Enigma (41 page)

It was a street like so many others: a double row of tiny
red-brick houses running parallel with the railway. Number nine was
a clone of all the rest: two little windows upstairs and one
downstairs, all three swathed in blackout curtains as though in
mourning, a spade’s length of front yard with a dustbin in it, and
a wooden gate to the road. The gate was broken, the timber
splintered grey and smooth like driftwood, and Jericho had to hoist
it open. He tried the door—locked—and hammered on it with his
fist.

A loud coughing—as loud and immediate as a woken guard dog. He
stepped back a pace and after a couple of seconds one of the
upstairs curtains flickered open. He shouted: “Puck, I need to talk
to you.”

A steady clop-clop of hooves. He glanced up the road to see a
coal dray turning into the street. It passed by slowly and the
driver took a good, long look at him, then flicked the reins and
the big horse responded, the tempo of its hooves increasing. Behind
him Jericho heard a bolt being worked and drawn back. The door
opened a crack. An old woman peered out.

“I’m so sorry,” said Jericho, “but it’s an emergency, I need to
speak to Mr Pukowski.”

She hesitated, then let him in. She was less than five feet
tall, a wraith, with a pale blue, quilted housecoat clutched across
her nightdress. She spoke with her hand held in front of her mouth
and he realised she was embarrassed because she didn’t have her
teeth in.

“He’s in his room.”

“Could you show me?”

She shuffled down the passage and he followed. The coughing from
upstairs had intensified. It seemed to shake the ceiling, to swing
the grimy lampshade?

“Mr Puck?” She tapped on the door. “Mr Puck?” She said to
Jericho: “He must be still asleep. I heard him come in late.”

“Let me. May I?”

The little room was empty. Jericho was across it in three
strides, pulling back the curtains. Grey light lit the kingdom of
the exile: a single bed, a washstand, a wardrobe, a wooden chair, a
small mirror of thick, pink, crystalled glass with birds carved
into it, suspended above the mantelpiece by a metal chain. The bed
had been lain on rather than slept in, and a saucer by the bedhead
was filled with cigarette stubs.

He turned back to the window. The inevitable vegetable patch and
hooped bomb shelter. A wall,

“What’s over there?”

“But the door was bolted—”

“On the other side of the wall? What’s over there?”

With her hand in front of her mouth she looked aghast. “The
station.”

He tried the window. It was jammed shut.

“Is there a back door?”

She led him through a kitchen that couldn’t have altered much
since Victorian days. A mangle. A hand pump for raising water to
the sink…

The back door was unlocked.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” She’d stopped worrying about her
teeth. Her mouth was trembling, the skin around it furrowed,
sunken, brown.

“I’m sure. You go back to your husband.”

He was following Puck’s trail now. Footprints—large
footprints—led across the vegetable patch. A tea chest stood
against the wall. It bowed and splintered as Jericho mounted it,
but he was just able to fold himself over the top of the sooty
brickwork. For a moment he almost tumbled head first on to the
concrete path, but then he managed to brace himself and brought his
legs up.

In the distance: the whistle of a train.

♦

He hadn’t run like this for fifteen years, not since he was a
schoolboy being screamed at on a five-mile steeplechase. But here
they were again, as grim as ever, the familiar instruments of
torture—the knife in his side, the acid in his lungs, the taste of
rust in his mouth.

He tore through the back entrance into Bletchley Station and
flailed around the corner on to the platform, through a cloud of
leaden-coloured pigeons that flapped and rose heavily and settled
again. His feet rang on the ironwork of the footbridge. He took the
stairs two at a time and ran across the gantry. A fountain of white
smoke spurted up to his left, his right, and filtered through the
floorboards, as the locomotive passed slowly underneath.

The hour was early, the waiting crowd was small, and Jericho was
halfway down the steps to the northbound platform when he spotted
Puck about fifty yards away, standing close to the tracks, holding
a small suitcase, his head turning to follow the slow parade of
compartments. Jericho stopped and clutched the hand rail, bent
forwards, struggling for air. The Benzedrine, he realised, was
wearing off. When the train at last jolted to a stop, Puck looked
around, walked casually towards the front, opened a door and
disappeared.

Using the rail to support himself, Jericho picked his way down
the last few steps and almost toppled into an empty
compartment.

He must have blacked out, and for several minutes, because he
never heard the door slam behind him or the whistle blow. The next
thing he was conscious of was a rocking motion. The banquette was
warm and dusty to his cheek and through it he could feel the
soothing rhythm of the wheels—dah-dah-dee-dee, dee-dee-dah-dah,
dah-dah-dee-dee…He opened his eyes. Smudges of bluish cloud edged
in pink slipped slowly across a square of white sky. It was all
very beautiful, like a nursery, and he could have fallen asleep
again, but for a vague recollection that there was something dark
and threatening he was supposed to be afraid of, and then he
remembered.

Levering himself up, he ministered to his aching head—shook it,
rotated it in a figure of eight, then pushed down the window and
thrust it into the cold draught of rushing air. No sign of any
town. Just flat, hedged countryside, interspersed with barns and
ponds that glinted in the morning light. The track was curving
slightly and ahead he could see the locomotive flying its long
pennant of smoke above a black wall of carriages. They were heading
north on the main west-coast line, which meant—he tried to
recall—Northampton next, then Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester
(probably), Liverpool…

Liverpool?

Liverpool. And the ferry across the Irish Sea.

Jesus.

He was stunned by the unreality of it all, yet at the same time
by its simplicity, its obviousness. There was a communication cord
above the opposite row of seats (“Penalty for improper use: £20”)
and his immediate reaction was to pull it. But then what? Think. He
would be left, unshaven, ticketless, drug-eyed, trying to convince
some sceptical guard there was a traitor on board, while Puck—what
would Puck do? He would climb down from the train and disappear.
Jericho suddenly saw the full absurdity of his own situation. He
didn’t even have enough money to buy a ticket. All he had was a
pocketful of cryptograms.

Get rid of them.

He pulled them from his pocket and tore them into fragments,
then hung his head back out of the window and released them into
the slipstream. They were whipped away, borne up and over the top
of the carriage and out of sight. Craning his head the other way,
he tried to guess how far up the train Puck was. The force of the
wind stifled him. Three carriages? Four? He pulled back in and
closed the window, then crossed the swaying compartment and slid
open the door to the corridor.

He peered out, carefully.

The rolling stock was standard, pre-war, dark and filthy. The
corridor, lit for the blackout by faint blue bulbs, was the colour
of a poison bottle. Four compartments off to one side. A connecting
door at the front and rear led into the adjacent carriages.

Jericho lurched towards the head of the train. He glanced into
each compartment as he passed. Here were a pair of sailors playing
cards, there a young couple asleep in one another’s arms, there
again a family—mother, father, boy and girl—sharing sandwiches and
a flask of tea. The mother had a baby at her breast and turned
away, embarrassed, when she saw him looking.

He opened the door leading to the next carriage and stepped into
no man’s land. The floor shifted and pitched beneath his feet like
a catwalk at a funfair. He stumbled and banged his knee. Through a
three-inch gap he could see the couplings clanking and, beneath
them, the rushing ground. He let himself into the other carriage in
time to see the big, unsmiling face of the guard emerging from a
compartment. Jericho slipped smartly into the lavatory and locked
himself in. For a moment he thought he was sharing it with some
tramp or derelict but then he realised that this was him—the
yellowish face, the dwindled and feverish eyes, the windblown hair,
the two days’ growth of blue-black beard—this was his reflection.
The toilet was blocked and stinking. A trail of sodden, soiled
paper curled from its bowl and wrapped around his feet like an
unravelled bandage.

“Ticket please.” The guard rapped loudly. “Slide your ticket
under the door, please.”

“It’s in my compartment.”

“Oh, is it then?” The handle rattled. “You’d better come and
show me.”

“I’m not feeling awfully well.” (Which was true.) “I’ve left it
out for you.” He pressed his burning forehead the cool mirror.
“Just give me five minutes.”

The guard grunted. “I’ll be back.” Jericho heard of rush of
wheels as the connecting door opened, then the slam of it closing.
He waited a few seconds then flipped open the lock.

There was no sign of Puck in this carriage, or in the next, and
by the time he’d leaped the gyrating iron plates into the third he
could sense the train beginning to slow. He moved on down the
corridor.

Two compartments filled with soldiers, six in each
sullen-looking, their rifles stacked at their feet.

Then one empty compartment.

Then Puck.

♦

He was sitting with his back to the engine, leanin forwards—the
same old Puck, handsome, intense, his elbows on his knees,
engrossed in conversation with someone just out of Jericho’s line
of sight.

It was Claire, thought Jericho. It had to be Claire. It would be
Claire. He was taking her with him.

He turned his back on the compartment and moved discreetly
crabwise, pretending to look out of the dirty window. His eyes
registered an approaching town—scrubland, goods wagons,
warehouses—and then an anonymous platform with a clock frozen at
ten to twelve, and faded posters with jolly, buxom girls
advertising long-dead holidays in Bournemouth and
Clacton-on-Sea.

The train crawled along for a few more yards, then stopped
abruptly opposite the station buffet.

“Northampton!” shouted a man’s voice. “Northampton Station!”

And if it was Claire, what would he do?

But it wasn’t her. He looked and saw a man, a young man—neat,
dark, tanned, aquiline: in every essence, foreign—saw him only
briefly because the man was already up on his feet and releasing
Puck’s hand from a double clasp. The young man smiled (he had very
white teeth) and nodded—some transaction had been completed—and
then he was stepping out of the compartment and was moving quickly
across the platform, sharp shoulders slicing through the crowd.
Puck watched him for a moment, then pulled the door shut and sank
back into his seat, out of sight.

Whatever his escape plans, they did not appear to include Claire
Romilly.

Jericho jerked his gaze away.

Suddenly he saw what must have happened. Puck cycling over to
the cottage on Saturday night to retrieve the cryptograms—and
instead finding Jericho. Puck returning later to discover the
cryptograms were missing. And Puck assuming, naturally, that
Jericho had them and was about to do what any loyal servant of the
state would do: run straight to the authorities and turn Claire
in.

He glanced back at the compartment. Puck must have lit a
cigarette. Films of smoke were settling into wide, steel-blue
strata.

But you couldn’t allow that, could you, because she was the only
link between you and the stolen papers? And you needed time to plan
this escape with your foreign friend.

So what have you done with her?

A whistle. A frantic working-up of steam. The platform shuddered
and began to slide away. Jericho barely noticed, unconscious of
everything except the inescapable sum of his calculations.

♦

What happened next happened very quickly and if there was never
to be a single, coherent explanation of events, that was due to a
combination of factors: the amnesia induced by violence, the deaths
of two of the participants, the bureaucratic fog-machine of the
Official Secrets Act.

But it went something like this.

About two miles north of Northampton Station, close to the
village of Kingsthorpe, a set of points connected the west-coast
main line with the branch line to Rugby. With five minutes’ notice,
the train was diverted off its scheduled course, westwards down the
branch line, and very shortly afterwards a red signal warned the
driver of an obstruction on the tracks ahead.

The train was therefore already slowing, although he didn’t
recognise it, when Jericho slid open the door to Puck’s
compartment. It moved very easily, at a finger’s pressure. The
layers of smoke rippled and erupted.

Puck was just extinguishing the cigarette (his ashtray was
subsequently found to contain five stubs) and he was pushing down
the window—presumably because he had noticed the loss of speed, and
maybe the diversion, and was suspicious and wanted to see what was
happening. He heard the door behind him and turned, and his face,
in that instant, became a skull. His flesh was shrunken, tautened,
masklike. He was already a dead man, and he knew it. Only his eyes
were still alive, glittering beneath his high forehead. They
flickered from Jericho to the corridor to the window and back to
Jericho. A frantic effort was going on behind them, you could see,
a mad and hopeless attempt to compute odds, angles,
trajectories.