Chapter 28 The North Sea Run

Margaret went back to Wrackmore on the Tuesday, and this time Dorothy came with her. She had not told Dorothy everything. She had told her about the cipher, and the message, and the name Helmut Voss, and the photograph in the boathouse with its torn corner and its two words on the back. What she had not told her, because she was not yet sure how to say it, was the feeling that had followed her off the train the week before, the feeling that the village had been expecting her, that the note in her coat pocket had been waiting for someone to come and find it, and that the Fisherman's line was not dead at all. They found Arthur Crane in the same place, on the bench at the end of the harbour wall, with the same net across his knees and the same horizon in his eyes. He looked at Margaret, and then at Dorothy, and he said, you brought a friend this time. I did, Margaret said. Sit where you are, Mr. Crane. I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly, because I think you have been carrying it for a very long time. I carried a great many things, the old man said quietly. You will have to be more particular. The nets, Margaret said. The mending of the nets. You were paid for the mending of the nets, and I think you know what that means. Arthur Crane looked at her for a long moment, and then he looked down at his hands, and then he folded the net away from his knees with the slow, careful movements of a man doing something for the last time. He was not a man who talked much, she understood. He was a man who had kept his mouth shut for thirty years because keeping it shut was the price of staying alive, and he had paid that price so often that he had forgotten the taste of speaking. I carried tins, he said at last. Sealed tins, once a month, in the dark of the moon. I took the Mabel out past the Dogger Bank to a point I knew by the shape of the water, and there was a boat there, a German trawler, blacked out and waiting, and I handed the tins across the rail and I took the money and I came home. I told myself it was brandy. I told myself it was tobacco. I told myself a hundred things, and I knew it was none of them, and I never asked, because asking was the one thing that would have made it real. How long? Dorothy asked. From the autumn of 1938 to the autumn of 1942, Arthur said. Four years. The month I stopped was the month I could not look at my own hands in the morning without seeing the sea on them. September 1942, Margaret said. Your last run was September 1942. The old man nodded slowly. That was the double-pay run, he said. Olafsen sent word by the church that the September run would be worth double, and that I was to take the Mabel out alone, and that I was not to speak of it to anyone, not even to Edith. I thought it strange. He had never sent word by the church before. But I went, and I handed over the tins, and I took the money, and I came home, and I never went out again. Margaret sat very still. September 1942. The month Alan Pemberton went down to the lake at Bletchley to watch the water and never came back. The month the key-reuse fragment in the message on her desk had been cut from the German traffic. The month the ghost keys had been set by a different hand, on the first Saturday, at the same hour, while a boat from Wrackmore slipped out past the Dogger Bank. She asked the question she had come to ask. Did you ever see his face? The man who took the tins from you. The man on the German boat. Did you ever see him? Arthur Crane was silent for a long time. Then he reached inside his coat and brought out a folded paper, yellowed and creased almost to splitting, and he held it out to her with a hand that was not quite steady. I kept this, he said. I meant to give it to the police after Edith was taken, and I could not, because it was hers. But it is not hers. It is his. He signed a receipt the first time and the last time, and I kept both, because a man who runs a boat learns to keep paper. I do not know what the name means. I have carried it for nine years without knowing what it means. Margaret unfolded the paper. On it, in a hand that had shaped a girl's cipher exercises the way a wind shapes a dune, was a single line of cramped, careful script. Received, one cargo, September 1942. H. Voss. She looked at the name for a long time, and then she folded the paper back along its creases and put it in her pocket next to the photograph and the note, and she understood that the line between the old war and the new one had never been a line at all. It was a net, and it had been mended in the same harbour, by the same hands, for the whole of her life. She called Brennan from the station at Wrackmore, standing in the cold booth with the receiver pressed to her ear while Dorothy watched the platform. I have his name, she said. H. Voss. The receipt for a run in September 1942, signed by the man who taught Edith Crane to set keys. There is more, Brennan said. His voice was flat, the way it went when he was holding something back. Our people in Berlin found a photograph in a house on the edge of the Soviet sector. The house belonged to a man who ran a German naval signals school during the war. The photograph is of a class of students, and on the back, in the same hand as the school's register, it says: for Olafsen, who taught them the sea. The name the village knew him by, Margaret. The name on the receipt is the name he was born with. Helmut Voss is the teacher. And the teacher is still alive. Margaret closed her eyes. The train for London was pulling in, slow and loud, and the grey water of the harbour beyond the station roof was exactly the colour it had been on the morning she had first read the message that predicted her death. The long night is over, she thought. The new one is beginning. Brennan, she said. He is reaching for me. The message, the key fragment from September 1942, the note in my pocket, he has been writing to me for weeks, and I have only just learned to read him. He wants a meeting. And I think he will keep writing until I come. Then we will decide what you do about that, Brennan said. Come home, Margaret. We will decide together. But Margaret stood in the booth a moment longer, watching the train doors open and the passengers step down onto the platform, and she understood that she was not coming home to a decision. She was coming home to prepare for a meeting that had been arranged years ago, by a man who had taught a fourteen-year-old girl to hide things in plain sight, and who had been writing keys ever since, patient as the tide, for whatever reader the world provided. She stepped out of the booth, and she and Dorothy boarded the train, and neither of them spoke of the sea for the rest of the journey. But Margaret could feel the message in her pocket, folded small and warm against her hip, and she could feel the shape of the name on the receipt, Helmut Voss, Helmut Voss, and she knew that somewhere on the grey water between Wrackmore and the coast of Europe, a man was setting a key for her, by a different hand, and waiting for her to turn it. ---