Enigma

umbrella.
    'Heaviside,' he said, 'Major Heaviside, as in the eponymous layer. And you must be Miss Wallace and you must be . . .?'
    'Tom Jericho.'
    'Mr Jericho. Excellent. Splendid.' He shook their hands vigorously. 'This is a treat for us, I must say. A visit from head office to the country cousins. Commander sends a thousand sorrows and says d'you mind if I do the honours? He'll try and catch us later. 'Fraid you've missed lunch, but tea? Cup of tea? Filthy weather ..."
    Jericho had been braced for some suspicious questions, and had used the journey to rehearse some careful answers, but the major merely ushered them under his leaking umbrella and guided them into the house. He was young, tall and balding, with spectacles so smeared with debris it was a wonder he could see through them. He had sloping shoulders, like a bottle, and the collar of his tunic was blanched white with dandruff. He took them into a cold and musty drawing room and ordered tea.
    By now he'd finished his potted history of the house ('designed by the same bloke who built Nelson's Column, so they tell me') and was well embarked on a detailed history of the wireless interception service ('started out in Chatham till the bombing got too bad . . .'). Hester was nodding politely. A woman Army private brought them tea as thick and brown as shoe polish and Jericho sipped it and glanced impatiently around the empty walls. There were holes in the plaster where the picture hooks had been pulled out, and grimy shadows traced the outlines of large frames, now removed. An ancestral seat without ancestors, a house without a soul. The windows looking out on to the garden were crossed with strips of sticky tape.
    He pointedly took out his watch and opened it. Almost three o'clock. They would need to be moving soon.
    Hester noticed he was fidgeting. 'Perhaps,' she said, leaping into a brief lull in the major's monologue, 'we might take a look around?'
    Heaviside looked startled and clattered his teacup into his saucer. 'Oh, crumbs, sorry. Right. If you're fit, then, we'll make a start.'
    The rain was mixed with snow now, and the wind was blowing it hard, in waves, from the north. It lashed their faces as they came around the side of the big house and as they picked their way through the mud of a flattened rose garden they had to raise their arms against it, like boxers warding off blows. There was an odd keening, howling noise, like nothing Jericho had ever heard before, coming from beyond a wall.
    'What the devil's that?'
    'The aerial farm,' said Heaviside.
    Jericho had only visited an intercept station once before, and that had been years ago, when the science was still in its infancy: a shack full of shivering Wrens perched on top of the cliffs near Scarborough. This was of a different order. They went through a gate in the wall and there it was—dozens of radio masts laid out in odd patterns, like the stone circles of the Druids, across several acres of fields. The metal pylons were bound together by thousands of yards of cable. Some of the taut steel hummed in the wind, some screamed.
    'Rhombic and Beveridge configurations,' shouted the major above the racket. 'Dipoles and quadra-hedrons . . . Look!' He tried to point and his umbrella was abruptly snapped inside out. He smiled hopelessly and waved it in the direction of the masts. 'We're about three hundred feet up here, hence this bloody wind. The farm's got two main harvests, can you see? One's pointing due south. That picks up France, the Med, Libya. The other's targeted east to Germany and the Russian front. The signals go by coaxial cables to the intercept huts.' He spread his arms wide and bellowed, 'Beautiful, isn't it? We can pick up everything for the best part of a thousand miles.' He laughed and waved his hands as if he were conducting an imaginary choir. 'Sing to me, you buggers.'
    The wind slashed sleet in their faces and Jericho cupped his hands to his ears. It felt as though they were interfering with nature, tapping into some rushing elemental force they had no business dabbling in, like Frankenstein summoning down lightning into his laboratory. Another gust of wind knocked them backwards and Hester clutched at his arm for support.
    'Let's get out of here,' yelled Heaviside. He gestured for them to follow him. Once they were on the other side of the wall they had some shelter from the wind. An asphalt road girdled what looked, at a distance, to be an estate village nestling in the grounds