Chapter 25 The Last Morse

The match burned between them for a long, terrible moment, and then Edith Crane let it fall. It dropped onto the concrete at her feet and went out with a small, sad hiss, and Margaret understood that she had never intended to light anything at all. The flame had been a greeting, a way of saying that she knew exactly who was hiding in the dark and that she had come prepared for her. So, Edith said. You came. I knew you would. You could never leave the pattern alone, Miss Chase. That was always your trouble, and it was always your saving grace. Margaret stepped out from between the cabinets, into the circle of light. Her heart was beating hard, but her voice was steady. I know what you did, she said. I know about the ghost keys. I know about Alan Pemberton. I know you wrote the message in Hayes's cipher so that if it was ever decoded, it would point to him and not to you. Edith Crane nodded slowly, as if Margaret had just recited a lesson she had taught her years ago. William was a useful man, she said. He believed he was the centre of the network, the great architect of chaos, and it suited him to think so. He never knew that I set the keys he was so proud of working around. He never knew that I was the one who decided what he should see and what he should not. When you found his notebook, I let him fall. It was the cheapest way to be rid of him. And the message that predicted my death, Margaret said. That was yours. It was, Edith said. The fire was real, Miss Chase. William was going to burn you in December of 1943, exactly as the message said. The prediction was written in his cipher so that if anything went wrong, if you survived, if you decoded it and went looking, every piece of evidence would point to him. Look to the dead was the part that was for me. It sent you to Thomas Webb, and to the fire that had taken him, and it kept you busy looking at the ashes of the past while the woman who set the keys walked free. It worked rather well, I thought. Margaret took a step forward. The decoy box sat on the cabinet between them, heavy with its brick and its blank paper, and she made herself look at it as if it were the most precious thing in the world. You came back for the records, she said. You could not let Pemberton's notebook survive. It is the only thing that proves you were ever here. Edith's eyes flicked to the box, and for the first time Margaret saw something other than calm in them. I came back for more than the records, she said. I came back for you. The fire was promised to you in 1943, and promises have to be kept. When the hangar burns tonight, it will burn with the records and with the woman who came to save them, and in the morning there will be nothing left of either of them. A tragedy. A fire. A hero who died too soon. She reached into her coat, and Margaret saw the glint of a canister, and heard the soft slosh of petrol. She had come prepared to burn the hangar down, and she had come prepared to burn it down with Margaret inside it. You are out of the war, Edith, Margaret said. The Germans have lost. There is no one left to report to, no one left to reward you. You could have stayed in the shadows for the rest of your life, and no one would ever have found you. Why would you come back for this? Because the war is never over, Edith said. Not for people like us. The hand that wrote the keys for Germany is still writing keys, Miss Chase, for a different reader now. And when the new war comes, the woman who built a network inside the park will be worth a great deal to the men who are already fighting it. I did not come back to burn the records. I came back to collect you. The petrol canister came up in her hand, and Margaret moved without thinking. She threw herself sideways as the liquid arced across the space between them, drenching the filing cabinet behind her, and she hit the floor with her shoulder taking the weight, her hand reaching for the whistle at her coat. Edith was already moving, the canister dropping to the floor, her hand going to the pocket where the matches were, and Margaret knew she had three seconds, perhaps four, before the fire that had been promised to her for four years finally arrived. She put the whistle to her lips and blew. The sound cut through the hangar like a blade, and the loading door crashed open, and the light of torches flooded the darkness as Brennan's men came through it in a wave. Edith Crane looked up, and for the first and only time Margaret saw fear on her face, real fear, the fear of a woman who had built her life on being invisible and had been seen at last. She spun, searching for a way out, but there was no way out. There had never been a way out, not once she had stepped through the door. It is over, Margaret said, getting to her feet. The hangar is empty of everything but paper, Edith. Pemberton's notebook is in a vault at Scotland Yard, along with the key logs and every record that proves you were ever here. The fire was never coming back. I was. Edith Crane stared at her, and slowly, very slowly, the fear in her eyes was replaced by something else. Respect, perhaps, or recognition, or the simple acceptance of a woman who had played the long game and lost it to a woman who had refused to look the other way. She said nothing as the officers took her arms and led her toward the door. She did not look back. Margaret stood alone in the hangar in the cold light of the torches, and she felt the night draining out of her the way water drains from a boat that has finally been brought to shore. Dorothy came through the door and caught her as her knees buckled, and held her, and did not let go. It is over, Dorothy said. It is finally over. Yes, Margaret said. I believe it is. She went back to the office the following morning, because there was nowhere else to go and nothing else she knew how to do. The courier pouch was waiting on her desk, and she opened it with the same methodical care she had brought to every pouch for the last seven years. Most of it was routine. But one message made her stop. It was a short transmission, three lines of encoded text, and it was written in a cipher she had never seen before. It was not German. It was not Hayes's private cipher, and it was not any of the Japanese codes she knew, and it was not the language of the ghost keys. It was something new, and it was waiting for her, patient as the dead. Margaret Chase. We know the woman who kept the keys. We know the name of the man who taught her. The long night is over. The new one is beginning. She read it three times, and then she set it down, and she looked out the window at the grey London sky, and she smiled. The war was not over. The war would never be over, not for people like her. There was always another cipher, always another transmission, always another hand reaching out of the dark to test the lock she had spent her life learning to pick. She picked up her pencil, and she began to work. The last morse had been sent. And somewhere in the silence that followed it, Margaret Chase could hear the first notes of the next one, already tuning up, already beginning. ---