Enigma

possible. Likely, in fact, knowing Miles. Yes, yes of course.' Hester turned round to face him. 'I see what you're driving at. In the time between Miles being told to pull the plug and the order reaching Beaumanor, four more messages had been intercepted.'
    'Exactly. Which came into Hut 6 late on the night of the 4th. But by then the order had already been issued that they weren't to be decoded.'
    'So they just got caught up in the bureaucracy and were passed along the line.'
    'Until they ended up in the German Book Room.'
    'In front of Claire.'
    'Undecrypted.'
    Jericho nodded slowly. Undecrypted. That was the crucial point. That explained why the signals in Claire's bedroom had showed no signs of damage. There had never been any strips of Type-X decode gummed to their backs. They had never been broken.
    He peered into the wood but he didn't see trees, he saw the German Book Room on the morning after the night of 4 March, when the cryptograms would have arrived to be filed and indexed.
    Would Miss Monk herself have rung the Hut 6 duty officer, or would she have delegated the task to one of her girls? 'We've got four orphan intercepts here, without the solutions. What, pray, are we supposed to do with them?' And the reply would have been—what?
    Oh, Christ! File them? Forget them? Dump them in the bin marked CONFIDENTIAL WASTE?
    Only none of those things had happened.
    Claire had stolen them instead.
    'In theory?' Weitzman had said. ' On an average day? A girl like Claire would probably see more operational detail about the German armedl forces than Adolf Hitler. Absurd, isn't it?'
    Ah, but they weren't supposed to read it, Walter, that was the point. Well-bred young ladies wouldn't dream of reading someone else's mail, unless they were told to do so for King and country. They certainly wouldn't read it for themselves. That was the reason why Bletchley employed them.
    But what was it Miss Monk had said of Claire? 'She'd really become much more attentive of late . . .' Naturally she had. She had begun to read what was passing through her hands. And at the end of February or the beginning of March she had seen something that had changed her life. Something to do with a German rear-echelon signals unit whose wireless operator played Morse code to the Gestapo as if it were a Mozart sonata. Something so utterly 'un-boring, darling', that when Bletchley had decided they couldn't bear to read the traffic any more, she had felt compelled to steal the last four intercepts herself.
    And why had she stolen them?
    He didn't even need to pose the question. Hester had reached the answer ahead of him, although her voice was faint and disbelieving and almost drowned out by the rain.
    'She stole them to read them.'
    She stole them to read them. The answer slid beneath the random pattern of events and fitted it like a crib.
    She stole the cryptograms to read them.
    'But is it really feasible?' asked Hester. She seemed bewildered by the destination to which her logic had led her. 'I mean, could she really have done it?'
    'Yes. It's possible. Hard to imagine. Possible.'
    Oh, the nerve of it, thought Jericho. Oh, the sheer breathtaking bloody nerve of it, the cool deliberation with which she must have plotted it. Claire, my darling, you really are a wonder.
    'But she couldn't have managed it on her own,' he said, 'not locked away at the back of Hut 3. She'd have needed help.'
    'Who?'
    He raised his hands from the steering wheel in a hopeless gesture. It was hard to know where to begin. 'Someone with access to Hut 6 for a start. Someone who could look up the Enigma settings for German Army key Vulture on March the 4th.'
    'Settings?'
    He glanced at her in surprise, then realised that the actual workings of an Enigma was not the sort of information she would have needed to know. And in Bletchley, what you didn't need to know you were never told.
    'Walzenlage,' he said. ' Ringstellung. Stecker-verbindungen. Wheel order, ring setting and cross-plugging. If Vulture was being read every day, they'd already have had those in Hut 6.'
    'Then what would you have had to do?'
    'Get access to a Type-X machine. Set it up in exactly the right way. Type in the cryptograms and tear off the plaintext.'
    'Could Claire have done that?'
    'Almost certainly not. She'd never have been allowed anywhere near the decoding room. And anyway she wasn't trained.'
    'So her accomplice would have needed some skill?'
    'Skill, yes. Arid nerve. And time, come to that. Four