The Messenger Bird Page 9

  “This one’s called Phoenix,” said Josh. “Look, it says so on that wooden plaque.”

  “A mythical bird rising from the ashes,” said Percy dramatically.

  I didn’t think the machine looked anything like a phoenix. It was an eagle we needed anyway.

  “The Bombe machine did an automatic search to find all the Enigma rotor settings,” said Josh excitedly. “So the Bletchley people could work out the enemy messages.”

  “Knows his stuff, this chap does,” Percy said, making Josh blush and grin even more. “Alan Turing was the fella that designed it, building on an originally Polish idea.” He pointed out a statue at the other side of the hall of a man sitting working. “That’s him there. Clever chap, that one, too.”

  “Here’s an Enigma Machine!” Josh called from a nearby glass display case. “We need to know about this, don’t we, Nathan? You know, for our school project.”

  I nodded at him, but I couldn’t help thinking we were getting sidetracked. Actually I was itching to ask Percy straight about the lion eagle clue. He didn’t look corrupt, but how could you tell? And even if we could trust him, he might start spouting at the top of his voice and who knew who might be listening round a corner. No, that would have been way too risky. I jut hoped Josh wouldn’t put his foot in it.

  “An Enigma Machine, that’s right,” said Percy, going over and clearing his throat. “One of several captured from the enemy. I’m sure you know it was used by the Nazis to send secret messages.”

  “What I want to know is how did they keep what they were doing so secret here at Bletchley Park?” asked Josh. He was starting to take the school project cover a bit far. We didn’t have time for all these questions!

  Percy looked shocked. “Nobody would even dream of talking about the work they did here,” he said. “Not even to their best mates or families. All the workers at Bletchley had to sign the Official Secrets Act before they started.”

  I saw Sasha glance at me. I looked at my feet and chewed my lip. I didn’t want to hear about the Official Secrets Act. It made me think of Dad, and how he’d been accused of breaking it, though that seemed pretty tame compared to what he was accused of now.

  But Percy was on a roll. “Even after the war ended, a lot never let on what they did. Maybe it’s hard for us to understand nowadays, that kind of secrecy – saw that statue of a goose yet, did you?” Josh shook his head. “The geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled, that’s what Churchill said the workers at this place were. Even the people living round about didn’t know what Bletchley was used for.” Percy straightened his back as if he was standing to attention. “Emergency situations call for emergency measures. Imagine if the enemy had got to know about what went on here – it would have made this place top of their list of targets!”

  I shifted from one foot to the other. If the corrupt members of staff knew we were on the trail to Dad’s evidence, we’d be top of their list of targets! We had to get on! Find the lion eagle!

  “Say there was a city that they thought might get bombed.” Josh paused, and I guessed he must be thinking about my hunch that Lily’s dad had worked in Coventry. “Couldn’t the people that lived there leave, just in case?”

  “What – might get bombed? Down tools on a bit of hearsay?” said Percy. “Anywhere might get bombed. There was a war on, remember!”

  I stared into the Enigma Machine case, wondering if I should just ask Percy about the lion eagle after all. I stared at the weird sort of typewriter through the glass. At least it looked like an old typewriter, except it had two keyboards and some extra dials, and wires that plugged into little holes at the front. There were three windows by the dials that had capital letters in them.

  “There are three rotors inside,” Percy was saying. “That’s why there’s three dials.”

  “The dials change the letters in the windows!” said Josh. You could see he was itching to get his hands on it, and would have done, if there wasn’t a box of thick glass all round it.

  “You had to set the three letters right first, before you could do anything,” Percy said. “It was like a password, you might say, to start things off. The key, it was called…”

  Sasha nudged me with her elbow. “Three letters!” she hissed. “Like the lists in Lily’s notebook.”

  I nodded. The keys for decoding Enigma messages, were they? It still didn’t make much sense.

  “Now, there would originally have been five rotating dial wheels to choose from,” Percy went on. “That’s sixty possible ways to set those for starters, and then there are plugs at the front that can be slotted in different positions…”

  Josh was hanging on his every word.

  Sasha pulled me to the side. “OK,” she whispered. “This might help us with the Lily story, but what about the lion eagle clue?”

  “So how does the electromechanical rotor work exactly?” we heard Josh say to Percy.

  I turned back to Sasha. “Just what I was thinking,” I said anxiously. I checked my watch. I tried to catch Josh’s attention but he was in full swing.

  “The keys were changed at midnight every single day by the enemy,” he read out loud from a display on the wall, “so the race was always on at Bletchley to find the day’s key. Did they break all the codes, then?”

  “Most of the codes did get broken,” said Percy. “But if they couldn’t get the key for a certain day, the code was called a dead duck and none of the messages could be solved…”

  “Oh no!” gasped Josh.

  “That’s the way it was sometimes, though,” continued Percy. “Rarely, but sometimes. But they were a determined bunch here at BP! They wouldn’t give up easily. Kept hopeful, they did. Where would we be without hope?”

  “Do you know anything about someone called Lily Kenley?”

  Josh clamped his hand over his mouth as soon as he’d said it. He looked terrified and Sasha scowled at him.

  “Sorry,” he muttered to me through one side of his mouth.

  But I guess I was too worried about Monday to be that cross with him. Too worried about time ticking away and us getting nowhere. And I did want to know about Lily. Maybe knowing more about her would help us with her clue. We had nothing else to go on.

  “Kenley?” Percy frowned. “The name rings a bell…”

  “It’s for a school project,” Josh said earnestly, and I had to give him a little smile to stop him looking so worried.

  “Give me a minute. It’s coming back to me.” Percy tapped his forehead. “We’ve heard about a Lilian Kenley. Quite infamous, she was. Thorn in the side of the place. She could have blown everything.”

  We stared at one another. “What do you mean?” said Sasha.

  “Like to keep her quiet, we do,” whispered Percy, doing the drama thing again and tapping his nose. “Unofficial, like. Even after all this time! Follow me.”

  He led us back up the stairs and outside and we crunched along the snowy road and into Hut 8, which we’d passed before.

  “Bit warmer in here,” said Percy, wiping his shoes on the mat.

  We went down a long corridor with all these little rooms to the sides with displays in. I kept my eyes peeled all the way, hoping something would jump out to help me with Lily’s clue. I glimpsed a stuffed pigeon peeping out from a capsule under a little parachute … the cluttered little office where Alan Turing had worked…

  There was a room right at the very end of the hut, and a display board in the far corner, and round the back of the board there were laminated sheets of text stuck in a line with drawing pins. “There you go,” said Percy. “I knew it was here somewhere. Some info for you there. Don’t know what happened to the last card, though.”

  He looked around the floor and you could tell he was annoyed with the lack of organization. “Must have dropped off. Or someone was messing. I’ll have to see to that.”

  Me and Sasha and Josh crowded round the board and I felt my eyes go wide. BP’s Terrible Secret, said the title on the f
irst laminated sheet. The Traitor of Hut 6. There was a black and white photo by the text, and it was small and blurry, but it was definitely the same woman in the photo back home, definitely Lily, or Lilian, or whoever she was. I started to read fast. Accused of stealing an Enigma Machine, and found with top-secret papers, Miss Lilian Kenley was arrested in December, 1940, and imprisoned awaiting trial…

  “Nathan!” Sasha gasped as she read it too, and I felt Josh grip my shoulder.

  Her story’s like your dad’s, a voice whispered in my head.

  Mum’s words came back to me. One morning Lily was gone.

  I carried on reading.

  …Stunned colleagues described Kenley as a quiet, hard-working woman who often volunteered extra shifts, which her superiors later forbade at risk of exhaustion and mistakes. Her landlady, Ethel Vane …

  Ethel Vane! Auntie Hilda’s mum!

  … described her as seldom in the house the days before her arrest, her whereabouts not known.

  The Enigma Machine was never recovered. It was assumed it had been returned to the enemy, although she would never say what happened to it. She refused, in fact, to speak at all. After her arrest…

  That’s where the text ran out.

  “Strange, though,” commented Percy, studying the cards. “If it was lots of money she was after, why not just tell the Nazis about BP so they could come and bomb it to the ground?” He shrugged. “Still all a bit of a mystery, that whole business, and not something we want to draw too much attention to, you can understand. A security breach on that scale would be extremely damaging for the reputation…”

  There was the noise of kids running about and loud laughing, and we saw a flash of green uniforms at the other end of the room.

  “So what happened to her?” I asked over the din, the question catching in my throat.

  “Eh?” Percy was looking at the kids, his eyes like a radar. “Excuse me, would you?”

  “Wait! Percy!” I had to know what happened to Lily, but Percy was off, homing in on the rowdy kids like a sheepdog or something.

  We hung around a bit, but he didn’t appear, so we made our way back through the hut, checking the displays in the little side rooms, and we were just about to give up and go somewhere else when a small board caught my eye. The truth behind the myth, the title said. Bletchley Park and the Coventry Blitz.

  I called to the others, “Look at this,” and we huddled together as I read it out.

  It talked about how Bletchley Park knew the Moonlight Sonata raid was coming; how they’d been working round the clock trying to find out which city was the target…

  I was about to read on when a voice came from beside us. “That’s a very controversial story.” I flinched sideways.

  A woman was standing next to us. She pushed some blonde curls under her black hat, which was speckled with silver sequins, and her feathery earrings swayed about. She laughed, a tinkling kind of laugh. “Some people still think that Churchill knew the target was Coventry but pretended not to, although I expect Percy would put them straight about that!”

  I looked at her. The long sheepskin coat and black Wellington boots. She didn’t look like a corrupt member of staff any more than Percy did, but still. “You know something about the Coventry Blitz?” I asked, keeping my guard up.

  She gave me a warm smile. “Bits and pieces. I’m studying for my history PhD.” You could see Josh was impressed. She tossed her lime green scarf over one shoulder. “I’m Rose, by the way. Hello.”

  She tapped the display board gently with the tip of a bright pink umbrella. “Shame the information’s so limited.” She adjusted the poppy pinned on her coat and clicked the top button of her jacket ready to leave, then looked at us sideways. “You’re keen historians, are you?”

  “When it’s for a school project,” Josh said earnestly.

  Rose laughed a friendly laugh. “Well, let me think. There’d probably be more information in the archives room. I’m a bit pressed for time, but … I could take you there if you like?”

  We all trooped off, making trails across the snow. Sasha wasn’t saying much, but I felt a fizz of excitement. The archives room – there was bound to be loads of useful stuff in there! Maybe, just maybe, there could be what we needed to solve the lion eagle clue.

  We got to the door of the archives building and Rose grinned. “Best not let that Percy see us in here – he’ll only be jealous!” She had a special pass in a flip-out plastic wallet with an emblem of an anchor or something on it, and the woman on the front desk shifted up her glasses when she saw it and waved us straight through.

  Rose smiled at us and we walked down a very long corridor that seemed to go on for ever.

  We stopped at a door and she stamped the melting snow from her boots and slipped them off. “Welcome to my office!” she said, waving us in. “Not bad, is it? Yeah, I come in here quite a lot. Have to even do the night shift sometimes. I’ve this crazy deadline!”

  I knew that feeling.

  Rose opened and closed a few drawers and took out a packet of custard creams. “Grab a few of those,” she said, dumping them on the desk. She sunk her teeth into a biscuit and started opening filing cabinets, then slamming them shut.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea, Nathan?” Sasha said to me out of the corner of her mouth. “How do we know we can trust her?”

  “She seems OK,” I said. “A bit weird, maybe. But we haven’t exactly told her much.”

  Josh chomped the top off a custard cream and Sasha pulled a face at me.

  Rose wrenched open a drawer and started rifling through it. “I love research! Bit of a treasure hunt, isn’t it? Let’s see.”

  Sasha fidgeted in her seat, then looked at me, frowning and tapping her watch with a finger. She was right. I looked at the rows and rows of metal filing cabinets, and the shelves going up to the ceiling. Where would you even start in a place like this? My hopes about the archives room started fading fast. This was all taking way too long.

  Rose slammed one drawer shut and opened another.

  “Where’s the Coventry Blitz information, then?” Sasha asked impatiently.

  “Ah, top secret and classified, that is,” Rose said. “I can tell you, but I’d have to kill you afterwards!”

  We all laughed. All except Sasha.

  “Thing is, Rose,” said Sasha, out of patience, “we have to go soon, so if you can just show us the stuff about Coventry, please.”

  “Course!” she cooed. Rose waggled a couple of files from the drawers and slapped them down on the table. “You have a look at that, Sash, and there’s one for you, Joshua my lad. One’s about the Blitz and the other has copies of all the displays in Bletchley!”

  Josh beamed and started looking through a chunky file with a thick elastic band round it, stamped:

  COVENTRY BLITZ: THE MOONLIGHT SONATA RAID

  Rose’s mobile phone rang. She flashed us an apologetic smile and padded out of the room in her socks to answer it.

  “Nathan!” Sasha hissed. “Why are we wasting so much time here?”

  “We’re trying to find out what lion eagle means!” I whispered back. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Course I do,” grumped Sasha. Her shoulders twitched. “Pass me that silly file, then!” I shoved over Master copies of displayed texts and she opened up the cover. “Let’s get to work! Anything lion eagle.”

  Rose came back looking hassled. “PhD supervisors!” she said, pulling her boots from under the table. “I’ve got to shoot off. Get back to uni. Listen, I had a word with the lady on the desk and you can stay longer in here if you want.” She wagged a finger at us. “No touching anything else, though, OK?” she said firmly, giving us a look. Then she fluttered her fingers in a wave and left.

  I jumped up and rushed out after her. “Rose, I just wanted to ask you…”

  But the long corridor was empty. Funny. She moved fast. I went back in and closed the door.

  Sasha slapped over a page of her f
ile. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be trusting anyone, Nathan! But first Percy, now this Rose woman!” She stood up and went over to a filing cabinet and opened a drawer.

  “What are you doing?” said Josh, pulling on the strings of his hood with alarm. “Rose said we couldn’t…”

  “Shhh!” Sasha shut the drawer with a bang. Then she went round the back of Josh, whipped the Coventry file from off the table and shoved it under her coat.

  “You can’t!” protested Josh.

  “I just did!” Sasha’s face was flushed, triumphant. “Besides, I’m just borrowing it. There’s way too much in there to read now. I’ll give it back.”

  She sat down again and turned the pages of Master copies of displayed texts huffily. “Seriously, though, it could be useful, right, Nathan? You told us you think Lily’s dad was living in Coventry, and that Lily was trying to find out if that was the target of the raid. Or do you prefer to ask Rose all about it?”

  “But she can’t just take it, Nathan,” Josh fretted. “They might notice it’s missing. They might know it was us and…”

  “Nathan.” Sasha pulled out a page from her file and touched my shoulder lightly. All the moodiness had gone out of her voice. “I found it. A copy of that missing card. From that display board about Lily.”

  “What?” I lurched up. “Let me see.”

  She fingered one corner of the sheet, bending it. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.” My mouth felt all dry like feathers. I did want to know, course I did, but… That stuff about her in prison, about her being charged with stealing secrets…

  “Maybe you shouldn’t look,” said Sasha, holding the card away from me. “It’s not good news.”

  I stood up. “Please, Sash!”

  She sighed, then handed the card over, and I started to read.

  …Kenley died in prison after only a few days… I stopped and let out a gasp. I read on, the other words coming in snatches … weak heart … despite efforts to resuscitate her… I saw Dad, an old man on the floor of a cell… Always known as the Traitor of Bletchley Park… Traitor…