Enigma

and an occasional, loping run—keeping to the side of the pavement, down the hill and into the sleeping town. Outside the pub lingered a soapy smell of last night's beer. The Methodist chapel a few doors down was dark and bolted, its blistered sign unchanged since the outbreak of war: 'Repent ye: for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' He went under the railway bridge. On the opposite side of the road was Albion Street, and a little further along the Bletchley Working Men's Club ('The Co-Operative Society Presents a Talk by Councillor A. E. Braithwaite: The Soviet Economy, Its Lessons for Us'). After another twenty yards he turned left into Alma Terrace.
    It was a street like so many others: a double row of tiny red-brick houses running parallel with the railway. Number nine was a clone of all the rest: two little windows upstairs and one downstairs, all three swathed in blackout curtains as though in mourning, a spade's length of front yard with a dustbin in it, and a wooden gate to the road. The gate was broken, the timber splintered grey and smooth like driftwood, and Jericho had to hoist it open. He tried the door—locked—and hammered on it with his fist.
    A loud coughing—as loud and immediate as a woken guard dog. He stepped back a pace and after a couple of seconds one of the upstairs curtains flickered open. He shouted: 'Puck, I need to talk to you.' t
    A steady clop-clop of hooves. He glanced up the road to see a coal dray turning into the street. It passed by slowly and the driver took a good, long look at him, then flicked the reins and the big horse responded, the tempo of its hooves increasing. Behind him Jericho heard a bolt being worked and drawn back. The door opened a crack. An old woman peered out.
    'I'm so sorry,' said Jericho, 'but it's an emergency, I need to speak to Mr Pukowski.'
    She hesitated, then let him in. She was less than five feet tall, a wraith, with a pale blue, quilted housecoat clutched across her nightdress. She spoke with her hand held in front of her mouth and he realised she was embarrassed because she didn't have her teeth in.
    'He's in his room.'
    'Could you show me?'
    She shuffled down the passage and he followed. The coughing from upstairs had intensified. It seemed to shake the ceiling, to swing the grimy lampshade. ?
    'Mr Puck?' She tapped on the door. 'Mr Puck?' She said to Jericho: 'He must be still asleep. I heard him come in late.'
    'Let me. May I?'
    The little room was empty. Jericho was across it in three strides, pulling back the curtains. Grey light lit the kingdom of the exile: a single bed, a washstand, a wardrobe, a wooden chair, a small mirror of thick, pink, crystalled glass with birds carved into it, suspended above the mantelpiece by a metal chain. The bed had been lain on rather than slept in, and a saucer by the bedhead was filled with cigarette stubs.
    He turned back to the window. The inevitable vegetable patch and hooped bomb shelter. A wall,
    'What's over there?'
    'But the door was bolted-'
    'On the other side of the wall? What's over there?'
    With her hand in front of her mouth she looked aghast. 'The station.'
    He tried the window. It was jammed shut.
    'Is there a back door?'
    She led him through a kitchen that couldn't have altered much since Victorian days. A mangle. A hand pump for raising water to the sink ...
    The back door was unlocked.
    'He's all right, isn't he?' She'd stopped worrying about her teeth. Her mouth was trembling, the skin around it furrowed, sunken, brown.
    'I'm sure. You go back to your husband.'
    He was following Puck's trail now. Footprints—large footprints—led across the vegetable patch. A tea chest stood against the wall. It bowed and splintered as Jericho mounted it, but he was just able to fold himself over the top of the sooty brickwork. For a moment he almost tumbled head first on to the concrete path, but then he managed to brace himself and brought his legs up.
    In the distance: the whistle of a train.
    He hadn't run like this for fifteen years, not since he was a schoolboy being screamed at on a five-mile steeplechase. But here they were again, as grim as ever, the familiar instruments of torture—the knife in his side, the acid in his lungs, the taste of rust in his mouth.
    He tore through the back entrance into Bletchley Station and flailed around the corner on to the platform, through a cloud of leaden-coloured pigeons that flapped and rose heavily and settled again. His feet rang on the ironwork of the