by Tony Cape
However, despite the wealth of references to “See Bletchley” or “See GCCS,” there was no individual file with this title. Given Bowles’ penchant for mordant file headings, he checked them all carefully more than once, but of the twelve files he had removed, there was none with such a title or that dealt directly with the wartime institution. He wondered that he might have missed a crucial document, as he had with the Kennedy Theorem file, but he was sure he had been careful and methodical in removing the summaries from every hanging file in the second drawer. As he racked his memory, he thought he had seen something in his first examination of the Cambridge drawer about golf and chess, which might have been one of Bowles’ oblique references to Bletchley. He had not physically removed the files until the following day, when Alice Wentworth had given him permission. A cold fist struck Smailes below the ribcage. Had the files been sabotaged? Had a crucial piece of Bowles’ research been removed between the time he first inspected the file drawers late Wednesday afternoon and on Thursday, when Alice Wentworth gave him permission to borrow them? If so, by whom? The cabinet had been left open, but the room had remained locked during that whole period according to the college, until Allerton and the sister had taken a key from the lodge ten minutes before his arrival. Had Alice Wentworth some motivation to doctor her brother’s papers? He remembered the cool, proprietorial manner she had assumed when he presented her with her brother’s Kennedy files, her unhesitating gesture to allow him to remove the Cambridge documents. Or Allerton and his sleazy bookseller friend, while he and the sister were conducting their interview in Poole’s room? Hawken, of course, would have a pass key, as would Beecroft, and what about Davies’ alarmed reaction at the crematorium the following day? Was he the culprit? Smailes kicked himself that he had disavowed the instinct to inventory the contents of the room. He could have done so easily in the forty-five minutes he waited for Klammer to dust the room, or after Klammer had left. He felt angry, negligent, incompetent. He could not swear to George Dearnley that a file was stolen, but perhaps he could persuade him there was sufficient suspicion to reopen the case. Except Dearnley would probably get angry that he had freelanced again, had removed evidence without observing proper procedures or completing the proper forms, and had felt the files significant enough to remove, yet had omitted to inventory them. Smailes cursed inwardly, and realized that he had jammed himself up. To barge into Dearnley with his doubts would only get him further into hot water. His alternative was to pursue his inquiries independently, and find out what he could about Bletchley Park. He could go to the library, or perhaps track down the texts that Bowles himself had used. He did not doubt that the young man’s books had been sold to the shabby bookseller who was Allerton’s friend. He resolved to visit the bookshop as soon as he could.
Derek Smailes cursed under his breath as he hunted along Chesterton Lane and its side streets looking for parking. He eventually found a space in Magrath Avenue and walked slowly back to the lights at Magdalene Street, then turned left towards the city center. He found the facade of the dilapidated little bookshop without difficulty, opposite the front gates of Magdalene College. In the window was a dusty display of first editions about Scott of the Antarctic, behind an eerie poster of a man in an overcoat with no head, with a legend in Polish. He pushed the door and stepped in.
Behind a high counter immediately inside the door to the right sat the character Smailes had met in Simon Bowles’ room. There was no heat in the shop and the man wore a red tartan scarf over the faded velvet jacket, his hands cupping a cracked mug of tea. He stared at Smailes painfully. The detective looked around and saw that apart from a rotund, bearded student scanning the science fiction racks, the place was empty.
He stepped up to the man, who gave him no sign of recognition, and asked for the titles on espionage. The face was light gray and unshaven, with dark pockets beneath the eyes.
“Fiction or nonfiction,” he replied, barely audibly.
“Nonfiction,” said Smailes, and the man mumbled something about the back of the store.
“I’m sorry?”
The man gestured with his head to the racks at the rear left of the store, his eyes actually rolling backwards into his skull. Smailes realized suddenly that he was laboring under a poisonous hangover and retreated quickly.
It was not difficult to find the titles Bowles had owned. They were each distinguished by thick marks from a black felt-tip at the base of the spine, and they occupied almost three whole shelves. Smailes scanned back and forwards for several minutes, aware the the small shop was slowly filling up. He finally picked out a generic history of the British security services and two titles specifically on Bletchley Park. He turned toward the front of the store and hesitated. Leaning against the counter with her back to him, talking earnestly with the proprietor, was Lauren Greenwald.
Smailes stuck the books back in the rack and stepped immediately to his right to begin examining a shelf of mystery novels. He glanced at her surreptitiously and was struck by her careless grace as she leant on an elbow, one foot supporting her weight, straining to hear what her unfortunate friend was saying. She was wearing a New York Mets baseball jacket, jeans and a thick woolen scarf. She began to turn around and Smailes went back to examining the racks of Desmond Bagley and Ngaio Marsh.
“You’re into mysteries. Makes sense,” said a voice to his left.
He turned and smiled at her. She was tall, maybe five eight, and the thick strands of dark hair, streaked with lighter tints, fell forward onto the rims of the round glasses. The effect was both artful and unkempt, and Smailes wondered how she accomplished it. The complexion was sallow, the mouth small and even. Her chin was tilted toward him.
“Now and again. For recreation. How about you? What do chemical engineers read before they put out the light?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Magazines, mostly, I guess. I haven’t read a novel in years.”
“No science fiction?”
“You really do have a lot of stereotypes,” she said, but not harshly. “What are you doing here? This is mostly a student hang-out.”
“I could ask you the same, since you don’t read books.”
“I have supervision at Magdalene on Wednesday mornings, and I usually stop by afterward. I’m friends with Michael,” she said quietly, indicating with a glance the front of the store. “I know him through Giles. He’s having a tough time. Estella, that’s his old lady, has threatened to kick him out if he doesn’t quit drinking, and Michael won’t even admit he has a problem. We’re trying to get him some help. You know how it is.”
“Yeah,” said Smailes absently. Lauren did not move. “Well, you can find the occasional bargain here,” he said weakly. “I sometimes drop in, on a day off. Thought I recognized the guy the other day, at St. Margaret’s.” He hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt. He would not want anyone, particularly not a friend of Bowles, to know of his suspicions or the real reason for his trip to the little shop.
He felt her eyes on him and felt suddenly self-conscious. He turned to look at her. Despite himself he asked, “How do you get your hair to look like that?”
She smiled at him broadly, unembarrassed. “Easy, detective. I wash it every morning, and I don’t comb or brush it.”
“Ah, I see,” he said, a little foolishly. There was a pause, and she said, “Well, see you around.”
“Sure,” said Smailes, unable to prevent himself watching as she swung away, the jacket billowing above the tight jeans, waving to the proprietor as she left. He stood lost in thought a moment, and then retrieved the nonfiction titles, paid for them without ceremony, and headed back towards Chesterton Lane.
“Sure,” he said to himself again as he sat behind the wheel of the Allegro, squinting at himself in the rearview.
Smailes interrupted his review of Bowles’ notes to educate himself about Bletchley Park. It was a strangely intimate feeling to be reading the same books that Simon Bowles had used in his own research
. Occasionally there were underlinings or notes in the margin that reminded Smailes that he was following in someone’s deliberate footsteps. All his hostility and skepticism towards Simon Bowles had left him, and he now felt him almost as a peer, a colleague. And the first chapter of the first book he opened convinced him that his suspicions of tampering with Bowles’ files were correct.
The Government Code and Cipher School, housed in its wartime premises of Bletchley Park, a rambling mansion fifty miles north of London, had been known informally to the intelligence community as the Golf Club and Chess Society. That was the name Smailes had seen as a file heading the first day he had inspected the second drawer of the file cabinet, he was convinced. It meant a file had been stolen, and meant that someone was obviously interested in the suppression of evidence surrounding Bowles’ death. Had he been murdered? Or had his suicide meant that damaging revelations from his research might now come to light? What had Bowles written in his Bletchley file that was not in the public domain, that someone would risk exposure to remove? Derek Smailes stayed up late two nights in a row to read through the literature. In the end he was no nearer finding an answer to his question.
Smailes read with interest the accounts of the stunning success of the British cryptanalysts at Bletchley, who were able to crack most of the encipherments of the fearsomely complex Enigma coding machine, which was used by all the German armed forces, including the High Command. This had been one of the best kept secrets of the war, and gave the Allies priceless intelligence, code named Ultra, on enemy strategy as the war progressed. Ultra intelligence was credited with turning the tide of the U-boat war of the North Atlantic, reversing the damaging successes of Rommel in North Africa, and allowing the Allies to know that their deceptions over the site of the D-Day landings in Normandy had worked. Knowledge of the intelligence breakthrough at Bletchley was restricted to very few of Britain’s wartime leaders, and none of those involved in the massive undertaking—the staff at Bletchley grew to ten thousand at its peak—leaked a word about the project until the Government authorized the first account of the center in 1974, almost thirty years after the war’s conclusion.
Smailes noticed an irony while reading the accounts of the wartime triumph at Bletchley, and suspected it had struck Simon Bowles in much the same way. It appeared that the top cryptographers at Bletchley were nearly all recruited from Cambridge University, and that at least one, Alan Turing, who had designed the first prototype computer to perform the bewildering number of calculations needed to break through the German codes, had been homosexual. Yet for all the venom Smailes remembered spilled in the press around the time of the Blunt affair about the links between Cambridge University, homosexuality and treason, the Bletchley scientists had achieved one of the most significant intelligence coups of all time in a total secrecy that had lasted a generation. Bowles had drawn a fat line down the margin of the page where this was pointed out, and had written three large exclamation marks beside a particularly poignant footnote. It appeared that Turing, having returned to academic life sworn to secrecy and with his wartime heroism unsung, had taken his own life in 1954 following prosecution under Britain’s barbarous public decency laws for homosexual conduct with a consenting lover. Had Simon Bowles, in some bizarre way, repeated the self-destructive act of his wartime predecessor? The triple exclamation marks stood as mute witness to the bond Bowles had clearly felt with the dead mathematical genius. It was a provocative question, and one more that Smailes could not hope to answer.
Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS WITH a mounting sense of irritation that Derek Smailes resumed his study of the dead student’s files. Part of Bowles’ technique seemed to have been to examine the careers not only of known communist sympathizers, but of whole groups of individuals from which known agents had been recruited. In a long file called Fellows and Travellers he had extended his investigation to cover scores of Cambridge dons who may have had contacts with active communists in the thirties. For each individual he would reach a conclusion about their attitude towards communism—the range seemed to span from “member” and “sympathizer” to “neutral” and “hostile.” Since most of the Bletchley codebreakers had been recruited from Cambridge science departments, and since many prominent Cambridge scientists had been overt communists, Bowles had written evaluations of the careers of many of the senior figures at GCCS. These profiles appeared under the sub-heading “Cantab Junction and the Golf Club and Chess Society,” and Smailes suddenly wondered that this reference were not the one he had noticed on his first examination of the files, in which case his alarm at potential sabotage was misplaced. The possibility only succeeded in making him more annoyed that he had neglected the simple task of a physical inventory. However, his frustration was quickly replaced by excitement when he began reading the entries. Two of these first profiles were of peculiar interest to him, those of Nigel Hawken and Sir Martin Gorham-Leach.
It seemed that both Hawken and Gorham-Leach had seen wartime service at Bletchley Park after being recruited as research fellows at Cambridge. According to Bowles, both men had studied at Oxford as undergraduates, although their careers there had not overlapped, Gorham-Leach graduating in mathematics and physics in 1934 and Hawken going up in 1935 to study history. The two men might have met later at Cambridge, because Gorham-Leach was recruited to join the Bletchley codebreakers in early 1940, and Hawken was recruited by the War Office in 1941 after completing a doctorate in history. According to Bowles’ research, Hawken wound up at Bletchley in mid-1942 as a military intelligence liaison officer, whereas Gorham-Leach seemed to have spent his entire wartime career as part of the front line codebreaking team. No doubt this was why G-L had been unable to tell him of his assignment during the war years, although much of the record of the Bletchley triumph was now in the public domain. The Official Secrets Act simply prevented a signatory from discussing the nature of his work in perpetuity, and Gorham-Leach was obviously the kind of man who would regard such a commitment solemnly. Smailes wondered whether there were any personal animosity on G-L’s part toward Hawken that had caused him to push Bowles in Hawken’s direction. The action seemed slightly out of character. Hawken had also claimed the two men were friendly, social acquaintances, which struck Smailes as incongruous. The profiles also answered another question for Smailes—Hawken did appear to hold a bona fide doctorate so was at least nominally qualified to be a Cambridge professor.
According to Bowles’ research, Hawken had seen considerable service abroad with the Secret Intelligence Service—MI6—after the war, in Washington, Ankara and Bonn, before officially leaving the intelligence service in 1964 to take the position at St. Margaret’s. It was clear that Bowles had been skeptical that Hawken’s intelligence role had ever formally ended. As Gorham-Leach had indicated, he had been at Cambridge, officially with the Cavendish Laboratory as a fellow of St. Margaret’s, since the war, apart from three years at Princeton University in the fifties. Nothing was mentioned about the Cambridge Research Institute.
At this juncture in his notes, Bowles had written “See Oxford Blues and Reds,” which referred to the research the young man had completed in the Oxford University archives. The volume of material was not so great as the Cambridge research, comprising one relatively slim document. It seemed that not as much was known about Soviet recruitment efforts there, although it was clear that pro-communist sentiment among undergraduates was equally as strong as at Cambridge. With his characteristic thoroughness, Bowles had identified clubs and societies to which both Hawken and Gorham-Leach had belonged, none of which seemed particularly provocative. Hawken had belonged to the History Society, the Oxford Union and the Pistol Club. Gorham-Leach apparently had not belonged to any political groups, but belonged to the Oxford University Alpine Club and something called the Blenheim Hunt. The conclusion reached about each man’s communist sympathies at the time was the same—“hostile,” which seemed eminently reasonable to Smailes. Once again, he recognized the names of a
number of well-known political figures among Bowles’ profiles of those who had been active socialists while at Oxford University. Smailes wondered what the young man planned to do with all this information, and whether any of it was of interest to the authorities. But to believe Hawken, such information was all already known and Bowles was fruitlessly treading waters that had been thoroughly plumbed at both institutions. While Smailes found himself reluctant to believe Hawken on principle, he had to concede that it seemed unlikely that persons who had showed overt communist sympathies at Oxford or Cambridge would not by now have been identified and questioned.
One question continued to gnaw at Smailes as he completed his first review of Bowles’ Cambridge files. Nowhere in the material he had read was the newly-explained question he had seen on Bowles’ notecard, about the flagging of Bletchley files, explained, or even echoed. It might have no more significance than a doodle, but the fact that he could not confirm or deny its significance exasperated him.
It was around six on a Friday afternoon after his visit to Myrtlefields Hospital, and Derek Smailes had straightened the papers on his desk and was about to leave for the day. He had just filed his duplicate of the request to the coroner’s office for a re-inspection of Bowles’ personal belongings when his phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring.
“Smailes, CID,” he said gruffly.
“Del-baby. Nabbed any bank robbers lately?” Only Iain Mack was allowed to use the hated diminutive or to tease him about his work. Smailes grinned into the receiver.
“Iain, you old bastard. I called you twice this week. Where are you? I’ve got a raft of questions for you.”
“You’ll never make it stick. I deny everything. I’m at the bleeding railway station, where do you think I’m calling from? Filial duty time, you know. You free tonight?”