The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  He pointed to the middle section of the crease. The wind carried his soft words away and Honey strained to hear. ‘The first thing you have to think about is why the piece was enciphered in the first place. The person obviously wants you to know what it says, which is why . . .’ He couldn’t say it aloud ‘. . . machine enciphering is unlikely. Why would you need something that complicated, and how would they know you could access it?’ He paused for breath. ‘So. Was there ever a special language you used together?’

  ‘I never knew him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Piotr looked contrite for the first time. He blinked and glanced in the direction of the church. There was a weathervane in the shape of a moon. It looked oddly pagan on top of the square steeple and punched battlements. ‘So what makes you think . . .?’

  ‘There was a book. A cipher book. It was an old thing. A bit like the ones you see for children. I think he’d bought it before the first war, and my brother said he was working on this . . . piece of music with it when he left.’ She sighed. ‘I’m telling you more than I wanted to.’

  ‘I’m helping you more than I want to.’

  ‘All right. His name was Korichnev. He escaped to Russia because he was worried about being exposed as a Bolshevik or . . . I’m not sure what.’

  Piotr gave a small, bitter snort but didn’t say anything.

  ‘He made music using codes. That’s what my brother said.’

  ‘And where is your brother now?’

  She paused. ‘Dead. He was murdered two nights ago in Bletchley.’

  Piotr stood up. ‘I can’t help you.’

  Her hand shot out as he moved to leave and she grasped the hem of his jumper. He looked down at her fingers clutching the wool; gradually she released the knitted threads.

  ‘Miss Deschamps, I don’t know who you are but I can’t get tangled up in anything involving police, or murder, or Bletchley. You don’t know how hard it is. How hard they watch us.’ He flicked his eyes around frantically as if there might be spies in among the headstones.

  ‘No, no, no.’ Honey strained to correct herself and keep her voice quiet. ‘I have to tell you more.’

  He sat down again and rubbed his fingers back through his hair, flattening it. ‘I don’t like this at all. I’m here on your king’s business, and I tell you they execute people like me if they even think we talk. I’ve heard of what your government does. Do you know about the London cage?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s a place where they torture prisoners of war. Foreigners. Native traitors they simply shoot. Us?’ She watched his eyes grow fearful with whatever images he was conjuring in his head.

  ‘Trust me,’ she urged him. ‘Please. I’m trusting you.’

  Whether it was the word ‘trust’ or a note in her voice, he rubbed his hand over his chin and held the paper close to his face again.

  ‘Dickie, my brother,’ she whispered, ‘had the cipher book on him when he was found. The police have it. It was the only thing he had left on him at the time. He’d tucked it into his trousers. The rest of his papers and money and things had been stolen. Them, they, those people you speak of, the authorities, they know about the amber pieces. They know someone is sending me them. But they don’t know about these.’ She pointed at the piece of paper with the cipher rubbings. ‘Please. I need to know. I need to know what they say.’

  His head twitched impatiently. He slapped the paper. ‘I need time. I can’t just look at this and break a code like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Have you tried anything? Letter frequency analysis? An alphabet shift?’

  ‘I’m not a codebreaker. I—’

  ‘Do you know anything about the most basic tenets of cryptanalysis? It’s not all magical shape-shifting of numbers and letters. Most of it is counting, and has nothing to do with that . . . that . . . machine you mentioned. Before you have even read a word of the first message, you count the number of messages on a particular frequency, you count the number with the same callsign, count the number from the same battalion, the same distance . . .’ He rubbed his lips together and pointed at one of the headstones. ‘Go on over there and count the number of T’s on that.’ He saw her pause. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Letter frequency analysis. Traffic analysis. Moira explained all that.’

  ‘She did, did she? Hmmm.’ He went back to scribbling on the page. ‘Then you’ll know it’s very difficult to crack an individual message. Almost impossible to intercept it if you don’t know anything at all about the sender or recipient.’ He looked at her.

  ‘She mentioned something. A word, beginning with V. A common cipher. Not a common one but a known one, a classical one.’

  He smoothed the papers out on the bench between them. On the backs of the payslips Moira had copied only the letters, not the curls or the drawings of the branches, and they looked plain and ugly in the raw capitals of her handwriting.

  ‘All right. All right, I’m thinking. Something beginning with V. Your father was a musician? You said he was interested in art, a renaissance man.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know but—’

  ‘We go on assumptions for now, because this starts with trial and error. Classical ciphers. Assuming he’s not a professional cryptanalyst, which, I understand, he is not—’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then he’s relying on ciphers commonly known to people who look for them. He’s probably using an old-fashioned one. There’s no dominant letter frequency here.’ He saw the confusion on her face and breathed out impatiently. ‘If you have a single letter substitution cipher — for instance one letter is always used to replace another, the same letter — then you should have the same letter frequency as you get in plain text. E is the most common letter in English — you know that, don’t you? So whatever is the predominant letter in the enciphered text is likely to represent E.’

  ‘Simple,’ Honey said bitterly.

  ‘Well, there is no predominance here. That suggests multiple enciphered letters are being used to represent the same plain text letter. In a single alphabet transfer the frequency of each letter in the normal alphabet will correspond to their frequency in the enciphered one. That . . . machine . . . uses multiple alphabets – a different random one for each new plain text letter, decided upon by the scramblers. There are millions and millions of options, literally. It makes it more difficult to tell.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Didn’t you read the cipher book your brother had?’

  ‘He never let me have it, that was the problem. He was a very selfish child.’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t see any letter occurring more frequently than another. That suggests to me multi-alphabet. And the most — well, let’s say — flourishing of those hand ciphers is the Vigenère square; something that would appeal to a man in love with art.’

  ‘Vigenère. That was the word Moira used. That’s it.’

  ‘But.’ He hushed her with a finger. ‘You need a keyword.’

  ‘Oh, bloody brilliant,’ she sighed.

  ‘You need to make a square of alphabets and you need a keyword that runs along the top of that square and determines which of the multiple alphabets you will use to encipher each letter. Without the keyword, I’m afraid there’s no way round it. Well, there is, but it would take — not as long as . . . the machine—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake just say Enigma. You know it and I know it too.’

  The colour in his face rose.

  She lit on it. ‘Stravinsky. Try Stravinsky.’

  She watched as he scribbled out a rough grid then wrote StravinskyStravinskyStravinskyStrav across it.

  ‘Aren’t you going to finish it?’

  ‘Be patient,’ he hissed. ‘I had to hide in a well for eight hours to escape Nazi troops, you can wait a little longer for your code.’

  She saw him scribble out beneath the row of Stravinskys the enciphered text from the panels. ‘What is this letter?’ He pointed.

  ‘I don’t know, let me c
heck.’ She reached into the gas mask box and pulled out the fur-wrapped slabs. As she uncurled the pelt from around the surface of the first one, a few of the threads stuck. She brushed them out. Over her shoulder his eyes burned. ‘Is that the amber?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she lied.

  ‘Did he steal it?’

  ‘Please can we—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he muttered. ‘It’s an H. Your H’s are strange.’

  ‘Not mine, Moira’s.’ She liked watching him work his way down the code, scribbling out the squares. His gaunt, childish face took on concentration. He drew a grid and then twenty-six alphabets, one after the next, each one shifting down a letter, so the first row started ABC, the second BBC, the third CCD and so on. Then he counted down and drew a long oblong round several sets of alphabets. ‘The keyword determines which alphabet you will use to crack each letter.’

  ‘Is this what they’re doing in the crib room?’

  He smiled at her. ‘There are thousands of possible combinations for the Vigenere cipher. The French called it le chiffre indéchiffrable. For Enigma there are more than 150 million million million. What they’re doing in the crib room is part of what we’ve done here – guesswork. But on a much larger scale. Is it a supplies report? Maybe the name of a General or the words Heil Hitler come up at the end of the message. Maybe the coder at the other end used the word “Scheisse” or “Fotze” as the start of their ring settings for the day. You learn a lot about German swear words working on Enigma.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘With the keyword Stravinsky, you have ten alphabets in play in the message as a whole. If you look along each of the letters of the keyword and where they correspond to the enciphered text, that tells you which alphabet you use and where.’

  He saw confusion cross her face.

  ‘This is not . . . quantum physics. This is – I mean, you could get this from a textbook on ciphers you’d buy in a bookshop. No army is going to use it. But it’s a good cipher for people interested in trying their luck. Now, let’s see. The letter S at the start would mean we use the first alphabet along. This would encrypt it as F. If we try the next one, we’re looking for the letter that corresponds to the T alphabet. This makes D.’ He continued at a pace, cracking through each letter until he had a pile of new letters in a third row beneath the keyword.

  FDLWULJLHSRZVZ AY GVHSRGEIKMMPFBD

  He turned his head to look at her and she saw the wry amusement on his face. ‘Mean anything to you?’

  She frowned and snatched the paper from him. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘Then it’s probably the wrong keyword. Or the wrong cipher. Or someone is making it up. Do the letters themselves mean anything?’

  ‘No, but. . .’ She cursed her stupidity. ‘The bird. It’s not Stravinsky at all. It – I mean it must be The Firebird. It’s only The Firebird that means anything to us. Try firebird.’

  Piotr took another of his slow breaths and removed the paper from her hands again. He worked down the pattern. The letters that came out though were still nonsense.

  SOLSOLFAMISOLREDOFAMIREFAMIDORE

  He looked sour. ‘Perhaps it’s a double encryption.’

  Honey frowned, then looked more closely and let out a small cry. ‘It’s them. It is a double cipher, but how could I . . .? What is one of the most common forms of encryption?’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for riddles.’

  ‘Musical notation. Music. You see that pattern. Sol sol fa mi-sol re do fa-mi-re-fa-mi-do re.’ She sung it gently, then dropped her voice. ‘It’s The Firebird. It’s the theme. It makes perfect sense.’

  She surprised herself as the emotion caught in her throat. Through a choke she saw the amber come to life, the fire in it glowing gold as the music burned through her head. She closed her eyes and saw Dickie dancing. But she saw it with new meaning now. He had loved The Firebird because it belonged to him. Every time he danced it, he danced because in some way it was part of his blood. It belonged to a performance he had seen their father create, a performance that was locked in him, every time he moved his feet. She imagined him, imagining the man he’d seen conduct at the Opera House. And as she did so something else rose in her. She opened her eyes and looked at the carved gold.

  The Firebird had belonged to Dickie because he danced it. Now, fossilised in its enciphered form, it belonged to her too. For a second she loved not ghosts from the past but that they had made her who she was.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured to Piotr.

  He unwedged something from between his teeth and spat it gently onto the ground. He nodded at her lap where both slices of amber sat, half-peeping from their fur shrouds. ‘That’s only the first. What about the second?’

  Using the same keyword they worked through the second slab in the same way. This time the text was plain, the message clear, in English, and it snatched away her daydreams.

  In Piotr’s looping hand was written, ‘To get mixed up in politics is ruination for art.’

  ‘It’s not quite got the same romance,’ he muttered.

  Honey went over the words to herself but they gave her no recall. She hadn’t heard them before. ‘It is the sort of thing Dickie would say,’ she said quietly.

  Piotr was shaking his head. His hand had dropped to his side and he played with a little scrape of lichen embedded on the bench.

  ‘Is it a famous saying?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Was this what your father believed?’

  He looked up. Honey was taken aback by his face. She struggled for words. ‘Why are you angry?’

  He hesitated. Another secret flared behind his skin and he opened his mouth briefly, then closed it again.

  ‘Ruination for art, is it? Politics.’

  ‘I didn’t write it.’

  ‘And yet you . . . you want to know the person who did? Only an idiot in a war could say a—’ He hesitated again. His mouth had soured and he was glaring across at the church wall, not really looking at it, clutched in some horror. Whatever he was holding was on the verge of sinking back down into a pit inside. His expression shifted. He went from looking worried to resigned; the resignation brought relief to his brow. He kept his mouth sealed for a few further seconds. Then he rose and said suddenly, ‘I’ll be late.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Work.’

  ‘What work do you do?’

  He spun and his eyes were aflame. ‘How dare you ask me that? My government, my people, we reach out to help you, and all you do is ask, ask, ask. I come here for help, and do they let me do the work I was trained to do? The work I passed on to them? No, they keep my machines to themselves, they develop them and won’t let us see the finished ones. They took our plans, they took our name for the machines, and then they shove me into this horrid little industry of theirs and they keep my research to themselves.’

  He began to move off in the direction of the church path but stopped beside a huge ancient tomb. Above it rose a colossal angel, smothered in ivy and moss, suspended green tears draping to its toes.

  Her fingers stumbled to gather the amber and stuff it back into the gas mask box.

  ‘Wait. That was what you were doing that night at Wavendon? Behind the huts? Looking into the hut the Wrens use, where the noise was coming from?’

  He didn’t turn but spoke as if he was talking to the stone. ‘We developed plans for those machines back in Poland. We called them “bomba” after an ice cream. We passed on the plans to the British. I believe your people call them only “bombe”. Perhaps the French is easier to say, I don’t know. It seems they work well. You have the Professor Turing in your midst.’ He turned and his face was hollow and sad. ‘If you can see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, isn’t that right? But even standing on a regular person . . . he would not be able t
o see anything at all were it not for that person. We gave away the idea for the bombes but they don’t trust us enough to work with you at. . . that place you work. They shove us in another building, another camp, to do different work. See, that word again, trust.’

  ‘I’m not sure I quite understand.’

  Piotr smiled. ‘It’s all right.’ He put his hand on the angel and pulled off some of the moss, then crumbled it to the ground. ‘I like that you trusted me. That’s all. With your amber.’ He was gazing into her eyes now and there was a penetrating sorrow in his, a look that was almost childlike. He was so far from Dickie and his fiery moods, and yet somehow he reminded her of him. ’I can’t help you any more. I hope you find your father.’

  The word tore at her, and Tiver’s story loomed too large in her head. And on some level she knew that even though in her wildest dreams she might not find what she was looking for, she was going to seek it anyway. As she reached the edge of the cemetery she turned at the same time Piotr did, and saw two more words on his lips. ‘Be careful.’

  Chapter 19

  There was no time left for pause. The stories were fizzing in her; Stravinsky, Leningrad, the palace, the amber, the censors’ stamps. She wanted to know what was real and what was not, and she knew where she had to go to find it. It had been there all along but the terror of confronting it was too great, for wasn’t it enough that houses, streets, towns, families were being blasted away without the shaking to pieces of one’s own past?

  Heaving her heart from where it had sunk to the dirt and moss she left Piotr at the stone angel and caught a bus back to Bletchley. She was racking her brains to think where she could borrow a car from. Perhaps Felix had one. Beatrix’s was no good if she was on back shift. She would need it again too soon. The trains weren’t reliable enough to get back in time for midnight.