Chapter 16 The Network

Margaret and Thomas worked together to unravel the remaining network, using the evidence from Thomas's notebook and the information from Frank's cooperation to expose the traitors and bring them to justice. It was slow, difficult work, requiring patience and precision and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it led. But they were persistent. And they were determined. And they were not alone. Dorothy was with them, offering her linguistic expertise and her insights into the Japanese network that had been operating alongside the German one. Superintendent Brennan was with them, providing the resources and the authority to make arrests and to prosecute. Together, they dismantled the network, piece by piece, traitor by traitor, until there was nothing left but the echoes of a conspiracy that had threatened to destroy everything they had worked for. And in the end, they had won. Margaret and Thomas worked side by side through the spring of 1944, in a quiet room at the back of Hut 8 that the duty roster listed as a stationery cupboard and that smelled, regardless of how often the cleaners were sent in, faintly of pipe tobacco and old varnish. Each had their own reason for the work. Margaret was finishing what Webb had begun; Thomas was finishing what the fire had interrupted; Dorothy, when she came in from her Japanese tables with tea and a careful face, was finishing what her own people had begun in another war on another side of the world. The days arranged themselves around evidence the way days at Bletchley always had. They sorted messages by date and origin, marked every name against the list Webb had left in his notebook, and rebuilt the courier route on a single sheet of foolscap until it could be read in the time it took Brennan to drink his first cup of morning tea. The challenges ahead were formidable, but they had been formidable for a year now, and the three of them had stopped counting them as obstacles and started counting them as the cost of doing the work at all. Thomas looked up from the courier schedule one grey afternoon and observed, without raising his voice, that the route was older than any of them. Margaret said that she had come to the same conclusion. He said that older routes bred older couriers, and that the next name they found would not be the last. She agreed, and they went back to their work, because the alternative to work was waiting, and none of them could afford another winter of waiting. Brennan swallowed the courier route whole and produced, within a fortnight, two men who seemed to have spent their careers waiting for precisely such an errand. On the first Thursday they watched a woman in green gloves empty locker 183 at eleven minutes past nine, cross the concourse, and dissolve into the Euston crowd; her string bag held, the watchers noted, two oranges and a rolled newspaper, which is how professionals carry files. Nobody touched her, on orders. The second Thursday the locker hung unclaimed until half past ten, when a stooped man in railway uniform helped himself and disappeared into the stationmaster's office for twenty minutes. Two sets of habits in a single fortnight: the machine was improvising now, and improvisation leaves fingerprints. Spring brought the courtrooms, which the public never saw. Six prisoners pleaded in camera before commissioners with long faces and short memories; sentences ranged from penal servitude for life down to two years for the photographer, whose defence consisted chiefly of demonstrating how bad at his job he had been. Dorothy sat through every session with her hands folded, translating silences. Inside the park the truth never landed at all—colleagues invented departures to Cheltenham, Edinburgh, a liaison posting to Washington, and the inventions hardened into fact because nobody dared test them. Margaret typed summaries she was forbidden to file and attended proceedings she was forbidden to describe, and came to understand exactly what Brennan had meant about justice wearing its blindfold crooked. The rebuilt transmitter went north to an Ordnance examiner who discussed solder the way sommeliers discuss vintages. His report returned in March: joints laid by a left-handed worker using a high-tin alloy favoured among radio amateurs, flux applied with a bird's feather, the whole signature of a man self-taught at home before the war out of the popular handbooks. Dorothy mined pre-war callbooks in the patent library licence by licence, surfaced four hundred candidates, and narrowed them to three who had let their addresses lapse after Dunkirk. One had been a maintenance fitter on the London Midland railway, resident in Northampton, called up, invalided out, discharged to munitions inspection in 1941, and thereafter a name without an address anywhere in Britain. The file grew a red border around it, which in Brennan's bureaucracy was the closest thing to a shout. Mr. Rennie contributed from Wolverton the way ghosts contribute—plain envelopes, no return address. Among his papers that spring appeared a decrypt of captured Abwehr traffic showing the Berlin station calling the English network nightly for eleven days after Hayes's arrest, working the old schedules, receiving silence, and finally reporting the network compromised. Except that the calls had continued afterward on reduced power, twice monthly, aimed at a coastal frequency nobody could place. Somebody, somewhere, still kept MERIDIAN's timetable. Brennan read the decrypt twice and ordered the file kept open over whatever objection Whitehall cared to raise, and Whitehall, perhaps sensing the shape of what was still out there, raised none. Walking back past Hut 8 on the last evening of April, Margaret counted the lit windows out of old habit—four, five, six—and made herself stop outside the seventh, where a lamp burned steady behind pale glass in a room the duty roster insisted housed nobody. She stood in the cold until the light went out, and by then she had finished telling herself it was some caretaker's oversight. Everyone said the network was dismantled. Dismantled machines, she had learned, kept one part ticking somewhere that no inventory ever reached. A fortnight later the two watchers produced their single trophy: a long-lens photograph of the green-gloved woman mid-stride outside the barrier, face angled just enough to defeat identification without quite defeating character. Brennan pinned it to his wall and saw a courier. Margaret studied it longer and saw something the lens had kept anyway—the kid gloves were good quality but mended at the left seam, stitched by hand with thread a shade wrong in colour, which was not how professionals dressed and exactly how somebody's sister or landlady or aunt dressed, out of love and thrift in equal parts. She said so. Brennan grunted that sentiment made poor surveillance material, then ordered a second print regardless, and Margaret filed hers among her papers, where her private museum of unfinished business accepted one more exhibit and declined, like all its fellows, to be closed. ---