Chapter 5 The First Suspect

The investigation narrowed the suspect list to three people: Dr. William Hayes, Sergeant Frank Miller, and Dorothy Chen. Each had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to send the messages and to kill Thomas Webb. Dr. William Hayes was the most prominent of the three, a senior codebreaker with access to the most sensitive information in the park. He was also, by all accounts, a good man—a respected colleague, a generous mentor, a friend to many. But Margaret had learned that good men could be the worst traitors, the ones who betrayed not for money or ideology but for a twisted sense of patriotism that justified any means. Sergeant Frank Miller was a signals operator, a man who had survived Dunkirk only to lose his leg and his sanity in the process. He was haunted by the past, by the memories of the men he had left behind, by the guilt of having survived when they had not. Margaret suspected that Frank had been recruited by the Germans, that he had been blackmailed or coerced into revealing secrets that he had no right to reveal. Dorothy Chen was the most enigmatic of the three. She was quiet, reserved, and deeply private, with a past that she rarely discussed and a family that she rarely mentioned. Margaret suspected that Dorothy had been recruited by the Japanese, that she had been coerced into spying for a foreign power, and that she was using her position at Bletchley to gather intelligence for her handlers. But Margaret could not prove any of these suspicions. She had no concrete evidence, no smoking gun that would identify the traitor and expose their crimes. She had only the notebook, the messages, and her own intuition—and intuition was not enough to convict a man or to protect herself from a killer. She needed more. She needed to find the proof that would expose Hayes and protect herself. She began by revisiting Thomas Webb's house, the burned-out shell of a Victorian terrace in the outskirts of London that had been his home for the last two years of his life. The house had been cleared out by the police, the debris removed, the foundation exposed and covered with tarps to protect it from the weather. But Margaret had noticed something during her first visit—a loose brick in the chimney breast that she had not mentioned to anyone. She returned to the house on a rainy Tuesday evening, when the street was empty and the neighbours were indoors. She climbed the rubble-strewn garden and entered through the broken back door, her torch beam cutting through the darkness. The house smelled of damp and ash and decay, a place that had been consumed by fire and left to rot. She made her way to the chimney breast and pried out the loose brick, revealing a small cavity behind it. Inside was a bundle of papers, wrapped in oilcloth and protected from the rain. Margaret unwrapped the bundle and found a letter, written in Thomas Webb's hand, addressed to someone named William. Dear William, the letter began. I think you know what I have found. I think you understand the significance of what I have discovered. And I think you understand why I cannot trust you anymore. I am sending this to you because I need you to know the truth, even if you cannot help me. The traitor is among us. The traitor is feeding information to the Germans. The traitor is responsible for the deaths of men like me—men who asked too many questions and who learned too much. I do not know who it is, but I am getting close. And I am afraid that by the time you read this, it will be too late for me. I am sorry, William. I am so sorry. Margaret stared at the letter, her heart hammering. Thomas Webb had suspected that one of his colleagues was the traitor. He had written to someone named William—someone he trusted, someone he believed could help him. But the letter had not been answered, or at least, Thomas had not received a reply. And then he had died. Margaret knew who William was. William Hayes, the senior codebreaker, the charming, brilliant, ruthless Dr. Hayes. Thomas had suspected him of being the traitor, and he had written to him in a last, desperate attempt to expose him. But Hayes had known, and he had killed Thomas to silence him. Margaret tucked the letter into her coat and left the house, her mind racing with the implications of what she had found. She had the evidence she needed. She had the proof that Hayes was the traitor. But she also had the proof that Hayes knew she was close to the truth, and that he would not hesitate to kill her. She needed to be careful. She needed to be smart. And she needed to act before Hayes acted first. Margaret decided to visit Thomas Webb's family, to learn more about him and about the circumstances of his death. But before she could make the trip, she received a third message. This one was even more direct. It read: Stop digging. You will regret it. Margaret showed the message to Commander Wright, who summoned her to his office immediately. She found him there, pacing the floor with an expression of deep concern. We have a problem, he said without preamble. A second message has been intercepted, this one addressed to you specifically. It contains a threat. Wright's office smelled of cold tea and carbon paper. He told her that security could double her escort, that the Yard had been notified, that she was to surrender anything relevant to the colonel who would arrive on Thursday, and that he would not see the park's best naval decoder buried in a country churchyard for want of precautions. Margaret agreed to all of it and volunteered none of it. The letter from the chimney lay against her ribs, folded into a banknote wallet, and its existence stayed there, hidden, while she promised cooperation in a voice she kept flat as the fens outside. Crossing the quadrangle afterwards, rain needling her collar, she passed the signals annexe, where a lamplit window showed Sergeant Miller hunched over a receiver log, writing with the deliberate slowness of a man whose hands had been broken once and set badly. He had logged the dawn burst on the fourth of January; his initials stood at the foot of the transcript page, neat as a signature on a confession or a receipt. A haunted man, a ruined leg, a survivor's guilt—none of it was evidence. Margaret made herself note that twice before she allowed the thought beneath it to finish forming: the one man who had handled the intercept first was also the one man nobody seemed to be watching. Back in her room she took out the letter again and studied its creases under the lamp. The paper had been folded in thirds and then thirds again—the habit of a signals man trained to fit sheets into standard service envelopes, not the habit of a mathematician posting private correspondence. So perhaps William had never received it at all. Perhaps it had gone astray in the post, or been opened en route by the very traitor it named, which would mean Hayes had known about the letter for a year and had let Thomas die with it unsent. She slit the spine of her old Cambridge algebra text, laid the letter flat in the wound, and glued the cover down with flour paste from the kitchens. Then she wrote Dorothy a single line—tomorrow, the logs—and put out her light to wait for it to matter. ---