Chapter 23 The Ghost Keys

Edith Crane's service record took Margaret three days to assemble, and when it was finally complete, spread across her desk in a careful fan of photocopies and index cards, it told a story that made her sit very still and very quiet for a long time. Edith Crane had joined the Wrens in the summer of 1941, at the age of nineteen, a girl from a fishing village on the coast of Norfolk who had passed the signals course with a fluency that her instructors had noted and passed on. She had been posted to Bletchley Park that autumn, assigned to the key room, where the daily settings for the Enigma machines were logged and distributed and where a single error in a single column of figures could set the whole of Hut 6 spinning in the wrong direction for a day. Her superiors had described her as quiet, efficient, and utterly reliable. Nobody had described her as anything else, because there was nothing else to describe. She was the kind of person the park depended on and never noticed, a woman who did her job so well that she became invisible. That was the first thing that troubled Margaret. The second thing was that Edith Crane's name appeared in every file that mattered. She had logged the daily keys in the autumn of 1942, when Pemberton had first noticed the ghost in the machine. She had been on duty at the lake on the evening he drowned, though her statement had been brief and had given no sign that she had seen anything unusual. She had been the one to pack Pemberton's quarters after his death, on the authority of a supervisor who had since retired and could not be found. And in the winter of 1943, two weeks after Margaret had decoded the message that predicted her own death by fire, Edith Crane had resigned from the Wrens, citing ill health, and had disappeared from every record Margaret could find. She was a ghost, Margaret thought. A ghost who had been standing in the corner of the room the whole time, so quiet and so efficient and so utterly reliable that no one had ever thought to look at her twice. She went to Brennan again, and this time she brought Dorothy. Dorothy had arrived in London two days earlier, stepping off a train from Southampton with a single suitcase and a look in her eyes that Margaret remembered from the winter of 1943. She had been working in the Far East since the end of the war, in a signals office in Hong Kong, translating traffic that the Japanese networks had left behind, and she had come back the moment she received the message. It had found her in the way of all such things, folded into a routine dispatch that should have been nothing at all. But the rhythm of it had caught her eye, the same rhythm that Margaret had caught in London, and when she had decoded it, it had said: The drowned man is awake. The fire will return. Tell her to look to the keys. I thought I was done with this, Dorothy said, sitting in Margaret's flat with a cup of tea that had gone cold in her hands. I thought I had paid for my mistakes and closed the book. But the book was never closed, Margaret. It was only resting. What mistakes? Margaret asked. Dorothy had never spoken of a price she had paid, and Margaret had never asked. It had been enough that her friend had come back from the dark place where the investigation had taken her, whole in body if not in spirit. I was not the only one who was recruited, Dorothy said quietly. The Japanese wanted a line into the park, and they found me because I was frightened and young and far from home. But the Germans had a line too. A separate line. A woman. I knew there was another agent, someone who did not report through Hayes, someone the network was careful never to mention in the same message as him. I told myself I did not know who she was. But I knew where the keys were logged, and I knew who logged them. Edith Crane, Margaret said. Dorothy nodded. I never met her. I never saw her face. But I heard the name once, in a dispatch I was not supposed to read, and I have carried it with me ever since, like a splinter under the skin. The Germans called her the Keeper of the Keys. The pattern was complete now, and Margaret could see it the way she had once seen the shape of a cipher in a column of random letters. Hayes had been the public face of the network, the man who took the risks and made the contacts and drew the attention. But behind him, invisible, had stood a woman who never communicated with him directly, who fed her information to Germany on a separate line, who logged the daily keys and re-set them by a different hand once a month, and who had been watching the water the night Alan Pemberton went to the lake to watch it too. The message that predicted my death was in Hayes's cipher, Margaret said slowly. Every test pointed to him. Every piece of evidence I found, from Thomas Webb's letter to the notebook in his desk, pointed to him. He confessed to everything. And no one ever thought to ask why the man who planned to kill me by fire would send me a message telling me to look to the dead. Because the message was not from him, Dorothy said. It was from her. She wrote it in his cipher so that if it was ever decoded, the blame would fall on him. He was her shield, Margaret. She hid behind him from the very beginning, and when he fell, she simply stepped out from behind his body and walked away. Margaret thought of Edith Crane's service record, of the girl from the fishing village who had been so quiet and so efficient and so utterly reliable. She thought of the ghost keys, re-set by a different hand on the first Saturday of every month, and of a man who had gone down to the water to watch and had never come back. And she thought of the woman in the grey coat she had glimpsed three days earlier, when she had gone back to Eastcote to look at the key logs again. The woman had been standing at the far end of the hangar, half hidden behind a filing cabinet, watching Margaret the way a heron watches a fish. She had been gone before Margaret could cross the room, but the impression had stayed with her, a grey coat and a headscarf and a stillness that was not the stillness of a woman reading files. I saw her, Margaret said. Three days ago. She was in the records hangar. She knows I am looking for her. Then we have very little time, Brennan said. If she knows you are close, she will not wait. She will move. The question is, where is she going, and what is she planning to burn? Margaret looked down at the papers spread across her desk, at the name repeated again and again in the margins of her notes, and she understood with a certainty that settled in her bones like the cold of the lake itself. The records, she said. Pemberton's notebook is in the hangar at Eastcote, sealed and boxed. So are the key logs for the winter of 1942. So is everything that proves she was ever there. If those papers burn, the ghost keys burn with them, and Edith Crane becomes what she has always wanted to be. A woman who was never there at all. ---