Chapter 22 The Drowned Man

Eastcote was an old RAF station that had been swallowed by the new organisation the way the sea swallows a harbour, quietly and completely. The runways had become car parks, the hangars had become warehouses, and the rooms where pilots had once waited out the night were now filled, floor to ceiling, with the records of a war that everyone was trying very hard to remember and to forget at the same time. Margaret presented the key Brennan had given her to a clerk with tired eyes, who directed her to a block of filing cabinets at the far end of a hangar so vast that her footsteps echoed off the rafters. The air smelled of dust and old paper and the particular cold that lives in places where the sun has never learned to reach. She found the personnel file for Alan Pemberton exactly where the ledger said it would be, in a cabinet labelled Hut 6, 1942, and she carried it to a small reading room with a single bare bulb and a table that wobbled on one leg. Alan Pemberton, the file told her, had been twenty-four years old when he died. He had come to Bletchley in the spring of 1942, a mathematician from Manchester with a first-class degree and a shy manner, and he had been assigned to Hut 6, working on Army and Air Force Enigma. His performance reports were glowing. His supervisor had written that Pemberton possessed an almost perverse talent for finding the message inside the message, the pattern beneath the pattern, and that his work on a particular class of intercepts had been of considerable interest. The file ended abruptly in September 1942, with a death certificate and a coroner's report. Alan Pemberton had drowned in the lake at Bletchley Park on the evening of the fourteenth of September. He had gone out on the water alone in one of the small rowing boats kept for the staff, an evening activity that the park encouraged in the long summer months as a relief from the pressure of the work. His boat had been found overturned near the far bank. His body had been recovered the following morning. The inquest had returned a verdict of accidental death, noting that Pemberton had been a competent swimmer but that the lake was cold in September and that a cramp, or a sudden squall, or the sheer weariness of a man who had worked fourteen-hour days, might reasonably explain what had happened. The report was signed by the coroner and countersigned by a representative of the park. Margaret read it twice, then a third time, and she set it down with the quiet conviction that it was wrong. She requested Pemberton's effects. They arrived in a single cardboard box, labelled and sealed, and she opened it with the care of a woman unwrapping something fragile. Inside she found a fountain pen, a worn copy of a mathematics textbook, a photograph of a woman who was probably his mother, and a notebook bound in dark cloth. The notebook was the thing she had been looking for, and she knew it the moment her fingers closed around it. It was a working notebook, dense with calculations and columns of letters and the small, cramped handwriting of a man who was always thinking faster than his pen could move. Margaret turned the pages slowly, reading as she went, and the further she read, the colder the room seemed to become. Pemberton had been chasing something. She recognised the shape of the problem immediately, because she had chased it herself, four years earlier, in the winter of 1943. He had found a pattern in a particular class of intercepts, a set of messages that did not behave the way Enigma traffic was supposed to behave. There was a ghost in the machine, a second layer of encryption hidden inside the daily keys, and Pemberton had been trying to isolate it, to prove it existed, to find out who was putting it there. She turned to the final pages of the notebook, and her heart stopped. The last ten pages had been cut out. Not torn, not damaged by water, but cut out cleanly, with a blade, as if someone had taken a knife to the man's work the way they had taken his life. All that remained was the stub of the binding and, on the page before the cut, a single line in Pemberton's hand, written as if he had been interrupted mid-thought. The key is set by a different hand. She re-sets it every month. First Saturday, always the same hour. I will watch the— The sentence ended there. I will watch the water. That was what he had been writing. I will watch the water, and he had gone down to the lake to do exactly that, to watch and to wait for the key to be re-set, and someone had made sure he never came back. Margaret sat in the cold reading room for a long time, the notebook open on the table in front of her, and she thought about the message that had brought her here. The dead man has risen. He is watching the water. Ask the drowned man. Pemberton had been watching the water, and someone had known he would be there. Someone had known his habits, his movements, his work. Someone inside the park, someone with access to the records and to the lake and to the keys, had watched him go and had made certain he stayed. She went back to the filing cabinets and pulled the personnel records for the staff who had been attached to Hut 6 in the autumn of 1942. It took her the better part of an afternoon, but she found what she was looking for in the records of the Wrens, the women who ran the bombe machines and the key rooms and the endless clerical machinery that the codebreakers depended on without ever thinking about it. One name stood out, because it appeared in Pemberton's file where no such name should have appeared, and because it appeared again in the list of Wrens on duty at the lake that September evening, and because it appeared a third time in the staff records as the woman responsible for logging the daily key settings in the winter of 1942, the months during which Pemberton had first noticed the ghost in the machine. Edith Crane. Margaret copied the name onto a slip of paper, folded it carefully, and put it in her coat pocket. She returned the notebook to its box, sealed it, and walked out of the hangar into the grey afternoon. She did not know yet who Edith Crane was, or where she had gone after the war, or whether she was the same woman who had learned Hayes's private cipher and set it to work again. But she knew that the trail she had been following for four years had never been cold. It had only been waiting, the way the lake waits, still and patient on the surface, for whatever it is asked to hold. She was going to find Edith Crane. And she was going to ask her what she knew about the water, and about the dead, and about the fire that had been meant to take Margaret Chase in the winter of 1943. ---