A Vengeance of Spies Read online

  A Vengeance of Spies

  Manda Scott

  Manda Scott

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Author’s Note

  Free Stuff!

  About the Author

  Other Books by Manda Scott

  Chapter One

  The Shipwrights

  Chipping Sudbury

  9/1/2019

  My dear Elsa,

  You are grieving, and I’m sorry. It is perhaps not the best time to burden you with a confession, but there are things that I feel ought to be known for posterity and, of all those to whom I could leave this, you are by far the most likely to forgive all those concerned.

  Because this is not only a confession. It is an accusation.

  So, in case you get no further, here is the bald fact.

  I killed your grandfather.

  There have long been rumours to this effect, but they never spread beyond the service. Now that I am dead however, those who whispered may become bolder. If nothing else, people will talk. They will say things that you know to be untrue, and so I wish you to be armed with the facts: you may do with them as you wish.

  That said, if you are going to reach the heart of things, you will require more understanding of the past than you presently possess. This is not a value judgment, you live in the now and I am ever in awe of your ability to find delight in the beauty of things the rest of us see as mundane. (I am thinking of a robin drinking from a puddle, and the photograph you took of it that made your mother weep).

  Nonetheless, if you are truly to understand why I did what I did, then you will need the tools so to do and, they are herein provided. If you decide that the present moment is more captivating, then, with my blessing, please throw this letter onto the fire and take joy in the flames it feeds.

  Whatever else you do, please don’t pass it to anyone else just yet. Your mother in particular will live more peacefully if she is allowed to retain the ability not to see what lies under her nose. I trust you to protect her from those things which may disturb her equanimity. If, in time, there are those whom you feel would benefit from the detail I give you, then I trust you to do what is right. But only if you have read to the end of this letter. I trust you to honour this.

  So let me take you back in time to my first taste of adulthood, three months out of finishing school.

  Our world made no more sense than yours does now, only that, as you pointed out on the march last summer, our fascists were largely foreign and spoke a different language, while yours are attempting to wrest control of the nation from within.

  Still, the chaos afforded us opportunity. This is a cliché now, much worn by people with no understanding of China who burble rubbish about crisis and opportunity. Nonetheless, it has a nugget of truth, for, in all the havoc-ridden richness of the days, we who might otherwise have found ourselves confined to secretarial roles, fending always for men who could not fend for themselves, found that we were offered the chance to engage in something far greater than any individual. Where before, I might have learned to type, now I was given Germany’s secrets to decipher.

  Some of them were easy. Most of them were not.

  I began work at the Government Code and Cipher School on the first Monday of August, 1940. The start was not remotely auspicious. I shall never forget the sensation of waking in the damp, cold bed at number fifteen Drayton Lane, wishing I had not listened to the advice of my elders.

  With the encouragement of more or less everyone around me, I had swapped Marshbrook, with its seventeen centrally-heated rooms and a water closet on every landing, for a cramped, brick-built, semi-detached farm workers’ cottage where the bed reeked of cat urine, the unironed linen had black streaks of mould along the fold lines and the carpet was essentially felted mud.

  Cat’s piss was not the worse of it. The smell pervading this place was beyond description. For the first few weeks, I believed it to be the stench of very old, very badly cooked cabbage.

  Over time, I learned that it was, in fact, the flatulent output of Mr Wellington, husband of my landlady. He had lost a leg to some kind of maggot in Africa during the Great War and the resulting horrors had left him with what Mrs Wellington described as poor nerves and a jippy tummy.

  Translated into modern parlance, he had PTSD and IBS and both were killing him quite swiftly, but in the interim his main contribution to the current war was to lie abed emitting loud, liquid noises at terrifyingly regular intervals. How Mrs W. slept alongside him is beyond imagining, and I believe she was as relieved as the rest of us when he finally went to meet his Maker in the spring of ’42.

  That’s a long way off. We are in August of 1940, a Monday morning. I had slept badly and woke with sore joints and a sore throat, feeling as if I had aged by six decades. In fact, I was just shy of eighteen and should have been going to Cambridge to read mathematics. Girton had offered me a place, but Felicity Hargreave’s father had mentioned me to his old tutor at Trinity, who had mentioned me to his uncle, who had a discrete word at the club with my father, who had very likely put Hargreave up to it in the first place.

  As a result, I was dispatched to an office off the Old Kent Road where a man with a single white hair growing like a tusk out of his left nostril gave me some crosswords to solve, and when I had completed these to his satisfaction, he set me some ciphers.

  These took a little longer: I had never heard of letter substitution, but it wasn’t hard, especially when the encoded message was, ‘God Save the King’.

  Yes, really. Never let it be said that those who populate the lower reaches of the civil service suffer from spontaneous outbreaks of imagination.

  I signed the Official Secrets Act that day, and was told to inform my family that I had been offered a position at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Given that every male member of my family worked for some branch or other of the secret services and my father had hatched the entire plot in the first place, this was an unnecessary subterfuge, but, as you have noted on occasion, we are, by and large, a dutiful family and we followed orders, adding to the layers of family fiction.

  Conversations at home had always been circumlocutory and continued in this vein.

  ‘Did you do anything useful at the Ministry this week, Grace?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. Sold some turnips, bought a consignment of corned beef from Argentina. Seems as if the U-boats are particularly hungry these days so it may not get through.’

  And thus, the family inferred that I was working on the hunting patterns of the enemy in the north Atlantic and that we were not doing well. You have lived with this kind of dissimulation all your life. You may yet join one of the services if your activism doesn’t rule you out. You will find it becomes second nature after a while.

  What was not second nature was brushing my teeth over a sink in which I would not previously have washed my boots, dressing in clothes which nobody had pressed the night before, and eating off plates that had not been properly scrubbed for weeks, if ever.

  I have lived in far worse circumstances since then: in Russia, in East Germany, in Hungary, more recently, and distressingly, in north America - but I was the daughter of a viscount, the granddaughter of two bishops and I had never before used an outdoor privy, still less one that did not flush.

  Number fifteen shared its earth closet with numbers thirteen, eleven, nine and seven and the stench from that made the Wellingtons’ bedroom seem positively fragrant. We had a chamber pot on the landing for night-time necessities and I was required to help empty it in the mornings before work. I will spare you the details, but I have nightmares about it still.

  Thus began my introduction to the real world. I was sitting downstairs at the breakfast table, staring at a slice of toast on which mould competed for space with soot, wondering if margarine was actually edible…when the door opened and a woman of my own age popped her head in to the room, favoured me with a sparkling smile and delivered what remains one of the most memorable introductions in my life’s history.

  ‘You must be Grace Handley-Page. I’m Katherine St John. Welcome to your first day at the Ministry. I’m to take you in and show you the ropes. After breakfast, of course. Margarine’s an acquired taste. Give it a few weeks and you won’t remember you ever ate butter on your toast. I’ve requisitioned a bicycle for you. It’ll take us about twenty minutes to get to work, so we need to leave in just under half an hour. Can you do that, do you think?’

  Katherine was taller than me by half a hand, which was unusual in those days. She looked pin neat and clean and fresh: all the things I did not feel.

  Her short, wiry hair was one shade warmer than black, her eyes a shade warmer still - and they knew me. Her gaze had made one circuit of the room before it settled on me and it was as if she peeled back each layer of horror and saw the truth of all that I was: a privileged, spoiled, arrogant, naive stinking mess with ginger hair sticking out like a lavatory brush because I would never have dared cut it as short as she had cut hers.

  All of this, and still she smiled and came over to shake my hand. The distance from the door to the table was a bare three strides. I struggled to my feet as she approached.

  She took my hand. I took hers.

  I said, ‘I need to tidy my hair.’

  ‘Really?’ She tilted her head. My hair then was as yours is now: coppery, strong and impossible to cont
ain. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I wanted at least to make more of an effort than I had done.

  Katherine raised one perfect brow. ‘I’ll wait outside with the bicycles.’

  Chapter Two

  The place you know as Bletchley Park was not called that, at least, not by us. If we knew the name, we never let it cross our minds, lest we speak it out loud.

  You have watched the Cumberbatch film, though, so I won’t bore you with too much detail: it wasn’t wholly accurate, but the anachronisms were not so great as to be worth detailing.

  What matters are those aspects which affected the days, and most of those related to temperature: the huts were windbreaks, lacking any kind of insulation. In winter they were freezers; in summer, they were ovens and both made it hard to concentrate.

  The work was, for the most part, mind-numbingly tedious, but it mattered to get it right.

  The famous bombes didn’t exist when I first started: Turing and Bill Tutte and the others had barely begun their mathematical ascent of the Everest that was the German cipher machines. The bulk of the Axis military and naval output was gibberish and we despaired of ever making sense of it.

  The only woman allowed into Hut Eight, with Turing and the others, was Joan Clarke, who started shortly before I did. She did the full Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge and came out as Senior Wrangler, or pretty close, which put her in the god-sphere as far as we were concerned.

  We got to know each other by sight, but never really spoke. Katherine and I were part of a group based in Hut Ten, which was on the end of one row. In those early days, our job was to break the hand ciphers that came in from enemy agents working under cover in the allied and neutral countries.

  On my first morning, knowing none of this, I followed so close to Katherine’s back wheel, that when she veered across my path I had to come off my bike or crash into her.

  ‘Sorry!’ She reached out to catch my handlebars before I fell over. ‘I forgot you didn’t know the way. Welcome to the bike sheds.’

  It was seven thirty and the sheds were half full. I learned later that working through the night was not uncommon. That morning, I thought everyone had slept warmly and risen early, bright and eager.

  I looked around, ready to stride off to do whatever it was they wanted me to do.

  ‘Wait.’ Katherine gripped my wrist and turned me round. ‘The colonel’s in there: Edward Catherston. Watch yourself round him. He’s—’

  ‘A termagant?’ Hardly surprising. At this stage in the war, the top brass still encouraged a neat rigidity of mindset.

  Katherine pulled a face. ’More that he thinks Hut Ten can end the war and he’s in a hurry to make it happen.’

  ‘What do we do to avoid his wrath?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t show fear, that’s the first thing. After that, just break every cipher he brings. And don’t ask where they’re going or where they came from. Also best not to be disparaging about Winchester.’

  ‘The college? Or the town.’

  ‘Both, I think, but mostly the college.’

  Following her into the hut, I made inner vows that even then, I didn’t expect to keep.

  Hut Ten had a comfortingly familiar aroma of pipe smoke and sweat, with undertones of school desks and exam nerves, so that it was like the first days back at school after the long vac, only more so.

  Edward Catherston sat at the front of the class with his back to the window. The low morning sun lit his hair to gold, when even then, the shock of war had left him silver.

  Long and lean, he looked barely older than me, far too young to be a colonel, but we were at war, and old men were dying, and I learned later that he had done something noteworthy during the evacuations from France and was marked for great things.

  At the time, what struck me was the sucked-in shape of his features, as if he’d spent the mornings chewing a lemon.

  It’s entirely plausible that he had a landlady like Mrs. Wellington, but that didn’t occur to me then. I was too busy wrestling with the desk to which Katherine directed me.

  Third row back, second from the left, this, like all the others, had clearly been requisitioned from a local office. It was ink-stained and ridiculously unlevel, so the first thing I did that morning, was to fold a handkerchief into eight and put it under the wobbling leg of my desk. When I straightened, it was to find Colonel Catherston standing over me.

  ‘Commander Handley-Page’s daughter, I presume?’ Remember this: we were somebody’s daughter until we were somebody’s wife. Never ourselves. This happened in living memory and if the antichrists running America get their way, it’ll happen again. I leave it to you to prevent this. I have done what I can.

  Back then, it was normal. Held fast by his gaze, I said, ‘Sir.’

  ‘You have a cold in your foot, perhaps?’

  ’Sir. The desk was wobbling, sir. I thought…’

  ‘To repair it for us. How touching. You are new. I’m sure we can overlook a little eccentricity. Are you familiar with Delastelle’s Four Square cipher?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Can’t be helped. What languages do you speak?’

  ‘French, German, Spanish, Italian, a little Portuguese if it’s spoken clearly.‘

  ‘And written?’

  ‘All of those and a smattering of Hungarian.’

  I had heard that the Mistress of Girton spent her summers in Hungary and thought that teaching myself the language would increase my chances of a place.

  Catherston waited. Katherine’s warning sprang around in my mind. I bit my tongue and did not add, ’And English, obviously.’

  Presently, he nodded, as if I had passed a test.

  ’Then Miss St John will teach you the principles of a Four Square. We have only one fresh in today so you will not be overly taxed. The language of origin is unlikely to be English. Therefore if you apply your languages and Miss St John applies her mathematics. I expect you to have an answer before you go home.’

  He turned through forty five degrees and spoke to Katherine. ‘It’s from CASPAR, obviously. Check the usual signifiers.’

  Well, then.

  The four square cipher is old now, and if I gave you access to the processors at Cheltenham, you could break it in your sleep. When done by hand, though, it at least gives the cryptanalysts more to think about and it’s a good deal more secure than the Playfair which, by then, was routinely broken by anyone with paper, pencil and a working knowledge of the sender’s chosen language.

  My inner cryptographer wants to tell you the detail of hand-coding the Four Square, but it’s late and I’m tired and you’re grieving (I believe) so I think this is neither the time nor the place.

  Google is your friend and you can find the detail easily enough if you want. I’ll put a link at the end you can follow if you’re sufficiently interested.

  The thing you do need to know is that, unless the selected cipher keyword is long with few repetitions (antidisestablishmentarianism isn’t as good as you might first think) or you use several words put together, then there’s not enough variation in the encoded message and any half-decent cryptographer will make mincemeat of it.

  Second, if you know some of the plain text, or can guess it, you can begin to work out the keyword, which is solid gold in the breaking of ciphers.

  And finally, if you know the language you’re working in, then you can begin to crack open your message based on letter frequencies.

  Vowels are common. E is more common than A, O, U and I. Of the consonants, T is most common and overall, is second only to E… and on and on, at least, this is the case in English.

  I would be lying if I said I remembered the detail of that first CASPAR text, or that I had been instrumental in breaking it and thus saving lives of those at the front or on the high seas.

  I was overwhelmed by almost every aspect of the work, but Katherine’s desk was next to mine and we laboured shoulder to shoulder throughout the day with a ten minute break for lunch and shorter breaks for tea.