Enigma (14 page)

“It’s a cathedral city. On the Danube, I believe. Partly in
French—well, bon, obviously. Disagreement with Hamelin. That’s
easy. Hamelin—Pied Piper—rats. Rat wbon. Rat is good. Not the view
in Hamelin.”

He starts to laugh then stops himself. Just hark at yourself, he
thinks, you’re babbling like an idiot.

“Fill up ten. Nine letters.”

“That’s an anagram,” he says immediately. “Plentiful.”

“Morning snack as far as it goes. Five letters.”

“Ambit.”

She shakes her heard, filling in the answers. “How do you get it
so quickly?”

“It’s not hard. You learn to know the way they think.
Morning—that’s a.m., obviously. Snack as far as it goes—bit with
the e missing. As far as it goes—well, within one’s ambit. One’s
limit. May I?”

He reaches over and takes the paper and pencil. Half his brain
studies the puzzle, the other half studies her—how she takes a
cigarette from her handbag and lights it, how she watches him, her
head resting slightly to one side. Aster, tasso, loveage,
landau…It’s the first and only time in their relationship he’s ever
fully in control, and by the time he’s completed the thirty clues
and given her back the paper they’re pulling through the outskirts
of a small town, crawling past narrow gardens and tall chimneys.
Behind her head he sees the familiar lines of washing, the air raid
shelters, the vegetable plots, the little red-brick houses coated
black by the passing trains. The compartment darkens as they pass
beneath the iron canopy of the station. “Bletchley,” calls the
guard. “Bletchley station!”

He says, “I’m afraid this is my stop.”

“Yes.” She looks thoughtfully at the finished crossword, then
turns and smiles at him. “Yes. D’you know, I rather guessed it
might be.”

“Mr Jericho!” someone calls. “Mr Jericho!”

♦

“Mr Jericho!”

He opened his eyes. For a moment he was disoriented. The
wardrobe loomed over him like a thief in the dim light.

“Yes.” He sat up in the strange bed. “I’m sorry. Mrs
Armstrong?”

“It’s a quarter past six, Mr Jericho.” She was shouting to him
from halfway up the stairs. “Will you be wanting supper?”

A quarter past six? The room was almost dark. He pulled his
watch out from beneath his pillow and flicked it open. To his
astonishment he found he had slept through the entire day.

“That would be very kind, Mrs Armstrong. Thank you.”

The dream had been disturbingly vivid—more substantial,
certainly, than this shadowy room—and as he threw off the blankets
and swung his bare feet on to the cold floor, he felt himself to be
in a no-man’s-land between two worlds. He had a peculiar conviction
that Claire had been thinking of him, that his subconscious had
somehow acted like a radio receiver and had picked up a message
from her. It was an absurd thought for a mathematician, a
rationalist, to entertain, but he couldn’t rid himself of it. He
found his sponge-bag and slipped his overcoat over his pyjamas.

On the first floor a figure in a blue flannel dressing gown and
white paper curlers hurried out of the bathroom. He nodded politely
but the woman gave a squeak of embarrassment and scuttled down the
passage. Standing at the basin, he laid out his toiletries: a
sliver of carbolic soap, a safety razor with a six-month-old blade,
a wooden toothbrush worn down to a fuzz of bristles, an almost
empty tin of pink tooth powder. The taps clanked. There was no hot
water. He scraped at his chin for ten minutes until it was red and
pricked with blood. This was where the devil of the war resided, he
thought, as he dabbed at his skin with the hard towel: in the
details, in the thousand petty humiliations of never having enough
toilet paper or soap or matches or baths or clean clothes.
Civilians had been pauperised. They smelled, that was the truth of
it. Body odour lay over the British Isles like a great sour
fog.

There were two other guests downstairs in the dining room, a
Miss Jobey and a Mr Bonnyman, and the three of them made discreet
conversation while they waited for their food. Miss Jobey was
dressed in black with a cameo brooch at her throat. Bonnyman wore
mildew-coloured tweeds with a set of pens in his breast pocket and
Jericho guessed he might be an engineer on the bombes. The door to
the kitchen swung open as Mrs Armstrong brought in their plates.
“Here we go,” whispered Bonnyman. “Brace yourself old boy.”

“Now, don’t you go getting her worked up again, Arthur,” said
Miss Jobey. She gave his arm a playful pinch, at which Bonnyman’s
hand slid beneath the table and squeezed her knee. Jericho poured
them all a glass of water and pretended not to notice.

“It’s potato pie,” announced Mrs Armstrong, defiantly. “With
gravy. And potatoes.”

They contemplated their steaming plates. “How very, ah,
substantial,” said Jericho, eventually. The meal passed in silence.
Pudding was some kind of stewed apple with powdered custard. Once
that had been cleared away Bonnyman lit his pipe and announced
that, as it was a Saturday night, he and Miss Jobey would be going
to the Eight Bells Inn on the Buckingham Road.

“Naturally, you’re very welcome to join us,” he said, in a tone
which implied that Jericho, naturally, wouldn’t be welcome at all.
“Do you have any plans?”

“It’s kind of you, but as a matter of fact I do have plans. Or,
rather, a plan.”

After the others had gone, he helped Mrs Armstrong clear away
the dishes, then went out into the back yard to check his bicycle.
It was almost dark and there was a sharpness in the air that
promised frost. The lights still worked. He cleaned the dirt off
the regulation white patch on the mudguard and pumped some air into
the tyres.

By eight o’clock he was back up in his room. At half past ten,
Mrs Armstrong was on the point of laying aside her knitting to go
up to bed when she heard him coming downstairs. She opened the door
a crack, just in time to see Jericho hurrying along the passage and
out into the night.

§

The moon defied the blackout, shining a blue torch over the
frozen fields, quite bright enough for a man to cycle by. Jericho
lifted himself out of the saddle and trod hard on the pedals,
rocking from side to side as he toiled up the hill out of
Bletchley, pursuing his own shadow, cast sharp on the road before
him. From far in the distance came the drone of a returning
bomber.

The road began to level out and he sat back on the saddle. For
all his efforts with the pump, the tyres remained half-flat, the
wheels and chain were stiff for want of oil. It was hard going, but
Jericho didn’t mind. He was taking action, that was the point. It
was the same as code-breaking. However hopeless the situation, the
rule was always to do something. No cryptogram, Alan Turing used to
say, was ever solved by simply staring at it.

He cycled on for about two miles, following the lane as it
continued to rise gently towards Shenley Brook End. This was hardly
a village, more a tiny hamlet of perhaps a dozen houses, mostly
farmworkers’ cottages. He couldn’t see the buildings, which
sheltered in a slight hollow, but when he rounded a bend and caught
the scent of woodsmoke he knew he must be close.

Just before the hamlet, on the left, there was a gap in the
hawthorn hedge where a rutted track led to a little cottage that
stood alone. He turned into it and skittered to a halt, his feet
slipping on the frozen mud. A white owl, improbably huge, rose from
a nearby branch and flapped soundlessly across the field. Jericho
squinted at the cottage. Was it his imagination or was there a hint
of light in the downstairs window? He dismounted and began to wheel
his bike towards it.

He felt wonderfully calm. Above the thatched roof the
constellations spread out like the lights of a city—Ursa Minor and
Polaris, Pegasus and Cepheus, the flattened M of Cassiopeia with
the Milky Way flowing through it. No glow from earth obscured their
brilliance. You can at least say this for the blackout, he thought,
it has given us back the stars.

The door was stout and iron-studded. It was like knocking on
stone. After half a minute he tried again.

“Claire?” he called. “Claire?”

There was a pause, and then: “Who is it?”

“It’s Tom.” He took a breath and braced himself, as if for a
blow.

The handle turned and the door opened slightly, just enough to
reveal a dark-haired woman, thirtyish, about Jericho’s height. She
was wearing round spectacles and a thick overcoat and was holding a
prayer book.

“Yes?”

For a moment he was speechless. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was
looking for Claire.”

“She’s not in.”

“Not in?” he repeated, hopelessly. He remembered now that Claire
shared the cottage with a woman called Hester Wallace (“she works
in Hut 6, she’s a sweetie”) but for some reason he had forgotten
all about her. She did not look very sweet to Jericho. She had a
thin face, split like a knife by a long, sharp nose. Her hair was
wrenched back off a frowning forehead. “I’m Tom Jericho.” She made
no response. “Perhaps Claire’s mentioned me?”

“I’ll tell her you called.”

“Will she be back soon?”

“I’ve no idea, I’m sorry.”

She began to close the door. Jericho pressed his foot against
it. “I say, I know this is awfully rude of me, but I couldn’t
possibly come in and wait, could I?”

The woman glanced at his foot, and then at his face. “I’m afraid
that’s impossible. Good evening, Mr Jericho.” She pushed the door
closed with surprising force.

Jericho took a step backwards on to the track. This was not a
contingency envisaged in his plan. He looked at his watch. It was
just after eleven. He picked up his bicycle and wheeled it back
towards the lane, but at the last moment, instead of going out on
to the road, he turned left and followed the line of the hedge. He
laid the bicycle flat and drew into the shadows to wait.

After about ten minutes, the cottage door opened and closed and
he heard the rattle of a bicycle being wheeled over stone. It was
as he thought: Miss Wallace had been dressed to go out because she
was working the midnight shift. A pinprick of yellow light
appeared, wobbled briefly from side to side, and then began to bob
towards him. Hester Wallace passed within twenty feet in the
moonlight, knees pumping, elbows stuck out, as angular as an old
umbrella. She stopped at the entrance to the lane and slipped on a
luminous armlet. Jericho edged further into the hawthorn. Half a
minute later she was gone. He waited a full quarter of an hour in
case she’d forgotten something, then headed back to the
cottage.

There was only one key—ornate and iron and big enough to fit a
cathedral. It was kept, he recalled, under a piece of slate beneath
a flowerpot. Damp had warped the door and he had to push hard to
open it, scraping an arc on the flagstone floor. He replaced the
key and closed the door behind him before turning on the light.

He had only been inside once before, but there wasn’t much to
remember. Two rooms on the ground floor: a sitting room with low
beams and a kitchen straight ahead. To his left, a narrow staircase
led up to a little landing. Claire’s bedroom was at the front,
looking towards the lane. Hester’s was at the rear. The lavatory
was a chemical toilet just outside the back door, reached via the
kitchen. There was no bathroom.

A galvanised metal tub was kept in the shed next to the kitchen.
Baths were taken in front of the stove. The whole place was cold
and cramped and smelled of mildew. He wondered how Claire stuck
it.

“Oh, but darling, it’s so much better than having some ghastly
landlady telling one what to do…”

Jericho took a couple of steps across the worn rug and stopped.
For the first time he began to feel uneasy. Everywhere he looked he
saw evidence of a life being lived quite contentedly without
him—the ill-assorted blue-and-white china in the dresser, the vase
full of daffodils, the stack of pre-war Vogues, even the
arrangement of the furniture (the two armchairs and the sofa drawn
up cosily around the hearth). Every tiny domestic detail seemed
significant and premeditated. He had no business here.

He very nearly left at that moment. All that stopped him was the
faintly pathetic realisation that he had nowhere else particularly
to go. The Park? Albion Street? King’s? His life seemed to have
become a maze of dead ends.

Better to make a stand here, he decided, than run away again.
She was bound to be back quite soon.

God, but it was cold! His bones were ice. He walked up and down
the cramped room, ducking to avoid the heavy beams. In the hearth
was white ash and a few blackened fragments of wood. He sat first
in one armchair, then tried the other. Now he was facing the door.
To his right was the sofa. Its covers were of frayed pink silk, its
cushions hollowed and leaking feathers. The springs had gone and
when you sat in it you sank almost to the floor and had to struggle
to get out. He remembered that sofa and he stared at it for a long
time, as a soldier might stare at a battlefield where a war had
been irretrievably lost.

♦

They leave the train together and walk up the footpath to the
Park. To their left is a playing field, ploughed into allotments
for the Dig for Victory campaign. To their right, through the
perimeter fence, is the familiar huddle of low buildings. People
walk briskly to ward off the cold. The December afternoon is raw
and misty, the day is leaking into dusk.

She tells him she’s been up to London to celebrate her birthday.
How old does he think she is?

He hasn’t a clue. Eighteen perhaps?

Twenty, she says triumphantly, ancient. And what was he doing in
town?

He can’t tell her, of course. Just business, he says. Just
business.

Sorry she says, she shouldn’t have asked. She still can’t get
the hang of all this “need to know”. She has been at the Park three
months and hates it. Her father works at the Foreign Office and
wrangled her the job to keep her out of mischief. How long has he
been here?