Twenty minutes later, Jack sat back, having told Louise about their dive off Sierra Leone. On the coffee table were two large photographs of the wreck, one showing the ship’s name painted below the bow, the other the gaping hole caused by the torpedo explosion. He had not yet shown her the intact British torpedo that had been resting inside the hull, or the gold. He was still feeling for what she might know, and did not want to press her too far.
She had been mesmerized by the images. “Fascinating. You know, I’m glad my friend Fan won’t be seeing these. She felt personally responsible for the men lost in that convoy.”
Jack looked up from the pictures. This was what he had wanted to hear. “Was she also at Bletchley?”
“We called it the special operations hut. Commander Ian Bermonsey.”
“You worked together?” Jack said cautiously.
Louise shook her head. “Not exactly. We were in digs together, though. Fan always thought I did something frightfully mysterious, but really all I did was what I told her, supervising the Wrens operating one of the bombes. It was stinking, dirty, noisy work. Computers then were not like they are now. Not the obvious thing for a cosseted girl like me, but we all got on with what we were told to do. There was a war on.”
“So Fan was more the mathematician of the two of you?”
“Not at all. We both had first-class degrees. To some extent it was luck of the draw where they put you in Bletchley. They wanted clever people everywhere, even oiling the bombe. But Fan was exceptional, a really clever statistician. And she’d had an actual job before the war, teaching math at a school. I’d gone back into London society after Cambridge and was in danger of becoming a flibbertigibbet. Really, Bletchley was the best thing that could have happened to me. You could say I drew the short straw getting the bombe, but mucking in with the Wrens was probably just what I needed.”
“Do you remember the thirtieth of April 1943, when Clan Macpherson went down?”
“I remember it well. It was cold, unseasonably so. Summer wasn’t yet in sight. Fan came back to our digs that evening terribly upset about something, but of course she couldn’t talk about it. I knew that her hut was where the decrypts were put into action, as it were, sent down the line to the Admiralty. Maybe they’d tried but failed to reroute a convoy. There were two battles that night, I remember, one in the mid-Atlantic and one off West Africa. Later I saw on her bedside table that she’d copied down the names of the ships lost in that West African convoy, and had underlined Clan Macpherson. I’d never seen Fan cry before. It was odd. She was usually so tough. I suppose we all have a breaking point. It never happened again.”
Jeremy opened the tablet computer he had brought in with him. “Have you got wireless in this place?”
“Wouldn’t have allowed them to move me here if they hadn’t.”
“Okay. I’ve got the stats here for the two convoys that night. ONS-5, the mid-Atlantic one, Liverpool to Halifax, forty-two ships and sixteen escorts, with a total of forty-three U-boats in two patrol lines arraigned against them. The ensuing week-long battle saw thirteen merchant ships sunk against seven U-boats destroyed and six damaged. The African convoy was TS-37, Takoradi to Sierra Leone, a fairly short hop on the West African route from Cape Town to the UK. Seven merchant ships sunk by U-515, one of the biggest tallies of the war for a solo U-boat attack. No U-boat losses.”
Jack thought for a moment. “The evening of the thirtieth of April, when Fan came back distressed, was before these losses had actually been incurred. Maybe she was upset because she knew a decision had been made not to act on the Ultra decrypts that day. I can see why that decision might have been made for ONS-5. The S designation means that it was a slow convoy, and altering course would have been a long-winded business. Even if Bletchley did have decrypts showing the position of U-boats, with over forty boats out there they might have been redirecting the convoy straight into another line of U-boats.”
“Think about the overall context, too,” Jeremy said. “The escort corvettes by that point had become very proficient at killing U-boats. Dönitz’s fleet was already losing more boats than could be replaced. As the Bletchley intelligence people might have anticipated, the ONS-5 battle was hard-fought, with bad losses, but turned out to be one of the decisive battles of the war.”
“You’re saying they wanted that battle to happen,” Costas interjected. “That the merchant ship losses in ONS-5 were a price worth paying to bring the navy and the U-boats together. If she knew about that, no wonder the girl was upset.”
“It’s harder to explain a decision not to save the other convoy, the one with Clan Macpherson, TS-37,” Jack said. “A single U-boat, a distant route off the main battle area that had rarely been hit. Given that, you might have thought it was safe enough for a decrypt to be acted upon without exciting German suspicion.”
“Maybe they didn’t have an Ultra signal showing the position of U-515 clearly enough,” Jeremy said. “Maybe her captain was on silent patrol, lurking. Sometimes U-boat captains did that when they didn’t want to be reined in by Dönitz. I’ve been reading a lot about it over the past few days.”
Jack pursed his lips. “I’d agree with you, except that the girl appears to have been specifically upset about that West African convoy and Clan Macpherson, suggesting that they could have rerouted that convoy too.”
While they were talking, Louise had been struggling to reach a framed group photo on her windowsill. Jeremy quickly got up to help her, placing it on the table so they could all see. “There,” she said. “That’s the only picture I’ve got from Bletchley. Actually, it’s not at Bletchley, as hardly any photos were taken there, but it shows a group of Bletchley cryptographers just after the war back at Cambridge, members of a chess club. Those were some of our chaps.”
“Seems a fairly unlikely-looking bunch for a girl like you,” Jeremy said, pushing up his glasses and sweeping back his hair. “I mean, romantically speaking.”
Costas peered at the picture and then inspected him. “You should talk. The only thing missing is a bow tie. Otherwise you’d fit in perfectly.”
“You’d be surprised,” Louise said, pointing at the photo. “That one there could really do the business, once you showed him the ropes. He became my husband.”
“Ah,” Jeremy said.
“You never took his name?” Jack asked.
“Too independent for that. Also, my postwar job. You couldn’t show you were married for risk of being compromised. I can’t really talk about it.”
“Understood. We don’t want you to say more than you’re comfortable with.”
“Jeremy’s right, though,” she went on. “Before the Americans arrived, it was a question of going with what you’d got. The cryptographers could be pretty awkward, but then the alternative was those poor men in uniform who’d been wounded or traumatized, burned-out submariners, that kind of thing. Bermonsey had been one of those.”
“Did you know him personally?” Jack asked.
“I invited him for a drink in the pub near our billets soon after he arrived, in early autumn of ’42, I think. I’d known his sister before the war in London, and she asked me to look out for him. He was very nervy, wouldn’t talk much. By that stage we’d been at war for three years, and there were a lot of men like that. It sounds harsh, but that’s why the arrival of the Americans was such a breath of fresh air for us girls.”
“Did Fan ever talk about him?”