Chapter 63

Beth? ” Mrs. Knox blinked in surprise, opening the door. “What on earth—child, you’re white as a sheet. ”

“I’m sorry to disturb you. ” Beth felt the folder under her cardigan nearly burning through her blouse. “I need to get into Dilly’s study. ”

Thank God Mrs. Knox was a woman accustomed to not asking questions. She led Beth inside, toward the library. It was nearly dark; when she switched on the lamp, the pool of yellow light threw shadows like gargoyles across the shelves of books. Beth looked at the cracked leather armchair where Dilly had so often sat, and nearly wept. Dilly, why did you have to die? It all would have been easy if he were alive. He’d have known what to do with the dynamite she’d decrypted.

But Dilly had been resting in his grave since last February, and Beth was on her own.

As soon as Mrs. Knox departed, Beth flung herself at Dilly’s desk. He’d kept the key on his watch chain for as long as Beth had known him; where was it now? She gave a sob of relief when her frantic fingers sifted through the piles of old paper and found a familiar small brass key. She went to the panel in the wall and swung it out on its invisible hinge to reveal the safe. A turn of the key, and it opened—empty.

Slipping the folder of Rose-ciphered messages out of her cardigan, Beth hesitated. Most of them were still unbroken—she was tempted to take over Dilly’s desk and see if she could crack any more. But time was slipping away, and she had to be back at BP by midnight. She looked at the first report, the only one she’d broken. The beginning was garbled and hadn’t come out, but the message’s middle lines in English were clear. She already had them memorized.

—possibility is intriguing, but for now we have our own methods. Please convey our thanks to your source inside ISK and assure our continued interest in any further information. The usual compensation.

There was some sort of code name as a signature, a word Beth didn’t know. That wasn’t the part that had frozen her to her marrow when she read it.

Your source inside ISK.

These weren’t just dummy messages. Someone inside Bletchley Park had been passing information. . . and given the age of this traffic, they’d been doing it since ’42.

“Did you suspect? ” she whispered aloud, looking at Dilly’s chair. But her simulacrum was silent tonight. Surely he hadn’t realized—if the secrecy of Bletchley Park was compromised, the Rose cipher would have been assigned its own section, not left to a dying man in his private library. No, Dilly had only taken it on because Rose was different, interesting, an anomaly. His last puzzle.

My puzzle now, Beth thought, and locked the folder away, closing the wall panel over the safe. If something as secret as Enigma decrypts had to be taken off Park property, at least the Knox safe had already been approved as a secure location. Beth didn’t dare take it back to Aspley Guise, and she couldn’t leave it at ISK, either.

Someone there was a traitor.

Who? she thought in a twist of utter wretchedness—because they were precious to her, every single one. Peggy, who had taught her how to rod; Giles, who said she was the best cryptanalyst he’d ever seen and didn’t sound resentful admitting it; Jean and Claire and Phyllida and all the rest of Dilly’s team who had worked with her on the Matapan crisis. . . one of them was selling information from Bletchley Park?

The usual compensation.

Beth’s stomach churned sickly.

She looked at the safe’s key, then slipped it into her pocket. Dilly had often joked that he really should have more than one safe key; if he ever lost this one he’d be up the spout. The Rose file could sit there until Beth could bring it to Commander Travis, whenever that might be. If he won’t see me tonight, then he’ll see me the hour the invasion is over, for better or worse. No later. Beth didn’t care if she had to hack her way into his office with a fire ax; he was going to give her a hearing.

“Finished, dear? ” Mrs. Knox asked as Beth slipped out of the library.

“Yes. Please don’t tell anyone I was here. I left something in the library. . . don’t look for it. ”

“Of course not. ” Dilly’s wife looked unfazed.

Beth hesitated, then reached out and gave Olive Knox a hard, brief hug. “Thank you. ”

Mrs. Knox’s elderly man-of-all-work nodded at Beth as she came out to the front drive. “Where to, miss? I’m to give you a lift. ”

Beth was about to say Bletchley Park, but a familiar dull ache had bloomed low in her belly, and she felt a dampness on the back of her skirt—her monthly had begun. If she was going to be working a double shift starting midnight, then she’d need a sanitary towel. “Aspley Guise, ” Beth told the driver, and battled a wave of utter weariness. How much she hated being a woman sometimes: underpaid and underestimated and betrayed by your own body. She wanted to storm into BP and shout at the top of her lungs that they had a traitor, damn it, and everyone had better listen—but would they listen to a woman with blood on her skirt? So many men seemed to think women were crazy when they were bleeding.

She dragged herself up the stairs at Aspley Guise, fighting off the cold waves of suspicion as her mind turned from one ISK colleague to another—It can’t be you—Could it be you? —How could it be you! —and let herself into her shared room. Osla was at the washstand scrubbing her face, and Boots looked up from his basket with a yawn. “Beth, ” Osla greeted her, “is something going on? I had a telephone call, something about Mab and Coventry. . . ”

Beth was rummaging for her little bin of sanitary supplies, but she straightened with a sudden surge of nerves. “Coventry? ”

“I couldn’t really make sense of it—”

Mab stalked into the bedroom that she had once shared with the two of them, and not set foot in since her husband and daughter had died. Beth turned, barely in time to notice Mab’s blazing eyes before her friend struck her savagely across the face.

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