The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

else. Some hopes of that. Anything sent in plain language was fair game as far as he was concerned. Reception would be just as good if he dismantled the main aerial and threw a piece of inconspicuous wire out of the window.

      They drove away ten minutes later, so he returned to his work on the highly forbidden frequencies, reflecting that they had nothing on him. He was always careful to renew the television licence.

      He opened a manual from the United States which gave the police and security frequencies, and checked them one by one on the radio. They were silent for a while, or mere oddments on short wave bounding up to the heaviside layer and coming down and leaping up again, invisibly around the world and diminishing in potency to vanishing point. Then one of the Interpol frequencies became active, allowing him to pull in a choice item of a ship that had departed from a port in Turkey. The message queried its load of phosphates, and gave the boat’s appearance: ‘Structure just aft of midships, twin funnels aft of bridge, hull dark blue with bright green bulwarks, fore and aft funnels dark grey with black top. Keep a sharp look out. Thought to have destination Trieste.’

      To prove he was earning his keep he took the weather for that part of the Mediterranean: ‘Aegean and south of Crete sectors, northwesterly wind, Force 5, increasing. Scattered showers, moderate visibility, slight sea, outlook changeable,’ and so on for another half sheet. If the ship was known about, its progress could be realistically monitored. Should any message be due from its master he would keep watch on the maritime channel. Maybe the ship had nothing to do with them at all, but every scrap of information had to be passed on in case it was useful. He phoned the signals through, then posted them for confirmation in the box at the end of the lane.

      Back in his room he thought it hard to know how long his spying could go on. Sooner or later an astute organisation like Interpol would wonder if their plain-language signals were being intercepted. Didn’t they know someone was always listening, and that hand-sent morse wasn’t secure? Seemed not. Maybe they were being cunning, running fictional texts so as to fox people like him, plotting to lure the mob into a trap. What a web of deceit he would have spun in their place, the best and neatest spider in the business, purely on the offchance, so subtle, so complicated, so certain to get the drug smugglers to a pre-arranged spot where launches and armed helicopters would be lurking on red alert – with an alacrity that chilled his spine.

      Circumstances and accident had put him on the opposite side, because his intelligence reports were better paid, not to mention the boat trips. Working for law abiders would have been more permanent, possibly more absorbing, not to mention – he laughed out loud – there being a pension at the end. Well, they could stuff their perks and pensions. All he knew was that drug running would go on forever, and the money was better for whoever got involved.

      The trouble was that sooner or later Interpol would modernise its communications, though he would try to keep up with them. They would go radio teletype, or send a message in a single burst which couldn’t be deciphered, but he would be ready for them because the clever and enterprising Japanese already had decoders on the market, and one was on its way from a shop in the north of England. He would only be defeated if they came up with a cipher he could not break, one-day message pads impossible to disentangle. It would be little enough trouble for them, and he was expecting it at any time. Five-letter groups would rip across the screen of his decoder, money spent for nothing, bugger-all left but to confess to his contacts in London that their spy branch would be closing down, at least on the telegraphy spectrum.

      For a month or so he might pass on messages out of his imagination, based on the knowledge he’d so far acquired. He would tell them about phantom boats heading for secret coves, and ghostly small aeroplanes alighting on disused airfields, or the arrival of teams from Colombia about to flood the airports of western Europe with false-bottomed suitcases stuffed with the latest paradise powders.

      The chaos would set them to hunt him down and kill him, unless he never went to sleep and sat at the window with his two-two rifle beamed in the lane. Boys’ Own stuff. He would explore the aether for other stations. There was always something to pick up, with scanners coming on the market.

       Trouble was you couldn’t tune in to every frequency at once, though maybe the blind man who had been doing it for far longer had stumbled on a few items Richard didn’t know about, wavelengths or stations providing priceless gen he couldn’t have found by himself. Blind Howard might be someone who, in his innocence, would boastfully babble on about what he had alighted onto like a cloth-footed fly in his darkness. Any signals fed to the boss would keep the pay-cheques coming, so it might be the best idea he’d had for a long time.

      Amanda came in with cups of tea.

      ‘This is my lucky day.’

      ‘You can say that again, though I don’t know why you sit all the hours God sends at that bloody silly radio.’

      ‘I’m hoping to find out how long I’ve got to live.’

      ‘Tell me if you do. I’ll want to know.’ She laughed, and sat in the large padded armchair, balancing her cup. His table was laden with books full of figures and letters she didn’t understand, notepads, and three (three!) radio sets. He had placed the table in front of the window so that he could look out while listening. The floor was covered with a tough grey cord, though the strands were shining through under his table at the wear from his nervous feet. The windowless wall was taken up by a chart of the radio facilities of the British Isles, a map of northwest Europe, and a chart of the Mediterranean. He liked playing captain on the bridge, between his yachting trips. ‘I expect you’re going to live forever, anyway, so why bother to find out?’

      He faced her, hoping not to miss anything good on the waveband while talking. ‘Is that what you want?’

      ‘I love you, don’t I?’

      ‘Do you?’

      ‘I must, if I say so.’

      ‘I love you, too.’

      ‘There’s nothing like hearing good news.’

      She often threw at him that he never talked, so he disproved her now by dredging up the incident while driving back from Bracebridge. ‘I saw this woman in a lay-by. Her car had a flat tyre, so I pulled in and changed it for her.’

      ‘Your good deed of the year. Was she pretty?’

       ‘I suppose she had been in her time. She was still good looking, but a bit over forty.’

      ‘A really good deed, then. I’ll bet you didn’t know she was that old before you pulled in.’

      ‘No, but I was glad I helped her. We went to The Foxglove afterwards for a drink. It turned out that she was married, to a man who’s been blind since the war. He got shot up in a bomber. Sounds a lonely old cove, but the coincidence is that he’s also an ex-wireless operator, and spends all his time listening to morse. She begged me to call on them when I could, and talk to him. I’d cheer him up, no end, she said.’

      ‘Another good deed?’

      ‘I might do it.’

      ‘Why not? Before your next trip, I suppose.’

      ‘I don’t have one lined up at the moment.’

      ‘As long as you let me know when you have.’ She stood, kissed him on the lips, as if in thank you for the story. ‘I must be off now. I’m going to call on Doris in Angleton.’

      ‘Have a nice time.’

      ‘I’ll try.’

      In such a good phase she was bound to.

      ‘Love you,’ she called.

      What they got up to he couldn’t imagine. Probably went to a pub and had a jolly time. His mood for eavesdropping had misted away. The front door banged. Her car bumped over the ruts on the lane. He liked being alone, not listening to the radio. Strange, though, that all his best transcripts came when Amanda was in the house. Maybe she provided the electricity that gave persistence and brought luck. When she was out he was dilatory, got up too often