Enigma

whining: 'Come on, Bonny, I'm frightened, let's go back.'
    But Bonnyman had no intention of turning back. Even on a normal evening, Mrs Armstrong monitored every peep and squeak in the ether of the Commercial Guesthouse like a one-woman intercept station; tonight, she'd be on even higher alert than usual. Besides, he always found this place exciting. The light flashed on bare brick and on evidence of earlier liaisons—AE + GS, Tony = Kath. The spot held an odd erotic charge. So much had clearly happened here, so many whispered fumblings . . . They were a part of a great flux of yearning that went back long before them and would go on long after them—illicit, irrepressible, eternal. This was life. Such, at any rate, were Bonnyman's thoughts, although naturally he didn't express them at the time, nor afterwards to the police.
    'And what happened next, sir? Precisely.'
    He won't admit to this either, thank you very much, precisely or imprecisely.
    But what did happen next was that Bonnyman wedged the torch in a gap in the brickwork where something had been torn from the wall, and threw his arms around Miss Jobey. He encountered a little light resistance at first—some token twisting and turning and 'stop it', 'not here'—which quickly became less convincing, until suddenly her tongue was up to its tricks again and they were back where they'd left off outside the Eight Bells Inn. Once again his hands began to ride up her skirt and once again she pushed him away, but this time for a different reason. Frowning slightly, she ducked and pulled down her knickers. One step, two steps, and they had vanished into her pocket. Bonnyman watched, enraptured.
    'What happened next, inspector, precisely, is that Miss Jobey and myself noticed some hessian sacking in the corner.'
    She with her skirt up above her knees, he with his trousers down around his ankles, shuffling forwards like a man in leg-irons, dropping heavily to his knees, a cloud of dust from the sacks rising and blossoming in the torch-beam, then much squirming and complaining on her part that something was digging into her back.
    They stood and pulled away the sacks to make a better bed.
    'And that was when you found it?'
    'That was when we found it.'
    The police inspector suddenly brought his fist down hard on the rough wooden table and shouted for his sergeant.
    'Any sign of Mr Wigram yet?'
    'We're still looking, sir.'
    'Well, bloody well find him, man. Find him.'

4

    The bombe was heavy—Jericho guessed it must weigh more than half a ton—and even though it was mounted on castors it still took all his strength, combined with the engineer's, to drag it away from the wall. Jericho pulled while the engineer went behind it and put his shoulder to the frame to heave. It came away at last with a screech and the Wrens moved in to strip it.
    The decryptor was a monster, like something out of an H. G. Wells fantasy of the future: a black metal cabinet, eight feet wide and six feet tall, with scores oft five-inch-diameter drum wheels set into the front. The back was hinged and opened up to show a bulging mass of coloured cables and the dull gleam of metal drums. In the place where it had stood on the concrete floor there was a large puddle of oil.
    Jericho wiped his hands on a rag and retreated to watch from a corner. Elsewhere in the hut a score of other bombes were churning away on other Enigma keys and the noise and the heat were how he imagined a ship's engine room might be. One Wren went round to the back of the cabinet and began disconnecting and replugging the cables. The other moved along the front, pulling out each drum in turn and checking it. Whenever she found a fault in the wiring she would hand the drum to the engineer who would stroke the tiny brush wires back into place with a pair of tweezers. The contact brushes were always fraying, just as the belt which connected the mechanism to the big electric motor had a tendency to stretch and slip whenever there was a heavy load. And the engineers had never quite got the earthing right, so that the cabinets had a tendency to give off powerful electric shocks.
    Jericho thought it was the worst job of all. A pig of a job. Eight hours a day, six days a week, cooped up in this windowless, deafening cell. He turned away to look at his watch. He didn't want them to see his impatience. It was nearly half past eleven.
    His menu was at that moment being rushed into bombe bays all across the Bletchley area. Eight miles