Enigma

anti-tilt mechanisms, which prevented two drawers being opened at once. He looked down and saw that the bottom drawer was protruding slightly. He closed it gently with his foot and to his relief the top drawer slid open.
    Brown cardboard folders. Bundles of smudged carbons, held together by metal paperclips. Log sheets and W/T red forms. Day, Month and Year in the top right-hand corner. Meaningless jumbles of handwritten letters. This folder for 15 January 1943.
    He stepped back and counted quickly. Fifteen four-drawer cabinets. Sixty drawers. Two months. Roughly a drawer a day. Could that be right?
    He strode over to the sixth cabinet and opened the third drawer down. February the 6th. Bingo.
    He held the image of Hester Wallace's neat notation steady in his mind. 6.2./1215. 9.2/1427. 20.27 1807. 2.3./1639, 1901 ...
    It would have helped if his fingers hadn't swollen to the size of sausages, if they weren't shaking and slippery with sweat, if he could somehow catch his breath.
    Someone must come in. Someone must hear him, surely, opening and closing the metal drawers like organ stops, pulling out two, three, four cryptograms and the log sheets, too (Hester had said they'd be useful), stuffing them into his inside coat pocket, five, six—dropped it, damn—seven cryptograms. He almost gave up at that—'Quit while you're ahead, old love' -but he needed the final four, the four Claire had hidden in her room.
    He opened the top drawer of the thirteenth filing cabinet, and there they were, towards the back, virtually in sequence, thank you, God.
    A footstep outside the storeroom. He grabbed the logs and red forms and had just about got them into his pocket and the drawer shut when the door opened to silhouette the trim figure of Kay the intercept girl.
    'I thought I saw you come in,' she said, 'only you left your scarf, see?' She held it up and closed the door behind her, then slowly advanced down the narrow room towards him. Jericho stood paralysed with an idiot grin on his face.
    'I don't mean to bother you, sir, but it is important, isn't it?' Her dark eyes were wide. He dimly registered again that she was very pretty, even in her Army uniform. The tunic was belted tight at her waist. Something about her reminded him of Claire.
    'I'm sorry?'
    'I know I shouldn't ask, sir—we're never meant to ask, are we?—but, well, is it? Only no one ever tells us, see? Rubbish, that's all it is to us, just rubbish, rubbish, all day long. And all night, too. You try to go to sleep and you can still hear it—beep-beep-bloody-beep. Drives you barmy after a bit. I joined up, see, volunteered, but it's not what I expected, this place. Can't even tell my mum and dad.' She had come up very close to him. 'You are making sense of it? It is important? I won't tell,' she added, solemnly, 'honest.' 'Yes,' said Jericho. 'We are making sense of it, and it is important. I promise you.'
    She nodded to herself, smiled, looped his scarf around his neck and tied it, then walked slowly out of the storeroom, leaving the door open. He gave it twenty seconds, then followed her. Nobody stopped him as he went out through the hut and into the rain.

4

    Heaviside didn't want them to leave. Jericho tried feebly to protest—the light was bad, he said, they had a long journey ahead, they had to beat the blackout -but Heaviside was horrified. He insisted, insisted they at least take a look at the direction finders and the highspeed Morse receivers. He was so enthusiastic, he looked as though he might burst into tears if they said no. And so they trailed meekly after him across the slick wet concrete, first to a row of wooden huts dressed up to look like a stable block and then to another fake cottage.
    The chorus of the aerial farm sang weirdly in the background, Heaviside became increasingly excited describing abstruse technicalities of wavelength and frequency, Hester pretended heroically to be interested and carefully avoided meeting Jericho's eye, and all the time Jericho walked around unhearing, in a cocoon of anxiety, nerved for the distant sounds of discovery and alarm. Never had he been more desperate to get away from anywhere. From time to time his hand stole into his inside coat pocket, and once he left it there, reassured to feel the roughness of the intercepts safely between his fingers, until he realised he was doing a passable impersonation of Napoleon, whereupon he promptly snatched it out again.
    As for Heaviside, such was his pride in