Chapter 2
TWO
THE MAN IN HUT X
ART
Iwoke to the wrong light.
That was the first sign something had gone badly off course.
The grey seeping through my attic skylight was too bright, too established, the kind of winter morning that had been happening for hours while I'd been lost in dreams I couldn't remember.
My body knew before my mind caught up, that sick lurch of panic that came with the certainty that I'd failed at something fundamental again.
I'd overslept. Third time this week.
The thought propelled me upright so fast the room spun.
Cold air hit my skin like punishment, and I was already cataloguing what I'd done wrong: stayed up too late working through the Tunny intercepts in my head, forgot to wind my alarm clock, got lost in the patterns dancing behind my eyes until exhaustion had dragged me under without permission.
Clothes. I needed clothes.
Yesterday's shirt was draped over the chair where I'd left it.
Not ideal, but finding a clean one would require opening the wardrobe, which would require remembering where I'd put my laundry, which would require executive function I simply did not possess at this hour.
I pulled the shirt on, then trousers, then the cardigan with the hole in the left cuff that I kept meaning to mend.
My tie was still knotted from yesterday, loose enough to slip over my head, which was the only reason I still wore ties at all.
Socks. Where were my socks?
I found a pair under the bed that might have been clean. Might not. I put them on anyway.
Shoes proved more difficult. One had migrated to the corner by the desk, the other was somehow behind the coal stove, and retrieving it required me to crouch in a position that made my back complain.
The whole time, my brain was running calculations: twenty minutes late already, another seven to walk to Hut X, Finch would be making notes in that little book of his, the one where he recorded every infraction like a ledger of sins.
I was halfway to the door, jacket in hand, when the absence registered.
The Black Book.
My fingers went to my jacket pocket before the conscious thought had finished forming. Empty. The pocket was empty. I checked the other side, then the cardigan, then patted down my trousers with increasing desperation. Nothing. The notebook wasn't there.
The room contracted around me.
I couldn't breathe properly. The air was there, I could feel it moving in and out of my lungs, but it wasn't working, wasn't doing what air was supposed to do.
My hands were shaking as I tore through the bedclothes, throwing the pillow across the room, yanking the thin blanket off the mattress.
Not there. Not under the desk. Not on the chair or the windowsill or any of the seventeen places I might have left it.
Where is it where is it where is it.
The words looped in my head, drowning out everything else.
That notebook was mine. Bea had made it for me, had stitched my initials inside with crooked letters, had written for your clever thoughts and secret codes on the first page in her messy hand.
It was where I kept everything I couldn't say aloud, encrypted in systems only I could read.
My fears. My failures. The thoughts about men that could get me imprisoned or worse.
Without it, I was exposed. Unarmoured. Anyone could look at me and see the truth of what I was.
I dropped to my knees and shoved my arm under the bed, fingers scraping against dust and the spines of books I'd forgotten I owned. My vision was narrowing at the edges, that particular tunnel focus that meant I was minutes away from something I couldn't control.
Then I saw it. Wedged between the bed frame and the wall, half-hidden in shadow. It must have fallen while I was writing last night, transcribing my thoughts into cipher because that was the only way they made sense anymore.
I grabbed it. Pressed it against my chest. Closed my eyes and counted backwards from twenty in French because English required too little concentration.
Vingt. Dix-neuf. Dix-huit.
By the time I reached un, my breathing had steadied and the room had stopped trying to crush me. I slipped the notebook into my jacket pocket, felt its weight settle against my ribs like a second heartbeat, and only then could I finish getting ready.
I was going to be catastrophically late.
The walk from my billet to Hut X usually took seven minutes.
I knew this because I'd timed it, because knowing things like that helped me feel less like I was constantly losing track of the world.
I also knew that there were exactly forty-three paving stones on the main path if you counted the broken one near the manor steps, and that the third lamp post from the canteen made a clicking sound when the wind blew from the east.
These were not useful facts. My brain collected them anyway, filing them alongside German naval call signs and the rhythmic quirks of individual Enigma operators, all the patterns that made up the texture of my days.
This morning, I made it in five minutes by walking fast enough to make my lungs burn. The cold air scraped at my throat, and my shoes, not properly laced, threatened to come off with every step.
By the time I pushed through the door of Hut X, I was breathing hard and probably looked like I'd been in a fight with my own wardrobe.
The hut was already full. Rows of desks stretched toward the far wall, occupied by people bent over stacks of paper, fingers moving across typewriter keys, pencils scratching calculations.
The wireless in the corner crackled with static and fragments of intercepted transmissions.
Someone was arguing in low tones near the filing cabinets.
The overhead lights buzzed at 50 hertz, a frequency that always made my teeth itch, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and ink and too many bodies in too small a space pressed against me like a physical weight.
I kept my head down and made for my desk, which was positioned near the window at the back.
Ostensibly for the light, but really because it was as far from the main door as I could get.
Less chance of being startled every time someone came in.
Less chance of people stopping to chat when they passed.
Ruth looked up as I dropped into my chair.
Her dark eyes swept over me once, cataloguing the rumpled shirt, the shadows under my eyes, the way my hands were still trembling slightly.
She didn't comment. Ruth rarely said anything unnecessary, which was one of the many reasons I could tolerate sitting next to her for eighteen hours at a stretch.
“The Scharnhorst intercepts are on your desk,” she said, turning back to her own work. “Morrison tried to crack them this morning. Couldn't find the entry point.”
The Scharnhorst. My stomach tightened at the name.
German battlecruiser, thirty-two thousand tonnes of steel and firepower that had been terrorising Allied convoys in the Arctic for months.
She'd sunk the aircraft carrier Glorious back in 1940, killed over fifteen hundred men in a single engagement.
Every sailor in the Royal Navy knew her silhouette, feared the moment she might appear on the horizon.
And now she was moving again. The Admiralty had been tracking her position for weeks, desperate to catch her in open water before she could slip back into the Norwegian fjords where our bombers couldn't reach her.
If these intercepts contained her patrol routes, her refuelling schedule, her planned engagement zone. ..
“How long did he spend?”
“Three hours.”
I pulled the stack toward me and started scanning.
Morrison was competent enough with the standard Enigma traffic, but he thought in straight lines, following procedures, checking boxes.
He didn't have the instinct for the places where patterns broke, the small irregularities that revealed the human hands behind the machines.
The letters blurred together at first, my tired brain struggling to focus. Then something caught, a familiar rhythm in the call signs, and the world narrowed to the page in front of me.
This was where I belonged. In the space between chaos and meaning, where encrypted secrets became intelligence that could save lives or end them. Here, my brain stopped fighting itself. The constant background noise of anxiety and self-doubt faded to a whisper, and I could finally, finally think.
Twenty minutes later, I had the entry point Morrison had missed. It was in the weather report preamble, where it usually was. The German operators were creatures of habit, and habits were weaknesses, and weaknesses were doors. Forty minutes after that, I had the first section decoded.
Convoy positions. Departure times. A list of ships and their designated routes.
The information was three days old, probably useless by now.
The convoys had already sailed or sunk or scattered across the grey Atlantic.
But the methodology mattered. Every code we cracked taught us something about how the Germans thought, how their operators made mistakes, where the patterns lived and died.
I was reaching for the next stack when Noor Bennett appeared at my desk, arms crossed, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Her Women's Auxiliary Air Force uniform was crisp despite the hour, the blue-grey wool and brass buttons marking her as one of the wireless operators who spent their shifts hunched over receivers in the signals hut, pulling encrypted German transmissions from the static.
We called them WAAFs, and they were the first link in our chain, the ones who caught the raw intercepts before they ever reached my desk.
Her dark hair was pinned back in regulation style, and she looked, as always, like someone who found the entire war vaguely amusing.
“You have ink on your face,” she said.
“What? Where?”