Enigma

1

THE APPLE TREES wept blossom in the wind. It drifted across the graveyard and piled like snow against the slate and marble tombs.

Hester Wallace leaned her bicycle beside the low brick wall and surveyed the scene. Well, this was life, she thought, and no mistake about it; this was nature going on regardless. From inside the church rolled the booming notes of the organ. 'O God, Our Help in Ages Past…" She hummed to herself as she tugged on her gloves, tucked a few stray hairs under the band of her hat, straightened her shoulders and strode on up the flagstone path towards the porch.

The truth was, if it hadn't been for her, there would never have been a memorial service. It was she who persuaded the vicar to open the doors of St Mary's, Bletchley, even though she had to concede that 'the deceased', as the vicar primly put it, was not a believer. It was she who booked the organist and told him what to play (Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E flat major to see them all in, the Sanctus from Faure"s Requiem to get them all out). It was she who chose the hymns and the readings and had the service cards printed, she who decorated the nave with spring flowers, she who wrote out the notices and posted them around the Park ('a short service of remembrance will be held on Friday 16 April at 10 o'clock…'), she who lay awake the night before, worrying in case nobody bothered to come. But they came all right.

Lieutenant Kramer came in his American naval uniform, and old Dr Weitzman came from the Hut 3 Watch, and Miss Monk and the girls from the German Book Room, and the heads of the Air Index and the Army Index, and various rather sheepish-looking young men in black ties, and many others whose names Hester never knew but whose lives had clearly been touched by the six-month presence at Bletchley Park of Claire Alexandra Romilly, born 21.12.22 and died (according to the police's best estimate) 14.3.43: Rest in Peace.

Hester sat in the front pew with her Bible marked at the passage she intended to read (I Corinthians 15.li-lv: 'Behold, I show you a mystery…') and every time someone new came in she turned to see if it was him, only to glance away in disappointment.

'We really ought to begin,' said the vicar, fussing with his watch. 'I've a christening due at half past.'

'Another minute, vicar, if you'd be so good. Patience is a Christian virtue.'

The scent of the Easter lilies rose above the nave -virgin-white lilies with green, fleshy stems, white tulips, blue anemones…

It was a long time since she had seen Tom Jericho. He might be dead for all she knew. She had only Wigram's word that he was still alive, and Wigram wouldn't even tell her which hospital he was in, let alone allow her to visit. He had, though, agreed to pass on an invitation to the service, and the following day he announced that the answer was yes, Jericho would love to come. 'But the poor chap's still quite sick, so don't count on it is my advice.' Soon Jericho would be going away, said Wigram, going away for a good long rest. Hester hadn't cared for the way he had said this, as if Jericho had somehow become the property of the state.

By five past ten the organist had run out of music to play and there was an awkward hiatus of shuffling and coughing. One of the German Book Room girls began to giggle until Miss Monk told her loudly to hush.

'Hymn number 477,' said the vicar, with a glare at Hester. '"The Day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended."'

The congregation stood. The organist hit a shaky D. They started to sing. From somewhere near the back she could hear Weitzman's rather beautiful tenor. It was only as they reached the fifth verse ('So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never, Like earth's proud empires, pass away') that Hester heard the door scrape open behind them. She turned, and so did half the others, and there, beneath the grey stone arch – thin and frail and supported by the arm of Wigram, but alive, thank God: indisputably alive – was Jericho.

Standing at the back of the church, in his overcoat with its bullet holes freshly darned, Jericho wished several things at once. He wished, for a start, that Wigram would take his bloody hands off him, because the man made his flesh crawl. He wished they weren't playing this particular hymn because it always reminded him of the last day of term at school. And he wished it hadn't been necessary to come. But it was. He couldn't have avoided it.

He detached himself politely from Wigram's arm and walked, unaided, to the nearest pew. He nodded to Weitzman and to Kramer. The hymn was ending. His shoulder ached from the journey. 'Thy Kingdom stands and grows for ever,' sang the congregation, 'Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.' Jericho closed his eyes and inhaled the rich aroma of the lilies.

The first bullet, the one that had hit him like a blow from a car, had struck him in the lower left-hand quadrant of his back, had passed through four layers of muscle, nicked his eleventh rib and had exited through his side. The second, the one that had spun him round, had buried itself deep in his right shoulder, shredding part of the deltoid muscle, and that was the bullet they had to cut out surgically. He lost a lot of blood. There was an infection.

He lay in isolation, under guard, in some kind of military hospital just outside Northampton – isolated, presumably, in case, in his delirium, he babbled about Enigma; guarded in case he tried to get away: a ludicrous notion, as he didn't even know where he was.

His dream – it seemed to him to go on for days, but perhaps that was just a part of the dream: he could never tell – his dream was of lying at the bottom of a sea, on soft white sand, in a warm and rocking current. Occasionally he would float up and it would be light, in a high-ceilinged room, with a glimpse of trees through tall, barred windows. At other times, he would rise to find it dark, with a round and yellow moon, and someone bending overhead.

The first morning he woke up he asked to see a doctor. He wanted to know what had happened.

The doctor came and told him he had been involved in a shooting accident. Apparently, he had wandered too close to an Army firing range ('you bloody silly fool') and he was lucky he hadn't been killed.

No, no, protested Jericho. It wasn't like that at all. He tried to struggle up but the pain in his back made him cry out loud.

They gave him an injection and he went back to the bottom of the sea.

Gradually, as he started to recover, the equilibrium of his pain began to shift. In the beginning, it was nine-tenths physical to one-tenth mental; then eight-tenths to two-tenths; then seven to three, and so on, until the original proportions were reversed and he almost looked forward to the daily agony of the changing of his dressings, as an opportunity to burn away the memory of what had happened.

He had part of the picture, not all of it. But any attempt to ask questions, any demand to see someone in authority – any behaviour, in short, that might be construed as, 'difficult' – and out would come the needle with its little cargo of oblivion.

He learned to play along.

He passed the time by reading mystery stories, Agatha Christie mostly, which they brought him from the hospital library – little red-bound volumes, warped with use, with mysterious stains on their pages which he preferred not to study too closely. Lord Edgeware Dies, Parker Pyne Investigates, The Seven Dials Mystery, Murder at the Vicarage. He got through two, sometimes three a day. They also had some Sherlock Holmes and one afternoon he lost himself for a blissful couple of hours by trying to solve the Abe Slaney cipher in The Adventure of the Dancing Men (a simplified Playfair grid system, he concluded, using inverted and mirror images) but he couldn't check his findings as they wouldn't let him have pencil and paper.

By the end of the first week, he was strong enough to take a few steps down the corridor and visit the lavatory unaided.

In all this time, he had only two visitors: Logie and Wigram.

Logie must have come to see him some time at the beginning of April. It was early evening, but still quite light, with shadows dividing the little room – the bed of tubular metal, painted white and scratched; the trolley with its jug of water and metal basin; the chair. Jericho was dressed in blue-striped pyjamas, very faded; his wrists on the counterpane were frail. After the nurse had gone, Logie perched uneasily on the edge of the bed and told him that everyone sent their best.

'Even Baxter?'

'Even Baxter.':

'Even Skynner?'

'Well, no, maybe not Skynner. But then I haven't seen much of Skynner to be honest. He's got other things on his mind.'

Logie talked for a bit about what everyone was doing, then started telling him about the convoy battle, which had gone on for most of the week, just as Cave had predicted. Twenty-two merchantmen sunk by the time the convoys reached air-cover and the U-boats could be driven off. 150,000 tons of Allied shipping destroyed and 160,000 tons of cargo lost – including the two weeks' supply of powdered milk that Skynner had made that disastrous joke about, remember? Apparently, when the ship went down, the sea had turned white. 'Diegrosste Geleitzugschlacht aller Zeiten,' German radio had called it, and for once the buggers weren't lying. The greatest convoy battle of all time.

'How many dead?'

'About four hundred. Mostly Americans.'

Jericho grunted. 'Any U-boats sunk?'

'Only one. We think.'

'And Shark?'

'Hanging in there, old love.' He patted Jericho's knee through the bedclothes. 'You see, it was worth it in the end, thanks to you.'

It had taken the bombes forty hours to solve the settings, from midnight on Tuesday until late on the Thursday afternoon. But by the weekend the Crib Room had made a partial recovery of the Weather Code Book – or enough of it to give them a toehold -and now they were breaking Shark six days out of seven, although sometimes the breaks came in quite late. But it would do. It would do until they got the first of the Cobra bombes in June.

A plane passed low overhead – a Spitfire, to judge by the crack of its engine.

After a while, Logie said quietly: 'Skynner's had to hand over the plans for the four-wheel bombes to the Americans.'

'Ah.'

'Well, of course' said Logie, folding his arms, 'it's all dressed up as cooperation. But nobody's fooled. Leastways, I'm not. From now on, we're to teleprinter a copy of all Atlantic U-boat traffic to Washington the moment we receive it, then it's two teams working in friendly consultation. Blah, blah, blah. What bloody have you. But it'll come down to brute force in the end. It always does. And when they've got ten times the bombes we have – which won't take very long, I reckon, six months at the outside – what chance do we stand? We'll just do the interception and they'll do all the breaking.'

'We can hardly complain.'

'No, no. I know we can't. It's just… Well, we've seen the best days, you and I.' He sighed and stretched out his legs, contemplating his vast feet. 'Still, there is one bright side, I suppose.'

'What's that?' Jericho looked at him, then saw what he meant, and they both said 'Skynner!' simultaneously, and laughed.

'He is bloody upset,' said Logie contentedly. 'Sorry about your girl, by the way.'

'Well…' Jericho made a feeble gesture with his hand and winced.

There was a difficult silence, mercifully ended by the nurse coming in and telling Logie his time was up. He got to his feet with relief and shook Jericho's hand.

'Now you get well, old love, d'you hear what I'm saying, and I'll come and see you again soon.'

'Do that, Guy. Thank you.'

But that was the last time he saw him.

Miss Monk approached the pulpit to give the first reading: 'Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth' by Arthur Hugh Clough, a poem she declaimed with great determination, glaring at the congregation from time to time, as if defying them to contradict her. It was a good choice, thought Jericho. Defiantly optimistic. Claire would have enjoyed it:

"And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.'

'Let us pray,' said the vicar.

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?

Beside him, Wigram uttered a loud 'Amen'.

Wigram's visits had been frequent and solicitous. He would shake Jericho's hand with the same peculiar and tenuous grip. He would plump his pillows, pour his water, fuss with his sheets. 'They treating you well? You want for nothing?' And Jericho would say yes, thank you, he was being well looked after, and Wigram would always smile and say super, how super everything was – how super he was looking, what a super help he had been, even, once, how super the view was from the sickroom window, as if Jericho had somehow created it. Oh yes, Wigram was charming. Wigram dispensed charm like soup to the poor.

In the beginning it was Jericho who did most of the talking, answering Wigram's questions. Why hadn't he reported the cryptograms in Claire's room to the authorities? Why had he gone to Beaumanor? What had he taken? How? How had he broken the intercepts? What had Puck said to him as he leaped from the train?

Wigram would then go away, and the next day, or the day after, come back and ask him some more. Jericho tried to mix in some questions of his own, but Wigram always brushed them away. Later, he would say. Later. All in good time.

And then one afternoon he came in beaming even more broadly than usual to announce that he had completed his enquiries. A little web of wrinkles appeared at the edges of his blue eyes as he smiled down at Jericho. His lashes were thick and sandy, like a cow's.

'So, my dear chap, if you're not too exhausted, I suppose I should tell you the story.'

Once upon a time, said Wigram, settling himself at the bottom of the bed, there was a man called Adam Pukowski, whose mother was English and whose father was Polish, who lived in London until he was ten, and who, when his parents divorced, went away with his father to live in Cracow. The father was a professor of mathematics, the son showed a similar aptitude, and in due course found his way into the Polish Cipher Bureau at Pyry, south of Warsaw. War came. The father was called up with the rank of major to rejoin the Polish Army. Defeat came. Half the country was occupied by the Germans, the other half by the Soviet Union. The father disappeared. The son escaped to France to become one of the fifteen Polish cryptanalysts employed at the French cipher centre at Gretz-Armainvillers. Defeat came again. The son escaped via Vichy France to neutral Portugal, where he made the acquaintance of one Rogerio Raposo, a junior member of the Portuguese diplomatic service and an extremely dodgy character.

'The man on the train,' murmured Jericho.

'Indeed.' Wigram sounded irritated at being interrupted: this was his moment of glory, after all. 'The man on the train.'

From Portugal, Pukowski made his way to England.

Nineteen-forty passed with no news of Pukowski's father or, indeed, of any of the other ten thousand missing Polish officers. In 1941, after Germany invaded Russia, Stalin unexpectedly became our ally. Representations were duly made about the vanished Poles. Assurances were duly given: there were no such prisoners in Soviet hands; any there might have been had been released long ago.

'Anyway,' said Wigram, 'to cut a long story a whole lot shorter, it appears that at the end of last year, rumours began to circulate among the Poles in exile in London that these officers had been shot and then buried in a forest near Smolensk. I say, is it hot in here or is it me?' He got up and tried to open the window, failed, and returned to his perch on the bed. He smiled. 'Tell me, was it you who introduced Pukowski to Claire?'

Jericho shook his head.

'Ah, well,' sighed Wigram, 'I don't suppose it matters. A lot of the story is lost to us. Inevitably. We don't know how they met, or when, or why she agreed to help him. Or even what she showed him exactly. But I think we can guess what must have happened. She'd make a copy of these signals from Smolensk, and sneak them out in her knickers or whatever. Hide them under her floorboards. Lover-boy would collect them. This may have gone on for a week or two. Until the day came when Pukowski saw that one of the dead men was his own father. And then the next day Claire had nothing to bring him but the undecoded intercepts, because someone – Wigram shook his head in wonder '- someone very, very senior indeed, I have since discovered, had decided they just didn't want to know.'

He suddenly reached over and picked up one of Jericho's discarded mystery stories, flicked through it, smiled, replaced it.

'You know, Tom,' he said thoughtfully, 'there's never been anything like Bletchley Park in the history of the world. There's never been a time when one side knew so much about its enemy. In fact, sometimes, I think, it's possible to know too much. When Coventry was bombed, remember? Our beloved Prime Minister discovered from Enigma what was going to happen about four hours in advance. Know what he did?

Again Jericho shook his head.

'Told his staff that London was about to be attacked and that they should go down to the shelters, but that he was going upstairs to watch. Then he went out on to the Air Ministry roof and spent an hour waiting in the freezing cold for a raid he knew was going to happen somewhere else. Doing his bit, d'you see? To protect the Enigma secret. Or, another example: take the U-boat tankers. Thanks to Shark, we know where they're going to be, and when, and if we knocked them out we might save hundreds of Allied lives – in the short term. But we'd jeopardise Enigma, because if we did that, Donitz would know we must be reading his codes. You see what I'm driving at? So Stalin has killed ten thousand Poles? I mean, please, Uncle Joe's a national hero. He's winning the frigging war for us. Third most popular man in the country, after Churchill and the King. What's that Hebrew proverb? "My enemy's enemy is my friend"? Well, Stalin's the biggest enemy Hitler's got, so as far as we're concerned, for present purposes, he's a bloody good friend of ours. Katyn massacre? Katyn frigging massacre? Thanks awfully, but, really, do shut up.'

'I don't suppose Puck would have seen it quite like that.'

'No, old chap, I don't suppose he would. Shall I tell you something? I think he rather hated us. After all, if it hadn't been for the Poles, we might not even have broken Enigma in the first place. But the people he really hated were the Russians. And he was prepared to do anything to get revenge. Even if it meant helping the Germans.'

'"My enemy's enemy is my friend,"' murmured Jericho, but Wigram wasn't listening.

'And how could he help the Germans? By warning them Enigma wasn't safe. And how could he do that? Wigram smiled and spread his hands. 'Why, with the assistance of his old friend from 1940, Rogerio Raposo, recently transferred from Lisbon and now employed as a courier at the Portuguese legation in London. How about some tea?

For the dear ones parted from us

We would raise our hymns of prayer;

By the tender love which watcheth

Round thy children everywhere…

Senhor Raposo, said Wigram, sipping his tea after the nurse had gone, Senhor Raposo, presently a resident of His Majesty's Prison, Wandsworth, had confessed to everything.

On 6 March, Pukowski had gone to see Raposo in London, handed him a thin, sealed envelope and told him he could make a great deal of money if he delivered it to the right people.

The following day, Raposo flew on the scheduled British Imperial Airways flight to Lisbon carrying said envelope, which he passed to a contact of his on the staff of the German naval attache".

Two days after that, the U-boat service changed its Short Weather Code Book, and a general review of cipher security began – Luftwaffe, Afrika Korps… Oh, the Germans were interested, of course they were. But they weren't about to abandon what their experts still insisted was the most secure enciphering system ever devised. Not on the basis of one letter. They suspected a trick. They wanted proof. They wanted this mysterious informant in Berlin, in person.

'That's our best guess, anyway.'

On 14 March, two days before the start of the; convoy battle, Raposo made his next weekly trip to-Lisbon and returned with specific instructions for Pukowski. A U-boat would be waiting to pick him up; off the coast of northwest Ireland on the night of the 18th.

'And that was what they were discussing on the train,' said Jericho.

'And that was what they were discussing on the; train. Quite right. Our man Puck was collecting his; ticket, so to speak. And shall I tell you the really frightening thing?' Wigram took another sip of tea, his little finger delicately crooked, and looked at Jericho over the rim of his cup. 'If it hadn't been for you, he might just have got away with it.'

'But Claire would never have gone along with this,'; protested Jericho. 'Passed on a few intercepts – yes. For? a lark. For love, even. But she wasn't a traitor.'

'Lord, no.' Wigram sounded shocked. 'No, I'm sure; Pukowski never even told her for one minute what he: was planning to do. Consider it from his point of view. She was the weak link. She could have given him away at any moment. So imagine how he must have felt when he saw you walk back through the door from Cambridge on that Friday night.'

Jericho remembered the look of horror on Puck's face, that desperate attempt to force a smile. He had already seen what must have happened: Puck leaving a message at the cottage that he needed to talk to her, Claire hurrying back into the Park at four in the morning – click click click on her high heels in the darkness. He said quietly, almost to himself: 'I was her death warrant.'

'I suppose you were. He must've known you'd try and get in touch with her. And then, the next night, when he went round to the cottage to get rid of the evidence, the stolen cryptograms, and found you there… Well…'

Jericho lay back and stared at the ceiling as Wigram rattled through the rest of the story. How, on the night the convoy battle had started, just before midnight, he'd been called by the police and told that a sack full of women's clothing had been found. How he'd tried to find Jericho, but Jericho had disappeared, so he'd grabbed Hester Wallace instead and taken her down to the lakeside. How it had been obvious at once what had happened, that Claire had been bludgeoned, or maybe bludgeoned and strangled, and her body rowed out into the lake and dumped.

'Mind if I smoke?' He lit up without waiting for a reply, using his saucer as an ashtray. He examined the tip of his cigarette for a moment. 'Where was I exactly?'

Jericho didn't look at him. 'The night of the convoy battle.'

Ah, yes. Well, Hester had refused to talk at first, but there's nothing like shock to loosen the tongue and eventually she'd told him everything, at which point Wigram had realised that Jericho wasn't a traitor; realised, in fact, that if Jericho had broken the cryptograms he was probably closer to discovering the traitor than he was.

So he had deployed his men. And watched.

This would have been about five in the morning.

First, Jericho was seen hurrying down Church Green Road into the town. Then he was observed going into the house in Alma Terrace. Then he was identified boarding the train.

Wigram had men on the train.

'After that, the three of you were just flies in a jam jar, frankly.'

All passengers disembarking at Northampton were stopped and questioned, and that took care of Raposo. By then, Wigram had arranged for the train to be diverted into a branch line where he was waiting to search it at leisure.

His men had orders not to shoot unless they were shot at first. But no chances were going to be taken. Not with so much at stake.

And Pukowski had used his pistol. And fire had been returned.

'You got in the way. I'm sorry about that.' Still, as he was sure Jericho would agree, preserving the Enigma secret had been the most important objective. And that had been accomplished. The U-boat that had been sent to pick up Puck had been intercepted and sunk off the coast of Donegal, which was a double bonus, as the Germans probably now thought that the whole business had been a set-up all along, designed to trap one of their submarines. At any rate, they hadn't abandoned Enigma.

'And Claire?' Jericho was still staring at the ceiling. 'Have you found her yet?'

'Give us time, my dear fellow. She lies under at least sixty feet of water, somewhere in the middle of a lake a quarter of a mile across. That may take us a while.'

'And Raposo?'

'The Foreign Secretary spoke to the Portuguese ambassador that morning. Under the circumstances, he agreed to waive diplomatic immunity. By noon we'd taken Raposo's flat apart. Dreary place at the wrong end of Gloucester Road. Poor little sod. He really was only in it for the money. We found two thousand dollars the Germans had given him, stuffed in a shoe box on top of his wardrobe. Two grand! Pathetic.

'What will happen to him?'

'He'll hang,' said Wigram pleasantly. 'But never mind about him. He's history. The question is, what are we going to do with you?

After Wigram had gone, Jericho lay awake for a long time, trying to decide which parts of his story had been true.

'Behold, I show you a mystery,' said Hester.

'We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

'In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

'For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

'O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'

She closed her Bible slowly and regarded the congregation with a dry and level eye. In the end pew she could just make out Jericho, white-faced, staring straight ahead.

'Thanks be to God.'

She found him waiting for her outside the church, the white blossom raining down on him like confetti. The other mourners had gone. He had his face raised to the sun and she guessed from the way he seemed to be drinking in the warmth that he hadn't seen it for a long while. As he heard her approach, he turned and smiled and she hoped her own smile hid her shock. His cheeks were concave, his skin as waxy as one of the candles in church. The collar of his shirt hung loosely from his gaunt neck.

'Hello, Hester.'

'Hello, Tom.' She hesitated, then held out her gloved hand.

'Super service,' said Wigram. 'Absolutely super. Everybody's said so, haven't they, Tom?'

'Everybody. Yes.' Jericho closed his eyes for a second and she understood immediately what he was signalling: that he was sorry Wigram was there, but that he couldn't do anything about it. He released her hand. 'I didn't want to leave,' he said, 'without seeing how you were.'

'Oh, well,' she said, with a jollity she didn't feel, 'bearing up, you know.'

'Back at work?'

'Yes, yes. Still blisting away.'

'And still in the cottage?',

'For now. But I think I'll move out, as soon as I can find myself another billet.'

'Too many ghosts?'

'Something like that.'

She suddenly found herself loathing the banality of the conversation but she couldn't think of anything better to say.

'Leveret's waiting,' said Wigram. 'With the car. To run us to the station.' Through the gate Hester could see the long black bonnet. The driver was leaning against it, watching them, smoking a cigarette.

'You're catching a train, Mr Wigram?' asked Hester.

'I'm not,' he said, as if the notion was offensive. 'Tom is. Aren't you, Tom?'

I'm going back to Cambridge,' explained Jericho. 'For a few months' rest.'

'In fact we really ought to push off,' continued Wigram, looking at his watch. 'You never know – there's always a chance it may be on time.'

Jericho said, irritably: 'Will you excuse us for just one minute, Mr Wigram?' Without waiting for a reply, he guided Hester away from Wigram, back towards the church. 'This bloody man won't leave me alone for a second,' he whispered. 'Listen, if you can bear it, will you give me a kiss?'

'What?' She wasn't sure she could have heard him correctly.

'A kiss. Quickly. Please.'

'Very well. It's no great hardship.'

She took off her hat, reached over and brushed his thin cheek with her lips. He held her shoulders and said softly in her ear: 'Did you invite Claire's father to the service?'

'Yes.' He had gone mad, she thought. The shock had affected his mind. 'Of course I did.'

'What happened?'

'He didn't reply.'

'I knew it,' he whispered. She felt his grip tighten.

'Knew what?'

'She isn't dead…'

'How touching,' said Wigram loudly, coming up behind them, 'and I hate to break things up, but you're going to miss your train, Tom Jericho.'

Jericho released her and took a step back. 'Look after yourself,' he said.

For a moment she couldn't speak. 'And you.'

I'll write.'

'Yes. Please. Be sure you do.'

Wigram tugged at his arm. Jericho gave her a final smile and a shrug, then allowed himself to be led away.

She watched him walk painfully up the path and through the gate. Leveret opened the car door and as he did so, Jericho turned and waved. She raised her hand in return, saw him manoeuvre himself stiffly into the back seat, then the door slammed shut. She let her hand drop.

She stayed there for several minutes, long after the big car had pulled away, then she replaced her hat and went back into the church.

2

'I almost forgot,' said Wigram, as the car turned down the hill. 'I bought you a paper. For the journey.'

He unlocked his briefcase and took out a copy of The Times, opened it to the third page and handed it to Jericho. The story consisted of just five paragraphs, flanked by an illustration of a London bus and an appeal for the Poor Clergy Relief Corporation:

MISSING POLISH OFFICERS

GERMAN ALLEGATIONS

The Polish Minister of National Defence, Lieutenant-General Marjan Kukiel, has issued a statement concerning some 8,000 missing Polish officers who were released from Soviet prison camps in the spring of 1940. In view of German allegations that the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers had been found near Smolensk and that they had been murdered by the Russians, the Polish Government has decided to ask the International Red Cross to investigate the matter…

'I particularly like that line,' said Wigram, 'don't you: "released from Soviet prison camps"?'

'That's one way of putting it, I suppose.' Jericho tried to give him back the paper, but Wigram waved it away.

'Keep it. A souvenir.'

'Thanks.' Jericho folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, then stared firmly out of the window to forestall any further conversation. He'd had enough of Wigram and his lies. As they passed under the blackened railway bridge for the final time he surreptitiously touched his cheek and he suddenly wished he could have brought Hester with him for this last act.

At the station, Wigram insisted on seeing him on to the train, even though Jericho's luggage had been sent on ahead at the beginning of the week and there was nothing for him to carry. And Jericho consented in return to have Wigram's hand for support as they crossed the footbridge and strolled along the length of the Cambridge train in search of an empty seat. Jericho was careful to make sure that he, rather than Wigram, chose the compartment.

'Well, then, my dear Tom,' said Wigram, with mock sadness, I'll bid you goodbye.' That peculiar handshake again, the little finger somehow tucked up into the palm. Final things: did Jericho have his travel warrant? Yes. And he knew that Kite would be meeting him at Cambridge to escort him by taxi to King's? Yes. And he'd remembered that a nurse would be coming in from Addenbrooke's Hospital every morning to change the dressing on his shoulder? Yes, yes, yes.

'Goodbye, Mr Wigram.'

He settled his aching back into a seat facing away from the engine. Wigram closed the door. There were three other passengers in the compartment: a fat man in a dirty fawn raincoat, an elderly woman in a silver fox, and a dreamy-looking girl reading a copy of Horizon. They all looked innocent enough, but how could one tell? Wigram tapped on the window and Jericho struggled to his feet to lower it. But the time he had it open, the whistle had blown and the train was beginning to pull away. Wigram trotted alongside.

'We'll be in touch when you're fit again, all right? You know where to get hold of me if anything comes up.'

'I certainly do,' said Jericho, and slid the window up with a bang. But still Wigram kept pace with the compartment – smiling, waving, running. It had become a challenge for him, a terrific joke. He didn't stop until he reached the end of the platform, and that was Jericho's final impression of Bletchley: of Wigram leaning forwards, his hands on his knees, shaking his head and laughing.

Thirty-five minutes after boarding the train at Bletchley, Jericho disembarked at Bedford, bought a one-way ticket to London, then waited in the sunshine at the end of the platform, filling in The Times crossword. It was hot, the tracks shimmered; there was a strong smell of baking coal dust and warm steel. When he'd finished the final clue he stuffed the newspaper, unread, into a rubbish bin and walked slowly up and down the platform, getting used to the feel of his legs. A crowd of passengers was beginning to build up around him and he scanned each face automatically, even though logic told him it was unlikely he was being followed: if Wigram had feared he might abscond, he surely would have arranged for Leveret to drive him all the way to Cambridge.

The tracks began to whine. The passengers surged forwards. A military train passed slowly southwards, with armed soldiers on the engine footplate. From the carriages peered a line of gaunt, exhausted faces, and a murmur went through the crowd. German prisoners! German prisoners under guard! Jericho briefly met the eyes of one of the captives – owlish, bespectacled, unmilitary: more clerk than warrior – and something passed between them, some flash of recognition across the gulf of war. A second later the white face blurred and disappeared, and soon afterwards the London express pulled in, packed and filthy. 'Worse than the bloody Jerries' train,' complained a man.

Jericho couldn't find a seat, so he stood, leaning against the door to the corridor, until his chalk complexion and the sheen of perspiration on his forehead prompted a young Army officer to give up his place. Jericho sat down gratefully, dozed, and dreamed of the German prisoner with his sad owl's face, and then of Claire on that first journey, just before Christmas, their bodies touching.

By 2.30 he was in London, at St Pancras Station, moving awkwardly through the mass of people towards the entrance to the Underground. The lift was out of action so he had to take the stairs, stopping on every landing to recover his strength. His back was throbbing and something wet was trickling down his spine, but whether it was sweat or blood he couldn't tell.

On the eastbound Circle Line platform, a rat scurried through the rubbish beneath the rails towards the tunnel mouth.

When Jericho failed to emerge from the Bletchley train, Kite was irritated but unconcerned. The next train was due in within a couple of hours, there was a good pub just around the corner from the station, and that was where the college porter chose to do his waiting, in the amiable company of two halves of Guinness and a pork pie.

But when the second train terminated at Cambridge, and still there was no sign of Jericho, Kite went into a sulk that lasted him throughout the half hour it took him to trudge back to King's.

He informed the domestic bursar of Jericho's non-appearance, and the domestic bursar told the Provost, and the Provost dithered over whether or not to call the Foreign Office.

'No consideration,' complained Kite to Dorothy Saxmundham in the Porter's Lodge. 'Just no bloody consideration at all.'

With the solution in his pocket, Tom Jericho left Somerset House and made his slow way westwards, along the Embankment, towards the heart of the city. The south bank of the Thames was a garden of ruins. Above the London docks, silver-coloured barrage balloons turned and glinted and nodded in the late afternoon sun.

Just beyond Waterloo Bridge, outside the entrance to the Savoy, he managed at last to find a taxi for hire and directed the driver to Stanhope Gardens in South Kensington. The streets were empty. They reached it quickly.

The house was big enough to be an embassy, wide and stucco-fronted, with a pillared entrance. It must have been impressive once, but now the plasterwork was grey and flaking and in places great chunks of it had been blasted away by shrapnel. The windows of the top two storeys were curtained, blind. The house next door was bombed out, with weeds growing in the basement. Jericho climbed the steps and pressed the bell. It seemed to ring a long way off, deep within the bowels of the dead house, and left a heavy silence. He tried again, even though he knew it was useless, then retreated across the road to wait, sitting on the steps of the opposite house.

Fifteen minutes passed, and then, from the direction of Cromwell Place, a tall, bald man appeared, startlingly thin – a skeleton in a suit – and Jericho knew at once it must be him. Black jacket, grey-striped trousers, a grey silk tie: all that was needed to complete the cliche was a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella. Instead, incongruously, he carried, as well as his briefcase, a string bag full of groceries. He approached his vast front door wearily, unlocked it and vanished inside.

Jericho stood, brushed himself down and followed.

The door bell tolled again; again, nothing happened. He tried a second time, and a third, and then, with difficulty, got down on his knees and opened the letter flap.

Edward Romilly was standing at the end of a gloomy passage with his back to the door, perfectly still.

'Mr Romilly?' Jericho had to shout through the flap. 1 need to speak to you. Please.'

The tall man didn't move. 'Who are you?'

'Tom Jericho. We spoke once on the telephone. Bletchley Park.'

Romilly's shoulders sagged. 'For God's sake, will you people just leave me alone!'

I've been to Somerset House, Mr Romilly,' said Jericho, 'to the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. I have her death certificate here.' He pulled it out of his pocket. 'Claire Alexandra Romilly. Your daughter. Died on 14 June 1929. At St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. Of spinal meningitis. At the age of six.' He propelled it through the letter flap and watched it slither across the black and white tiles towards Romilly's feet. 'I'm going to have to stay here, sir, I'm afraid, for as long as it takes.'

He let the flap snap shut. Weary with self-disgust, he turned away and leaned his good shoulder against one of the pillars. He looked across the street to the little communal gardens. From beyond the houses opposite came the pleasant hum of the early-evening traffic on Cromwell Road. He grimaced. The pain had begun to move out from his back now, establishing lines of communication into his legs, his arms, his neck; everywhere,

He wasn't sure how long he knelt there, looking at the budding trees, listening to the cars, until at last behind him Romilly unlocked the door.

He was fifty or thereabouts, with an ascetic, almost monkish face, and as Jericho followed him up the wide staircase, he found himself thinking, as he often did on? meeting men of that generation, that this would be roughly the age of his father now, if he had lived. Romilly led Jericho through a doorway into darkness and tugged open a pair of heavy curtains. Light spilled into a drawing room full of furniture draped in white sheets. Only a sofa was uncovered, and a table, pushed up close to a marble fireplace. On the table was some dirty crockery; on the mantelpiece, a large pair of matching silver photograph frames.

'One lives alone,' said Romilly apologetically fanning away the dust. 'One never entertains.' He hesitated, then walked over to the fireplace and picked up one of the photographs. This is Claire,' he said, quietly. 'Taken a week before she died.'

A tall, thin girl with dark ringlets smiled up a" Jericho.

'And this is my wife. She died two months after Claire.'

The mother had the same colouring and bone-structure as the daughter. Neither looked remotely like the woman Jericho knew as Claire.

'She was driving alone in a motorcar,' went on Romilly, 'when it ran off an empty road and struck a tree. The coroner was kind enough to record it as an accident.' His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. 'Does anyone know you're here?'

'No, sir.'

'Wigram?'

'No.'

'I see.' Romilly took the pictures from him and replaced them on the mantelpiece, realigning them precisely as they had been. He stared from mother to daughter and back again.

'This will sound absurd to you,' he said eventually, without looking at Jericho, 'it sounds absurd to me, now – but it seemed to be a way of bringing her back. Can you understand that? I mean, the idea that another girl of exactly her age would be going around, using her name, doing what she might have done… Living her life… I thought it might make sense of what had happened, d'you see? Give her death a purpose, after all these years. Foolish, but…' He raised a hand to his eyes. It was a minute before he could speak. 'What exactly do you want from me, Mr Jericho?'

Romilly lifted a dustsheet and found a bottle of whisky and a pair of tumblers. They sat on the sofa together staring at the empty fire.

'What exactly do you want from me?'

The truth, at last, perhaps? Confirmation? Peace of mind? An ending…

And Romilly seemed to want to give it, as if he recognised in Jericho a fellow sufferer.

It had been Wigram's bright idea, he said, to put an agent into Bletchley Park. A woman. Someone who could keep an eye on this peculiar collection of characters, so essential to the defeat of Germany, yet so alien to the tradition of intelligence; who had, indeed, destroyed that tradition, turning what had been an art – a game, if you like, for gentlemen – into a science of mass production.

'Who were you all? What were you? Could all of you be trusted?'

No one at Bletchley was to know she was an agent, that was important, not even the commander. And she had to come from the right kind of background, that was absolutely vital, otherwise she might have been dumped at some wretched out-station somewhere, and Wigram needed her there, at the heart of the place.

Romilly poured himself another drink and offered to top up Jericho's, but Jericho covered his glass.

Well, he said, sighing, putting the bottle at his feet, it was harder than one might think to manufacture such a person: to conjure her into life complete with identity card and ration books and all the other paraphernalia of wartime life, to give her the right background ('the right legend,' as Wigram had termed it), without at the very least dragging in the Home Office and half a dozen government agencies who knew nothing of the Enigma secret.

But then Wigram had remembered Edward Romilly.

Poor old Edward Romilly. The widower. Barely known outside the Office, abroad these past ten years, with all the right connections, initiated into Enigma – and, more importantly, with the birth certificate of a girl of exactly the right age. All that was required of him, apart from the use of his daughter's name, was a letter of introduction to Bletchley Park. In fact, not even that, since Wigram would write her letter: a signature would suffice. And then Romilly could continue with his solitary existence, content to know he had done his patriotic duty. And given his daughter a kind of life.

Jericho said: 'You never met her, I suppose? The girl who took your daughter's name?'

'Good God, no. In fact, Wigram assured me I'd never hear another word about it. I made that a condition. And I didn't hear anything, for six months. Until you called one Sunday morning and told me my daughter had disappeared.'

'And you got straight on the telephone to Wigram to report what I'd said?'

'Of course. I was horrified.'

'And naturally you demanded to know what was happening. And he told you.'

Romilly drained his scotch and frowned at the empty tumbler. 'The memorial service was today, I think?'

Jericho nodded.

'May I ask how it went?'

'"For the trumpet shall sound,"' said Jericho, '"and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed…'" He looked away from the photograph of the little girl above the fireplace. 'Except that Claire – my Claire – isn't dead, is she?'

The room darkened, the light was the colour of the; whisky, and now Jericho was doing most of the talking.

Afterwards, he realised he never actually told; Romilly how he had worked it all out: that host of tiny inconsistencies that had made a nonsense of the official version, even though he recognised that much of what Wigram had told him must have been the truth.

The oddity of her behaviour, for a start; and their failure of her supposed father to react to her disappearance, or to show up at her memorial service; the puzzle of why her clothes had been so conveniently; discovered when her body had not; the suspicious speed with which Wigram had been able to halt the train… All these had clicked and turned and rearranged themselves into a pattern of perfect logic.

Once one accepted she was an informer, everything else followed. The material which Claire – he still called her Claire – had passed to Pukowski had been leaked with Wigram's approval, hadn't it?

'Because really – in the beginning, anyway – it was nothing, just chickenfeed, compared with what Puck already knew about naval Enigma. Where was the harm? And Wigram let her go on handing it over; because he wanted to see what Puck would do with it. See if anyone else was involved. It was bait, if you like. Am I right?'

Romilly said nothing.

It was only later that Wigram had realised he'd made the most almighty miscalculation – that Katyn, and more especially the decision to stop monitoring it, had tipped Puck over the edge into treason, and that somehow he'd managed to tell the Germans about Enigma.

'I assume it wasn't Wigram's decision to stop the monitoring?'

Romilly gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. 'Higher.'

How high?

He wouldn't say.

Jericho shrugged. 'It doesn't matter. From that point on, Puck must have been under twenty-four-hour watch, to find out who his contact was and to catch them both red-handed.

'Now, a man under round-the-clock surveillance is not in a position to murder anyone, least of all an agent of the people doing the watching. Not unless they are spectacularly incompetent. No. When Puck discovered I had the cryptograms he knew Claire would have to disappear, otherwise she'd be questioned. She had to vanish for at least a week, so he could get away. And preferably for longer. So between them they staged her murder – stolen boat, bloodstained clothes beside the lake. He guessed that would be enough to make the police call off their hunt. And he was right: they have stopped looking for her. He never suspected she was betraying him all the time.'

Jericho took a sip of whisky. 'Do you know, I really think he may have loved her – that's the joke of it. So much so that his last words, literally, were a lie – "I killed her, Thomas, I'm so very sorry" – a deliberate lie, a gesture from the edge of the grave, to give her a chance to getaway.

'And that, of course, was the cue for Wigram, because from his point of view, that confession neatly tied up everything. Puck was dead. Raposo would soon be dead. Why not leave "Claire" to rest at the bottom of the lake as well? All that he needed to do to round the story off was to pretend that it was me who led him to the traitor.

'So to say that she's still alive is not an act of faith, but merely logical. She is alive, isn't she?'

A long pause. Somewhere a trapped fly barged against a window pane.

Yes, said Romilly, hopelessly. Yes, he understood that to be the case.

What was it Hardy had written? That a mathematical proof, like a chess problem, to be aesthetically satisfying, must possess three qualities: inevitability, unexpectedness and economy; that it should 'resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way'.

Well, Claire, thought Jericho, here is my proof.

Here is my clear-cut constellation.

Poor Romilly, he didn't want Jericho to leave. He had bought some food, he said, on his way home from the office. They could have supper together. Jericho could stay the night – God knew, he had enough room…

But Jericho, looking around at the furniture dressed as ghosts, the dirty plates, the empty whisky bottle, the photographs, was suddenly desperate to get away.

'Thank you, but I'm late.' He managed to push himself to his feet. 'I was due back in Cambridge hours ago.'

Disappointment settled like a shadow across Romilly's long face. 'If you're sure I can't persuade you…' His words were slightly slurred. He was drunk. On the landing he bumped against a table and switched on a tasselled lamp, then conducted Jericho, unsteadily, down the stairs to the hall.

'Will you try and find her?'

'I don't know,' said Jericho. 'Perhaps.'

The death certificate was still lying on the letter-stand in the hall. 'Then you'll need this,' said Romilly, picking it up. 'You must show it to Wigram. If you like, you can tell him you've seen me. In case he tries to deny everything. I'm sure he'll have to let you see her then. If you insist.'

'Won't that get you into trouble?'

'Trouble?' Romilly gave a laugh. He gestured behind him, at his mausoleum of a house. 'D'you think I care about trouble? Come on, Mr Jericho. Take it.'

Jericho hesitated, and in that moment he had a vision of himself- a few years older, another Romilly, struggling vainly to breathe life into a ghost. 'No,' he said at last. 'You are very kind. But I think I ought to leave it.here.'

He left the silent street with relief and walked towards the sound of traffic. On Cromwell Road he hailed a cab.

The spring evening had brought out the crowds. Along the wide pavements of Knightsbridge and in Hyde Park it was almost like a festival: a profusion of uniforms, American and British, Commonwealth and exile – dark blue, khaki, grey – with everywhere the splashes of colour from the summer dresses.

She was probably here, he thought, tonight, somewhere in the city. Or perhaps that would have been considered too risky, and she had been sent abroad by now, to lie low until the whole business had been forgotten. It occurred to him that a lot of what she had told him might actually be true, that she could well be a diplomat's daughter.

On Regent Street, a blonde-haired woman on the arm of an American major came out of the Cafe1 Royal.

He made a conscious effort to look away.

ALLIED SUCCESS IN NORTH ATLANTIC read a newspaper placard on the opposite side of the street. NAZI U-BOATS SUNK.

He pulled down the window and felt the warm night air on his face.

And here was something very odd. Staring out at the teeming streets he began to experience a definite sense of- well, he could not call it happiness, exactly. Release, perhaps, would be a better word.

He remembered their last night together. Lying beside her as she wept. What had that been? Remorse, was it? In which case, perhaps she had felt something for him.

'She never talked about you,' Hester had said.

I'm flattered.'

'Given the way she used to talk about the others, you should be…'

And then there had been that birthday card: 'Dearest Tom… always see you as a friend… perhaps in the future… Sorry to hear about… in haste… Much love.

It was a solution, of a sort. As good a solution, at any rate, as he was likely to get.

At King's Cross Station he bought a postcard and a book of stamps and sent a message to Hester asking her to visit him in Cambridge as soon as she could.

On the train he found an empty compartment and stared at his reflection in the glass, an image which gradually became clearer as the dusk gathered and the flat countryside disappeared, until he fell asleep.

The main gate to the college was closed. Only the little doorway cut into it was unlocked and it must have been ten o'clock when Kite, dozing beside the coke stove, was woken by the sound of it opening and closing. He lifted the corner of the blackout curtain in time to see Jericho walking into the great court.

Kite quietly let himself out of the Porter's Lodge to get a better view.

It was unexpectedly bright – there were a lot of stars – and he thought for a moment that Jericho must have heard him, for the young man was standing at the edge of the lawn and seemed to be listening. But then he realised that Jericho was actually looking up at the sky. The way Kite told it afterwards, Jericho must have stood that way for at least five minutes, turning first towards the chapel, then the meadow, and then the hall, before moving off purposefully towards his staircase, passing out of sight.