‘How’s Brian?’ she asked.
‘Shivering in Trondheim.’
Which could mean frying in Tangiers or sitting downstairs at a desk: his once-temporary transfer to SIS had long ago turned permanent. He had never attempted to be Carl’s father, which was just as welclass="underline" everyone knew that Carl had been sired by Jack Woods, Lieutenant RN, deceased.
For spinster read widow.
‘I wondered’ – with her, Rupert rarely spun things out – ‘whether you had seen much of AMT lately.’
His voice sounded languid, but the signals he transmitted were always what he wanted others to read. The real Rupert Forrester was buttoned up inside; she wondered if Brian ever saw that man.
‘I’ve been to Manchester a few times,’ she said. ‘The Colossus there, even the Pilot ACE, are far behind the Eastcote setup, but we’re starting to struggle. You know that the Americans are going to dominate the computer world if you don’t let civilian BP veterans talk about it. In a couple of years, we’ll have lost our lead. Plus,’ she added, ‘we need Alan full time, not the short-term visits he’s been putting in.’
Turing had been GCHQ’s chief liaison to the Americans.
‘You’re singing to the choir, Gabby. Our lords and masters don’t agree.’
‘Right. And?’
‘And what, precisely?’
‘Come on, Rupert. It’s a travesty. Alan’s no security risk. He was totally open with the police when he reported the theft. That’s how his homosexuality landed him in court, but that’s precisely why he was never open to blackmail in the first place.’
Unspoken: Rupert of all people had to sympathize.
‘Men like … Alan,’ he said, ‘are accepted more than ever these days, by ordinary people, though that’s not saying much. Accepted by men who served alongside queers in the war.’
The pejorative had an ugly tone in his mouth, immediately covered up.
‘But there’s paranoia blowing through the corridors of Whitehall’ – he gestured at the door – ‘and he damn well should have known better, the stupid bastard. I can’t do anything for him.’
‘If you can’t, then who will?’
‘No one, that’s the point. You probably won’t know this, but your senior directors—’
‘Offered him a permanent post,’ she said. ‘Five thousand a year, cheap at the price and academia’s loss. So for God’s sake, why can’t we have him?’
‘Because the world’s insane, which is why you and I have jobs in the first place.’ He stared at the window, and asked it: ‘Have you read Forster?’
‘Captain Hornblower? One of Carl’s favourites.’
‘I meant E.M.’ He faced her again. ‘As you well know. He said he hoped to have the strength to betray his country before his friends. Ignore the abstract in favour of the tangible, I expect he meant.’
‘So I take it RO never considered him,’ she said, meaning the Recruitment Office.
‘Unlikely. I was hoping you’d do a courier job for me. Be my legman.’ He smiled his Etonian smile. ‘Legwoman.’
From a drawer he took a cream-coloured envelope. Only the best stationery for the privileged few.
‘It looks thin,’ she said.
‘There’s a cheque inside, farewell payment for services rendered. Drawn,’ he said, ‘from a slush fund that does not exist as far as the grannies are concerned.’
For grannies read accountants.
‘Made out to whom?’
‘To A. M. Turing, old girl. To the man who did more than any other individual, apart from maybe Winnie, to save this bloody country from the jackboot.’
The envelope was light in her hand.
‘Is there a message to go with that?’
‘Yes.’ Just for a moment, something burned in Rupert’s eyes; then the glacial mantle was back in place. ‘Tell him, we hope he enjoyed his holiday in Norway.’
The Lyons Tea House establishments were ubiquitous, and while Rupert these days would not be seen dead in one, Gavriela rather liked them: warm and moist, with steam escaping from the polished urns, the chatter of young mothers taking their children out for a treat – a glass of orange squash, a soft round doughnut crunchy with sugar – and men of all sorts reading newspapers while they drank their tea. Also, the company had designed and built their own computer, the LEO, operational for the past two years, which made them smart people, or so Gavriela thought.
On her way here, she had seen no mobile spotters; but a watcher already in place would be hard to detect, except by being too good: an absence of vibration from someone who looked capable. She sat waiting and watching, tea in front of her, picking up nothing untoward.
Alan came at the appointed time, bought tea and McVitie’s at the counter, and brought his tray over. His eyes, the same shade of startling blue as Oppenheimer’s, remained fastened on her as he sat, scraping the wooden chair into place.
‘Nice to see you again, Gabby.’
‘Likewise. Have you been following the news from Japan?’
‘Mesons? Yes, interesting, isn’t it?’ With an almost-smile: ‘Even I know you’re not here to talk physics.’ He pulled his jacket down, tight against his chest. ‘What do you think? Am I developing gorgeous teats or what?’
He let go, and his clothing fell normally, making his bust less obvious.
‘God, Alan. I … Oh, God.’
Not calling on the divine, but expressing inarticulate sympathy.
‘Organotherapy, they call it,’ he said. ‘Sounds so scientific, doesn’t it?’
‘Like eugenics.’ She was trying not to cry. ‘And about as palatable.’
People like him had gone to the gas chambers, alongside people like her.
‘Everything is subject to causal laws,’ he said. ‘By definition of being inside the light-cone of creation. Vacuum being weightless, you see, it must expand at lightspeed.’
‘I thought we weren’t going to discuss physics.’
‘I’m just trying to make sense of people.’
‘Talk about lost causes,’ she said. ‘Listen … The message is, hope you enjoyed your holiday in Norway. Spoken by someone who looked like he was chewing a lemon, by the way.’
‘I don’t need a computer to decode that one.’
‘Oh.’
‘The terms of my sentence are quite explicit. If I’m abroad with a friend, outside the borders of this country, certain restrictions on my behaviour do not apply. Except that my body remains filled with oestrogen, not conducive to romance, shall we say.’
‘But it means they’re keeping you under surveillance,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t get the significance.’
She was careful passing the envelope, not knowing who might be watching now.
‘Call it recompense from a friend,’ she added.
Terming it an apology would be insulting. This was bad enough.
‘I saw some runes over there,’ he said.
‘Ruins?’
‘Runes, in Norway. In a museum. Saw a buckle with your name on, like this.’
He took a propelling pencil from his inside pocket, and drew on the envelope:
Gavriela had never studied the archaic symbols, never learned them as far as she could remember; and yet the word made sense.
‘How did you know?’ she said.
She had been Dr Woods, not Wolf, at Bletchley Park.
‘I’ve seen so much. Maybe I really am a security risk, the way they say.’ He slipped the envelope inside his pocket, as if it had been there all along, with his pencil. It was nicely done. ‘I probably won’t see you around, will I?’
‘Probably not.’
She let him go first, then headed for the ladies room. There, stairs led down to a side entrance; she let herself out, walked past a stack of crates, and checked the alleyway. No one expected her to be a field operative; but the annual streetcraft course was mandatory, and her memory of wartime Berlin always made the exercises vivid.
By the time she crossed the High Road and doubled around the block, her expectation had been that Alan would have disappeared. But he had stopped to chat with an Evening Standard vendor under the Tube overhang – KILBURN STATION rendered in white against blue – and as he went inside, just for a moment Gavriela thought she saw a shadow within shadows, a darkness descending to follow her lost friend; but the memory that made her shiver went all the way back to a graveyard in Berlin, to the man who saved her then met her family, but terrified her whenever she remembered.