At Dead of Night

by Tony Whelpton

  ‘That they were herbal cigarettes, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I heard him say it.’

  ‘So, even if they were cannabis or something like that, Keith had no idea?’

  ‘No idea at all, no. Keith wouldn’t have had one if he hadn’t been assured they were okay…’

  ‘Thank God for that… You are telling me the truth, aren’t you, Carolyn?’

  ‘Of course I am! When did you last hear me defend my brother?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘And neither can I! You know as well as I do that I don’t really get on with Keith – if he was really at fault I would probably be the one that would have dropped him in it!’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s going a bit far…’

  ‘Look, Dad, Keith and I hate each other’s guts! We can’t stand each other! Never have done, and never will! Full stop! He knows that as well as I do.’

  ‘But why would Keith have called the police to his own party?’

  ‘Ask him yourself! I have no idea, except that he was a bit fed up with you… And me, for that matter, because I made a point of getting to the record player first.’

  At that point Keith came downstairs, and John was able to ask him directly. ‘Keith, what made you call the police to your own party last night?’

  ‘Who said I did?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Keith, everyone knows you did! You didn’t really make a secret of it, did you?’ said Carolyn.

  ‘Because I was fed up with the party and I thought it would be a good laugh.’

  ‘And so that you could get your dad into trouble as well,’ Carolyn added.

  ‘Well, that too,’ Keith admitted shamefacedly. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I was really fed up.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Because all we have in this house is rows! Rows between you and Mum, rows between me and Carolyn, rows between one of us kids and Mum or you, it never ends… And I’ve had enough!’

  ‘So have I, Dad!’ Carolyn added.

  At that point Muriel also came downstairs, and was made aware that they were all fed up with the hostile atmosphere which pervaded their home. Fortunately Muriel too had enough sense not to resort to her habitual answer to the effect that it was none of her doing; she answered, ‘I’ve had enough too. Last night was the last straw. It was the first time the police have ever been involved in any of our altercations, and I really felt ashamed. I’m sorry if any of it was my fault.’

  ‘And so am I,’ said John.

  ‘Me too,’ said both Carolyn and Keith.

  An hour later a policeman came to the house and informed Keith that no further action would be taken in connection with the offence he had been charged with the previous night, because tests had shown that the confiscated cigarette was harmless, and John suggested they should all go out together for a celebratory lunch.

  ‘What are we celebrating?’ Carolyn asked.

  ‘Publicly, I think we’ll make it Keith’s 17th birthday,’ said John. ‘But deep inside myself, I think it’s more to do with the end of hostilities!’

  They all smiled, then went out and enjoyed lunch.

  David printed off his story and Margaret read it. As soon as she had finished, she commented, ‘We know that Keith called the police himself, but we aren’t told who the voice on the telephone was! So who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know! Possibly one of the neighbours, possibly one of Keith’s friends. Why does it matter?’

  ‘Because the readers want to know!’

  ‘Well, they’ll have to use their imagination then! There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

  ‘No, of course not! That’s up to you. But what a dysfunctional family you’ve invented! Where did you dream that up from?’

  ‘I have no idea! I just created the characters, and they just started reacting to one another.’

  ‘They were a really nasty bunch, weren’t they? Did they all live happily ever after? I don’t suppose so! I wonder how long that truce will last! What do you think?’

  ‘It depends how fed up they all are with the vicious circle that they got sucked into,’ said David. ‘I know that writing about it made me thoroughly depressed, so I hope it turns out all right in the end!’

  ‘Well, if you don’t know, who on earth does?’ was Margaret’s final comment.

  Chapter Six

  Exactly seven days later, Margaret said to David, ‘I expect as usual you haven’t the remotest idea what you’re going to write this week, have you?’

  ‘No, for once you’re wrong! I had a wakeful spell during the night, and I started thinking about the book, and lo and behold! an idea came into my head!’

  ‘That’s wonderful! Am I allowed to know what it’s about?’

  ‘Not quite yet, no. I don’t know myself how it’s going to turn out, but I know roughly how I’m going to start. Actually I’ve had something along these lines at the back of my mind for quite a while, but I didn’t want to start on it until I had a good idea which way it would be heading.’

  ‘And now you do know where it’s heading, do you?’

  ‘More or less. Funnily enough, it’s one of the first ideas I had after the phone call that kicked it all off.’

  ‘Really? So what’s it going to be about?’

  ‘Well, as soon as something funny happens in Cheltenham, people start wondering if GCHQ has something to do with it, and I’ve been racking my brains to find out some way I could use that idea, and now I have an idea – well, it’s a starting point anyway! I’ll let you have a look at it when it’s done!’

  ‘I hate to remind you of this, but I was the first to mention GCHQ in connection with that call you received!’

  ‘Did you? I don’t remember, I’m sorry! What did you suggest?’

  ‘I didn’t actually suggest anything. It was simply that we were talking about the ‘number unobtainable’ tone that you kept hearing, and I said that phones at GCHQ can make calls, but if you were to try and find out what number was calling, you wouldn’t be able to!’

  ‘Oh, so you did, sorry, I’d forgotten that. Anyway, I’d better crack on!’

  ‘Okay, and I shall look forward to reading all about it!’

  Peter Watmough and his wife Joan lived alone in Charlton Kings, a leafy suburb of Cheltenham, just along from the beautiful parish church. Joan was Peter’s second wife, and Peter was Joan’s second husband. They had no children of their own, but they each had offspring from their earlier marriages: Peter had two sons, now in their late twenties, whilst Joan had a daughter named Lucy, of roughly the same age as Peter’s elder son, Andrew.

  All three children were married, and lived in the Cheltenham area; they had all moved away from Cheltenham to go to university, but whereas the youngest of them, Richard, had returned to Cheltenham to go into teaching, Lucy and Andrew had returned to enter the Civil Service. But at work, Lucy and Andrew did not spend their time filling in forms or merely pen pushing, for each of them had a good degree in modern languages, Andrew in Russian and Lucy in Mandarin, which was a prime reason for their being enlisted into the Civil Service.

  If one approaches Cheltenham from Gloucester, driving along the A40, one’s attention is seized on the outskirts of the town by what at first sight appears to be a modern sports stadium: locals, however, term it ‘the Doughnut’, because of its shape, and there can be few inhabitants of Cheltenham who do not know that it houses the Government Communications Headquarters, otherwise known as GCHQ, an important part of the United Kingdom’s security service. Essentially a listening post, GCHQ employs many linguists and mathematicians in highly secret jobs as part of which many of them will work in collaboration with the other branches of the Secret Service, MI5 and MI6, and, indeed, with the security services of our European and transatlantic allies too.

  In the early years of the 21st century, however, the work of GCHQ has become much less secretive than it used to be in the past; these days, for instance, everybody knows what it is for, although secrec
y surrounds its precise function. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, it was not even named GCHQ; people who worked there simply said that they worked for the Foreign Office, and in off-duty conversation among themselves, they habitually referred to it as ‘the office’. That was an era, of course, when most people were much more likely to accept that one was simply not allowed to know certain things, because it was essential for national security: it was only in the 21st century that secrecy became an insult to democracy and therefore GCHQ became obliged to defend its operations in lengthy public enquiries. There were comparatively few people, however, who believed unquestioningly what the officers of GCHQ said. Nor were there many who believed that, even if the spokesmen for GCHQ were essentially telling the truth, that it was the simple, unadulterated truth – in fact it was often said among GCHQ employees meeting in private, in a deliberate parody of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip, that in GCHQ terms the truth is seldom simple, and never unadulterated.

  There can be few inhabitants of Cheltenham either, who do not personally know several GCHQ employees, and virtually all of them accept that asking them what they do is a waste of time, because they are all bound by the Official Secrets Act, which means that very few people even bother to ask about their work. Naturally there are some who do ask; by the same token there are probably some GCHQ employees who are a little less discreet than their employers would like, but, on the whole, if something is supposed to be a secret in Cheltenham, it tends to remain a secret. Even so, the writer David Sumner was correct in claiming that if something strange happens in Cheltenham, there is inevitably a widespread suspicion that GCHQ probably had something to with it.

  In 2002 the United Kingdom government and the government of the United States, to say nothing of the United Nations Security Council, were much exercised by the matter of whether the state of Iraq, still under the rule of Saddam Hussein, possessed an indeterminate number of weapons of mass destruction, and the television news was full of it too.

  It was not a matter which caused Peter Watmough to lose much sleep, however. As a small town solicitor, spending most of his time on the fairly pedestrian task of conveyancing, this was far from being one of his major interests: he was much more preoccupied with the affairs of his local golf club, of which he was currently Captain. How on earth could Peter become embroiled in the Iraq situation? It would perhaps be stretching credulity a little too far to suggest that he was totally ignorant of the location of Iraq, but he never watched the news and always read the newspaper from the back, starting with the sports news. It was therefore unsurprising that he did not even suspect that GCHQ might be involved with a mysterious phone call of which he was the recipient in the early hours of the morning towards the end of December 2002.

  It was just after two o’clock in the morning that his telephone rang, and, naturally, he and his wife were fast asleep. Joan continued to sleep while Peter himself answered the telephone, and, indeed, remained asleep during the whole of Peter’s conversation with the caller, who, he was convinced, was none other than his stepdaughter Lucy. This was the full extent of their conversation:

  ‘Hello… Who’s that?’ said Peter.

  ‘Are you listening?’ inquired a female voice.

  ‘Yes, Lucy, I am…’

  The caller ignored the fact that Peter had called her Lucy, and continued, ‘This is very important. I did not call the police. It was your family who called the police.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Would you mind repeating that?’

  But answer came there none, for the caller had replaced the receiver.

  Although Peter’s head was in a whirl, bearing in mind both the incomprehensibility of the message and the fact that he had been awakened at dead of night to receive the call, he did what most people would have done on receiving a live call from a member of his family by whose message he was not only puzzled but also deeply worried, and immediately rang her back; in those days people knew phone numbers by heart, and were less reliant on new-fangled things like instant redial, so he dialled her number himself. But even after his call he was no nearer to understanding what it was all about, for it was Lucy’s husband Ian who picked up the phone, and all he could do was tell Peter that Lucy could not possibly have been the person who called him, because she was fast asleep by his side at that very moment.

  The principal reason Peter was worried was because of Lucy’s use of the expression ‘your family’ during the call; technically, of course, Lucy was not a member of Peter’s family because the only way they were related was because Peter had married Lucy’s mother while Lucy was still in her teens, but even so, Peter found himself extremely distressed to hear his stepdaughter drawing a distinction between ‘her family’ and his. It was for this reason that Peter found himself on the phone again a few hours later, and once more speaking to his son-in-law Ian, who told him that he would not be able to speak to Lucy right away because she had been called into work that morning ‘because something had come up’; in consequence it was mid-afternoon before he could even begin to assuage his concerns.

  When he did succeed in catching up with Lucy in the middle of the afternoon, all she was able to do was confirm her husband’s statement that she could not possibly have made the call herself because she was fast asleep at the time, although she was able to allay Peter’s fears somewhat by saying that she would have been extremely unlikely to use the expression ‘your family’ to Peter, because as far as she was concerned, they were all one family, and she would never dream of making a distinction between ‘Joan’s family’ and ‘Peter’s family’, stressing, without being prompted, that in her mind Peter was her dad, not her step-dad.

  That evening, however, Lucy and Ian happened to be entertaining Peter’s son Andrew and Andrew’s wife Melanie to dinner, and during the course of the evening Lucy brought up the subject of the phone call that Peter had received; on hearing the message that Peter had been given, all professed themselves as mystified as Peter himself had been as to what it could all have been about. But only ten minutes after Andrew had returned home at the end of the evening, Lucy was surprised to receive a short phone call from him, saying that he had something to say to her about the mysterious phone call, but, whatever she did, she must not mention to Ian, or to anybody else, that he had even phoned her about it. Not that he actually said anything about the call that made sense to Lucy, for all he did was arrange to meet her the following day for lunch in the GCHQ staff canteen and say that what he wanted to talk about was ‘office-related’.

  When Lucy and Andrew eventually met over lunch the following day, Lucy wasted no time in asking her stepbrother the meaning of his phone call and the significance of his swearing her to secrecy.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing sinister at all about it,’ he was quick to assure her, ‘but there is nobody outside this establishment that I would be able to discuss it with. But, since we have both signed the Official Secrets Act and are subject to its restrictions, and since we’re inside the office, there is no reason at all why I should not share this information with you. But I’m sure I don’t need to stress how important it is for you not to tell anybody outside the office what I’m about to tell you.’

  Lucy assured him that she was all ears, and would not dream of telling anybody outside GCHQ what her brother was about to tell her, so Andrew went on: ‘I was chatting to Dad on the phone yesterday, and he did mention the call he’d received, so I know exactly what the message was that he was given, and, as soon as he told me what it was, I was immediately aware that he was not the intended recipient of the call, because there would be no way in which he would be able to understand the coded message that he received.’

  ‘Coded message?’ Lucy replied.

  ‘Yes, a coded message,’ he confirmed. ‘Nor would you understand the code either, by virtue of the fact that we don’t work in the same section. As you know, the way this place works is that there are very few people who are allowed to possess all the pieces of the
jigsaw. In fact there are times when I wonder whether there is actually anyone who does! But I suppose we have to make a leap of faith and believe that there is someone for whom it all makes sense, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to carry on working here!

  ‘The thing is that the message Dad was given contained the expressions “Are you listening?”, “This is very important”, “my family”, “your family” and “the police”. Now in my section the words “Are you listening?” followed by “This is very important” are themselves a coded warning that there are other coded expressions coming up. “My family” means the British, or, more specifically GCHQ, “Your family” means the Americans, and “the police” refers to the United Nations Security Council. Of course, if the person speaking was actually American, “my family” would mean the Americans and “Your family” would apply to the nationality of whatever person he was speaking to. Do you get my drift?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ replied Lucy. ‘I can see that. But that raises another problem, doesn’t it? Dad thought the call must have been from me because the person who rang him spoke like me. Therefore she must have had an English accent, and therefore “My family” must mean the British. But the fact that she also used the expression “Your family” when talking to Dad, that would only make sense if Dad was an American, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly! That is what leads me to the conclusion that Dad was not the intended recipient of the call, which is why I need to tell my superiors about the call he received.’

  ‘So in reality,’ said Lucy, ‘it was supposed to be a message from a British person to an American, giving them the information that somebody had been talking to the Security Council, but it wasn’t the Brits, it must have been the Yanks!’

  ‘That’s right. Unless, of course, it was a message from somebody with a British accent working for the American government – and there are some! – in which case it means that it was the Brits who had been talking to the Security Council! In any case, the person who received the call was supposed to be able to interpret the coded messages, which Dad certainly wasn’t! And if the Security Council were involved, it must have been something very important, which is why I’ve already passed on to my Line Manager as much as I know, because somebody obviously dialled the wrong number!’