Kerry Greenwood - Tamam Shud

‘Hmm, yes. Can you see a pencil? And my glasses? Yes, thanks, yes, I’ll just run through the alphabet and see…’

He found a long strip of lettered paper, laid another one beside it, and began to check code letters against their equivalents. Phryne could see that he was about to become totally absorbed, so she wandered off to explore the house.

It was large and furnished with an odd collection of whatever someone had thought worth hauling up the mountain along with boxes of books and household items which the late Stephanie had brought from England and had never got around to unpacking. Phryne had liked Stephanie, which was why she had not persisted in the affair with Bernard, although he had always attracted her and had been a warm and delightful lover. She found some English magazines and sat down on the balcony to read them. The wind was not so hot here in the hills; the leaves were brushed, not lashed, by the moving air. She was engrossed in a report of a debate in the House of Commons about the Employment Prospects of the Returned Serviceman when she was summoned by a shout from inside.

‘It’s unbreakable, unless we have the code word,’ announced Bernard in tones of rising wrath. ‘Is there something you haven’t told me, Phryne?’

‘Yes, there is,’ said Phryne. ‘The code word must be TAMAM SHUD, and I should like to make love with you.’

‘TAMAM SHUD, eh? I’ll just make a note of it,’ he scribbled on the alphabet strip, ‘and then, as to your second proposal…’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, and enveloped her in a huge hug.

WPC Hammond was drinking tea when a paper was thrown across her desk.

‘Circulate that, Hammond. The tailor says that the man came from America – at least, he swears that’s where his clothes were made.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘You had any bright ideas?’

‘No, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘Women ! I don’t know why they let ’em into the force. No good at detection.’

‘Sir,’ said Hammond stonily.

Something of the ice in her voice made itself felt to the sergeant.

‘Yes, well, no one else has solved it, either.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Have all the ships checked. See if anyone has lost a crewman.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And get on with it!’ Hammond stood up.

‘Yes, sir.’

She went out without another word. The sergeant swore. He hadn’t wanted a female detective. They had made him have one, to look after the whores and the lost children and to search women. But no one said he had to like WPC Hammond, and he didn’t.

A young man came out through the railway gates and into the hot sunshine. He doffed his hat as he went into the Railway Hotel and ordered a beer. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and his complexion had not seen much sunlight. He sat neatly, with his feet together and his elbows pressed to his sides. The barman slid the beer across and said, ‘Too hot for you, mate?’

‘Far too hot.’ The voice had a faint accent, possibly Canadian, possibly somewhere closer. The barman moved the client’s panama hat aside and wiped the bar. The hat had PH marked on the sweatband.

‘Another beer,’ said PH. ‘And will you join me?’

Phryne lifted her head from the bare chest of Bernard Cooper when he groaned as though in pain. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m just remembering…’

‘Remembering Stephanie?’

‘No, not that. You must have noticed how some memories come back to haunt you when you are feeling wonderful.’

‘Yes, so they do.’

‘Why, what’s yours?’

‘Just move your arm a little, Bernard. Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes, my dear Phryne. Swap’s fair dealing. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’

‘All right.’ She breathed in the scent of male human and sweat and mingled gum forest, exhaled by the outside hills. ‘It was a young soldier, a Wehrmacht, you understand, in field grey, not an SS man in black with death’s heads. Just an ordinary young man; and we had captured him because he knew when a train was coming, a train carrying a Resistance prisoner who had to be rescued. Jean Moulin. You recall?’

‘I gather that Jean Moulin was killed by Klaus Barbie in Lyons’

‘Yes. But we did not know that he was dead my Maquis captured him, this soldier, and I was keeping watch while they interrogated him. I heard the guttural voices, in the dark, in the country, with the scent of mimosa ‘ Sprecben Sie! ’ they threatened; and he said ‘ Soll ich nichts sagen: Will ich nichts sprechen .’

‘I should not speak and I will not speak,’ translated Bernard, his white beard scraping Phryne’s cheek.

‘Yes. Rather poetic, really. They threatened him again, ‘ Sprechen Sie! ’ and I saw his face in the torchlight as he said ‘ Nie .’

‘Never.’

‘Yes. Just ‘ Nie ’ and then he said nothing more.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Oh, we killed him. Of course. He haunts me; the face, the face of the dead young man with a cold, pure, smug smile. He kept his secret beyond death. We never did find out what train it was.’

‘My poor Phryne.’ Bernard held her close as she shivered. The black hair, striped with white, fanned across his chest. ‘And yours?’

‘Oh, yes. Mine. I found out something when I was breaking codes. Just a routine message.’

‘What was it?’

‘Destroy Coventry.’

‘Oh, Bernard!’

‘I decoded it twelve hours before the bombers came. Thousands of people died. I knew it was going to happen. I did nothing.’

‘There was nothing that you could do.’

‘They said, you see, that if we warned Coventry, the Germans would know that we could break their codes. So they didn’t say anything. Coventry went all-unknowing to its doom. And I knew.’

Phryne turned in Bernard’s embrace to touch his mouth with her own. He responded with slow and delicious kisses. She found the place on his hip where a shell splinter had scarred him.

‘What did that?’

‘The Blitz’. He chuckled. ‘A pair of old crocks we are. How did you come by that scar, eh?’

‘A Gestapo man didn’t like my answers.’ He ran a meditative finger down her thigh.

‘But you got away?’

‘Oh, yes. I had… friends’

‘Yes, and you still have. Old Archie’s been on the phone, telling me to help you all I could and to make sure that you didn’t get into any trouble.’

‘Oh? What trouble could I get into in Adelaide?’

‘That’s up to you, my dear. As long as you did not bring your dead man with you.’

‘No, I swear.’

All right, then, presently we shall get up and I shall make tea, and then we shall solve your little puzzle.’

‘So easily?’

‘Oh, yes, I think so.’

‘Presently,’ said Phryne.

‘We assume that TAMAM SHUD is the code word,’ instructed Bernard Cooper, hunting for his glasses and his lost pencil, ‘and we look at the frequency of letters in the English language.’

‘What if it’s in another language?’

‘Then we are in trouble.’

‘Oh.’

‘Where’s that confounded pencil?’

Phryne handed it to him.

‘Thank you. We leave out the duplicated letters. Now, if we assume that TAMSHUD refers to ETAJONS, then we have the first problem.’

‘What’s that?’

‘U does not appear. So let’s approximate and take P to mean N. It’s just a guess but this is a long message and it should have at least one N.’

‘All right.’

‘Now that gives us AUR GT ST US AEK. Hmm. Possibly this is not as easy as it looks.’