She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I can be of any help, I’m afraid. I inherited all of Thomas’s belongings. I know there were no notebooks or journals, anything like that, among his effects. But there are quite a lot of regular gardening-related books in the guest room. That’s about all in the way of reading matter.’
‘Would it be terribly rude of me to ask to see them – the books?’
Jennifer shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’ She got up from her chair. ‘They’re in here,’ she said, gesturing to a partially open door to her right.
Kingston followed her into a small bedroom. It was light and airy and smelled of freshly ironed sheets. Built into each side of the leaded casement window were two symmetrical tiers of white-painted shelves, each filled with orderly rows of tightly packed books. As Kingston walked over to examine the small library, an oval framed photo standing on the marble-topped bedside table caught his eye. ‘May I look at this picture?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she answered.
He walked over, picked it up and studied it.
‘That’s Thomas, when he was in the army,’ Jennifer said. ‘That one, over there on the chest, is of him and his wife, Cathy. She died several years before Thomas.’
Kingston examined the grainy black and white army photograph. It was of an unsmiling slim-faced man with a dark bushy moustache. He was in a jaunty pose, holding a pipe to his mouth. The three pips on each epaulette of his uniform indicated the rank of captain. Kingston couldn’t quite make out the regimental badge in the centre of his peaked cap. ‘What regiment was he in?’ he asked, casually.
‘You know, I’m not really sure. That was a long time ago. I don’t recall Thomas ever saying much about his army days – or the war. Probably, like a lot of servicemen, he preferred to forget about those terrible times.’
Kingston placed the photograph back on the table.
‘There’s some more pictures in here,’ she said, opening the lid of a pine blanket chest at the foot of the bed. She handed him two leather-bound photo albums. Placing one of them on the bed, he started to leaf through the other. Most of the black and white photos were typical family snapshots. Two boys, pictured at different ages, appeared in a number of the photos. ‘One of these little boys is your uncle, I take it?’
‘Yes, Thomas, the smaller one. His brother Adrian was two years older. He was in the RAF.’
‘Handsome lads,’ said Kingston, closing the first album.
Four pages into the second album, which was more up-to-date than the first, his eyes came to rest on a large sepia photo. It was an informal group photo depicting a dozen smiling men, a few in military uniform but most in civilian clothes. With Captain Farrow’s bushy moustache, Kingston had no difficulty identifying him. Glancing down to the caption below, he saw Farrow’s name. Kingston scanned the photo, his index finger tracing the row of names. His finger stopped. There he was, fifth from the right, Major Jeffrey Cooke. Printed under the caption were the words: Bletchley Park, Hut 8. 1943.
‘Bletchley Park,’ he murmured. He held the album in both hands and stood staring at the rivulets of rain dribbling down the windowpane in front of him. ‘I was right,’ he said under his breath.
‘Did you find something?’ Jennifer asked.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he said, closing the album and handing it back to Jennifer. ‘Something most interesting.’
When Kingston arrived at The Parsonage later that afternoon, Kate greeted him at the front door wearing a flour-dusted apron.
‘You’re in luck, Lawrence,’ she announced, ‘I’m testing a new recipe for osso buco.’
His blue eyes opened wide. ‘Splendid,’ he said.
Kate was surprised to see that he was gripping a small holdall. Surely she’d made it clear that the invitation was just for dinner? It certainly wouldn’t have been like Alex to suggest an overnight stay. She shrugged it off – there had to be an explanation. ‘Come on in,’ she said with a smile. ‘You’ll find Alex on the terrace. I’ll come out in a minute and fix you both a drink.’
A couple of hours later at the dining table, Kate and Alex sat listening to Kingston’s long-winded discourse. For the most part, they ate in silence, occasionally stealing a knowing glance or smile at each other as Kingston described every detail of his afternoon with Jennifer Farrow.
Now, over strawberries and clotted cream, he was explaining the significance of the Bletchley Park, Hut 8 caption.
‘Early in World War II, a top-secret team of British code breakers set up shop at an old Victorian manor in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park. Station X, it was dubbed. Their objective was to break seemingly unbreakable German military codes. If they could crack them, they would be able to target German supply shipments, eavesdrop on Luftwaffe activities, and most important, locate and destroy the U-boats that were playing havoc with Allied convoys.’
‘Somebody wrote a novel about it, I believe,’ Kate remarked.
Kingston nodded. ‘Enigma. Damned good one, too.’ He polished off the last strawberry and took a sip of the dessert wine. ‘The coded messages were transmitted daily on a code-making machine the Germans called Enigma,’ he said. ‘It was a devilishly clever contraption capable of scrambling messages in an astronomical number of ways. To make things even more difficult, the Jerries changed the wiring set-up for their transmitters and receivers daily. So the messages intercepted by our lads were utter gibberish.’
‘The odds against anyone breaking the code must have been staggering,’ said Kate.
‘I’m told that, for anyone who didn’t know the machine settings, the odds were a hundred and fifty million million million to one,’ Kingston replied.
Kate whistled.
‘I read somewhere that it supposedly pioneered the age of the computer,’ said Alex.
‘That was actually the contraption our chaps developed to decipher the codes sent on the Enigma. It was called Colossus. And you’re right, Alex, it’s believed to be the world’s first programmable electronic computer.’
‘Those chaps must have been awfully clever,’ said Kate.
‘Sheer genius is more like it. Helped by counter-espionage and a bit of luck here and there.’
‘How did they find all these geniuses at such short notice?’ asked Alex.
‘At the beginning it was quite a motley group. A lot of them were cryptic crossword puzzle whizzes – mostly The Times and the Telegraph, I believe. There were chess masters, mathematicians, all kinds of intellectuals. One was a rare book dealer, apparently. People with eidetic minds,’ Kingston added.
Kate had never heard of the word. She reminded herself to look it up later.
‘What was amazing,’ Kingston continued, ‘was that they were all sworn to absolute secrecy – not only at the time but for some thirty years after the end of the war. Churchill described it as “his goose that laid the golden egg but never cackled”.’
‘Where on earth did you learn all this, Lawrence?’ asked Alex.
‘At Bletchley Park. After seeing Jennifer, I stopped off there. It’s a museum now, run by a charitable trust – the grounds are lovely. You should go up there sometime.’
‘I think we will, when this rose business is over,’ said Kate.
There was a pause in the conversation while she stacked the dessert plates and placed them to one side. She smoothed the tablecloth in front of her and looked at Kingston. ‘So, Lawrence, your theory is that since we now know that Major Cooke and Captain Farrow were part of the secret team at Bletchley, it’s almost certain that, one way or another, they were familiar with cryptography. Is that the right word?’
‘Yes, it is. And yes, that’s right, Kate,’ Kingston replied. ‘It’s quite plausible that they would have known of the Enigma programme. Which means,’ he said, picking up his glass and gently swirling the last drops of wine, ‘that instead of inventing a code for their horticultural experiments, they simply used an existing code. Perhaps one of the more fundamental ones. Impossible for most people to decipher, but a piece of cake for any former Bletchley cryptographer.’