The 9 by Madalyn Morgan (tools of titans ebook .txt) 📕

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, ‘I understand.’

On the way home, Ena cried again.

Freda put her arms around her. ‘When we get to Rugby I’ll treat you to a drop of brandy.’

‘A drop? I could do with a large one. Do you think Mr Silcott would notice if we had a drink or two from the bottle he keeps in the annexe for medicinal purposes?’

‘Not when he knows why we drank it.’

Ena burst into tears again. ‘Oh Freda, I killed a man.’

‘No Ena, he killed himself when he fell.’

‘But it was because I hit him with the case that he fell.’

‘Ena,’ Freda said, exasperation in her voice, ‘you have to stop blaming yourself. You hit that madman because he had me round the throat.’

‘But I didn’t mean to kill him.’

‘Of course you didn’t. As the commander said, it was self-defence.’

Ena felt a little better knowing that the commander and Freda agreed about the man’s demise. But that was all they agreed on. Freda thought the man was a madman, the commander and Ena knew he was a German spy who would think nothing of killing them both.

Freda knew nothing about Mr Silcott being attacked the year before, the man stealing his clothes, drugging Ena on the train and stealing her work, replacing it with sabotaged work, posing as Mr Silcott, and delivering it to Bletchley Park. Ena wanted to tell her. She thought she owed it to her friend to warn her, so she knew how dangerous people like the man on the train were, but the commander had strictly forbidden her to tell anyone.

Over the next six months, Freda helped Ena to come to terms with what had happened on that terrible day, reminding her every time she talked about it that she didn’t have a choice, that the man who attacked her would have killed her if Ena hadn’t intervened.

‘It was him or me,’ Freda would say – and Ena would agree. She didn’t know what she’d have done without Freda during those months. Sometimes, although those times were getting fewer, Ena would find herself remembering vividly what happened. Out of the blue, she would see the man’s face, his eyes, and it would make her tremble. Freda was a Godsend when Ena got the shakes. And when Ena had to talk it out, Freda would listen patiently, never interrupting, until Ena had got it out of her system. Freda would tell her over and over that what had happened was not her fault. She helped her to be strong, to come to terms with what had happened, and to live with it.

A couple of times when they were talking, Ena had come close to confiding in Freda that the man’s body hadn’t arrived in Euston. She wondered what she’d say if she knew he had most likely been thrown from the train and lay rotting somewhere along the railway embankment? After six months he still hadn’t been found or Commander Dalton would have told her.

For all this time, the man had been exposed to the elements and to wild animals. He had probably been eaten by foxes. Ena felt the bitter-sweet taste of bile rise from her stomach to her throat. Breathing deeply and slowly, she stopped herself from being sick.

She banished all morbid thoughts of animals and corpses from her mind. There was a time when she saw his face every time she closed her eyes. When she slept, she would see him on the floor of the train, his eyes open, dull and staring. He would sit up and his chalky face would come towards hers. It would get nearer and nearer – until she woke up clenching her teeth, drenched in sweat.

The nightmares happened less as time went on. In later months, Ena had even started to accept that the man’s death was unavoidable. A terrible accident that, unless she could turn back the clock, she couldn’t change. The man was going to kill Freda. Ena had to do something to save her.

Ena knew she would never be able to forget what had happened, that it was something she would have to live with for the rest of her life, but she was at last trying to forgive herself.

It was early summer when Ena received a telephone call from Commander Dalton telling her that work sent to Beaumanor had been compromised. Her heart sank with frustration. She was no nearer to finding out who had stolen and sabotaged her work eighteen months before, and now she had the added problem of Beaumanor.

Since she was the last person at Silcott’s to check the work before putting it into the concrete safe, Ena had at first thought it was someone at Bletchley changing a few wires around when the opportunity arose. But at Beaumanor as well? Ena didn’t believe in coincidences. Nor did she think there were two independent saboteurs at work.

The two engineers at the Park, who were in on the problem from the start, checked every delivery of work against Ena’s diagram before fitting it. On the odd occasion when there were muddled wires, the engineers informed Commander Dalton before quietly getting on with the job of correcting them. Except for Ena, the commander, and the two engineers, no one, not even Herbert Silcott or Freda, was told when there were problems. It was imperative that no one knew when the problems were found and corrected.

Ena met Commander Dalton every Friday when she delivered new dials for the X-boards. One of the engineers had let slip that the work she did was for a decoding machine. Ena had worked that out for herself while explaining the number and letter confusion the muddled wiring would cause on the day her work was stolen. But because she had never been told officially, she referred to the