Enigma

by Robert Harris

  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.

  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.

  SEVEN

  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)

  1

  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 Fauré’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 Ge
rman 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.li-lv: ‘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. ‘Die grösste Geleitzugschlacht aller Zeiten,’ German radio had called it, and for once the buggers weren’t lying. The greatest convoy battle of all time.

  ‘How many dead?’

  ‘About four hundred. Mostly Americans.’

  Jericho grunted. ‘Any U-boats sunk?’

  ‘Only one. We think.’

  ‘And Shark?’

  ‘Hanging in there, old love.’ He patted Jericho’s knee through the bedclothes. ‘You see, it was worth it in the end, thanks to you.’

  It had taken the bombes forty hours to solve the settings, from midnigh
t on Tuesday until late on the Thursday afternoon. But by the weekend the Crib Room had made a partial recovery of the Weather Code Book – or enough of it to give them a toehold – and now they were breaking Shark six days out of seven, although sometimes the breaks came in quite late. But it would do. It would do until they got the first of the Cobra bombes in June.

  A plane passed low overhead – a Spitfire, to judge by the crack of its engine.

  After a while, Logie said quietly: ‘Skynner’s had to hand over the plans for the four-wheel bombes to the Americans.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Logie, folding his arms, ‘it’s all dressed up as cooperation. But nobody’s fooled. Leastways, I’m not. From now on, we’re to teleprinter a copy of all Atlantic U-boat traffic to Washington the moment we receive it, then it’s two teams working in friendly consultation. Blah, blah, blah. What bloody have you. But it’ll come down to brute force in the end. It always does. And when they’ve got ten times the bombes we have – which won’t take very long, I reckon, six months at the outside – what chance do we stand? We’ll just do the interception and they’ll do all the breaking.’

  ‘We can hardly complain.’

  ‘No, no. I know we can’t. It’s just … Well, we’ve seen the best days, you and I.’ He sighed and stretched out his legs, contemplating his vast feet. ‘Still, there is one bright side, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jericho looked at him, then saw what he meant, and they both said ‘Skynner!’ simultaneously, and laughed.

  ‘He is bloody upset,’ said Logie contentedly. ‘Sorry about your girl, by the way.’

  ‘Well …’ Jericho made a feeble gesture with his hand and winced.

  There was a difficult silence, mercifully ended by the nurse coming in and telling Logie his time was up. He got to his feet with relief and shook Jericho’s hand. ‘Now you get well, old love, d’you hear what I’m saying, and I’ll come and see you again soon.’