Coming Soon.
A Historical Mystery and Espionage Thriller Set at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park, February 1943. One gate, a mile of wire, and a house full of people forbidden to say what they do there, even to each other.
A young woman is found in the lake at first light. Marion Graves, twenty-four, a mathematician in Hut 3, frightened of water since she was a child and never willing to say why. She signed in at ten o’clock for the night watch. There is one door to Hut 3, a sentry on it until six, and a book at that door which says she never came out again. The water is three hundred yards off, down an open lawn in full view of the house.
Hazel Ward vets the people who work at the Park. Before the war she was a solicitor’s clerk in Lincoln, and what she brought with her is a clerk’s habit: write it down in the order it happened, so that when a man tells you the same story twice the difference between the two is sitting there on the page. Half the estate has passed under her hand and not one of them knows it. She has never investigated a murder, and nobody has yet said in plain words that she is investigating one now.
Marion had not been looking for anything. She had been counting, which was most of what she did, and two sets of figures would not agree. A few decodes over the winter with nothing behind them: no station they had been taken from, no slip out of the intercept room, no operator anywhere who had ever sat and written them down. Anybody else in the building would have called it bad filing and gone to lunch. On the Thursday afternoon she asked a colleague where one of them had come from. It was a question about paperwork. She was dead before midnight.
The house wants the whole thing settled quietly, because an inquest sits in public and puts whoever it likes on oath. Then a car comes up from London. Captain Alistair Fenn of MI5 is courteous about it, and quite clear: she reports to him, and if any of this goes near the secret the Park exists to keep, it stops. He has already decided which sort of answer would be least inconvenient, and he is not a stupid man, and that is the trouble with him.
Outside the wire, Detective Inspector Chadwick of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary has been turned away at the gate and has carried on asking regardless. He has got hold of a post-mortem the Park would rather he had not, and what is in it does not sit comfortably beside the word accident, which is the word the Park settled on before anyone had looked.
Hazel will find her answer inside the wire rather than outside it, and when she has it she will have to decide what it is worth: to the dead woman, to the war, and to herself.
For readers of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, Robert Harris’s Enigma and Kate Atkinson’s Transcription.
A murder that never happened, in a place where the house, the huts, the wire and the water are as they were.