The Golf, Cheese and Chess Society

by Jason Blacker

  Frances feared that things were going to get out of hand.

  “Carlisle, perhaps you’d like to explain what you were doing up there if it wasn’t to protect Minnie Shelford. And I’d certainly like to know why you were pretending to be a Frenchman.”

  “I do apologize for the ruse, my Lady,” said Desmont, “but I was working in an official MI6 role. We had heard that Minnie Shelford had found out where you were, and we thought she might be coming up to visit you. I was there to check on your welfare and to ensure that nobody else was trying to make contact with you.”

  “And why were you concerned about my welfare?” she asked Desmont.

  “We were aware of Brimley’s Operation Cracking Eggs.” Alfred smirked, concealing it well. “And we wanted to be sure that nothing untoward happened to you. I was also there to check on the welfare of Minnie of course, but I can’t be at every place at once.”

  “Please explain this to me, Carlisle. Because I’m having a hard time of it. You’re up at the Lake District to keep an eye on me, and yet as soon as Minnie’s murdered you’re like a ghost on the wind.”

  “Yes, well we felt that with the constable from Cumbria staying with you and with Alfred at your side that the danger to your welfare was minimal. I felt that I should rather report back to MI6 than risk having my cover uncovered so to speak.”

  Frances shook her head.

  “I don’t know what to say. Between MI5 and MI6 you’ve turned this whole thing into a dog’s breakfast and we have three decent people murdered because of it and likely a price paid for my head as well.”

  “I am quite certain that you are no longer in danger, my Lady,” said Albutt. “With my experience I should think that you gave the German quite a scare and he’ll be off back towards home as soon as he can. Indeed, the three greatest threats to him he has now murdered. I think you are quite safe.”

  Albutt turned towards Brimley for support.

  “As much as I hate to say it,” said Brimley, “I have to agree with my colleague from MI6. If we also follow his trajectory, he has clearly been moving south from the Lake District. He was up there over the weekend when he murdered poor Minnie Shelford and then he tried to attack you. Since then he’s moved down here where he attacked Pelagia Paterson which I believe happened late last night. And then this morning Inspector Pearce informed me that Group Captain Dowd was found murdered. I would suggest that this German spy is now making his way to the coast to try for the fatherland.”

  Frances nodded. It did make sense to her. But she’d rather have him caught and brought to justice for these atrocious crimes.

  “I want this man caught and brought to justice. There will be no favors for him or offers to spy for us in exchange for leniency. I will speak to both Petrie and Menzies. Your organizations, like your personalities, are clashing and not working together as they should. Both the left and the right hands of the government should know what’s going on.”

  Frances was clearly upset. This was not the sort of thing she expected from British intelligence agencies, and more than that, it had hit home.

  “And if Menzies and Petrie are not amenable, I know that Churchill will be. Have I made myself clear?” she asked.

  She was a small woman but she carried authority. These were not idle threats for she had the ear of the Prime Minister as well as most of the House of Lords and the Royal Family. But more than that, she was well liked by all of them.

  “Yes, mum,” said Albutt and Brimley in unison. Frances turned towards Desmont.

  “And why were you pretending to be a Frenchman?” she asked.

  “My French is good, my Lady, and we thought it would aid my cover.”

  “I should think not. Your French is good but your accent is not sufficient. I would suggest that any good undercover work stays as close to the truth as possible. Next time you might be a navy officer on leave visiting the country.”

  “Yes, mum,” he said.

  There was silence for a while as Albutt and Brimley licked their wounded pride.

  “Perhaps we should show Mr. Turing the cryptic message and see if he can’t help us with it?” asked Declan.

  Frances nodded.

  “Yes, that’s really the reason we came up here, isn’t it? Alfred, could you show Alan the message we received.”

  “Yes, my Lady,” he said.

  Alfred reached into his coat pocket and took out his notebook. He fanned through the pages until he found what he was looking for. It was on a page by itself. He showed it to Alan Turing.

  HRRIYHXDIDEKPTYMYCLOHAMHJZSB

  MHJZSPYHMBFSPNAZGTEBAUIAKT

  “I can’t make heads nor tails of it I’m afraid, Alan. We were hoping you might be able to. It was found in the poor girl’s dying hand. She gave it to Elmer Nisbet who found her. We believe it was meant for me.”

  “I know exactly what it is,” said Turing.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Four Square

  “THE girls here are very fond of this sort of a cipher,” said Turing. “They use it to send notes to each other.”

  Turing looked over at Desmont.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  Desmont nodded, smiling and pleased with himself that someone had uncovered his little bit of genius.

  “What would Carlisle know?” asked Frances.

  “Well, my Lady,” said Alan, “the nom de plume that Carlisle used, Félix Delastelle, is actually the name of a real Frenchman, a cryptographer, who invented this cipher.”

  Frances looked over at Carlisle, she wasn’t amused nor impressed. If he had put half as much effort into actually watching over Minnie as he had done in choosing his undercover name, well, Minnie might still be amongst the living.

  “So you know how to decrypt it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Alan. He took a pencil out of his shirt pocket, and proceeded to show Frances how the cipher worked. “It’s called the four-square cipher. And it’s called that because you put the alphabet into four squares like this.”

  Frances and Declan and Alfred crowded around Alan as he showed them how it worked on Alfred’s notebook. He drew four empty squares just below the cryptic message.

  “Usually,” continued Alan, “you write the alphabet plainly, in a five by five grid in the top left and bottom right squares.”

  Alan did just that. He started with A and wrote all the way to E on the first line then the second line he started with F just under the A and went all the way to J under the E, and so on.

  “As you can tell,” he said, “there is one small problem with this five by five grid. Can you tell what it is?”

  “The English alphabet has twenty-six letters, but there are only twenty-five spaces,” said Declan.

  Alan looked up at him and smiled.

  “Exactly, so what the cryptographer will do is usually combine I and J into one of the twenty-five grids or omit Q because it is one of the least used letters in the English language.”

  “I see,” said Frances. “How do we know which one it is?”

  “Well, we don’t,” said Alan. “Though what I’ve seen the girls use most often is to just eliminate the Q, so we’ll start that way.”

  They watched Alan fill out the top left and bottom right squares with the alphabet. The fourth line of each square started with P and then went straight to R, missing the Q and ending the line on the letter U. Knox had come over to see what was going on.

  “Ah, you’re showing them the four-square cipher,” he said. Alan nodded. “Marvelous little cipher for personal notes and quite difficult to crack unless you know the key. Are you trying to crack that?”

  Knox pointed to the cryptic string of letters above the squares that Alan had drawn. Alan nodded.

  “I was just telling them how it works, Dilly,” he said.

  “Oh yes, the ladies here love using it for little notes,” said Knox.

  “I see you haven’t filled in the other two squares,” said Frances.

  “Quite r
ight,” said Alan, “these two squares are the ciphertext squares. They’re used to encrypt and decrypt the message. But we need the key.”

  “A key?”

  “Usually a couple of words,” offered Knox, “one for each square.”

  He patted Alan on the back.

  “Sorry, Alan, I’m interfering again,” he said.

  “Not to worry,” said Alan. “But yes, we need two words to start off these other squares. Those two words will be the key. Usually you’ll start the alphabet with them from the top left and across as if you’re beginning the alphabet like in the plain text cipher squares. Sometimes you can write the word starting at the top left and moving down to the bottom left. But we need those two words. Was this all that you found with Minnie?”

  Alfred put out his hand for his notebook. Alan returned it to him.

  “There was another note that we found in her suitcase inside her room at Mr. Nisbet’s farmhouse. But I don’t see how it can help,” said Frances. She nodded at Alfred who turned the pages back a couple and then handed the notebook back to Turing.

  “That was the note as we found it,” said Frances.

  “Lady Frances - , If you have this then it seems the worst has happened to me. Please find the answers in the note.”

  “Excellent, I’m sure that is the key,” said Alan.

  “But it’s a sentence, not a couple of words,” said Frances.

  Alan nodded.

  “Yes, I know, but this is exactly how it was written?” he asked.

  Frances nodded, and looked over at Alfred.

  “I wrote it down verbatim,” he said.

  “Then these two words ‘Lady Frances’ are the keys.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the girls put the keywords between hyphens in a sentence. That way it’s harder to uncover if the key note is found. Let’s give it a try and see if I’m right. Seeing as there isn’t a second hyphen, I’m assuming the two words in front of the hyphen are the keys.”

  Frances, Declan and Alfred watched Alan fill in the top right and bottom left squares. The top right square, along the first line he wrote L A D Y and ended it with B. Then he filled in the rest of the five by five grid with letters that hadn’t been used before, while also omitting Q.

  “Obviously you don’t use the same letter twice,” he said.

  He started the bottom left square writing F R A N C and then started the second line with E S before completing it with B D G as the A, C, E and F had all been used.

  “Now, before we decrypt it let me show you how it would be used to encrypt a message. Then we just do the reverse and we should be able to decrypt the message we have,” said Alan. “Let’s say I want to encrypt the word ‘help’. This sort of a cipher encrypts in pairs of letters because we have two cipher squares. So we take the first two letters in our word, ‘h’ and ‘e’, and we follow along from the plain text squares over to the cipher squares.”

  They watched Alan trace his finger from the H in the top left plain text square over to the top right cipher square where the H from the top left plain text square and the E from the bottom right plain text square intersected. That letter happened to be an H. Alan wrote it down.

  “Now we start with the second letter which was an ‘e’, and we do the same thing,” he said.

  Alan traced his finger, this time from the bottom right plain text square where the E was over to where that row intersected in the bottom left cipher square with the H from the top left plain text square. That letter happened to be A. He wrote it down. He then did the next two letters from ‘help’ which were L and P. They turned into I and O.

  “And that is how you encrypt a word. ‘Help’ has become ‘HAIO’. Reversing the process decrypts the word back again.”

  “Very ingenious,” said Frances.

  “I’m afraid I need to interrupt,” said Knox. “Brimley and Albutt want to debrief us about what’s been going on.”

  He was speaking to Turing.

  “Please ask Maisey Penderslate to decrypt the message,” said Knox. “She’s the one in charge inside.”

  Brimley walked over to Lady Marmalade.

  “We’ll be in Hut 10 when you’re ready. Come and join us,” he said.

  Frances nodded. Turing gave the notebook back to Alfred.

  “Maisey won’t have any difficulty with it,” he said, then he left with the others. They watched the five of them walk away towards Hut 10.

  “You’re right, Mother,” said Declan, “both hands of His Majesty’s intelligence services need to get onto the same page.”

  Frances nodded slowly.

  “They do, indeed,” she said. “This has turned into quite the debacle. I’m going to speak to both Heads about it.”

  “In the meantime, let’s get this cryptic message decrypted,” said Declan.

  Declan led them inside. It wasn’t difficult to determine who Maisey Penderslate was. She was walking around the room occasionally stopping by a woman’s desk and looking at the work that was being done. The work was mostly typing. She was a slim woman in her early forties with brunette hair in short curls. Declan introduced himself as Admiral Branham.

  “This is my mother, Lady Marmalade,” he said.

  “Good afternoon, my Lady,” said Maisey.

  “Please call me Frances.”

  “And this is Alfred Donahue,” said Declan.

  Alfred smiled and nodded at the young woman and shook her hand.

  “Alan said you might be able to help us with this. He called it a four-square cipher,” said Declan, handing her Alfred’s notebook.

  “I’m sorry to say that this was a note I got from Minnie Shelford just before she passed,” said Frances.

  Maisey nodded and it seemed as if she was fighting back tears. She put the notebook on a table that was next to her.

  “It’s been a hard day for all of us,” she said. “What happened? All we know is rumors spread around by the girls.”

  Frances filled the woman in with her encounter with Minnie and the note that she’d been given by DCI Milling which was in Minnie’s possession at the time of her death when Elmer Nisbet found her. Frances explained what she knew. That Minnie had been up at the Lake District with the fake name of Mary Sorrows. How she had just given the excuse of wanting to escape London for the day.

  Frances didn’t go into details about her death other than to admit that Elmer found her after she had just been stabbed and that he saw the murderer run off. She explained that it seemed quite certain they knew who they were looking for. A German spy. Frances tried to reassure her that they weren’t in any danger as this spy was believed to be making his way back to Germany now. She didn’t tell Maisey that this German spy had also tried to kill her.

  “What about Pelly and Group Captain Dowd?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I just found out about them this afternoon when I arrived. I don’t know the details about their deaths, though we believe the spy is responsible.”

  “But why would he kill them?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you much information about that, Maisey. Suffice it to say that they were all working bravely for His Majesty’s government.”

  “Is it true that Pelly was strangled to death?”

  Frances could understand the questions. People wanted to try and make sense of the senseless, though it oftentimes didn’t help. Not that this was a question she could answer.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t been made aware of the causes of death for either Group Captain Dowd or Pelagia.”

  Frances smiled at Maisey. The woman was doing a good job of holding back her emotions but they were still written all over her face as if someone had taken a pen to it.

  “You were close to her, were you?”

  Maisey bit her lip and nodded her head. She brought her hand up and covered her eyes. Her other hand was in front of her waist. Alfred offered her a handkerchief which she took. She took a dee
p breath and sighed and then dabbed at her eyes with Alfred’s clean white handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Pelly and I were quite close. She was in charge of the other team and we often took over from each other. I also have a son like she did. He’s around the same age as Sebastian. We both lost our husbands in this war…”

  She trailed off and dabbed at her eyes some more. She stared at the ground to try and steady herself. Frances put her hand on Maisey’s forearm. After some time Maisey looked up again.

  “You will make sure he pays for this, won’t you?”

  Frances nodded.

  “We are doing everything in our power,” she said. “Did Pelagia ever mention meeting someone, or being concerned about someone?”

  Maisey shook her head.

  “No, wait. That’s not quite correct. She’d go down to the pub in town, it’s called the Snow and Stone. I think she was meeting someone there but she’d never admit it. She did tell me that she thought she had been followed on occasion but she said whenever she stopped to look back she could never see anyone. She brushed it off as just her overactive mind. She said it was probably because of all the secret stuff we were doing here that her mind had become somewhat imaginative.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A couple of months back. In March I think.”

  “And nothing since then?”

  “I think she stopped going to that pub then. That and perhaps she didn’t want to worry me about it anymore. I can’t say for certain. She didn’t talk about it after that.”

  Frances didn’t think that she’d be of any help. Brimley was fairly certain who they were dealing with. Alfred too, thought that he might be able to recognize the spy if he came upon him again. If Alfred had caught him with some shot, he’d be limping and on top of that he was missing a right finger. He wasn’t going to be hard to identify if they corralled him.

  Nevertheless, she felt that Maisey needed to be helpful. Indeed, it had picked up her spirits some just being able to offer the information she had.

  “Thank you, Maisey. I’ll personally see to it that we keep you informed once we have this murderer in our custody,” said Frances.