Enigma

by Robert Harris

  The WAAF went one way and he went the other, towards the morning star and the main gate. The sky was black, the telephone box almost invisible in the shadows of the arboretum. It was empty. He walked straight past it and pushed his way into the vegetation. Sir Herbert Leon, the last Victorian master of the Park, had been a dedicated arborist, planting his realm with three hundred different species of tree. Forty years of re-seeding, followed by four years without pruning, had turned the arboretum into a labyrinth of secret chambers, and here Jericho squatted on the dry earth and waited for Hester Wallace.

  By five fifteen it was clear to him she wasn’t coming, which suggested she had been detained. In which case, they were almost certainly looking for him.

  He had to get out of the Park, and he couldn’t risk the main gate.

  At five twenty, when his eyes were thoroughly used to the dark, he began to move northwards through the arboretum, back towards the house, his bundle of secrets heavy in his pocket. He could still feel the effects of the Benzedrine – a lightness in his muscles, an acuteness in his mind, especially to danger – and he offered a prayer of thanks to Logie for making him take it, because otherwise by now he’d be half-dead.

  Puck, Puck, what have you done?

  What have you done with her?

  He came out cautiously from between two sycamores and stepped on to the lawn at the side of the mansion. Ahead of him was the long, low outline of the old Hut 4, with the mass of the big house behind it. He skirted it and went around the back, past some rubbish bins and into the courtyard. Here were the stables where he’d started work in 1939, and beyond those the cottage where Dilly Knox had first pried into the mysteries of the Enigma. Drawn up in a semicircle on the cobbles he could just make out the gleaming cylinders and exhausts of half a dozen motorcycles. A door opened and in the brief glow he saw a dispatch rider, padded, helmeted and gauntleted, like a medieval knight. Jericho pressed himself against the brickwork and waited while the motorcyclist adjusted his pillion, then kicked the machine into life and revved it. Its red light dwindled and disappeared through the rear gate.

  He considered, briefly, trying to get out using the same exit, but reason told him that if the main entrance was probably being watched, then so was this. He stumbled on past the cottage, past the back of the tennis courts, and finally past the bombe hut, throbbing like an engine shed in the darkness.

  By now a faint blue stain had begun to seep up from the rim of the sky. Night – his friend and ally, his only cover – was preparing to desert him. Ahead, he could begin to make out the contours of a building site. Pyramids of earth and sand. Squat rectangles of bricks and sweet-smelling timber.

  Jericho had never before paid much notice to Bletchley’s perimeter fence, which turned out, on inspection, to be a formidable stockade of seven-foot-high iron stakes, tapering at their tips into triple spears, bent outwards to deter incursion. It was as he was running his hands over the galvanised metal that he heard a swish of movement in the undergrowth just beyond it, to his left. He took a few steps backwards and retreated behind a stack of steel girders. A moment later, a sentry ambled past, in no great state of alertness, to judge by his slouched silhouette and the shuffle of his step.

  Jericho crouched lower, listening as the sounds faded. The perimeter was perhaps a mile long. Say, fifteen minutes for a sentry to complete a circuit. Say, two sentries patrolling. Possibly three.

  If there were three, he had five minutes.

  He looked around to see what he could see.

  A two-hundred-gallon drum proved too heavy for him to shift, but there were planks, and some thick sections of concrete drainage pipe, both of which he found he was able to drag over to the fence. He started to sweat again. Whatever they were building here, it was going to be vast – vast and bombproof. In the gloom the excavations were fathomless. ‘FIVE LAYERS CORPSES. UPPER MUMMIFIED LOWER LIQUID …’

  He upended the pipes and stood them about five feet apart. He laid a plank on top. Then he hefted a second set of pipes on to the first, picked up another length of timber and staggered over with it balanced on his shoulder. He set it down carefully, making a platform with two steps – about the first practical thing he had made since boyhood. He climbed on to the rickety structure and seized the iron spears. His feet scrabbled for a purchase on the rails. But the fence was designed to keep people out, not in. Fuelled by chemicals and desperation, Jericho was just able to pull himself astride it, twist, and lower himself down the other side. He dropped the last three feet and stayed there, squatting in the long grass, recovering his breath, listening.

  His final act was to put his foot through the railings and kick away the planks.

  He didn’t wait to see if the noise had attracted attention. He set off across the field, walking at first, then trotting and finally running, sliding and skidding over the dewy grass. There was a big military camp to his right, concealed by a line of trees only just now materialising. Behind him, he could sense the dawn on his shoulders, brightening by the minute. He looked back only when he reached the road, and that was his last impression of Bletchley Park: a thin line of low, black buildings – mere dots and dashes along the horizon – and above them in the eastern sky an immense arc of cold blue light.

  He had been to Puck’s digs once before, on a Sunday afternoon a year ago, for a game of chess. He had a vague memory of an elderly landlady who doted on Puck pouring them tea in a cramped front room, while her invalid husband wheezed and coughed and retched upstairs. He could remember the game quite clearly, it had a curious shape to it – Jericho very strong in the opening, Puck in the middle, and Jericho again at the end. A draw agreed.

  Alma Terrace. That was it. Alma Terrace. Number nine.

  He was moving quickly – long strides and an occasional, loping run – keeping to the side of the pavement, down the hill and into the sleeping town. Outside the pub lingered a soapy smell of last night’s beer. The Methodist chapel a few doors down was dark and bolted, its blistered sign unchanged since the outbreak of war: ‘Repent ye: for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ He went under the railway bridge. On the opposite side of the road was Albion Street, and a little further along the Bletchley Working Men’s Club (‘The Co-Operative Society Presents a Talk by Councillor A. E. Braithwaite: The Soviet Economy, Its Lessons for Us’). After another twenty yards he turned left into Alma Terrace.

  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 lamp
shade.

  ‘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 to the cool mirror. ‘Just give me five minutes.’

  The guard grunted. ‘I’ll be back.’ Jericho heard the 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, leaning 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.