The Messenger Bird

by Ruth Eastham

  Josh had stopped pacing. He stood peering at the padded wall, at where a sliver of fabric had come loose. A nail was missing, and we watched as Josh peeled a strip of the padding back. Grey foamy stuff poured out from inside.

  “Nathan,” said Sasha. “He’s losing it!”

  “I think I’ve found something else,” said Josh, and when I went to look at the bare wood underneath…

  I

  There was something scratched on! A letter?

  Sasha and I helped him bend the padding back more and there was the groan of leather and a nail pinged out on to the floor.

  “Josh, you’re a genius,” I told him, and he went red with pride.

  Ini…

  “No way!” breathed Sasha as we tugged the padding off.

  Initially you…

  We stared at each other.

  Initially you must set the three.

  But it didn’t end there. There were more letters. We yanked the tightly nailed fabric, pulling out handfuls of grey foam like there was no tomorrow. We should have thought about things better, that we were taking off the soundproofing, that with that gone anyone in the ballroom would hear us through the wall. But we were too excited. We didn’t think. Not until it was too late.

  QANHV XGHPF WYYIN… Round the walls the Enigma code went. Fistfuls of foam and pinging nails flew across the secret room. On and on in a long, straight line. XXOIY RBODF BSRQC ALRPA XCNJE. We tore away the padding, revealing more and more letters. LOWDC RZZGT PLFVJ UQAZC IJGHD CAW…

  Round and round the letters went, all written in Lily’s same style – I recognized it from her notebook, her message, the engraving on the milestone; Lily had definitely written them – until at last we’d gone full circle and we were back to where we started.

  Initially you must set the three.

  And there was a date scratched underneath.

  December 1940.

  Sasha ran her fingers round the row of letters. “Is it the Enigma code Lily was trying to crack, do you think?” she whispered. “A dead duck she never managed to work out?”

  I knew one thing – it was a message Lily scratched here before she was arrested, just before she died; the date proved that. Somehow she must have got underneath the soundproofing; replaced the foam over it afterwards. What might the message say? Might it explain why she set the trail in the first place; why she never told the Bletchley people about this secret room?

  What if we could know the truth? Clear her name or something.

  “Hey, Josh, wouldn’t it be great if we could work this out?” I said.

  At the very least it would help focus him on something else that wasn’t pacing and fretting and being scared to death. We still had a good few hours to kill, after all. Besides, I wanted to know the truth. Lily had got to me. Help me, her first words had been, speaking to me from the past.

  “Yes, Josh,” Sasha said. “What do you say?”

  “We absolutely have to decode it,” Josh said, and Sasha and I exchanged relieved glances.

  “You really think we can?” she said.

  Josh held up the plug with its twisty cable. “There’s an old socket here,” he said, tapping the wall. “Maybe the Enigma Machine can run off the mains. But we can’t do anything if we haven’t got power.”

  “Let me try.” I eased the plug into the wall, half-expecting fiery sparks or some kind of an explosion.

  Nothing happened.

  “That socket must be part of a really old circuit,” Sasha sighed. “Maybe it just doesn’t work any more.”

  “Press a key,” suggested Josh. His eyes were much calmer now, shining.

  I tapped down G and at the same time a letter C lit up in the middle panel.

  My arm tingled. Josh leapt back with a cry. “Oh, excellent!” You could tell he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

  I pressed G again and a different letter, an R, lit up.

  “Imagine how funny it will be when the Bletchley Park people find out there’s a genuine Enigma Machine stuck behind a panel in the ballroom.” Josh laughed. “Initially you must set the three,” he read from the wall. “Lily could be talking about the key – you know – the three starting letters we have to set these dials to!”

  Could Josh be right? And if we got the correct key, could we solve the whole of Lily’s message?

  I studied the three dials at the top of the machine, and the letters in the three windows alongside them: A—A—C. I’d noticed that the letter in the third window had changed as I’d typed; clicked one letter forward with each press.

  “But the plug board needs to be set right as well,” said Josh, pointing to the holes and wires we’d found when we’d swung the front wooden panel open. He peered at it. “At the moment it’s set at … A to J, and … S to O. But your dad could have messed about with those; any curious thirteen-year-old would.”

  “Hang on.” I’d had a thought. I lifted up Dad’s loose page and flapped it at him and Sasha.

  the settings when I found it

  Josh grinned.

  I checked the diagram quickly. “A to J, S to O. Good one! A–A–A. Put the key back to where it was!”

  I didn’t have to ask twice. Josh turned the right-hand dial on the Enigma Machine and the third letter went back to join the others: A—A—A.

  The Enigma Machine was ready. Set exactly as Dad had found it. Exactly as Lily had left it?

  “Initially you must set the three!” exclaimed Josh as the idea came to him. “A is the initial letter of the alphabet! The key must be right!”

  “OK, then,” I said, suddenly feeling all breathless. “Let’s try.”

  “I’ve something to write with,” said Sasha. She turned over Dad’s paper and fished a pen from her pocket. “Ready,” she said.

  I shone one torch on the letters on the wall, and angled one on the Enigma Machine. “Go on then, Josh.”

  He took a big breath, then pressed the first letter from Lily’s message. Q.

  H lit up on the keyboard.

  He pressed A, and another H came up.

  Next came N and we got S.

  A letter at a time, Josh typed the code from the wall while Sasha wrote down the letters as they lit up. We carried on, but it wasn’t looking right at all. Sasha stopped and showed us what she’d written:

  HHSDP… That didn’t make any sense. What a letdown.

  “The key must be wrong,” Josh said, frowning. “We’ll have to try another.”

  “Lily would have chosen a key that meant something, do you think?” I said. “Not just any old key, surely? Try … DAD.”

  “Good idea,” Josh set the dials.

  D—A—D.

  The message still made no sense. That key must be wrong too.

  “LIL, short for Lily?” suggested Sasha, tapping her pen on the page of the pad and looking doubtful.

  L—I—L.

  One-by-one she wrote down the lit-up letters.

  Still nothing.

  I racked my brain. “Try S—O—S.”

  Josh clicked the dials into place and I started to type. Another string of gobbledegook appeared on the pad.

  “How did Bletchley Park ever work any messages out?” I said. “This is impossible! How many different keys are there, Josh? Can’t we just try them all?”

  “Just by a process of elimination? Well,” said Josh. “It’s quite a few. Usually with the extra rotors and different settings on the plug board there, there’s…” He screwed up his face. “A hundred and fifty-nine million million million.”

  I half laughed, half groaned.

  “A hundred and fifty-nine quintillion for short,” he added, like that made a helpful difference. “That’s why the enemy thought their codes were uncrackable; that’s why Bletchley Park needed Alan Turing’s Bombes. You’ve a ten million million times better chance of winning the lottery than you have of guessing a key,” said Josh. “Percy told me.”

  “Well, we’ve tried four settings,” said Sasha, “so that�
��s four down, and…” She wrote a number across the paper, then held it up with a crooked smile. “Only this many to go.”

  158,999,999,999,999,999,996

  Million, million, million.

  I thought about the pages and pages of crossed-out letters in Lily’s notebook. She’d only had the Enigma Machine in here, no Bombe. She’d been trying to work out the keys for the messages she wanted to crack! Must have been.

  Million, million, million. I thought about Lily, afraid, alone, crouched over the Enigma Machine in this little secret space behind the panels. Lily desperate to find out if Coventry was the target city in the Moonlight Sonata raid; desperate to decode an Enigma message that might tell her if it was. Lily gone a bit crazy, trying the keys and crossing them off one by one in her notebook. I heard the sound of keys clacking, a pencil being sharpened; saw the curls of wood shavings falling to the floor. Lily, exhausted, ill, trying to save her dad, trying to crack the dead duck codes she never would.

  She hadn’t deserved what happened to her, or what people said about her. “Initially you must set the three.” I muttered the words under my breath, like a prayer. “Initially you must set the three.”

  Think literally and laterally, Nat. Literally and laterally.

  Initially. An idea shot through me. Was the clue cryptic, like Josh had thought? A clue within a clue? Initially. Not the initial letter of the alphabet, but… My heart hammered.

  Initials! Might the key be Lily’s initials? “Hold the torches for me, Josh.” I hurried to set the dials, forcing myself to remember her full name from the old address book.

  Lilian Elizabeth Kenley.

  L—E—K.

  20

  Cracking the Enigma Code

  I clicked the three stiff dials into place, Josh trying to keep the torch beams still as he twitched with excitement.

  L—E—K.

  My fingertips hovered over the keys as I squinted at the code scratched on the wall and my fingers clumsily started to type. One by one the letters lit on the middle keyboard and Sasha scribbled them down, torchlight spilling across the page.

  LILYKENLEYNOV

  “Yes!” I hissed, punching the air with the fist of my good arm. The torch beams danced about as Josh jumped up and down, and Sasha hugged me tight.

  EMBERNINETE

  The string of letters were making words.

  ENFORTYONEDAYIDLIKETOTH

  Words with no spaces.

  INKTHEYLLKNOWTHETRUTH

  But words that made sense.

  IAMATRAITORISTOLEANENIGMACHINEIMADECO

  I stopped, ears pricked, and I felt Sasha and Josh tense up.

  There had been a sound. A sound from the place we’d come through. The sound of the panel sliding up, very, very slowly. Then a pause. I felt Josh holding my shoulder, really, really tight.

  “Nathan?” A voice. Muffled and distorted through the narrow gap.

  The panel slid up a little more. “Na-than.” The voice again.

  “They know we’re here!” Josh said desperately, fumbling to switch off the torches. His mouth gaped and for a second before the lights went off, he looked ghost white, like one of the faces from the ballroom ceiling.

  Dad’s phone! I crammed it deep in the pocket of my jeans, squashing it against the bottle of perfume Sasha had brought for Mum.

  We sat absolutely still. We knew we were trapped in there, that there was no other way out. The panel slid up a little more and a grey slab of moonlight reached towards us like a long, thick finger. Josh let out a horrified groan. I felt Sasha squeeze my arm so it was killing me. An eye was in the gap, looking straight at us.

  “Nathan, is that you?”

  Rose?

  It was Rose, PhD Rose from the Bletchley archives room, her sparkly hat winking and her long blonde hair touching the floor as she leaned in. She shone her torch around. “What on earth are you doing here? What is this place? It’s amazing!”

  Sasha’s voice was all suspicious. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you, I work through the night sometimes. I saw your light. Then heard you through the panels.”

  “There were people after us,” blurted Josh. “We only just got through the gate in time! You should get in here with us – it’s dangerous out there!”

  Rose widened her eyes. “Are you sure? I didn’t see anyone else.”

  “But what’s going on? What are you doing here? What is this place?”

  “It’s too long to explain now,” Josh said. “We can’t let them find us, Rose, so get in here quickly, can you? We have to close the panel again and…”

  “This place is amazing,” she said again. She sat cross-legged in the gap, peering in.

  The three of us exchanged looks. Had Rose heard Josh? Was she deliberately ignoring what I’d said?

  “Best get home, I think,” Rose said. “That’s the safest thing. I can drive you, if you like. Take you back to Foxglove Cottage, Nathan.”

  My back stiffened against the shredded wall. “How do you know?” I said quietly.

  “What?” said Rose, smiling at me, all innocent.

  “How do you know I live at Foxglove Cottage?”

  21

  Traitor

  Rose gave a short laugh. “You told me.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  I saw Sasha and Josh’s reaction, the way they’d started edging further away from where Rose was sitting. Tension shot through the secret room like a bullet.

  I felt my mouth drop open. Rose. It all made sense suddenly. Appearing at Bletchley Park like that in just the right place at just the right time; Percy looking confused when her name was mentioned. All stuff we should have given way more thought to before. Rose knew I lived at Foxglove Cottage. Was she the one who’d broken into our house and been rifling around?

  “Silly me,” said Rose. All the friendliness had gone from her voice. She was filling the gap, blocking our escape.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  Rose’s mouth set into a hard line. “Your dad made some sort of treasure hunt to find it, didn’t he?”

  I said nothing.

  “I know about the evidence, Nathan,” she said. “I heard you talking in your garden, so it’s best not to play games.”

  Had it been her in the garden that other time too, I asked myself, when I first found the eye symbol; her in the long coat and hat, outside Mr Edwards’s office?

  “Anyway,” continued Rose, “I know the whole story from that essay you wrote for your friends.”

  What did she mean? Those pages of explanation I’d written for Sasha and Josh on my pad? We stared at each other. She couldn’t have read those! I’d burnt the papers on the fire straight after!

  Rose must have seen our confusion. “The impression of your pen went through to the next pages, Nathan,” she said. “A quick computer scan with some special software was all it needed. I managed to read the majority of it.”

  “You broke into Nathan’s house!” spat Sasha. “Why didn’t you just stop him before, then, while you had the chance?”

  “I needed Nathan to follow the trail for me, of course,” Rose answered, her voice calm and even. “Lead me to the evidence. Why else would I have helped you?”

  I remembered our special treatment in the archive room; the nervous look the woman at the desk gave Rose as she flashed her pass – what had I seen on that pass again – an anchor…? Anchor, crown, eagle – would that have been the emblem for the Ministry of Defence?

  “You work with my dad?”

  “A different department. The MoD is a big place.”

  “Were you following me?” I said.

  “I had to find out what you were up to,” said Rose. “Lend a helping hand if needed. If you hadn’t had that brainwave to ring me at the gate, I would have just slipped in quietly after you. Your football stadium decoy was clever, but I wasn’t about to fall for that.”

  “But your fake Mrs Atkinson stopped me going out!” I said. “So what you
’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Mrs Atkinson?” Rose shook her head. “Oh, she’s not with me. She’s just a Special Services agent on official government business. No, I wanted you to leave the house. How else would you lead me to the end of the trail? Once I’d found a way in, I just followed your footprints. Then I got a call from Mr Edwards. He’s got two children. You can’t really blame him.”

  So Mr Edwards told her where we were! He was being blackmailed!

  “Why did you send those texts?” I said, my voice going hoarse.

  “I thought Lily was a real person at first,” said Rose. “I thought she might know where the evidence was, and I was trying to get you to contact her. It was an easy mistake to make.”

  “You must be losing your touch,” said Sasha. “They can’t get traitors like they used to.”

  “Sorry, Nathan,” stuttered Josh. “But the pigeon was all wonky and I just…”

  “It’s OK, Josh,” I said gently. I felt my jaw go tight. What was Rose-the-traitor going to do next?

  “That’s enough explanation, I think,” she said. “Where’s the evidence, Nathan? I know you must have it. I want you to hand it over to me.”

  None of us moved.

  “I want the evidence, Nathan,” repeated Rose. “It’s better if you cooperate.”

  We still didn’t move.

  “The evidence, Nathan.” I heard the edge in her voice. “Now.”

  There was something in her hand; the gleam of metal. My jaw went rigid. Rose had a gun, and she was pointing it straight at me.

  “It’s over.” She beckoned with her fingers. “Just hand me the evidence and I’ll help you all get home. I can’t really guarantee your safety otherwise, Nathan, or that of your friends.”

  What choice did I have? She had a gun. I’d promised myself I’d keep Sasha and Josh safe.

  Slowly I eased Dad’s phone from my pocket. I saw a brief flicker of surprise on Rose’s face as she saw it. “A phone, is it? I guess that makes sense.”

  “Don’t give it to her!” said Sasha, holding my arm. “Don’t, Nathan!”

  “No, don’t,” said Josh shakily. “It’s the end for your dad if you do!”

  Would Rose really shoot us? Could she really do that, murder children? I shoved the phone back in my pocket with the perfume bottle. I chewed my lip. Braced myself.