Jeffrey Archer - As the Crow Flies

The colonel vigorously nodded his agreement, but all he had to say on the subject was, "Bloody woman."

When both my parents were out of the house, I looked up "Trentham" in the telephone directory. There was only one listing: Major G. H. Trentham, MP, 19 Chester Square. I wasn't any the wiser.

When in 1939 Trinity College offered me the Newton Mathematics Prize Scholarship I thought Dad was going to burst, he was so proud. We all drove up to the university city for the weekend to check my future digs, before strolling round the college's cloisters and through Great Court.

The only cloud on this otherwise unblemished horizon was the thunderous one of Nazi Germany. Conscription for all those over twenty was being debated in Parliament, and I couldn't wait to play my part if Hitler dared to plant as much as a toe on Polish soil.

My first year at Cambridge went well, mainly because I was being tutored by Horace Bradford who, along with his wife, Victoria, was considered to be the pick of the bunch among a highly talented group of mathematicians who were teaching at the university at that time. Although Mrs. Bradford was rumored to have won the Wrangler's Prize for coming out top of her year, her husband explained that she was not given the prestigious award, simply because she was a woman. The man who came second was deemed to have come first, a piece of information that made my mother puce with anger.

Mrs. Bradford rejoiced in the fact that my mother had been awarded her degree from London University in 1921, while Cambridge still refused to acknowledge hers even existed in 1939.

At the end of my first year I, like many Trinity undergraduates, applied to join the army, but my tutor asked me if I would like to work with him and his wife at the War Office in a new department that would be specializing in code-breaking.

I accepted the offer without a second thought, relishing the prospect of spending my time sitting in a dingy little back room somewhere in Bletchley Park attempting to break German codes. I felt a little guilty that I was going to be one of the few people in uniform who was actually enjoying the war. Dad gave me enough money to buy an old MG, which meant I could get up to London from time to time to see him and Mum.

Occasionally I managed to grab an hour for lunch with him over at the Ministry of Food, but Dad would only eat bread and cheese accompanied by a glass of milk as an example to the rest of his team. This may have been considered edifying but it certainly wasn't nourishing, Mr. Selwyn warned me, adding that my father even had the minister at it.

"But not Mr. Churchill?" I suggested.

"He's next on his list, I'm told."

In 1943 I was made up to captain, which was simply the War Office acknowledging the work we were all doing in our fledgling department. Of course, my father was delighted but I was sorry that I couldn't share with my parents our excitement when we broke the code used by the German U-boat commanders. It still baffles me to this day why they continued to go on using the four-wheel enigma key long after we'd made our discovery. The code was a mathematician's dream that we finally broke on the back of a menu at Lyons Corner House just off Piccadilly. The waitress serving at our table described me as a vandal. I laughed, and remember thinking that I would take the rest of the day off and go and surprise my mother by letting her see what I looked like in my captain's uniform. I thought I looked rather swish, but when she opened the front door to greet me I was shocked by her response. She stared at me as if she'd seen a ghost. Although she recovered quickly enough, that first reaction on seeing me in uniform became just another clue in an ever more complex puzzle, a puzzle that was never far from the back of my thoughts.

The next clue came in the bottom line of an obituary, to which I wasn't paying much attention until I discovered that a Mrs. Trentham would be coming into a fortune; not an important clue in itself, until I reread the entry and learned that she was the daughter of someone called Sir Raymond Hardcastle, a name that allowed me to fill in several little boxes that went in both directions. But what puzzled me was there being no mention of a Guy Trentham among the surviving relatives.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't been born with the kind of mind that enjoyed breaking codes and meddling with mathematical formulas. But somehow "bastard," "Trentham," "hospital," "Captain Guy," "flats," "Sir Raymond," "that brat Nigel," "funeral," and Mother turning white when she saw me dressed in a captain's uniform seemed to have some linear connection. Although I realized I would need even more clues before logic would lead me to the correct solution.

Then suddenly I worked out to whom they must have been referring when the marchioness had come to tea all those years before, and told Mother that she had just attended Guy's funeral. It must have been Captain Guy's burial that had taken place. But why was that so significant?

The following Saturday morning I rose at an ungodly hour and traveled down to Ashurst, the village in which the Marchioness of Wiltshire had once lived—not a coincidence, I concluded. I arrived at the parish church a little after six, and as I had anticipated, at that hour there was no one to be seen in the churchyard. I strolled around the graveyard checking the names: Yardleys, Baxters, Floods, and Harcourt-Brownes aplenty. Some of the graves were overgrown with weeds, others were well cared for and even had fresh flowers at the head. I paused for a moment at the grave of my godmother's grandfather. There must have been over a hundred parishioners buried around the clock tower, but it didn't take that long to find the neatly kept Trentham family plot, only a few yards from the church vestry.

When I came across the most recent family gravestone I broke out in a cold sweat:

Guy Trentham, MC

1897–1927

after a long illness

Sadly missed by all his family

And so the mystery had come literally to a dead end, at the grave of the one man who surely could have answered all my questions had he still been alive.

When the war ended I returned to Trinity and was granted an extra year to complete my degree. Although my father and mother considered the highlight of the year to be my passing out as senior Wrangler with the offer of a Prize fellowship at Trinity, I thought Dad's investiture at Buckingham Palace wasn't to be sneezed at.

The ceremony turned out to be a double delight, because I was also able to witness my old tutor, Professor Bradford, being knighted for the role he had played in the field of code-breaking—although there was nothing for his wife, my mother noted. I remember feeling equally outraged on Dr. Bradford's behalf. Dad may have played his part in filling the stomachs of the British people, but as Churchill had stated in the House of Commons, our little team had probably cut down the length of the war by as much as a year.

We all met up afterwards for tea at the Ritz, and—not unnaturally—at some point during the afternoon the conversation switched to what career I proposed to follow now the war was over. To my father's abiding credit he had never once suggested that I should join him at Trumper's, especially as I knew how much he had longed for another son who might eventually take his place. In fact during the summer vacation I became even more conscious of my good fortune, as Father seemed to be preoccupied with the business and Mother was unable to hide her own anxiety about the future of Trumper's. But whenever I asked if I could help all she would say was: "Not to worry, it will all work out in the end."

Once I had returned to Cambridge, I persuaded myself that should I ever come across the name "Trentham" again I would no longer allow it to worry me. However, because the name was never mentioned freely in my presence it continued to nag away in the back of my mind. My father had always been such an open man that there was no simple explanation as to why on this one particular subject he remained so secretive to such an extent, in fact, that I felt I just couldn't raise the subject with him myself.