Enigma (45 page)

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. “I 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 at 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.