‘At least she’s going to get to see him after all.’ Honey nodded in the direction of the train. They mounted the station bridge together.
Out in the open air the moon was blinding. The sky was a mauve velvet. On the horizon, where it met hill or field, traces of amber burned the edges, almost like a very pale sunrise.
They heard, then saw, in the distance planes taking off, heading for the south coast that would lead them across France to Münster, Lübeck, Cologne, where they would drop their incendiaries on steeples, factories, houses. Tiny blinking black moths, so small and far away they could have been dark shooting stars. They watched for a few seconds, not saying anything.
Then Felix murmured, ‘Moon’s a blinder.’
‘It’s beautiful. Like a jewel.’
‘You can see where the name moonstone comes from.’
‘I was just thinking.’ She looked at him, though she could see only light and shadow, not the features of his face. ‘I was just thinking that on a night like this, you realise how very little you want to die.’
‘Honey.’ He spoke very quietly.
She placed her fingers on the knot of his coat belt, moving delicately into the hard scratchy felt. She had a compulsion to clutch it in her hand, to have something firmly attached to someone, and know exactly who was on the end of it. No ducking into shadows, no games. The knot of his blackout coat fitted her palm exactly. It led her straight to him. His heart was thumping. She could feel it through the layers of wool.
But they had walked too close to the Park. A torchlight shone, roaming for their faces, and she felt for a frightening second as if they had been caught naked in its glare.
‘Night shift, love?’ The Military Policeman held his hand out for her card. In the spillage of light from his torch, she became aware of footsteps coming and going all around them, soft as insects in the night’s foliage. They had stumbled into the ecosystem of the Bletchley midnight changeover and there were no places to hide, no places to kiss.
She found her identity card in her pocket, and handed it over. The man took it, shone his torch on it then up to her face, then waved her through.
‘You’re not coming in at this time of night, are you?’ he said, shining his light on Felix.
Felix laughed; a hollow, curious sound. ‘No, no, not tonight.’
‘Hmmm,’ the Military Policeman said. ‘Wouldn’t have thought so. Bit late for you.’
In the checkpoint hut beyond, the policeman’s colleague was stamping his feet. Clouds of white diamond dust sprang from them. Felix waved to Honey and in the torchlight that shone still from the MP she caught his face, and it had that avuncular expression again, the one he had given her in the grounds, right after the stare. She waved back, then for some reason embarrassment took her and she dropped her eyes and couldn’t bring herself to look again as she walked away.
There was a somnambulant queerness that filtered through the Park at the midnight shift change. It had none of the chatter or bustle of the day change; it was as if nocturnal creatures had crept from their burrows. Scurrying came from the bushes and you couldn’t immediately tell whether it was human, bird or rodent. Here and there a dipped electric torch, its lens covered over with white tissue, would make a low slate-tinted portion of the ground show up, and sometimes a scream from another part would tell you that people were still buoyant, still playing on the rounders lawn, or the tennis courts, or arguing as they skated on the lake.
But she could have orientated herself to Hut 6 even if it had been pitch black. She visited the freezing privy outside first, to avoid having to venture back out once in the hut, then she pushed open the door.
Even from the door end of the hut she could tell when the Typex machines were in swing. But tonight the noise was riotous. Rupert Findlay dashed from one room and into another. ‘Light Blue,’ came the cry through the walls. ‘Can we have some Typexes for this one from Decoding?’ He flew back out of the room and into another. Doubling back, he clung to the doorframe, bracing the weight of his body. ‘Deschamps. You starting?’
‘Yes.’ Honey was struggling to shrug off her coat. She saw her breath cloud, thought better of it and buttoned it back up again.
‘They’re in there.’ He gestured with his head to the left.
‘The Decoding Room’s been moved?’
‘Supposed to happen yesterday but the duffer from maintenance said he got the day wrong.’
‘Oh.’ She pushed the door to her left. It was a nasty feeling, being confronted with these sudden changes of rooms, especially on night shift. Night shift was bad enough but the sight of familiar equipment in an unfamiliar order and setting, with a different team, made her feel dizzy. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. They frequently moved rooms around in order to accommodate the shifting of staff.
She took a bundle of Light Blue raw intercepts from the pile by the door and set up station. She only knew a couple of the girls on this watch. Switching shift patterns had put her out of sync with her usual lot. The night shift Head of Room was a timid, spiny woman named Roache who kept an unsettling silence most of the time, but if riled she would spit. She was always cold and kept the coke stove at full poisonous pelt.
As Honey sat down the women on the back shift end of changeover couldn’t pick up their coats or cigarettes quickly enough. The midnight crew settled, idle chatter died away and Honey began pounding through the Light Blues, spewing out German. She was out of Russia now, back into France.
Lists of names, repetitious weather reports, slips that said ‘KEINE BESONDEREN VORKOMMNISSE’ – nothing to report – again and again came pouring through the traffic. At night her technique was to focus intently on each letter, as if the letters themselves were nothing more than pictures, shapes like hieroglyphs for her to recognise, input and recreate. She took note too of the shapes of the German on the other end, identifiable as words at a glance. But she took no notice of what they said, only that they made sense.
As the night wore on it seemed to clasp her more and more tightly, until she felt as if she had been sucked down into a half-conscious underworld, where nothing mattered but the shape of the letters, sharp-cut and black and crowding around her. Above this underworld Moira walked breezily; she danced high up in dresses cut from parachute fabric with bluebell sleeves. Her father was reaching towards her with hands made of amber, his fingers conducting batons, stretching across a salt lake that became the sea the further he stretched, until ships rocked and rose on it. The ships turned into battleships and mastered the ice-tips of the waves for a time, but soon the sky began to sink and black clouds puffed lower and lower and began to gather in and swallow them. Flying fire came ducking out from under the clouds, turning into the shape of crows with wings flaring furnace-bronze, roaring as they swooped, and swooped closer to the front of the ships, their flame-wings opened in a half-embrace, and that was when Honey brought her mind back to the letters and their shapes, the letters and their shapes. Always, on the night shift, it had to be about the letters and their shapes. A song began to strike in her head, a nonsense song like a nursery rhyme, keeping her sedate and awake. The letters and their shapes, the letters and their shapes . . .
She didn’t know how much time had passed before she rose to roll up the decrypts she had worked through, stuff them into their tube and load them into the pulley for Hut 3. She remembered later that she was still standing up when the door flung back.
The noise of the machines was so loud she didn’t hear it at first. It was only the gust of cold that cut through the coke smoke and reached around her shoulders that made her turn.
‘Deschamps.’ It was the boy Findlay again. ‘Someone’s here for you.’
Afterwards it seemed to her that the moment had spread itself out into broad splodges – Picasso strokes – like the waking dream about her father and the sea. She turned. There was a man standing in the doorway, in Military Police uniform. Her first thought was for her identity card – it was habit w
hen she saw one of them. Her hand went for the pocket of her coat, and found the corners of the card. She couldn’t read the man’s expression. He had a moustache and eyebrows that were just as thick and he looked for all the world as if he were exceedingly cross. But about what?
‘Would you come with me to the house?’
‘What’s it about?’
‘My instructions are to bring you to the house.’
Honey let go of the card comers in her pocket and let him lead her from the hut.
For the third time in the past two days she trudged the dirt gravel that skirted the lake, bypassing the lawn. The MP insisted on going without a torch. He held her elbow and she still didn’t know whether she was being arrested or protected. The light had shifted. The sun was far from rising but there was a telltale violet glow that said it was on its way. When they were inside the mansion hallway she looked at the clock. It was six thirty in the morning.
Dread balled in her stomach as they steered towards Tiver’s office. But the MP turned off at the cafeteria instead, and took her to a table in the furthest comer. There was a man in a double-breasted grey suit already waiting. The cafe was surprisingly lively for the time of day. Men were playing chess over piles of cooked offal and glossy gravy. The smell of burnt toast and bacon was sharp.
‘Cup of tea?’ The man in the double-breasted suit stood. He did introduce himself but she forgot his name instantly. He was a detective from the local CID. He dismissed the MP with a murmured word, and Honey muttered thanks, though she didn’t know yet for what.
‘I’m not sure if I’d like a cup of tea. Can you tell me why you’re here first?’ The image of the drawer closing in her bedroom sprang up in her mind. That evening before she left for the Ritzy . . . the sheets of Moira’s tissue rubbings, she had pushed them in, along with fragments of amber and those scratchings: letters and shapes, letters and shapes . . .
‘Do you have a brother?’
‘You can find that out from my administrative record. Captain Tiver keeps details—’
‘Miss Deschamps.’ He reached out across the table as if he might take her hand. She flinched back. ‘I’m not here to challenge you. I know you’re Martha Deschamps’ girl. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes. What are you here for?’
‘Is your brother Whittington Deschamps?’
‘Dickie. Why, what’s he done?’
‘Have you any reason to believe he might have been coming to visit you tonight?’
Her spine cried out. It was all she could do to stop the cracking note from escaping her mouth, to keep it trapped inside her skeleton. She coughed and swallowed. ‘Yes. I wrote him a letter, yesterday. But he hasn’t replied yet.’
The detective shrugged. ‘It can take days from London at the moment. Telegrams are as bad.’
‘What’s he done?’ she repeated. In a strange trick of fate or time, the way the universe shifts a notch when déjà vu occurs, Honey knew exactly what he had done the second before the detective opened his mouth.
At the moment he told her, a cry went up from the far corner. A man’s fist hammered the table, sending the chess pieces and a blue-rimmed cup of coffee flying. Steaming drips splashed up and flecked back down. ‘By Jove, you’re a rogue. You belong to the Jerries!’ The sound of the cup striking the floor split the air, rendering the detective’s words inaudible. But Honey read the shape of them on his moving lips.
‘Miss Deschamps, sit steady. We believe Dickie may have been murdered.’
Chapter 14
The cup’s crash on the floor seemed to knock the wind from her. For a second she was back in her lucid dream, swimming under the purple shadow of a battleship. She found it hard to focus on the detective in front of her; her eyes seemed cloudy; the world was spinning at a nauseating rate.
It had happened at last. They had come, they had come, and this time it really was about Dickie.
But oh Dickie, what a coup de théâtre.
They got her to the police motor car, two men, one on each arm. Her knees were wrapped under a freezing itchy blanket, and the car stank of the pipe tobacco coming off the large officer sitting next to her. She thought of Dickie as they drove: Dickie the dancer, Dickie the pacifist. Dickie who had objected to the sign-up because he believed, like Martha, that ballet was a salve to morale, that music could one day save the world. Dickie who danced to Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky and Prokofiev in tights and his little leather shoes that creaked on the polished parlour floor. He had grazed his knee in the garden once as a child and howled so hard a family of starlings had flushed out of a tree. Dickie with his cipher books and his puzzles who never finished the crossword because he didn’t have the attention span to keep still for long enough, and Dickie who chewed his lip so hard when he was thinking that he had a wart-like growth on the side of his mouth that would flare when he was under pressure and he chewed it too much. Dickie never picked up his caramel wrappers – he left a little trail of them wherever he went – and complained they gave him indigestion when he danced after eating too many. Dickie hated cigarette smoke and he hated his birth name, Whittington. Dickie was a vegetarian. How could he be dead when she felt his force so alive inside her?
She felt rageful, burning with nerves beneath cold flesh, and she felt entitled to her rage. Her brother’s death was huger and more tragic than any other death, surely. It was bloodier, it was more brutal, it hurt more – surely no one, no wife, no cousin, no mother could hurt this much. Surely the country could not be filled with people who felt this way, or how could it function? She hoped bitterly that it was someone else’s brother or someone else’s son murdered and lying in the cold morgue. Then she would not care. She would feel sorry, but she would not sting like this. The car moved slowly and swerved to avoid a scurrying creature on a country lane. Silvery moonlit flecks moved like fish past the window. Once the driver let out a curse – then, ‘Sorry. Sorry, ma’am. Nearly there.’
After they reached the hospital, the events became tangled and muddied in her mind. She couldn’t remember whether it was before she saw the beaten body or afterwards that they told her where it had been found.
‘There’s a coffin maker’s behind the railway line,’ the man who had spoken to her in the cafe said – his name, she knew now, was Detective Inspector Cole. They were standing in the lobby of the hospital and it smelled powerfully of ethanol and rot. ‘The proprietor is Edwin James. You might know him up at the Park as he has the contract to work on the huts. He started work at five this morning. He said the wagon horse was crying over something or other. He found the body in the back of the stable, underneath the cortege carriage. Local roughs, brickworkers perhaps. Everything in his wallet was gone.’
‘How did the police know it was him?’ She saw Dickie’s face floating in her mind. The conversation must have been after she saw the body because Dickie’s face seemed to her blue and livid on one side, perfect on the other.
‘He had this buried down inside his clothes.’
The officer had taken her aside, and sat her on a leatherette bench. Now he pulled from his coat a book. Honey’s hands began to tremble as she reached forward for the green leather binding. It was softened now to scraps, frayed at the edges. Figley’s Book of Ciphers. So it did exist. She hadn’t dreamt it, she hadn’t conjured it in memory. And he had brought it. Dickie had come to help and he had brought Figley’s Book of Ciphers.
She had last seen it when she was seven or eight, just old enough to understand, not old enough to do anything about it. It was much smaller than she remembered. The detective held it lightly by its comers with a handkerchief. She flattened her hand to touch it and he pulled it back. ‘Use this, and only touch the edges.’ She opened the cover. The pages were old and creaked like doors as she turned them. The smell she knew, sweet vanilla paper, cut straight through the hospital scent.
‘Whittington Deschamps,’ had been written at the very top in a child’s spidering hand, then scored out with a different-coloured pe
n. In the same hand, smoother, ‘Whittington Korichnev’ was written below, and below that, also in the same hand – Dickie’s hand, there was no mistaking it now – the inscription: ‘To Dickie, Love from Papa.’ Further below still was an elaborate, artful squiggle, code for a signature. ’
She had seen it before many times, but only now did she see Dickie’s hand in the whole thing: the message, the signature, the care taken in the flourishes, mimicking the quick hand of someone debonair and creative. She had believed with everything in her soul that the book was a gift from their father. Why had he done that? Had Dickie stolen the book, before their father left? Was it a relic he was never able to give to Dickie? Snatched by the child just before their father was exiled to Russia? Had he perhaps sneaked a secret message to Dickie later that Dickie had copied into the book? These were the things she wanted to believe. She had no reason to doubt what Dickie said. That was the story and that was what she believed. Because what else was there to believe? It wasn’t as if she had a selection of lies from which to choose.
She turned the first page. Inside the title page, in the top corner, the same hand had scrawled, ‘This book belongs to Dick, and if it you nick, you’ll get a kick.’
The swing doors of the mortuary flapped, letting out the pathologist in his stiff white coat. From his breast pocket several metal instruments poked, and a pen, and the sight of them raised with grisly force the face she had seen: his broken collarbone, his vulnerable ballet dancer’s soft skin, the blinding starched sheet that had only one rogue smirch of brown blood on it.
‘Miss Deschamps.’ The officer had been repeating her name. His yellow-stained fingers landed on her arm. She looked down, then up at him, startled. ‘Did you know your brother was coming to visit you?’
Honey shook her head, and realised she had not yet cried.
‘He didn’t give you any word?’
‘No.’ She cleared her throat. She thought back to the British Restaurant at the station. The train had been late in. The girl in the silver monkey fur had been waiting for her sweetheart. She wondered if the sweetheart had arrived on the saiyie train.
The Amber Shadows Page 18