The Turning Tide (25 page)

A loud knock at the pub door made her jump. ‘Police!’ a woman shouted through the post slot. ‘We’re here about the disturbance.’

‘Fucking finally,’ Heather blurted. She bounded to the door and slid the lock open. ‘Thank you so much for getting here so quickly, thank you, thank you,’ she gushed. Two figures in high-vis jackets over black police uniforms led her and the Major outside. She was reassured to note they had come prepared with helmets, batons and shields.

‘They sent one man and one girl?’ the Major scoffed. ‘Political correctness isn’t going to help us at a time like this. We need the real constabulary, not a brace of community officers.’

‘Charming,’ the woman officer addressed Heather. ‘Is he always like this?’

Heather shrugged. ‘Are you here to help or what?’

The woman sighed and turned round. The police formed a barrier in front of Heather and the Major and opened the back door, using their riot shields to push back the jeering crowd that had gathered there. The publicans smiled and waved the unwelcome visitors off, then closed and locked the door behind them.

Newshounds and citizen journalists jostled with each other to get the best footage on their smartphones and the Major took a deep breath. He put on the thousand-yard stare and gazed out over the crowd. If the buggers were going to try to attack him a second time, well it wouldn’t work. This time he was ready.

The protestors, meanwhile, seemed uncertain about the police presence and the chants died away. Even the reporters appeared to be holding their breath, waiting to see what happened next. ‘Awright, you English wanker,’ a voice said from inside the crowd.

‘Racist Jock scum!’ the Major yelled back. He scanned the assembled faces for the culprit, but couldn’t tell who had said it. One of the police officers turned his head and shot the Major a warning look. Heather laid her hand on his sleeve.

‘Whitney,’ she said under her breath, ‘leave it.’ Her face returned to its usual, composed countenance. It was as if the presence of television reporters had a pacifying effect.

The Major shrugged her off. ‘No, woman, damn it,’ he said. ‘Anti-British sentiment is the last socially acceptable bigotry, and I’ve had it with this ridiculous double standard.’

‘There are cameras,’ she hissed. The crowd started to inch them closer and closer against the locked door. The police appeared to be getting instructions through earphones. They nodded silently, but Whitney couldn’t tell what was going on.

‘Forget the cameras,’ he said. She might have the ability to run hot and cold on demand, and switch off her anger for the benefit of the media, but he was not about to take it lying down. ‘This is about principles!’ the Major roared, and shook a huge, knobbly fist at the crowd. Someone grabbed his arm and jerked it back. He attempted to twist his body away. Too late, they were on him now. ‘Police!’ he yelled, appealing to the officers for help.

‘We are the police,’ said a woman’s voice in his ear. The grip on his arm wrenched back further. ‘And we’re taking you in for disturbance of the peace.’ Her partner, with a good six inches and two stone on the Major, tightened the cold bracelets of handcuffs onto his wrists.

He and Heather were bundled through the alley to a car park then into the back of a van and the double doors were slammed shut. The jeering crowd followed. A few kicks bashed the side of the van and the sound of muffled laughter echoed in the alley. Sirens on, the vehicle zoomed away through the narrow streets.

The Major was sat on a hard bench opposite Heather, struggling against the tight handcuffs. ‘Oh, would you pull yourself together?’ she said.

‘That’s fine for you to say, you’re not the one whose very reputation is at stake.’ His high forehead glistened with sweat and was almost as red as his eyes. ‘I should have known better than to leave this event to someone so—’

Heather scowled. ‘So what?’

‘Two-faced,’ the Major said.

Heather huffed and turned away.

After a couple of minutes the van came to a stop. The policewoman who had cuffed the Major popped open the back door and led them out into an unfamiliar street. Unlocking the cuffs, she told them they were free to go.

‘We’re not being arrested?’ Heather said. The policewoman shook her head.

‘The danger has passed,’ the policewoman said. ‘Provided you agree to leave the Highlands in peace and not organise such a demonstration again, you are welcome to depart the area without any further police involvement.’

‘Wait! What?’ Whitney spluttered. ‘Anyone with eyes can see that the demonstration was against us, not the other way round.’

‘Whitney, come on,’ Heather tugged at his sleeve. They were in the car park of Whitney’s hotel on the edge of town, some two miles from the High Street. ‘I’ll call a cab and we’ll get the next train back.’ She turned to the policewoman. ‘We’ve had enough of this rubbish little town anyway.’

‘No, damn it!’ Whitney snatched his arm back from Heather’s grasp and turned to the policewoman, whose colleague had now emerged from the front of the van and was watching with interest. ‘I know my rights. As a veteran and a public servant, this is a gross infringement of my free speech.’

The policewoman laughed like a schoolteacher indulging a child’s tantrum. ‘You are the ones who came to Cameron Bridge with the intent of causing a scene. You organised a public political event, opposite the council building, without a permit, much less completing the relevant health and safety assessments,’ she said.

‘Health and safety?’ Whitney bellowed. ‘Health and safety? This is about freedom of speech, damn it!’

The policewoman exchanged glances with her colleague. The large man slipped a baton out of his belt. ‘All things considered, you are lucky we don’t take you both in. We had a quick chat with Mickey and Duncan,’ she said. Whitney shrugged. ‘Don’t you remember? The men your assistant paid to kick things off. Or didn’t she ask their names?’ she said. ‘They’re regulars at the station, records long as your arm.’

Her fellow officer nodded gravely. ‘Long as your arm,’ he repeated. His enormous hands slowly extended and retracted the baton.

Whitney’s head whipped round to look at Heather. ‘Is that true?’

‘I have friends in high places,’ Heather leaned forward and jabbed her finger in the middle of the policewoman’s protective vest. ‘Your superiors will hear about this.’

The two police exchanged glances. ‘Is that so?’ she said. ‘Only you happen to be already speaking to the ranking officer in Cameron Bridge.’ She nodded at her colleague. The policeman leant across and tapped Heather’s knuckles with the end of the baton. She barked and snatched her hand away, rubbing it with her other hand.

‘How dare you attack a lady!’ the Major leapt in. His voice wobbled, breathless, at the scratchy height of its range. ‘This is nothing short of police brutality! I will call my solicitor and ensure you are out of a job immediately!’

The police pair smirked at each other and the man slipped the baton back into his belt. ‘You do that, by all means,’ the policewoman nodded. ‘Police Scotland appreciates your input on our quality of public service provision.’ The van door slammed. She waved at them as the van drove off. ‘Have a good day.’

: 23 :

The small ferry chugged its way across Loch Linnhe and a sharp wind pulled at Erykah’s coat. To the north, the mountains behind Cameron Bridge caught the bits of afternoon sunshine; to the south, the outlines of Lismore and Mull jutted into the water in gradations of indigo blue. The ride across the narrows was a short one and she walked off the boat straight into the village of Ardgour. She double-checked a slip of paper, but really, it was not necessary: there were only a handful of bungalows facing the water. One small garden was decorated gaily with scraps of colourful rope and old fishing floats wound through the links of the fence. On a buzzer by the door was a label with letters scratched out in formal, old-fashioned block capitals.
L. MANDELKERN
.
She pressed the button next to the nameplate.

She wondered how the demo in town was going. She had expected the Major to be upset when she told him she couldn’t go, but he didn’t even ask her why. Ordinarily she would have been keen – any chance to make herself more useful – but with one day in Cameron Bridge, there wasn’t time to do everything.

A figure appeared behind the glass door. Wisps of white hair topped a familiar face, older now, but still recognisable. ‘You made it,’ Leonie said, and held out her arms. The tiny woman clasped Erykah in a strong embrace and stood back to look at her. ‘Rikki Barnes,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘It’s Erykah Macdonald now,’ she said, and winced, thinking that was one more thing she would have to get used to again: her old name, once she and Rab split up. ‘For a short time anyway.’

‘My eyes aren’t very good,’ Leonie said, and raised a pair of bifocals hanging on the chain. ‘You haven’t changed one bit.’

‘As you said, your eyes aren’t very good.’

Leonie laughed, a rich chuckle broken by a lung-wrenching cough. ‘Please, come in. Before the wind blows you in.’

‘You’re looking well,’ Erykah said, and followed her into the front room. The wide front window looked out over the ferry slipway and loch. The side tables and ledges were crowded with stacks of books, and plant pots with cacti and succulents of all kinds and sizes, including a jade plant as big as a person.

Leonie smiled. ‘Kind of you to say. I feel like rubbish,’ she said. She eased herself into a green armchair with a crocheted cushion. ‘Though judging by the general health of my contemporaries, feeling rubbish is something of a privilege these days.’

Erykah wasn’t certain, but Leonie must have been near ninety by now. University rumour had it that the emeritus professor was a child chess prodigy, smuggled out of Poland at the start of the German occupation in 1939. Sometimes the story claimed she had been hidden in the back of an ox cart for three weeks across central Europe until reaching the Pyrenees, then hiked alone over the border to Spain, where she joined a ship leaving for Britain. Others said she travelled across the continent disguised as a German national, using the papers of a child of the same age who had died at birth, stolen from an orphanage and paid for with her mother’s own gold teeth. Whichever version, it always ended up with Leonie in Britain and supposedly cracking codes at Bletchley Park when she was still in her teens.

Whether or not it was true was something Leonie herself never confirmed. What she would acknowledge was that she was alone among her immediate family in escaping the Lodz ghetto. And that the Mandelkerns, being among the first residents of the ghetto, were also some of the first moved on to the death camps at Chelmno. This grim count included the death of her father, a mathematician and member of the Polish Cipher Bureau. The Biuro Szyfrów had done much to advance cryptography between the wars, including early steps towards the cracking of the Enigma code. And Leonie had arrived in Britain during the winter, early in 1940. That much was a matter of record.

Leonie arranged the fabric of her shawl around her shoulders. ‘So,’ she said, her eyes bright and curious. ‘What are you doing in the Highlands?’

‘A bit of a side job,’ Erykah said. ‘When I realised I was going to be up in your part of the world anyway, I thought I might as well drop in to talk about those emails I sent.’

‘Well, that’s wonderful. It’s always better to put heads together in person, saves so much time.’ Leonie looked over the top of her glasses. ‘I assume this other side job of yours has nothing to do with academics.’

Erykah shook her head. ‘Even if I had wanted to return to university I’m not sure that door would have been open to me.’

‘You should have stayed in contact,’ Leonie said. ‘I asked the dean what became of you, but he said you left no forwarding address.’

‘I wanted to disappear,’ Erykah said. ‘So I got married instead.’

Leonie eyed the large rings Erykah was wearing. ‘So you did. You were always one of my best,’ she said. ‘So much ahead of you. I wished you had come back.’

What even did that mean now? Maybe, as Rab had always said, what Erykah had needed to do was pick herself up, dust herself off, and start all over again. Doing so seemed like an impossible task. Maybe accepting her fate and slinking off to lick her wounds in the suburbs was the same as defeat. She should have tried again. Worse things had happened to better people and all of that.

But searching Leonie’s face she saw no judgment, no points being scored. Only a statement of fact.
I wished you had come back
. No one, so far as she could remember, had ever said such a simple thing to her. ‘Maybe I should ask, what are you doing up here?’ she asked. ‘Why Scotland?’

‘Why anywhere?’ Leonie said and looked around the room with its bookshelves leaning under the weight of books and plants. ‘London life didn’t suit me any longer. This is about as far away from London as you can get, in more ways than one.’

Erykah looked out the window. The village was hardly even that: an inn by the ferry terminal, a few houses, a small shop with only the basics, then sheep farms as far as the eye could see. ‘I couldn’t imagine living in a place like this.’

‘No?’ Leonie said. ‘I think you could get used to anything. There’s one bus a day to Cameron Bridge, and that is enough. It’s quiet. Quiet is sometimes a good thing.’

‘But you loved the students,’ Erykah said. ‘And the students loved you.’ If circumstances had made Leonie’s existence a solitary one, it was the students in London who became her second family. Most professors would have found ways to wiggle out of lecturing first year undergraduates, but Leonie relished it. She often said that there was nothing to match the thrill of seeing a light go on in someone’s eyes when they mastered a skill they thought was beyond their ability. As a result the students were loyal to a fault to her. And she to them.

‘I know, I know.’ Leonie raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘It’s too much work. I’m too old. I was already old when you were there, already being pushed out of the department,’ she said. ‘Here, I have a view of the loch, some trees. It’s a short walk to the inn for a drink. I grow things. Did you know if you take a clipping of a succulent, it will root itself? In rocks, in sand, with nothing to sustain it.’

Erykah looked at the plants jostling for space on the windowsills, the sharp points of aloe, the spotted serpentine patterns on the gasterias, the Mother-of-Thousands dropping its tiny plantlets into other pots and on the floor. ‘I didn’t know that. It’s amazing they grow here.’

‘They wouldn’t last long outside.’ Leonie unfolded herself from the chair. ‘Nor would I, for that matter,’ she said. ‘But it’s comfortable here, and homely.’ Leonie smiled, her lips drawn thin over her yellow teeth. ‘Especially these last few years with so many bakers and grocers coming to the Highlands from Poland. Finally, I can buy a loaf of bread in this country that I don’t feel ashamed to eat.’

‘You never wanted to move back? After you retired? Everything must have changed for the better by now.’

‘No. And that’s why. There is a saying, what is it? You can never go home again.’ Leonie shook her silver head. ‘Visiting a memorial to the people I knew, to those who died in the ghetto, that is not the place I want to see.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘People of my generation are already history. My memories of it should stay as they are.’ Her face was drawn now, the lines in her skin pulled vertical. ‘The home of my childhood is a fragrance I catch sometimes on the wind. A piece of a song being played far away, a reflection in glass. It doesn’t exist in life.’ Leonie drew the shawl close around her shoulders and smiled again, though it did not quite reach her eyes.

She stayed that way for several minutes, Leonie with her back to the window, the early spring light concentrated by the windows.

‘Anyway,’ Leonie said. ‘Have you brought the rest of the files?’

‘I need them back before tonight though, or else there might be trouble,’ Erykah said.

‘Ah. Pity about that, but not crucial,’ Leonie set out a pot of jasmine tea and two tiny cups on a table. ‘So, with the pages you faxed me, I’ve found something very interesting.’

Erykah sat down. ‘You cracked it?’

‘Not yet. But nearly. If what I’m thinking is right, it’s a straightforward code. I’ll show you how,’ Leonie said. ‘My first thought when I saw how it was laid out – the solid block of text – was that it’s a variation of the Caesar cipher.’

‘A stands for B, B stands for C, and so on?’ Erykah said.

‘Exactly,’ Leonie said. ‘There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, so you can offset the letters using one of twenty-five different Caesar ciphers to come up with a substitution code. But using the same alphabet throughout would be very easy to crack, and I’m sure you will have tried that already.’ Erykah nodded.

‘But there’s a variation you may not know about. It’s called the Vigenère cipher, and what I’m missing is the key.’

Erykah hadn’t heard of a Vigenère cipher before. ‘The key?’

‘A message encoded with the Vigenère cipher uses a key word over a grid of letters. Each letter in the key indicates a different offset cipher alphabet. So you take your grid of letters here, and write the key over the top of each column.’ She turned a copy of the text around to show Erykah. ‘It just repeats across all the columns.’ Leonie wrote the letters K E Y, K EY, repeating, at the top of each column until she reached the edge of the page. ‘The longer the key, the harder it is to break.’

She pulled out another paper. On this was the alphabet written out over and over again in her handwriting, but each time, offset by one letter. ‘Each line here is one alphabet,’ she explained. ‘This is called the Vigenère square, and as long as you have the keyword, deciphering the message is child’s play.’

Erykah examined the Vigenère square. It was an elegant idea, so simple really. ‘So the Ks mean all the letters underneath a column with K are offset by ten letters, all the ones under Es are offset by four letters, and all the ones under Ys are offset by twenty-four letters?’

‘Exactly right,’ Leonie said. ‘But what I don’t have is the real key in this puzzle, and without that?’ She laughed. ‘Well, there’s a reason the French called it the
chiffre indéchiffrable
for three hundred years,’ Leonie said. ‘Because it’s easy to understand, but hard to crack.’

‘But you said it was indecipherable for three hundred years, so someone did figure out how to do it.’

‘Yes, they did,’ Leonie said. ‘Brute force can work if you have the processing power. But I am retired; I have no access to the programs I used to use, or the computers. And it was a very unusual cipher, seldom used. So doing this by hand takes considerable effort. If the key was only five or six letters, then with frequency analysis I might have cracked it by now,’ Leonie said. ‘The one thing we do have, though, is that when people choose the keys themselves for a private code, instead of keys assigned at random for security, they will choose something easy for them to remember. Which could mean a name or other word they associate with. Something that is meaningful to them.’ She paused and sipped the jasmine tea.

‘A key word?’ Erykah said. Her gaze lit on the surfaces of the room, the profusion of plants, the stacks of books. Framed awards and photographs that seemed familiar, that she recognised from Leonie’s old office. A watercolour of a street scene in Lodz between the wars.

‘Your cup is going to go cold,’ Leonie said. ‘Shall I warm it up for you?’

‘Oh, that’s very kind,’ Erykah said. ‘It’s lovely. I’m just not in the mood for tea right now, it seems a little bit . . .’

‘Weak?’ Leonie winked. ‘I have just the thing. Stay right here.’ She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a small glass bottle filled with pale pink liquid. Leonie set two tiny sherry glasses on the table, decorated with delicate pinks and gold leaf scrolls. She unstoppered the bottle and poured two measures of the liquid. ‘Rhubarb spirits,’ she said. ‘Now that I can buy Polish rectified spirits, I can make my own liqueur.’ Erykah sniffed at the glass. ‘Please, try it. It’s delicious.
Na zdrowie
!’

‘Cheers!’ Erykah quaffed the drink in one swallow, breathed deeply, and coughed. ‘Wow. Wow. That’s . . . certainly strong.’ Leonie laughed.

‘Now, the key word. The question for us is what would have been meaningful to him. I tried his name. First and last, then both together – none of them worked. His wife’s name and his children’s. The name of the university, a few other keywords that come up commonly. No luck.’

Erykah closed her eyes and tried to remember Schofield’s office. The things people carry with them from place to place, continent to continent, over decades of their lives. What meant the most to someone who had travelled the world for his work? ‘I think I know what it could be,’ she said.

Leonie raised a thin white eyebrow. ‘Do tell.’

‘When I went to his office, I tried to get into his terminal. There was a password, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. There’s a photo of him next to his desk with a place that seems to have meant a lot to him.’ The words poured out of Erykah as Leonie nodded slowly. It made sense now. The password was easy to guess, not because it was guarding anything on his computer – that would have been too obvious – but because it was guarding something not on his computer at all. No wonder his email and browsing histories looked completely clean. They didn’t need to be wiped of information because he had never kept anything important there in the first place.