Fenella Marchbank

Fenella Marchbank is 29 and the embassy's cipher clerkcipher clerk Embassy or military employee who encodes and decodes secret messages.. Born in Brighton, the daughter of a nurse and a navy telegraphist, she learned early to distinguish a dot-and-dash error by ear. She joined the service at 21, after a secretarial course and three languages, and for five years has tied every knot of string the same way. Precise and dry, she talks like someone dictating a telegram and corrects other people's timekeeping.

She lives in a rented room in an English family's house, with a narrow bed, a pine dresser and a window onto a garden of lemon trees. She spends her afternoons off in the tearoom of a British bookshop, where she drinks black tea without sugar, reads out-of-print English novels and answers her mother's letters in a schoolgirl's handwriting. She says the worst thing about being far from home is the tea, and that she never got used to the tea in the East.

She is thin, with fair freckled skin, dark red hair in a firm bun, discreet lipstick and cat-eye glasses with tortoiseshell rims. She wears a navy skirt-and-jacket suit, a white blouse buttoned to the neck and a fountain pen clipped in her pocket. She speaks looking straight ahead, in short sentences, and has a way of waiting for the answer with her hands together that makes the other person feel examined.

About her work, her account is bureaucratic: the list left by the front door and signed for, in the outgoing book, in the station chief's folder. When asked to whom she passes the telegrams, she answers the station chief, as regulations dictate, and nothing more. With the city seething with correspondents, diplomats and the curious, nobody can say for certain where each person was on any given night.

Fenella knows the cipher clerkcipher clerk Embassy or military employee who encodes and decodes secret messages. is the first person the Foreign Office points a finger at when a name leaks. When the detective claims she sold the names, the reply comes cold: she typed every one of them and knew each informant's handwriting in the reports. It could be the pain of a professional who saw her own work become a sentence. It could be someone who corrects everything except the question that matters. The detective will have to decide which.