Chapter 7 The Third Suspect

The plan was simple but dangerous. Margaret and Dorothy would infiltrate Hayes's quarters after dark, searching for any evidence that would implicate him in the conspiracy. They would take only what they could carry, hide it in a secure location, and use it to expose him before he could strike again. It was a risky plan, and both women knew it. Hayes was not a fool. He would have security measures, hidden compartments, and fail-safes designed to protect his secrets. And he would be watching, waiting for the moment when they slipped up, when they made a mistake, when he could catch them and silence them forever. But they had no choice. They could not wait for Hayes to strike first. They had to act, and they had to act quickly. They began the search late that night, slipping into Hayes's room in the east wing of the main building. The room was small and sparse, furnished with a desk, a bed, and a wardrobe, with a single window that looked out over the park. Margaret locked the door and turned on the small electric lamp that she had brought with her, while Dorothy began to search the desk drawers. They worked in silence, their movements precise and efficient, their minds focused on the task at hand. Margaret searched the wardrobe and the under-bed storage, looking for hidden compartments or false bottoms or anything that might contain evidence. Dorothy searched the desk drawers, going through papers and notebooks and files with the care of a woman who knew that a single misplaced document could ruin everything. After an hour, they had found nothing. The room was clean, orderly, and devoid of any incriminating evidence. Hayes had been thorough, as thorough as he had been with Thomas Webb. But then Dorothy found it. It was hidden in the false bottom of a desk drawer, a small notebook that had been carefully concealed from view. Dorothy lifted the false bottom and revealed the notebook, its cover black and unmarked, its pages filled with dense handwriting. She opened the notebook and began to read, her face growing pale with each line. Margaret leaned over her shoulder and read as well, her heart hammering with the force of discovery. The notebook contained a series of coded messages, each one a communication between Hayes and a German handler. The messages were encrypted using a cipher that Margaret recognized—a variant of the Enigma code that had been used by German intelligence throughout the war. She had seen it before, in the intercepts that she had decoded, and she had never suspected that it was being used by one of her own colleagues. The messages revealed a network of espionage that ran deeper than Margaret had ever imagined. Hayes was not working alone. He was part of a larger conspiracy, a network of traitors who had infiltrated the codebreaking operation and who were using their access to pass sensitive information to the Germans. The network included men and women in various huts and departments, all of them loyal to Hayes and all of them committed to the destruction of the British war effort. Margaret and Dorothy read the messages in silence, their minds racing with the implications. This was worse than they had feared. This was not merely a case of one man's betrayal. This was a systematic, organized campaign of espionage that had been underway for months, perhaps years. And they had the evidence. They had the proof. They had the notebook that would expose Hayes and his accomplices. But they also had the proof that Hayes knew they were coming. The last entry in the notebook was dated that morning, and it contained a single sentence: I know what they are planning. I know what they are going to do. And I will stop them. Margaret felt a chill run down her spine. Hayes was not merely a traitor. He was a predator, a hunter who was stalking his prey. And he had just discovered that he was being hunted in turn. They took the notebook and left the room, locking the door behind them and slipping back into the darkness of the park. They had the evidence. They had the proof. Now they had to use it before Hayes used it against them. They left Hayes's building by the coal store, following a drainage ditch that stank of cinders and soaked them to the knee, and twice they stood still as posts while a sentry coughed somewhere off to the west. The moon was down, and the blackout turned the park into a field of black rectangles with one dim lane between them. At Dorothy's door they parted without goodbye. The notebook travelled divided: half the coded pages sewn flat into the lining of Margaret's coat, the other half strapped against Dorothy's spine beneath her jumper, so that if one of them was stopped in the dark the other might still carry something through. For three nights afterwards they copied. Dorothy's hand was quicker and surer; she reproduced cipher groups by the hundred without once lifting her pen to guess, and Margaret checked every fifth line against the original until her eyes burned in their sockets. The true notebook went into the ground—wrapped in tarred canvas inside a biscuit tin, buried beneath the flagstone where the old greenhouse had stood before the war, a grave dug for paper with the same care Webb might have spent on a colleague. What remained above ground was a fair copy, deniable and incomplete, the kind of document an examiner could be told was forgery. It felt less like victory than like preparing a case against themselves. On the third night Margaret translated the final entry twice to be certain of it. The sentence about knowing their plans was not rhetoric; the entry carried a time, 0640, and a fragment of context that stopped her breath—a reference to the leave roster, and to her own surname reduced to the bare initial C. Hayes read the same bulletins she did. He knew she had been to London twice in a fortnight. Now he knew, or believed he knew, that she meant to act. We have perhaps two days, she told Dorothy across the kitchen table, before he stops collecting proof against us and starts removing us. Then write to your superintendent tonight, Dorothy said, and give him enough that staying silent becomes harder for him than moving. ---