Enigma (42 page)

Jericho said: “What have you done with her?”

Puck had the stolen Smith and Wesson in his hand, safety catch
off. He brought it up. His eyes went through the same routine:
Jericho, corridor, window, then Jericho again and finally the
window. He tilted his head back, keeping the gun held out at arm’s
length, and tried to see up the track.

“Why are we stopping?”

“What have you done with her?”

Puck waved him back with the gun, but Jericho didn’t care what
happened now. He took a step closer.

Puck began to say something like “Please don’t make me” and
then—farce, as the door slid open and the guard came in for
Jericho’s ticket.

For a long moment they stood there, this curious trio—the guard
with his large, bland face, creasing with surprise; the traitor
with his wavering pistol; the cryptanalyst between them—and then
several things happened more or less at once. The guard said “Give
me that” and made a lunge at Puck. The gun went off. The noise of
it was like a physical blow. The guard said “Ooof?” in a puzzled
way, and looked down at his stomach as if he had a bad twinge of
indigestion. The wheels of the train locked and screamed and
suddenly they were all on the floor together.

It may have been that Jericho was the first to crawl free.
Certainly he had a memory of actually helping Puck to his feet, of
pulling him out from beneath the guard, who was making a ghastly
keening sound and leaking blood everywhere—from his mouth and his
nose, from the front of his tunic, even from the bottom of his
trouser legs.

Jericho knelt over him and said, rather fatuously, because he’d
never seen anyone injured before: “He needs a doctor.” There was a
commotion in the corridor. He turned to find that Puck had the
outside door open and the Smith and Wesson pointed at him. He was
clasping the wrist of his gun hand and wincing as if he’d sprained
it. Jericho closed his eyes for the bullet and Puck said—and this
Jericho was sure of, because he spoke the words very deliberately,
in his precise English: “I killed her, Thomas. I am so terribly
sorry.”

Then he vanished.

♦

The time by now was just after a quarter past seven—7.17,
according to the official report—and the day was coming up nicely.
Jericho stood on the threshold of the carriage and he could hear
blackbirds singing in the nearby copse, and a skylark above the
field. All along the train, doors were banging open in the sunshine
and people were jumping out. The locomotive was leaking steam and
beyond it a group of soldiers were scrambling down the slight
embankment, led—Jericho was surprised to see—by Wigram. More
soldiers were deploying from the train itself, to Jericho’s right.
Puck was only about twenty yards away. Jericho jumped down to the
grey stones of the track and set off after him.

Someone shouted, very loudly, almost directly behind him: “Get
out of the fucking way, you fucking idiot!”—wise advice, which
Jericho ignored.

It couldn’t end here, he thought, not with so much still to
know.

He was all in. His legs were heavy. But Puck wasn’t making much
progress either. He was hobbling across a meadow, trailing a left
ankle which autopsy analysis would later show had a hairline
fracture—whether from his fall in the compartment or his leap from
the train, no one would ever know, but every step must have been
agony for him. A small herd of Jersey cattle watched him, chewing,
like spectators at a running track.

The grass smelled sweet, the hedges were in bud, and Jericho was
very close to him when Puck turned and fired his pistol. He
couldn’t have been aiming at Jericho—the shot went wide of
anything. It was just a parting gesture. His eyes were dead now.
Sightless, blank. There was an answering crackle from the train.
Bees buzzed past them in the spring morning.

Five bullets hit Puck and two hit Jericho. Again, the order is
obscure. Jericho felt as though he had been struck from behind by a
car—not painfully, but terrifically hard. It winded him and pitched
him forward. He somehow kept on going, his legs cartwheeling, and
saw tufts flying out of Puck’s back, one, two, three, and then
Puck’s head exploded in a red blur, just as a second
blow—irresistible this time—spun Jericho from his right shoulder
round in a graceful arc. The sky was wet with spray and his final
thought was what a pity it was, what a pity it was, what a pity it
was that rain should spoil so fine a morning.

∨
Enigma
∧

PLAINTEXT

PLAINTEXT: The original, intelligible text, as it was
before encipherment, revealed after successful decoding or
cryptanalysis.

A Lexicon of Cryptography (“Most Secret”, Bletchley
Park, 1943)

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.lilv: “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.