Enigma

compartment. It moved very easily, at a finger's pressure. The layers of smoke rippled and erupted.
    Puck was just extinguishing the cigarette (his ashtray was subsequently found to contain five stubs) and he was pushing down the window—presumably because he had noticed the loss of speed, and maybe the diversion, and was suspicious and wanted to see what was happening. He heard the door behind him and turned, and his face, in that instant, became a skull. His flesh was shrunken, tautened, masklike. He was already a dead man, and he knew it. Only his eyes were still alive, glittering beneath his high forehead. They flickered from Jericho to the corridor to the window and back to Jericho. A frantic effort was going on behind them, you could see, a mad and hopeless attempt to compute odds, angles, trajectories.
    Jericho said: 'What have you done with her?'
    Puck had the stolen Smith and Wesson in his hand, safety catch off. He brought it up. His eyes went through the same routine: Jericho, corridor, window, then Jericho again and finally the window. He tilted his head back, keeping the gun held out at arm's length, and tried to see up the track.
    'Why are we stopping?'
    'What have you done with her?'
    Puck waved him back with the gun, but Jericho didn't care what happened now. He took a step closer.
    Puck began to say something like 'Please don't make me' and then—farce, as the door slid open and the guard came in for Jericho's ticket.
    For a long moment they stood there, this curious trio—the guard with his large, bland face, creasing with surprise; the traitor with his wavering pistol; the cryptanalyst between them—and then several things happened more or less at once. The guard said 'Give me that' and made a lunge at Puck. The gun went off. The noise of it was like a physical blow. The guard said 'Ooof?' in a puzzled way, and looked down at his stomach as if he had a bad twinge of indigestion. The wheels of the train locked and screamed and suddenly they were all on the floor together.
    It may have been that Jericho was the first to crawl free. Certainly he had a memory of actually helping Puck to his feet, of pulling him out from beneath the guard, who was making a ghastly keening sound and leaking blood everywhere—from his mouth and his nose, from the front of his tunic, even from the bottom of his trouser legs.
    Jericho knelt over him and said, rather fatuously, because he'd never seen anyone injured before: 'He needs a doctor.' There was a commotion in the corridor. He turned to find that Puck had the outside door open and the Smith and Wesson pointed at him. He was clasping the wrist of his gun hand and wincing as if he'd sprained it. Jericho closed his eyes for the bullet and Puck said—and this Jericho was sure of, because he spoke the words very deliberately, in his precise English: 'I killed her, Thomas. I am so terribly sorry.'
    Then he vanished.
    The time by now was just after a quarter past seven—7.17, according to the official report—and the day was coming up nicely. Jericho stood on the threshold of the carriage and he could hear blackbirds singing in the nearby copse, and a skylark above the field. All along the train, doors were banging open in the sunshine and people were jumping out. The locomotive was leaking steam and beyond it a group of soldiers were scrambling down the slight embankment, led—Jericho was surprised to see—by Wigram. More soldiers were deploying from the train itself, to Jericho's right. Puck was only about twenty yards away. Jericho jumped down to the grey stones of the track and set off after him.
    Someone shouted, very loudly, almost directly behind him: 'Get out of the fucking way, you fucking idiot!'—wise advice, which Jericho ignored.
    It couldn't end here, he thought, not with so much still to know.
    He was all in. His legs were heavy. But Puck wasn't making much progress either. He was hobbling across a meadow, trailing a left ankle which autopsy analysis would later show had a hairline fracture—whether from his fall in the compartment or his leap from the train, no one would ever know, but every step must have been agony for him. A small herd of Jersey cattle watched him, chewing, like spectators at a running track.
    The grass smelled sweet, the hedges were in bud, and Jericho was very close to him when Puck turned and fired his pistol. He couldn't have been aiming at Jericho—the shot went wide of anything. It was just a parting gesture. His eyes