The Blue Rose

Chapter Eight

Thomas Farrow’s cottage was in a cul-de-sac at the north end of Little Stanton village. It took Kingston two passes through the hamlet before he found it. The chattering windscreen wipers of the TR4 were no match for the gusting rain that made it difficult to see much up ahead.

Finally he glimpsed the braided cap of the thatched roof peeking out above a tall yew hedge. It was the only part of the cottage visible from the street. Climbing out of his car, Kingston gingerly made his way up a narrow flight of slippery stone steps, keeping a firm grip on his umbrella and his briefcase. He had brought four of Major Cooke’s journals with him, just in case. At the top of the steps the garden opened to a wide band of lawn, edged by shrub and perennial borders. On a more agreeable day the view to the south was undoubtedly splendid. Now a menacing parade of dark thunderclouds rolled across the rain-shrouded horizon. Turning away from the dispiriting view, he was cheered at the sight of the brightly painted peacock-blue door.

He lifted the tarnished lion’s-head knocker and let it drop loudly. Almost immediately the door was opened by a slender young woman, casually but fashionably dressed.

‘Good afternoon, my name’s Lawrence Kingston. Dr Kingston. I’m trying to locate a Mr Thomas Farrow,’ he said evenly. ‘I was given this address by a former acquaintance of his. I wondered whether he might still live here?’

‘Oh, I’m so awfully sorry – you obviously don’t know,’ the young woman stammered. ‘Thomas died several years ago. I’m his niece. Was he a friend of yours?’

‘Not exactly. More like a friend of a friend, really.’

‘Your friend wasn’t aware, either, then – that Thomas had died?’

Conscious of her apprehensive expression, as she gripped the edge of the partially open door, Kingston stepped back two paces. ‘No. No, he wasn’t,’ he said. His next words were lost, as a crack of thunder echoed across the leaden sky. He waited as it rumbled off into the distance. Then it started to bucket down. ‘I’m awfully sorry to learn about your uncle,’ he said.

A sudden gust of wind threatened to blow Kingston’s umbrella inside out. Rain splattered noisily off the porch behind him. It suddenly occurred to him what a sorry sight he must present to this pleasant young woman.

‘Please…’ She opened the door wider and stepped back. ‘Do come in. It’s such a wretched day. At least you can dry off a little. I’m sure you could do with a cup of tea. My name’s Jennifer, by the way.’

‘Thank you, Jennifer, that’s awfully kind of you. It is getting a bit nasty out here. Yes, tea would be lovely.’

He set his briefcase down on the tiled floor of the hallway, took off his sopping trench coat, and handed it to her. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on. You get yourself warmed up a bit,’ she said, leaving Kingston standing with his back to the meagre fire smouldering in the hearth of the low-ceilinged living room.

When Jennifer returned with the tea, they sat down and she talked about her uncle. She said he’d passed away, suddenly, about six or seven years ago. She confirmed that he had, indeed, been passionately interested in roses and, yes, he had belonged to a garden club. She had done her best, she said, to keep up his garden in the back of the cottage but, sadly, it was nowhere near as glorious now as it had been when he was alive.

‘You haven’t told me your reason for coming,’ she said.

‘I’m trying to establish whether your uncle was a friend or acquaintance of a man named Jeffrey Cooke. Major Jeffrey Cooke. He was also keenly interested in roses. I recently found out that they belonged to the same garden club.’

‘You said, “was”. This Major Cooke – he’s no longer alive, then?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘You still haven’t told me how you think Thomas might have helped you.’

‘You’re right, forgive me. Well, some close friends of mine recently purchased a nice old house from Major Cooke’s widow. There are lots of roses in the garden – upwards of two hundred – some quite old and rare. The garden’s large, of course.’

‘It sounds lovely.’

‘It is. Well, Mrs Cooke lent us some of her husband’s journals containing records of his hybridizing roses. We’re pretty certain they’re Major Cooke’s notes but it’s also possible that some of the entries could have been made by your uncle, because we’re led to believe that from time to time they worked together on the rose breeding. We’re trying to find out exactly what information is contained in the journals.’

‘I don’t quite understand.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Kingston, placing a hand on his brow. ‘I forgot to tell you, they’re written in some kind of code.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s a bit queer, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I can be of any help, I’m afraid. I inherited all of Thomas’s belongings. I know there were no notebooks or journals, anything like that, among his effects. But there are quite a lot of regular gardening-related books in the guest room. That’s about all in the way of reading matter.’

‘Would it be terribly rude of me to ask to see them – the books?’

Jennifer shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’ She got up from her chair. ‘They’re in here,’ she said, gesturing to a partially open door to her right.

Kingston followed her into a small bedroom. It was light and airy and smelled of freshly ironed sheets. Built into each side of the leaded casement window were two symmetrical tiers of white-painted shelves, each filled with orderly rows of tightly packed books. As Kingston walked over to examine the small library, an oval framed photo standing on the marble-topped bedside table caught his eye. ‘May I look at this picture?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she answered.

He walked over, picked it up and studied it.

‘That’s Thomas, when he was in the army,’ Jennifer said. ‘That one, over there on the chest, is of him and his wife, Cathy. She died several years before Thomas.’

Kingston examined the grainy black and white army photograph. It was of an unsmiling slim-faced man with a dark bushy moustache. He was in a jaunty pose, holding a pipe to his mouth. The three pips on each epaulette of his uniform indicated the rank of captain. Kingston couldn’t quite make out the regimental badge in the centre of his peaked cap. ‘What regiment was he in?’ he asked, casually.

‘You know, I’m not really sure. That was a long time ago. I don’t recall Thomas ever saying much about his army days – or the war. Probably, like a lot of servicemen, he preferred to forget about those terrible times.’

Kingston placed the photograph back on the table.

‘There’s some more pictures in here,’ she said, opening the lid of a pine blanket chest at the foot of the bed. She handed him two leather-bound photo albums. Placing one of them on the bed, he started to leaf through the other. Most of the black and white photos were typical family snapshots. Two boys, pictured at different ages, appeared in a number of the photos. ‘One of these little boys is your uncle, I take it?’

‘Yes, Thomas, the smaller one. His brother Adrian was two years older. He was in the RAF.’

‘Handsome lads,’ said Kingston, closing the first album.

Four pages into the second album, which was more up-to-date than the first, his eyes came to rest on a large sepia photo. It was an informal group photo depicting a dozen smiling men, a few in military uniform but most in civilian clothes. With Captain Farrow’s bushy moustache, Kingston had no difficulty identifying him. Glancing down to the caption below, he saw Farrow’s name. Kingston scanned the photo, his index finger tracing the row of names. His finger stopped. There he was, fifth from the right, Major Jeffrey Cooke. Printed under the caption were the words: Bletchley Park, Hut 8. 1943.

‘Bletchley Park,’ he murmured. He held the album in both hands and stood staring at the rivulets of rain dribbling down the windowpane in front of him. ‘I was right,’ he said under his breath.

‘Did you find something?’ Jennifer asked.

‘Yes, I think so,’ he said, closing the album and handing it back to Jennifer. ‘Something most interesting.’

When Kingston arrived at The Parsonage later that afternoon, Kate greeted him at the front door wearing a flour-dusted apron.

‘You’re in luck, Lawrence,’ she announced, ‘I’m testing a new recipe for osso buco.’

His blue eyes opened wide. ‘Splendid,’ he said.

Kate was surprised to see that he was gripping a small holdall. Surely she’d made it clear that the invitation was just for dinner? It certainly wouldn’t have been like Alex to suggest an overnight stay. She shrugged it off – there had to be an explanation. ‘Come on in,’ she said with a smile. ‘You’ll find Alex on the terrace. I’ll come out in a minute and fix you both a drink.’

A couple of hours later at the dining table, Kate and Alex sat listening to Kingston’s long-winded discourse. For the most part, they ate in silence, occasionally stealing a knowing glance or smile at each other as Kingston described every detail of his afternoon with Jennifer Farrow.

Now, over strawberries and clotted cream, he was explaining the significance of the Bletchley Park, Hut 8 caption.

‘Early in World War II, a top-secret team of British code breakers set up shop at an old Victorian manor in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park. Station X, it was dubbed. Their objective was to break seemingly unbreakable German military codes. If they could crack them, they would be able to target German supply shipments, eavesdrop on Luftwaffe activities, and most important, locate and destroy the U-boats that were playing havoc with Allied convoys.’

‘Somebody wrote a novel about it, I believe,’ Kate remarked.

Kingston nodded. ‘Enigma. Damned good one, too.’ He polished off the last strawberry and took a sip of the dessert wine. ‘The coded messages were transmitted daily on a code-making machine the Germans called Enigma,’ he said. ‘It was a devilishly clever contraption capable of scrambling messages in an astronomical number of ways. To make things even more difficult, the Jerries changed the wiring set-up for their transmitters and receivers daily. So the messages intercepted by our lads were utter gibberish.’

‘The odds against anyone breaking the code must have been staggering,’ said Kate.

‘I’m told that, for anyone who didn’t know the machine settings, the odds were a hundred and fifty million million million to one,’ Kingston replied.

Kate whistled.

‘I read somewhere that it supposedly pioneered the age of the computer,’ said Alex.

‘That was actually the contraption our chaps developed to decipher the codes sent on the Enigma. It was called Colossus. And you’re right, Alex, it’s believed to be the world’s first programmable electronic computer.’

‘Those chaps must have been awfully clever,’ said Kate.

‘Sheer genius is more like it. Helped by counter-espionage and a bit of luck here and there.’

‘How did they find all these geniuses at such short notice?’ asked Alex.

‘At the beginning it was quite a motley group. A lot of them were cryptic crossword puzzle whizzes – mostly The Times and the Telegraph, I believe. There were chess masters, mathematicians, all kinds of intellectuals. One was a rare book dealer, apparently. People with eidetic minds,’ Kingston added.

Kate had never heard of the word. She reminded herself to look it up later.

‘What was amazing,’ Kingston continued, ‘was that they were all sworn to absolute secrecy – not only at the time but for some thirty years after the end of the war. Churchill described it as “his goose that laid the golden egg but never cackled”.’

‘Where on earth did you learn all this, Lawrence?’ asked Alex.

‘At Bletchley Park. After seeing Jennifer, I stopped off there. It’s a museum now, run by a charitable trust – the grounds are lovely. You should go up there sometime.’

‘I think we will, when this rose business is over,’ said Kate.

There was a pause in the conversation while she stacked the dessert plates and placed them to one side. She smoothed the tablecloth in front of her and looked at Kingston. ‘So, Lawrence, your theory is that since we now know that Major Cooke and Captain Farrow were part of the secret team at Bletchley, it’s almost certain that, one way or another, they were familiar with cryptography. Is that the right word?’

‘Yes, it is. And yes, that’s right, Kate,’ Kingston replied. ‘It’s quite plausible that they would have known of the Enigma programme. Which means,’ he said, picking up his glass and gently swirling the last drops of wine, ‘that instead of inventing a code for their horticultural experiments, they simply used an existing code. Perhaps one of the more fundamental ones. Impossible for most people to decipher, but a piece of cake for any former Bletchley cryptographer.’

‘Why use a code for hybridizing roses in the first place?’ asked Alex. ‘It all seems a bit pointless. Aren’t we over-reaching just a wee bit? All this cloak and dagger stuff?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Kingston retorted. ‘Not if Cooke and Farrow sensed they were close to a breakthrough as earthshaking as a blue rose.’

Kate thought Alex’s question reasonable but it was clear by Kingston’s frown that he didn’t agree one bit.

‘Under the circumstances,’ he said, straightening up in his chair and looking down his nose at Alex, ‘some kind of coded entries of their cross-pollinating would be logical – even advisable, I would say. It’s not at all far-fetched. Besides, they were old army chums. It was fun. Brought back memories of their old days.’

‘You know something,’ said Kate. ‘Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead. It seems to me that if we continue digging into this code business we might well end up establishing that Cooke and Farrow did, indeed, create the rose. This seems counterproductive to what Adell is doing – trying to establish us as the rightful owners.’

Alex was looking testy. ‘Look, if I recall correctly, Adell’s last words were that we were to proceed on the assumption that we are the sole owners.’ He looked briefly at Kate, then rested his eyes on Kingston. ‘So, for the time being, why don’t we do that?’

‘I think Alex is right,’ said Kate, breaking the momentary silence.

Kingston simply shrugged.

Alex folded his napkin and placed it tidily in front of him. ‘Going back to what you were saying, Lawrence – about the code thing. I’ll buy your theory,’ he said, ‘but who the hell would be capable of cracking the Major’s code now? This Enigma business was nearly sixty years ago. Surely most of those people are long gone by now, aren’t they?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Kingston, ‘but I’ve been doing a little digging on my own.’

‘Of course you have,’ Alex muttered.

Kingston ignored the jibe. ‘When I was up at Bletchley I posed the question to the director, a nice lady. As I expected, nobody on the staff up there has any knowledge of the codes themselves, but she suggested that I talk to the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre people at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose for a moment. ‘If we draw a blank there, there would appear to be no other avenues left open, I’m afraid.’

‘If we know the code, does that mean we can replicate the rose? Create more of them?’ Kate asked.

‘In all probability, yes. But there’s a small problem.’

‘What’s that?’ Alex asked.

‘The missing journal,’ said Kingston.

‘What about it?’

‘I’d bet a tidy sum that the crossing formula necessary to do that is contained in the missing journal. That’s why it’s missing.’

‘Somebody else knows about the blue rose?’ Kate asked, frowning.

‘I wouldn’t rule it out entirely,’ Kingston said, leaning back in his chair.