Enigma

himself to his feet. 'I couldn't tell you the year, old love, never mind the day.' He had three pipes in a rack and he blew noisily through each of them, making a harsh, cracking sound, then slipped them into his pocket. 'Now don't forget your scotch.'
    'I don't want the bloody scotch.'
    'Take it. Please. For my sake.'
    In the corridor, he shook Jericho's hand, and Jericho feared Logie was going to say something embarrassing. But whatever it was he had in mind, he thought better of it. Instead, he merely gave a rueful salute and lurched along the passage, banging the door behind him.
    *
    The Big Room, in anticipation of the midnight shift, was almost empty. A little desultory work was being done on Dolphin and Porpoise at the far end. Two young women in overalls were on their knees around Jericho's desk, gathering every scrap of waste paper into a couple of sacks, ready for incineration. Only Cave was still there, bent over his charts. He looked up as Jericho came in.
    'Well? How's it going for you?'
    'Too early to tell,' said Jericho. He found the code book and slipped it into his pocket. 'And you?'
    'Three hit so far. A Norwegian freighter and a Dutch cargo ship. They just went straight to the bottom. The third's on fire and going round and round in circles. Half the crew lost, the other half trying to save her.'
    'What is she?'
    'American Liberty ship. The James Oglethorpe. Seven thousand tons, carrying steel and cotton.'
    'American,' repeated Jericho. He thought of Kramer.
    'My brother died, one of the first'
    'It's a slaughter,' said Cave, 'an absolute bloody slaughter. And shall I tell you the worst of it? It's not going to finish tonight. It's going to go on and on like this for days. They're going to be chased and harried and torpedoed right the way across the bloody North Atlantic. Can you imagine what that feels like? Watching the ship next to you blow up? Not being allowed to stop and search for survivors? Waiting for your turn?' He touched his scar, then seemed to realise what he was doing and let his hand fall. There was a terrible resignation in the gesture. 'And now, apparently, they're picking up U-boat signals swarming all around SC-122.'
    His telephone began to ring and he swung away to answer it. While his back was turned, Jericho quietly placed the half-empty half-bottle of scotch on his desk, then made his way out into the night.
    His mind, on a fuel of Benzedrine and scotch, seemed to be wheeling away on a course of its own, churning like the bombes in Hut 11, making bizarre and random connections—Claire and Hester and Skynner, and Wigram with his shoulder holster, and the tyre tracks in the frost outside the cottage, and the blazing Liberty ship going round and round over the bodies of half her crew.
    He stopped by the lake to breathe some fresh air and thought of all the other occasions when he had stood here in the darkness, gazing at the faint silhouette of the mansion against the stars. He half-closed his eyes and saw it as it might have been before the war. A midsummer evening. The sounds of an orchestra and a bubble of voices drifting across the lawn. A line of Chinese lanterns, pink and mauve and lemon, stirring in the arboretum. Chandeliers in the ballroom. White crystal fracturing on the smooth surface of the lake.
    The vision was so strong that he found he was sweating in his overcoat against the imagined heat, and as he climbed the slope towards the big house he fancied he saw a line of silver Rolls-Royces, their chauffeurs leaning against the long bonnets. But as he drew closer he saw that the cars were merely buses, come to drop off the next shift, pick up the last, and that the music in the mansion was only the percussion of telephone bells and the tapping of hurrying footsteps on the stone floor.
    In the labyrinth of the house he nodded cautiously to the few people he passed—an elderly man in a dark grey suit, an Army captain, a WAAF. They appeared seedy in the dingy light and he guessed, by their expressions, he must look pretty odd himself. Benzedrine could do funny things to the pupils of your eyes, he seemed to remember, and he hadn't shaved or changed his clothes for more than forty hours. But nobody in Bletchley was ever thrown out for simply looking strange, or the place would have been empty from the start. There was old Dilly Knox, who used to come to work in his dressing gown, and Turing who cycled in wearing a gas mask to try to cure his hay fever, and the