Enigma (20 page)

A woman’s voice said: “Operator speaking.”

“Good morning. I’d like to make a call, please, to Kensington
double-two five seven.”

She repeated the number. “That’ll be fourpence, caller.”

A sixty-mile land line connected all Bletchley Park numbers to
the Whitehall exchange. As far as the operator could tell, Jericho
was merely calling one London borough from another. He pressed four
pennies into the slot and after a series of clicks he heard a
ringing tone.

It took fifteen seconds for a man to answer.

“Ye-es?”

It was exactly the voice Jericho had always imagined for
Claire’s father. Languid and assured, it stretched that single
short syllable into two long ones. Immediately there was a series
of pips and Jericho pushed the A-button. His money tinkled into the
coin-box.

Already, he felt at a disadvantage—an indigent without access to
a telephone of his own.

“Mr Romilly?”

“Ye-es?”

“I’m so sorry to trouble you, sir, especially on a Sunday
morning, but I work with Claire…”

There was a faint noise, and then a pause, during which he could
hear Romilly breathing. A crackle of static cut across the line.
“Are you still there, sir?”

The voice, when it came again, was quiet, and it sounded hollow,
as if emanating from a vast and empty room. “How did you get this
number?”

“Claire gave it me.” It was the first lie that came into
Jericho’s head. “I wondered if she was with you.”

Another long pause. “No. No, she isn’t. Why should she be?”

“She’s not turned up for her shift this morning. Yesterday was
her day off. I wondered if she might have gone down to London.”

“Who is this speaking?”

“My name is Tom Jericho.” Silence. “She may have spoken of
me.”

“I don’t believe so.” Romilly’s voice was barely audible. He
cleared his throat. “I’m awfully sorry, Mr Jericho. I’m afraid I
can’t help you. My daughter’s movements are as much a mystery to me
as they seem to be to you. Goodbye.”

There was a fumbling noise and the connection was broken
off.

“Hello?” said Jericho. He thought he could still hear somebody
breathing on the line. “Hello?” He held on to the heavy bakelite
receiver for a couple of seconds, straining to hear, then carefully
replaced it.

He leaned against the side of the telephone box and massaged his
temples. Beyond the glass, the world went silently about its
business. A couple of civilians with bowler hats and rolled
umbrellas, fresh from the London train, were being escorted up the
drive to the mansion. A trio of ducks in winter camouflage came in
to land on the lake, feet splayed, ploughing furrows in the grey
water.

“My daughter’s movements are as much a mystery to me as they
seem to be to you.”

That was not right, was it? That was not the reaction one would
expect of a father on being told his only child was missing?

Jericho groped in his pocket for a handful of change. He spread
the coins out on his palm and stared at them, stupidly, like a
foreigner just arrived in an unfamiliar country.

He dialled zero again.

“Operator speaking.”

“Kensington double-two five seven.”

Once again, Jericho inserted four pennies into the metal slot.
Once again there was a series of short clicks, then a pause. He
tightened his finger on the button. But this time there was no
ringing tone, only the blip-blip-blip of an engaged signal, pulsing
in his ear like a heartbeat.

♦

Over the next ten minutes Jericho made three more attempts to
get through. Each met the same response.

Either Romilly had taken his telephone off the hook, or he was
involved in a long conversation with someone.

Jericho would have tried the number a fourth time, but a woman
from the canteen with a coat over her apron had turned up and
started rapping a coin on the glass, demanding her turn. Finally,
Jericho let her in. He stood on the roadside and tried to decide
what to do.

He glanced back at the huts. Their squat, grey shapes, once so
boring and familiar, now seemed vaguely threatening.

Damn it. What did he have to lose?

He buttoned his jacket against the cold and turned towards the
gate.

§

St Mary’s Parish Church, eight solid centuries of hard white
stone and Christian piety, lay at the end of an avenue of elderly
yew trees, less than a hundred yards beyond Bletchley Park. As
Jericho walked through the gate he saw bicycles, fifteen or twenty
of them, stacked neatly around the porch, and a moment later heard
the piping of the organ and the mournful lilt of a Church of
England congregation in mid-hymn. The graveyard was perfectly
still. He felt like a late guest approaching a house where a party
was already in full swing.

“
We blossom and flourish as leaves on a tree, And wither, and
perish, but naught changeth thee…
”

Jericho stamped his feet and beat his arms. He considered
slipping inside and standing at the back of the nave until the
service ended, but experience had taught him there was no such
thing as a quiet entry into a church. The door would bang, heads
would turn, some officious sidesman would come hurrying down the
aisle with a prayer sheet and a hymn book. Such attention was the
last thing he wanted.

He left the path and pretended to study the tombstones. Frosted
cobwebs of improbable size and delicacy shone like ectoplasm
between the memorials: marble monuments for the well-to-do, slate
for the farmworkers, weathered wooden crosses for the poor and
infants. Ebenezer Slade, aged four years and six months, asleep in
the arms of Jesus. Mary Watson, wife of Albert, taken after a long
illness, rest in peace…On a few of the graves, bunches of dead
flowers, petrified by ice, testified to some continuing flicker of
interest among the living. On others, yellow lichen had obscured
the inscriptions. He bent and scratched away at it, hearkening to
the voices of the righteous beyond the stained glass window.

O ye Dews and Frosts, bless ye the Lord: praise him
and magnify him for ever.

O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify
him for ever…

Odd images chased through his mind.

He thought of his father’s funeral, on just such a day as this:
a freezing, ugly Victorian church in the industrial Midlands,
medals on the coffin, his mother weeping, his aunts in black,
everyone studying him with sad curiosity, and he all the time a
million miles away, factoring the hymn numbers in his head
(“Forward out of error,⁄Leave behind the night”—number 392 in
Ancient and Modern—came out very prettily, he remembered, as
2×7×2×7×2…)

And for some reason he thought of Alan Turing, restless with
excitement in the hut one winter night, describing how the death of
his closest friend had made him seek a link between mathematics and
the spirit, insisting that at Bletchley they were creating a new
world: that the bombes might soon be modified, the clumsy
electro-mechancial switches replaced by relays of pentode valves
and GT1C-thyatrons to create computers, machines that might one day
mimic the actions of the human brain and unlock the secrets of the
soul…

Jericho wandered among the dead. Here was a small stone cross
garlanded with stone flowers, there a stern-looking angel with a
face like Miss Monk. All the time he kept listening to the service.
He wondered whether anyone from Hut 8 was among the congregation
and, if so, who. With all else failing, might Skynner be offering
up a prayer to God? He tried to imagine what fresh reserves of
sycophancy Skynner would draw on to communicate with a being even
higher than the First Lord of the Admiralty, and found he couldn’t
do it.

“The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost, be amongst you and remain with you always. Amen.”

The service was over. Jericho wove quickly through the
headstones, away from the church, and stationed himself behind a
pair of large bushes. From here he had a clear view of the
porch.

Before the war the faithful would have emerged to an uplifting
peal of grandsire triples. But church bells now were to be rung
only in the event of invasion, so that when the door opened and the
elderly priest stationed himself to say farewell to his
parishioners, the silence gave the ceremony a subdued, even
melancholy air. One by one the worshippers stepped into the
daylight. Jericho didn’t recognise any of them. He began to think
he might have come to the wrong conclusion. But then, sure enough,
a small, lean young woman in a black coat appeared, still holding
the prayer book from the night before.

She shook hands briefly, even curtly, with the vicar, said
nothing, looped her carpetbag over the handles of her bicycle and
wheeled it towards the gate. She walked quickly, with short, rapid
steps, her sharp chin held high. Jericho waited until she had gone
some way past him, then stepped out from his hiding place and
shouted after her: “Miss Wallace!”

She stopped and glanced back in his direction. Her weak eyesight
made her frown. Her head moved vaguely from side to side. It wasn’t
until he was within two yards of her that her face cleared.

“Why, Mr…”

“Jericho.”

“Of course. Mr Jericho. The stranger in the night.” The cold had
reddened the sharp point of her nose and painted two neat discs of
colour, the size of half-crowns, on her white cheeks. She had long,
thick, black hair which she wore piled up, shot through and secured
by an armoury of pins. “What did you make of the sermon?”

“Uplifting?” he said, tentatively. It seemed easier than telling
the truth.

“Did you really? I thought it the most frightful rot I’ve heard
all year. ‘Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over
the man, but to be in silence…’ ” She shook her head furiously. “Is
it a heresy, do you suppose, to call St Paul an ass?”

She resumed her brisk progress towards the lane. Jericho fell in
beside her. He had picked up a few details about Hester Wallace
from Claire—that before the war she’d been a teacher at a girls’
private school in Dorset, that she played the organ and was a
clergyman’s daughter, that she received the quarterly newsletter of
the Jane Austen Society—just enough clues to suggest the sort of
woman who might indeed go straight from an eight-hour night-shift
to Sunday matins.

“Do you attend most Sundays?”

“Always,” she said. “Although increasingly one wonders why. And
you?”

He hesitated. “Occasionally.”

It was a mistake and she was on to it at once.

“Whereabouts d’you sit? I don’t recall ever seeing you.”

“I try to keep at the back.”

“So do I. Exactly at the back.” She gave him a second look, her
wire-framed round spectacles flashing in the winter sun. “Really,
Mr Jericho, a sermon you obviously didn’t hear, a pew you never
occupy: one might almost suspect you of laying claim to a piety you
don’t rightly possess.”

“Ah…”

“I’ll bid you good day.”

They had reached the gate. She swung herself on to the saddle of
her bicycle with surprising grace. This was not how Jericho had
planned it. He had to reach out and hold on to the handlebars to
stop her pedalling away.

“I wasn’t in church. I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Kindly remove your hand from my machine, Mr Jericho.” A couple
of elderly parishioners turned to stare at them. “At once, if you
please.” She twisted the handlebars back and forth but Jericho held
on.

“I am so sorry. It really won’t take a moment.”

She glared at him. For an instant he thought she might be about
to reach down for one of her stout and sensible shoes and hammer
his fingers loose. But there was curiosity as well as anger in her
eyes, and curiosity won. She sighed and dismounted.

“Thank you. There’s a bus shelter over there.” He nodded to the
opposite side of Church Green Road. “Just spare me five minutes.
Please.”

“Absurd. Quite absurd.”

The wheels of her bicycle clicked like knitting needles as they
crossed the road to the shelter. She refused to sit. She stood with
her arms folded, looking down the hill towards the town.

He tried to think of some way of broaching the subject. “Claire
tells me you work in Hut 6. That must be interesting.”

“Claire has no business telling you where I work. Or anyone else
for that matter. And, no, it is not interesting. Everything
interesting seems to be done by men. Women do the rest.”

She could be pretty, he thought, if she put her mind to it. Her
skin was as smooth and white as Parian. Her nose and chin, though
sharp, were delicate. But she wore no make-up, and her expression
was permanently cross, her lips drawn into a thin, sarcastic line.
Behind her spectacles, her small, bright eyes glinted with
intelligence.

“Claire and I, we were…” He fluttered his hands and searched for
the word. He was so hopeless at all this. “ ‘Seeing one another’ I
suppose is the phrase. Until about a month ago. Then she refused to
have anything more to do with me.” His resolution was wilted by her
hostility. He felt a fool, addressing her narrow back. But he
pressed on. “To be frank, Miss Wallace, I’m worried about her.”

“How odd.”

He shrugged. “We were an unlikely couple, I agree.”

“No.” She turned to him. “I meant how odd that people always
feel obliged to disguise their concern for themselves as concern
for other people.”

The corners of her mouth twitched down in her version of a smile
and Jericho realised he was beginning to dislike Miss Hester
Wallace, not least because she had a point.

“I don’t deny an element of self-interest,” he conceded, “but
the fact is, I am worried about her. I think she’s
disappeared.”

She sniffed. “Nonsense.”

“She hasn’t turned up for her shift this morning.”