Enigma

fancies this chap, don't you, Mr Jericho?' Heaviside laughed and gave her shoulder another pat. 'All right, Kay. Good work. Back to it.'
    They moved on. 'One of my best,' he confided. 'Can be pretty ghastly, you know, eight hours listening at a stretch, just taking down gibberish. Specially at night, in the winter. Bloody freezing out here. We have to issue 'em with blankets. Ah, now, here, look: here's one coming in.'
    They stood at a discreet distance behind an operator who was frantically copying down a message. With her left hand she kept fractionally adjusting the dial on the wireless set, with her right she was fumbling together message forms and carbon paper. The speed with which she then started to take down the message was astonishing. 'GLPES,' read Jericho over her shoulder, 'KEMPG NXWPD
    'Two forms,' said Heaviside. 'Log sheet, on which she records the whispers: that's tuning messages, Q-code and so forth. And then the red form which is the actual signal.'
    'What happens next?' whispered Hester.
    'There are two copies of each form. Top copy goes to the Teleprinter Hut for immediate transmission to your people. That's the hut we passed that looks like the cricket pavilion. The other copies we keep here, in case there's a garble or something goes missing.'
    'How long do you keep them?'
    'Couple of months.'
    'Can we see?'
    Heaviside scratched his head. 'If you want. Not much to it, though.'
    He led them to the far end of the hut, opened a door, turned on the light and stood back to show them the interior. A walk-in cupboard. A bank of about a dozen dark green filing cabinets. No window. Light switch on the left.
    'How are they arranged?' asked Jericho.
    'Chronologically.' He closed the door.
    Not locked, noted Jericho, continuing his inventory. And the entrance not really visible, except to the four operators nearest to it. He could feel his heart beginning to thump.
    'Major Heaviside, sir!'
    They turned to find Kay standing, beckoning to them, one of her headphones pressed to her ear.
    'My mystery piano player, sir. He's just started doing his scales again, sir, if you're interested.'
    Heaviside took the headset first. He listened with a judicious expression, his eyes focused on the middle distance, like an eminent doctor with a stethoscope being asked to give a second opinion. He shook his head and shrugged and passed the headphones to Hester.
    'Ours not to reason why, old chap,' he said to Jericho. When it was Jericho's turn, he removed his scarf and placed it carefully on the floor next to the cable form that connected the wireless set to the aerials and the power supply. Putting on the headphones was rather like putting his head under water. There was a strange rush of sounds. A howl that reminded him of the wind in the aerial farm. A gunfire crackle of static. Two or three different and very faint Morse transmissions braided together. And suddenly, and most bizarrely, a German diva singing an operatic aria he vaguely recognised as being from the second act of Tannhauser. 'I can't hear anything.'
    'Must have drifted off frequency,' said Heaviside. Kay turned the dial minutely anticlockwise, the sound wowed up and down an octave, the diva evaporated, more gunfire, and then, like stepping into an open space, a rapid, staccato dah-dah-dah-dah-dah of Morse, pulsing clearly and urgently, more than a thousand miles distant, somewhere in German-occupied Ukraine.
    *
    They were halfway to the Teleprinter Hut when Jericho raised his hand to his throat and said, 'My scarf.'
    They stopped in the rain.
    'I'll get one of the girls to bring it over.'
    'No, no, I'll fetch it, I'll catch you up.'
    Hester took her cue. 'And how many machines did you say you have?' She began to walk on.
    Heaviside hesitated between the two of them, then hurried after Hester. Jericho could have kissed her. He never heard the major's answer. It was whipped away by the wind.
    You are calm, he told himself, you are confident, you are doing nothing wrong.
    He went back into the hut. The woman sergeant had her fat back to him, leaning over one of the interceptors. She never saw him. He walked swiftly down the central aisle, looking straight ahead, and let himself into the storeroom. He closed the door behind him and turned on the light.
    How long did he have? Not long.
    He tugged at the first drawer of the first filing cabinet. Locked. Damn it. He tried it again. Wait. No, it wasn't locked. The cabinet was fitted with one of these irritating