第9章 The Countdown

Margaret and Dorothy met with Superintendent Brennan the following morning, in a secure room at Scotland Yard that was far from the prying eyes of Bletchley Park. They presented him with the notebook, the translated messages, and the letter from Thomas Webb, and they told him everything they had discovered. Brennan listened in silence, his expression unreadable, his mind working through the implications of what they had told him. When they had finished, he spoke. This is serious. Very serious. I will act on this evidence immediately. But I need you to be careful, Miss Chase. Mr. Hayes is a dangerous man, and he will not surrender without a fight. I know, Margaret said. But I am not afraid of him. Brennan looked at her for a long moment. I believe you, he said. But belief is not enough. You need protection. You need security. And you need to be ready for whatever comes next. He assigned two officers to protect Margaret and Dorothy, and he ordered a surveillance team to monitor Hayes's movements. He also issued a warrant for Hayes's arrest, to be executed the moment they had sufficient evidence to justify it. But they were running out of time. The date on the message was December 15th, and it was now only three days away. Hayes knew they were coming, and he would not wait to be arrested. He would strike first, and he would strike hard. Margaret returned to Bletchley with her guards, but she knew that they would not be enough. Hayes was a predator, and he would not be caught by ordinary means. She needed to be smarter, faster, and more careful than she had ever been before. She spent the next two days in a state of heightened alert, watching her colleagues, listening to their conversations, trying to anticipate Hayes's next move. She saw him in the mess hall, laughing with his friends, drinking coffee and discussing the latest intercepts. She saw him in the huts, working on the Enigma machines, his face a mask of concentration and determination. She saw him everywhere, and she knew that he was watching her in return. The countdown had begun. Three days until the fire. Three days until Hayes made his move. Margaret did not sleep. She sat in her room, the notebook in her hands, the letter from Thomas Webb on her desk, and she waited for the storm to break. December third. Twelve days remaining. The frost had given way to rain, a steady, relentless downpour that turned the grounds of Bletchley Park into a sea of mud. Margaret walked to Hut 8 with her coat pulled tight and her head bowed against the wind, her mind consumed by the calculations that were racing through it like a machine that couldn't be stopped. She had spent the previous two days trying to find Thomas Webb's personal effects, the belongings that would have been returned to his family after his death or stored in the estate's records. But the search had turned up nothing. On the morning of the third, with the probate file she had borrowed from the county office open on her desk and the rain still hammering at the hut's iron roof, Margaret sat very still and let the absence speak. Webb had died intestate. His effects, by regulation, should have travelled to the nearest office of the probate service within six weeks of the inquest, and from there into a numbered deed box waiting for someone to claim it. Nothing had reached his sister in Wolverton. Nothing had been returned to the university. The dead man's notebooks, his cipher specimen pages, the loose sheets on which he had drawn his careful maps of convoy losses—all of it should have been on a clerk's shelf, listed in triplicate, and none of it was. She read the inventory twice, then closed the file and stood at the window watching the rain stipple the parade ground. The only explanation that satisfied both the absence and the silence was that someone had come for the box before the clerks did, and had walked out of the building with Webb's working papers folded under one arm. She knew, without yet being able to write it down, whose initials the ledger would carry when she found the right ledger to ask. The solicitor's office in Stony Stratford smelled of paraffin and dead ferns. Thomas Webb had died intestate, his effects pending probate in a deed box numbered 214, and a weary clerk brought it out with the ceremony of a man handling his own lunch. Inside lay spectacles with one lens starred, a pocket watch stopped at eleven minutes past two, a fountain pen with a cracked cap, two folded shirts, and a Great Western timetable from the previous May, soft with handling, its margins ringed and annotated in pencil. No notebooks. No papers beyond the timetable. Margaret asked, as gently as she could, whether anyone had ever removed items from the box before this morning. There had been one such visitor. The ledger came off its shelf trailing ribbon, and there it stood in faded ink: three weeks after the fire, a single entry, initials W.H., signature an unreadable flourish, items described only as working papers, quantity unspecified. The clerk recalled nothing—he processed dozens of boxes for dozens of dead men—but he did remember that the gentleman had come by motor car, which had been unusual on that street. Margaret copied the entry onto the back of a laundry receipt, thanked him, and walked out into rain that was turning to sleet, feeling the silence of the box close behind her like water over a dropped stone. Her escort waited across the road beneath the town clock, stamping and bored and entirely visible. Beyond them, at the mouth of the bus shelter, a tall man stood with his umbrella angled into the wind and his face turned towards the timetables. He did not board the bus that came, nor the one that followed it. When she glanced back from the corner the shelter held nothing but a woman with a pram. It proves nothing, she wrote in her notebook that evening, and then, underneath, because she could not help herself: it proves nothing only if he was not there. In Dorothy's room they laid the week out across the bed like instruments before an operation. Hayes had collected Webb's working papers ahead of the police inventory, ahead of probate, ahead of everyone—that was theft from a dead man's estate at the very least, and housekeeping by a murderer at worst. He was closing accounts. The letter had survived through accident; the notebook had survived through accident; nothing else would be permitted to. When every piece of evidence sits on our side of the scale, Margaret said, he simply waits until he is free to burn our side down. Then we stop weighing, Dorothy answered. We make him move in front of witnesses. The phrase settled over the little room, obvious and terrible, and Margaret understood that she had been walking towards it for a month: if he would only strike at a discovery, then she would have to be discovered holding one. The tenth of December passed in drills and false calm. She rehearsed her rumour until it sounded like gossip—a breakthrough, a universal method, nearly finished—and chose her listeners with care, letting the words fall where Hayes's friends took their coffee. Her guards reported nothing unusual. The frosts returned at night. On her wall calendar she inked a slow black circle around Friday the fifteenth, and beside it, with the same pen, a smaller steadier ring around Wednesday the thirteenth, because by that day, one way or another, the waiting would have to end. ---