Enigma (33 page)

He would have chosen the other way but thank God he didn’t
because she was right. Soon the road ahead began to brighten. They
could see patches of weeping sky. He pressed his foot down and the
speedometer touched forty as they passed out of the forest and into
the open. When, after a mile or so, they came to a village, she
told him to pull up outside the tiny post office.

“Why?”

“I need to find out where we are.”

“You’d better be quick.”

“I’ve really no intention of sight-seeing.”

She slammed the door behind her and ran through the rain,
sidestepping the puddles with a gym mistress’s agility. A bell
tinkled inside the shop as she opened the door.

Jericho glanced ahead, then checked in his mirror. The village
appeared to consist of nothing more than this one street. No parked
vehicles that he could see. No one about. He guessed that a private
car, especially one driven by a stranger, would be a rarity, a
talking-point. In the little red-brick cottages and the
half-timbered houses he could already imagine the curtains being
twitched back. He turned off the windscreen wipers and sank lower
in his seat. For the twentieth time his hand went to the bulge of
cryptograms in his inside pocket.

Two Englands, he thought. One England—this one—familiar, safe,
obvious. But now another, secret England, secluded in the grounds
of stately houses—Beaumanor, Gayhurst, Woburn, Adstock,
Bletchley—an England of aerial farms and direction finders,
clattering bombes and, soon, the glowing green and orange valves of
Turing machines (“it should make the calculations a hundred times,
maybe a thousand times as fast”). A new age beginning to be born in
the parklands of the old. What was it that Hardy had written in his
Apology? “Real mathematics has no effect on war. No one has yet
discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of
numbers.” The old boy couldn’t guess the half of it.

The bell tinkled again and Hester emerged from the post office
holding a newspaper over her head like an umbrella. She opened the
car door, shook the paper and threw it, not very gently, into his
lap.

“What’s this for?” It was the Leicester Mercury, the local rag:
that afternoon’s edition.

“They print appeals for help, don’t they? From the police? When
someone is missing?”

It was a good idea. He had to concede it. But although they
checked the paper carefully—twice, in fact—they could find no
photograph of Claire and no mention of the hunt for her.

♦

Dropping southwards, heading for home. A different route for the
return journey, more easterly—this was Hester’s plan. To keep their
spirits up, she occasionally recited the names of the villages and
checked them in the gazetteer as they rattled down their empty high
streets. Oadby, she said, (“note the early English to Perpendicular
church”), Kibworth Harcourt, Little Bowden, and on across the
border out of Leicestershire and into Northamptonshire. The sky
over the distant pale hills brightened from black to grey and
finally to a kind of glossy, neutral white. The rain slowed, then
stopped. Oxendon, Kelmarsh, Maidwell…Square Norman towers with
arrow-slits, thatched pubs, tiny Victorian railway stations nesting
in a bosky countryside of high hedges and dense copses. It was
enough to make you want to burst into a chorus of “There’ll Always
Be an England” except that neither of them felt like singing.

Why had she run? That was what Hester said she couldn’t
understand. Everything else seemed logical enough: how she would
have got hold of the cryptograms in the first place, why she might
have wanted to read them, why she would have needed an accomplice.
But why then commit the one act guaranteed to draw attention to
yourself? Why fail to turn up for your morning shift?

“You,” she said to Jericho, after she had thought it over for a
few more miles. There was a hint of accusation in her voice. “I
think it must be you.”

Like a prosecuting counsel she took him back over the events of
Saturday night. He had gone to the cottage, yes? He had discovered
the intercepts, yes? A man had arrived downstairs, yes?

“Yes.”

“Did he see you?”

“No.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I may have shouted “Who’s there?” or something of the
sort.”

“So he could have recognised your voice?”

“It’s possible.”

But that would mean I knew him, he thought. Or at least that he
knew me.

“What time did you leave?”

“I don’t know exactly. About half past one.”

“There you are,” she said. “It is you. Claire returns to the
cottage after you’ve gone. She discovers the intercepts are
missing. She realises that you must have them because this
mysterious man has told her you were there. She believes you’ll
take them straight to the authorities. She panics. She runs.”

“But that’s madness.” He took his eyes off the road to stare at
her. “I’d never have betrayed her.”

“So you say. But did she know that?”

Did she know that? No, he realised, returning his attention to
the wheel, no, she did not know that. Indeed, on the basis of his
behaviour on the night she found the cheque, she had good reason to
assume he was a fanatic about security—a pretty ironic conclusion,
given he now had eleven stolen cryptograms stuffed inside his
overcoat pocket.

A twenty-year-old bus with an outside staircase to its upper
deck, like something out of a transport museum, pulled over to the
grass verge to let them overtake. The schoolchildren on board waved
frantically as they passed.

“Who were her boyfriends? Who was she seeing apart from me?”

“You don’t want to know. Believe me?” There was relish in the
way she threw back at him the words he had used to her in church.
He couldn’t blame her for it.

“Come on, Hester.” He gripped the steering wheel grimly and
glanced into the mirror. The bus was receding from view. A car was
emerging from behind it. “Don’t spare my blushes. Let’s keep it
simple. Just confine it to men from the Park.”

Well, they were impressions, she said, rather than names. Claire
had never mentioned names.

Give me the impressions, then.

And she did.

The first one she’d encountered had been young, with reddish
hair, clean-shaven. She’d met him on the stairs with his shoes in
his hand one morning in early November.

Reddish hair, clean-shaven, repeated Jericho. It didn’t sound
familiar.

A week later she’d cycled past a colonel parked in the lane in
an Army staff car with the headlights dowsed. And then there was an
Air Force man called Ivo Something, with a weird vocabulary of
“prangs” and “crates” and “shows” that Claire used to mimic fondly.
Was he Hut 6 or 3? She was fairly sure Hut 3. There was an
Honourable Evelyn double-barrelled someone-or-other—“thoroughly
dishonourable, darling”—whom Claire had met in London during the
Blitz and who now worked in the mansion. There was an older man who
Hester thought had something to do with the Navy. And there was an
American: he was definitely Navy.

“That would be Kramer,” said Jericho.

“You know him?”

“He’s the man who lent me the car. How recent was that?”

“About a month ago. But I got the impression he was just a
friend. A source of Camels and nylons, nothing special.”

“And before Kramer there was me.”

“She never talked about you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Given the way she used to talk about the others, you should
be.”

“Anyone else?”

She hesitated. “There may have been someone new in the last
month. She was certainly away a good deal. And once, about two
weeks ago, I had a migraine and came home early off shift and I
thought there was a man’s voice coming from her room. But if there
was they stopped talking when they heard me on the stairs.”

“That’s eight then, by my count. Including me. And leaving out
any others you’ve forgotten or don’t know about.”

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

“It’s quite all right.” He managed to arrange his face into a
parody of a smile. “If anything it’s rather fewer than I’d
thought.” He was lying, of course, and he guessed she knew it. “Why
is it, I wonder, that I don’t hate her for it?”

“Because that’s the way she is,” said Hester, with unexpected
ferocity. “Well, she never made much secret of it, did she? And if
one hates her for what she is—then, really, one can’t have loved
her very much in the first place, can one?” Her neck had blushed a
deep pink. “If all one wants is a reflection of oneself—well,
honestly, there’s always the mirror.”

She sat back, apparently as surprised by this speech as he
was.

He checked the road behind them. Still empty apart from the
same, solitary car. How long since he’d first noticed it? About ten
minutes? But now he came to think of it, it had probably been there
a good while longer, certainly since before they overtook the
school bus. It was lying about a hundred yards back, low and wide
and dark, its belly close to the ground, like a cockroach. He
squeezed his foot harder on the accelerator and was relieved to see
the gap between them widen until at last the road dipped and turned
and the big car disappeared.

A minute later it was back again, maintaining exactly the same
distance.

The narrow lane ran between high, dark hedges flecked with buds.
Through them, as through a magic lantern, Jericho caught odd
glimpses of tiny fields, a ruined barn, a bare, black elm,
petrified by lightning. They came to a longish stretch of flat
road.

There was no sun. He calculated there must be about half an hour
of daylight left.

“How far is it to Bletchley?”

“Stony Stratford coming up, then about six miles. Why?”

He looked again in the mirror and had just begun to say, “I
fear—” when a bell started to clamour behind them. The big car had
finally tired of following and was flashing its headlights,
ordering them to pull over.

Until this moment, Jericho’s encounters with the police had been
rare, brief and invariably marked by those exaggerated displays of
mutual respect customary between the guardians of the law and the
lawful middle classes. But this one would be different, he saw that
at once. An unauthorised journey between secret locations, without
proof of ownership of the car, without petrol coupons, at a time
when the country was being scoured for a missing woman: what would
that earn them? A trip to the local police station, for sure. A lot
of questions. A telephone call to Bletchley. A body search.

It didn’t bear contemplating.

And so, to his astonishment, he found himself measuring the road
ahead, like a long-jumper at the start of his run. The red roofs
and the grey church spire of Stony Stratford had begun to poke
above the distant line of trees.

Hester grabbed the edges of her seat. He jammed his foot down
hard to the floor.

♦

The Austin gathered speed slowly, as in a nightmare, and the
police car, responding to the challenge, began to gain on them. The
speedometer climbed past forty, to fifty, to fifty-five, to nearly
sixty. The countryside seemed to be racing directly at them, only
swerving at the last second to flash by narrowly on either side. A
main road appeared ahead. They had to stop. And if Jericho had been
an experienced driver that is what he would have done, police or no
police. But he hesitated until there was nothing he could do but
brake as hard as he dared, change down into second gear and yank
the steering wheel hard left. The engine screamed. They spun and
cornered on two tyres, he and Hester pitched sideways by the force.
The clanging bell was drowned by the roar of an engine and suddenly
the radiator grille of a tank transporter was rushing to fill the
rear-view, mirror. Its bumper touched them. An outraged blast from
its hooter, as loud as a foghorn, seemed to blow them forwards.
They shot across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal and a swan
turned lazily to watch them and then they were doglegging through
the market town—right, left, right, shuddering over cobbled alleys,
the wheel shaking in Jericho’s hands—anything to get off this
wretched Roman road. Abruptly the houses receded and they were out
in open country again, running alongside the canal. A narrowboat
was being towed by a weary carthorse. The bargeman, lying stretched
out beside the tiller, raised his hat to them.

“Left here,” said Hester, and they swung away from the canal
into a lane that was not much better than the forest track: just
two strips of potholed, tarmaced road, extending ahead like tyre
tracks, separated by a mound of grass that scraped the bottom of
the car. Hester turned and knelt on her seat, staring out of the
back window for any sign of the police, but the countryside had
closed behind them like a jungle. Jericho drove on slowly for two
miles. They passed through a tiny hamlet. A mile the other side of
it a space had been dug out to allow cars—or, more likely, carts—to
pass one another. He drove up into it and switched off the
engine.

They did not have much time.

♦

Jericho kept watch on the lane while she changed in the back
seat of the Austin. According to the map, they were only about a
mile due west of Shenley Brook End and she was insistent she could
make it back to the cottage on foot across open country before
dark. He marvelled at her nerve. To him, after the encounter with
the police, everything had taken on a sinister aspect: the trees
gesticulating at one another in the wind, the patches of dense
shadow now gathering at the edges of the fields, the rooks that had
erupted, cawing, from their nests and were now circling high above
them.

“Can’t we read them?” Hester had asked, after they had parked.
He had taken the cryptograms from his pocket so that they could
decide what to do with them. “Come on, Tom. We can’t just burn
them. If she thought she could read them, why can’t we?”