Enigma (24 page)

In the event, it was to be well past seven before he got away.
Logie was passing through the Big Room when he stopped off at
Jericho’s table and told him, for God’s sake, to get back to his
digs and get some rest. “There’s nothing more for you to do here,
old love. Except wait. I expect it’ll be around this time tomorrow
that we’ll start to sweat.”

Jericho reached thankfully for his coat. “Did you talk to
Skynner?”

“About the plan, yes. Not about you. He didn’t ask and I
certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.”

“Don’t tell me he’s forgotten?”

Logie shrugged. “There’s some other flap on that seems to have
taken his mind off things.”

“What other flap?”

But Logie had moved away. “I’ll see you in the morning. You just
make sure you get some kip.”

Jericho returned the stack of Shark intercepts to the Registry
and went outside. The March sun, which had barely risen above the
trees all day, had sunk behind the mansion, leaving a fading streak
of primrose and pale orange at the rim of an indigo sky. The moon
was already out and Jericho could hear the sound of bombers, far
away, a lot of them, forming up for the night’s attack on Germany.
As he walked, he gazed around him in wonder. The lunar disc on the
still lake, the fire on the horizon—it was an extraordinary
conjunction of lights and symbols, almost like a portent. He was so
engrossed he had almost passed the telephone box before he realised
that it was empty. One last try? He glanced at the moon. Why not?
The Kensington number still wasn’t answering so he decided, on a
whim, to try the Foreign Office. The operator put him through to a
duty clerk and he asked for Edward Romilly. “Which department?” “I
don’t know, I’m afraid.”

The line went silent. The chances of Edward Romilly being at his
desk on a Sunday night were slim. He rested his shoulder against
the glass panel of the booth. A car went past slowly, then pulled
up about ten yards down the road. Its brake lights glowed red in
the dusk. There was a click and Jericho returned his attention to
the call. “Putting you through.”

A ringing tone, and then a cultured female voice said: “German
Desk.”

German Desk? He was momentarily disconcerted. “Ah, Edward
Romilly, please.”

“And who shall I say is calling?”

My God, he was there. He hesitated again.

“A friend of his daughter.”

“Wait, please.”

His fingers were clamped so tight around the receiver that they
were aching. He made an effort to relax. There was no good reason
why Romilly shouldn’t work on the German Desk. Hadn’t Claire told
him once that her father had been a junior official at the Berlin
Embassy, just as the Nazis were coming to power? She would have
been about ten or eleven. That must have been where she learned her
German.

“I’m afraid, sir, Mr Romilly’s already left for the evening. Who
shall I say called?”

“Thank you. It doesn’t matter. Good night.”

He hung up quickly. He didn’t like the sound of that. And he
didn’t like the look of this car, either. He came out of the
telephone box and began to walk towards it—a low, black machine
with wide running boards, edged white for the blackout. Its engine
was still running. As he came closer it suddenly catapulted
forwards and shot round the curving road towards the main gate. He
trotted after it but by the time he reached the entrance it had
gone.

♦

As Jericho went down the hill, the vague outline of the town
evaporated into the darkness. No generation for at least a century
could have witnessed such a spectacle. Even in his
great-grandfather’s day there would have been some illumination—the
gleam of a gaslight or a carriage lantern, the bluish glow of a
night watchman’s paraffin lamp—but not any more. As the light
faded, so did Bletchley. It seemed to sink into a black lake. He
could have been anywhere.

He was aware, now, of a certain paranoia, and the night
magnified his fears. He passed an urban pub close to the railway
bridge, an elaborate Victorian mausoleum with FINE WHISKYS, PORTS
AND STOUTS inlaid in gold on the black masonry like an epitaph. He
could hear a badly tuned piano playing “The Londonderry Air” and
for a moment he was tempted to go in, buy a drink, find someone to
talk to. But then he imagined the conversation—

“So, what’s your line then, pal?”

“Just government work.”

“Civil service?”

“Communications. Nothing much. Look, I say, can I get you
another drink?”

“Local are you?”

“Not exactly…”

—and he thought: no, better to keep clear of strangers; best,
really, not to drink at all. As he was turning into Albion Street
he heard the scrape of a footstep behind him and spun round. The
pub door had opened, there was a moment of colour and music, then
it closed and the road was dark again.

The guesthouse was about half way down Albion Street, on the
right and he had almost reached it when he noticed, on the left, a
car. He slowed his pace. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one
that had behaved so oddly at the Park, although it looked quite
similar. But then, when he was almost level with it, one of the
occupants struck a match. As the driver leaned over to cup his hand
to the light, Jericho saw on his sleeve the three white stripes of
a police sergeant.

He let himself into the guesthouse and prayed he could make the
stairs before Mrs Armstrong rose like a night fighter to intercept
him in the hall. But he was too late. She must have been waiting
for the sound of his key in the latch. She appeared from the
kitchen through a cloud of steam that smelled of cabbage and offal.
In the dining room, somebody made a retching noise and there was a
shout of laughter.

Jericho said weakly, “I don’t think I’m very hungry, Mrs
Armstrong, thanks all the same.”

She dried her hands on her apron and nodded towards a closed
door. “You’ve got a visitor.”

He had just planted his foot defiantly on the first stair. “Is
it the police?”

“Why, Mr Jericho, whatever would the police be doing here? It’s
a very nice-looking young gentleman. I’ve put him,” she added, with
heavy significance, “in the parlour.”

The parlour! Open nightly to any resident from eight till ten on
weekdays, and from teatime onwards, Saturday and Sunday: as formal
as a ducal drawing room, with its matching three–piece suite and
antimacassars (made by the proprietress herself), its mahogany
standard lamp with tasselled shade, its row of grinning Toby jugs,
precisely lined above its freezing hearth. Who had come to see him,
wondered Jericho, who warranted admission to the parlour?

At first he didn’t recognise him. Golden hair, a pale and
freckled face, pale blue eyes, a practised smile. Advancing across
the room to meet him, right hand outstretched, left hand holding an
Anthony Eden hat, fifty guineas’ worth of Savile Row coat draped
over manly shoulders. A blur of breeding, charm and menace.

“Wigram. Douglas Wigram. Foreign Office. We met yesterday but
weren’t introduced properly.”

He took Jericho’s hand lightly and oddly, a finger crooked back
into his palm, and it took Jericho a moment to realise he had just
been the recipient of a masonic handshake.

“Digs all right? Super room, this. Super. Mind if we go
somewhere else? Whereabouts are you based? Upstairs?”

Mrs Armstrong was still in the hall, fluffing up her hair in
front of the oval mirror.

“Mr Jericho suggests we might have our little chat upstairs in
his room, if that’s OK with you, Mrs A?” He didn’t wait for a
reply. “Let’s go then, shall we?”

He held out his arm, still smiling, and Jericho found himself
being ushered up the stairs. He felt as though he had been tricked
or robbed but he couldn’t work out how. On the landing he rallied
sufficiently to turn and say, “It’s very small, you know, there’s
barely room to sit.”

“That’s perfectly all right, my dear chap. As long as it’s
private. Onwards and upwards.”

Jericho switched on the dim light and stood back to let Wigram
go in first. There was a faint whiff of eau de cologne and cigars
as he brushed past. Jericho’s eyes went straight to the picture of
the chapel, which, he was relieved to note, looked undisturbed. He
closed the door.

“See what you mean about the room,” said Wigram, cupping his
hands to the glass to peer out of the window. “The hell we have to
go through, what? And a railway view thrown in. Bliss.” He closed
the curtains and turned back to Jericho. He was cleaning his
fingers on a handkerchief with almost feminine delicacy. “We’re
rather worried.” His smile widened. “We’re rather worried about a
girl called Claire Romilly.” He folded the blue silk square and
thrust it back into his breast pocket. “Mind if I sit down?”

He shrugged off his overcoat and laid it on the bed, then
hitched up his pinstriped trousers a fraction at the knees to avoid
damaging the crease. He sat on the edge of the mattress and bounced
up and down experimentally. His hair was blond; so were his
eyebrows, his eyelashes, the hairs on the back of his neat white
hands…Jericho felt his skin prickle with fear and disgust.

Wigram patted the eiderdown beside him. “Let’s talk.” He didn’t
seem the least put out when Jericho stayed where he was. He merely
folded his hands contentedly in his lap.

“All right,” he said, “we’ll make a start, then, shall we?
Claire Romilly. Twenty. Clerical grade staff. Officially missing
for—” he looked at his watch “—twelve hours. Failed to show for her
morning shift. Actually, when you start to check, not seen since
midnight, Friday—dear oh dear, that’s nearly two days ago now—when
she left the Park after work. Alone. The girl she lives with swears
she hasn’t seen her since Thursday. Her father says he hasn’t seen
her since before Christmas. Nobody else—girls she works with,
family, so forth—nobody seems to have the foggiest. Vanished.”
Wigram snapped his fingers. “Just like that.” For the first time
he’d stopped smiling. “Rather a good friend of yours, I
gather?”

“I haven’t seen her since the beginning of February. Is this why
there are police outside?”

“But good enough? Good enough that you’ve tried to see her? Out
to her cottage last night, according to our little Miss Wallace.
Scurry, scurry. Questions, questions. Then, this morning, into Hut
3—questions, questions, again. Phone call to her father—oh, yes,”
he said, noticing Jericho’s surprise, “he rang us straight away to
say you’d called. You’ve never met Ed Romilly? Lovely bloke. Never
achieved his full potential, so they say. Rather lost the plot
after his wife died. Tell me, Mr Jericho, why the interest?”

“I’d been away for a month. I hadn’t seen her.”

“But surely you’ve got plenty more important things to worry
about, especially just now, than renewing one acquaintance?”

His last words were almost lost in the roar of a passing express
train. The room vibrated for fifteen seconds, which was the exact
duration of his smile. When the noise was over, he said: “Were you
surprised to be brought back from Cambridge?”

“Yes. I suppose I was. Look, Mr Wigram, who are you,
exactly?”

“Surprised when you were told why you were needed back?”

“Not surprised. No.” He searched for the word. “Shocked.”

“Shocked. Ever talk to the girl about your work?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not. Strike you as odd, though—possibly more than a
coincidence, possibly even sinister—that one day the Germans black
us out in the North Atlantic and two days later the girlfriend of a
leading Hut 8 cryptanalyst goes missing? Actually on the same day
he comes back?”

Jericho’s gaze flickered involuntarily to the print of the
chapel. “I told you. I never talked to Claire about my work. I
hadn’t seen her for a month. And she wasn’t my girlfriend.”

“No? What was she then?”

What was she then? A good question. “I just wanted to see her,”
he said lamely. “I couldn’t find her. I was concerned.”

“Got a photo of her? Something recent?”

“No. Actually, I don’t have any pictures of her.”

“Really? Now here’s another funny thing. Pretty girl like that.
But can we find a picture? We’ll just have to use the ID copy from
her Welfare file.”

“Use it for what?”

“Can you fire a gun, Mr Jericho?”

“I couldn’t hit a duck at a funfair.”

“Now that’s what I would have thought, though one shouldn’t
always judge a chap by his looks. Only the Bletchley Park Home
Guard had a little burglary at their armoury on Friday night. Two
items missing. A Smith and Wesson.38 revolver, manufactured in
Springfield, Massachusetts, issued by the War Office last year. And
a box containing thirty-six rounds of ammunition.”

Jericho said nothing. Wigram looked at him for a while, as if he
were making up his mind about something. “No reason why you
shouldn’t know, I suppose. Trustworthy fellow like you. Come and
sit down.” He patted the eiderdown again. “I can’t keep shouting
the biggest frigging secret in the British Empire across your
frigging bedroom. Come on. I won’t bite, I promise.”

Reluctantly, Jericho sat down. Wigram leaned forwards. As he did
so, his jacket parted slightly, and Jericho glimpsed a flash of
leather and gunmetal against the white shirt.

“You want to know who I am?” he said softly. “I’ll tell you who
I am. I’m the man our masters have decreed should find out just
what’s what down here in your little anus mundi.” He was speaking
so quietly, Jericho was obliged to move his head in close to hear.
“Bells are going off, you see. Horrible, horrible bells. Five days
ago, Hut 6 decoded a German Army signal from the Middle East.
General Rommel’s becoming a bit of a bad sport. Seems to think the
only reason he’s losing is that somehow, by some miracle, we always
appear to know where exactly he’s going to attack. Suddenly, the
Afrika Korps want an enquiry into cipher security. Oh dear. Ding
dong. Twelve hours later, Admiral Donitz, for reasons as yet
unknown, suddenly decides to tighten Enigma procedure by changing
the U-boat weather code. Ding dong again. Today, it’s the
Luftwaffe. Four German merchant ships loaded with goodies for the
aforementioned Rommel were recently “surprised” by the RAF and sunk
halfway to Tunisia. This morning, we read that the German C-in-C,
Mediterranean, Field Marshal Kesselring himself, no less, is
demanding to know whether the enemy could have read his codes.”
Wigram patted Jericho’s knee. “Peals of alarms, Mr Jericho. A
Westminster-Abbey-on-Coronation-Day peal of alarms. And in the
middle of them all, your lady friend disappears, at the same time
as a shiny new shooter and a box of bullets.”