes out from under her, so he fetches his overcoat and lays that across her, and then he lies beside her, shivering in the January night, stroking her hair.

  They stay like that for half an hour until, at last, when she is calm again, she gets up off the bed and begins to dress. He cannot bring himself to look at her and he knows better than to speak. He can just hear her moving around the room, collecting her scattered clothes. Then the door closes quietly. The stairs creak. A minute later he hears the click of her bicycle being wheeled away from beneath his window.

  And now his own nightmare begins.

  First, there is guilt, that most corrosive of emotions, more torturing even than jealousy (although jealousy is added to the brew a few days later, when he happens to see her walking through Bletchley with a man he doesn’t recognise: the man could be anyone, of course – cousin, friend, colleague – but naturally his imagination can’t accept that). Why did he respond so dramatically to so small a provocation? The cheque could, after all, have been a reward for anything. He didn’t have to tell her the truth. Now that she’s gone, a hundred plausible explanations for the money come to mind. What had he done to provoke such terror in her? What awful memory had he reawakened?

  He groans and draws the blankets over his head.

  The next morning he takes the cheque to the bank and exchanges it for twenty large, crisp, white five-pound notes. Then he searches out the dreary little jewellery shop on Bletchley Road and asks for a ring, any ring as long as it is worth a hundred pounds, at which the jeweller – a ferret of a man with pebble-thick glasses, who clearly can’t believe his luck – produces a diamond worth less than half that amount, and Jericho buys it.

  He will make it up to her. He will apologise. It will all be right.

  But luck is not with Jericho. He has become the victim of his own success. A Shark decrypt discloses that a U-boat tanker – the U-459, under Korvettenkapitän von Williamowitz-Mollendorf, with 700 tons of fuel on board – is to rendezvous with, and refuel, the Italian submarine Kalvi, 300 miles east of St Paul’s Rock, in the middle of the Atlantic. And some fool at the Admiralty, forgetting that no action, however tempting, must ever be taken that will endanger the Enigma secret, orders a squadron of destroyers to intercept. The attack is made. It fails. The U-459 escapes. And Dönitz, that crafty fox in his Paris lair, is immediately suspicious. In the third week of January, Hut 8 decrypts a series of signals ordering the U-boat fleet to tighten its cipher security. Shark traffic dwindles. There is barely enough material to make a menu for the bombes. At Bletchley, all leave is cancelled. Eight-hour shifts drag on to twelve hours, to sixteen hours … The daily battle to break the codes is almost as great a nightmare as it was in the depths of the Shark blackout, and Skynner’s lash is felt on everybody’s back.

  Jericho’s world has gone from perpetual sunshine to bleak midwinter in the space of a week. His messages to Claire, of entreaty and remorse, vanish, unanswered, into a void. He can’t get out of the Hut to see her. He can’t work. He can’t sleep. And there’s no one he can talk to. To Logie, lost and vague behind his smokescreen of tobacco? To Baxter, who would regard a dalliance with a woman like Claire Romilly as a betrayal of the world proletariat? To Atwood – Atwood! – whose sexual adventures have hitherto been confined to taking the prettier male undergraduates on golfing weekends to Brancaster, where they quickly discover that all the locks have been removed from the bathroom doors? Puck would have been a possibility, but Jericho could guess at his advice – ‘Take out someone else, my dear Thomas, and fuck her’ – and how could he admit the truth: that he didn’t want to ‘fuck’ anyone else, that he had never ‘fucked’ anyone else?

  On the final day of January, collecting a copy of The Times from Brinklow’s the newsagent in Victoria Road, he spots her, at a distance, with the other man, and he shrinks into a doorway to avoid being seen. Apart from that, he never meets her: the Park has become too big, there are too many changes of shift. Eventually, he’s reduced to lying in wait in the lane opposite her cottage, like a Peeping Tom. But she seems to have stopped coming home.

  And then he almost walks right into her.

  It is 8 February, a Monday, at four o’clock. He’s walking wearily back to the hut from the canteen; she is part of a flood of workers streaming towards the gate at the end of the afternoon shift. He has rehearsed for his moment so many times, but in the end all he manages is a whine of complaint: ‘Why don’t you answer my letters?’

  ‘Hello, Tom.’

  Sh
e tries to walk on, but he won’t let her get away this time. He has a pile of Shark intercepts waiting for him on his desk but he doesn’t care. He catches at her arm.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  Their bodies block the pavement. The flow of people has to pass around them, like a river round a rock.

  ‘Mind out,’ says someone.

  ‘Tom,’ she hisses, for God’s sake, you’re making a scene.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get out of here.’

  He is pulling at her arm. His pressure is insistent and reluctantly she surrenders to it. The momentum of the crowd sweeps them through the gate and along the road. His only thought is to put some distance between them and the Park. He doesn’t know how long they walk for – fifteen minutes, perhaps, or twenty – until, at last, the pavements are deserted and they are passing through the hinterland of the town. It is a raw, clear afternoon. On either side of them, semidetached suburban villas hide behind dirty privet hedges, their wartime gardens filled with chicken runs and the half-buried, corrugated-iron hoops of bomb shelters. She shakes her arm free.

  ‘There’s no point in this.’

  ‘You’re seeing someone else?’ He hardly dares to ask the question.

  ‘I’m always seeing someone else.’

  He stops but she walks on. He lets her go for fifty yards then hurries to catch her up. By now the houses have petered out and they’re in a kind of no-man’s land between town and country, on Bletchley’s western edge, where people dump their rubbish. A flock of seagulls cries and rises, like a swirl of waste paper caught by the wind. The road has dwindled to a track which leads under the railway to a row of abandoned Victorian brick kilns. Three red-brick chimneys, as in a crematorium, rise fifty feet against the sky. A sign says: DANGER, FLOODED CLAY PIT – VERY DEEP WATER.

  Claire draws her coat around her shoulders and shivers – ‘What a filthy place!’ – but she still walks on ahead.

  For ten minutes, the derelict brick works provide a welcome distraction. Indeed, they wander through the ruined kilns and workshops in a silence that is almost companionable. Amorous couples have scratched their formulae on the crumbling walls: AE + GS, Tony = Kath, Sal 4 Me. Lumps of masonry and brick litter the ground. Some of the buildings are open to the sky, the walls are scorched – there’s clearly been a fire – and Jericho wonders if the Germans could have mistaken it for a factory, and bombed it. He turns to say as much to Claire, but she has disappeared.

  He finds her outside, her back to him, staring across the flooded clay pit. It is huge, a quarter of a mile across. The surface of the water is coal-black and perfectly still, the stillness hinting at unimaginable depths.

  She says: ‘I ought to get back.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’

  And he will, if she wants it. He doesn’t care about security or the war. He’ll tell her about Shark and Dolphin and Porpoise. He’ll tell her about the Bay of Biscay weather crib. He’ll tell her all their little tricks and secrets, and draw her a diagram of how the bombe works, if that’s what she wants. But all she says is: ‘I do hope you’re not going to be a bore about this, Tom.’

  A bore. Is that what he is? He is being a bore?

  ‘Wait,’ he calls after her, ‘you might as well have this.’

  He gives her the little box with the ring in it. She opens it and tilts the stone to catch the light, then snaps the lid shut and hands it back.

  ‘Not my style.’

  ‘Poor you,’ he remembers her saying a minute or two later, ‘I’ve really got under your skin, haven’t I? Poor you …’

  And by the end of the week he’s in the deputy director’s Rover, being borne back through the snow to King’s.

  2

  The smells and sounds of an English Sunday breakfast curled up the staircase of the Commercial Guesthouse and floated across the landing like a call to arms: the hiss of hot fat frying in the kitchen, the dirge-like strains of a church service being relayed by the BBC, the muffled crack of Mrs Armstrong’s worn slippers flapping like castanets on the linoleum floor.

  They were a ritual in Albion Street, these Sunday breakfasts, served up with appropriate solemnity on plain white utility crockery: one piece of bread, as thick as a hymn book, dunked in fat and fried, with two spoonfuls of powdered egg, scrambled and slopped on top, the whole mass sliding freely on a rainbow film of grease.

  It was not, Jericho had to acknowledge, a great meal, nor even a particularly edible one. The bread was rust-coloured, flecked with black, and obscurely flavoured by the kippers that had been cooked in the same fat the previous Friday. The egg was pale yellow and tasted of stale biscuits. Yet such was his appetite after the excitements of the night that, despite his anxiety, he ate every scrap of it, washed it down with two cups of greyish tea, mopped up the last of the grease with a fragment of bread, and even, on his way out, complimented Mrs Armstrong on the quality of her cooking – an unprecedented gesture which caused her to poke her head around the kitchen door and search his features for a trace of irony. She found none. He also attempted a cheerful ‘Good morning’ to Mr Bonnyman, who was just groping his way down the banisters (‘Feeling a bit rough, to be honest, old boy – something wrong with the beer in that place’) and by seven forty-five he was back in his room.

  If Mrs Armstrong could have seen the changes he had wrought up there, she would have been astonished. Far from preparing to evacuate it after his first night, like so many of the bedroom’s previous tenants, Jericho had unpacked. His suitcases were empty. His one good suit hung in the wardrobe. His books were lined along the mantelpiece. Balanced on the top of them was his print of King’s College Chapel.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the picture. It was not a skilful piece of work. In fact, it was rather ugly. The twin Gothic spires were hastily drawn, the sky was an improbable blue, the blob-like figures clustered around its base could have been the work of a child. But even bad art can sometimes have its uses. Behind its scratched glass, and behind the cheap Victorian mezzotint itself, laid flat and carefully secured, were the four undecrypted intercepts he had removed from Claire’s bedroom.

  He should have returned them to the Park, of course. He should have cycled straight from the cottage to the huts, should have sought out Logie or some other figure of authority, and handed them in.

  Even now, he couldn’t disentangle all his motives for not doing so, couldn’t sort out the selfless (his wish to protect her) from the selfish (his desire to have her in his power, just once). He only knew he could not bring himself to betray her, and that he was able to rationalise this by telling himself that there was no harm in waiting till the morning, no harm in giving her a chance to explain.

  And so he had cycled on, past the main gate, had tiptoed up to his room and had hidden the cryptograms behind the print, increasingly aware that he had strayed across whatever border it is that separates folly from treason, and that with every passing hour it would be harder for him to find his way back.

  For the hundredth time, sitting on his bed, he ran through all the possibilities. That she was crazy. That she was being blackmailed. That her room was being used as a hiding place without her knowledge. That she was a spy.

  A spy? The notion seemed fantastic to him – melodramatic, bizarre, illogical. For one thing, why would a spy with any sense steal cryptograms? A spy would be after decodes, surely: the answers not the riddles; the hard proof that Enigma was being broken?

  He checked the door, then gently took down the picture and dismantled the frame, working the thumbtacks loose with his fingers and lifting away the hardboard backing. Now he thought about it, there was something distinctly odd about these cryptograms, looking at them again he realised what it was. They should have had the thin paper strips of decode produced by the Type-X machines gummed to their backs. But not only were there no strips, there weren’t even any marks to show where the strips had been torn off. So, by t
he look of them, these signals had never even been broken. Their secrets were intact. They were virgin.

  None of it made any sense.

  He stroked one of the signals between finger and thumb. The yellowish paper had a slight but perceptible odour. What was it? He held it close to his nose and inhaled. The scent of a library or an archive, perhaps? Quite a rich smell – warm, almost smoky – as evocative as perfume.

  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.