Enigma

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