‘Caramels?’
‘Caramels?’
‘Well, I don’t know, what the devil are they? They look like slices of the caramel that came out when my granny used to try and make toffee.’
‘Smell.’ Honey stuck one out towards her.
Moira sniffed. ‘Soir de Paris.’
Honey snatched it back. ‘Perfume on the brain. It’s amber.’
Moira was shaking her head lightly. There was a fizz in her tonight. Her hands moved quickly over the lipstick cases, as if by staying in one place for too long they might be caught at something, by someone. She reached over and took the first piece by its sharp corners, wincing as it pricked her, and looked it over with calculating, logical eyes. Honey watched her. In the bright electric ceiling light the flaws on the carvings showed up: bits of dust clotted in the gaps, wax still clinging to the face. There were tiny slivers where the glue had not quite settled between the mosaic shards, and others where it had oozed a little and hardened, where the sanding hadn’t been quite flush.
‘I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be looking at. Where did you get these from?’
‘I don’t know.’
Moira looked up and stared at her. ‘What’s written on them?’
‘I need your help to find out.’
Downstairs the baby had begun to scream, ungodly bursts in boiling waves, surging up, down, up again, then a quick pierce of lung. Moira stood up and put her hand to her brow. ‘Does my nerves in. Where did they come from? Is this what you were sent today in the hut, and the other day?’
‘By the PO Box, 222, the London one.’
Moira shook her head. ‘No, no. These wouldn’t get past the censors. Do you see these?’ She pointed at the letters. ‘Don’t you know what happened to Betty . . . Betty . . .’ She snapped her fingers but the name didn’t come. ‘Well, Betty Somebody. Betty Somebody was writing to her boyfriend in code. He was in another hut and was writing back in code, it was all just supposed to be a bit of romantic fun, but they both got hauled in front of Tiver.’
‘Where’s Betty Somebody now?’
Moira shook her head. ‘Don’t know. Not at the Park.’
Honey looked at Moira. Her brown eyes had stilled. Her mouth was small and straight.
She leaned forward and rubbed her finger on the panel. ‘They didn’t look like this when I opened them. They all had wax on them, a layer covering up the carvings. You wouldn’t be able to tell just at a glance if you opened them.’ ‘Oh, bloody hell.’
‘That’s why I need you to help me find out what they say.’
‘So we can both be shot.’
‘I’m not a fifth columnist.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Moira spat. ‘She’s got ears like a wolf. If that baby makes a babble three rooms away and she’s cleaning up here she’s down the stairs like a rat.’ Moira grabbed the other two pieces, laid them out on the floor, and dragged the flex of the lamp closer. Honey could see her brain beginning to warm up, clack clack clack like a sewing-machine needle it went, over and under the pieces. She ran her finger along the pattern. ‘Who is he, have you any idea?’
Honey hesitated. ‘No.’
‘What was the postmark?’
She stalled.
‘Spit it out.’
‘Are you ready?’ She looked down and focused on the vines. ‘Leningrad.’
Moira’s finger stopped. Honey held her breath. In the silence she lowered herself carefully down onto the floor, crossed her legs and loosened the belt of her coat. Still Moira was staring at the amber. After a while her face turned up and she frowned very close to Honey, appraising her makeup, first round her eyes then her mouth. The sewing-machine brain was going clack clack clack again. Then she began to laugh.
‘What?’
She put her hand to her mouth and spittle came bursting through her lips. ‘God, you know how to make one shit one’s knickers.’
Honey snatched the piece from her. ‘What?’
‘Leningrad? Honey, no one is sending you codes from Leningrad. It’s besieged. You’ve seen the decrypts. Come to think of it, you’ve got a wireless, haven’t you? You can read a newspaper. The Nazis have surrounded it.’
‘That’s what I’m frightened of.’
Moira scanned her face again and saw that she was serious. She took the piece gently back out of Honey’s hands. ‘Wax or no, I don’t even know if they have a postal service left, let alone . . .’ She shook her head and leaned forward. ‘He’s not a Russian, that’s for sure. But you’re too pretty for your own good, Miss.’
Honey felt tears of shame gathering at the top of her nose. She had an impulse to crunch the piece in her hand. Was this not mockery? Was her father not there, among the occupied, reaching out to her with whatever he could? Moira had to be wrong. She opened her mouth to say as much, but sense caught her at the last second.
Moira was untucking the collar of Honey’s blouse where it had folded in. ‘You know the boys in our hut have a funny sense of humour. Someone’s bashed up the family chess set and glued it to tin foil, or painted and scratched out a bit of glass. It’s a token.’
‘I can see how helpful you’re going to be.’ Honey began wrapping the panels back in the fur.
‘Don’t get a cob on. I’m not the one using bits of tat to flirt.’
Honey couldn’t face looking up. Her cheeks were warm. Her nose felt swollen.
‘You should be flattered. Half a minute ago you were a fifth columnist, now it’s nothing but a silly boy with too much time on his hands. Look, a codebreaker wants to woo someone he thinks is a clever girl — probably put the shits up her as well because they all like a bit of that, you know some boys think frightening a girl is the same thing as seducing her. I mean, it might even be a Hut 3 boy, they’re off their rockers, Reuben said as much.’ Moira prised the pieces back out of Honey’s hands, calmly but firmly, into her own warm fingers. Her nails were painted red, a brilliant thick lacquer. She lifted one of the slices to the lamp again. The lamp bulb was dark orange and flattered the amber. She examined the curled letters. ‘It’s very pretty. It’s not perfect but someone has an artist’s eye. How did you know to scrape the wax off?’
‘It fell in the bath. Mr Steadman’s overalls had been in there.’
Moira made a face. ‘I don’t know why you put up with them, you could put in for a change of billet.’
‘Well, there must have been some kind of solvent in the water or maybe just the warmth because it melted the wax off. I cleaned the rest.’
Moira picked up her lipstick and butter knife and went back to stuffing the case. ‘Listen, you’re not completely safe just yet. Whoever sent these could still be disciplined. You could be disciplined for having them. You should probably get rid of them somewhere and just hope he comes up with a more sensible way of asking you to a hop.’
She wanted to tell Moira about her father, about Dickie and the book of ciphers, but the words wouldn’t come. Every time they drew close to her lips they began to feel foolish. ‘Can you help me find out what they say?’
Moira sighed and leaned against the frame of her bed. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’
‘But you were in the Cottage.’
She looked sharply at Honey.
‘Didn’t they teach you some techniques?’
Moira paused. She looked down, frowned and wiped a smear of greasy red from her thumb. She sighed a little huffily and eventually said in a dropped voice, ‘You need multiple messages. Or at least an idea of what you’re working with. Traffic analysis comes first, place it in context before you can begin to think about cracking it.’
‘There are multiple messages. There are two.’
Moira put down the lipsticks again and pointed with the knife at the panels. ‘Look, you are at an advantage over us because the person sending you these obviously wants you to read them. When we intercept a cipher we’re interlopers. They don’t want us to know what’s written; they’re deliberately disguisin
g it from us, so we have to start from the very beginning to try to crack it. Figure out where on earth it’s coming from, or what context it’s been sent in. Whoever sent you this wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t think you’d be able to read it somehow, in the end.’
‘So they think I have the key?’
‘Or it’s a challenge to you to find it.’
‘Would be too easy if they just sent the key.’
‘Maybe.’ Moira paused. They looked at each other. For some reason Honey knew Moira was thinking about the crossword competitions too. Rumours were going round about the new recruitment methods; they put crosswords in the newspapers and invited people to submit their answers to a PO box. The ones who completed it all were summoned to London, to further tests. Some said Mooden had come via that route, and a girl called Sarah who worked in the Machine Room. The ones who passed highly were given senior positions.
‘But why you?’ Moira said, and Honey caught the flash of something in her eye. It wasn’t jealousy but something else, more melancholy.
Honey shook her head. ‘If it is a test, it’s not just for my brain, it’s for my loyalty.’ She thought of the gun muzzle, the awful firing squad chair. Blindfolded. The baby began to cry again downstairs.
Moira sighed deeply. ‘Then let’s hope it’s nothing but a smelly tweed boy playing a love prank, shall we?’
Honey swallowed, still hoping in blackest hope that it was the other option instead.
‘With a single cipher like this you have no inroad. There’s no pattern to place it in. The more letters you have in a message, the more tools you have to work with, the easier it is to crack.’
They were spread on the floor, stomachs down, the three pieces lined up in front of the lamp.
‘With more letters you can start to develop patterns. The first and simplest of those analyses is letter frequency.’ Moira pointed to the first sheet of amber. ‘Count the B’s then the F’s then so on . . . If you have enough of a message and if it’s a simple letter substitution cipher — A always equals K, B always equals S, the easiest kind – you should start to see patterns emerging that correspond to the way the real alphabet is used. Say there are the most Y’s in your cipher text. What’s the most common letter of the normal alphabet?’ ‘S?’
‘No, S is seventh after E, T, A, O, I and N.’
‘Nations,’ Honey mused. ‘No, that doesn’t quite work. I’m useless at anagrams anyway.’
‘It’s not an anagram, it’s a cipher. You count up the most frequent letter in your cipher and the likelihood is—’
‘It will be E or T. Possibly A.’
‘Yes.’ Moira looked at her cautiously. ‘Then it becomes a case of guesswork. Where are the letters you think you’ve cracked placed, in relation to other letters? For example, say X equals T, and you think that B equals E. If you have the pattern XFB repeated throughout the text, what does that make F?’
‘H. The.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But you don’t do that with Enigma.’
‘You can’t do that with Enigma because the letters haven’t been scrambled once, they’ve been — you don’t really want me to explain Enigma, do you?’ Moira was screwing one brow up.
‘But this can’t be an Enigma cipher because whoever sent it wouldn’t have access to a machine, or at least they wouldn’t know if I did.’
Moira raised an eyebrow. The Typexes.
‘All right then, but I wouldn’t have access to the key. And Enigma has – well, many keys.’
‘You would need to find the key, certainly. But I don’t think this is Enigma. This is—’
Honey felt it floating up in her, staying just behind her mouth: the amber itself is part of the code. It’s the last place he worked.
‘The next thing we have to think about,’ Moira went on, ‘is traffic analysis. It was weeks before we even began looking at the individual messages in the Cottage. What we’d do is make tables of where the messages were coming from. What their callsigns were, what time of day they were logged, the length of the message. Then we’d separate them out into groups. This data, shall we call it — this tells you a dozen things about a message before you’ve even looked at its contents. Say you get a report sent from a ship at six a.m. every single day without fail. Same number of letters, same callsign. What could it be?’
‘General report.’
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know, supplies?’
Moira looked out of the window.
‘Weather.’
‘Yes.’
‘So then,’ Honey said, ‘like a crossword clue you can take that information to the intercepted message and work out where the words “weather report” might go. The words “weather report” become your crib — your guesswork of the solved bit.’
‘Indeed. And sometimes it’s “nothing to report”. Sometimes they use the same sign-off, “Heil Hitler”, or they always write the full name of a General, that’s for certain, which they should never do. The Italians like to say “fine messagio”, end of message. One of the girls used to think this was terribly arrogant — to declare their messages fine. But you see repetitions are the cryptanalyst’s best friend.’
‘You shouldn’t be telling me this.’
‘You shouldn’t be showing me your little trinket box, should you?’
Honey sighed and picked up two of the pieces. She chinked them against each other. The noise was musical; pleasing, distracting. She did it again. ‘Did you like working in the Cottage?’
Moira stared at a tiny red blemish on her calf, emerging between the slashed leaves of the gown. Then she rolled over onto her side and picked up a piece of fluff from the carpet. ‘Same. Same as the hut.’
‘You saved a ship, didn’t you?’
Moira picked up her lipstick tube and began wiping the sides with her index finger, where the red had smeared over the rim. ‘Well, I’ll never know them and they’ll never know me so that’s really that, isn’t it? I prefer the Typexes anyway, it’s better for my nerves, so the doctor says.’ She threw the lipstick onto the bed and reached across for a skein of tissue paper. As she pulled it towards her it crackled open to reveal a silk flower; a cream rose, floppy and soft, fashioned from what looked like parachute material. There was a card lying idle next to it. ‘Listen, I can take a rubbing of these patterns and have a look. Can’t promise you anything though.’
‘Be careful with them.’ Honey began moving the torn muffler back towards her.
‘But there’s something you also have to do for me.’ Moira grabbed her wrist. ‘That dance, tomorrow night. Wavendon.’
Honey began to shake her head. Visions of Bugs and the woollen man took slow shape in the shadows on the wall. ‘Please, no.’
‘I’ll find you something to wear. Please, Honey, I need someone to come with me.’
‘Reuben will go with you.’ She pointed at the silk flower on the bed. Moira coloured up to her brow and pushed it under the quilted bedspread. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ She got to her feet and moved over to the wardrobe. Peacocks and lilies were carved in hard dark wood on the doors. ‘Look, he’s going to make it official, tomorrow. He said about as much tonight. Or hinted. That thing at the revue, not really talking to anyone at the interval, that was just a little mood he takes. But I can’t go with him to the dance until it’s official. Do you know what I mean? Wait till you see what I’m going to wear.’
She wrestled with the closet’s crammed insides until Honey heard the noise of fabric rasping clear. ‘What do you think?’
Honey looked down at Moira’s painted toenails, then up all the way to where the fabric reached her shoulders and brushed against her hair. She had a look in her eye that was unstable, wild. She dropped her lashes to gaze over herself, over the way the fabric settled on her figure. She had a beautiful figure; the kind certain types of men felt entitled to stare at. All those brains up top, thought Honey, and what she wanted to do now, all she wanted to do now
, was make and mend, hoard lipsticks and flowers. Sometimes she wondered what had really gone on inside the Cottage. Moira was holding against her body a siren suit, a long scratchy felt all-in-one with a turquoise hood draping behind it and a zip up the front.
‘You’re going to wear a siren suit to the dance?’
‘Why not? No danger of anyone turning up in the same outfit. And it’ll be bloody freezing in a field outside Waven-don. It’s on an airbase.’
‘But you’ll roast inside the hall.’
Moira danced a couple of steps closer and Honey reached out and took the felt hem of one of the trouser legs in her hand.
‘I’m not planning on doing much in the way of dancing.’ Moira’s eyes lit up. ‘I have a beautiful patchwork dress you can wear. Scarf silk. I’ll put your hair in a turban.’
Honey gathered together the pieces.
‘Hang about, I haven’t finished rubbing them.’ Moira dropped down onto the floor again, the siren suit cast onto the bed. ‘Please come,’ she blurted. ‘Tonight, he took me to one of those places, by the station. You know the ones the Tommies go to.’ Honey knew the ones. ‘But you could forget you’re in one of them when you see him, when you feel him.’ She paused. Behind her eyes, in the lines of her face Honey saw it plain, the waters of the dam rising to breaking point. Then all Moira’s secrets came flooding out.
The contours of his body, the secret scents and textures of a man’s skin; each and every noise he made at each and every different moment. She roamed up and around him in candid little tales, clutching sometimes for the right word, like it was a pleasure to clutch for it, to think again on what it had been like, what exact feeling, what smell, what taste.
Honey watched Moira’s eyes roll back the hours. She could picture the hotel. It was down a track where lock-ups curved under the railway arches. Tin-town, they called it; there were trinket shops and pie shops and in between them ladies flashed their torches in little patterns at the men who passed. There was a house at the end of the lane, a public house with a spirits licence for the parlour. It was a poor, shabby front for a local madam who had ‘rooms for soldiers’. She catered – said Wilf the cribster once, with relish – for a ‘variety of tastes’.
The Amber Shadows Page 8