I loved the Enigma machine. It was such a beautiful thing, with its nickel-trimmed keyboard and polished wood case. Its steady lamps picked out letter after letter for me to transfer to my exercise book, and in the moment when the meaningless soup of code became German it always felt like a jolt of electricity was going through me. It was magic.

I made duplicates of the next translation, one to leave in the record album, and one to give Ellen, in case she got to Jamie first. The message was complicated: something about a U-boat surfacing for urgent repairs between Scotland and Denmark, asking the Luftwaffe to protect the maintenance ship that was going to meet them. The coordinates were all in Roman numerals, as the cipher machine didn’t have numbers on it. I worked through the code three times to be sure I’d got it right.

I was more anxious about hiding my penny above the bar than I’d been about anything since meeting Jane on the Isle of Man. I thought Nan would less likely notice something new up there than something old missing, but it was a risk. I didn’t want her to catch me. Was I breaking the law? I don’t think so, I didn’t think there were any laws about what I was doing, but if there were and I was, I couldn’t imagine the consequences. I didn’t want anyone to catch me.

“Rules are made to be broken,” I whispered aloud as I folded the copied messages.

We didn’t use the thick paper from my exercise book to leave the message on. We didn’t want anyone but Jamie noticing it behind the notes in the Django Reinhardt record. Jane cut a thin strip from a page of one of her own books, a beautiful edition of a fat novel called Ulysses, itself hidden in a paper dust jacket off a French/English dictionary.

“Why is your book in disguise?”

“They never would have let me take it to Rushen Camp if they knew what it was,” said Jane smugly. She could be quite smug for an old woman. “Quite the filthiest piece of writing ever published. It would upset Nancy more than an enemy cipher machine if she found a copy of it under her roof!”

A racy book disguised as a stern old dictionary—it rather reminded me of Jane herself.

I wrote out Jamie’s message in English. Jane guessed a little about how the German coordinates worked and added a note for David Silvermont at the end. I added a warning on the back about keeping our new communications system secret—as if they needed to be told that!