ERIC AND THE ENIGMA
An Antiques Dealer, Jeremy Paxman, and a Mysterious Parcel in Paignton!
Above: Jeremy Paxman, October 2000.
(This began as a wall-of-text Facebook posting. I decided it might inadvertently develop “legs” and I’d become an unwilling Person of Interest. Hardly anyone reads my Substack, however.)
I had these friends who some 25 years back were living in a small building of flats in Devon. (Paignton, I believe it was their Paignton period.) Their landlord was a friendly but highly mysterious man named Eric. Eric was away from his own domicile most of the time—he did a lot of travelling in import-export work, and my friends believed he'd worked in intelligence at one time. Maybe, they averred, he still did. His flat was clean as a whistle. No personal effects, unwashed crocks, dirty laundry left around. My friends knew this because they looked after the place while Eric was away. They also signed for the occasional package. When Eric was in town and I was visiting, occasionally we'd all go out and have dinner together. Eric didn't seem to have any family or friends in the vicinity. He knew someone in Paris who dealt in antiques, which Eric traded in, too; and I'd ring up Eric when we were both in Paris. That contact brought me no closer to solving the Eric mystery, and I didn't personally have any reason to dig deeper.
In 2000, about a year after I met Eric, a big, heavy package arrived for him in Devon. It was shaped like a squarish overnight case wrapped in brown paper, and when you lifted it, it seemed to be full of lead or gold bullion. Very heavy indeed. My friend Andrew signed for it and dragged it the few yards into Eric's flat. And that was the end of it, other than maybe Eric thanking Andrew for going to all that work, instead of leaving it on the outside landing where some immensely strong weightlifter-thief might make off with it...
Andrew and his lady friend Claire speculated on what that parcel might be. They kept saying bullion, although then Andrew said it also seemed to be like a wooden box holding some very heavy machinery. You know, like an engine block.
And then, some weeks later, Jeremy Paxman, host of Newsnight, announced on the television that he had received a very heavy, compact parcel. Paxman took sensible precautions—bombs can be very heavy items—and brought in experienced personnel to open the package for him. And inside was a rare relic of the Second World War, an Enigma machine.
And not just any old Enigma, it was a four-rotor Enigma. Now, if you know anything about the War, you remember that in early 1942 the Germans upgraded their Enigma ciphering by adding a fourth gear to the scrambling mechanism, making their U-Boat signals something like 4 million times harder to decrypt. The Bletchley Park gang had succeeded in decrypting the original three-rotor Enigma codes...but now they had to begin again, almost from scratch. This took nearly a year. Meantime about half the cargo tonnage sent to Britain and Murmansk went to the bottom of the ocean.
The people at the Bletchley Park Trust not only identified Jeremy Paxman's Enigma machine, they told the newspapers that their only four-rotor Enigma had been stolen from their museum a few months earlier, during an open-house day for visitors. In the meantime they'd received ransom notes for return of the machine. The note-writer demanded over £10,000 and immunity from prosecution. Presumably the writer—who claimed not to be the thief, but merely an unwitting recipient of the package—soon grew fearful and gave up and decided to post the package to someone in the news media. However, if he posted it himself, it would be traceable. He needed a cutout who wouldn't reveal its source, and could send it anonymously.
Now, it was the considered belief of Andrew and Claire that Eric was perfectly capable of doing such things as posting heavy boxes anonymously. And that the odd parcel may very well have been the Enigma. But they couldn't very well ask their friend and landlord if he'd been shipping any purloined Enigma machines recently.
So the years roll on and we never ask Eric. Someday I must look him up again. I wonder if he's still around.
