Chapter 14 The Pattern

The pattern emerged slowly, piece by piece, as Margaret and Dorothy worked through the evidence and analyzed the connections between the various members of the network. They found that Hayes had not been working alone. He had recruited several others, men and women who shared his belief that Germany would win and that they should be on the winning side. They had been scattered throughout the park, embedded in various huts and departments, feeding information to Hayes and through him to the Germans. But the network was not large. It was small, intimate, and tightly controlled. Hayes had been the center, the hub around which the wheel turned, and with him gone, the network had collapsed. Most of the members had been arrested or had fled. A few had surrendered, offering information in exchange for leniency. And a few had remained at large, hiding in the shadows, waiting for the opportunity to strike again. Margaret and Dorothy worked tirelessly, tracking down the remaining members, gathering evidence, and building a case that would bring them to justice. They received help from Superintendent Brennan and his team, who provided resources and support and protection as the investigation unfolded. And they received help from an unexpected source: Frank Miller, the signals operator who had been one of the original suspects. Frank had come forward voluntarily, offering information about the network and about Hayes's activities in exchange for protection for himself and his family. He had been coerced into cooperation by the Germans, he said, blackmailed with threats against his loved ones. But he was ready to fight back, ready to expose the truth and to help bring the traitors to justice. Margaret was skeptical at first, but Frank's information was accurate and detailed, and it corroborated what she and Dorothy had already discovered. He was telling the truth, and he was willing to help. Together, the four of them—Margaret, Dorothy, Frank, and Brennan—worked to dismantle the remaining network, to expose the traitors, and to bring them to justice. Margaret returned to Bletchley to find Dorothy waiting for her. The younger woman's face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, but there was a new resolution in her expression that Margaret had not seen before. I have decided, Dorothy said without preamble. I will tell you everything. Everything? Every thing. About the Japanese, about my mother, about the transmitter, about who is giving the orders. Dorothy took a deep breath. It is Dr. Hayes. Margaret felt the world tilt beneath her feet. William Hayes? The man who had been helping them? Helping her? Margaret sat down on the nearest bench, because the room had suddenly become a place where standing was no longer possible, and looked at Dorothy with an expression that was not surprise so much as the slow settling of a thing she had long refused to admit. "Brennan," Margaret said, when she could trust her voice again. "Bring me Frank Miller. Whatever this is, I want to hear the rest of it from the man who sent the messages." Frank Miller told it in the guardroom at Bletchley with his service revolver laid on the table between them like a surrendered explanation. In September of 1943, he said, Dr. Hayes had invited him for a drink and produced two things: an envelope of banknotes sufficient to clear every debt the Dunkirk settlement had left him, and a photograph of himself on the mole at Dunkirk, standing apart while others loaded boats, cropped so that context died. The caption wrote itself. A court could have been persuaded; his own conscience was already persuaded; and a man with one leg and no family to speak of discovered that shame is the cheapest handle on any door. The three messages had been his. He said it plainly, before either woman asked, and the room's clock suddenly became the loudest object in England. Text arrived on carbon slips tucked into his toolbox, timings specified to the quarter-hour, settings supplied verbally by Hayes as priority traffic that outranked the safe's morning routine. The set itself lay cached in a rabbit warren beyond the receiving field's south fence, wrapped in sacking, serviced monthly—ground soft there after rain, he admitted, when Brennan slid across the photograph of a certain stride pressed into mud. He had sent them believing they were blackmail material bound for a German paymaster who collected embarrassments, and it was not until Margaret's own name came up from the keyboard under his fingers that the trade revealed itself as murder, and his hands had refused to be steady ever since. Payments were never posted. They waited in the hymnal of the third pew at the village church, folded inside the Order of Service, collected after evensong on alternating Sundays by a person Frank could describe only as ordinary: medium height, gloves, a walk designed to be forgotten. Twice the drop held something extra—a printed timetable page wrapped around used notes, crisp paper gone soft at the creases—and once, at the bottom, five letters in pencil that meant nothing to him and everything to everyone else at the table. Brennan set the limits of the possible before anyone could dream past them. No open trial would hear the words Enigma or Ultra; pleas would be negotiated in camera; Frank himself would be charged with nothing, transferred instead to a training unit where his signals knowledge would do more good than his imprisonment. Justice, the superintendent said heavily, sometimes wears a blindfold over one eye only. Margaret sat with the arithmetic of it: three months of terror purchased at a shilling a message, and the man who sent them now teaching the next generation how to listen. When the interview closed she shook his hand anyway, because his evidence had convicted six people her notebook alone could not touch, and because refusing it would have cost her more than him. One question remained nailed to the wall when everyone else had gone. The courier's habits, the hymnal route, MERIDIAN's signature—all of that belonged to the machinery Hayes had built. But someone had entered Dorothy's quarters twice without tripping a guard, read her correspondence, dictated a letter in her voice from London stationery, and known precisely which fell lane led to Mrs. Whitfield's gate. Frank's confession accounted for messages, money, and keys. It did not account for footsteps in the night, and Margaret wrote those two words in her log—footsteps unaccounted—and drew a line beneath them that she did not believe. Frank left a parting gift before the transfer papers carried him off: a pencil map drawn from memory on the back of a NAAFI menu, the rabbit warren beyond the south fence marked with an X rendered almost lovingly. Brennan's men dug for forty minutes at the indicated spot and brought up the sacking bundle precisely as promised—the little transmitter dry and oiled within, lovingly maintained, its serial numbers filed to bright scars. The set spent that afternoon on the interrogation-room table under a single lamp, and officers kept drifting in to study it the way farmers study a captured fox, with professional respect and no warmth whatsoever. Dorothy examined it longest, tracing the aerial lead with one fingertip. This is German equipment, she said at last, but modified—the power stage has been rebuilt by somebody who knew exactly what he wanted it to do. A man with money simply buys a radio. An engineer improves one. She glanced up at Margaret across the lamplight. Whoever improved this set was never Sergeant Miller, and he is still out there with his tools. ---