For a moment she couldn’t speak. ‘And you.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘Yes. Please. Be sure you do.’
Wigram tugged at his arm. Jericho gave her a final smile and a shrug, then allowed himself to be led away.
She watched him walk painfully up the path and through the gate. Leveret opened the car door and as he did so, Jericho turned and waved. She raised her hand in return, saw him manoeuvre himself stiffly into the back seat, then the door slammed shut. She let her hand drop.
She stayed there for several minutes, long after the big car had pulled away, then she replaced her hat and went back into the church.
2
‘I almost forgot,’ said Wigram, as the car turned down the hill. ‘I bought you a paper. For the journey.’
He unlocked his briefcase and took out a copy of The Times, opened it to the third page and handed it to Jericho. The story consisted of just five paragraphs, flanked by an illustration of a London bus and an appeal for the Poor Clergy Relief Corporation:
MISSING POLISH
OFFICERS
GERMAN ALLEGATIONS
The Polish Minister of National Defence, Lieutenant-General Marjan Kukiel, has issued a statement concerning some 8,000 missing Polish officers who were released from Soviet prison camps in the spring of 1940. In view of German allegations that the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers had been found near Smolensk and that they had been murdered by the Russians, the Polish Government has decided to ask the International Red Cross to investigate the matter …
‘I particularly like that line,’ said Wigram, ‘don’t you: “released from Soviet prison camps”?’
‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.’ Jericho tried to give him back the paper, but Wigram waved it away.
‘Keep it. A souvenir.’
‘Thanks.’ Jericho folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, then stared firmly out of the window to forestall any further conversation. He’d had enough of Wigram and his lies. As they passed under the blackened railway bridge for the final time he surreptitiously touched his cheek and he suddenly wished he could have brought Hester with him for this last act.
At the station, Wigram insisted on seeing him on to the train, even though Jericho’s luggage had been sent on ahead at the beginning of the week and there was nothing for him to carry. And Jericho consented in return to have Wigram’s hand for support as they crossed the footbridge and strolled along the length of the Cambridge train in search of an empty seat. Jericho was careful to make sure that he, rather than Wigram, chose the compartment.
‘Well, then, my dear Tom,’ said Wigram, with mock sadness, ‘I’ll bid you goodbye.’ That peculiar handshake again, the little finger somehow tucked up into the palm. Final things: did Jericho have his travel warrant? Yes. And he knew that Kite would be meeting him at Cambridge to escort him by taxi to King’s? Yes. And he’d remembered that a nurse would be coming in from Addenbrooke’s Hospital every morning to change the dressing on his shoulder? Yes, yes, yes.
‘Goodbye, Mr Wigram.’
He settled his aching back into a seat facing away from the engine. Wigram closed the door. There were three other passengers in the compartment: a fat man in a dirty fawn raincoat, an elderly woman in a silver fox, and a dreamy-looking girl reading a copy of Horizon. They all looked innocent enough, but how could one tell? Wigram tapped on the window and Jericho struggled to his feet to lower it. But the time he had it open, the whistle had blown and the train was beginning to pull away. Wigram trotted alongside.
‘We’ll be in touch when you’re fit again, all right? You know where to get hold of me if anything comes up.’
‘I certainly do,’ said Jericho, and slid the window up with a bang. But still Wigram kept pace with the compartment – smiling, waving, running. It had become a challenge for him, a terrific joke. He didn’t stop until he reached the end of the platform, and that was Jericho’s final impression of Bletchley: of Wigram leaning forwards, his hands on his knees, shaking his head and laughing.
*
Thirty-five minutes after boarding the train at Bletchley, Jericho disembarked at Bedford, bought a one-way ticket to London, then waited in the sunshine at the end of the platform, filling in The Times crossword. It was hot, the tracks shimmered; there was a strong smell of baking coal dust and warm steel. When he’d finished the final clue he stuffed the newspaper, unread, into a rubbish bin and walked slowly up and down the platform, getting used to the feel of his legs. A crowd of passengers was beginning to build up around him and he scanned each face automatically, even though logic told him it was unlikely he was being followed: if Wigram had feared he might abscond, he surely would have arranged for Leveret to drive him all the way to Cambridge.
The tracks began to whine. The passengers surged forwards. A military train passed slowly southwards, with armed soldiers on the engine footplate. From the carriages peered a line of gaunt, exhausted faces, and a murmur went through the crowd. German prisoners! German prisoners under guard! Jericho briefly met the eyes of one of the captives – owlish, bespectacled, unmilitary: more clerk than warrior – and something passed between them, some flash of recognition across the gulf of war. A second later the white face blurred and disappeared, and soon afterwards the London express pulled in, packed and filthy. ‘Worse than the bloody Jerries’ train,’ complained a man.
Jericho couldn’t find a seat, so he stood, leaning against the door to the corridor, until his chalk complexion and the sheen of perspiration on his forehead prompted a young Army officer to give up his place. Jericho sat down gratefully, dozed, and dreamed of the German prisoner with his sad owl’s face, and then of Claire on that first journey, just before Christmas, their bodies touching.
By 2.30 he was in London, at St Pancras Station, moving awkwardly through the mass of people towards the entrance to the Underground. The lift was out of action so he had to take the stairs, stopping on every landing to recover his strength. His back was throbbing and something wet was trickling down his spine, but whether it was sweat or blood he couldn’t tell.
On the eastbound Circle Line platform, a rat scurried through the rubbish beneath the rails towards the tunnel mouth.
When Jericho failed to emerge from the Bletchley train, Kite was irritated but unconcerned. The next train was due in within a couple of hours, there was a good pub just around the corner from the station, and that was where the college porter chose to do his waiting, in the amiable company of two halves of Guinness and a pork pie.
But when the second train terminated at Cambridge, and still there was no sign of Jericho, Kite went into a sulk that lasted him throughout the half hour it took him to trudge back to King’s.
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 cliché 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 vers
ion, 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 the 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.’
Enigma Page 34
